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| James W. Skillen |
Philosophy of the Cosmonomic Idea: Herman Dooyeweerd's Political and Legal Thought
by James W. Skillen (2008)
Short extracts from article:
<<The empirical inadequacy and the antinomic character of liberalism's fundamental assumptions and arguments have their root in the religious ground-motive of modern humanism, according to Dooyeweerd. That root is the dialectic of freedom and determinism. The antinomic character of this religious basic-motive became stark in Thomas Hobbes and other early modernists, and it reached a high point in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant.13 Dooyeweerd refers to the philosophic expression of modern humanism's religious ground-motive as the dialectic of the "freedom ideal" and the "science ideal." We can summarize the dilemma briefly as follows. The early ideal of human freedom or autonomy was carried largely by faith in science—the science ideal—a conviction that humans would achieve their Creator-like independence and self-sufficiency through rational, scientific mastery of nature. "Nature was conceived as the territory that had to be dominated by the free personality with its 'sovereign reason.'"14 Behind the science ideal was the assumption that all of reality, including human life, is subject to laws of nature, which scientific thought has the power to explain. Understanding those laws would supposedly lead to ever increasing human control over the environment, and thus to ever increasing self-government, self-mastery, and autonomy.15 Only if humans can gain freedom from the encumbrance of anti-scientific ecclesiastical dogma and political oppression can they become truly autonomous. The enlightening progress of science will supposedly make that possible.
However, if it is true that the growth of science is the key to human mastery and thus to human freedom, it appears that complete human autonomy will come about only when scientific thought reaches the point where it can explain the behavior of everything in the universe, including human behavior, in terms of the laws of nature. But this means that maximum human mastery will be attained when science eclipses all freedom, because everything will then have been shown to be predetermined by the laws that science has mastered. Freedom will be swallowed up in a pre-determined nature.16 As Dooyeweerd explains, as soon as the ideal of science dominating nature "began to make itself felt consistently in humanistic philosophy, so that the entire extent of reality from top to bottom was construed as a closed chain of mechanical cause and effect, there was no longer a place in any part of reality for the 'free autonomous personality.' 'Nature' showed itself to be a dangerous enemy of 'freedom.'"17
...Rejecting the identification of reason with the normative ordering of human life is a judgment that flows from Dooyeweerd's insistence on recognizing not only the irreducibility of modal aspects and the distinction between subject and law (or norm) in each modality, but also the distinction between creatures and their Creator. On these terms, Dooyeweerd also denies the possibility of natural theology in the sense of a theoretical knowledge of God, made possible by human reason, which by analogia entis gains access to the mind and eternal law of God.
... Dooyeweerd thus follows Calvin in what he refers to as Calvin's essential return to Augustine insofar as the latter sought to reject the neoplatonic blurring of boundaries between Creator and creature. Calvin is intransigent, says Dooyeweerd, in his opposition to every attempt to make human reason or the human will a co-legislator with God or with divine reason, because such an attempt invariably finds its origin in a speculative idea of a community of reason or will between God and creature.
...The basis of a just and pluralistic society is the cosmonomic order of God's creation to which humans are called to respond in creative, history-making obedience. This includes the responsibility to constitute the state as a community of justice for all in the course of the ongoing differentiation and integration of society. Among other things, the state brings about the public-legal integration of society. That integration succeeds only with the state's recognition and protection of the sphere sovereignty of other societal structures and of individual persons in the context of upholding the public trust shared by all citizens and public officials. A just state is one that upholds structural pluralism as a matter of principle, not as an uncomfortable or grudging accommodation to interest groups, or to individual autonomy, or to its own weakness. And with the continuing historical integration of peoples throughout the world, the normative demand of public justice will increasingly call for international and transnational administration of public affairs in accord with the political common good of all.
Justice cannot be achieved in a differentiating social order on the basis of either liberal or classical basic-ideas of reality, Dooyeweerd contends. What is needed is human obedience to God's creation ordinances, an obedience made possible by the restoration of the creation through God's redeeming grace in Jesus Christ. Living faithfully out of that religious basic motive opens humans to their true meaning and identity as God's image, male and female, throughout their generations, and makes possible the normative obedience necessary to pursue the stewardship of the earth and to unfold all the riches of human life in society in tune with God's judgment and anticipated fulfillment of the creation.
The purpose of this essay has been to introduce Dooyeweerd's philosophy of the cosmonomic idea and some of the critical elucidation it offers of the structural conditions of human social and political responsibility in God's creation. The purpose has not been to consider particular public policy challenges, or the adjudication of particular constitutional and legal cases, or the ways in which Christians and citizens of other faiths ought to be exercising their political responsibilities at this point in time in the United States or elsewhere. All of these are important tasks and must be pursued. My hope is that this essay may help to illuminate some of the background considerations that are essential for the wise and disciplined fulfillment of these urgent practical tasks, and that it may also help to expand the dialogue and debate among political philosophers of diverse persuasions.>>
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