J Glenn Friesen: Dooyeweerd and the experience of ‘Silberblick’

Bonaventura Peeters the Elder (Flemish, 1614-1652):
'Seascape with Sailors Sheltering from a Rainstorm' (1640s)

Dooyeweerd and the experience of 

‘Silberblick’. 

By J Glenn Friesen 

(The following is an extract from 'Enstasy, Ecstasy and Religious Self-Reflection: A History of Dooyeweerd’s Ideas of Pre-theoretical Experience' by Dr J Glenn Friesen.)

In one of his first student articles, he [Dooyeweerd] asks:

How is it, that the whole world around us can seem so empty, like the lead-grey clouds hanging low or the plaintive noise of rain trickling down on disconsolate grey towns, as a weeping melancholy comes over us and we see nothing but ghostly shadows of an unreal world, and hear nothing in our ears but monotone sounds from far away? How is it that the world, which has been created by the Father, can seem so lamentably empty to the Christian? Is it not because we do not see things in the way that regenerated persons must see them, everything under that single category of their goal? (Dooyeweerd 1915b; translation by J Glenn Friesen).

The world is experienced as empty unless we see it in terms of its (transcendent) goal. He repeats this idea in his mature work:

Every Christian knows the emptiness of an experience of the temporal world which seems to be shut up in itself. He knows the impersonal attitude of a “Man” [cf Heidegger's "Das Man"] in the routine of common life and the dread of nothingness, the meaninglessness, if he tries to find himself again in a so-called existential isolation. He is acquainted with all this from personal experience, though he does not understand the philosophical analysis of this state of spiritual uprooting in Humanistic existentialism. But the Christian whose heart is opened to the Divine Word-revelation knows that in this apostate experiential attitude he does not experience temporal things and events as they really are, i.e. as meaning pointing beyond and above itself to the true religious centre of meaning and to the true Origin (New Critique III, 30)

When we do see things as “pointing beyond and above themselves”– to a transcendent center, then the light of eternity illuminates our temporal world.

In the Biblical attitude of naïve [pre-theoretical] experience the transcendent, religious dimension of its horizon is opened. The light of eternity radiates perspectively through all the temporal dimensions of this horizon and even illuminates seemingly trivial things and events in our sinful world (New Critique III, 29)

Baader speaks of a similar experience that he calls the ‘Silberblick’ [Silver Vision].

The above text is an extract (pp 47-48) from 

'Enstasy, Ecstasy and Religious Self-Reflection: 

A History of Dooyeweerd’s Ideas of Pre-theoretical Experience' 

by Dr J Glenn Friesen.

Download this entire article (PDF 125 pages) 

HERE

Visit J. Glenn Friesen’s Dooyeweerd Site 

HERE

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J Glenn Friesen: Dooyeweerd's view of Enstasis as an entering into temporal reality.

Dooyeweerd's view of Enstasis 

as an entering into temporal reality. 

By J Glenn Friesen

(The following is an extract from 'Enstasy, Ecstasy and Religious Self-Reflection: A History of Dooyeweerd’s Ideas of Pre-theoretical Experience' by Dr J Glenn Friesen.)

As we have seen, Dooyeweerd says that it is only humans who can enter enstatically into the temporal cosmos. For Dooyeweerd, enstasis involves our supratemporal selfhood (our I-ness) entering into temporal reality:

In pre-theoretical thought, my I-ness enters enstatically by means of its naïve intuition into the cosmic temporal coherence of experience. Only humans can do this. Other beings are ex-statically absorbed by their temporal existence (WdW II, 415; NC II, 479-80).

For Dooyeweerd, our selfhood or I-ness is supratemporal. Dooyeweerd refers to the temporal coherence of experience as a ‘systasis.’ So enstasy involves the relation of our supratemporal selfhood to the systasis of temporal reality. I will discuss systasis in more detail below. For the moment it is sufficient to emphasize that enstasis is the entry into the temporal systasis. 

Dooyeweerd speaks of the relation of our supratemporal selfhood to the temporal systasis in several ways. First, Dooyeweerd refers to our being “fitted into” [ingesteld] temporal reality (WdW II, 401). We are simultaneously supratemporal beings as well as beings who have been “fitted into” temporal reality. It is only because we both transcend time and are fitted into it that we can perform the theoretical act of synthesis of meaning (Dooyeweerd 1931, 103). The temporal reality into which we are fitted is a fallen reality. We enter into temporal reality, in order to help redeem it and to fulfill it (Friesen 2009, Theses 75 and 77 and references).

Note Dooyeweerd’s emphasis on the entering of our selfhood into the “cosmic temporal coherence of experience.” For Dooyeweerd, ‘cosmic’ always refers to the temporal world, and does not include our selfhood, which is beyond time. We could have no true sense of time if we did not go above time in the deepest part of our being. (Dooyeweerd 1940, 181). Cosmic time is not the only kind of time; it is distinct from the aevum, the created eternity in which our supratemporal heart is situated. And both cosmic time and the aevum are distinct from God’s eternity. These distinctions of cosmic time, the supratemporal and the eternal, have their roots in Baader’s distinctions between time, the supratemporal, and the eternal.

