levels

Linked Glossary of Terms
(references to De Wijsbegeerte der Wetsidee, unless indicated. See concordance for correlation with pages in the New Critique. The concordance is in pdf format.)

levels	NC II, 552, 560, 489 fn1 (different levels of the a priori)
levels of a priori meaning	II, 422, 482, 491NC II, 552, 560-61

The horizon of the full actual reality overarches every modal horizon (NC II, 551).

The horizon of our human experience has several dimensions or levels: the religious,the temporal, the modal, and the dimension of individuality structures. The religious level is the supratemporal level of our selfhood. From there we descend to the temporal level. It includes the modal level. And the temporal and modal levels together encompass the fourth level, that of individuality structures.

These dimensions give our experience a perspectival nature:

All human experience remains bound to a perspective horizon in which the transcendent light of eternity must force its way through time. In this horizon we become aware of the transcendent fullness of the meaning of this life only in the light of the Divine revelation refracted through the prism of time (NC II, 561).

But our experience is not limited to the temporal functions of consciousness:

But if our experience were limited to our temporal functions of consciousness, or rather to an abstractum taken from our temporal complex of experiential functions, as is taught by the critical and the positivistic epistemologies, it would be impossible to have true knowledge of God, or of ourselves, or of the cosmos. (NC II, 561).

Thus, although Dooyeweerd may rejects an “analogy of being,” or a “chain of being,” there are still levels of reality. Dooyeweerd’s sees human existence as ek-sistere. But temporal reality has an even lesser degree of reality than our self, since temporal reality has no existence apart from our selfhood, its root (NC I, 100; II, 53).

Furthermore, the states of affairs uncovered by theoretical thought have a lesser degree of reality than what we experience in naive experience. They are not ontical, but only intentional.

If we restrict ourselves to the temporal, we do not experience things as they really are. Dooyeweerd warns us that when we lose sight of the supratemporal we fail to even view the temporal properly, and our own self-consciousness is weakened.

Naarmate het transcendente-besef van den mensch verzwakt, verzwakt ook zijn zelf-bewustzijn en zijn vermogen de perspectivische structuur van de tijd te ervaren. (“Het Tijdsprobleem in de Wijsbegeerte der Wetsidee” Part II , 1940 Philosophia Reformata, 209).

[To the degree that man’s understanding of the transcendent is weakened, so also is weakened his self-consciousness and his ability to experience the perspectival structure of time].

The Idea that temporal reality possesses a lower level of reality is also evident in Baader. He refers to cosmic time as appearance time [Scheinzeit], in contrast to the real time in which the Self exists.

Revised Aug 21/06