Response to Jeremy Ive’s Interpretation of Herman Dooyeweerd

I have posted my Response to Jeremy Ive’s Interpretation of Herman Dooyeweerd.

This is a critique of Jeremy Ive’s doctoral thesis, “A Critically Comparative Kuyperian Analysis and a Trinitarian, ‘Perichoretic’ Reconstruction of the Reformational Philosophies of Dirk H. Th. Vollenhoven and Herman Dooyeweerd,” (2013) King’s College London.

Ive tries too hard to minimize the differences between Dooyeweerd and Vollenhoven. This leads him to skate over their differences, and to misstate what Dooyeweerd actually says. For example, Ive rejects Dooyeweerd’s central idea of a truly ontical supratemporal heart. In support, Ive refers to a non-existent quotation. Ive mistranslates another text, and ascribes it to the wrong source; the actual text and the actual source affirm the reality of the supratemporal heart, the very opposite of what Ive says. Ive selectively leaves out crucial parts of Dooyeweerd’s work on anthropology; the parts he leaves out affirm the supratemporal heart. Ive adopts the conclusions of D.F.M. Strauss regarding the 1964 Lecture and Discussion and does not acknowledge how Strauss has not stated the text correctly or interpreted it in context.

It is not possible to reconcile the philosophies of Dooyeweerd and Vollenhoven. Dooyeweerd clearly states how crucial the idea of the supratemporal heart is to his whole philosophy. His other ideas like modalities and individuality structures cannot be understood apart from this idea.

Ive has forced his reading of Dooyeweerd into his preconceived theological scheme, and into his preconceived interpretation of Dooyeweerd’s philosophy. Ive’s theological framework of perichoresis in the Trinity is foreign to Dooyeweerd, who avoids such speculation, and who insists that theology is based on philosophy, since theology is itself a theoretical science. Ive has tried to give the primacy to his theology and not to philosophy. And instead of accepting what Dooyeweerd actually says, Ive has too often followed erroneous interpretations by other reformational philosophers.

Personal Individuality

This article in the New Yorker prompted me to reflect again on my individuality. Am I the same person I was when I was a child? When I was a teenager? When I was a hippie travelling overland to India? When I studied philosophy? When I was a lawyer?  When I was a scholar of comparative religion? When I was a husband? When I was divorced? When I decided to again take up the cello? Do I have the same personality as the person who stares out at me from various photos around the house? We go to high school reunions, and we look up old friends on Facebook in order to try to find a sense of continuity in our lives. And yet we find that both our friends and that we have changed in ways that we never imagined. Is my life a continuous narrative or only episodic?

I prefer to believe in continuity, even if the narrative of my life has taken many different turns. Part of this continuity is based on my memory. I have a very detailed (and I believe accurate) memory of my past. Other people I know remember very little of their past, but just live day to day. But I can reconstruct sounds and sights and even smells from past experiences. I don’t think that I am reconstructing the narrative of my life when I revisit these memories. The strongest continuity in my life is when I consider my children and grandchildren.

From a philosophical point of view, what gives me my identity? Is it only my DNA? What if I were to be cloned–would I then be two people? What would differentiate the two? I believe that my individuality is more than just a matter of material makeup of my body. The cells in my body have changed several times, so my identity is more than physical continuity. What about the idea of a soul? I reject the idea of a soul if it is regarded as pure rationality disconnected from my body. But, following Dooyeweerd and Baader, I do believe that I have a center to my being that transcends time and that will endure.

Both Dooyeweerd and Baader believed that we know from our experience that we live both within and outside of time. Baader referred to paranormal experiences as justification for the belief. Dooyeweerd assumes it in his description of naïve or everyday experience. He does refer to our experience of golden moments when all of our temporal existence is illuminated. Following Baader, Dooyeweerd also tries to prove the necessity of our supratemporal center by his transcendental critique of theoretical thought–that our thought requires a standpoint outside of time. He uses the transcendental Ideas of Origin, Totality, and Coherence. The question of the Origin refers to God’s eternity; the question of Totality refers to our supratemporal selfhood and religious root in the aevum or created eternity; the question of coherence relates to cosmic time (the coherence in our temporal reality). Eternity, aevum and cosmic time.

But what will endure after my death? Both Baader and Dooyeweerd say that this supratemporal center will have some kind of (spiritual?) body in which to express itself. The idea of a spiritual body is also found in St. Paul, who may have gotten the idea from the Stoics. Dooyeweerd does not speculate as to what the afterlife may be like, but he says that all temporal functions coincide in a radical unity. What does this mean? Baader says it is incorrect to describe our afterlife in terms of temporal life and functions. It is even incorrect to refer to “living” in the afterlife, since life is a temporal function:

“We should not say that we live after death; then we bring in again personality in the sensory forms. We should rather say, Dasein can really never cease.” (Lichtstrahlen 99).

