(16) The theory of modal spheres

We start with the theory of modal aspects.  First of all it is important to see that this is an attempt to understand reality; in other words the diversity to be investigated is a diversity that is to be found in reality and is not merely a question of what concepts we happen to choose or find useful.  The various ways reformational philosophers speak about modal aspects indicates this. Examples are: “aspects of reality”, “modes of being”, “modes of experience”.  Naturally any theory of these modal aspects necessarily involves concepts, and the diversity of concepts is both part of and reflects the diversity of reality.

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.

A third criterion arises out of the failures of each attempted reduction.  In trying to explain genuinely irreducible modes in terms of another mode, reality fights back leading to basic contradictions or paradoxes. We have already mentioned Zeno’s famous paradoxes concerning space and movement.

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(15) Irreducible diversity

Any philosophical perspective on reality has to account for both the apparent unity and coherence of the world while acknowledging the variegated richness of our experience of the world.  Traditionally philosophers have done this in two ways, either through an appeal to a single basic reality that provides the unity to which all diversity must be related, or by proposing two basic realities whose distinctness explains diversity and combination explains unity.

We have already had reason to consider some of the views of the great French philosopher Rene Descartes, and once again he can provide us with an instructive illustration of the issue.  His dualism has provided the starting point for a number of problems that have occupied many philosophers since.  Descartes held that the world divides into two separate substances: mind and matter.  This left the material world free to the investigation of the mathematical sciences, which tended towards a deterministic result, and it left the mind free for the church’s teachings on matters moral and spiritual.  It also set up the classical problem of epistemology: how does the non-physical thinking mind know the non-thinking physical world? And in addition the classical problem of the philosophy of mind: how does the mind relate to the brain?

Those who have come after Descartes, despite offering strong criticisms of his views, have largely accepted his model. Sometimes rejecting mind and embracing materialism, sometimes rejecting matter and embracing idealism. This, admittedly simplified, background is useful for seeing the distinctive nature of a reformational approach to philosophy which can be summed up like this: rather than search for the unity and coherence of reality within reality itself, reformational philosophy starts with the assumption that the cosmos has a coherent order by virtue of God’s act of creation.  A lot more will need to be said about this assumption later.  However, for now, let’s have a look at the different result it gives us.

Reformational philosophy gives us an account of the coherence and diversity of reality through its theory of 15 or so basic modes of reality, these are the modal laws referred to by Seerveld in the quote above.   From the diagram we can see that such an approach allows for an understanding of the world that is considerably richer than any which continues to work from within the model left by Descartes.  By releasing us from the necessity of finding the ultimate meaning and origin of reality within reality itself, reformational philosophy sets us on a path with quite a different focus.  Reformational philosophy seeks to investigate and give a provisional account of the diverse ways that things function and people act in the world.

The rich diversity of reality can be viewed from two distinct perspectives.  First we will look at this diversity from the perspective of the different ways in which people and things function.  This is the horizontal direction in the diagram above and concerns what we call modal theory.  Secondly we can look at this diversity from the perspective of the things and institutions that function in these diverse ways, the vertical direction which we will call a theory of entities. These two elements cover the broad range of what exists, we can talk of things, artefacts, institutions, people, acts and events. Rather than listing these in future we will follow Chaplin and speak of existents to cover this range.

Once these are in place it will be possible to deal with the more complex issues of human society and how to think philosophically about our own existing and acting in the world.

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Further Reading

At the beginning of reformational philosophy many contemporary thinkers were quite certain that the nature of philosophy excluded an explicitly religious starting point. Heidegger described “Christian philosophy” as on the level of a “square circle”. This meant that reformational philosophers have had to give sustained reflection to the nature of philosophy. The key presentation is Herman Dooyeweerd “Prolegomena” in A New Critique of Theoretical Thought Volume I Translated by David H. Freeman and William S. Young, (Paideia Press / Reformational Publishing Project, 2016) pp.3-165. The centre piece of Dooyeweerd’s position was a “transcendental critique of theoretical thought”. His presentation was from the start controversial and not easy reading and he returned to the same themes many times, for example in the more accessible In the Twilight of Western Thought (Craig Press, 1972). Vollenhoven sets out his ideas on the task of philosophy in “The place of Philosophy in the Cosmos and its Task” pp.9-18 in Introduction to Philosophy Translated by J. H. Kok (Dordt College Press, 2005). Most introduction to reformational philosophy start with a chapter on the nature of philosophy. For example L. Kalsbeek “What is philosophy?” pp. 35-43 in Contours of a Christian philosophy: An introduction to Herman Dooyeweerd’s thought, (Wedge Publishing, 1975), Andrée Troost “What is philosophy?” pp.1-21 in What is Reformational Philosophy? An Introduction to the Cosmonomic Philosophy of Herman Dooyeweerd translated by Anthony Runia, (Paideia Press, 2012), and the more challenging J.P.A. Mekkes “Introduction, The limits of philosophy” pp.1-16 in Creation, Revelation and Philosophy (Dordt College Press, 2010). One should add to this the important reflections in Gerrit Glas (2011) ‘What is Christian philosophy?’ Pro Rege 40:1 pp.1-17, and S.U. Zuidema “Philosophy as Point of Departure” pp. 124-128 in Communication and Confrontation (J.H.Kok, 1971).

