The Sense of History and the Historical World and Life View-II
At the end of the previous lecture/ chapter Dooyeweerd introduces two questions that will be addressed here:
What is the snare in the historicist view of our temporal world in both its forms?
What is the real place and meaning of the historical aspect in the temporal order of our experience?
Read the next chapter with these questions in mind – how does Dooyeweerd answer them?
Summary
introduction pp 83-84
Historicism is an absolutization of the historical viewpoint and is one of many isms in philosophy. all isms result I the absolutisation of one of the modal aspects.
Modal aspects are modes and as such relate to the ‘how’ rather than a concrete ‘what’.
historical facts 84-86
To smoke or to drink have historical aspects, they are not however historical facts. Historians are only concerned with the historical extracted from full reality.
analogical moments pp 87-
Dooyeweerd now applies the theory of modal aspects with the retrospective and anticipatory analogical moments to the historical aspect. (See 9-15 [9-12])
Modal aspect
retrocipations
anticipations
numerical
spatial
movement
energy (physico-chemical)
biotic
feeling and sensation
logical
historical
symbolic signification
social intercourse
economic
aesthetic
juridicial
moral
faith or belief
The important thing is to identify the modal kernel of the historical mode.
culture pp 89-93
Vico, under the influence of a humanistic freedom motive set the historical mode over the mathematical and scientific mode of thought. He identified culture with human society, the civil world. For Vico, against Descartes, the creation of culture occurs is a historical process. It is viewed as a separate world to nature; a world of specific historical reality.
The term ‘cultural’ is to be preferred to the term ‘culture’.
The modal kernel of the historical aspect is formative power or control. Hence, historical development is the development of formative power over the world and societal life.
There are two directions of the cultural mode: formative power over persons and formative power over things.
Personkultur = personal culture
Sachkultur = subject culture
Leopold Ranke
historical development pp 93-97
Cultural development is to be seen as a biotic analogy in the historical mode. It refers back to the biological aspect. It is founded in the logical mode.
Using the illustration of the battle of Waterloo shows that history cannot be founded on sensory perception alone.
Johan Huizinga (1872-1945)
Dutch historian and author of The Autumn of the Middle Ages (1919)
norms for cultural development pp 97-99
Dooyeweerd then looks at the norm for determining cultural development. In the biological sense development is not ruled by norms, but by the laws of nature. However, in the historical sense cultural development is normative vocation, given to humanity at creation.
differentiated and undifferentiated societies pp 99-106
In general, communities are undifferentiated. A tradition has the monopoly of formative power. The development process only shows analogies of the biotic phases: birth, adolescence, decline. When such communities decline they may go without leaving any trace.
In opened-up cultures cultural development often leads to a conflict between the holders of tradition and those who propound fresh ideas.
The opening-up of human cultures leads to national communities. A nation is not blood and soil. Ethical differences between different groups are integrated into an individual whole.
Leopold von Ranke 1795- 1886
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831)
Totalitarian regimes tend to annihilate the process of cultural differentiation.
Cultural differentiation, integration and individualization, is an objective norm of the unfolding of society. It provides a criterion to distinguish progressive from reactionary tendencies in history.
Georg Frobenius (1849-1917)
Comte and Spencer understand cultural differentiation in a different way to Dooyeweerd. They understand it in a pseudo-natural scientific sense. For Dooyeweerd in a differentiated society family, businesses, school, state and so on are clearly distinguished from each other. Each of the communities has their own sphere of formative power.
The typical structures of society are structures of individuality. All – except marriage and family – have a typical historico-cultural foundation. This means that they can be opened-up and developed.
Kulturkreislehre = culture circles
A German and Austrian movement in ethnology that arose at the end of the nineteenth century.
anticipatory aspects pp 106-110
In the linguistic aspect we have communication by signs with symbolic meaning. In the opening-up process of historical development this linguistic aspect anticipation gives rise to a symbolic signifying of historical facts in terms of for example chronicles and records.
This also leads to social intercourse between nations.
As cultures become differentiated this can lead to a battle between different cultural spheres (eg natural science, industry, commerce). Hence the preservation of harmonious relationships between the cultural spheres is vital.
The aesthetic and economic anticipations reveal themselves in the principle of cultural economy and cultural harmony. It is the violation of these principles that the juridicial anticipation is revealed.
Die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht = The world’s history is the world’s judgment.
Key terms
individuality structure this is the characteristic created lawful order of concrete things.
Review questions
1. What makes the historicist position unacceptable for a Christian?
2. What makes an ‘historical fact’?
3. Why is Ranke’s description of history naïve?
4. Why is it important to identify a mode’s kernel?
5. Why does Dooyeweerd prefer ‘cultural’ to ‘culture’?
6. Why is development in history not a metaphor?
7. How does Dooyeweerd distinguish between primitive and opened-up cultures?
8. What characterises the opening-up process of cultural life?
9. What is the role of tradition in culture?
10. How does Dooyeweerd’s view of cultural differentiation differ from Comte’s and Spencer’s?
11. How did German Nazism undermine the national consciousness of Germanic peoples?
12. How does historicism deny the character and meaning of the cultural-historical aspect?
Study questions
1. What is history?
2. Compare and contrast history and historicism.
3. Compare and contrast one primitive with one opened-up culture
4. How might a primitive culture be opened up?
5. How does the concept of a differentiated community affect the issue of asylum?
