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The Gust by Willem van de Velde (c 1680) |
The crisis in the thought of the 20th century, however, is much deeper than the one to which Kant gave expression in his critique of knowledge. At least in its most prominent and representative manifestations, the twentieth-century crisis reveals the unmistakable features of a process of spiritual uprooting that affect the deepest foundations and presuppositions of science itself. The critical doubt thus generated is, for those who experience it, borne from the spiritual anxiety of a person who is drowning after seeing his ship break apart and finding himself tossed on the turbulent ocean of world events.
This anxiety bears an existential character in the fullest sense of the word. The surrounding social reality of a thinker caught up in this doubt increasingly appears “alien” to him the more it loses the spiritual influence of its former ground-motive. Such a thinker has the experience – to use Martin Heidegger’s terminology – of being “thrown” into a brute and meaningless reality. Driven by the urge towards self-preservation, people begin to look for support in the inner possibilities of their existence, of their “Dasein” [“existence”]. But this “existence” is no longer firmly anchored in a supra-temporal certainty. Ontological reflection on human “Dasein” is now only found in the “historical consciousness” which elevates the human being above brute natural reality, above the blind “being-there.” This historical consciousness, embedded in the flow of “historical time,” teaches one that human existence is a “Sein zum Tode” (“Being unto Death”) that one has to accept in full “consciousness of guilt.”
Ever since the Renaissance, modern humanism has been driven by the proud freedom motive aimed at a new society, dialectically accompanied by the modern nature motive – i.e., the tendency to gain autonomous control of reality by means of modern science. Today, however, the humanist freedom motive has lost its vital power. Modern humanity, uprooted, finds its “autonomous freedom” only in the existential possibility to plan its future in a mood of “concern,” aware that this future ends ontologically in a “nothing,” in “death.” At the same time, the classical humanist science ideal as well, with its aim to establish the ideal realm of autonomous freedom through the “control of nature,” has lost its spiritual foundation. For the spiritually uprooted descendants of the humanist pioneers the once highly valued “objective science” now has the significance of a mere artificial aid in an ultimately hopeless struggle for existence.
Such is the philosophical self-reflection of modern historicism, which may well be designated as a full-blown revelation of the deadly disease of our Western culture. One finds it in Spengler’s The Decline of the West, in Heidegger’s Being and Time, and in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness – three representative works that follow the course of this self-reflection from the prelude to World War I to the spiritual climate after World War II.
(Extract from: Time, Law, and History, Selected Essays by Herman Dooyeweerd, Paideia Press, Grand Rapids, 2017, pp 157-158)
