Dooyeweerd's Second Letter to the Curators October 12, 1937
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Dooyeweerd’s Second Letter to the Curators October 12, 1937 [Draft] Translated and annotated for study purposes only by Dr. J. Glenn Friesen The text below is a provisional translation. Copyright is held by the Dooyeweerd Centre, Ancaster, Ontario, and publishing right is held by Mellen Press, Lewiston, New York. A definitive translation will be published in the series The Collected Works of Herman Dooyeweerd. Notes: This long letter, a copy of which was in the Dooyeweerd Archives in Amsterdam, bears a date of April 27, 1937, although the last page bears the date of October 12, 1937, with Dooyeweerd’s signature. April 27, 1937 is the date of Dooyeweerd’s First Letter to the Curators. It therefore seems that he had prepared this extensive reply, but chose to send his first four page letter in April instead. A comparison with excerpts from this letter in Verburg (Verburg, 219) indicate that what I have translated here is a draft, since there are some differences from what Verburg has cited. The differences, at least in the passages I have compared, appear to be stylistic and not substantial. A full comparison needs to be made with the copy of the letter received by the Curators, presumably in the Curators Archive. In the meantime, I thought it important to make this version available, since it contains so much information of interest to Dooyeweerd scholars. Dooyeweerd’s italics are shown as underlining in the original letter. The pdf version maintains that underlining; this online version changes the underlining to italics. All footnotes are by Dooyeweerd himself except where indicated otherwise by my initials JGF. I have translated some passages from other languages; these are shown in square brackets. Amsterdam, April 27, 1937 [Actually sent October 12, 1937] To the Curators of the Vrije Universiteit in AMSTERDAM Respected College! In your written communication dated April 3 of this year, no. 69, your College has first requested me to advise whether my colleague Hepp, at page 16 in the second of his brochures Dreigende Deformatie [Threatening Deformation] has accurately set out the quotation from my work De Wijsbegeerte der Wetsidee (Volume III, p. 629), and whether the conclusions that he draws from it represent my opinion.1 Secondly, you have asked me to advise how I might possibly respond to the said brochure by my colleague.2 1 JGF: From Dooyeweerd’s response, and from what Verburg says (p. 208), it appears that Hepp had placed under the subheading “The denial of the independent existence of the soul in distinction from the body” the following quotation from WdW III, 629: Daarmede is ook het probleem in zake de tijdelijke verhouding van “ziel” (als complex der psychische en logische functies) en “lichaam”, in den zin van afzonderlijke “substanties”, als zelf-geschapen schijn probleeem der immanentie-philosophie onderkend, gelijk ik te zijner tijd bij de verdere ontwikkeling van de Wijsbegeerte der Wetsidee uitvoerig hoop aan te toonen. En tenslotte–en dit in de voornaamste plaats–moeten wij principieel idedere opvatting van het menschelijk “ik” afwijzen, welke de menschelijke persoonlijkheid verzelfstandigt, of wel als een immanent “psychologisch” of “geestelijk” “Aktzentrum” vat. [With this, the problem concerning the temporal relation of “soul” (as a complex of psychical and logical functions) and “body”, in the sense of separate “substances”, is seen to be a self-created pseudo-problem of immanence philosophy, as I hope to show in due course and in more detail in the further development of the Philosophy of the law-Idea. And finally–and this must be in the primary place–we must reject in principle each conception of the human “I”, according to which the human personality is made independent, or which understands it as an immanent “psychological” or “spiritual” act-centre. (my translation; not in NC)]. 2 Note by Dooyeweerd, on first page of this response: On page 4 of his note, Mr. Hepp writes that he, “during a certain opportunity” (which one?), with both myself and Prof. V. [Vollenhoven], he extensively developed his objections against certain points. I can assure your College in all sincerity, that such an I willingly respond to this request. With respect to the first part [of your request], I understand it as meaning that your College does not want to be informed about the formal correctness of the quotation, but only desires to know whether my colleague has accurately understood the meaning of the assertion cited there. I must without any reservation respond to this question in the negative. In order to accurately interpret a particular passage from a theoretical work, one must without doubt begin by reading it in its complete context. Whenever it