On Distinguishing the Aspects

(Let us assume at least a measure of respect for Dooyeweerd's work, so that this discussion is positive rather than negative.)

The key question behind all this is: what distinguishes an aspect? On what grounds? As DE has put it:

I would like to ask you a question concerning the modalities in Dooyeweerdian philosophy, if possible? What I am wondering is basically what is the discriminator for identification and distinction of modalities according to Dooyeweerd? Do you know it? Or where it might be written? By discriminator I mean what criteria is used in order to qualify something as a modality and also distinguish these.

It is that query that has stimulate me to construct this page.

Criteria for Distinguishing the Aspects

Henderson's (1994) Illuminating Law: The Construction of Herman Dooyeweerd's Philosophy, 1918-1928 gives us some insight into this process. On p.138 he says that Dooyeweerd "pointed out a variety of factors, considerations, perspectives and lines of reasoning. But because of the complexity of each sphere, designating the method and various criteria (for what constituted and belonged to a sphere) was a difficult business." Nevertheless, Henderson discusses three factors that helped in identifying and discriminating the aspects:

• Irreducibility. "Each sovereign law sphere should be irreducible to any other sphere, its typical type of concept or explanatory principle should not be reducible to any other." "When one type of principle cannot be explained in terms of a 'higher' it becomes a candidate for a qualifying principle of one type of sovereign law sphere. If no other may be found to qualify or explain what it explains, it may be considered as capturing the specific modal meaning of that sphere."

• Intuition. The kernel meaning of each aspect (sphere) can never be fully grasped by theoretical thought, but their true nature can be grasped with reasonable accuracy by our intuition. Henderson does not discuss this at length, but says "By means of intuition .. one could bring to awareness the different 'fields-of-view'." This implies that, to Dooyeweerd, there is a 'friendship' between our thinking and what is 'out there' - our intuitive (though not instinctive) thinking is thus a better guide to the nature of the aspects than is theoretical thought. This goes completely against the assumptions that lie behind both realism and idealism; as Henderson says later on (p.180):

  "While realism conceived of 'things' as independent (self-sustaining), idealism conceived of 'consciousness' as independent (self-sustaining), both thereby negating the coherence between thought and 'thing' provided by (a sphere of) law. One neglected the fact that the thing, and the other than thought, operates under a diversity of organically related laws."

• Antinomy. This is where Henderson gives most attention, maybe because it is perhaps the clearest and most controllable method. "Once a scholar has singled out what he or she thinks to be a field or sphere, the method of antinomy is used to check the correctness of the intuition. It is a deductive method for eliminating what is first assumed to be an (irreducible) principle of a sphere of science. Within one sphere, Dooyeweerd holds, there can only be one principle (and type of law) which must not have contradictory implications; it must not give rise to theories or lesser laws which contradict each other." "An antinomy, according to Dooyeweerd, involves not merely things which are contrary but things which are contradictory; 'Justice and injustice, truth and falsehood, virtue and vice are contraries but not antinomies, not contradictories.'" Dooyeweerd made use of the notion of Husserl's 'eidetic reduction' to strip away the outer layers to arrive at the kernel meaning of a sphere - though he criticizes Husserl's version for allowing the severing the link between thought and 'thing' (see above). Dooyeweerd discusses antinomy in Kant's ideas at length in chapter IV of Book 1 of his A New Critique of Theoretical Thought (p.338-402).

Now, the above assumes certain things about the philosophical thought processes behind them. One is that the thought is not 'apostate', having a tendency to elevate one aspect and suppressing others. If this happens then one cannot truly determine whether one is reducible to another since one has already made assumptions that it is so. Another assumption is that we are dealing over the long term, maybe even centuries of thought, rather than with one person's thinking on a summer afternoon in an armchair or an evening's discussion in a pub. Only over the long term do certain irreducibilities and antinomies appear, as humanity explores several contexts or paradigms of thought.

On the Act of Discrimination

So, for example, if we would go to a parking lot and you would say lets identify all the cars that are here and the different types of cars. The answer would be, here is a car, it is a Ford, here is a car it is a BMW. But this kind of distinction would say that it is not adequate to say here is a car it is a truck, or here is a Spitfire aeroplane..., because they do not qualify throught the process of discrimination. Similar question of mine concerns the modalities!

