lundi 27 mai 2024

Herman Dooyeweerd: Meaning in the fall of man under the curse of God's wrath

NOTE by Fearghas MacFhionnlaigh: A key feature of Dooyeweerd’s thought is his insight that apostasy typically makes an idol of  — ie tries to integrate all of reality around — one single aspect of temporal existence. Dooyeweerd understands temporal reality as composed of fifteen creational “law-spheres” — aka “aspects”, “modalities of meaning”, “law-spheres” — which allow the “individuality structures” behind specific concrete things and events. Law-spheres (Aspects) are not abstracted properties of things, but ontically prior to things. Following the Genesis reference to animals being “created according to their kinds”, Dooyeweerd perceives the aspectual ordinances of Creation as being “irreducible” to each other. The attempt to reduce all of them to any single one automatically gives rise to idolatrous “-isms”, eg Rationalism, Materialism etc. Christ as Lord above time is the integration point of all Creation (“The stone the builders rejected has become the chief corner-stone”). In his website glossary note regarding aspects, J. Glenn Friesen gives us the following succinct statement by Dooyeweerd: “Iedere wetskring is in beginsel een zin-breking der boventijdelijke zintotaliteit.” [“Each law-sphere is in principle a refraction of meaning of the supratemporal totality of meaning”]. (From “De Theorie van de Bronnen van het Stellig Recht in het licht der Wetsidee,” Handelingen van de Vereeniging voor Wijsbegeerte des Rechts, XIX, 1932).


Meaning in the fall of man under the curse of God's wrath

By Herman Dooyeweerd (1894-1977)

(Extract from A New Critique of Theoretical Thought Vol 2)


There remains, however, another central problem of extreme importance: As regards his human nature, Christ is the root of reborn creation, and as such the fulness of meaning, the creature­ly Ground of the meaning of all temporal reality. But our tem­poral world in its apostate religious root lies under God’s curse, under the curse of sin. Thus there is a radical antithesis in the experiential side of the root of the earthly cosmos. It may be that this antithesis has been reconciled by the Redemption in Jesus Christ, but in temporal reality the unrelenting struggle between the kingdom of God and that of darkness will go until the end of the world. The falling away from God has affected our cosmos in its root and its temporal refraction of meaning. Is not this a final and decisive reason to distinguish meaning from reality? Does not the radical antithesis between the kingdom of God and that of darkness, which our transcendental Idea itself also recognizes as fundamental for philosophic thought, compel us to accept an ultimate dualism between meaning and reality?


Is sinful reality still meaning? Is it not meaningless, or rather the adversary of meaning, since meaning can only exist in the religious dependence on its Origin [ie our Creator]? Here we indeed touch the deepest problem of Christian philosophy. The latter cannot hope to solve it without the illumination of Divine Revelation if it wants to be guaranteed from falling back into the attitude of immanence-philosophy [ie non-Christian time-trapped philosophy].


I for one do not venture to try and know anything concerning the problem that has been raised except what God has vouchsafed to reveal to us in His Word. I do not know what the full effect of unrestrained sin on reality would be like. Thanks to God this unhampered influence does not exist in our earthly cosmos. One thing we know, viz. that sin in its full effect does not mean the cutting through of the relation of dependence between Creator and depraved creation, but that the fulness of being of Divine justice will express itself in reprobate creation in a tremendous way, and that in this process depraved reality cannot but reveal its creaturely mode of being as meaning. It will be meaning in the absolute subjective apostasy under the curse of God's wrath, but in this very condition it will not be a meaningless reality.


Sin causes spiritual death through the falling away from the Divine source of life, but sin is not merely privation, not something merely negative, but a positive, guilty apostasy insofar as it reveals its power, derived from creation itself. Sinful reality remains apostate meaning under the law and under the curse of God's wrath. In our temporal cosmos God's Common Grace reveals itself, as Kuyper brought to light so emphatically, in the preservation of the cosmic world-order. Owing to this preserving grace the framework of the temporal refraction of meaning [as per the creational law-spheres] remains intact.


The Christian as a stranger in this world.