concerns a philosophical work, and especially a work where the author has, on fundamental grounds, largely departed from the usual philosophical terminology, then there must furthermore be a requirement that one must become acquainted with the whole train of thought of the writer. If my esteemed colleague had held both of these requirements in view, he would then have seen immediately that the citation could not have rendered service that he desired. And for this reason: in its context it does not contain anything that he himself could not ardently subscribe to, based on an exposition of his own standpoint. In the first place, the cited passage must be read in context with the preceding assertion (page 628, second paragraph from the bottom): This puts it beyond any doubt that the various conceptions of “body” and “soul”, or of “body”, “soul” and “spirit” devised from the immanence- standpoint are in principle unserviceable in a Christian anthropology which starts from the radical basic motive of the Word-Revelation. The all-sided temporal existence of man, i.e. his “body”, in the full Scriptural sense of the word, can only be understood from the supra-temporal religious centre, i.e. the “soul”, or the “heart”, in its Scriptural meaning. Every conception of the “immortal soul”, whose supra-temporal centre of being must be sought in rational-moral functions, remains rooted in the starting point of immanence-philosophy. [As translated in NC III, 783-84). extensive exchange of ideas is not, I emphasize not, known to me. I do remember that once between lectures my colleague has said that he was completely not in agreement with the WdW, but he could not have understood this to be a serious and wide-ranging exchange of thoughts. Secondly, it must be read with the immediately preceding assertion (page 629): From our standpoint it is certain that man’s temporal existence can not be explained as two or three abstract complexes of functions (under the names “body”, “soul” and “spirit”), since we seen that such theoretical abstractions…essentially depend upon a hypostatizing of isolated functions, i.e. an elevation to “substances,” to self-sufficient beings [zelfgenoegzame wezenheden]. [page 2] The last extensive part of my book, from which he gave his quotation (!), had hardly appeared (October 1936), when Mr. Hepp’s first brochure appeared. And his second brochure followed very speedily following the appearance of this part. The Foreword of the first brochure is dated August 1936. However much my colleague may twist and turn the matter, his plan lay all ready before my work had been completed. He had already made the diagnosis before he could properly perceive the supposed illness. And in all of his brochures that have appeared, one finds no more than allusions to the central position in the Philosophy of the Law-idea taken by the heart, the religious root of human existence. The objection made by my esteemed colleague in his note, that in a popular work [Hepp’s brochure], it would not be required to view the quoted passage in its context with the whole system, is an objection that does not hold good with respect to this central point. The objection might hold good for the theory of the law-spheres and of the individuality structures, as well as for epistemology, which are developed one after the other in my book. But for the idea of the heart, which the WdW expressly calls Scriptural, (concerning which more will be said later), the objection does not hold good, for the heart is here identified with the “soul”, whose continued existence after death has, according to my colleague Hepp, been brought into question by “modern views.” For that matter, the manner in which my respected colleague first made this point in his note is itself the best refutation of the assertion that such a matter is too complicated for a popular brochure. In any event, I must assume from the categorical statement of my colleague that he has at least now become acquainted with the whole contents of my work. I would have preferred that he had rather denied this, for now the judgment of the way in which my esteemed colleague has read my work cannot appear except in a rather unfavorable light. I do not just mean a wrong interpretation of what I have written, a reproach that, from the beginning of his note, Prof. Hepp seems to have expected. No, now I have been forced to show that the assertions that he places in my mouth have either as a whole never been made by me, or that they have in my book even been expressly rejected. From a theoretical standpoint this is already an error, for which a writer is not easily forgiven. The error becomes much more serious now that my colleague uses it to accentuate what [he sees to be] destructive and dangerous in my standpoint. I will give two examples of this way of acting.