Dooyeweerd: State guardian for child only after family breakdown.

Pablo Picasso: 'Child with a Dove' (1901)

Dooyeweerd: State guardian for child only after family breakdown.

[...] So long as organized communities are a necessary factor in the inner vitality of a nation, the state has indeed the... juridical task... to take measures that support, restore and stimulate the life of non-political communities. Primarily this applies to the natural organized communal life of the nuclear family, insofar as this is threatened in its normal structure by the devastating effect of sin. But in the widest sense of the word, too, this competence of the state is valid for the world of enterprise and for cultural communities.

One must not think, however, that when the state takes measures such as depriving parental rights, appointing a guardian for the children, and so on, it materially interferes with the internal structure of the family bond. For such measures are adopted only when the internal structure of the family community has itself already been disrupted. Nor does the state interfere because it possesses absolute sovereignty over non-state communities in their internal structure, but rather because as state it has to ensure the preservation of the nation, in the life of which the family plays such a basic role. In this emergency situation the state uses its governing authority to provide artificial supports to these communities that threaten to disintegrate, as an emergency substitute for a natural structure that factually no longer exists.

[...] It is a profound fallacy to insist that in this temporal world order there has to be an authority that is capable of overruling absolutely every other authority in a juridical sense, under the pretense that otherwise anarchy would reign. God did not ordain any "absolute power" in time. The truth is that it is precisely the theory of the state's totality of juridical power that rests on an anarchistic, revolutionary basis, because it ignores the divine structural laws of human society.

Everyone acquainted with life knows that there are material limits to the competence of the state. It is unworthy of legal science to ignore the connection between law and life through a sterile formalism. Rather it should base itself on a cosmology that is capable of meaningfully clarifying these limits and indicating an unambiguous criterion for them.

[...] Neither the arbitrariness of a government nor an arbitrary contract is in itself a source of law. In all its individual forms, positive law is always the positivizing of divine jural principles, whose structure is determined by the divine world order.

Extracts from "The Crisis in Humanist Political Theory" by Herman Dooyeweerd (1931, Paideia Press, 2010, pp 178-179)

__________________________

Dooyeweerd: we would have no awareness of time if we did not transcend time.

Photo: F. MacFhionnlaigh

Dooyeweerd: we would have no awareness of time if we did not transcend time.

Short extract from book 

‘Time, Law, and History: Selected Essays’ 

It is indeed correct to say that we would not have a genuine awareness of time if we did not transcend time in the deepest core of our being. All merely temporal creatures lack an awareness of time. Every instance of absolutizing time rests on a lack of critical self-reflection.

But the true concentration point, the supra-temporal root of our existence, cannot be known on the basis of an autonomous philosophy; for the latter, in its theoretical character, necessarily remains enclosed within the horizon of time. It is only the divine Word-revelation that discovers us to ourselves. True self-knowledge, as Calvin remarks in his Institutes, is acquired only through true knowledge of God. I call this the religious concentration law of human existence.

The “soul” of the human being, which according to the testimony of Scripture is not affected by the temporal death since it continues to exist even after laying down the “body” - that is, after laying down the entire temporal form of existence enclosed in the individuality structure - is the religious root of the human being, also designated by Scripture as the “inner man” or the “heart” of a person, from which flow the “issues of life” and in which “eternity is laid”. It is, as Kuyper expresses it in his Stone Lectures on Calvinism: 

“that point in our consciousness where our life is still undivided and where it is still bound together in its unity.” 

According to Kuyper this concentration point is not found in: 

“the spreading vines but in the root from which the vines spring. That point cannot be found anywhere but in the antithesis between all that is finite in our human life and the infinite that lies beyond it. Here alone do we find the common source from which the different streams of human life spring and separate themselves.”

Kuyper employs not only the image of a religious root but also that of a focus: 

“Personally it is our repeated experience that in the depths of our hearts, at the point where we disclose ourselves to the Eternal One, all the rays of our life converge as in one focus, and there alone regain that harmony which we so often and so painfully lose in the stress of daily life.”