Although the fallen earthly cosmos is only a sad shadow of God's original creation, and although the Christian can only consider himself as a stranger and a pilgrim in this world, yet he cannot recognize the true creaturely ground of meaning in the apostate root of this cosmos, but only in the new root, Christ. Any other view would inevitably result in elevating sin to the rank of an independent counter-power opposed to the creative power of God. And this would result in avoidance of the world, an unbiblical flight from the world. We have nothing to avoid in the world but sin. The war that the Christian wages in God's power in this temporal life against the Kingdom of darkness, is a joyful struggle, not only for his own salvation, but for God's creation as a whole, which we do not hate, but love for Christ's sake. We must not hate anything in the world but sin.


The apostate world cannot maintain any meaning as its own property in opposition to Christ. Common Grace.

Nothing in our apostate world can get lost in Christ. There is not any part of space, there is no temporal life, no temporal movement or temporal energy, no temporal power, wisdom, beauty, love, faith or justice, which sinful reality can maintain as a kind of property of its own apart from Christ.


Whoever relinquishes the world taken in the sense of sin, of the 'flesh' in its Scriptural meaning, does not really lose anything of the creaturely meaning, but on the contrary he gets a share in the fulness of meaning of Christ, in Whom God will give us everything. It is all due to God's common grace in Christ that there are still means left in the temporal world to resist the destructive force of the elements that have got loose; that there are still means to combat disease, to check psychiatric maladies, to practise logical thinking, to save cultural development from going down into savage barbarism, to develop language, to preserve the possibility of social interaction, to withstand injustice, and so on. All these things are the fruits of Christ's work, even before His appearance on the earth. From the very beginning God has viewed His fallen creation in the light of the Redeemer.


We can only face the problem of the effect on temporal meaning that the partial working of the falling away from the fulness of meaning has in spite of common grace, when we have gained an insight into the modal structures of the law-spheres [among God’s structural “ordinances” as referred to in the Psalms] within the temporal coherence of meaning. But—and with this we definitively reject any separation of meaning from reality — meaning in apostasy remains real meaning in accordance with its creaturely mode of being. An illogical reasoning can occur only within the logical modality [law-sphere] of meaning; illegality in its legal sense is only possible within the modality of meaning of the jural sphere; the non-beautiful can only be found within the modal aspect of meaning of the aesthetic law-sphere, just as organic disease remains something within the modal aspect of meaning of the biotic law-sphere, and so on. Sin, as the root of all evil, has no meaning or existence independent of the religious fulness of the Divine Law. In this sense St Paul's word is to be understood, to the effect that but for the law sin is dead (Rom 7:8)


All along the line meaning remains the creaturely mode of being under the law which has been fulfilled by Christ. Even apostate meaning is related to Christ, though in a negative sense; it is nothing apart from Him.


As soon as thought tries to speculate on this religious [ie creational root-related] basic truth, accessible to us only through faith in God's Revelation, it gets involved in insoluble antinomies. This is not due to any intrinsic contradiction between thought and faith, but rather to the mutinous attempt on the part of thought to exceed its temporal cosmic limits in its supposed self-sufficiency. For thought that submits to Divine Revelation and recognizes its own limits, the antithesis in the root of our cosmos is not one of antinomy [ie intrinsic contradiction]; rather it is an opposition on the basis of the radical unity of Divine Law; just as in the temporal law-spheres justice and injustice, love and hatred are not internally antinomous, but only contrasts determined by the norms in the respective modalities of meaning.


The religious value of the modal [creational ordinance] criterion of meaning.

If created reality is to be conceived of as meaning, one cannot observe too strictly the limits of the temporal modal law-spheres in philosophic thought. These limits have been set by the cosmic order of time in the specific 'sovereignty of the modal aspects within their own spheres. Any attempt to obliterate these limits by a supposedly autonomous thought results in an attack upon the religious fulness of meaning of the temporal creation.


If the attempt is made to reduce the modal meaning of the jural or that of the economic law-sphere to the moral one of the temporal love of one's neighbour, or if the same effort is made to reduce the modal meaning of number or that of language to the meaning of logic, it must be distinctly understood that the abundance of meaning of creation is diminished by this subjective reduction. And perhaps without realizing what this procedure implies, one puts some temporal aspect of reality in the place of the religious fulness of meaning in Christ. The religious value of the criterion of meaning is that it saves philosophic thought from falling away from this fulness.


