Reading: Notes for Chapter 11

1. The law framework theory presented here is a summary of the theory first developed by Herman Dooyeweerd in his Wijsbegeerte de Wetsidee (Amsterdam, 1935), which was later expanded into the New Critique and further elaborated in other publications. A list of English translations of Dooyeweerd’s major works is provided in the final note to this chapter.

2. The non-reductionist theory of reality to be presented in this chapter is offered as broadly theistic, and thus as presupposing belief in a transcendent Creator common to Jews, Christians, and Muslims. As I have already said, in addition to the way belief in God requires a non-reductionist view of reality, the scriptures also contain specific teachings that can impinge upon theories. And I also said that I find these additional teachings to impinge most often on theories concerning aspects higher on my provisional list than those lower on it. So while I find no scriptural teachings that afford specific information for theories in math, physics, biology, logic, etc., other than that their data are all created by God, I do find specific teachings concerning human nature and the social, justitial, and ethical aspects of human life. As I apply the non-reductionist ontology to the social aspect and a theory of the state in succeeding chapters, I will therefore be combining it with some of these additional teachings. And since many of these are found only (or primarily) in the New Testament, the resulting theories will be not only broadly theistic but specifically Christian. I would not presume to say to what extent they may also be acceptable to Jews or Muslims, but I suspect there would be a significant overlap.

3. Dooyeweerd takes causal laws to originate with the physical aspect since there are no causal relations that hold between mathematical, spatial, or kinetic properties. From the physical upwards on our aspect list, however, there are such cause-effect relations, so he speaks of causality as “founded” in the physical aspect though not restricted to it. Aspects higher than the physical each contribute additional elements to causal relations, such that we experience biotic, sensory, social, economic, legal, etc., senses of causality in addition to the physical. See New Critique, vol. 2, 41, 110; vol. 3, 34 ff.

4. Despite the openness of this list to revision, I find it to have been convincingly defended by Dooyeweerd. See New Critique, vol. 2, 79-163.

5. T. Dantzig, Number: The Language of Science (Garden City, N.Y: Doubleday, 1954), 2-3.

6. See Dooyeweerd, New Critique, vol. 1, 93-106; and M. D. Stafleu, Time and Again (Toronto: Wedge, 1980), 80 ff.

7. Two comments: First, both the objectivist and subjectivist proposals about laws are implausible. How could laws be only our generalizations over the fixed natures   of things, as objectivism says? If there were no law-governed connections between properties, things couldn’t have fixed natures. Or how could all laws be supplied to experience by the mind, as subjectivism says? Unless there were already laws governing the mind that were not its creations, what would explain the uniformity of the ways the mind imposes laws on experience? Second, while I have been emphasizing a non-reductionist approach with respect to aspects, it should not be overlooked that theories have also been reductionist in other ways. We have just seen, e.g., that some have tried to reduce laws to things while others try to reduce things to laws. The law framework theory is equally opposed to all such reductions, taking all sides of the created cosmos to exist in mutual correlation instead. And the same arguments it gives against aspect reduction can be deployed against these other sorts as well.

8. The exact order of pre-conditionality is as open to revision as are the members of the list, and some advocates of the law framework theory have proposed alternatives. The theory being sketched here would need modification were the list or its order different, but it would not be affected in its essentials. Whatever aspects are taken as genuine would still be regarded as directly dependent on God, equally real, and mutually irreducible.

9. Two observations seem in order here: (1) Recent research suggests that certain animals may also have limited logical or linguistic active functions. See “Conversations with a Gorilla,” Francine Patterson, National Geographic (October 1978). (2) There is good reason to suppose that single-celled organisms should not be classified as either plants or animals. See Uko Zylstra’s “Dooyeweerd’s Concept of Classification in Biology,” in Life Is Religion, ed. H. Vander Goot (St. Catherines, Ontario: Paideia Press, 1981), 239-48.

