Early
on in in his main work: A New Critique of
Theoretical Thought, Dooyeweerd writes: “Meaning is the being of all that
has been created and the nature even of our selfhood” (NC I, 4). It is a statement that has intrigued and
confused. Dooyeweerd, however, wastes no
time in explaining that his point is that nothing in reality stands by itself
in its own strength. Anything, any
moment or aspect, any individual or institution in some way expresses something of something
else. In some way it refers beyond itself, and ultimately to
God. Echoing Saint Augustine’s famous
saying “Thou hast made us for thyself, and
our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee”,
Dooyeweerd described reality as restless.
This
restless referring and expressing suggested to Dooyeweerd the idea of meaning. We might also think of expressions like “the
meaning of life,” or “the meaning of history” to get a sense of what he was
getting at by using this term. It has
something to do with the direction and purpose of things, of all reality. The
idea of meaning is used by Dooyeweerd to point towards a religious dynamic, the movement of creation as
Saint Paul expresses it when writing to the Romans “For from him and through him
and for him are all things. To him be
the glory forever! Amen” (11:36). In
other words, reality expresses the
will of God and refers back to God.
As
with Vollenhoven’s use of the term ‘subject’, so too here it is useful to
contrast what Dooyeweerd is saying with what other philosophers might be
expected to say with the same term. We
would expect philosophers to take the term ‘meaning’ as designating something
about how reality may appear to us.
Reality-in-itself is just so many bits of matter with no inherent
meaning at all. It is only when the
human subject, in the sense rejected by Vollenhoven, confronts it that reality
gets cloaked with meaning, value, even emotion.
Meaning then is a term related to human experience as something quite
separate from reality. On the one side,
the human subject which bestows meaning on things; on the other, the object
meaningless-in-itself.
Dooyeweerd
responds to this picture by saying that it holds no relation to our
experience. Each element of reality is
interconnected with the rest of reality. The way things interrelate in both stable and
changing ways is at the very heart of reality, and the term ‘meaning’
designates this dynamic interconnectedness.
By saying that reality is
meaning, Dooyeweerd rejects the idea that anything could exist in-itself or
could be known of itself. Philosophical
notions like “substance”, “essence” and, “subject” are to be abandoned, or at
least seriously questioned, as they reveal attempts to disconnect some element
of reality both from its relation to other elements of reality and from its
very nature as a dependent creature, from,
through and for God.
We
can now summaries the key Biblical principles that lie at the heart of
reformational philosophy. (1) The
richness of creation demands that philosophy does justice to diversity. (2)
Humans have responsibility primarily realised in tasks that are always limited
in scope. (3) Creational diversity and human responsibility do not have meaning
in themselves but in relation to each other and ultimately to the command to
love God above all else. (4) The interaction between the ordered cosmos and
human responsibility to develop creation’s potential can be helpfully
understood in terms of a dynamic coordination of structure and direction.
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