A New Critique of Theoretical Thought. Deel 2. The General Theory of the Modal Spheres

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Part I
The general theory of the modal spheres

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Chapter I
The functional structure of the modal spheres, both in their sovereignty within their own orbit and in their temporal coherence of meaning

§ 1 - The criterion of a modal sphere

In the Prolegomena we discovered the cosmic order of time, which, as the limit to our ‘earthly’ temporal cosmos, determines the structure of reality in its diversity of meaning, both as regards its modal and typical laws and its subjectivity, including its subject-object-relations. The specific modal sovereignty of the different aspects of reality (with their various modal law- spheres) appeared to be founded in this cosmic order and at the same time made relative by it. Founded: for the specific modal sovereignty proved to be only possible in the temporal splitting up of the religious fulness of meaning, which in its turn is only given in the transcendent root of our cosmos. Made relative: for the modal law-sphere as a specific aspect of the meaning of temporal reality, proved to have no independent existence in itself, but rather to be interwoven with the temporal coherence of meaning. Cosmic time overarches the different aspects as order, and streams through their boundaries as duration.

The relation between the specific sovereignty of each separate modal law-sphere and the temporal coherence of meaning of all the modal spheres is not intrinsically contradictory.

There is no antinomy between modal sovereignty and the temporal coherence of all the law-spheres. An intrinsic contradiction would exist, as it does in immanence-philosophy, if, and only if the specific modal sphere-sovereignty of a part of the aspects were sacrificed in favour of one or more of the other aspects of meaning. We shall revert to this subject later on. But there is no

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antinomy in the acknowledgement that the modal law-spheres, irreducible among themselves, are nevertheless kept in a continuous coherence of meaning by cosmic time.

The continuity of cosmic time is not exhausted by any single specific aspect of meaning. Therefore this continuity cannot be comprehended in any concept, but only approximately apprehended in a transcendental Idea, and experienced in the pre-theoretical attitude. As time cannot contain the religious fulness of meaning, it splits the latter into the diversity of the modal aspects. But without the temporal, relative coherence of meaning the specific sovereignty of the modal law-spheres would not be possible.

The criterion of a modal sphere and its abstract theoretical character.

By what criterion do we distinguish a modal law-sphere as an aspect of cosmic reality? To raise this question is not the same as asking: What is it that guarantees specific modal sphere-sovereignty? The former question is, to be sure, inseparable from the latter, but the criterion in the narrow sense is of an epistemological nature: it is concerned with the problem how a particular law-sphere can be recognized as an irreducible, separate modal aspect of reality. The second question lies on a more fundamental plane, it lies at the very basis of thought; it must be answered in the cosmonomic Idea as the ὑπόϑεσις of philosophic thought itself, consequently also of the inquiry into the epistemological problem in the narrow sense, i.e. the question about the theoretical criterion of the law-sphere. This insight has been gained in our transcendental critique of theoretic thought. The latter has shown that, - no matter, whether the thinker has taken this into account in his critical self-reflexion or not - no question regarding our knowledge of temporal reality can have any meaning without a transcendental basic Idea.

And the facts are just as they were stated in the last part of the first volume. If the epistemological question is sounded to its very bottom, it is no longer possible to assign an isolated area to the problem of epistemology. The latter is indissolubly connected with our theoretical insight into the structure of the cosmos, and with our self-knowledge which transcends theory.

This will be clearly seen if we try for a moment to treat the question about the criterion of the modal law-sphere as an entirely independent problem. Arguing from the epistemo-

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logical nature of this criterion, the reasoning will run along the following lines: Philosophy will always be theoretical in character. Philosophic thinking is analysis and synthesis of meaning. Every analysis of meaning, however, must be based on logical distinction, and where theoretical analysis is involved, it must be based on epistemological analysis. According to the transcendental basic Idea, on which our philosophic thought is founded, temporal reality cannot be of a logical nature; it is not even capable of being contained in a concept. If this is true, is not a modal law-sphere which is only theoretically knowable to us, after all a mere product of theoretical analysis and synthesis? And if so, what is gained by continuing to speak about the law-spheres as separate modal aspects of the totality of temporal reality? Had we not better assign a purely epistemological character to them?