 At death, our temporal functions are withdrawn back into our supratemporal center. If death comes too suddenly (accidents, suicide, murder), some of our temporal functions may linger, and that is Baader’s explanation for ghosts. Dooyeweerd does not speculate about these matters, but does say at death, we lay down our temporal body or temporal “mantle of functions” (functiemantel). Our religious center is not subject to death, since it transcends all temporal things. Yet he also refers to the fact that in our religious center, all functions coincide and that the temporal functions will be fulfilled and perfected. And it is this religious center, our supratemporal selfhood that guarantees the individual unity of our existence (WdW III, 627).

Both Baader and Dooyeweerd emphasize that our selfhood, even after death, is not to be construed in individualistic terms. Dooyeweerd speaks of it as being “supra-individual.” By that he does not mean that we merge into some universal. We also remain individual, but we are not isolated from the community of other believers who have died, or from God our Origin. Baader says that each individual being is like a central point, receiving from all the other beings outside of it, from its infinite periphery that constitutes his horizon, all that it can receive, and sends in turn all that he can send. But for all the different particular centers, there is a general center, and a principal ray uniting each the first to the second. All the force of the influences of each individual on the others is channeled in the ray towards the center and then sent again to the points. Everything that is emanated from God is directed eternally towards Him, and nothing perishes of what He has expressed, and He is all in all (1 Cor. 15:28) (Werke 11, 42).

Even if we cannot describe what the afterlife is like, I find Baader’s words apt—it will be a “fulfilled individuality” (Philosophische Schriften 91831) II, 22).  And it will not be less than what we experience now:

“…the visible comes from the invisible, but man doesn’t usually see that the not seen, not heard, not understood, unmoved is not only not nothing, but is not less than the visible, audible, understandable, movable, but more than these. It is the Seeing, Hearing, Understanding and Moving.” (Philosophische Schriften I (1831) I, 323).

And Dooyeweerd shares Baader’s idea that our supratemporal religious center is also the creaturely center of the whole earthly, temporal cosmos, and that through us, this temporal cosmos is also saved (NC III 783).  That is of course a most anthropocentric view of the world, but it does give a reason for us to behave ethically towards the earth and its creatures.

Enkapsis

Biological Individuality: Integrating Scientific, Philosophical, and Historical Perspectives, ed. Scott Lidgard and Lynn K. Nyhart (University of Chicago Press, 2017).

Enkapsis. What is a biological individual? This book questions many of our assumptions. We tend to assume that individuality is what makes us unique, different from everyone else. For humans, this difference is said to be by virtue of our soul or our personality. For things, we often look to a properties as what constitutes a thing’s individuality. For organisms, we look to the genome. But genomes are essentially dynamic, processual systems, and the idea of intrinsic properties of things is problematic. In addition to identity, the idea of individuality involves ideas of wholeness, interaction between parts and wholes, propagation by various means, continuity over time, being part of a biological hierarchy, being a potential unit of selection, and contributing to evolutionary fitness.

In a very interesting essay, Olivier Rieppel refers to the idea of enkapsis. In contrast to the idea of properties of things, enkapsis views things and organisms as a nested hierarchy of systems of relationships. A gene is enclosed (encapsulated) by cells, which are enclosed by tissue, which is enclosed by an organ, which is enclosed by an organism. Each level is an emergent whole that is not reducible to its parts, or to the encapsulated wholes. An organism is not just a collection of cells. A whole is not just an aggregate of parts or even atoms. There is both upward and downward causation among the various levels of wholes.

Enkapsis was a key idea of Dooyeweerd’s philosophy. Dooyeweerd also opposed the idea of things with properties. Like Rieppel, Dooyeweerd relied on the idea of enkapsis, as expressed by the anatomist Martin Heidenhain (1864-1949). Heidenhain’s ideas were modified by Theodor Haering (1884-1964), as well as by Max Wundt, whose work Dooyeweerd used without acknowledgment (perhaps because of Wundt’s Nazi associations). Dooyeweerd says that things are an enkaptic interlacement of two or more of what he calls “individuality structures.”

Since most reformational philosophers today reject the idea of individuality structures, and since they also begin with concrete things and then try to abstract properties from those things, it is no wonder that they fail to understand Dooyeweerd’s idea of enkapsis.

Rieppel shows how the idea of enkapsis was also used by German philosophers in an extended way to show German society as enclosing all other structures. Dooyeweerd tries to avoid this totalitarian view of the state. But, as I have shown in my review of Jonathan Chaplin’s book on Dooyeweerd, Dooyeweerd did use enkapsis to show how most other societal organizations are enkaptically founded on the state. In this way, he weakened Kuyper’s idea of sphere sovereignty, which tried to separate the state from all other institutions and organizations. Because he does not understand individuality structures, Chaplin also fails to understand enkapsis.