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Reply to Roy
Clouser by J. Glenn Friesen
©2011 In 2009, Roy Clouser
wrote an article referring to
conversations with Dooyeweerd 40 years ago (Philosophia Reformata 74 (2009) 21-47). In
2010, I published a critique,
showing how Clouser’s Aristotelian interpretation of
Dooyeweerd differs from
what Dooyeweerd actually says (Philosophia Reformata 75 (2010) 97-116). Now, in 2011, Clouser has
published a very emotional response (Philosophia
Reformata 76 (2011) 216-230). Here are some
brief points in reply. 1. Clouser asks why I am
discussing his views of 40 years
ago. But Clouser himself made those views relevant by
his claims regarding discussions
with Dooyeweerd at that time. It appears that Clouser
still does not have copies
of his own letters to Dooyeweerd; it would have been
helpful if Clouser had
requested these copies from me before writing his
response. 2. In 2009, Clouser
stated at p. 22 fn17: “In fact,
Dooyeweerd’s ontology is strikingly parallel to
Aristotle’s…” I mistakenly
quoted this as “strikingly similar.” But it is clear
that Clouser intends to
show similarity in their theories of reality, except
for their different
divinity beliefs. He says that Dooyeweerd’s theory of
reality surpasses
Aristotle not in being more detailed but in his belief
in God as Origin. Already
in his 1968 letter to Dooyeweerd, Clouser says that
Dooyeweerd’s views are
“exactly parallel” to Aristotle’s view of substance
except that Dooyeweerd had
concluded that there must be a transcendent Archè.
In that letter, Clouser discusses Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Book VII, c. 17, which
Dooyeweerd refers to at NC III, 12.
In that chapter, Aristotle contrasts
questions that predicate something of something else
(example “why a man is
musical”) from questions that predicate something of
itself (“why man is man”).
The second type of question does not predicate a
property but refers to
essence, and essence is given by the form of a thing.
Form gives an identity
that is more than the sum of the parts of a composite
object. Clouser writes to
Dooyeweerd: If
we don’t restrict ourselves to just form and matter,
isn’t this argument [Aristotle’s]
greatly like your own? Doesn’t it parallel the line of
argument of the New
Critique in which things and events
may be explained from the standpoint of many aspects
by the special sciences
but the things are more than the sum of their aspects?
Doesn’t this argument
also proceed to show that no modality or combination
of them can be construed
as guaranteeing the intercoherence of all the aspects?
And isn’t the conclusion
that the intercoherence is brought about by a
transcendent God not to be
identified with any modal aspect? This seems to me
exactly parallel with Aristotle’s
argument with the exception that you are willing to
draw the conclusion to the
transcendence standpoint, whereas Aristotle was not.
But why do you say his
argument doesn’t really prove anything? In other
words, doesn’t this argument
of Aristotle’s show that the unity of the aspects of a
thing cannot be any of
the aspects, and shouldn’t his conclusion have been
that of a transcendent Archè?
Isn’t his fault that he was not
consistent with this argument rather than that the
argument itself is faulty? Clouser uses ‘parallel’ in the sense of
similarity, as is
shown by his phrase “greatly like your own.” Clouser
fails to see how
Dooyeweerd’s idea of enkapsis is
different from that of a whole and its parts, and how
a thing is an enkaptic
interlacement of at least two
individuality
structures. He also incorrectly
assumes that Dooyeweerd’s idea of modal
aspects corresponds to
Aristotle’s idea of non-essential predicates or
properties. This mistake is the basis for Clouser’s
Aristotelian view that we
know aspects by abstraction of properties from things. 3. Clouser says (Clouser 2011, 220 fn2) that
my reference to
“Clouser 2009, 29 fn 25” is “non-existent.” I can
assure readers that the
footnote does exist; it is Clouser’s own footnote,
where he refers to aspects
in terms of functions. Dooyeweerd distinguished aspects from functions of
individuality structures within the ontically prior
aspects (See Theses 21, 27
and references in my “95
Theses on Herman Dooyeweerd” (Philosophia Reformata (2009) 78-104). A careful reading of my
critique will also locate the other references that
Clouser claims are not
there. 4. Clouser wants a
citation to show that he has used a
formal logical way of describing aspects (Clouser
2011, 218). Clouser attempted
to give “a rigorous formulation of the conditions
under which ignoring an
aspectual distinction will lead to an antinomy.” He
attached the following to a
letter dated April 5, 1972 to Dooyeweerd (a date after
their meetings): I.
