CANAKAINOSIS | A Journal For Reformational Thought Volume Two, No, 2 December 1979 ‘The Legacy of Scholarly Renewal: A Response to |Anakainosis 1:4 Editor's note: We received the following reader's reaction from Lambert Quidervaart, a student of the Institute for Christian Studies preeently doing doctoral work (he te writing a dissertation on Neo-Marziat Philosopher Theodor Adorno) in Berlin. We welcome hie response and place it here in lieu of an editorial. Thie ie the kind of interchange that Anakainosis hopes to promote, and ve thank Lambert cordially for hie contribution. To continue the dialogue, we append some further editorial comments on the philosophy/theology question, and invite milar answere or rebuttals from the other contributore to the I:4 teaue to which Lambert takes exception. For direct communication, vurite to Heimet 24, Zr. C-22, 1000 Berlin 37, BRD (West Germany). It may be significant that Anakainoete Volume One, No. 4 carries an editorial on theology and philosophy, extracts on economics and personalism, and an article on semiotics. Thus several speculations, polemical though they be, may merit presentation as signs of personai concern about what could be a critical poverty in reformational thought. Early Dooyeweerd's questionable contention that God's will holds sway without mediation in every law-sphere (p. 14) could have programmed a forced division of labor that produces perfect theoretical fritos even when the chips are down. Protestantly, the following criticisms run rough-shod over several sovereign academic spheres in order to honor the Calvinist principle Dooyeweerd was reformulating. Apparently the "indissoluble, harmonious connection" between nature and grace (p. 15) has driven Dooyeweerd's philosophy and Calvinist theology apart; the editorial could be retitled "Theology or Philosophy." Of course his philosophy depends on a theological tradition. That is not the point. The point is that philosophy can not content itself with merely prolonging that tradition. Instead it must uncover how much unscriptural philosophy has gone into theology itself, without always having to ask permission first from theological interpretations of scripture. Theologians have been lamentably uncritical on this point. Even today many would obstruct non- theological inquiries that seek scriptural and Spiritual redirection. On the other hand, Dooyeweerd would have been naive with regard to his "naive experience” if he had thought that after years ofabsorbing Calvinist sermons, catechism, and theology, his own philosophical interpretations of scripture and of the cosmos in its light did not draw from a theological tradition. So has every other philosophy that has been worth its salt. Let that be no excuse to reduce philosophy to regurgitated theology, however, or to ignore the philosophic inadequacies of theology, any more than to baptize pagan philosophy as christian theology or to make light of how overwhelmingly anti-Christ much philosophy is. Contemporary christian theology and christian philosophy stand or fall in reciprocally corrective criticisms that stay open to the Spirit, scripture, and the time of day. One of the first objects for such criticism might be the notion that there can be only one "crucial discipline in working out Scripturally-directed learning" (p. 1), as if ongoing renewal must depend on philosophy or on theology iike the proletarian revolution on the critique of political economy. Unless the critique just mentioned spurs additional corrections, Calvinist doctrines will serve ideological purposes all too easily. Then "the Cultural Mandate" can be used in an extract such as "The Affluent Society Revisited" to proclaim the value of financially unprofitable activities but not to criticize the profit motive and the economic structures that make them unprofitable (p. 11). Why the government must step in to rescue artists from sure starvation without outlawing the production of those perfect potato chips remains a mystery. So does the reason why, in the light of the cultural mandate, full employment should be (only) an important(!) objective for the government(?) while the freedom to work in a suitable, life-sustaining position of service does not even enter the list of human rights guaranteed by a classically liberal constitution and expanded for the affluent society by Galbraithian economics (p.12). "The freedom to choose between a Big Mac and a Whopper" is obviously trivial, but not much more trivial than the freedoms "to speak, to write, to travel" (p. 12) for people who are hungry because they cannot find work or refuse to play Esau by selling their talents, time and “Arbeitskraft" for a mess of bad employment. Perhaps it is Esau's dilemma that Martin Buber has unwittingly translated into his existential ethics and that Dr. Troost's otherwise pertinent criticisms overlook. It will not do to fault Buber for devaluing reality by