Note also that it is our naïve intuition that allows our selfhood to enter into the temporal. We will discuss intuition in more detail later.

The above text is an extract (page 46) from 

'Enstasy, Ecstasy and Religious Self-Reflection: 

A History of Dooyeweerd’s Ideas of Pre-theoretical Experience' 

by Dr J Glenn Friesen.

Download this entire article (PDF 125 pages) 

HERE

Visit J. Glenn Friesen’s Dooyeweerd Site 

HERE

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Dooyeweerd – The Four Formative Undercurrents of Western Thought: 4) The Humanistic Nature-Freedom Motive

Pre-Union Scottish ship

Dooyeweerd – The Four Formative 

Undercurrents of Western Thought: 

4) The Humanistic Nature-Freedom Motive

Excerpt from ‘In the Twilight of Western Thought’, Paideia Press, 2012, pp 39-32)

The fourth religious basic motive that acquired a central influence on Western thought is that of modern Humanism, which arose and developed from the time of the Italian Renaissance of the 15th century. Since Immanuel Kant this motive has in general been designated as the theme of nature and freedom. Under the influence of the dogma of the autonomy of philosophical thought, its religious sense was camouflaged. Consequently, it was presented as a purely philosophical theme concerning the relation between theoretical and practical reason, a theme equally discussed in Greek and scholastic philosophy. In the same way, the Greek form-matter motive was presented in scholastic philosophy as a purely philosophical axiom concerning a primordial metaphysical distinction implied in the fundamental idea of being. A radical transcendental critique of philosophical thought should not be led astray by such axiomatic assertions. In fact, the Humanistic freedom-motive and its dialectical counterpart, the Humanist nature-motive, were of a central religious character.

A religion of humanity as subversion of Biblical basic-motive
The freedom-motive originated in a religion of humanity, into which the biblical basic-motive had been completely transformed. The renascimento device of the Italian Renaissance meant a real rebirth of man into a creative and entirely new personality. This personality was thought of as absolute in itself and was considered to be the only ruler of its own destiny and that of the world. This meant a Copernican revolution with respect to the biblical basic-motive of the Christian religion. The biblical revelation of the creation of man in the image of God was implicitly subverted into the idea of a creation of God in the idealized image of man. The biblical conception of the rebirth of man and his radical freedom in Jesus Christ was replaced by the idea of a regeneration of man by his own autonomous will, his emancipation from the medieval kingdom of darkness, rooted in the [scholastic] belief of the supra-natural authority of the Church.

New view of Nature as counterpart of new personality ideal
This new Humanistic freedom-motive, which was foreign to Greek thought since it presupposed the Christian motive of creation, fall into sin and redemption, called forth a new view of nature, which was conceived of as the macrocosmic counterpart of the new, religious personality-ideal. This so-called discovery of nature, in the Renaissance, had an indubitable religious background. After having emancipated himself from all belief in a supra-natural sphere in its scholastic-ecclesiastical sense, and having made himself into the only master of his destiny, modern humanity seeks in nature infinite possibilities to satisfy its own creative impulse. It considers the macrocosm from the optimistic view-point of its own expectation of the future. This means that the scholastic conception of the divine creator as natura naturans is transferred to the new image of nature. The adage, Deus sive natura [God or nature], current in the Italian Renaissance, testifies to a deification of the new image of nature, which is radically different from the deification of the ever-flowing stream of life in the old Ionian philosophy of nature. The revolution brought about later on by Copernicus in the astronomic image of the universe, was considered by the rising Humanism to be a consequence of the religious revolution caused by the rebirth (renascimento) device of the Italian Renaissance. The modern autonomous man recreates both his divine Origin and his world in his own image.

New freedom-motive not univocal
But the new freedom-motive, just like its correlative, the new nature-motive, includes a diversity of possible tendencies. The reason is that it lacks the radical unity of sense proper to the biblical conception of Christian freedom, which concerns the true root and center of human existence. Much rather, it again diverts the concentric religious impulse of the human ego towards the temporal horizon of our experience with its diversity of modal aspects. This means that the Humanistic basic-motive does not imply a univocal answer to the question: Where is the central seat of man’s autonomous liberty to be found? Neither does it furnish a univocal answer to the question: What is the relation between man’s free and autonomous personality and the realm of nature, and, under which viewpoint can nature be conceived as a unity?

Rulership over nature
From the Humanist starting-point, the center of man’s autonomous and creative freedom might be sought in the moral, or in the aesthetic, in the theoretico-logical or in the sensitive aspect of our temporal experiential horizon. In the same way the unity of nature as the macrocosmic universe could be conceived under different absolutized modal viewpoints.

Nevertheless, there was from the very beginning a strong tendency in the freedom-motive to strive after the rulership over nature, and this tendency, too, testifies to the influence of the secularized biblical creation-motive on the Humanist starting-point. For the biblical revelation concerning the creation of man in the image of God is immediately followed by the great cultural commandment that man should subject the earth and have the rule over it. As soon as the tendency to dominate the temporal world acquired the upper hand in the Humanist freedom-motive, the central seat of man’s autonomous freedom was sought in mathematical thought.

