tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5846671056195917287.post9150392372973760139..comments2024-03-12T00:51:27.766-04:00Comments on Ground Motive: Dooyeweerd's Modal Theory: Hermeneutics in Actionadmin1http://www.blogger.com/profile/16479743334126277132noreply@blogger.comBlogger8125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5846671056195917287.post-75271533170129588812016-03-06T17:53:58.402-05:002016-03-06T17:53:58.402-05:00Gpod point, Daniel. But . . . essentialism and st...Gpod point, Daniel. But . . . essentialism and structuralism are not the same althought the difference is subtle. Dooyeweerd is in Vollenhovian terms a pure cosmological thinker, or in Seerveld's adaptation, a structuralist thinker. He is interested in the things that perdure in the hurly burly of events that mark our passing throughtime. These are the things he moves to identify and tries to understand. It is what stays the same, not what changes that holds his philosophical attention. A structuralist orientation to our experience can express itself in an essentialism, IF we understand that things are at bottom like the concepts we use to define them. Such a position reduces things to their logical object functions. It seems to me that Dooyeweerd is not guilty of the latter position even while his orientation to human ordinary experience travels like an arrow from Robin Locksley's bow toward those dimensions of experience that stay the same beneath the "surface" of the changefulness that is inexorable within that same experience.bob sweetmanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02020964276816359915noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5846671056195917287.post-62791629107359513562016-03-03T14:47:56.952-05:002016-03-03T14:47:56.952-05:00Thanks Josh!
I too would like to see Dooyeweer...Thanks Josh!<br /> I too would like to see Dooyeweerd's notes on Heidegger's statement. I'm currently working through R. Henderson's study of Dooyeweerd's early thought and Tony Tol's work on the early Vollenhoven. Both D and V seemed to be very happy with the phenomenological program developed by Husserl even if they disagreed with his ultimate conclusions. In Vollenhoven's Isagoge Philosophiae and in Dooyeweerd's New Critique (as Bob emphasizes in his comment) immediate experience of Creational diversity is fundamental to philosophical work. The question I am struggling with at the moment is: Does immediate experience directly lead to phenomenological reflection or to ontological insight? It seems to me that our interpretation of immediate experience vis-a-vis phenomenology presupposes an ontological structure functioning as a lens through with phenomenology is performed. So, ultimately, I agree with Heidegger - ontology may manifest as phenomenology but whether phenomenology can function as ontology is a different question.Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18097165352419814595noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5846671056195917287.post-74639672754894260842016-03-03T14:41:05.507-05:002016-03-03T14:41:05.507-05:00Bob,
Thanks for your wonderful and insightful c...Bob,<br /> Thanks for your wonderful and insightful comment. I agree that the intuitions behind the kernals of meaning behind the modes are rooted in our ordinary engagement with the worlds of creatures but it is surprising to me that ordinary engagement with creatures could generate the kind of intuitions which lie behind Dooyeweerd's notion of types and type-laws found in volume III of the NCTT. Perhaps Dooyeweerd's modal ontology is not ultimately essentialist but I believe a species of essentialism (perhaps colouring his intuitions?) creeps into his typology of creatures. Otherwise it seems difficult to explain his continued emphasis on a Lamarckian model of biological history in the face of evolutionary models which did not necessarily have to be Darwinian in character. Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18097165352419814595noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5846671056195917287.post-39753427257288531212016-02-25T16:04:02.676-05:002016-02-25T16:04:02.676-05:00I wonder Daniel if "essentialist" really...I wonder Daniel if "essentialist" really gets at the modes and their kernals. The invitation to be in this and that way which I take to be a way of speaking about the divine active and creative presence that calls a world of creatures into being and that gifts that world's creatures with capacities and possibilities that point it and them eschatonically is real in the sense that we do not make it up but it is not real in the sense of a philosophical realism: in the sense that it is not part of the concrete structure of this or that creature or of the cosmos as a whole. What that world is and is called and gifted to become is a response to the divine presence, the divine invitation, the calling and the gifting. When one identifies a modal kernal via theoretical intuition one is not in the presence of an essence--the intelligible gist that is at bottom that by which a creature is what it is, presupposing thereby that creatures in their existence are at bottom like a concept. Hows are not whats. Moreover, the meaning laid bare in a modal kernal is not contained by the intellectual crystallization of that meaning as theoretical notion. And this because one does not really belly up to any discrete how apart from all the other hows, so to speak. This is the analogical structure of the modes. At bottom modes are not the logical object functions of entities by which I mean the thought-handles by which we hang on to things in theoretical encounters. So I would say that Dooyeweerd's modalities involve no essences, no realism, and yet God's invitation, God's gifting and calling wind themselves everywhere in and through all creatures and indeed the cosmos as a whole to establish, uphold, push and take creatures home so to speak. There is not one iota of the creation and its creatures that is not enveloped by that invitation, real but not realist. And here is the pay off. Theoretical insight or intuition is a response to the invitational dynamic of creaturely existence. It is an encounter with creation and its creatures, an encounter of a particular kind, one that allows humanly appropriate access to the ways that creatures respond to the invitations to be in this or that way that suffuse creaturely existence, that make it possible, that guide it into itself and its pregnant possibilities. Such theoretical intuition builds upon our ordinary engagements with the world of creatures, is rooted in our ordinary modes of apprehension and understanding, bringing out a specificity and depth we rarely have time or inclination for but which deepens our corporate existence within God's world by virtue of the self-reflexivity it allows, that is, the intensity of the self-awareness it brings to pass, provided we do not lose sight of what we are doing in all theory including philosophy--taking up ordinary experience and understanding of our world for a closer and preciser because schooled or disciplined look-see. Anyway that would be my two-cents' worth here.bob sweetmanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02020964276816359915noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5846671056195917287.post-1786455237824922522016-02-25T14:53:44.102-05:002016-02-25T14:53:44.102-05:00Wow, this is a really interesting set of questions...Wow, this is a really interesting set of questions, Dan. Well done. <br /><br />It would be very interesting to see Dooyeweerd's notes on Heidegger's point at the beginning of <i>Being and Time</i>: namely, "Only as phenomenology, is ontology possible" (SZ, 35). Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06143032361402350432noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5846671056195917287.post-26178572845679344292016-02-23T22:10:18.267-05:002016-02-23T22:10:18.267-05:00It might be of use to set this discussion against ...It might be of use to set this discussion against the perspective Doyeweerd lays out in the 1922 paper “Normatieve Rechtsleer: een kritische methodologische onderzoeking naar Kelsen’s normatieve rechtsbescouwing” in which Dooyeweerd’s reconfiguration of the Kantian way of speaking about “modality” first emerges.<br /><br />Page 45: Het kritisch realisme behoort m.i. het volgende standpunt in te nemen: allereerst vooronderstelt hat een denkvreemden kosmos, omvattendnde gans de schepping Gods, het denken inbegrepen, geordend naar kategoriëen. Maar — en dit tegen het verwijt van idealistische zijde, dat het realisme zich aan een onlogische verdubbeling schuldig zou maken — deze kategoriëen zijn niet logische kategoriëen, maar kosmische, d.w.z. het zijn kategoriëen van het kosmisch eenheidsverband, waarin geen logische onderscheiding kan ingaan. Deze kosmische sfeer is de rechtsgrond voor Lask’s objectieve Gegenstandssfeer, waarbinnen de methode der wezensschouwing haar plaats vindt. Deze Gegenstandssfeer van den zuiveren zin, welke op zichzelve niet kenbaar, maar slechts schouwbaar is, biedt het materiaal voor het denken der zuivere logica, welke de zuivere grondvormen van het denken in haar oordeelen ontvouwt.<br /><br />[freely translated] In my view, critical realism should take up the following position: first of all, it presupposes a cosmos foreign to thought, encompassing the entire creation of God, including thinking, ordered according to categories. But — and this against the reproach from the idealist side, that realism renders itself guilty of an illogical duplication — these categories are not logical categories, but cosmic, that is to say, they are categories of a cosmic coherence (eenheidsverband), which no logical differentiation can disturb. This cosmic sphere is the determining ground (rechtsgrond: a legal term) for Lask’s objective Gegenstandssfeer, in which the method of the showing essences (wezensschouwing) finds its place. This Gegenstandssfeer of pure meaning, which by itself (op zichzelf) isn’t knowable but only beholdable (schouwbaar), supplies the material for purely logical thinking, which the pure primordial forms of thinking lay out or unfold in thinking’s judgments.<br /><br />Note especially the “rechtsgrond” sentence.ennesonhttp://www.enneson.comnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5846671056195917287.post-31195244693827275932016-02-23T18:50:44.654-05:002016-02-23T18:50:44.654-05:00Thanks Jonathan. I agree entirely with your beauti...Thanks Jonathan. I agree entirely with your beautifully written comment. I'm not sure what Lambert would say today about Dooyeweerd's intuitionist explanation for modal nuclei (the original essay to which I was responding was written in 1973) but I believe that his original concern with this intuitionist explanation is that it may lead to a kind of epistemological relativism where truth is unable to find a proper grounding. <br /><br />I too wonder if a "genealogy of modes" is not a project that warrants undertaking. As a Reformationally-primed scholar who is very much interested in ontological law and its relation to Creation Order, it seems to me that a genealogy of modes might shed a whole lot of light on how we humans perceive God's ordered Creation and thus perhaps lead to a productive re-imagining of the notion of order. <br /><br />I personally believe that our basic modal intuitions as articulated by Dooyeweerd reveal the human call as "image bearers" of our Creator. If we are not endowed with the ability to intuit (imagine? See?) the order of Creation aright and thus organize our culture (and theory) making I am unsure what it would mean then to be "made in the image of God." Dooyeweerd recognizes something very important to human life when he grounds his modal ontology in intuition (inasmuch as he sees humans as made in the imago dei) and he's rejecting something just as important - the Neo-Kantian notion of the world as grounded within human-birthed ideas. Dan Rudisillhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17680689189503508575noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5846671056195917287.post-73154056878608429212016-02-23T17:23:31.879-05:002016-02-23T17:23:31.879-05:00I need some help understanding how the 'intuit...I need some help understanding how the 'intuitions explanation' of the nuclei of modes cuts off debate, or encourages scepticism. Thinking modally is to abstract aspects of reality from the whole. This is theoretical. But the thinking about these modes must have come from a somewhere that is not precisely theoretical. Who first considered number in isolation? Who investigated life first, and how? Where did psychology come from?<br /><br />Instead of a hidden ontology, I think Dooyeweerd roots intuition in the world of naive experience, or the lifeworld. When I think about aspectual exploration in human history, I think of the human propensity to tinker, to play, to fiddle. Our fascination with patterns of all sorts dates back to the neolithic peoples. I wonder if what is needed to answer the question of modal emergence in theoretical thought is to develop a "genealogy of modes", whereby modal intuition can be traced to its origins, whatever and wherever they may be. These primitive, magic-tinged, partial-birth intuitions may provide clues to how a developed modal analysis comes to be, and why it continues to develop. jonathanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07484923515655910277noreply@blogger.com