Two Sides of Reality: Law-Side and Entity-Side

• The entity-side comprises all that exists or occurs in the cosmos, as concrete reality e.g. you, me, the polar ice cap, a rose, a government, a symphony, a computer program, the Second World War, the decision I made this morning over what to eat, my act of writing now.

• The law-side comprises the framework within which all can exist or happen. It concerns modalities in which entities operate, e.g. physical, social, biotic, ethical, technical, aesthetic. It also, according to Dooyeweerd and others, includes type laws that make reference to such modalities.

NOTE on terminology: 'Entity side' is not a good name because some things that exist or occur are not entities. But no good name has yet emerged. Dooyeweerd sometimes called it the subject side, but there are objects too. Dooyeweerd sometimes called it the fact side, but as Stafleu [forthcoming, 2014] points out, "a fact [is] an objective expression of human knowledge. Within a certain discourse, something is considered a 'fact' (as opposed to a 'hypothesis') if everybody {1} concerned agrees with it." Stafleu suggests we call it subject and object side.

Dooyeweerd drew a clear distinction between the two sides and defined the relationships between them. The two sides can be seen as orthogonal: an entity crosses several modalities, and a modality crosses several entities. Universals cannot be found within the entity-side (nor can they be derived therefrom as various historical forms of empiricism hoped) but only in the law-side. Only entity-side is directly observable and experienced; the law-side is a framework within which even our observing and experiencing is made possible. To be aware of the law-side we must engage in some measure of theoretical or abstractive thought, because the law-side is not directly observable.

To Dooyeweerd, law is more like promise than authoritative demand: "If you do X then Y will result" rather than "You must do X". Law is that which enables rather than constrains. It is God's gift to the cosmos that enables its freedom, actuality and separate existence, the 'boundary' between what is Divine and what is not. We discuss the nature of Law, as Dooyeweerd saw it, elsewhere.

In recognition of these two sides, Dooyeweerd proposed two main 'theories' (actually frameworks for understanding, rather than scientific theories): a Theory of Modal Aspects and a Theory of Entities.

Difference from Traditional Thinking

Dooyeweerd view enabled him to postulate a theory of entities that overcomes many of the problems concerning 'existence' that have arisen.

In everyday living the entities stand to the fore, as it were, and the Law Side recedes into the background, but in science the Law Side comes to the fore while the entities recede. That is, when we analyse reality and seek to give universals we should study the Law Side rather than entities and happenings. We can indeed take the behaviour of entities as empirical data, but we should look behind it to distinguish the aspect of the behaviour that interests us and its laws. It is the Law Side that expresses the fundamental Meaning, and it is the Law Side that enables entities to 'exist'. Entity-centred thinking assumes that entities stand to the fore in both everyday and scientific thinking; it makes the assumption that science must of necessity take the same stance as everyday life.

Comparison of Law- and Entity-Side

... more to be written

Benefits

• It enabled Dooyeweerd to explain how Being could arise from Meaning. The entity-side emerges from the law-side as response is made to the laws.

• It provides a way of resolving the realism-nominalism controversy over whether there be universals. With nominalism, Dooyeweerd says that there are no universals - but only if we assume that reality is fundamentally entity-side (as most of our experience and science does). With realism, Dooyeweerd says that there are universals - but we must look for them only on the law-side.

• It enabled Dooyeweerd to posit that there are indeed norms for the cosmos that transcend human knowledge or opinion. Such norms are to be found on the law-side.

• But it enables us to draw a sharp distinction between such law-side norms and norms as we experience them, such as social norms and codified laws and rules. Social norms and codified rules and laws are within the entity side, having been socially constructed and agreed.
  • This, in turn, gives us a basis for deciding when to obey and when to question, disobey and alter such social norms and codified laws and rules, that is not based only on our personal preferences or whim.

Two sides to lifeworld

• It suggests two different horizons for our experience, what Dooyeweerd called the aspectual and the plastic horizons. In naïve experience the two horizons are interwoven but they impinge on us in different ways.
• Our experience of the (entity-side) world comes about because of our functioning, while our experience of law-side aspectual meaning is immediate.
• Meaningfulness is related to the law-side aspectual meaning, while meaning-to-us emerges as concrete entity-side meanings by virtue of aspectual functioning, such as analytic (Schutz and Luckmann's reflection), social (Straus), the faith aspect (Weber), lingual (Habermas).
• Law-side normativity transcends us and pertains, giving rise to repercussions even when we might not expect them - and thus enables us to research and analyse completely unexpected repercussions of IS use - while entity-side normativity comprises concrete norms that have been selected, formed, communicated, agreed socially and even juridically embodied in legal structures.
• Entity-side givenness what Schutz and Luckmann [1989:1] meant by "pregiven realities with which we must try to cope", and they impinge on us and have agency by virtue of our common aspectual functioning as subjects and objects. Entity-side givenness is dynamic, unpredictable, contingent, historically conditioned - and mired in debates about noumenon and phenomenon. Law-side givenness is universal meaning-and-law, that pertains for all and, since it does not arise from aspectual functioning, such debates are meaningless about it.
• The self relates to the law side by a law-subject relation, and to the entity-side by subject-object and subject-subject relations (and also enkaptic structural relations, which we do not consider here).
• Therefore, the agency of the law side is that it pertains while that of the entity side is that it impinges.

Created: 15 June 2004. Last updated: 13 September 2004 link to law.html. 23 November 2005 unets. 2 March 2006 Added lifeworld. 4 October 2013 note on terminology.