(Extract from Herman Dooyeweerd, ‘‘A New Critique of Theoretical Thought Volume 2, pp 32-36)


NOTE

Herman Dooyeweerd (1894-1977), was a Dutch reformational thinker in the wake of Abraham Kuyper. Dooyeweerd has been described as “the most original philosopher Holland has ever produced, even Spinoza not excepted.” 


Free PDFs of Dooyeweerds book downloadable here: 


http://herman-dooyeweerd.blogspot.com

samedi 11 mai 2024

Herman Dooyeweerd: Time, Eternity and Selfhood

Read also:

“Dooyeweerd at the Movies: 

Everything Everywhere All at Once’”

Herman Dooyeweerd: 

TIME, ETERNITY and SELFHOOD

“Ons Archimedisch punt, dat ons zelfbewustzijn (de crux van alle humanistische kennistheorie!) bepaalt, doet ons de tijdelijke werkelijkheid zien als een uiterst gedifferentieerde zin-breking van de religieuze zin-volheid van onzen kosmos doorhet prisma van den kosmischen tijd, welken tijd wij in den religieuzen wortel van ons zelfbewustzijn, in boventijdelijke zelf-heid transcendeeren, doch waarin wij metal onze tijdelijke bewustzijns- en andere kosmische functies tevens immanent verkeeren.” (Herman Dooyeweerd, De crisis der humanistische staatsleer in het licht eener calvinistische kosmologie en kennistheorie, Boekhandel W. ten Have, Amsterdam 1931, p93)
https://www.dbnl.org/tekst/dooy002cris01_01/colofon.php

“Our Archimedean point determines our self-consciousness (the crux of all humanist epistemology) and makes us see temporal reality as an exceedingly differentiated refraction of the religious fullness of meaning of our cosmos via the prism of cosmic time, which time we transcend in the religious root of our self-consciousness, in our supratemporal selfhood, but in which we at the same time dwell immanently with all our temporal consciousness and other cosmic functions.” (Herman Dooyeweerd: The Crisis in Humanist Political Theory, As seen from a Calvinist cosmology and epidemiology, Paideia Press, 2010, p 73)

TEMPORAL LAW-SPHERES AS REFRACTIONS OF SUPRA-TEMPORAL MEANING
Time structure (the horizon of time) and temporal duration.

In order to gain proper insight into the problem of time, it is of primary importance to remember that universal time, which embraces our entire temporal cosmic reality in all its modal aspects [law-spheres] of meaning, may not be identified with becoming, with continuously being subjected to change.


One can say that all genesis, all becoming and passing away, do take place within time, but not that time itself is becoming. Rather, within cosmic time, an initial distinction is required between (a) a law-side, and (b) a factual side subject to the former. These two sides co-exist in an unbreakable coherence.


According to its law-side cosmic time is the structural time-order embracing the entire temporal reality. As such, time bears a constant and transcendental character, that is to say, it makes possible temporal reality in its immanent structure.


This invariant cosmic time structure serves as the foundation both for the constant structures of the temporal modalities of reality (those of number, space, motion, organic life, feeling, and so on), and for the individuality structures of things, events, societal relationships, etc. etc. The individuality structures overarch the aspects and group them in different ways into individual totalities.

The 15 IRREDUCIBLE LAW-SPHERES of COSMIC TIME 
(Also called Aspects/ Modes of consciousness/ Modalities/ Meaning-sides) 
The Philosophy of the Cosmonomic Idea designates this time structure as such as the temporal horizon of all of empirical reality. As to its factual side time in its universal cosmic character is indeed a flowing continuum (fluidum), the continual mutual fusion of moments, which are temporal moments of subjective states, acts, events and so on.