However, this religious root of the individual human existence ought not to be understood in the sense of an “autonomous individual,” since it is created by God participating in the religious root-community of humankind. In Adam it found its first head falling away from God, but in Christ as its second head this religious community with God is restored. This religious root-community of humankind is the true supra-individual concentration-point of the entire cosmos. It also explains why the fall in Adam not only affected the total human race but drew with it also the entire temporal cosmos, as in Christ the whole cosmos is saved in its root.

A truly Christian philosophy of time is therefore impossible when theoretical thought is not directed towards the genuine supra-temporal concentration-point of the temporal cosmos. Theoretical thought in philosophy is never self-sufficient. Rather, by virtue of the structure of creation itself it is necessarily religiously determined, whether in an apostate direction or in a directedness towards the true Origin of everything, as revealed in Christ Jesus. 

Herman Dooyeweerd, ‘Time, Law, and History: Selected Essays’, Collected Works, Series B - Volume 14, Paideia Press 2017, pp 67-69)

____________________________

Robots tueurs, guerre 4.0/ Dooyeweerd: Artificial Intelligence

Géopolitis, 19.11.2017 | Robots tueurs, guerre 4.0
Des drones ou des robots capables de tuer sans intervention humaine remplaceront-ils bientôt les soldats sur les champs de bataille ? L’intelligence artificielle va transformer les guerres du futur et peut-être les équilibres stratégiques existants.

__________________________________________
Andrew Basden offers a Dooyeweerdian perspective on Artificial Intelligence:

Professor Andrew Basden takes a brief look at the debate over artificial intelligence, basing his observations on Herman Dooyeweerd's ground-motives, ie:

Hellenistic: Matter v Form
Medieval: Nature v Grace [Basden: "Nature v Supernature"]
Humanistic: Nature v Freedom
Biblical: Creation, Fall, Redemption [Basden: "Meaning"]

____________________________

Dooyeweerd writes regarding ground-motives:

'The religious ground-motives in the development of Western civilization are basically the following:

1. The "form-matter" ground-motive of Greek antiquity in alliance with the Roman power motive (imperium).

2. The Scriptural ground-motive of the Christian religion: creation, fall, and redemption through Jesus Christ in communion with the Holy Spirit.

3. The Roman Catholic [Thomistic] ground-motive of "nature-grace", which seeks to combine the two mentioned above.

4. The modern humanistic ground motive of "nature-freedom", in which an attempt is made to bring the three previous motives to a religious synthesis concentrated upon the value of human personality.' 

(Herman Dooyeweerd, Roots of Western Culture: Pagan, Secular, and Christian Options, Paideia Press, 2012, p15) 

____________________________

NOTE ON ASPECTS:

The 15 IRREDUCIBLE LAW-SPHERES of COSMIC TIME 

(Also called Aspects/ Modes/ Modalities/ Meaning-sides) 

________________________________________ 

Andrew Basden mentions Dooyeweerd's "aspects", and in particular the "analytical" aspect. In the chart above, this aspect (or "law-sphere") is paled blue for clarity.

Red column A 
shows the aspects to which the human is subject (ie all).

Brown column B 
shows aspects to which the (sensory) animal is subject.

Green column C
shows aspects to which the (organic) plant is subject.

Purple column D
shows aspects to which non-living (mineral) matter is subject.

It will be noted that animals, plants, and minerals function as "subjects" in their designated aspects, but only as "objects" in the remaining aspects above. 

A computer (artificial intelligence) would seem to be qualified in this chart's terminology as "mineral". Even if we consider plausible the development of organic, sentient, "androids" (or Bladerunner-type "replicants"), such consciousness would seem still to function in the "analytical" aspect as machine-like "object" rather than as human-like "subject".

It is crucial to appreciate that in Dooyeweerd's view no cosmic time aspect can be reduced to (or derived from) any other. This resistance reflects the "sphere-sovereignty" of each aspect. To attempt to reduce all aspects to, for instance, the logical (analytical) aspect (ie "logicism"), or to the physical aspect ("materialism"), would reflect a destructively impoverished and imbalanced description of reality. Thus the notion that "consciousness" is just a matter of "physical wiring" is problematically reductionist. 

