A second point is it possible to refer to the
diversity of reality in a very different way.
For example, the creation story in Genesis refers us to ‘the fish of the
sea’, ‘the beasts of the earth’, ‘the birds of the air’ and so on. Here we have a rich diversity of creatures,
there is this creature and that creature.
Modal aspects are not a matter of ‘what’ there is, but of ‘how’ they
exist, their ‘mode of existence’. In the
diagram we have indicated the reality of ‘what exists’ by the use of
vertical columns. The modes are the
horizontal rows that express how these animals, entities and
institutions exist. You will notice that
what exists always comes to expression through a number of modes. In fact, we will later see how everything
that exists asserts its being through all the modal aspects.
To get a better handle on some of these points, we can
begin with how Herman Dooyeweerd, one of the pioneers of this theory, came to
articulate his understanding of this diversity.
Dooyeweerd was trained in jurisprudence and after completing his
doctoral studies he began to investigate, in the 1920’s, the main currents of
the philosophy of law. What he found was
a number of theories that tried to explain law in terms of something other than
law itself. Some claimed that law was
based on ethics, others that it was the result of social relations, still
others that law could be explained in terms of logic. Dooyeweerd was not satisfied with any of
these solutions and instead started to develop his idea of irreducible
diversity. Each mode is distinct and
cannot be reduced to another mode.
Dooyeweerd, and others since, have noticed similar
issues arising in other sciences. For
example, in psychology the behaviourists reduced its perspective to the
physical and biotic, whereas others reduced it to the social. Mach reduced physics to observable sensations
whereas Heisenberg reduced physics to mathematics.
A question naturally arises as to how reformational
philosophy arrived at this list of 15 modal aspects. The long answer would require an ongoing
story that continues today involving much philosophical reflection and
empirical considerations. The list of
aspects has always been treated as provisional and subject to further
discussion and research. In light of
this we limit ourselves to three criteria that draw on what we have already
covered. Dooyeweerd’s assessment of
legal theory suggests that a field of scientific investigation tends to take
one or two modal aspects as the point of entry to the phenomena it
studies. This implies that different
sciences can investigate the same entity but will do so from the perspective of
different modal spheres. Therefore, one
criterion for the list of aspects is given by the diversity of scholarly
disciplines. Where we have an established special science (physics,
biology, psychology, economics, linguistics etc.) we can take seriously the
possibility that here we meet an irreducible aspect of reality.
A second criterion comes from the attempt of
theorists to reduce reality to one or two aspects. A reductionist project suggests the reality
of the mode to which the others are to be reduced. The second diagram shows that many different
reductionist projects have been attempted but the limited success of those
projects is a second kind of evidence for the reality of the modes taken to be
the basic denominator of reality.
Each form of reduction gets hold of a genuine aspect of reality but goes
astray by trying to reduce all others aspects to it. Such a strategy could not get off the ground
if the basic reality was not genuine.
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