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Imagination, Image of God and
Wisdom of God: by © 2006 Part 2 A .pdf version of the entire article can be downloaded here. Click here to go back to Introduction. Or select a different part of this article using the navigation bar at the left. II. Imagination is an Act A. Our supratemporal selfhood As we have seen, for Dooyeweerd, our creation in the image of God is related to the nature of our supratemporal selfhood. We were first created as supratemporal and then we were “fitted into” (ingesteld) temporal reality. The way that we were fitted into temporal reality was by means of our body or mantle of functions. But our supratemporal selfhood is a present reality. It is not just something that we strive for, or that we hope to attain only after death. In this life, we exist as both supratemporal and as temporal beings. Dooyeweerd makes this clear in many places [100]. Here is one such reference:
Note that in our selfhood we really and radically transcend time [101]. But although we transcend time in our selfhood, within the temporal coherence, we are universally-bound-to-time (NC I, 24; added to WdW). Dooyeweerd is fond of quoting the Biblical verse “out of the heart are the issues of life.” By “issues of life,” he means the functions of temporal life, which issue within time from out of our supratemporal heart. Dooyeweerd refers to the heart as the source of these functions:
Dooyeweerd says that our body is the total temporal form of existence, whereas our spirit (soul) is the total and integral root-unity of our human existence (Curators, 34). Dooyeweerd opposes both an absolutization of the temporal, and a spiritualistic flight away from the temporal [103]. Dooyeweerd calls the relation between our supratemporal selfhood and its temporal body a relation of ‘enstasis.’ (See ‘Enstasis’). Dooyeweerd says that the “key of knowledge” is the Christian Ground-motive of creation, fall and redemption, but only when that Ground-motive is understood in its central and radical sense, in relation to man as the supratemporal religious root of temporal reality. Man was created as the religious root, and temporal creation has its center in man as the supratemporal religious root. The fall was of man as religious root, which is why the temporal world also fell with man. And redemption is in Christ, the New Root, in whom our selfhood now participates (See Appendix D). The idea of the supratemporal selfhood as the religious root is also the key to understanding Dooyeweerd’s ideas of the nature of our actions of knowing, imagining and willing. Without the experience of our selfhood as the religious root, we do not experience the world as it really is–as meaning (NC III, 30; WdW III, 12). We can compare this seeing reality “as it really is” to what is said in the book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain [104]. We think that we know what a face looks like and so when we draw a portrait, we set the eyes in the top of the head, as children do when they draw. But when we really observe, we see that the eyes are at the equator, the middle of our head. Our previous conceptions of what the world looks like get in the way of our perception. Similarly, when we read what Dooyeweerd says about the Christian Ground-motive of creation, fall and redemption, we tend to skip over the passages, thinking, “I know that already from Sunday school, so I don’t have to read it.” But Dooyeweerd’s point in Twilight is that this theological knowledge is not enough, and to the extent that it ignores the supratemporal religious root, it is wrong (See Appendix D). In order to understand Dooyeweerd, we need to set aside what we think we already know about his work, the meaning of the Bible, and the meaning of creation, fall and redemption. B. Our acts proceed from out of our supratemporal selfhood Dooyeweerd says that all of our acts proceed from out of our supratemporal selfhood. Imagination is an act. And, like all of our acts, imagination proceeds from out of this supratemporal selfhood. The following quotation is worth examining in detail:
There is a great deal of information that needs to be unpacked from this long quotation. Let’s enumerate some of the points made:
Now let’s look at these points in detail. 1. Acts proceed from out of our supratemporal and integral center, our heart. All acts, including our acts of thinking and of imagining, proceed from out of our supratemporal selfhood (NC III, 88; added to WdW). Because our acts proceed from out of our supratemporal heart, our supratemporal heart is the central realm of “occurrence” (NC I, 32; added to WdW). But these acts are expressed temporally, within the functions of our temporal body, and within the temporal world. As already discussed, these functions are the issues of life, which proceed from out of our heart. Because our actions proceed from out of the heart, we cannot form a theoretical conception of the heart:
But we should not think of the acts as occurring in either the supratemporal selfhood alone or in the temporal body alone. The origination and the expression are one act:
2. Acts are expressed within our temporal human body, which is an enkaptic structural whole.\ All our acts [verrichtingen] come forth out of the soul (or spirit), but they function within the enkaptically structured whole of the human body (‘32 Propositions,’ Proposition VIII, p. 4]. Our acts function in our temporal body, or what Dooyeweerd calls our “mantle of functions” (functiemantel). This mantle of functions is a structural whole made up of four separate enkaptically intertwined individuality structures: the inorganic, the organic, the biotic and the act-structure [106]. Unlike temporal individuality structures, man as a whole cannot be qualified by any temporal functions:
So, although our acts come forth from our supratemporal center, they are expressed within our temporal mantle of functions. The human body is the free plastic instrument of the I-ness, as the spiritual centre of human existence (NC III, 88; added to WdW). As already discussed, we can temporally express our supratemporal selfhood because we are made in the image of God, who has expressed Himself in man as His image. And just as man finds his meaning in God, so the temporal world finds its meaning and existence within man as its supratemporal religious root. Just as Dooyeweerd uses the word ‘revelation’ as synonymous with God’s expression of Himself, so he also refers to man’s temporal expression of himself as ‘revelation.’ He uses the same Dutch word ‘openbaring’ for God’s revelation and for man’s revelation in time. He refers to our heart as “the root and centre of our temporal life-revelations” and he refers to “the temporal revelations of the heart in the distinguished life-spheres.“ (Curators, 26, emphasis Dooyeweerd’s). He mentions again “the whole Scriptural view of the heart as the religious root and centre of all temporal revelations of life” (Curators, 27) 3. Acts are inner activities In the long quotation being analyzed, Dooyeweerd says that imagination, like all of our acts, is an inner activity. And he says that the “inner” is the realm of the “intentional,” the realm of “meaning” [107]. The “outer world” is the world in which the act is realized in an action. Why has Dooyeweerd placed ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ in quotation marks? It is because what is ‘inner’ has two senses: (a) First, there is our central inner and supratemporal selfhood, from which all of our temporal acts proceed. (b) But these acts, which proceed from our supratemporal center, function in the enkaptically-structured whole of the human body, our mantle of functions. Our temporal body is also ‘inner’ in contrast to what is outside of our body. But this is a secondary level of ‘innerness’; it is a temporal distinction of inner and outer. 4. Acts are realized in actions in the external world. Not all acts are realized. An act of imagination that takes place only in reference to our body’s temporal functions of consciousness is an act that is not realized. It becomes an action only when it is realized in the external world. It is the performance (activity) that actualizes (realizes) the intention of the act (‘32 Propositions,’ 4). Thus, a purely intentional act still needs to be actualized or realized in temporal reality. When we realize our productive imagination, we make the product of our imagination real. (See below for an extended discussion of ‘productive’ and of ‘making real’). 5. There are three fundamental orientations of acts: knowing, imagining and willing. There are three different intentional directions to our acts: knowing, willing, and imagining (NC III, 88). But these temporal directions must be distinguished from the central (religious and supratemporal) act of self-consciousness:
A very similar idea is found in Kuyper, who also refers to knowing, willing and imagining as powers of the soul, but distinguishes this from “the pondering soul in its totality”:
For Dooyeweerd, these three directions of acts are not to be understood as separate faculties of our selfhood. Rather, they are all intertwined and interconnected in one act-structure (Encyclopedia, 223). This act-structure is a temporal structure. It is the most encompassing of the four enkaptic structures that make up our physical body. The three directions of acts have very different emphases. Knowing and imagining both have a contemplative orientation. And they are associated with the lingual and aesthetic modal aspects. The direction of our will is practical in orientation, and it is associated with the jural, moral and faith aspects (Encyclopedia, 192) [109]. Our practical will depends on the other two directions of acts, for no act of the will is possible without knowledge and imagination (Grenzen, 77). This has implications for theoretical thought. Theoretical thought is an act of the will; it therefore depends on pre-theoretical knowledge and imagination, as well as on a distinct theoretical use of the imagination in the Gegenstand-relation (see below). All acts, whether inward or outward, are expressed in all aspects (NC II, 112; added to WdW). For Dooyeweerd, our act of knowing, like all acts, occurs in all aspects. This is very different from the traditional conception of knowing based on a merely rational soul.