However conclusive this reasoning may seem to be, it hides a new pitfall. To conclude from the epistemological nature of this criterion to the purely epistemological character of a modal sphere itself would only be justified, if theoretical thought were self-sufficient and could determine the criterion on its own authority, without being itself bound to the transcendental structure of the cosmos.

Such a pre-supposition implies that the knowable diversity of meaning is after all of a (transcendental) logical nature. And this pre-supposition is indeed not to be justified in a purely epistemological manner. It is dependent on a transcendental basic Idea which must be rejected from our Christian starting-point. Just as in an earlier part of this work logical identity has been recognized as identity in a specific aspect of meaning, it should be maintained now that also logical diversity is only diversity in the specific logical aspect of meaning.

This foundation of the epistemological criterion enables us to see that logical diversity, being subject to the logical principle of contradiction, can only have a specifically logical sense in the cosmic diversity of meaning.

The cosmic diversity of aspects has no existence without logical diversity, but the former certainly exceeds the latter. Once this fact has been established, it must be admitted that philosophic thought can only form an idea of the modal aspect by means of theoretical abstraction. Only the latter separates the aspects of experience and sets them apart in logical discontinuity.

So at the outset it should be acknowledged that the criterion of a

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law-sphere must be a criterion of a specific inter-modal synthesis of meaning, which as such is of a theoretical character. If we are ever to gain theoretical knowledge of the modal aspects of meaning, we shall have to abstract the cosmic coherence in time.

The criterion of a modal law-sphere, though of a theoretical nature, is nevertheless not founded in thought, but in the cosmic order of time.

But the criterion is not and cannot be founded in theoretical thought. Theoretical thought itself remains within the boundaries of the temporal horizon of meaning. Hence it lacks the self-sufficiency which, on the immanence standpoint, must necessarily deprive it of all meaning if this view were to be consistently sustained.

If theoretical thought is only possible on the basis of the cosmic order of time, the theoretical criterion of the modal sphere must be founded in this cosmic order. Of course this criterion must have a logical aspect to supply the required standard of analytic distinction, which is possible only in a synthesis with the abstracted aspects of meaning of a non-logical character. The situation is consequently as follows: the modal law-spheres themselves are specific aspects of human experience, founded in the order of cosmic time. They are experienced, though not explicitly, in the naïve, pre-theoretical attitude of mind. Their diversity of meaning is based on the law of refraction of cosmic time. But theoretical thought, though itself integrated into cosmic time, in building up its concept of a specific law-sphere must necessarily abstract the latter from the temporal continuity. The question how this entire process of abstraction is possible will be answered later on in a special chapter on the epistemological problem.

In order to find the theoretical criterion of a specific aspect of meaning, abstraction is to be carried still further.

The criterion of a law-sphere as a modal concept of function. The functional structure of a law-sphere can only be understood after abstracting modal individuality.

In our theoretical investigation we shall for the present have to leave alone also the structures of individuality in order to find the general modal meaning which delimits one law-sphere from another.

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This general modal meaning in its analytic-synthetic abstraction is the criterion of the law-sphere that we are trying to find.

It implies a functional structure of the law-sphere, insofar as every specific individuality of meaning within the latter is integrated by the general modal meaning into a functional coherence with all the other individualities presenting themselves in the same modal sphere.

Consider the following example taken from the spatial aspect. The spatial figures present an infinitely varied individuality of meaning among themselves, but, notwithstanding this fact, they are spatially correlated, integrated into functional coherence by the general modal meaning of the aspect, viz. by spatiality.

Geometry¹ makes use of this insight in assuming a functional conformity to law in the coherence of spatial figures which among themselves present the greatest possible individual divergences, such as a circle and a polygon, the circumference of a circle, and a tangent, parallel and non-parallel straight lines. But this assumption is only possible, because geometry does not really consider individual sensory images of spatial figures; these images as such have no original spatial meaning, as shall be explained later on. A not formalized geometry, in its specific synthesis of meaning, investigates the original spatial sphere itself, in which all spatial individualities are placed in a functional correlation by the general modal meaning of the sphere.

The concept of the latter is an apriori functional one², lying at the foundation of every idea by which one tries to grasp types of individuality within the law-sphere.

1 We intend here only a geometry which has not been formalized. The formalization of modern geometry will occupy us in a later context.