Noticing and accounting for the role of abstraction in theoretical thought is a key insight of Dooyeweerd’s transcendental critique of theoretical thought. The best book length introduction and update of this element of Dooyeweerd’s philosophy is Roy Clouser’s The Myth of Religious Neutrality: An essay on the hidden role of religious belief in theories (Notre Dame Press 2005). Vincent Brummer gives a good exposition of Dooyeweerd’s presentation in Transcendental Criticism and Christian Philosophy (T. Wever, 1961). Danie Strauss’ Philosophy: Discipline of the Disciplines (Paideia Press, 2009) should be considered one of the most important contemporary developments of Dooyeweerd’s transcendental approach. His arguments in chapter 2 of Strauss 2009 were drawn on for my discussion, also useful were Renato Coletto (2011) “The elaboration of a demarcation criterion in reformational philosophy” in Acta Academica, 43(2):41-65, and Martin Rice (2000) “What is Science?” pp.239-269 in Contemporary Reflections on the Philosophy of Herman Dooyeweerd Edited by D.F.M. Strauss & Michelle Botting.

As already mentioned Dooyeweerd’s transcendental critique has been both influential and controversial among reformational philosophers. To get a good sense of the issues the reader should consult DMF Strauss “An Analysis of the Structure of Analysis” Philosophia Reformata 1983 pp.35-56, Henk G Geertsema (2000) “Dooyeweerd’s Transcendental Critique: Transforming it Hermeneutically” in Strauss & Botting ed. (2000)  pp.83-108, Lambert Zuidervaart (2004), “The Great Turning Point: Religion and Rationality in Dooyeweerd’s Transcendental Critique,” Faith and Philosophy 21, 65-89, Roy Clouser “The Transcendental Critique Revisited and Revised” Philosophia Reformata 74:1 pp.21-47

Descartes’ quote on the Archimedean point is from Descartes Selected Philosophical Writings Translated by John Cottingham Cambridge University Press 1988, 80. The contrasting quotes from Descartes and Hume in §12 are from Strauss 2009:56. The argument concerning psychology (§13) borrows from Martin Rice’s account of these issues in ethics from an unpublished paper (2011) “Ethics as a religious activity”. The definition of philosophy given in §13 is adapted from Calvin Seerveld “Reformational Philosophy and Christian College Education” in Cultural Education and History Writing.

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(14) Philosophy not neutral

Philosophy claims to be neutral and to be conducted on a purely rational basis. Yet, as we look through the vast diversity of philosophical systems and insights, we are forced to account for this diversity through appeal to more than rational factors.  Philosophical concepts themselves require that we dig deeper.

In modern philosophy there is the basic motivation of personality/freedom and science/control which needs to be understood if we are to grasp the way concepts and arguments function.  These two are in constant tension.  Through science, humans come to understand the world. This delivers us from the fear of the mystery of nature. Further, our scientific knowledge gives us power over nature.  This power means that we can free ourselves from the capricious power of nature; we can even use the power of nature for our own benefit.  So science creates huge potential for human freedom.  Seen from a humanistic view point this freedom is created by humans. It is our power of reason that creates it, and through reason this freedom can become total.  Nature is an object that we can know completely and over which we can have complete power. We can become gods.

How do we gain complete control over nature?  We do this through strict adherence to the power of reason to analyse everything and to see the interconnections of everything.  This includes humans and human society if we are to have complete control over them.  It is not too hard to see that, along this path, what appeared to guarantee and to be irrefutable evidence for human freedom turns out to destroy human freedom, either through a deterministic science or social engineering.  This kind of problem has gone through many permutation over the last four centuries, the point to note is that underneath it we have a basic religious conviction of a humanistic kind.

Despite the fact that the history of philosophy requires us to take pre-rational factors seriously, it can still be held that neutrality is an ideal not yet attained. A second line of argument seeks to show that philosophy is not possible without a religious starting point; there is an inner point of contact between religious belief and theory.  This point of contact is to be found in certain basic ideas that make philosophy possible.  They are the ideas of (1) origin, (2) unity, and (3) diversity in coherence.

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(13) The Character of philosophy

Let us back-track a little because the above discussion of science, theory and abstraction leads us to an important argument.  The kind of sciences we have so far been talking about are specialized sciences because they investigate reality through the lens of one distinguishable sphere of properties and laws that acts as a unified principle of explanation. But notice this: we can only identify such a principle of explanation by simultaneously seeing how it is different from other possible principles of explanation.  We can focus on number as number only if we are able to distinguish it from other types of property such as motion, energy, life etc.  If reality contained only one kind of property then these special sciences would be impossible.  This undermines all claims to reduce reality to one type of thing.  The reductionist approach is inherently circular since the choice of principle for explaining everything else already presupposes a given diversity from which it makes it choice.  For example: materialism claims that all of reality can be reduced to matter. However, we can only understand this claim if we can identify matter as a distinctive kind of property in the world set off from other properties.  This in turn can only be accomplished if other properties distinct from matter really exist, and so strict materialism cannot possible be true.  