10. The fact that humans have an active function in every aspect is not, however, their only difference from other creatures. As mentioned in chapter 9, the identity of each human is centered in the self which scripture calls the “heart” or “soul,” which  is the unity of all human aspectual functions, the seat of consciousness, and is what most theologians take to survive the death of the body and thus provide the continued identity of a person between death and resurrection. Our theory explains these points to mean that on a biblical view, the human heart has a “pre-functional” side which is not exhausted by its temporal functions under aspectual laws. This has two important consequences: (1) it allows for genuine human freedom in thought and action relative to the laws of each aspect. For while humans are limited in their actions by what is made possible and impossible by aspectual laws and causal relations, they are not created  or determined by those laws; and (2) the essentially religious character of the human heart is not identical with its function in the fiduciary aspect of trust or faith. Rather, the heart’s religious character lies in its innate pre-functional disposition to be oriented to God or whatever divinity it puts in His place. This includes understanding itself and everything else in the light of that heart-orientation. So that orientation also directs each person’s concrete acts of trust. It is only those acts that are qualified by the fiduciary aspect. For these (and other) reasons, we hold that humans have no qualifying function — a point to be explained shortly.

11. Yes, this means that the laws of every aspect have existed “from the foundation of the world.” It should be noticed that the type of emergence theory objected to here is not one that simply sees a hierarchy between aspects (with which we agree), but one that reduces one aspect to another in one or more of the objectionable senses formulated in note 5 to the last chapter. So if “emergence” is used without commitment to any of those senses, the law framework theory has no objection to it.

12. Emergence theories of the type I’m objecting to thus trade on our ordinary prescientific use of the term “cause” for their plausibility, while it’s the scientific sense of the term they need. In ordinary speech we often speak of one event causing another even though it is not both a necessary and sufficient condition for the other, which is what is sought in science. Andre Troost (The Christian Ethos [Bloemfontein: Patmos, 1983]) has given a good example of how events qualified by different aspects are ordinarily spoken of as causes of each other, but are not causes in the sense of being both necessary and sufficient conditions. Suppose, says Troost, a violinist cuts her finger while preparing dinner. In the ordinary sense of “cause,” we would say that the (physical) cut caused her (sensory) pain, which caused her to make a mistake that (aesthetically) ruined a concert, which caused her to be (legally) fired, which caused some (unethical) swearing on her part. But in each case, the preceding event was neither a necessary nor sufficient precondition for its successor. Each precondition could have occurred without the ensuing result, and each result could have occurred without the event that in fact occasioned it.

Sometimes it is objected at this point that the law framework theory does not really avoid all reductionism since it takes all aspects alike to be dependent on God, and thus reduces them all to God. The answer is that reduction is not identical to dependence, even if many theories attempt to accomplish a reduction by arguing that one aspect depends on another. The difference is this: whereas all aspects depend on God, they are not reduced in status relative to one another by that dependence. All are equally real, though dependent, constituents of the created cosmos.

13. Despite this emphasis it would be inaccurate to call this a theory of naive realism. “Naive experience” is intended to refer to experience as we have it prior to breaking it up by high abstraction, and so is not a hypothesis at all. The upshot of our critique     is that theories of reality cannot deny naive experience wholesale, or entire aspects of it, without incurring serious incoherency. Theories must explain naive experience, not explain it away. In this way the law framework theory fulfills Wittgenstein’s quip that philosophy should ”leave everything as it finds it” even better than his own theories did (Philosophical Investigations, part 1, sect 124).

14. Dooyeweerd develops this idea at great length and demonstrates that such connections cannot be dismissed as mere figures of speech. See New Critique, vol. 2, 55- 180, and also his monograph “De analogische grondbegrippen der vakwetenschappen en hun betrekking tot de structuur van de menselijken ervaringshorizon,” in Mededelingen der Koninglijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, afd. Letterkunde, New Series, vol. 17, no. 6 (Amsterdam: Noord-Hollandsche Uitgevers Maatschappij, 1954). (The unpublished translation of this article is by Robert Knudsen.)

15. Dooyeweerd, New Critique, vol. 3, 53-153.

16. What I have here termed “type laws,” Dooyeweerd called “individuality structures,” which he described as making possible “the typical arrangement of the . . . aspects within a structural whole.” (See New Critique, vol. 3, 78-153.) I have altered the expression because “individuality structure” is subject to being misunderstood as the factual organization of particular individuals rather than understood as the laws which make possible the organization of properties into the types of individuals we discover in the world. (As noted earlier, Dooyeweerd may have gotten this idea from Calvin, who spoke of a “law of creation” which determines the “particular nature of each class of beings” (Institutes, II, ii, 16).