2 In advance the reader should guard against a constructive view of the apriori in our use of the term. When the epistemological problem is dealt with, it will appear that the apriori structure of reality can only be known from experience. But this is not experience as it is conceived by immanence-philosophy.

The functional modalities of meaning.

The general modal meaning of the law-sphere may be called a functional modality of the religious fulness of meaning. The functional structure of meaning, guaranteeing to the law-sphere its specific internal sovereignty, is indeed nothing but a modal splitting up of the totality of meaning, in time. This functional

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modal meaning has a law-side and a subject-side, just as cosmic time itself appeared to have (cf. Vol. I, p. 28).

We are now sufficiently alive to the fact that law and subject are mutually irreducible, notwithstanding the opinions of rationalists and irrationalists. Law and subject are only possible in their indissoluble correlation. The functional subject-side of the law-sphere is determined and delimited by the functional laws of the sphere. Both the law-side and the subject-side of the sphere are determined in their structural meaning by the cosmic order of time. Through the latter as refractional order the law-side and the subject-side of the law-sphere are integrated into a functional modality of the religious fulness of meaning. Here it appears clearly that the criterion of the law-sphere is absolutely dependent on the transcendental Idea of the totality of meaning. Any one who looks for the criterion of the modal aspects of reality, should first of all consider, in his theoretical self-reflection, to what basic denominator he wants to reduce the law-spheres in order to be able to compare them.

In the light of our transcendental basic Idea this denominator is found in the cosmic time-order, reflecting itself in the same manner in the modal structure of every aspect. But this time-order itself is to be viewed in its relation to the religious fulness of meaning. The specific modal aspect is incomprehensible outside of the transcendental Idea of its temporal coherence with all the other aspects, and outside of its reference to the totality and the Ἀϱχή of all meaning.

§ 2 - The criterion of the modal aspect of meaning in its absolute contrast with the form-notion of immanence-philosophy.

Already in the Prolegomena it appeared that the modal sovereignty of each law-sphere within its own orbit, conceived as a fundamental cosmological principle in our transcendental basic Idea, cannot possibly be recognized on the immanence-standpoint. Immanence-philosophy can only hold its own by a subjective elimination of the cosmic order of time and a primary absolutizing of theoretical thought. It should therefore be clear that the modal criterion by which we gain theoretical knowledge about the modal boundaries of the law-spheres, can in no way be reduced to any criterion by means of which immanence-philosophy tries to attain a theoretical determination of the diversity of meaning.

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In the first place the form-matter-scheme of immanence-philosophy appears to be unserviceable in the theory of the modal spheres.

The form-matter scheme in ancient and medieval metaphysics.

In its philosophical use this scheme functioned in two ways, viz. a metaphysical and an epistemological one. In ancient and medieval metaphysics Form, as οὔσια or ground of being, had to impart a certain delimitation of meaning to chaotic matter (ὕλη; in Plato the μὴ ὀν, in Aristotle the δυνάμει ὄν, i.e. potentiality, possibility), which is in itself a-morphic, non-ordered.

Plato held to the transcendent being of the ideal form-world in the Eleatic sense and included in it the numbers themselves (eidetic numbers) as well as the exact geometrical figures. A very rigorous χωϱισμός (i.e. isolation) separates the ideal world of of true being from that of the phenomena subject to the material principle of becoming and decay. And yet in the ideal world Plato sought the ground of being (αἰτία) of all perishable things. The metaphysical χωϱισμός between the principle of matter and that of form entangled his thought in sharp antinomies. According to the first conception of his theory of Ideas, developed in the dialogue Phaedo, the eidè are of a static and simple nature. The things that have come into being in the phenomenal world are complex, which makes them liable to the material principle of perpetually coming into being and decaying. But how can the ideal form be the essential basis of perishable, complex things, if in the transcendent form-world there is no connection possible between the eidè, and if there is not any paradeigma here for the principle of matter (the principle of becoming and decay)?