Unlike the idea of a merely rational soul, our act of thinking is not to be identified with merely the logical aspect.[110] Imagination is another of the three directions that our acts may take. And just as the act of thinking is not to be identified with merely the logical aspect, so the act of imagination should not be identified with merely the psychical aspect of feeling. It takes place in all aspects, including the psychical. Perception, representation, and remembrance are acts, not modalities (NC II, 372; WdW II, 308). As an act, perception functions in all aspects (NC II, 112; added to WdW). How do these acts fit with the three directions of knowing, imagining and willing? I believe that perception and remembrance are acts of knowing. Representation is certainly an act of the imagination. And yet, as we shall see, imagination is also involved in perception and remembrance, for they also involve the forming of images. We should recall here that Dooyeweerd says that all three directions of our acts work together. 6. Acts orient themselves under normative points of view. As discussed, knowing and imagining both have a contemplative orientation. And they are associated with the lingual and aesthetic modal aspects. The direction of the will is practical in orientation, and it is associated with the jural, moral and faith aspects. All of these aspects are normative aspects. For Dooyeweerd, the logical aspect, and all the aspects succeeding it, are normative aspects. Sometimes he refers to these normative aspects as ‘spiritual’ aspects, in distinction to the ‘natural’ aspects (the pre-logical) [111]. This is important, because as we shall see later, Dooyeweerd speaks of the imaginative opening up process of reality as a ‘spiritualizing-through’ [door-geestelijking’] of temporal reality. 7. Acts orient themselves intentionally towards situations in reality or in the world of our imagination. For Dooyeweerd, ‘intentionality’ may refer to either what is external to our temporal body, or to what is within the functions of our body. When used to refer to what is external to us, Dooyeweerd does not use the word ‘intentional’ in a phenomenological sense, where there is a directedness to supposedly independent things in the outer world. When acts are “purely intentional,” they are directed inwardly. That is, they are directed to our functions within our temporal body, without reference to what is happening outside. In the case of theory, our own temporal functions of consciousness are analyzed in the Gegenstand-relation (See below). When they are directed outwardly, our acts become actions. Dooyeweerd illustrates the difference between inner and outer intentionality by the example of riding in a train through a summer landscape. Looking out the window, we receive psychical impressions. We can direct our spiritual [inward] view to something else, such as a memory. The meaning of the outer world then escapes our eye, but the psychological beholding [aanchouwing] of it remains present (Verburg, 55). Meaning is always related to an inner intentionality. 8. In either case (inner or outer directedness), we need to make the temporal functions of our acts “our own.” When we make an act “our own,” we relate that temporal act, which participates in all modal aspects, to our supratemporal selfhood, which transcends or goes beyond all temporal aspects. It is our intuition that makes us aware of our temporal functions as “our own.” Even the identification of a sensation such as a sweet taste would be impossible without intuition:
Similarly, the modal aspects are not foreign to us, but are our own “cosmically” (WdW II, 409; NC II, 474). And in theoretical thought, we need to make the theoretical Gegenstand our own (NC II, 475). The role of intuition in theoretical thought is discussed in more detail in Part VI below.
Go to Part 3: Imagination and Perception Endnotes [100] See J. Glenn Friesen: “Dooyeweerd versus Strauss: Objections to Immanence Philosophy within Reformational Thought (2006), online at [http://www.members.shaw.ca/hermandooyeweerd/Objections.html] [101] Dooyeweerd specifically rejects Vollenhoven’s idea of a fully temporal and merely pre-functional selfhood (NC I, 31, fn1). [102] Herman Dooyeweerd: Het Tijdsprobleem in de Wijsbegeerte der Wetsidee [The Problem of Time in the Philosophy of the Law-Idea], Philosophia Reformata 5 (1940) 160-192, 193-234, at 181 [‘Tijdsprobleem’]. Translation online at [http://www.members.shaw.ca/hermandooyeweerd/Tijdsprobleem.html]. Dooyeweerd quotes the same passage from Kuyper in his 1939 article “Kuyper's Wetenschapsleer,” at 211.
[104] Betty Edwards: Drawing on the Right side of the Brain, (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher, 1999, originally published 1979). Of course, I am not suggesting that a mystical new view can be reduced to a change in physical brain states. [105] Encyclopedia, 223. Dooyeweerd says very much the same elsewhere. For example,
An almost identical passage occurs in Grenzen van het theoretisch denken (Baarn: Ambo, 1986) [‘Grenzen’], 74. And see ‘32 Propositions,’ 4. [106] See my article ‘Enkapsis.’ Also see “32 Propositions.” and NC III, 88. [107] See “32 Propositions” regarding ‘innerness” (innerlijkheid). [108] Herman Dooyeweerd: “Het tijdsprobleem en zijn antinomieën,” Philosophia Reformata 1 (1936) 65-83, 4 (1939), 1-28 [‘Antinomieën’], 1:
[109] The inner act also has its lingual aspect. We think in judgments that we speak inwardly (Grenzen,78 fn). [110] Dooyeweerd repeats this idea elsewhere: “No act of will (volition) is possible apart from acts of knowing and imagining” (Encyclopedia, 225). Like Dooyeweerd, Baader says that imagination and will are required before we can act (as deed). Sinful acts proceed along the same sequence:
[111] See Linked
Glossary, entry for ‘spiritualistic’
at [http://www.members.shaw.ca/jgfriesen/Definitions/ Go to Part 3: Imagination and Perception Revised Jul 15/06
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