There is another conclusion to be drawn from this line of thought.  Since any special science is limited to the angle of approach of one dimension of reality, a view of how that dimension relates to the whole of reality (or to other dimensions or aspects) must require a more-than-special-scientific viewpoint.  This means that any definition of a special science must take a view outside of its specific modal viewpoint.  For example, to claim that “mathematics is the discipline encompassing algebra and topology” is to give a definition that is not mathematical in character since it is not itself an axiom, theorem or deduction either in algebra or topology.  It is a claim about mathematics and not a claim of mathematics.  This suggests that specialised sciences can only account for what they are doing by moving beyond their natural domain and so it points us towards the need for theoretical reflection that has as its focus such boundary-transcending issues.  Theoretical thinking requires a discipline that deals with the interrelation between different facets of our world.    Since every science and human task has set limits, philosophy must give itself to the service of others by listening to and learning from these disciplines and making conceptually clear the nature, limits, inter-relational meaning and potential for blessing/curse of things, events and human activities.  

It may help to develop an example (borrowed and adapted from Martin Rice).  If you are developing a psychological theory, then you will presume the existence of psychological phenomena, including certain psychological laws and properties which characterise psychological functioning.  Here we meet with a very basic kind of philosophical question which asks what is the nature of these phenomena and how they relate to other acknowledged realities.  It is true that some may wish to deny the existence of such realities and may advocate that we eliminate all talk of psychological laws and properties in a mature science.  Such a view would not even want to offer an explanation of psychological phenomena, but will instead propose an explanation of why we are mistaken in our belief that there are such. Either way, whether we accept or deny their existence we will be advancing a philosophical position.

Let us suppose that psychological properties and laws do constitute a genuine sphere of functioning in the reality we meet with in our experience of events and objects. The question now arises how these properties relate, connect with, or depend upon other, non-psychological phenomena. Here we have a choice: either psychological phenomena have independent existence with the other aspects of reality dependent on them, or they do not. Let’s take the first option where psychological properties exist independently of the remaining aspects.  We see a version of this in the (radical) empiricist position in philosophy where our sensory experience, sometimes called sense data, is seen as having a distinct existence and providing our only guide to true reality.  This is clearly a philosophical view.  To the extent that our sensory experience is taken as basic and independent it is also a religious view since psychological properties are given the role of a divinity.

In the second case, we assume there is a relationship of some sort between the psychological aspect of reality and the remaining aspects. How can this be conceived, or explained? That is, what kind of relationship are we dealing with? It could be that one of the remaining aspects explains or accounts for the relationship between the psychological aspect of reality and the remaining aspects to which it is related. This would have to be done by either a non-eliminative reduction to the relating aspect, or by a supervenience relation upon the aspect that does the relating. In either case we are involved in a substantive philosophical theory, since we are making a theory that comments, in whole or in part, on the number of, and interrelations between, the basic aspects of reality.

Of course, the kind of connection that exists between the psychological aspect and the remaining aspects of reality may not be characterized by one of the aspects at all. We may have a non-reductive relationship between the psychological aspect and the remainder. It is precisely such a philosophical view that is developed by reformational philosophy.

The point of the above example is that, as a special science develops, it is forced to take a philosophical stance on the limits of its field and how its conceptual results relate to other universes of discourse and knowledge.

An authentic Christian philosophy should seek to combat the tendency to reduce reality to one or two basic realities on which all else depends or through which all else can be explained.  It also has the task of exploring the richness of God’s world as uncovered by the many fields of scholarship by giving a theoretical overview that remains open to further surprises, and as with all cultural tasks this should be done in obedience to the two great commandments: to love God and serve one’s neighbour with the expectation of the redemption of the whole of creation.

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(12) No Archimedean point

Now we recall that theoretical thought, often under the name “reason”, was linked to the divine and seen as capable of revealing the whole meaning of reality to us.  Here, many a philosopher has thought, is our true Archimedean point, a watch tower we can ascend and overcome the limitations of our body and senses to survey reality from a “Gods-eye-view”.  Rene Descartes, considered the father of modern philosophy, put it like this: “Archimedes used to demand just one firm and immovable point in order to shift the entire earth; so I too can hope for great things if I manage to find just one thing, however slight, that is certain and unshakeable.”.  Famously he proposed the cogito, the self as a thinking thing, to be his Archimedean point.  Reason then becomes a form of pseudo-revelation; it takes upon itself the role of revealing to us what is divine.

