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| Judith Leyster: 'Laughing Children with Cat' (Dutch 1629) |
Where meaning ceases, created reality and human experience end.
By Herman Dooyeweerd
‘A New Critique of Theoretical Thought’ Vol 2, p 539)
Why is it meaning-less to restrict the datum of experience to the sensory matter of sensory impressions? Because this thesis is self-destructive, insofar as KANT'S conception of matter is the product of theoretical abstraction. What has been abstracted can never be the datum. The sensory function of intuition has a modal meaning by which it is integrated into the full temporal reality and which offers an insurmountable resistance to any attempt to make the sensory aspect of experience theoretically independent. Such an attempt cannot he supposed to leave at least the sensory aspect of experience intact, but it cancels this aspect and lands us in "pure nothingness" (das reine Nichts). If the human selfhood is capable of consciously experiencing the sensory aspect of reality in its subject-object relations, it necessarily experiences this sensory aspect in the cosmic temporal meaning-coherence.
This conscious experience is a quite different thing from the subjective undergoing of sense-impressions found in animals. And if the human selfhood transcends cosmic time, not a single aspect of temporal reality can transcend the self-consciousness operative in all human experience.
Speculative metaphysics has invented the splitting up of temporal reality into a noumenon and a phenomenon. The phenomenalistic conception of human experience remains tainted with the (fundamentally religious) prejudice of this metaphysics which is recognisable even in the disguise of a positivism claiming to be free of all manner of preoccupation.
There is nothing in experience that has been given us without the psychical [ie sensory] function of consciousness. But if nothing outside of this function had been given us, we should not have been given anything at all, not even the sensory itself.
This thesis is merely the counterpart of the thesis we have formulated in the Prolegomena: We cannot know anything without logical thought, but if we were not able to know anything outside of logical thought, we could not know anything at all. For not a single aspect of experience can exist outside of the cosmic coherence of meaning, and where meaning ceases, there is an end of created reality and of all human experience.
Herman Dooyeweerd, ‘A New Critique of Theoretical Thought’ Vol 2, p 539)
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The 15 EXPERIENTIAL, IRREDUCIBLE,
LAW-SPHERES of COSMIC TIME
(Also called Aspects/ Modes of Consciousness/
Modalities/ Meaning-sides)
(Diagrams by FMF)
NOTES: Aspects and "isms"
(by FMF)
No law-sphere (aspect) can be reduced to another. Infringements of 'irreducibility' are behind all 'isms'. These 'idolatries' show the human heart attempting to integrate entire reality around a single aspect (or 'law-sphere'). There is a plausibility to this because each aspect is present as an analogy in every other aspect. This gives each aspect an omnipresence, which Dooyeweerd designates 'sphere-universality'. (by FMF)
Crucially, since no aspect can be reduced to another, none can be reduced even to the 'Logical / Analytical Aspect' (in other words, the above panoply of aspects is not a theoretical product of logic. Rather, it is "experiential". It is "intuitive consciousness"). This must be particularly and continually emphasised. Failure to bear that specific fact in mind makes a 'logicism' out of Dooyeweerd's philosophy, when it is primarily against logicism that he is arguing (Dooyeweerd's 'A New Critique of Theoretical Thought' is essentially a critique of Kant). A moment's reflection will observe that the aspects correspond pretty closely to standard academic disciplines.
It is key to Dooyeweerd to appreciate his insistence that there is no thinking without a thinker ("the hidden performer on the instrument of philosophic thought" (Prolegomena, New Critique). The thinker ALWAYS functions in ALL aspects, but transcends them all in the concentration-point of his or her deepest selfhood ('heart'), which is directed towards or away from the Living God Who alone gives meaning to temporal reality. In refusing God as only source of meaning, a substitute ultimate focus (or "idol") is sought by the selfhood within the temporal cosmos by absolutising a law-sphere or combination of law-spheres.
Dooyeweerd writes:
"It is an undeniable fact that in the first life-phase of a suckling baby feeling precedes the first development of logical distinction; the latter precedes the controlling manner of forming sounds, which in turn precedes the primitive symbolical designation of concepts by words etc. But that does not prove that the higher mental functions originate from feeling [the sensory aspect] as their undifferentiated origin. Rather it testifies to the truth of our view of the order of the modal aspects of experience, as a real temporal order, related to subjective duration in the genetic process." (Herman Dooyeweerd, A New Critique of Theoretical Thought Vol II pp 112,113)
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