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| John Tenniel illustration for Lewis Carroll's 'Alice in Wonderland' |
DOOYEWEERD: The walls of the absolutization of personal individuality have no windows."The Christian speaks with awe about the living personal God, Who in His mercy and grace has revealed His identity to fallen humanity. But also in the communion with this God in Christ, the Christian remains within the human creaturely limits of the possibility of experience.
"Subjective individuality can never determine the structural horizon of human experience and of the cosmos.""This horizon is a structural order, the Divine order of the creation itself. It comprises in its determining and limiting structure the individuality of human personality, its religious [core selfhood] root as well as its temporal existence. Creaturely subjective individuality cannot determine and limit itself, but is a priori determined and limited by the Divine order.
"But for its super-individual law-conformity, individual subjectivity would be an 'apeiron', a meaningless indeterminateness.""The possibility of subjective experience would be cancelled, if the horizon of human experience were subjectively individual. The cosmic self-consciousness in which all cosmological knowledge remains founded, is not an experiential entrance into the absolutely individual horizon of some 'personal world', of a 'microcosm' (Scheler). It enters into the full, unique cosmos created by God within the temporal horizon, in the full meaning-coherence of all its modal and plastic structures.
"Naive [concrete] experience, the great primary datum of all epistemology, does not know anything of a cosmos as a 'personal world' supposed to be identical with countless other 'personal worlds' in an abstract, universal, merely intended [mental] essential structure alone. This is already precluded by...the plastic horizon of human experience.
"Human beings experience their individual existence within the temporal horizon exclusively in the one and only cosmos into which they been integrated together with all creatures. They also experience their individuality in the various structures of the temporal societal relationships.
"The individuality of human experience within the temporal horizon has a societal structure excluding any possibility of a hermetically closed 'microcosm'."(Herman Dooyeweerd, A New Critique of Theoretical Thought, Vol 2: pp 592-594) [Direct DOWNLOAD of above book PDF]
