NFGM, the Nature-Freedom Ground-Motive

• Grace became Freedom, replacing God by the free human ego.
• Nature-as-secular became Nature-as-unfree: the non-free and non-human, the determined, mechanism, control, causality, rationality.

What Dooyeweerd called the Ideal of Science became opposed to the Ideal of Personality.

From within this ground-motive, the tension or antinomy between Nature and Freedom can never be resolved, and yet the human spirit and the everyday attitude cries out for its resolution. As a result Western soceity's thinking, fashions and movements have swung dialectically and often violently over the past 500 years or so between Freedom and Control.

Dooyeweerd traced its effects on Western thought and culture in pages 148-206 of [Roots:148-206], showing many interwoven strands, all of which are driven by an unresolvable antinomy between Nature and Freedom. An early expression of Freedom was desire for emancipation from church hegemony and feudalism, leading eventually to such things as the French Revolution. But this then became absolutist (Nature pole). Another was a desire for freedom from natural disasters and diseases, to which end the natural sciences were co-opted. Science was immensely successful and, as Dooyeweerd [Roots:150] put it:

"Modern man saw 'nature' as an expansive arena for the exploration of his free personality, as a field of infinite possibilities in which the sovereignty of human personality must be revealed by a complete mastery of the phenomena of nature."

But [p.153]

"When it became apparent that science determined all of reality as a flawless chain of cause and effect, it was clear that nothing in reality offered a place for human freedom. ... Nature and freedom, science ideal and personality ideal -- they became enemies. ... Humanism had no choice but to assign religious priority or primacy to one or the other."

This has led to many lines of fracture in philosophical thinking, including material body versus thinking soul and autonomous thinking subject versus non-autonomous object (Descartes), being versus morality (Hume), science versus faith, public versus private and thought versus thing (Kant), and so on. Dooyeweerd examined variants in various fields like law, politics and sociology.

The Nature-Freedom Ground-motive Today

Here are some ways in which NFGM manifests itself today or in recent history. Each different way seems, to me at least, related to a different state concept or focus. It manifests itself in a wide variety of types, not necessarily directly, and not always fully.

It is not that these are all watertight compartments. Since a ground-motive is a religious rather than logical phenomenon it does not necessarily abide by the laws of logic. Rather, when some thinkers are dissatisfied with existing thought or ways of life, the way they come up with a new way of thinking tends to be a reaction that is guided by the Nature-Freedom polar opposition. Then, later, there is a counter-reaction back to the original pole, but in a new way (or, as Hegel might say, to a new and higher level: thesis, then antithesis, then synthesis).

Basden [1999], discussing the Hegelian view in more depth (which holds that everything contains its own negation, which underlies and is the engine of that process), has suggested a different interpretation based on Dooyeweerd's aspects. It proceeds in stages:

• In people's assumptions, some aspects of life or reality are suppressed, usually because others are unduly elevated.
• After a time, some people begin to feel for, and value, one of the suppressed aspects. The suppressed aspect is promoted.
• Thinkers reflect on this and try to account for it.
• The new aspect gains wider recognition.
• The new aspect becomes popular.
• The new aspect is elevated - and some other aspects are suppressed.

Thinkers tend to react in a dialectical fashion, rather than a pluralist recognition. Under the NFGM, the old aspect is associated with one pole and the new aspect with the other; indeed it is often something in the pole that leads to the discovery of that particular aspect.

The Genesis of the NFGM

I believe that one should see the secular modern West as the product of one such large-scale incursion, that of Latin Christendom, which in the later Middle Ages embarked on a long series of reforms (including but not confined to the Reformation) that ended up creating the disciplined, productive, pacified, rights-affirming world we live in , within the intellectual framework of a clear natural/supernatural distinction unique in human history hitherto. It is in fact the very nature of Christian faith to produce such transformations of the world, such secular expressions, one might say, and then to recover the Christian language in which to live them and speak to them in a stance of benign-but-critical non-identity .

[==== more to be written]

Unsustainability of NFGM

But everyday experience does not recognise these splits, and the human spirit eventually reacts against them. So we find Hobbes reacting against Descartes into materialism, Marx against the being-morals split into absolutism, Husserl against the thought-thing split into phenomenology, Heidegger against the subject-object split into existentialism, and so on.

But then further fractures would appear, because the NFGM cannot allow Nature and Freedom to integrate. Hegel spoke of "the apparent tension between law and freedom". According to Dooyeweerd [NC,I:64-65], Hegel tried "think together" the two poles but ultimately failed because "this antinomy cannot be resolved". (For a possible Dooyeweerdian reinterpretation of Hegel, see Basden [1999].) The influence of NFGM today can also be seen in dialectical movements from positivism to interpretivism or constructivism in research, and modernism to postmodernism in society's world-views.

But, perhaps more ominous, is the destruction of nature and planetary environment. Some early environmentalists tried to blame Christianity for this, but a Humanism under the NFGM must take the lion's share of the blame because, while 'Christianity' under NGGM did at least have a motive of responsibility-to-God to curb its excesses, the Humanistic notion of complete Freedom of the human ego does not, and allows - indeed urges - humanity to do whatever it likes with Nature.