Mathematical analysis as creative power
In sharp contrast with the Greek and medieval conception of mathematics, a creative power was ascribed to mathematical analysis, viewed as the universal foundation of logic. The Humanist freedom-motive does not allow the acceptance of a given structural order of creation within the temporal horizon of experience. This would contradict the Humanist meaning of the autonomy of theoretical thought, which is fundamentally different both from the Greek and from the scholastic view of this autonomy. Therefore, the Cartesian renovation of the methodical fundamentals of philosophy implied a theoretical destruction of the entire given structural order of human experience, in order to reconstruct the material world more geometrico.

The impulse to dominate nature by an autonomous scientific thought required a deterministic image of the world, construed as an uninterrupted chain of functional causal relations, to be formulated in mathematical equations. Galileo and Newton laid the foundations of classical mathematical physics. To construct an image of the world corresponding with the domination-motive, the method of this special science was elevated to a universal pattern of scientific philosophic thought. Nature was conceived as a central unity under the absolutized mechanistic viewpoint. But now the inner religious dialectic of the Humanistic basic motive began to reveal itself in modern philosophy. The mechanistic world-image constructed under the primacy of the nature-motive, aiming at the sovereign domination of the world, left no room for the autonomous freedom of human personality in its practical activity. Nature and freedom appeared to be opposite motives in the Humanistic starting-point.

Dialectical process, Rousseau, Kant
Henceforth, Humanistic philosophy was involved in a restless dialectical process. With Rousseau, primacy is transferred to the freedom-motive and the central seat of human freedom is sought in the modal aspect of feeling. Kant’s critical philosophy led to a sharp separation of the realms of nature and freedom. The nature motives were depreciated. The mathematical and mechanistic science-ideal was restricted to an empirical world of sensory phenomena ordered by transcendental-logical categories of the human understanding. The autonomous freedom of man does not belong to the sensory realm of nature, but to the supra-sensory realm of ethics, which is not ruled by natural laws, but by norms. As in Rousseau, the religious primacy was ascribed to the freedom-motive. But the central seat of human freedom was now sought in the moral aspect of the human will. (Post-Kantian idealism seeks to overcome Kant’s critical dualism by a dialectical mode of thought which was supposed to bring about an ultimate synthesis of nature and freedom.)

Historicism, relativism, spiritual uprooting
The mathematical science-ideal, born from the impulse to dominate nature, is replaced by another philosophical pattern of thought, oriented to the historical aspect of experience. This gives rise to a historicist view of the temporal world, which reduces all the other aspects of our experience to the historical one. The new historical mode of thought is polarly opposed to the rationalistic and individualistic method of thinking, which originated from the mathematical and mechanistic science-idea. It is inspired by an irrationalistic and universalistic turn in the Humanist freedom-motive. But in the middle of the last century, the German freedom-idealism broke down and gave place to a naturalistic positivism. The nature-motive regained the upper hand and the historical mode of thought was transformed into a more complicated kind of natural scientific thinking. Meanwhile historicism, no longer checked by the belief in eternal ideas of the human reason, began to display its relativistic consequences, resulting in a process of spiritual uprooting of Western thought. The former Humanistic belief itself was viewed as a mere historical phenomenon, the perishable product of our Western cultural mind.

The transitory influence of neo-Kantianism and neo-Hegelianism could not stop this process. Both contemporary logical positivism and its polar opposite, Humanistic existentialism, testify to a fundamental crisis of Humanist philosophy.

MOTIVES: ONE  TWO  THREE  FOUR

Excerpt from ‘In the Twilight of Western Thought’ by Herman Dooyeweerd, Paideia Press, 2012, pp 29-32)

For similar analyses of religious ground motives, see New Critique Volume I, Part II; and Dooyeweerd, The Roots of Western Culture, Collected Works, Series B, Volume 3.

For FREE Downloads of these Dooyeweerd books go HERE

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Dooyeweerd – The Four Formative Undercurrents of Western Thought: 3) The Scholastic Nature-Grace Motive

Medieval depiction of a cog on a seal of Stralsund

Dooyeweerd – The Four Formative 

Undercurrents of Western Thought:

3) The Scholastic (Thomistic) Nature-Grace Motive

Excerpt from ‘In the Twilight of Western Thought’, Paideia Press, 2012, pp 39-32)

In the first phase of Christian thought, in which the Augustinian influence was predominant, the central working of the biblical basic motive [see previous post] was restricted to dogmatical theology.

In the second phase, beginning with the rise of Thomism, philosophy and dogmatical theology were sharply distinguished. But at the same time a third religious basic motive arose, which excluded the radical and integral influence of the central biblical motive on philosophy. This is the motive of nature and grace, which ever since has been the starting-point of scholastic philosophy as it developed both in Roman Catholic and Protestant circles. It originally aimed at a mutual accommodation of the biblical and the Greek religious basic motives. But since the Renaissance it could also be serviceable to a mutual accommodation of the biblical and the modern Humanistic starting-points. It implied the distinction between a natural and a supra-natural sphere of thought and acting.

