) ANAKAINOSIS | A Journal For Reformational Thought Volume One, No.3 April 1979 Editorial: On Stoker’s eightieth birthday As Anakainosis goes to press for its third issue, we have reason to take note of a significant milestone in the international movement for reformational scholarship. On April 4, 1979, the well-known South African philosopher Hendrik Stoker (perhaps the most outstanding among twentieth-century African philosophers, of whatever country or per- suasion) celebrated his eightieth birthday. Stoker, who taught for many years at the Potchefstroom University for Christian Higher Educa- tion, is the third of the three pioneers of reformational philosophy, next to Vollenhoven and Dooyeweerd. Anakainosis wants to take this opportunity to congratulate Professor Stoker, and to wish him continued health and mental vigor in the years of his old age. We sincerely hope that it may be possible, in the not-too-distant future, to have available in English some of his key books and essays, which have hitherto been published only in Afrikaans. Stoker came to study philosophy with Herman Bavinck in Amsterdam in 1921, only to be greeted by the news of Bavinck's death. Instead, he studied with the phenomenologist Max Scheler in Cologne, under whom he wrote a doctoral dissertation entitled Das Gewissen (Conscience) — a book which has the distinction of being cited in Martin Heidegger's Being and Time in 1926. Returning to Potchefstroom, Stoker taught a wide range of courses in philosophy and psychology, and worked toward the elaboration of his own philosophical systematics, building espec- ially on the work of Bavinck. He was especially helped in this by his reading of one of the first versions of Vollenhoven's systematics syllabus (the Isagogie), which he first saw in the late twenties. He later also drew on Dooyeweerd's work, although he remained critical of what he termed Dooyeweerd's "meaning-idealism" and exclusive attachment to the transcendental method. Although leaning heavily on the work of his Dutch colleagues, Stoker was an original philosopher in his own right, whose "philosophy of creation idea" contains a number of prom- ising and seminal insights ranging across almost every area of philo- sophical inquiry. Some of these are undoubtedly owing to his subtle application of a phenomenological approach towards a descriptive onto- logy. One of his major differences with Vollenhoven and Dooyeweerd is his positing of a dimersion of gebeurtenisse ("events" or "happenings") next to a modal and plastic dimension, and some of his most suggestive analyses (e.g. of history, technology, labour) belong under this category. 1Transcendental Method in Dooyeweerd, by Robert Knudsen In his "Zum Geleit" to the dissertation of Michael Fr. J. Marlet,? Herman Dooyeweerd praised him for having suceeded in penetrating into what is the heart of his method. They share, he said, the common ground of a transcendental criticism of theoretical thought. His own philosophy, Dooyeweerd continued, must be understood as a Christian transcendental philosophy. Although Dooyeweerd criticized his own earlier work as not being trans- cendental enough, his philosophy from the outset was transcendentally oriented. What this means is not readily grasped; nevertheless, it is significant and worthy of painstaking study. One of the major considerations behind Dooyeweerd's use of a transcen- dental method was his concern, on the one hand, for the structure of law which God has placed in his creation, a structure that is universally valid and that must be taken into account by everyone, and his convic- tion, on the other hand, that this law-order comes to its focus in the center of human existence in its relation to its transcendent origin, God. The great turning point in his own thinking, Dooyeweerd said, came when he realized that all thought has a religious root. Originally, he was strongly under the influence of neo-Kantianism and then of the phenomen- ology of Edmund Husserl. He broke definitively with these positions when it became clear to him that theoretical thought is not neutral but is religiously oriented, being dependent upon a taking of position with regard to considerations lying outside of that thought, namely, to God as the Origin of all things, to the positioning of human existence in relation to him, and to an order of the cosmos in which thought is em bedded and which provides the foundation of its very possibility. Dooyeweerd then began to take a stance against "immanence thinking," i.e., thinking that proceeds on the assumption that the starting point of thought resides within thought itself. A question then arises with force: How is this transcendent religious orientation related to those concerns which are proper to theoretical thought? Considering the same question from a somewhat different point of view, we might formulate it thus: How is this transcendent taking of position, which is obviously not agreed upon by all, related to the universal structure of things, which is common to all, no matter how diverse their religious orientation? The question arises, namely, concerning the relationship of the immanent concerns of theoretical thought to the transcendent taking of position with respect’ to the origin. This relationship and the method by which it,was brought to expression Dooyeweerd began to call "transcendental."I In his three-volume work of 1935-193G, De Wijsbegeerte der Wetsidee (The Philosophy of the Idea of Law),® in which he brought to systematic expression his developing philosophical insights, Dooyeweerd expressed the lack of self-sufficiency of all things, including thought, in relation to their origin (God) by declaring that the being of everything that exists is meaning. That is to say, everything in the cosmos points to everything else and also to its origin in the sovereign will of the Creator-God. In keeping with biblical revelation, he said that man was appointed to be the viceregent of God in the creation. All of the di- verse rays of meaning in the cosmos focus on man and through him on their origin. Where all the strands of meaning come together, in what Dooyeweerd has called the "heart," there is a fundamental, religous taking of position with respect to the origin. Either one is rooted in the transcendent God as he is revealed in the Scriptures or he is related to an idol, worshipping what is a fabrication of his apostate and distorted imagin- ation, namely, a myth. At any and every point one is turned in his heart either to the right or to the left, either to the true God or to an idol. Because it is of a central, radical kind, this orientation manifests itself in all human activity. This transcendent orientation does not allow itself to be grasped theoretically. It is the hidden player, Dooyeweerd said, on the instru- ment of thought, establishing its direction and determining its deepest religious sense. Thought, however, can be brought to reflect on this transcendent taking of position. Indeed, it turns inevitably in this direction. Again, the direction that this reflection takes and the method of bring- ing it to expression Dooyeweerd called "transcendental." One who is engaged in theoretical thinking can, as it were, look back over his shoulder, to the religious motive that is driving his activity and establishing its orientation. Transcendental method is that method which, allowing fully for the God- given, universally valid structure of reality, nevertheless brings thought to reflect on its own presupposita.* I Thought is not self-sufficient; it is dependent upon a divinely created order of reality, which manifests itself in experience. Within this experience Dooyeweerd distinguished three horizons, as it were, three proscenium arches, within which experience appears: 1) the transcen- dent horizon (the heart); 2) the transcendental horizon (the ways in which our experience is qualified); 3) the "plastic" (plastisch) horizon (the level of concrete, individual things, events, persons). In our attitude of naive experiencing, we relate to individual things, persons, and events without abstracting from their concreteness, as we would in the theoretical attitude of thought. In this naive experienc- ing there is a typical subject-object relation. The "subject" is subject to the law. On the subject side, i.e., on the side of what is subject to the law, there are both subjects and objects. For example, aman may gaze at a sunset and declare that it is beautiful. The sun- set itself cannot observe and make aesthetic judgments; it has, however, 3