Notes on Danie Strauss’ and Roy Clouser’s misunderstanding of Herman Dooyeweerd’s transcendental critique

 

In response to Herman Dooyeweerd's transcendental critique of theoretical thought, Danie Strauss and Roy Clouser have offered objections to and reformulations of it. It seems to me that their main objections are based on misunderstanding Dooyeweerd's view on several points. I don't cite where they explain their objections or document my counter-position with citations from Dooyeweerd here, but hope to do so eventually.

 

 

Strauss

1. he mistakes (what is really Dooyeweerd’s) distinction between the operations of antithetic abstraction and synthetic conceptualization for two separate ‘steps’.

 

While some infelicitous expressions of Dooyeweerd lend to that misunderstanding, these operations actually take place together in Dooyeweerd's view, as other expressions of Dooyeweerd make clearer. The former operation is performed ‘in’ the latter.

 

 

2. he mistakes Dooyeweerd’s formulation of the 2^nd transcendental problem about synthesis to be concerned with how one might go about synthesizing(conceptualizing) after one has already abstracted.

 

Dooyeweerd clarifies that the 2^nd problem rather concerns the basis upon which the synthesizing occurs, although again, certain unclear expressions by Dooyeweerd lend to the misunderstanding.

 

 

3. he mistakes Dooyeweerd’s view of 'Gegenstand' (object of theoretical analysis) to be exclusively non-logical.

 

While Dooyeweerd does refer to abstracted non-logical aspects as Gegenstand, he also makes clear that the logical (abstracted in contrast with the non-logical) may be a Gegenstand  – as any non-logical may be – as a field of theoretical/scientific investigation/analysis. Moreover, he also uses Gegenstand in reference to things that aren't aspects.

 

 

Clouser (agrees with Strauss’ misunderstandings and adds two others)

4. he mistakes Dooyeweerd’s view of the ‘isolating’ abstraction of one/each modal aspect from the rest to involve its abstractive isolation from the intermodal coherence of meaning, which is tantamount to absolutization.

 

Dooyeweerd clarifies that, rather, a modal aspect is abstractively isolated, not from the coherence of meaning with the rest, but only from its concrete temporal continuity.

The difference may be further clarified in terms of a supposed precisive and an actual nonprecisive abstraction.

 

 

5. he mistakes Dooyeweerd’s view of absolutization as thinking that successfully abstracts a modal aspect from the coherence.

 

Dooyeweerd clarifies that such (precisive) abstractive ‘seclusion’ or being ‘torn’ from the coherence is only supposed and not actual, because impossible.