Within the natural sphere a relative autonomy was ascribed to human reason, which was supposed to be capable of discovering the natural truths by its own light. Within the supra-natural sphere of grace, on the contrary, human thought was considered to be dependent on the divine self-revelation Philosophy was considered to belong to the natural sphere; dogmatical theology, on the other hand, to the supra-natural sphere. In consequence, there was no longer a question of Christian philosophy. Philosophical thought was, in fact, abandoned to the influence of the Greek and Humanist basic motives in their external accommodation to the doctrine of the Church. These motives were masked by the dogmatic acceptance of the autonomy of natural reason. The scholastic meaning ascribed to this autonomy was determined by the nature-grace theme. Natural reason [according to this scholastic line of thought] should not contradict the supra-natural truths of the Church’s doctrine, based on divine revelation.

This implied an external accommodation of either the Greek or the Humanistic philosophical conceptions to this ecclesiastical doctrine as long as the ecclesiastical authority was factually respected by the students of philosophy. The Thomistic attempt at a synthesis of the opposite motives of nature and grace, and the ascription of the primacy to the latter, found a clear expression in the adage: Gratia naturam non tollit, sed perficit (Grace does not cancel nature, but perfects it).

But the dialectical character of the nature-grace motive clearly manifested itself in the late medieval nominalistic movement. The Thomistic synthesis of nature and grace was replaced by a sharp antithesis. Any point of connection between the natural and super-natural sphere was denied. This was the beginning of shifting the primacy to the nature-motive. The process of secularization of philosophy had started.

MOTIVES: ONE  TWO  THREE  FOUR

Excerpt from ‘In the Twilight of Western Thought’ by Herman Dooyeweerd, Paideia Press, 2012, pp 29-32)

For similar analyses of religious ground motives, see New Critique Volume I, Part II; and Dooyeweerd, The Roots of Western Culture, Collected Works, Series B, Volume 3.

For FREE Downloads of these Dooyeweerd books go HERE

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Dooyeweerd – The Four Formative Undercurrents of Western Thought: 2) The Radical Biblical Motive

Rembrandt: Christ in the Storm on the Lake of Galilee

Dooyeweerd – The Four Formative Undercurrents of Western Thought: 

2) The Radical Biblical Motive

Excerpt from ‘In the Twilight of Western Thought’, Paideia Press, 2012, pp 39-32)

The second basic motive of Western thought [following the Greek form-matter motive] is the radical and central biblical theme of creation, fall into sin and redemption by Jesus Christ as the incarnate Word of God, in the communion of the Holy Spirit.This basic motive is the central spiritual motive power of every Christian thought worthy of this name. It should not be confused with the ecclesiastical articles of faith, which refer to this motive, and which can be made into the object of a dogmatic theological reflection in the theoretical attitude of thought. As the core of the divine Word-revelation, it is independent of any human theology. Its radical sense can only be explained by the Holy Spirit, operating in the heart, or the religious [ultimate] center of our consciousness, within the communion of the invisible Catholic church.

This basic religious [ultimate] motive has uncovered the real root, or center, of human nature and unmasks the idols of the human ego, which arise by seeking this center within the temporal horizon of our experience with its modal diversity of aspects. It reveals the real positive meaning of the human ego as the religious [ultimate] concentration-point of our integral existence; as the central seat of the imago Dei in the positive direction of the religious [ultimate] impulse of the ego upon its absolute Origin. Furthermore, it uncovers the origin of all absolutizations of the relative, namely, the negative, or apostate direction of the religious [ultimate, deepest-seated] impulse of the human ego. Thereby it reveals the true character of all basic motives of human thought which divert the religious [ultimate] impulse towards the temporal horizon. 

This, then, is also the radical critical significance of the biblical basic motive for philosophy since it frees the thinking ego from the prejudices, which, because they originated from absolutizations, fundamentally impede a philosophical insight into the real and integral structure of the temporal order of experience. Therefore, this biblical basic motive is the only possible starting-point of a Christian philosophy in its genuine sense. But the development of such a philosophy has been prevented again and again by the powerful influence of Greek philosophy, and later on by the rise of the scholastic basic motive of nature and grace.

In the first phase of Christian thought, in which the Augustinian influence was predominant, the central working of this biblical basic motive was restricted to dogmatical theology. The latter was erroneously equated with Christian philosophy, which implied that philosophical questions were only treated within a theological context. Accordingly, the Augustinian rejection of the autonomy of philosophical thought over against the divine Word-revelation amounted to the denial of this autonomy over against dogmatical theology, which was considered the queen of the sciences. This latter view was not biblical at all, but rather taken from the Aristotelian metaphysics, which had ascribed this royal position to a philosophical theology of which all other sciences would be the slaves. In fact, the philosophical fundamentals of Augustine’s thought were, in the main, taken from Hellenistic philosophy and only externally accommodated to the doctrine of the Church.

MOTIVES: ONE  TWO  THREE  FOUR

Excerpt from ‘In the Twilight of Western Thought’ by Herman Dooyeweerd, Paideia Press, 2012, pp 29-32)

For similar analyses of religious ground motives, see New Critique Volume I, Part II; and Dooyeweerd, The Roots of Western Culture, Collected Works, Series B, Volume 3.

