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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.
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.
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