In the so-called Eleatic dialogues (Parmenides, Sophistes and Politikos) Plato tried to unite the principles of form and matter by means of a dialectical logic. He devised eidè of a complex character comprising dialectical relations between simple eidè (e.g. being as a dialectical unity of movement and rest). Since then he also tried to find an ideal paradeigma for the principle of matter in the transcendent world of the forms of being. This is the so-called ἰδέα τοῦ ἀπείϱου (the foundation for the unlimited, the formless) which was called ‘ideal matter’ in Augustinian Platonic Scholasticism. Under the influence of Pythagoreanism Plato assumes that the arithmetical series of numbers

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(not the eidetic ‘number in itself’) has to make a dialectical connection possible between the transcendent form-world and the world of perishable things. It has to explain how the one-ness of the eidos can turn into multiplicity in the world of becoming and decay. In the Eleatic dialogues the attempt to establish a dialectical unity between the principles of matter and form led to a crisis in the doctrine of the Ideas. The eidè seem to lose their transcendence above the phenomenal world. But in the Philèbos this crisis has passed, and the newly introduced dialectical eidè prove to be complex entities, genera, comprising only that part of the ideal form-world which relates to things that have become. The simple eidè ‘in themselves’ are explicitly re-established. Only Plato acknowledged that they are beyond human logic and can only be discerned intuitively. In accordance with the view explained in the Politeia they are the ὑπόϑεσις of all dialectical conceptualization. After the manner of the Socratic Idea of the ϰαλοϰάγαϑον (the beautiful and the good) the process of becoming in the sensible world is understood as a γένεσις εἰς οὐσίαν, i.e. a teleological development of matter to a being under the influence of divine formation by the Idea of the good and the beautiful. In contrast with the earlier conception of the pre-existence of the human rational soul Plato now considers the latter to be composed of form and matter and includes it in the world of becoming. This raises the problem of the Timaeus concerning the ‘erratic cause’ (πλανωμένη αἰτία), originating from the ἀναγϰή of the matter-principle which has to account for the chaotic, the evil in the perishable sensory world¹.

The Platonic conception of the process of becoming as a γένεσις εἰς οὐσίαν under the influence of the form-principle was the starting-point for Aristotle in his last period. He broke with the Platonic separation between a transcendent ideal form-world and the empirical world of what has become. The transcendent eidé are rejected. The Platonic ‘dialectical’ eidos, composed of form and ideal matter is now conceived of as the immanent essence of the material substances in the empirical world. The essential form (morphè) of these substances is now considered as the teleological- or formal cause of the development of matter. As ‘potential being’ matter can only come into actual existence

1 For the entire development of the Platonic doctrine of the eidé I may refer to volume I of my new trilogy Reformation and Scholasticism in Philosophy (1949) and the sources analysed in it.

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through this form. The essential form of natural substances thus turns into the immanent teleological principle of their genesis, into an entelechy (immanent telos). In itself it has a universal character, but the specific matter of the substance makes it individual, as this matter is divisible and countable.

In Aristotle this metaphysical notion of form, as the immanent teleological principle (entelechy) of an individual substance, is made relative by the world-order, conceived teleologically as an intelligible order, in which a lower kind of form in its turn becomes matter for a higher kind. Only the actual νοῦς, the actual reason, cannot become matter, because it is the archè (ἀϱχή) of all delimitation of meaning.

The concept of substance.

This metaphysical principle of form and matter is unfit for our apprehension of the modal aspects of human experience. It is intended as an account of the permanent structural totality of individual things given in nature (physis), which are looked upon as substances. It has to explain how in the changes of their accidental qualities these things maintain their identity.

In my treatise on The Concept of Substance in the Thomistic Doctrine of Being¹, I have shown that this metaphysical concept, in its dialectical uniting of the Greek motives of form and matter, cannot at all do justice to the structural individuality of things in naïve experience. It is founded in an absolutized theoretical ‘Gegenstand-relation’. ‘Substances’ are opposed as ‘things in themselves’ to human consciousness. They are represented as being quite independent of the latter, independent of possible sensible perception, independent of the theoretical logical function of thought. They are thus excluded from the subject-object relation which is essential to naïve experience (cf. Prolegomena). While it is acknowledged that human consciousness stands in an intentional relation to the substances, this is considered to be immaterial for the reality of the substances in themselves. This view consequently breaks the integral coherence of all the modal aspects of our experience asunder. The ‘substantial forms’ qualifying or determining the meaning of the eidos, the essence of things, according to Aristotle, are not conceived in the cadre of a modal aspect. The soul, for instance, is regarded as the

1 Phil. Reform. 8 Year (1943) p. 65-99; 9 Year (1944) p. 1-41; 10 Year (1945) p. 25-48; 11 Year (1946) p. 22-52.

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organizing form of the material body. To the soul are attributed all the qualities of the living substance which are not exclusively proper to its ‘matter’, (such as countability, divisibility and extension).