personalizing it, when every day people rightly or wrongly experience reality as needing personalization, whether on assembly lines or in MacDonalds. The "particular intellectual aberration of our times" is not just a misguided “reaction against previous aberrations" (p. 17). It is an attempt to explain and correct our times. A devotee of Dooyeweerd might reply, yes, but previous intellectual aberrations have deformed our times. Then we could argue about the priority of the societal chicken or the theoretical egg, without hatching very much that is helpful. At any rate, Dooyeweerd's objection to the dialectic of Buber's personalism as “nothing but a modern’ irrationalist version of the dialectical basic- motive of Humanism" which "reforms the integral structure of human experience and eliminates its relation to the central religious sphere" (NC II [1961]: 143) is not helpful to the extent that it fails to show how not-so-integral experience lends force and motivation to Buber's distinction between the impersonal I-it and the existential I-Thou relations. Troost's comments leave one wondering how the "acknowledgement of the normative structures of reality" (p. 17) urged by Berkhouwer can avoid equating human structurations with God's ordinances without recourse to Dooyeweerd's puzzling "disharmony on the law-side" (NC IT [1969]: 334-337). Distortions arising from such an equation over too many decades 2are what called for the new account Buber attempted. To ignore the distortions would be unethical. It would break trust with those whom scholars serve. More questions must be raised in the hope of maintaining trust academically with reformational scholars themselves. Is it just a sign of the reader's ignorance that "Some Basic Semiotic Categories" seem so basic they resist interpretation? Fortunately a discussion of words leaves room for quibbling about them. Such as the deduction of universal factuality from a principle: "In principle all entities function either subjectively or objectively in all the modal aspects of reality, and thus every entity also has a specific sign function" (p. 3). Ewen if each clause were valid, drawing a conclusion this way violates logic, syntax, and the cosmonomic distinction between law and fact. Or consider the first category in the section on signs. It includes the sign functions of entities founded in an objective technical function and qualified by a sign function.’ "Curiously enough it seems that there are no entities with exclusively latent, objective sign functions" of this kind (p. 4). One becomes curious as to why the authors find this curious. Objectively, technically founded entities qualified by a sign function could hardly fail to have more than latent’ sign functions. Their technical and sign functions are inseparable. If a name has always been formed and given to function as a sign, how then could its sign function ever be exclusively latent? Or are there special senses to terms such as "qualify" and "latent" that need to be made patent here? The procedure of classification poses another puzzle. How are the "sign functions" in the three categories listed categorically distinct? The ambiguous term "sign functions" obscures the distinction at first. It can mean signs that function, entities that function as signs, or significative functions as such. The distinction being made turns out to be one between various entities which function as signs. If so, then the authors may have violated their own premises by failing to engage in that modal analysis supposedly needed to enter the analysis of entities, and by tending to confuse things with functions. Functions classified according to the entities of which they are functions, have not yet been analyzed as functions within a certain mode, even though the classification indicates there are functions that modal analysis needs to distinguish. Nor can the triad "qualified by a sign function/man-made/ not man-made" suffice for a precise modal classification. Without a modal classification, the account of "the typical specifications given to the universal sign function" (p. 3) can end up cloaking traditional semiotics with insignificant Dooyeweerdian jargon. That, however, is not the task of reformational thought. Dooyeweerd's legacy is one of scholarly anakainosie. It is squandered if his heirs use his categories without thinking through their implications, employ his philosophy simply as the shield of faith to quench the fiery arrows of the wicked, ignore it for the sake of a slick synthesis, or play it off against a theology that has not always taken seriously its own dictum about the ecclesia reformata. We must receive his contributions as his philosophy incorporated notions like the cultural mandate, sphere- sovereignty, nature and grace: by absorbing them discerningly, with sensitivity to the needs of the day and to interdisciplinary and cross- cultural implications. (L.Z.)