It should also be noticed that type laws connect the properties of a thing in a rigid way with respect to the properties of aspects lower on the list (rigid laws are laws not able to be violated by creatures). So there is no variation in the ways the mathematical, spatial, kinetic, or physical properties are combined in things of the same type. But properties of aspects having a normative order (an order that is not rigid but can be violated by creatures) are combined by type laws in ways that are not rigid. Thus for properties of the aspects from the biotic upwards, type laws allow variability in how properties of those aspects combine in things of the same type. This is why there can be deformed daisies or pigs, as well as deformed cultures, sentences, families, states, statutes, art, etc., which are nevertheless daisies, pigs, cultures, sentences, and so forth. This point will be explained more fully in the next chapters.

17. Speaking of a thing as the “individual structural assemblage of all its properties” is not intended to slight the fact that things are constructed of parts. Rather, it reflects the lesson of modern philosophy that the continued analysis of parts ends in the analysis of properties. Our difference from the ways that lesson has been applied in pagan-based theories is that while they have insisted on looking for the one or two property kinds which make all others possible and actual (or into which all others are resolvable), we contend that no aspect plays either role.

18. The religious basis for this point was argued earlier; esp. see the quote from Gregory Palamas referenced in note 13 to chapter 10. Further consequences of this view include the following: It is the type laws in conjunction with aspectual laws that determine which things are really possible, since aspectual possibilities alone can’t do that — not even logical possibility, as has so often been assumed to be the case (e.g., by Leibniz in both “Meditations on Knowledge, Truth, and Ideas” and “On the Method of Distinguishing Real from Imaginary Phenomena”). The mere absence of logical contradiction from a concept does not show it corresponds to a possible entity or state of affairs. For example, the concept of a square circle can be unpacked as an enclosed plane figure with four equal sides and four equal interior angles whose circumference is at every point equidistant from its center. There is no strictly logical contradiction in such a definition; its incoherency lies in the spatial incompatibilities it asserts, which cannot be discovered by logic alone. Thus a square circle isn’t logically impossible, it’s spatially impossible. Or consider Leibniz’s conclusion that there is no real limit to velocity because there is no logical limit to conceiving an increase over any speed whatever. The lack of a logical/conceptual limit does not prevent there being a real physical limit to velocity as has been shown by relativity physics. This is why the fact that it   is possible for us to form a consistent concept of a talking rock does not mean such a thing is really possible; the concept of a thing can be possible while the thing conceived is not. At the same time, the fact that there is no type law making such a thing possible does not make it impossible in the sense usually meant by that term, namely, that such a thing would violate a law. So a talking rock is not impossible in the same way that asserting both A and not-A is, or in the way a square circle is. For this reason, “not possible” with respect to type laws is not equivalent to “impossible.” (James Ross defends a similar point in the article cited earlier, “God, Creator of Kinds and Possibilities.”)

19. Dooyeweerd has used this theory to give an analysis of the stages of change in the wood of a tree from its biotic qualification as a natural thing, through its becoming semi-formed by having its trunk cut down, to having the trunk formed into boards, and finally to having the boards made into a finished product such as a chair (New Critique, vol. 3, 129-32). I know of few other philosophers who have even attempted such a project, and none with success. He also gives an extensive analysis of the nature of a book, and contrasts it to the failed attempt of Aristotle (ibid., 3, 150-53).

Dooyeweerd’s works, originally in Dutch, are now being translated into English and published by Edwin Mellen Press of Lewiston, N.Y., Queenston, Ontario, and Lampeter, UK. Already available in this series is a re-publication of A New Critique of Theoretical Thought (4 vols.), In the Twilight of Western Thought, Roots of Western Culture, Christian Philosophy and the Meaning of History, Essays in Legal, Social, and Political Philosophy, Encyclopedia of the Science of Law (3 vols.), and vol. 1 of Reformation and Scholasticism in Philosophy (3 vols.). The remaining volumes of the latter work, as well as other shorter essays and monographs, are scheduled to appear shortly.