Doubtless, Aristotle never thinks of the substantial form as a substance, as a ‘Ding an sich’. The soul as substantial form can only realize itself in a specific kind of matter. But this form, too, as ‘entelechy of the body’, is a metaphysical subject of qualities belonging to different modal aspects (e.g., the biotic and psychical aspects in plants and animals; and the logical and post-logical in human beings).

Although the ‘substantial form’, as a theoretical abstraction, is considered to be a ‘universal’ which is individualized by matter, it lacks every modal determination. But this form-concept fails to account for the general functional coherence of all the phenomena presenting themselves within a definite aspect of our experience. It is exclusively and entirely directed to the supposed internal structure of individual things and to the teleological order between their forms.

Exactly for this reason modern physical science, desiring to investigate the functional coherence of all phenomena within the physical aspect, had to turn away from this metaphysical notion of form.

The critical elaboration of this subject is out of place in the present context and can only be discussed in the third volume.

The form-matter-scheme in Kantian philosophy.

A quite different philosophical function is given to the form-matter-scheme in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Here it primarily assumes an epistemological character. The term ‘form’ is no longer brought to bear on ‘substance’ (taken in a metaphysical sense), on ‘the thing in itself’. Rather it turns into a transcendental condition of universally valid sensory experience, a constitutive apriori originating in ‘the transcendental consciousness’.

Space and time are conceived of as apriori forms of sensory intuition. Since this intuition or perception functions within the modal psychical aspect of experience (i.e. that of feeling), space and time, insofar as they belong to the structure of this aspect, cannot have the original modal meaning of the mathematical aspects of spatiality and movement. Hume's psychological criticism of pure mathematics was irrefutable from the psychological

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point of view. Kant nevertheless ascribes pure mathematical sense to space and time as apriori forms of sensory perception. So he eliminates the modal structure of sensory perception by effacing the modal boundaries of meaning between the mathematical and the psychical law-spheres, although he does not reduce pure space and time to sensory impressions. The modal structure of sensory space cannot have an original mathematical character.

In the same manner Kant's transcendental-logical thought-forms or categories are destructive to the insight into the modal structure of the different aspects of human experience. They imply, in fact, an inter-modal theoretical synthesis between the transcendental elements of the logical and of the mathematical and physical aspects of empirical reality. Nevertheless, Kant ascribes to them a purely logical meaning, although he acknowledges that they are concepts of a ‘pure synthesis a priori’, and constitutive for human experience only in a synthesis with sensory impressions. On the other hand, the Kantian conception of the ‘matter’ of human experience is intrinsically antinomous and incompatible with the modal structure of the aspects. It is conceived by him as a sensory-psychical material which, as such, lacks determination and order.

But, if the ‘matter’ of knowledge has sensory meaning, how can it, as such, be chaotic and unarranged? How can there be any question of sensuous ‘matter’, if this matter itself does not possess any inner modal determination and delimitation of meaning due to its own modal structure? The antinomy of the Greek conception of ‘matter’ as an absolute apeiron, analysed in Plato's Parmenides, reappears here. The two forms of intuition, viz. space and time, by means of which Kant wants to establish the first apriori order in the chaotic mass of sensory impressions, certainly constitute no criterion of the sensory aspect of experience. They appeared to be conceived of in a mathematical sense which is not pertinent to the sensory impressions.

But Kant is not aware of this. His form-concept is no modal criterion of meaning at all, but it is explicitly meant to level out the boundaries of the modal aspects of experience, for the sake of the maintenance of logical thought as the transcendental law-giver of nature.

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The relapse of neo-Kantian legal philosophers into the Aristotelian method of concept-formation.

The neo-Kantian students of a critical-idealistic theory of law immediately involved themselves in serious difficulties when, quite contrary to Kant's intentions, they tried to apply the epistemological form-matter scheme to the normative aspects of experience. They made this attempt to delineate the different ‘provinces of knowledge’ from one another, in a transcendental logical way, in accordance with specific forms of thinking.

