Eduardo Paolozzi: Wittgenstein in New York (1965)
Dooyeweerd: Old ontological,
modern epistemological a priori
The structural and the subjective a priori in human experience.
Yet there must be some truth in the old ontological view as well as in the modern epistemological conception of the a priori, in spite of the fact that both of them are inacceptable to Christian philosophy, both as regards their exclusiveness of each other and their own foundation and elaboration. To account for this element of truth, we shall have to introduce a distinction in our epistemology which will prove to be of essential importance, but which in this sense is unknown in immanence-philosophy.
There is an a priori complex in the cosmological sense of the structural horizon of human experience. This a priori as such has the character of a law. And there is also a merely subjective a priori complex in the epistemological sense of the subjective a priori insight into that horizon. We can distinguish the two a priori complexes simply as the structural and the subjective a priori. Only the subjective a priori can be true or false in an epistemological sense. As it is subjective insight expressing itself in judgments, it necessarily remains enclosed within the cosmological a priori horizon of human experience. In other words, the subjective a priori always remains determined and delimitated by the a priori structure of all human experience. It can never be the self-sufficient foundation of truth which critical epistemology considers it to be. The structural and the subjective a priori principles are related as the law-side and the subject-side of a priori human knowledge.
The horizon of human experience.
In the light of our cosmonomic Idea there can be no doubt that all human experience is bound to some horizon which makes this experience possible. We repeatedly mentioned the transcendent and the transcendental conditions of our knowledge. This horizon of experience is not a subjective cadre within which reality appears to us only in a phenomenal shape (determined by a supposedly creative synthesis) and behind which the fundamentally inexperienceable dimensions of some “thing in itself” (“Ding an sich”) are situated.
It is rather the a priori meaning-structure of our cosmos itself in its dependence on the central religious [ie supratemporal] sphere of the creation, and in subjection to the Divine Origin of all things. The horizon of human experience is that of our ‘earthly’ cosmos as it is given in the Divine order of the creation.
This is a truly supra-individual and law-conformable cadre which is constant, in contrast with all change in actual subjective experience.
The horizon of human experience.
In the light of our cosmonomic Idea there can be no doubt that all human experience is bound to some horizon which makes this experience possible. We repeatedly mentioned the transcendent and the transcendental conditions of our knowledge. This horizon of experience is not a subjective cadre within which reality appears to us only in a phenomenal shape (determined by a supposedly creative synthesis) and behind which the fundamentally inexperienceable dimensions of some “thing in itself” (“Ding an sich”) are situated.
It is rather the a priori meaning-structure of our cosmos itself in its dependence on the central religious [ie supratemporal] sphere of the creation, and in subjection to the Divine Origin of all things. The horizon of human experience is that of our ‘earthly’ cosmos as it is given in the Divine order of the creation.
This is a truly supra-individual and law-conformable cadre which is constant, in contrast with all change in actual subjective experience.
(Excerpt from A New Critique of Theoretical Thought Vol 2, pp 547-548)
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