For FREE Downloads of these Dooyeweerd books go HERE

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Dooyeweerd – The Four Formative Undercurrents of Western Thought: 1) The Greek ‘form-matter’ motive

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'The religious ground-motives in the development of Western civilization are basically the following:

1. The "form-matter" ground-motive of Greek antiquity in alliance with the Roman power motive (imperium).

2. The Scriptural ground-motive of the Christian religion: creation, fall, and redemption through Jesus Christ in communion with the Holy Spirit.

3. The Roman Catholic [Thomistic] ground-motive of "nature-grace", which seeks to combine the two mentioned above.

4. The modern humanistic ground motive of "nature-freedom", in which an attempt is made to bring the three previous motives to a religious synthesis concentrated upon the value of human personality.' 

(Herman Dooyeweerd, Roots of Western Culture: Pagan, Secular, and Christian Options, Paideia Press, 2012, p15) 

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Dooyeweerd – The Four Formative Undercurrents of Western Thought: 

1. The Greek ‘form-matter’ motive.

Excerpt from ‘In the Twilight of Western Thought’, Paideia Press, 2012, pp 39-32)

The central motive of Greek philosophy, which we have designated as the ‘form-matter’ motive in line with the Aristotelian terminology, originated from the meeting of the pre-Homeric religion of life and death, with the younger, cultural religion of the Olympian gods. The older religion deified the ever-flowing stream of organic life, which issues from mother earth and cannot be bound to any individual form. In consequence, the deities of this religion are amorphous. It is from this shapeless stream of ever-flowing organic life that the generations of perishable beings originate periodically, whose existence, limited by a corporeal form, is subjected to the horrible fate of death, designated by the Greek terms anangkē or heimarmenē tuchē. This existence in a limiting form was considered an injustice since it is obliged to sustain itself at the cost of other beings so that the life of one is the death of another. Therefore all fixation of life in an individual figure is avenged by the merciless fate of death in the order of time. This is the meaning of the mysterious utterance of the ancient Greek philosopher, Anaximander, which reads “the (divine) Origin of all things is the apeiron” (that is to say, that which lacks a limiting form). “The things return to that from which they originate according to destiny. For they pay to each other penalty and retribution of their injustice in the order of time.”

The central motive of this religion, consequently, is that of the shapeless stream of life eternally flowing throughout the process of birth and decline of all that exists in a corporeal form. This is the original religious sense of the matter-principle in Greek philosophy. It issued from a deification of the biotic aspect of our temporal horizon of experience and has found its most suggestive expression in the ecstatic cult of Dionysus, imported from Thrace.

The form-motive, on the other hand, was the central motive of the younger Olympian religion, the religion of form, measure and harmony. It was rooted in the deification of the cultural aspect of classical Greek society. This motive found its most profound expression in the cult of the Delphian god, Apollo, the legislator. The Olympian gods have left mother earth with its ever-flowing stream of organic life and its inescapable anangkē. They have acquired the Olympus as their residence and have a personal and immortal form, imperceptible to the eye of sense, an ideal form of a perfect and splendid beauty, the genuine prototype of the Platonic idea as the imperishable metaphysical form of true being. But these immortal gods have no power over the anangkē, the inexorable fate of death. Remember the utterance of Homer in his Odyssey: “The immortals too cannot help lamentable man when the cruel anangkē strikes him down.” This is why the younger Olympian religion was only accepted as the public religion of the Greek polis, the city-state. But in their private life the Greeks continued to hold to the old earthly gods of life and death.

The form-matter motive, originating in the religious consciousness of the Greeks from the meeting of these two antagonistic religions, was not in itself dependent upon the mythological and ritual form of the latter. As its central basic motive it ruled Greek thought from the very beginning. The autonomy claimed by Greek philosophical theories over against the popular belief implied merely an abandonment of those mythological forms of the latter which were bound to sensuous representation. It did not mean a break with the form-matter motive, as such. To the contrary it was much rather the common religious starting-point of all Greek thinkers. It was this very basic motive, which alone guaranteed a real community of thought between Greek philosophical tendencies, polarly opposed to one another. It determined the Greek view of nature, or physis, which excluded in principle the biblical idea of creation; it also ruled the classical Greek meaning of the terms eidos and eide, which are only understandable from the religious significance of the Greek form-motive. It lay at the foundation both of the Greek metaphysical view of being in its opposition to the visible world of becoming and decline, and of the Greek views of human nature and human society. Because of its dialectical character, it has involved Greek thought in a dialectical process that displays all the traits which we have briefly indicated.

MOTIVES: ONE  TWO  THREE  FOUR

Excerpt from ‘In the Twilight of Western Thought’ by Herman Dooyeweerd, Paideia Press, 2012, pp 29-32)

For similar analyses of religious ground motives, see New Critique Volume I, Part II; and Dooyeweerd, The Roots of Western Culture, Collected Works, Series B, Volume 3.

For FREE Downloads of these Dooyeweerd books go HERE

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SEE ALSO -

DOOYEWEERD: Form-Matter ground-motive | Superheroes and Zombies
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Herman Dooyeweerd: Where meaning ceases, created reality and human experience end.

Judith Leyster: 'Laughing Children with Cat' (Dutch 1629)

Where meaning ceases, created reality and human experience end.