(FMF)

___________________________________________

See also Andrew Basden's webpage: 

The Artificial Intelligence Question: 

A Dooyeweerdian Resolution

___________________________________________

Dooyeweerd: The uncritical character of the immanence standpoint in prevailing philosophy.

The 15 IRREDUCIBLE LAW-SPHERES of COSMIC TIME 

(Also called Aspects/ Modes/ Modalities/ Meaning-sides) ________________________________________ 

Dooyeweerd: The uncritical character of the immanence standpoint in prevailing philosophy. 

Short extract from book 

‘Time, Law, and History: Selected Essays’

Yet this state of affairs cannot be appreciated and acknowledged unless the immanence standpoint in philosophy is abandoned. This standpoint is characterised by the fact that one attempts to find the starting-point of philosophy [ie the “Archimedean point”*], from which the diversity of aspects is to be apprehended, in a theoretical “totality view,” within theoretical thought itself.

[...] Proceeding from its Christian starting-point, the Philosophy of the Cosmonomic Idea not only radically distanced itself from this immanence standpoint but also demonstrated that its postulate regarding the so-called autonomy of theoretical thought is uncritical and dogmatic. The truth is that the immanence standpoint, too, is not a purely theoretical standpoint: the postulate of the self-sufficency of theoretical thought is a dogmatic assumption, at bottom a preconception of a religious kind which flagrantly contradicts the entire structure of the temporal cosmos. The postulate of the self-sufficency - the “unconditionality” - of theoretical thought, even if qualified by adding “within its own domain,” implies a primary absolutization of the theoretical synthesis, that is to say, of a theoretical abstraction whereby all of reality is “theoreticized” by denaturing the big datum of naive [ie everyday non- or pre-theoretical] experience.

[…] Why is the prejudice of the “self-sufficiency of theoretical thought within its own domain” uncritical and dogmatic? Because theoretical thought in its modal logical aspect [= analytical law-sphere in above chart] (and this is intended here) cannot unilaterally determine its relationship to the other modal aspects of reality. In the “cogito” the thinking selfhood is active, functioning not only in the logical-analytical aspect but equally in all other aspects of reality and so functioning at the same time as the individual concentration point of all these aspects of temporal human existence. Since all aspects are equally embraced by cosmic time and therefore are intrinsically temporal in nature, the concentration point of the human being, where all temporal aspects coincide as in one focal point, cannot itself be of a temporal but only of a supra-temporal, transcendent character. The theoretical synthesis is determined both by cosmic time and by the supra-temporal transcendent selfhood.

[...] The dogmatic character of the "transcendental-logical" conception of the selfhood is apparent as soon as one realizes that it is a theoretical abstraction and as such a thought-product of the thinking selfhood. The thinking selfhood identifies itself uncritically with its own thought product.

Herman Dooyeweerd, ‘Time, Law, and History: Selected Essays’, Collected Works, Series B - Volume 14, Paideia Press 2017, pp 63-66 (£10.00; $12.95) 

______________________

*More on the "Archimedean point" -

Dooyeweerd writes:

"It follows that true self-knowledge is the primary condition for truly critical philosophical reflection. For where the self seeks its reliable ground and origin, that is where the Archimedean point of its philosophy is. Once we have understood this state of affairs, we can only conclude that the idea of the immanent self-sufficiency of theoretical thought betrays a lack of veritable critical self-reflection. The choice of the Archimedean point cannot be purely theoretical, for it is only the thinker himself who is able to make this choice. Rather than theoretical this choice is a religious act. In this act theoretical thought is concentrated upon that which is accepted by the thinking self as the ultimate root and self-sufficient origin of the cosmos. 

"This self, which in Holy Scripture is called the heart*, from which life springs, is subject to the restless search for its own origin and that of the entire cosmos. This is the religious law of concentration, which even on the immanence-standpoint does not lose its sway. This unrest, issuing from man’s heart, affects philosophical thought, which in its tendency towards origin and totality cannot but point beyond its own immanent limits towards its ultimate religious Root and its Origin. 

"The philosophical ground-idea is the foundation of all philosophy. It is the ultimate theoretical limiting idea in which this tendency towards origin and totality comes to expression. When we reflect upon it, we get to the necessary presuppositions of all philosophical thought. 