A metaproperty is a highest order property of
properties and laws. II.
An aspect is the maximal domain of properties and laws
qualified by a single
metaproperty. III.
An alleged aspectual distinction between two domains
of properties and laws A
and A¢ will be upheld
provided
that: 1. There is no causal law in A
which is derivable from A¢ and vice versa; 2. There is no causal law which
is a higher order law to both a causal law in A and a causal law in a¢ [sic]; 3. That nothing will count as a
higher order law in (2) which is simply the
conjunction or disjunction of
causal laws or their denials which already occur in A
or A¢;
and 4. That A and A¢ each
contain at least one law relating a least two
properties, while every attribute
mentioned in such a law belonging to one of the
domains is itself a member of
the domain. IV.
A law L is a higher order law to a law L¢ just in case: 1. Any property mentioned in L¢ is
a species or determinant of some property mentioned in
L; or 2. L¢ is
derivable from L by virtue of meaning relations or
formal deduction. V.
An attribute is a property in its original aspectual
qualification not counting
its meaning connections to other aspects. Clouser thus uses formal logic to attempt to
distinguish
aspects. Clouser does not respond to Dooyeweerd’s
criticism of formal or
symbolic logic. Clouser’s idea of a metaproperty as a
“highest order property”
depends on set theory and classes of properties. Note,
too, Clouser’s reference
to properties being a species of a property in a
higher order law. The
correlate of ‘species’ is ‘genus,’ and Clouser’s views
are open to Dooyeweerd’s
critique of using that Aristotelian way of
classification to distinguish the
aspects. Clouser’s ideas of properties, domains,
highest orders and meta-properties
are entirely foreign to Dooyeweerd’s thought. Clouser
gives no reference for
his statement “according to Dooyeweerd, logically
distinguishing aspects is
essential to the ontology he developed” (Clouser 2011,
218). Dooyeweerd in fact
rejects that view; he says that it is logicistic to
attempt to distinguish
aspects by the logical mode; this leads to antinomies
and to cancelling the
irreducibility of the meaning-kernels (Dooyeweerd
1975, 100). 5. Clouser now wants to
rely on a letter he believes
Dooyeweerd sent to his supervisor, a letter that he
never saw and of which he
never had a copy. But we cannot argue from what we do
not know. If there was
such a letter, it cannot be used to disregard
Dooyeweerd’s later views on these
issues. What we do know is that as of June 21, 1972,
after these meetings with
Dooyeweerd, and after Clouser’s defence of his thesis,
Dooyeweerd still did not
agree that aspects are “kinds of properties and laws.”
Clouser’s committee was
requiring revisions to his thesis. Clouser says that
the making of aspectual
distinctions is not unique to Dooyeweerd’s philosophy,
and that his thesis
supervisor was still challenging why Clouser’s list of
aspects is uniquely
correct. Clouser writes to Dooyeweerd: And
though I find your list of aspects very appealing, I
do not see any way to
answer this critical question. The situation seems to
me analogous to
questioning our color classifications. […] And this
seems to me the same issue
at stake in showing that the aspects are ultimate
genera of meaning not
subsumable under any wider classification that is not
arbitrary. If
all this sounds objectionable on the grounds that I am
talking of aspects as kinds
of properties and laws rather than as modes of
experience (as you
suggested in your last letter), then I’m afraid I
don’t see the crucial meaning
of “mode” which avoids the difficulties I just
mentioned. For the substitution
of “mode” for “property-kind” seems to me to leave all
the difficulties with
generating any uniquely correct list of them intact. On
the other hand, if the whole matter is supposed to
rest with the principle of
excluded antinomy, then I must say that the same
things still trouble me about
it that I mentioned before: (1) how can we ever be
sure as to whether what we
have on our hands is a genuine antinomy or a logical
contradiction?
Antinomy-finding seems suspiciously like the sort of
thing someone could appear
to succeed with at any point if he were only clever
enough. Besides, you appear
to use antinomy in more than the strict sense of a
conflict of laws. […]
The entire letter is
important, but this excerpt is enough
to show that even at this late date, Dooyeweerd
objected to Clouser’s reference
to aspects as “kinds of properties and laws” rather
than “modes of experience.”
Clouser cannot refer to earlier conversations to
support his views. Note, too
that that Clouser sees “kinds of laws and properties”
in terms of “ultimate
genera of meaning not subsumable under any wider
classification that is not
arbitrary.” ‘Genera’
is of course the
plural of ‘genus.’