Right from the beginning of philosophy there was a faith in theoretical thought that it would lead us to the true picture of reality, a picture that sets itself against the changing diversity (and richness) of everyday experience.  This meant that the result of theoretical thinking was identified with true reality.  Put in another way, the fallible and limited outcome of human thinking became the standard for what is truly real and important.  Given that theoretical thinking involves isolating and focusing on a specific feature of the world, the identification of the result of our theoretical thinking with true reality has led philosophers to take what they had isolated in thought to be the independent and fundamental basis of all reality.  This shows a kind of forgetfulness because what is isolated in thought is isolated only as a result of our activity of separating it from its everyday context and not because it really is isolated and independent. We forget, at our peril, that what our thinking gives us is just a small focused part of reality and not its true, underlying nature: what philosophers often call essence or substance.

Now, to take something in reality as the independent and fundamental basis of all reality, is to take that part of creation and give it a divine like status.  By seeking the answer to the boundary question of unity and diversity within the confines of what reason reveals to us leads to a form of intellectual idolatry.  Not only that, it also fails to solve the problem.  Let’s see why that is.  Philosophers have tended to identity one or two features as basic to reality. If just one feature (monism), then there remains the problem of how we can get from this one feature all the diversity we experience.  For example, how from matter we can get life, consciousness, morality and so on.  If two features are made fundamental then the unity of what we experience, and the way things in God’s world seem to fit together become problematic because we are now required work out how these two very different features can interact with each other.  For example, in addition to matter Rene Descartes added mind, but then had great difficulty in explaining how the mind can affect the body and how the body can affect the mind.

A further problem is that since created reality is not absolute, and since the feature that our thinking has isolated for investigation is not truly isolated and independent but in actual fact intertwined with the rest of reality, then taking it to be the key to reality leads to irresolvable problems.  These can be seen in the various paradoxes and antinomies that crop up throughout the history of philosophy, perhaps none as famous as those identified by Zeno of Elea.  He developed a number of arguments to support his view that motion was not real.  The most famous is known as the Achilles paradox (after the famous Greek hero), or sometimes as the ‘tortoise and the hare’.  Here we are to imagine a race between a tortoise and Achilles (or a hare).  Achilles being a good sport allows the tortoise a head-start but doesn’t realise that in order to overtake the tortoise he must first reach the place where the tortoise started from, by which point the tortoise has moved on.  Now Achilles must cross an admittedly short distance to arrive at the position the tortoise has now got to.  Unfortunately, by the time Achilles has got there the wily tortoise has kept going on to a further point and so it seems the same will happen ad infinitum (to infinity) meaning that Achilles will never be able to overtake the tortoise!  This paradoxical conclusion, that Achilles will never overtake the tortoise when we know that in reality he will, is a result of Zeno’s attempt to explain everything in terms of space.  Since motion is different from space, it cannot be explained on its basis and so a consistent reduction of all of reality to space will end up denying the reality of motion.

One more problem we mention now is that due to the great diversity exhibited in creation there are many modes of reality that can be isolated and made into the fundamental starting point of our explanations.  This variety means that it becomes quite arbitrary what choice is made as regards what is taken to be ultimately real.  This is revealed in the changing fashions of -isms that one encounters in the different fields of scholarship, such as rationalism, behaviourism, psychologism, organicism, historicism, economism, physicalism etc.  Each of these has been equally successful (and unsuccessful) at organising its explanation of all reality around just one dimension of reality.  Later we shall see why reductionism can meet with a certain degree of success.  For now, to give a sense of how arbitrary the choice is, compare the following positions of Rene Descartes and David Hume.  First Descartes:

Yet I certainly seem to see, to hear, and to be warmed.  This cannot be false; what is called ‘having a sensory perception’ is strictly just this, and in this restricted sense of the term it is simply thinking.  (Descartes Meditations II)

Now compare with Hume:

To hate, to love, to think, to feel, to see; all this is nothing but to perceive. (A Treatise of Human Nature, Book I, Part II, sec. vi)

Descartes reduces all the phenomena of human experience to thinking, while Hume reduces the same realities to perception.  While the consequences are significant, it is difficult to know why one form of reduction should be favoured over the other.  Both in their own way are expressions of faith. Both reductions rely on the abstractive and isolating activities of thought. Now, since theory focuses on elements and cannot comprehend the whole, it is itself one element of the whole.  This means that the answer to the problem of unity and diversity must be found prior to theory, including philosophical theory.  A vision of the whole, as a vision of ‘life, the universe and everything’, is a vision of faith whether one is “religious” or not.  The conclusion is that philosophy cannot give us an Archimedean point.

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(11) Theory and abstraction

Based on our first approximation in defining philosophy (§9) we should look for what makes theoretical thought a distinctive part of our cultivation of God’s creation.  If we go back to the earliest philosophers we notice that theoretical thinking helped them to take ordinary features of our world such as water, fire and air, or certain pervasive realities such as change and constancy and turn them into fundamental ordering principles of the whole cosmos.  By claiming that the whole of reality could be explained by, or reduced to certain basic elements, these elements are given godlike status as being the independent basis of all the rest of reality.

