The 15 IRREDUCIBLE LAW-SPHERES of COSMIC TIME
(Also called Aspects/ Modes/ Modalities/ Meaning-sides)
Dooyeweerd: Prismatic time-order of refracted aspects
Short extract from book
‘Time, Law, and History: Selected Essays’
As horizon of the modal aspect structures the order of time truly is a law of refraction. The meaning-totality of our temporal cosmos, which constitutes the essential unity and fullness of the meaning of all aspects of creation, cannot be given within time. It has a transcendent, supra-temporal character.
This applies to both the law-side and the subject-side of reality.
According to its religious fullness and meaning-totality, the law of God is one and indivisible: the demand to serve God whole-heartedly. According to the religious fullness and meaning-totality of the subject-side of reality, the temporal creation, since the fall, is completely concentrated in the religious root-community of the new humanity in Christ. However, within time this religious fullness according to its law-side and subject-side is refracted into the modal aspects in which the wisdom of God’s plan for creation unfolds in a rich diversity of modal ordinances and subject-functions. Just as unbroken sunlight is refracted through a prism into the multicoloured richness of the spectrum, so the religious fullness of meaning of creation is refracted in the wealth of modal aspects which do not find their transcendent root-unity within time itself.
In its general theory of the modal aspects the Philosophy of the Cosmonomic Idea has shown, by means of theoretical analysis, that the modal-aspect structures essentially are time-structures.
As we have seen, cosmic time, which in its continuity embraces and and overarches all modal aspects, refuses to be theoretically analysed, because it is a transcendental pre-supposition of theoretical analysis. Therefore, the only access open to the philosophical investigation of the cosmic time-order is by way of analysing the modal structures of time. Within the transcendental ground-idea of philosophy, cosmic time itself serves as philosophy's basic presupposition.
This ground-idea (or cosmonomic idea) is a foundational limiting concept of philosophy. Through it, philosophical thought, in the process of critical self-reflection, gives an account of its own necessary presuppositions which are themselves non-theoretical in nature and which make possible philosophical investigation to begin with. This basis idea contains, in addition to an idea about the origin and deeper unity of the modal aspects of temporal reality, also an idea about the interrelation or coherence of these aspects.
It is striking that these three transcendental ideas, which in their internal linkage are comprehended in any cosmonomic idea, lie at the foundation of every philosophical system, whether a thinker shows a critical awareness of it or not. Yet the immanence standpoint cannot concede that one's philosophical ground-idea is determined by non-theoretical presuppositions.
(Herman Dooyeweerd, ‘Time, Law, and History: Selected Essays’, Collected Works, Series B - Volume 14, Paideia Press 2017, pp 73-75)
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NOTES ON DOOYEWEERD'S USE OF THE TERM “RELIGION”
Dooyeweerd writes -
“To the question, what is understood here by religion? I reply: the innate impulse of human selfhood to direct itself toward the true or toward a pretended absolute Origin of all temporal diversity of meaning, which it finds focused concentrically in itself.
[...] There is one thing, however, on which we cannot lay too much stress. As the absolutely central sphere of human existence, religion transcends all modal aspects of temporal reality, the aspect of faith included.
[...] For we have seen that the faith-function [pistical law-sphere] is bound to cosmic time and to the temporal coherence of meaning with the other modal functions of our existence. It should not be identified with the religious centre of this latter.
[...] Therefore, with respect to its inner essence, religion can never be described 'phenomenologically'. It is no 'psychological phenomenon', it is no emotional feeling-perception; it is not to be characterised, as is done by Rudolph Otto, as experience of the 'tremendum'. It is the ex-sistent condition in which the ego is bound to its true or pretended firm ground. Hence, the mode of being of the ego itself is of a religious character and is nothing in itself. Veritable religion is absolute self-surrender. The apostate person who supposes that their selfhood is something in itself, loses their self in the surrender to idols, in the absolutising of the relative.
[..] After having given an account of what we understand by religion, we can establish the fact that the concentric direction in theoretical thought must be of religious origin. It must be of a religious origin, even though it always remains theoretical in character, because of its being bound to the antithetic gegenstand-relation. It springs from the tendency to the origin in the centre of human existence, which tendency we previously discovered in the Introduction. But now we have made clear the inner point of contact between philosophic thought and religion from the intrinsic structure of the theoretical attitude of thought itself. Critical self-reflection in the concentric direction of theoretical thought to the ego necessarily appeals to self-knowledge (which goes beyond the limits of the theoretical gegenstand-relation). Consequently we may establish the fact that even the theoretical synthesis supposes a religious starting-point. Furthermore, we have now explained that it is meaningless to ask for a theoretical proof of its religious character, because such a proof presupposes the central starting-point of theoretical thought."
(Herman Dooyeweerd, ‘New Critique of Theoretical Thought’ Vol 1: ‘The Necessary Presuppositions of Philosophy’, pp 57-59)
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