By Herman Dooyeweerd

‘A New Critique of Theoretical Thought’ Vol 2, p 539)

Why is it meaning-less to restrict the datum of experience to the sensory matter of sensory impressions? Because this thesis is self-destructive, insofar as KANT'S conception of matter is the product of theoretical abstraction. What has been abstracted can never be the datum. The sensory function of intuition has a modal meaning by which it is integrated into the full temporal reality and which offers an insurmountable resistance to any attempt to make the sensory aspect of experience theoretically independent. Such an attempt cannot he supposed to leave at least the sensory aspect of experience intact, but it cancels this aspect and lands us in "pure nothingness" (das reine Nichts). If the human selfhood is capable of consciously experiencing the sensory aspect of reality in its subject-object relations, it necessarily experiences this sensory aspect in the cosmic temporal meaning-coherence.

This conscious experience is a quite different thing from the subjective undergoing of sense-impressions found in animals. And if the human selfhood transcends cosmic time, not a single aspect of temporal reality can transcend the self-consciousness operative in all human experience.

Speculative metaphysics has invented the splitting up of temporal reality into a noumenon and a phenomenon. The phenomenalistic conception of human experience remains tainted with the (fundamentally religious) prejudice of this metaphysics which is recognisable even in the disguise of a positivism claiming to be free of all manner of preoccupation.

There is nothing in experience that has been given us without the psychical [ie sensory] function of consciousness. But if nothing outside of this function had been given us, we should not have been given anything at all, not even the sensory itself.

This thesis is merely the counterpart of the thesis we have formulated in the Prolegomena: We cannot know anything without logical thought, but if we were not able to know anything outside of logical thought, we could not know anything at all. For not a single aspect of experience can exist outside of the cosmic coherence of meaning, and where meaning ceases, there is an end of created reality and of all human experience.

Herman Dooyeweerd, ‘A New Critique of Theoretical Thought’ Vol 2, p 539)

Free download of this and other books by Herman Dooyeweerd 

HERE

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The 15 EXPERIENTIAL, IRREDUCIBLE, 

LAW-SPHERES of COSMIC TIME 

(Also called Aspects/ Modes of Consciousness/ 

Modalities/ Meaning-sides)

(Diagrams by FMF)

NOTES: Aspects and "isms"
(by FMF)

No law-sphere (aspect) can be reduced to another. Infringements of 'irreducibility' are behind all 'isms'. These 'idolatries' show the human heart attempting to integrate entire reality around a single aspect (or 'law-sphere'). There is a plausibility to this because each aspect is present as an analogy in every other aspect. This gives each aspect an omnipresence, which Dooyeweerd designates 'sphere-universality'. 

Crucially, since no aspect can be reduced to another, none can be reduced even to the 'Logical / Analytical Aspect' (in other words, the above panoply of aspects is not a theoretical product of logic. Rather, it is "experiential". It is "intuitive consciousness"). This must be particularly and continually emphasised. Failure to bear that specific fact in mind makes a 'logicism' out of Dooyeweerd's philosophy, when it is primarily against logicism that he is arguing (Dooyeweerd's 'A New Critique of Theoretical Thought' is essentially a critique of Kant). A moment's reflection will observe that the aspects correspond pretty closely to standard academic disciplines.

It is key to Dooyeweerd to appreciate his insistence that there is no thinking without a thinker ("the hidden performer on the instrument of philosophic thought" (Prolegomena, New Critique). The thinker ALWAYS functions in ALL aspects, but transcends them all in the concentration-point of his or her deepest selfhood ('heart'), which is directed towards or away from the Living God Who alone gives meaning to temporal reality. In refusing God as only source of meaning, a substitute ultimate focus (or "idol") is sought by the selfhood within the temporal cosmos by absolutising a law-sphere or combination of law-spheres. 

Dooyeweerd writes:

"It is an undeniable fact that in the first life-phase of a suckling baby feeling precedes the first development of logical distinction; the latter precedes the controlling manner of forming sounds, which in turn precedes the primitive symbolical designation of concepts by words etc. But that does not prove that the higher mental functions originate from feeling [the sensory aspect] as their undifferentiated origin. Rather it testifies to the truth of our view of the order of the modal aspects of experience, as a real temporal order, related to subjective duration in the genetic process." (Herman Dooyeweerd, A New Critique of Theoretical Thought Vol II pp 112,113)

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DOOYEWEERD: Democracy and Political Parties: Relativism and Absolute Truth.

"Ja! Nein!" - Photo Credit: Alasdair Nicol (flickr)

Democracy and Political Parties: 

Relativism and Absolute Truth.

by Herman Dooyeweerd

(Extract from A New Critique of Theoretical Thought, Vol III pp 606-609. ‘Structures of Individuality of Temporal Human Society’)

See preceding extract HERE

A primordial question. Can a political party have a normative structural principle? The political contrast between the parties, and political relativism.

PART 1

Meanwhile, there is a primordial question to be answered before we engage in an investigation of the inner nature of the political party: Does not the latter imply a division of the State’s people into opposite factions? If so, how can such a party have a normative structural principle of a supra-arbitrary transcendental character?

This difficulty is indeed insoluble so long as the internal structural principle is not distinguished from the subjective purposes and factual behaviour of the actually existing parties.