"By the light of God's revelation in Jesus Christ we do not regard the immanence standpoint as a natural premise for the Christian transcendence standpoint, but rather as a radical defection (apostasy) from the genuine self and from the true origin of all things. Thus we regard it as a falling away from the reliable ground and Origin of truth. The self that seeks a reliable ground in its theoretical thinking has fallen away from its true nature. In the end it identifies itself with its thought-abstraction. By so doing, it stumbles into the temporal diversity of meaning, where it is being dispersed. It can then only find its concentration in an absolutization, that is to say, a deification of something created."

Excerpted from "The Dilemma for Christian Philosophical Thought & the Critical Character of the Philosophy of the Cosmonomic Idea (Wijsbegeerte der Wetsidee)" by Herman Dooyeweerd (Translated by Chris van Haeften).

_______________________________

*More on the "heart" - 

Dooyeweerd writes:

"God created man in His image. In the heart of man, the religious root, the center of his being, God concentrated all of creation toward His service; here He laid the supratemporal root of all temporal creatures. This human heart, from which according to Scripture come the wellsprings of life ["Above everything else guard your heart, because from it flow the springs of life." Prov 4:23 NSV], transcends all things temporal in the service of God. 

The whole religious sense (meaning) of God’s creation lies in our heart, our entire ego, our complete self. This heart, in which according to the Word eternity has been laid ["He has also set eternity in the human heart" Eccles 3:11 NIV], is the true supratemporal center of man’s existence, and at the same time it is the creaturely center of all of God’s creation. 

The apostasy of this heart, of this root of creation, necessarily swept with it all temporal creation. In Adam not only all mankind fell, but also that entire temporal cosmos of which man was the crowned head. 

And in Christ, the Word become flesh, the second Covenant Head, God gave the new root of His redeemed creation, in Whom true humanity has been implanted through self-surrender, through surrender of the center of existence, the heart." 

(Herman Dooyeweerd: The Christian Idea of the State, Craig Press 1968, p5)

________________________________
"Fata Morgana"

'The inner restlessness of meaning, as the mode of being of created reality, reveals itself in the whole temporal world. To seek a fixed point in the latter is to seek it in a "fata morgana", a mirage, a supposed thing-reality, lacking meaning as the mode of being which ever points beyond and above itself. There is indeed nothing in temporal reality in which our heart can rest, because this reality does not rest in itself... 

The question: "Who is man?" is unanswerable from the immanence-standpoint. But at the same time it is a problem which will again and again urge itself on apostate thought with relentless insistence, as a symptom of the internal unrest of an uprooted existence which no longer understands itself.' (Herman Dooyeweerd, A New Critique of Theoretical Thought, Vol III: 109, 784)

________________________________
“ Dès lors, beaucoup de ses disciples se retirèrent et cessèrent d’aller avec lui. Jésus demanda alors aux douze disciples: « Voulez-vous partir, vous aussi? » Simon Pierre lui répondit: « Seigneur, à qui irions-nous? Tu as les paroles qui donnent la vie éternelle.” 
(Évangile selon Jean 6:66-68, La bible en français courant)
________________________________
'At this, many of his disciples turned away and no longer accompanied him. Jesus asked the Twelve, "Do you also want to leave?" Simon Peter answered, "Lord, where would we go? You have the words of eternal life.”' (John 6:66-68 CEB)
________________________________
'On àm sin thionndaidh mòran dhe a dheisciobail air ais agus cha do choisich iad tuilleadh còmhla ris. Mar sin thuirt Ìosa ris an dà fhear dheug, “Am bu toigh leibhse falbh cuideachd?” Fhreagair Sìmon Peadar e, “A Thighearna, cò thuige a thèid sinn? Is ann agadsa a tha faclan na beatha maireannaich.”' (Eòin 6:66-68)
________________________________
'Ansin tharraing a lán dá dheisceabail siar agus ní théidís timpeall lena chois a thuilleadh. Dúirt Íosa dá bhrí sin leis an dáréag: “Cad mar gheall oraibhse, an mian libhse freisin imeacht?” D'fhreagair Síomón Peadar é: “A Thiarna, cé chuige a rachamaid? Is agatsa atá briathra na beatha síoraí.”' (Eoin 6:66-68)
________________________________

Dooyeweerd: Historical Aspect discloses formative anti-reactionary task. But tradition retains a role.