Theoretical thinking is a feature of science and there are today many sciences.  At school we typically study physics, chemistry and biology; then there are also subjects such as psychology and mathematics.  Each of them investigates its own irreducible terrain of reality in which certain properties and laws that form a basic kind of functioning of the objects and events in our experience are grouped together.  Mathematicians, for example, focus on numbers themselves, not on counting particular objects, but investigating numerical properties as they can be understood in isolation from the objects of ordinary experience.  In biology we investigate generative (living) systems that reproduce and go through cycles of development.  In physics the focus is on the interactions of energy that are presupposed in living organisms, but also on physical forces such as gravity and electromagnetism. We can see that theory works by isolating aspects of the world in order to produce explanations [add examples]. This characterises science and cuts across the division of so-called ‘natural’ and ‘social’ sciences.[1]  We can also see that the explanations produced give us a model of the world that is different from what we directly perceive.  From this we conclude that theoretical thinking has the character of analysis, of identifying and distinguishing things, of taking things apart in thought.  In theory we view reality from an abstract perspective such as that of physics; we may start with the fullness of our experience of reality but we find a point of entry that directs us to certain features that are of specific interest.  So we might have a flower in front of us and our point of interest is in the psychological benefits of having flowers in a hospital environment, or our point of interest may be in its economic value and role in a particular economy, or we may be interested in the flower from a more strictly biological perspective its processes of growth, maturation, reproduction etc.  In each approach there is a human busy in the activity of selecting particular features of an object for further investigation.  In this act of thought we leave behind, though only in our thinking and explaining, the fullness of reality as we usually experience it and investigate an isolated part of it.

It takes considerable training to achieve this ability to select a relevant viewpoint to guide our investigation into some matter or other, and yet as a learnt human skill it becomes part of the scientist’s second nature and so easily passes unnoticed.  However, if we step back from this activity and ask ourselves how the resulting analysis and explanation relates to the results of other sciences with their different points of interest, and how these in turn relate to the original fullness of reality that we confront in our everyday experience then we face a perplexing philosophical problem of unity and diversity. We can unpack this by asking two distinct questions: How do all these perspectives relate to each other? And then: Can they all be united into a single understanding of reality?  But these questions cannot be answered by theoretical thought alone even though it is awakened by them. They are questions that sit on the very boundary of theoretical thought, or we could say at its limits.  Here it is appropriate to say that philosophy should proceed with a sense of wonder.

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[1]I say so-called ‘natural’ because social sciences such as sociology, economics, history and so on can hardly be said to investigate non-natural aspects of reality.  These sciences investigate properties and processes that are just as much part of our world as those studied by the ‘natural’ sciences.  It is only a certain kind of philosophical prejudice that elevates the ‘natural’ sciences to a level of ‘real’ or ‘hard’ science as opposed to ‘soft’ sciences.  This is another result of reductionist thinking.

(10) Rational thinking

The nature and status of human rational thinking is a central theme of philosophy, and we can certainly agree with the claim that philosophy has to do with thinking and a special kind of thinking at that.  It is correct to see in the birth and development of philosophy the beginning of science also since we find here the discovery of the power of theoretical thinking for exploring and explaining the world around us.  Anaximander, for example, attributed thunder storms to the compression of wind within a dense cloud rather than to the activity of the gods.  If our human task is to develop and cultivate the potential God laid in creation then the discovery and development of theoretical thinking was a great achievement.  Unfortunately, two less-than-positive developments are found together with the discovery of theoretical thought.  Firstly, the positive ability of theoretical thought to give us new perspectives on the world by mentally splitting up reality to permit a focused analysis of specific isolated elements was uncritically taken to give us a truer picture of the world than that given in our everyday experience.  This signalled the beginning of a reductionist spirit in which theory becomes the correct way to make the world comprehensible as it reduces the rich, multifaceted character of reality to only one or two basic elements.  In consequence, the number and nature of the factors used to explain reality was severely limited even while there appeared to be a number of options available; some chose water, some air, some fire etc.  While this may not have been so serious at an early stage of the development of theoretical thought, the prejudice, very much alive today, that science is necessarily reductive and that physics will soon give us a single true unified picture of the world, is a serious misconception.

The second negative development set philosophy more immediately off-track.  In the absence of a proper recognition of the Creator, this gift of theoretical thought was soon elevated to divine status.  Xenophanes (c.570-475 BC), admiring what he took to be pure and universal in us, projected consciousness (life, sensitivity and thought) on to his idea of the One god, supreme above the others.  Something that God had made for our good got turned into an idol (Romans 1:25).  This god is conceived as pure consciousness, “complete he sees, complete he thinks, complete he hears”.  The notion of “completeness” that Xenophanes uses would set off a powerful tradition that sees god as a motionless thinking, as a simple (as in not being made up of parts) spiritual being.  This idea of “divine simplicity” was unfortunately adopted by some early Christian intellectuals and has since caused havoc in Christian theology, putting a road block in the way of understanding the reality of the covenanting God who meets us in the Bible.

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Two links worth checking out

The Faith-in-scholarship blog often has great pieces. A recent one explains the excellent Church Scientific project. It's called could a Christian worldview enhance science?