According to its factual side time can be called duration in moments, and it soon becomes apparent that this "duration" can never be "empty": it can never be separated from the factual side of temporal reality, no more than it can exist outside the universal time-structure, outside the horizon of time. On no account should this duration be identified with one of its modal aspects, such as the duration of motion, emotional duration or historical duration. On the contrary, its cosmic continuity is of a supra-modal character which pervades and overarches all law-spheres.


The whole of temporal reality, within its time-structure, has a certain cosmic duration which flows through its modal aspects in a supra-temporal continuum.


This cosmic duration within the time-structure can only be experienced by the human being, who has a supra-temporal center of its temporal existence, the heart, in which eternity was placed.


Time can only be experienced in its relation to created eternity (the aevum, as it is called in Scholasticism, in opposition to the aeternitas increata, the uncreated eternity of God).


All immanent temporal time-measurement, for example in hours, minutes and seconds, in the final analysis remains external and as such cannot provide us with an awareness of time. Our intuition of time, which itself cannot be grasped conceptually, is undeniably rooted in the identity of our selfhood, in the transcendent center of our existence. All that restlessness in our experience of time, as Augustine already realized from a truly Christian point of view, derives from the heart, from the stirring of time and eternity in the innermost depths of our existence.


(Excerpt from Herman Dooyeweerd, TIME, LAW,and HISTORY: Selected Essays, Collected Works, Series B — Volume 14, Translated by Daniël Strauss, General Editor Daniël Strauss, 2017, pp 3-5)


Purchase options and free PDF of volume HERE:


http://herman-dooyeweerd.blogspot.com

———

COMMENT: 

ARCHIMEDEAN POINT = MELCHIZEDEK POINT?


“Thubhairt an Tighearna rim Thighearna, Suidh aig mo dheaslàimh, gus an cuir mi do naimhdean nan stòl fod chasan…Mhionnaich an Tighearna, agus cha ghabh e aithreachas, Is sagart thu gu bràth, a rèir òrdagh Mhelchisedeic.”
 (Salm 110:1&4, Am Bìoball Gàidhlig 1992)

‘The Lord said to my Lord,
“Sit at My right hand,
Till I make Your enemies Your footstool.”
…The Lord has sworn
And will not relent,
“You are a priest forever
According to the order of Melchizedek.”’
 (Psalm 110:1&4, NKJV)


Currently reading Hebrews. Just powerfully realised that Dooyeweerd’s “Archimedean Point” could well have been inspired by Hebrews 6:19,20 -


“Sure and steadfast anchor of the soul (heart)”


So could the Archimedean Point even be called the Melchizedek Point? :


“Gum biodh sinne a theich thuige airson dìdein air ar misneachadh gu làidir gus grèim a ghabhail air an dòchas a tha romhainn, agus tha sin againne mar acair stèidhichte is cinnteach dhar n‑anam, 's a tha a' dol a‑steach air taobh a‑staigh a' chùirtear far an deach Ìosa, an ro‑ruitheadair, a‑steach air ar son‑ne, a chaidh a dhèanamh na àrd‑shagart gu sìorraidh a rèir òrduigh Mhelchisedeic.” (Eabhraich 6:18-20, An Tiomnadh Nuadh anns an Eadar-Theangachadh Ùr Gàidhlig 2017)


“This hope we have as an anchor of the soul, both sure and steadfast, and which enters the Presence behind the veil, where the forerunner has entered for us, even Jesus, having become High Priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek.” (Hebrews 6:19,20)

I am remembering that Andree Troost in his book “What is Christian Philosophy: An Introduction to the Cosmonomic Philosophy of Herman Dooyeweerd (Paedeia Press, 2020) helpfully relates Dooyeweerd’s “supratemporal” feature to Melchizedek.