Dooyeweerd: Historical Aspect discloses formative anti-reactionary task. But tradition retains a role.

Short extract from book 

‘Time, Law, and History: Selected Essays’

In the historical aspect time reveals itself in the modal sense of historical development. (Footnote: According to its subject-side “culture” is “formative control”). Historical “periods” are periods in the execution of the human task of formation and control. They are not mathematically demarcated from each other; the vital cultural factors of an earlier period are absorbed into those of the later cultural period. It is in tradition that historical developmental time fuses past, present and future. This time-order bears, similar to those present in all the subsequent aspects to be discussed, a modal normative character. It imposes on humankind a normative task to be culturally formative: it confronts the inertia of resting in the present or vegetating on the past with the demands of the future. A reaction in history is an anti-normative reaching back to a dead past; in a reactionary way it positions itself against the norm of historical development.

Extract from: Herman Dooyeweerd, ‘Time, Law, and History: Selected Essays’, Collected Works, Series B - Volume 14, Paideia Press 2017, pp 58 (£10.00, $12.95)

____________________________

Dooyeweerd: The modal aspects of time and their cosmic continuity.

Dooyeweerd: The modal aspects of time and their cosmic continuity.

Short extract from book 

‘Time, Law, and History: Selected Essays’

Temporal reality functions in a diversity of modal aspects which themselves are not subject to change in time but instead form a constant and basic modal framework within which the individual changeable entities, events, acts, deeds and societal relationships display their variable functions. The modal aspects make possible this variable functioning.

The modal structure does not exhibit the concrete what that is typical of individuality structures, since it reveals the how of reality. Each modal aspect is a functional way of being, a modality or a modal aspect of reality.

In the general theory of modal aspects the Philosophy of the Cosmonomic Idea provisionally brought to light fourteen [subsequently fifteen (FMF)] such modal aspects of temporal reality. According to their law-like structure they are designated as law-spheres. They are that of:

1) quantity [numerical], 
2) spatiality, 
3) the aspect of movement [kinematic], 
4) [the physical energy aspect,] 
5) the biotic aspect,
6) the feeling (psychical) [sensory] aspect, 
7) the analytical (or logical) aspect, 
8) the historical [cultural, formative power] aspect, 
9) the aspect of symbolical signification [lingual], 
10) that of social interaction, 
11) the economic, 
12) the aesthetic, 
13) the jural, 
14) the moral [ethical]  
15) and the faith [pistical/ certitudinal] aspect.

In theoretical-philosophical analysis these modalities are essentially set apart in a theoretical discontinuity. However, within temporal reality they are fitted into a continuous cosmic coherence and, as we shall see, this cosmic coherence is a temporal coherence. 

As modal aspects of temporal reality they are implicitly modal time-aspects. In other words, within each modality of reality time comes to expression in a distinctive way without being exhausted by any one of them. The modal structure of reality itself is enclosed within cosmic time.

[...] The truth is that all so-called definitions of time are merely definitions of modal aspects of time, where time itself constantly remains the indefinable presupposition.

Extract from: Herman Dooyeweerd, ‘Time, Law, and History: Selected Essays’, Collected Works, Series B - Volume 14, Paideia Press 2017, pp 50-51 & 53. (£10, $12.95)

______________________________

Fascism: Brief Dooyeweerdian Critique

FASCISM: 

Brief Dooyeweerdian Critique

"When the Historical School attempted to understand the whole of culture, language, art, jurisprudence, and the economic and social orders in terms of the historical development of an individual national spirit, it elevated the national character to the status of the origin of all order. It therefore denied the truth that the individual creature always remains subject to law. It argued that if the individual potential of a man or nation is the only law for development and action, then this potential cannot be evaluated in terms of a universally valid law. Accordingly, any nation was considered to act rightly and legitimately if it simply followed the historical fate or goal implicit in its individual potential or disposition." (Herman Dooyeweerd, 'Roots of Western Culture' p 52)

READ FULL ARTICLE

HERE

________________________