Dooyeweerd: The three transcendental problems of a theoretical total view of human society

'Hunters in the Snow' by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1565)

The three transcendental problems of a theoretical total view of human society

By Herman Dooyeweerd 

(Extract from: A New Critique of Theoretical Thought, Vol III pp 168-170, 'Structures of Individuality of Temporal Human Society')

For the present we must restrict ourselves to an elucidation of the transcendental problems involved in a theoretical total view of human society. We may formulate them as follows:

1. Where is the basic denominator to be found needed for a comparison of the different types of societal relationships, set apart and opposed to one another in the antithetic Gegenstand-relation of theoretical thought?

2. How is their mutual relation and coherence to be viewed?

3. Where do they find their radical unity and totality of meaning, or in other words, from which starting-point can we grasp them in the theoretical view of totality?

The 15 EXPERIENTIAL, IRREDUCIBLE, 
LAW-SPHERES of COSMIC TIME 

(Also called Aspects/ Modes of Consciousness/ 
Modalities/ Modes of Meaning)

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Our general transcendental critique of theoretical thought has brought to light that the philosophical immanence-standpoint [for which only temporal reality exists] can only result in absolutizations of specific modal aspects [see above chart - note resemblance to university disciplines] of human experience. Similarly we may establish that on this standpoint every total view of human society is bound to absolu­tizations both of specific modal aspects and of specific types of individual totality. This will appear from our following struc­tural analysis.

From the Christian transcendence-standpoint the radical unity and meaning-totality of all temporal societal structures of in­dividuality is only to be found in the central religious [not ecclesiastical but supratemporal “spiritual-root”] community of mankind in its creation, fall, and redemption by Jesus Christ. This starting-point excludes in principle every universalist socio­logical view, which seeks the unity and all-embracing totality of all types of societal relationships in a temporal community of mankind. Neither a nation, nor the Church in the sense of a temporal institution, nor the State, nor an international union of whatever typical character, can be the all-inclusive totality of human social life, because mankind in its spiritual root transcends the temporal order with its diversity of social structures.

(Thanks to whoever originally designed this diagram)

This was the firm starting-point from which Christianity by the spiritual power of its divine Master broke through the pagan totalitarian view of the Roman empire, and cleared the way for a veritable and salutary revolution of the social world-view. The radical meaning of this Christian revolution would be frustrated by identifying it with the Stoic idea of mankind as a temporal community of all-inclusive character. It is true that the natural law doctrine of Hugo Grotius used this Stoic idea as a foundation for international law and that this idea broke through the classical Greek absolutization of the polis. But it could never become the starting-point for a social world-view which hits any absolutization of temporal societal life at its roots. It could not clear the way for a theoretical examination of the basic structures of individuality determining the inner nature of the different types of societal relationships.

It is only from the Biblical Christian transcendence-standpoint that the three transcendental basic problems formulated above can be solved in a way which precludes absolutizations. The basic denominator for a theoretical comparison of the different structural types of human society can here only be the temporal world-order rooted in the divine order of creation. The mutual relation between the social structures of individuality is only to be viewed as that of an inner sovereignty of each structure with­in its own orbit, balanced by its coherence with the other struc­tures in cosmic time; the latter guarantees enkaptic [interwoven] external functions of any particular social relationship in all the others, insofar as their different structural principles are realized.

And this theoretical total view is only possible from the starting-point that the different societal structures of individu­ality find their radical unity and meaning-totality beyond cosmic time in the central religious [supratemporal “spiritual-root”] community of mankind.

It is indeed our transcendental basic Idea in its application to the theoretical total-view of the societal structures of individu­ality which gives this solution to the three transcendental problems formulated above. (Go to NEXT EXTRACT)

(Herman Dooyeweerd, A New Critique of Theoretical Thought, Vol III pp 168-170, Structures of Individuality of Temporal Human Society)

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