Contrary to what
he now says, Clouser did use that Aristotelian method
of classification of
properties, and it resulted in him not being able to
distinguish the aspects. Clouser
is attempting to logically classify the aspects,
something that Dooyeweerd says
is logicism, which results in cancelling the
irreducibility of the aspects. And
that is why Clouser is having such difficulty in
distinguishing the aspects. 6. We also know that on February 9, 1971
Clouser asked
Dooyeweerd to write an introduction to the book that
would result from his
thesis. In a rather prescient remark, Clouser says,
“For unless you do, and
state in that introduction that the work correctly
represents your thought, I
can only expect that for years to come I will be
accused of misrepresenting
you.” Clouser repeated this request when they met in
September, and he repeated
it a third time by letter dated March 20, 1972. He
says that without
Dooyeweerd’s approval, many adherents of Dooyeweerd’s
philosophy will simply
regard his interpretation as “wildly inaccurate,” and
that “without some
introductory words to the contrary, I will spend the
next thirty years
defending this book as a correct interpretation of the
New Critique.” But Dooyeweerd did not
write such an introduction.
What Dooyeweerd did write was his last article
“Gegenstandsrelatie”
(Dooyeweerd
1975), directed against the
logicistic
views that Clouser is now advocating. 7. In 2009, Clouser tried to avoid the force
of Dooyeweerd’s
last article by distinguishing between abstraction and
deduction. He now tries
a different argument–that Dooyeweerd only rejected the
idea that we can know
modal structures
by abstraction, and
not that we can know the nuclear moment
of an aspect by abstraction (Clouser 2011, 223-24).
But the nuclear moment is
not different from the modal structure; it is the center of the modal structure and
guarantees the sphere-sovereignty
of the entire aspect. Every aspect is expressed
in its own modal structure, a law-sphere, which
includes the nuclear moment or
kernel as well as its analogical meaning-moments (NC II, 74-5, Dooyeweerd 1975, 91). Since
the modal structure cannot
be known by abstraction, neither can the kernel of
that structure. The kernel
cannot even be logically defined. The aspects are
“universal modalities of
temporal being” (NC
I, 3 fn1). This universal
modal character cannot be
discovered by abstraction from things: But this
opinion clearly depends on the thought that I have
already fundamentally
rejected–that the modal structures are only given to
us in their supposed
individualization within the individuality-structures
of concrete things,
events, social relations and so on, and that their
universal modal character is
only to be discovered by theoretical abstraction from
out of these
individuality-structures. (Dooyeweerd
1975, 90). 8. Dooyeweerd does refer to abstraction. But aspects are
abstracted from the continuity of time, and not by
abstraction of properties
from things. Clouser cites NC II, 469
(Clouser 2011, 223), but Clouser leaves out the
crucial statement, “That which
is abstracted in anti-thetical theoretical thought
appeared to be nothing but
the continuity of time.” 9. I made no reference to panentheism in my critique of
Clouser. Clouser’s discussion of this issue is a
diversion from answering my
critique of his Aristotelianism. Clouser himself does
not believe in
panentheism, but that is not the point. The issue is
what Dooyeweerd meant. Clouser’s
theology gets in the way of the reading of
Dooyeweerd’s text (although it is
surprising that Clouser has to rely on non-canonical
texts like the Dead Sea
Scrolls for support). Panentheism does not require a
belief in emanation or
that we are temporal bits of God’s own being.
Dooyeweerd criticized the
doctrine of creatio
ex nihilo. He
says it should not be considered as a conceptual
definition, and he warns: But
it is well known that the words ex nihilo
have turned out to be not entirely harmless in
Augustine's theological
exposition of the doctrine of creation, since they
foster the idea that
nothingness would be a second origin of creaturely
being bringing about a
metaphysical defect in the latter (“Cornelius Van Til
and the Transcendental
Critique of Theoretical Thought,” Jerusalem and Athens, p. 459, fn15).
God alone is Being. All creation is “out,
from and towards”
God as Origin (Theses 48, 52). See also my Response
to Gerrit Glas and Henk Geersema
(online). For a detailed review of the history of
the development of Dooyeweerd’s
philosophy, including the issue of panentheism, see “Two
Ways of Reformational Philosophy”
[http://www.members.shaw.ca/hermandooyeweerd/History.html].
Dec 4/11
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