Jonathan Chaplin has a great piece at the Center for Public Justice

Before justice acquired a reactive, corrective inflection due to the fall, it was what Nicholas Wolterstorff calls “primary justice”–a rich relational lattice enabling the development of flourishing human societies in tune with God. It still is. Humans need just familial, neighborly, cultural, geographical, economic, and political relationships if they are to fulfill their original calling to be images of God tending and unfolding creation’s gifts. Justice is constitutive of the Gospel because it is constitutive of being human. Human history testifies to our necessary, stumbling, occasionally impressive, and often oppressive, attempts to build institutions that facilitate the doing of justice in each of these areas.

(9) Criticism and criteria

Philosophy as a deep kind of thinking, as specialised logical analysis, as an exercise in wonder, as critical, as a search for wisdom and as rational: what should we make of all these ideas?  A good place to start is the idea of being critical.  Since we will not be able to agree with all the above ideas and the ways in which they have been thought through, we will need to be critical ourselves.  Being critical has often been equated with incessant questioning, with a sceptical attitude that refuses to be duped.  This gives us the image of philosophy as a kind of thinking that reflects more deeply than usual by uncovering assumptions and presuppositions that we often take for granted, and have perhaps never given much attention to.  Or perhaps being critical involves questioning convictions that are held on to with great passion and are rarely subjected to rational scrutiny.  While these certainly have a place, at its root ‘to be critical’ means to hold something up for judgement according to some criteria.  It is not a mark of being critical just to question everything.  Instead, we need a firm hold of the basis or principle on which we build our judgement.  This “firm hold” is nothing other than an element of faith that is inseparable from our thinking; we must trust and be committed to the criteria we use to make our judgements.  So we can see that simply playing off philosophy as “critical” against religion as “dogmatic,” with the accompanying claim that philosophy is based on “reason” whereas religion is based on “faith” is actually a lazy way of understanding things that needs to be critically questioned!

Now it is legitimate to ask us for the criteria we will use in our judgements about philosophy.  Despite showing in the previous paragraph that any answer to this question must involve faith, our answer will still be controversial.  Let us just say for now that any answer should be controversial because it concerns the choice we make about the basis and origin of the meaning of our lives.  The direction of our lives is at stake in such a choice.  If we are to seek a Christian philosophy, then our orientation must come from God’s word.  God’s word is primarily revealed in the Word made flesh, Jesus Christ, and Jesus as the image of the invisible God is witnessed to by the written word of God found in the Bible.  The Bible also directs our attention to the “glory of God”, the law and commandments of God that are wordlessly spoken throughout creation (Psalms 19, 104, 119).  If we take Jesus as the key to the meaning of the Bible and the Bible as the key to the meaning of creation, then we will have a sure guide to walk in God’s ways through our life, and also in philosophy.

As we saw earlier, we learn from God’s word that we are creatures made in the “image of God”, that we find our home in God’s good creation and that we are given the task to rule over, to care for, to cultivate and develop creation (See §2-5).  Our definition of philosophy must therefore reflect this.  So as a first approximation we will take philosophy to be one way in which we can bear God’s image in caring for and developing creation.  Since this is a definition that can serve for all human activities it may seem of little consequence. However, it will help us sift through the ideas we enumerated earlier and give us criteria to make (admittedly fallible) judgements about their worth.  In particular we will stress that philosophy is a human activity that fits into created reality and cannot be understood apart from the reality in which it is embedded.  As Dooyeweerd notes in the above quote, reality is a coherence of many interrelated meanings (see also §7) and philosophy is itself part of this coherence and not something above it.  As a human activity it has no special relationship to God, no privileged role in guiding life or setting out what is ultimately true.  When people divorce themselves from their true identity as image bearers of God and fail to recognise that meaning and purpose come from God, the source of true wisdom (Proverbs 1:7, Colossians 2:2-3), that all creation belongs to God and is made by, through and for him (Romans 11:33-36), then philosophy can become a vehicle of false religious hope and faith.  On these grounds we are forced to question one of the most important and long-standing convictions to be found in the history of philosophy.  Again and again we will confront the high esteem given to Reason by many philosophers:  that Reason is the highest and best in us, that Reason is the key to reality, that Reason is that which is unchanging and unconditionally reliable, that it is what is most godlike in us, that it is independent of particular cultures and faith commitments.  This veneration of Reason is central to much western philosophy, which has taken itself to be the exercise of Reason par excellence.  To ask critically whether assigning such a status to Reason properly helps us understand what is going on in philosophical thought is not an easy task and we shall have to keep returning to it.

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Dooyeweerd on the nature of philosophy

“The intent of philosophy is to give us a theoretical insight into the coherence of our temporal world as an inter-modal coherence of meaning. Philosophic thought is bound to this coherence within which alone it has meaning.” Dooyeweerd New Critique I, 24

(8) The question "what is philosophy?"

The question which we here deal with is clearly important and fundamental when considering the possibility and outline of a Christian philosophy.  Unfortunately, we will not easily find a satisfactory answer; certainly not one that will satisfy everybody.  It has been well said that the question “what is philosophy?” is itself a philosophical question and one that has received many different answers.