In itself the rise of political parties is a manifestation of the interest and the feeling of responsibility of its founders and members with respect to State affairs.

In his famous work Modern Democracies, James Bryce has rightly observed that political parties, notwithstanding the justified complaints lodged against them in their factual appearance, are indispensable in any large and free country. No single representative government can do without them. They awaken and maintain the public spirit in the people and they bring about a necessary order in the chaos of the enormous mass of electors. Party discipline, though it should be bound to certain limits, has proved to be a remedy against political egoism and corruption.

We may add to Bryce’s observations that the divergence of opinion concerning the principles of policy of the State is a necessary result of the individualizing [differentiating, opening-up] process of human society, which proved to be implied in the process of disclosure of the latter. [See previous chapters of ‘A New Critique’]

There can be nothing wrong in such a divergence so long as it does not concern the supra-arbitrary fundamentals of the State and of the societal order in general.

Within this scope no single subjective political opinion of a party can as such lay claim to absolute validity. Therefore, a debate between different parties may contribute to a mutual correction and to finding a common basis of cooperation in practical questions of policy without eliminating the fundamental divergence of political viewpoints. This is the considerable value of the parliamentary debate in the framework of the modern parliamentary system.

But this state of affairs should not be interpreted in the sense of a universal axiological relativism, which Kelsen has ascribed to democracy as its ‘life- and world-view’, in contradistinction to autocracy which is supposed to be founded in the belief in an absolute verity (Vom Wesen und Wert der Demokratie,1920, Allgemeine Staatslehre, pp. 396 ff.).

The truth is that no single political total view is independent of a religious [ie ultimate, deeper-than-theoretical] basic motive, which rules both the practical ‘life- and world-view’ and the theoretical view of temporal reality. If indeed democracy -- or at least modern parliamentary democracy -- should be deemed to be incompatible with the belief in an absolute Truth, this would be tantamount to its inner dissolution as a political governmental system. For a consistent axiological relativism cannot allege a single ground for the maintenance of the State and the entire societal order, which impose themselves upon everybody, and are incompatible with anarchism as an axiological view. Such a relativism cannot provide any argument for the superiority of a democratic to an autocratic system of government. It cannot even account for the democratic majority principle.

If democracy should imply that, for lack of an absolute standard, no single political belief may lay claim to a higher legal appreciation than the others, it contradicts itself by attributing prevalence to the opinion of a parliamentary majority. For the principle of proportionality to which Kelsen appeals (Allgemeine Staatslehre, p. 370) is not warranted from a relativistic point of view.

And if the relativist should try to base the rule of majority upon the necessity of binding legal rules and decisions, we must observe that this very necessity is not to be justified from a relativistic standpoint.

PART 2
If, however, every theoretical and practical political conception concerning the State and the principles of a just government is in the last instance dependent on a 'religious' [ultimate, deeper-than-theoretical] basic motive which transcends any theoretical axiological relativism, no single political party can start from the latter. For this would be tantamount to a flat abandonment of its claim to superiority in comparison with other parties. Of course, this does not mean that a subjective political aim or program can as such lay claim to absolute validity. It only implies that without the belief in an absolute supra-theoretical Truth and in supra-arbitrary political norms any struggle between political parties becomes meaningless.

It is true that modern Historicism has to a high degree undermined the belief in eternal ideas or values and has even led to the fundamental crisis of Humanism amply described in the first volume of this work [A New Critique of Theoretical Thought, Vol I - DIRECT DOWNLOAD (608 page pdf)]. But we have shown that this Historicism itself did not originate in an independent theoretical thought, but much rather in the religious dialectic of the Humanist basic motive [Nature and Freedom].

Theoretically it may result in a complete relativism and nihilism, but practically it cannot maintain this relativism which even destroys its own foundation, viz. the absoluteness of the historical viewpoint as such.

A political party is concerned with practical policy though it cannot do without the aid of political theory. Therefore it cannot hold to an axiological relativism in the sense of Kelsen. It must appeal to a supra-relativistic starting-point in the central religious [ultimate 'ontic'] sphere of human existence, irrespective of the question as to whether or not it pretends to be neutral with regard to religion.

This has nothing to do with the untenable assumption that the factual grouping of a population into different political parties coincides with the differentiation into “religious groups”; this assumption is no better than the opposite supposition that party-grouping coincides with the occupational or class-differentiation.

Opposite political parties may start from the same religious basic motive and it may be that the same party embraces Christians and atheists. But this does not detract from the fact that the radical antithesis between the Biblical basic motive [ie ‘Creation, Fall, Redemption through Jesus Christ in communion with the Holy Spirit’] and the apostate religious [including atheistic] starting-points is of decisive importance to the ultimate division of the political views. For it rules the most fundamental divergence in the total view of human society and in the conception of the place of the State within the temporal societal order. It is only the influence of the dualistic scholastic [Thomistic-Catholic] motive of 'Nature and Grace' which may cause this fundamental line of division to be blurred.

From the above it should not be concluded that it is always and in every condition necessary to form separate Christian parties. It may be that this is factually impossible or undesirable, just as this may be the case with respect to the formation of Christian trade-unions or other Christian associations.

