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)

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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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