Let us at least begin with some common ideas without yet making any judgement about them.  Firstly, philosophy involves and is about thinking.  The twentieth-century philosopher Martin Heidegger at the end of his career even preferred to speak of “thinking” rather than philosophy, meaning by it a special and deep kind of thinking, and provocatively claimed that ‘science does not think’. In this way he stressed the difference between philosophy and science.  Others have seen science as the very pinnacle of human thought about reality so that philosophy is left with the task of clarifying the concepts and arguments we use both in science and in everyday life.  In this way philosophy becomes a specialised kind of thinking related to logical analysis.  So called “analytic” philosophy which is the predominant form of philosophy in universities today tends to follow this line.  The well-known Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga is a leading figure in analytic philosophy and once described philosophical reflection as “not much different from just thinking hard”.  Philosophy has also been said to start with a feeling of wonder, as Plato has it in the Theaetetus (155d)[1] and as Aristotle repeated (Metaphysics A 982b10)[2] – and also to involve reflection that goes deeper than usual thinking.  Let’s explore these ideas a bit further.

That people were struck by a feeling of awe at the world around them, and drawn by such a feeling to wonder at the origin of it all, certainly predated the beginnings of philosophy in 6^th century BC Ionia.  This is clear from the many myths that describe the birth of gods and of human beings.  From its inception, usually identified with Thales of Miletus, philosophy had an ambiguous relation to these myths.  It is quite possible that the importance of Miletus as the birth of philosophy, being home also to Anaximander and Anaximenes, was due to its importance as a trade-route with the older cultures of Babylon, Egypt, Lydia, and Phoenicia.  Contact with such cultures would have confronted the Greeks with creation myths quite different from their own. The early philosophers both drew on these myths for inspiration and ideas, as Thales did in identifying water as the ultimate element, but also showed a critical attitude – as far as we know Thales made no link to the gods and gave a more ‘naturalistic’ and structural account of reality.  Often the critical attitude has been emphasised and from this we get the idea that philosophy is in tension with religion as well as the idea that philosophy must be a kind of thinking that is critical. 

Then we should consider the term philosophy itself which derives from two Greek words philos and sophia which together mean the “love of wisdom”.  Here we can find the notion that philosophy can help us discover the meaning of life and show us how to live a good life.  Early on in the history of philosophy, ethics took an important role such that for many it became a kind of alternative religious way of life for intellectuals.  We could think of the religious cult that grew up around the legendary Pythagoras or later when Plato spoke of philosophy as a conversion of the soul from darkness to light, from the world of change to reality itself which is understood to be a divine order. As the philosopher comes to know this changeless order he becomes divine so far as is possible for a mortal (Republic 518c-d and 500c-d).  While this view became less common with the advent of Christianity, in our increasingly post-Christian age it is experiencing something of a revival as the likes of Luc Ferry and Alain de Botton try to show us how to live a good secular life with the help of philosophy.  Finally, and possibly the most important and pervasive idea about philosophy is that it has to do with reason and being rational.

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[1]"I see, my dear Theaetetus, that Theodorus had a true insight into your nature when he said that you were a philosopher, for wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder."

[2] “The fact that this science is not productive is also clear from those who first engaged in philosophy.  For human beings originally began philosophy, as they do now, because of wonder”

Further reading

These introductory posts have tried to lay some of the Biblical foundations for a Christian philosophy. While it may overlap with theology, what is covered is perhaps better described as ‘worldview’. In his book The Relation of the Bible to Learning, Evan Runner lay great emphasis on the fact that “the Word of God is one,” a living and active power that speaks to and redirects the heart and so provides guidance for the whole of life. This directing power must also guide theology and so should be distinguished from it. Runner’s book and its sequel Scriptural Religion and Political Task, can be found in Walking the Way of the Word: The collected writings of H. Evan Runner Volume 2, (Paideia Press, 2009.)

One book that was drawn on for much in these sections and which covers similar topics is Albert Wolter’s classic Creation Regained: Biblical basics for a Reformational Worldview, (Eerdmans, 1985/2005.) From Wolters is taken the claim, made in section 4, that “There is nothing in human life that does not belong to the created order” (p.25). His short paper “The Foundational Command:‘Subdue  the Earth!’” is very helpful in understanding the cultural mandate. Also The Transforming Vision: Shaping a Christian Worldview by Brian Walsh and Richard Middleton, (IVP, 1984), deals with creation, cultural mandate and the dangers of dualism. Richard Middleton’s recent A New Heaven and a New Earth: Reclaiming Biblical Eschatology, (Baker Academic, 2014), is a rich resource and was especially helpful for section 4; the quote there is from pp.101-102. The claim that God’s Word is “first published in creation, then republished in Scripture” is helpfully explained in Society, State, and Schools: A case for structural and confessional pluralism, by Gordon Spykman et. al. (Eerdmans, 1981) pp.151-155. Andre Troost has covered “The relation between the revelation of creation and Word-revelation” in chapter 2 of his book The Christian Ethos, (Patmos, 1983.)