This leads us to consider the very act of discriminating (aspects) itself.

Dooyeweerd's ideas of the innate sovereignty and irreducibility of sphers (aspects) developed under the influence of Lask, who claimed that gegenstand was non-logical in character. Henderson says (p.137), "This meant that the practical distinguishing of the spheres did not and could not derive from purely logical distinctions or merely from the 'material' alone, but depended upon a combination of both. ... Legal, social or economic regularities do not present themselves to us as such but must be picked out through intuition ... Such things have to be abstracted from the everyday coherence of law spheres of a unified creation."

But Dooyeweerd went beyond Lask, "insisting emphatically that the non-logical material has its own meaning." (Henderson, p.137). While Lask's concept is of a "logical comprehending of the irrational material" (Dooyeweerd quuoted by Henderson), Dooyeweerd maintains both that this material has its own importance as non-logical, and that there must also be an element of belief, commitment as well as knowledge, by which we accept the material.

In everyday living we function in all aspects without being aware of any of them. They are integrated within and around us - in a harmonious way.

But it seems to be a natural yearning in the human heart to forge taxonomies that break the light of experience into a rainbow of colours. Many have proposed taxonomies, systems of levels, factors, etc. For instance, Checkland, in his Soft Systems Methodology, states that we must take five things into account when building information systems: efficiency, efficacy, effectiveness, ethics and (a)esthetics. Ackoff likewise gives us around nine things we should consider. In all these cases the purpose of making such a list is to identify those aspects that cannot be reduced to, or expressed by, others.

In doing this we are making distinctions between the aspects. This analytical aspect allows us to apply itself recursively to the suite of aspects and tease out one from another.

So, the set of aspects that have been distinguished by Dooyeweerd are the result of a person's analytical functioning. What this means is that - because no aspect-functioning is absolute and even reason is fallible - we can never hope to arrive at 'the truth' about the aspects. We might get near the truth, but can never rely upon it. So Dooyeweerd's suite should never be taken as a near-guess at what reality is like, rather than as an absolute ontology.

What then? If (our knowledge of the distinguishing of) the aspects cannot be absolute and completely certain and sure, should we then go to the other extreme and reject all that Dooyeweerd said, as merely yet another opinion that we can dismiss (and, some would add, snigger at because it is outside the mainstream)? I don't think so. Because of Dooyeweerd's claim that thought and 'thing' are linked rather than severed, there is likely to be at least some truth in his proposed aspects. I argue in the following manner:

• 1. Discrimination of aspects is not special; it is still our functioning in the analytical modality, but the object of our analytical functioning is the aspects themselves.

• 2. Therefore, on the one hand, our belief in there being e.g. 15 aspects and which they are, can never be absolute nor final. Just as reality itself is beyond complete analysis, so even more so are the aspects which give it shape and meaning.

• 3. We should therefore hold our understanding of what the aspects are with a degree of humility.

• 4. But, on the other hand, this is not a retreat into constructivism. It is discrimination rather than construction. And it is discrimination of a figure from a ground, rather than construction of a figure out of nothing, and it is discrimination of a figure from a ground that is independent of us (or, strictly, that is not wholly dependent on us), rather than a construction of a figure that is wholly dependent on us. Our act of (analytical) functioning is dependent on us but the material we analyse is not wholly dependent of us.

• 5. Therefore, while we must hold our ideas lightly, they are more substantial than air. Our understanding of the modalities, including our discrimination of them from one another, has some substance and is likely to lie in the direction they really are rather than in some random direction - as long as our analysis of them is not curtailed or distorted by 'religious' philosophical commitments that prevent that close off our ideas.

• 6. I trust Dooyeweerd's ontology more than those of the others because:
  • He has given a sound theoretical basis for it.
  • He spent a lifetime on thinking it out.
  • He had no axe to grind: he was outside the major academic camps of the time.
  • It seems to apply to itself (as above).
  • I like the way it restores dignity to everyday living.
  • It restores dignity to intuition.
  • I have yet to find something that lies outside it (apart from those things like time and meaning and God that are meant to lie outside).
  See more detailed justifications.