But the “Archimedean Point” thing has hit home with me personally just now, having been reading Hebrews daily, then this evening reading the following passage from Dooyeweerd:


“Right from the beginning the Philosophy of the Cosmonomic Idea related the problem of time to that of the true character of reality, the being of what is. Since this insight into the ‘being of what is’ is entirely dependent on the choice of the Archimedean point or the transcendent starting-point of philosophical thought, and since the latter in turn determines the understanding of the cosmonomic idea as a foundation for philosophy, it should not be surprising as well that the philosophical treatment of the problem of time will faithfully mirror the assumed cosmonomic idea. On the immanence standpoint the problem of time becomes a wellspring of antinomies. The basic antimony of all immanence philosophy, after all, is the choice of Archimedean point within temporal reality itself. This antimony must then be camouflaged through the primary absolutisation of temporal aspects of meaning in which the thinker believes he can find its time-transcendent starting-point. But this primary absolutisation, through which the aspects or modalities concerned are apparently elevated above the universal temporal coherence prevailing between them, causes one to disregard the cosmic universality of time. No single absolutisation of a temporal aspect into a supra-temporal, self-contained resting point for philosophical thought, can indeed elevate that thought above time. This is the basic antimony of metaphysical immanence philosophy, which, for all its attempts to break through the bondage to time by means of metaphysical concepts, is itself only possible by the grace of time.”

(Herman Dooyeweerd, TIME, LAW, and HISTORY: Selected Essays, Paideia Press 2017, pp 1,2)

———————

IMPORTANT NOTE:
Dooyeweerd used the term “Archimedean Point” only in his earlier work, as he explains in this extract from a 1974 interview with Magnus Verbrugge (translated by Dr. J. Glenn Friesen 2007):

DOOYEWEERD: Well, the term 'Archimedean point' is derived from a saying of the great Greek natural scientist Archimedes, the defender of Syracuse during the Roman sea attack [vlootaanval]. He said, "Give me a point where I can stand, and I will move the earth." He had brought [physical] mechanics to a rather high degree of perfection so that this [saying] was something that was possible in early Greek thought. The Archimedean point is derived from this saying. In philosophy, it is necessary to have a point where we can stand, and from which we can obtain a view of totality over the whole of human experience in time, within time, within the order of time.

VERBRUGGE: A kind of lookout post?

DOOYEWEERD: A kind of a lookout post, but one that is set up in such a way that you cannot look out from a particular point of view that is contained within our temporal world of experience [onze tijdelijke ervaringswereld]. The viewpoint is one that transcends our temporal world of experience. And from that viewpoint we can indeed obtain a view over the whole. But as long as we remain within that of which we want to obtain an overview, we can only receive a view from out of a particular viewpoint [een bepaalde gezichtshoek].

VERBRUGGE: You have to transcend it.

DOOYEWEERD: You have to transcend it [je moet er bovenuit]. Indeed.

VERBRUGGE: And what is now the Archimedean point that you have chosen, or found?

DOOYEWEERD: Yes. I currently no longer use the term, and I in fact have not done so for quite some time. It was a term that I used in particular when I was working out the ideas of the Philosophy of the Law-Idea in its first edition, the Dutch edition. I used the term at that time, and I needed it in order to distinguish my standpoint from other views at the time that sought their point of departure within the temporal world itself.* In particular, they sought their standpoint in logical thought, or in sensory perception, or in some other particular point of view or particular aspect of our experience. So that is the Archimedean point, and we seek for it.
———
*Footnote by J Glenn Friesen: The important point here is that Dooyeweerd's philosophy begins from a standpoint that is not within the temporal world. Without his idea of the supratemporal selfhood, which stands outside of time, we cannot understand his philosophy or any part of it. Dooyeweerd has said that the theoretical attitude of thought, the Gegenstand-relation cannot be understood apart from this. The idea of the mutual irreducibility of the modal aspects can also not be understood apart from this supratemporal standpoint. The Christian Ground-motive of creation, fall and redemption depends upon it, for Dooyeweerd understands these ideas in their supratemporal religious root. And even our understanding of Word-revelation and of Christ's incarnation depends on it.

FULL VERBRUGGE INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPTION:
————-

And let us immediately clarify and emphasise most forcefully that Friesen’s latter statement that “The Christian Ground-motive of creation, fall and redemption depends upon it [this supratemporal standpoint], for Dooyeweerd understands these ideas in their supratemporal religious root” in no way divorces “creation, fall and redemption” from everyday grounded reality but contrariwise guarantees (rescues) concrete existence in an exhaustively comprehensive manner: “A body didst Thou prepare for me” (Heb 10:5). [FMF]