The table of aspects and questions in section 1 is adapted from Science in Faith: A Christian Perspective on Teaching Science edited by Arthur Jones pages 18-19. The reference to Oscar Cullmann in section 2 is to his “Immortality of the soul or resurrection of the dead?” Herman Dooyeweerd’s summary of the cultural mandate in section 3 is from Roots of Western Culture, (Paideia Press, 2012), p.30. This is a good place to start getting an insight into the worldview or “religious ground-motive” that propels reformational philosophy. The social perspective hinted at in section 3 is based on the principle of “sphere sovereignty” articulated by the Dutch statesman Abraham Kuyper in “Sphere Sovereignty” (1880) see pp.461-490 of Abraham Kuyper: A Centennial Reader edited by James D. Bratt, and chapter 3 of Lectures on Calvinism, (Eerdmans, 1931.) Dooyeweerd discusses sphere sovereignty in chapter 2 of Root of Western Culture. Some of the implications of this principle for society will be explored in the later sections; however, it will also become apparent that the basic principle is fundamental to the whole working out of a reformational philosophy. The quote from Vollenhoven in section 6 comes from §13 of his Introduction to Philosophy Edited by John J. Kok and Anthony Tol, ‘being-subject’ as the ‘point of orientation’ comes from §17, and Tol’s gloss is from Anthony Tol Philosophy in the making: D.H.Th. Vollenhoven and the emergence of reformed philosophy page xvii fn23. Johan van der Hoeven’s "In memory of Herman Dooyeweerd. Meaning, time and law" Philosophia Reformata 43: 130 -144, is helpful in understanding the key idea of meaning in Dooyeweerd.

To understand the reformational approach to reading the Bible, as well as the books already mentioned, one should consult Calvin Seerveld’s How to read the Bible to hear God speak, (Dordt Press, 2003.) Cornelis Veenhof described the atmosphere in the Netherlands surrounding the birth of reformational philosophy as “When the Scriptures Fell Open”. Prominent among those he mentions is the Amsterdam preacher S. G. de Graaf whose four volume Promise and Deliverance (Paideia Press, 2012) was deemed significant enough to be the only major translation project undertaken by Evan Runner. An important historical account of how evangelicalism has repeatedly fallen for a reduced understanding of Biblical faith is Keith Sewell’s The Crisis of Evangelical Christianity: Roots, Consequences, and Resolutions (WIPF & Stock, 2016.)

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(7) Created reality as ‘meaning’

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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(6) Created reality as ‘subject’

How does our view of reality as God’s creation translate into reformational philosophy?  We have seen that it requires us to recognise the goodness and the richness of the world around us as well as human responsibility within creation.  Philosophers like to use words in a precise way, so it would help to have a word that we can use to refer to the whole of reality that will direct our analysis according to the biblical principles outlined above.  We could just use the word ‘creation’, but that already carries lots of different meaning and would not help give the direction needed.  Instead, we want a word that has, or can be given, a fairly precise meaning that brings out something of philosophical significance from the belief that reality is indeed God’s creation.

A number of options can be suggested from the writing of different reformational philosophers.  We shall start with Vollenhoven’s characterisation of reality as ‘subject’. He writes “That which is created is completely dependent on the Creator, that is to say, wholly subject to his sovereign law, Word revelation, and guidance”.

It is not uncommon in modern philosophy to speak of ‘subject’ or of ‘subjectivity’.  Descartes, the so-called ‘father of modern thought’, sought to overcome scepticism and provide a foundation of certainty in science by starting from the thinking subject.  Descartes took the Cogito (‘I think’) as the source or principle of its own activity which can master the world which it confronts as its object.  This ‘turn to subjectivity’ puts freedom and rationality at the heart of our self-understanding and our view-point on the ‘external world’.

Vollenhoven’s notion is quite different.  As a creature, a human being must acknowledge that she finds herself called to be responsible.  There is already God’s Word that called us and the world into existence (Genesis 1), that gives us a task (Gen 1:28 & 2:15), that invites us to live under God’s blessing, represented in Genesis 2 by the tree of life, and that warns us against choosing our own path, represented by the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  As human beings we find that we “stand in subjection” to God’s command.  God is King and we are ‘subjects’.

The term subjectivity, in Vollenhoven, refers not just to us as human beings but to the whole of creation as called forth by God’s word and as being sustained by the same word. He takes this ‘being-subject’ of the cosmos as the point of orientation for philosophy. Anthony Tol notes that "this ‘point of orientation’ characterises the being of created reality not as a theoretical-intellectual is, nor a practical-moral ought, but, in emphasising address and response, a poetical-religious can"

By the word of the Lord the heavens were made,

their starry host by the breath of his mouth.

He gathers the waters of the sea into jars;

he puts the deep into storehouses.

Let all the earth fear the Lord;

let all the people of the world revere him.

For he spoke, and it came to be;

he commanded, and it stood firm. (Psalm 33:6-9)

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