We should not be surprised that we who are trapped in NFGM fail to see things that are visible under other ground-motives, or perhaps that we deem completely unimportant and meaningless what is important under other ground-motives. For example, from the point of view of CFR, the ground-motive Dooyeweerd worked within these include:

• Two sides of temporal reality, law and subject sides
• the dignity of both control and freedom, with freedom afforded to the subject side (cosmos) in the later aspects
• diversity that coheres, coherence that is diverse
• meaning as prior to, and contitutive of, being and process
• the religious root of all.

Yet even those trapped in NFGM 'feel' these things and reach for them because they are involved in everyday life as well as in theory. So we are always struggling to account for such things. And these things come through in the writings of many groups, especially those on the margins or those with an pioneering or campaigning agenda, such as:

• ==== to be supplied

Escaping NFGM

Kant developed the epitomal expression of the Nature-Freedom ground-motive, in which the centre of knowing shifted from the world to free human consciousness. This, however, exacerbated the divorce of subjective from objective (Descartes), and of Ought from Is. Values is, largely, a species of Ought, arising from free human attribution. Kant turned philosophy towards subjectivity, but this exposed the problem of how to deal with realities that seem to transcend subjective consciousness, such as encountered in mathematics and physics, in ecology and 'the other' in the environment, and social realities that transcend the individual, and the Reality of the Divine.

We might trace out several main philosophical responses, each trying to deal with a different problem that arose. One response is Critical Realism, which posits some transcending reality, but which can never be fully known by free human knowers. Another response is Phenomenology and Existenialism, which emphasise the individual as inherently connected within a world of other individual beings. A third response is the Social and Linguistic Turns in philosophy, which tackle the issue of how laws transcend individual freedom: they are socially constructed via the medium of conversations and agreed upon. However, the philosophical arena is a little more complicated than that. Various thinkers, especially of the twentieth century, in particular have recognised or felt some of these problems, and tried to escape NFGM. Here is a summary of some of them.

• Hegel. Was Hegel correct that the tension between law and freedom is only "apparent"? I believe that he was, if I understand Dooyeweerd aright, but Hegel did not find the route to real escape, only to an escapism.

• Nietzsche despised both the 'Judeo-Christian' and 'Humanistic' ground-motives (by 'Judeo-Christian' it is not clear whether he meant NGGM or CFR or both). His harsh regime of power may be interpreted as an attempt to avoid the nature-freedom gulf.

• The Critical Frankfurt School, of Adorno, and differently of Habermas, might be seen as trying to retain human freedom but within an overarching normativity of emancipation.

• The linguistic turn in philosophy recognises the problem of 'philosophy of consciousness' of Kant. In the linguistic turn, the individual is not free, because of the social lifeworld. But the linguistic turn probably accords complete autonomy to the lingual process of shared knowledge.

• Social Constructivism (e.g. Berger & Luckmann), which declaims that there is a reality that transcends individuals but it is constructed by social agreement (via the medium of language).

• Bruno Latour wanted to be able to treat human and non-human as equal actants (whereas NFGM treats human as free and, largely, non-human as non-free). He does this by dissolving the difference between subject and object, treating all as subjects acting in a network. His Actor-Network Theory is an interesting attempt to develop a practical way of analysing situations. Also, his We Have Never Been Modern, has something to say about NFGM.

• More to come

But it is arguable that none of these genuinely escape NFGM. They express an awareness of the deep antinomy in NFGM, but still are reluctant to give up autonomous freedom of some kind, so are always in the end driven back to one pole or the other. ==== more to be written.

Escaping NFGM via Dooyeweerd

• Meaningful freedom, rather than just freedom-as-such (as someone once said, "Of course I have the freedom to build a car with square wheels - but it wouldn't make much sense to do so."
• Diverse freedoms: a different kind of freedom, or latitude of response, in each aspect.

With this picture, constraining (guiding law is what enables meaningful freedom, rather than being antithetical to it. Here are some examples of freedom and constraint in most aspects:

REFERENCES

Taylor, C. (2005) Foreword, in Martin, D. (2005) On Secularization: Towards a General Theory by David Martin (2005) Ashgate Publishing, Aldershot.

This page, "http://dooy.info/nfgm.html", is part of The Dooyeweerd Pages, which explain, explore and discuss Dooyeweerd's interesting philosophy. Questions or comments are very welcome.

Compiled by Andrew Basden. You may use this material subject to conditions.

Written on the Amiga with Protext, in the style of classic HTML.

Created: 3 May 2007. Last updated: 9 October 2010; table and Basden 1999. 27 October 2010 more at end, incl. aspects. 20 November 2010 started attempts to escape. 2 October 2019 Hegel "apparent" tension. 20 May 2020 Three main responses to Kant and tidied attempts to escape; new .end,.nav.