But it is certainly a serious misconception to suppose that the Christian religion has nothing to do with the formation of political parties, or that according to its inner nature a political party is sinful and lacks a structural principle in the temporal world-order. As to its supra-arbitrary inner nature a political party is no more sinful than the State or any other social relationship. It is only the human formative activity and its subjective purpose which can give the structural principle of this type of association a sinful direction.

(Extract from A New Critique of Theoretical Thought, Vol III pp 606-609. ‘Structures of Individuality of Temporal Human Society’)

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Dooyeweerd: Individualism versus Universalism

Goebbels at "Degenerate Art" Exhibition (Munich 1938)

Individualism versus universalism

by Herman Dooyeweerd

(Extract from A New Critique of Theoretical Thought, Vol III pp 601-603. ‘Structures of Individuality of Temporal Human Society’)

See preceding extract HERE

The radical Christian idea of human freedom. The tension between free inter­-individual relations and organized integration in modern society.

Against the individualistic tendencies in free society, God’s conserving grace thus calls into play opposed organizational tendencies of an integrating character.

In this way the divine world-order is also maintained in the individualized inter-individual societal relations. But if this process develops under the predominant leading of an apostate attitude of faith absolutizing temporal interests, there is no harmonious cooperation between the free development of inter­-individual relations and the increasing integrative significance of organizational bonds [ie between individual freedom and communal integration]. Indeed it appears that modern social development displays the picture of a continuous tension between the two tendencies, alternately overstraining the one or the other at the expense of the sound development of both. 

Communism, Humanism, Scholasticism
After a period of extreme in­dividualism modern society is now threatened by a communistic universalism which seeks to realize a totalitarian community of humankind by means of the State’s power, although in its ideology the State is completely depreciated. More than a third part of the human race is delivered to the political power of this totalitarian ideology. Western democracy is in fear of this tremendous adversary and seeks to defend itself by an international integration of its military forces. Nevertheless, by military means alone the free­dom of humanity cannot be protected. 

It should not be forgotten that communism in its Marxian and Bolshevist sense is primarily a spiritual power, a secularized eschatological faith in the final liberation of humanity in a future classless society. It should be borne in mind that, viewed from this spiritual background, it has originated in the dialectical process in which Western thought has been involved since the religious Humanist basic motive of ‘nature and freedom’ began to reveal its driving power in Western history. And the historical rise of Humanism was closely con­nected with the dialectical process in which Christian thought was involved by the introduction of the [inherently flawed and unbiblical] dualist scholastic basic motive of ‘nature and grace’.

Universalism and individualism
In this entire dialectical process of Western thought the view of human society was continually swayed between the poles of universalism and individualism. All attempts to find a way out of this alternative were doomed to fail so long as the immanence [timebound] standpoint was maintained, and the radical and integral freedom of the individual or the radical and integral community of human­kind were sought in the temporal order of our earthly existence.

Historicism [2] [3] [4] [5], Relativism, Fascism, Nazism
It is of no avail to disregard the fact that to a large extent the spiritual basis of the modern Western ideas of freedom and authority has been undermined by historicism and relativism. The simple fact that the fascist and nazi totalitarian ideologies could be presented as the only real alternative over against the communistic system was a symptom of this process. And that this suggestion could acquire such a tremendous influence in many countries of central and Southern Europe should be a warning against an optimistic judgment of the real state of affairs. 

The truth is that since the decline of individualism, even in democratic countries new universalist ideas have penetrated the practical and theoretical view of society. They are presen­ted as a mere historical necessity and adapted to the traditional democratic ideas, which have changed their sense, and in the prevailing theories of the State have been emancipated from their former foundation in an eternal natural law order.

This is why the integrating tendencies in the inter-individual or inter-communal relationships and in the voluntary organi­zations are readily interpreted as a process of socialization in which the idea of community gains the upperhand. Since this view of social development is emancipated from the structural principles of the differentiated societal relationships, it results in an overestimation of the integrating role of the national and international political communities.

Human rights and Sphere-sove­reignty
Even the traditional doctrine of unassailable human rights is not able to check the absolutization of temporal communal rela­tionships, if these rights themselves are interpreted in a universalistic sense. As soon as the inter-individual and inter-communal relationships are viewed as intra-communal, and the structural idea of internal sphere-sovereignty of the different orbits of societal life is replaced by those of [devolved] autonomy or functional de­centralization, there is no fundamental and radical defence against the totalitarian systems.

This radical defence is only found in the Biblical view of human freedom implied in the basic motive of creation, fall in­to sin and redemption by Jesus Christ. For it converts the whole view of temporal society; it excludes in principle both universa­lism and individualism, and it enables us to see the structural patterns in the complicated interlacements between inter-indivi­dual and communal relationships. 

The internal sphere-sove­reignty of the different temporal structures of societal relation­ships is the expression of the transcendent destination of human­kind. This is the only basis of a harmonious relation of authority and freedom in social development. [NEXT]

(Extract from A New Critique of Theoretical Thought, Vol III pp 601-603. ‘Structures of Individuality of Temporal Human Society’)

Free DIRECT download of above volume (large file - 820 page pdf): 

HERE

Or visit home download page for free Dooyeweerd books: 

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