They saw the necessity of distinguishing the positive legal rules as a separate ‘field of knowledge’ from morality and the norms of social intercourse. In other words, they were confronted with the fundamental modal diversity in the aspects of human experience and tried to find a criterion. But Kant's critique of knowledge which knew of no other sciences than mathematics and mathematical physics, did not offer them a criterion for any modal aspect of meaning. Therefore they took refuge in Aristotelian logic and made the attempt to delimit the ‘provinces of knowledge’ from one another according to the genus proximum and the differentia specifica.

The modal aspects have no genus proximum.

But this method of concept-formation is not serviceable here in a really critical manner. The attempt must be made to arrive at a theoretical concept of the general modal meaning of the juridical aspect as such. This aspect must be delimited theoretically from the moral sphere, from that of social intercourse, and finally from all other modal aspects of experience.

But, since the different modal aspects are irreduceable to one another, there cannot be found a genus proximum in a modal sense. The modalities of meaning themselves are rather the ultimate genera of modal meaning under which are to be subsumed only typical and individual manifestations of the modalities within the different aspects. Consequently, the denominator of comparison for the different aspects can never be a genus proximum. This is also true on the immanence-standpoint. When here the basic denominator of the different aspects of human experience is sought in an absolutized non-logical aspect, the latter can no longer be considered as a modality; rather it is identified with reality itself as the bearer of all its aspects.

And, just as in metaphysics the ‘substance’ cannot be the ‘genus proximum’ of its accidents, reality cannot be conceived

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as the genus proximum of its modalities. The metaphysical concept of being can no more be handled in this sense. It has appeared in the Prolegomena of Vol. I that this concept was considered as an analogical one which is never to be used as a genus including species.

Why the Kantian categories cannot be subsumed under a genus proximum.

The transcendental-logical categories of Kant's epistemology could not be subsumed under a genus proximum because they were not conceived of as form-concepts in the sense of Aristotelian logic and metaphysics. They were not serviceable for the generic and specific distinction of different provinces of human knowledge. Rather they were supposed to have a creative function and to constitute the whole field of human science.

This is the meaning of Kant's sharp distinction between transcendental and formal logic.

It makes no sense to say that in Kantian epistemology the category of causality is the genus proximum of all natural-scientific thought-forms and that, in contradistinction to the causal manner of scientific thought, there is to be found in the transcendental consciousness a normative or a teleological generic category which, through the addition of differentia specifica, can constitute other fields of scientific experience.

The whole Aristotelian method of concept-formation according to a genus proximum and differentia specifica pre-supposes the existence of genera and species which are independent of logical thought and are only to be abstracted and classified by the latter. But this supposition contradicts the creative function which in Kantian epistemology is ascribed to the categories in respect to the ‘Gegenstand’ of the transcendental logical function of thought.

It may be that this ‘Gegenstand’ is constituted only by a theoretical synthesis of these categories with a given ‘matter’ of sensory impressions. But the latter is, as such, deprived of any generic and specific determination.

In Kant's Critiques there is no room for generic and specific concepts except in the teleological judgment which lacks any constitutive function in human knowledge. These concepts are viewed in a nominalistic manner, they are not founded in ‘substantial forms’.

So we must conclude that the neo-Kantian legal philosophers

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who tried to connect Kantian transcendental logic with the Aristotelian method of concept-formation according to genera and species, deviated from the fundamentals of Kantian epistemology. They took refuge in a method of classification which contradicts the very nature of Kant's transcendental logic.

The genus proximum and the differentia specifica construed by them to delineate the epistemological field of jurisprudence, were presented as transcendental-logical categories. They are, however, nothing but pseudo-generic and -specific concepts, for they lack any synthetical modal determination.

Stammler's concept of law.

This whole method of ‘transcendental logical delimitation of the juridical sphere’ may be exemplified by Stammler's fundamental concept of law (Rechtsbegriff).

Stammler conceives of the jural modality of experience as a form of thinking, as a logical ordering of the experiential ‘matter’ by means of specific categories. By this ordering the ‘matter of experience’ assumes an historical-economical nature! For this purpose, however, the legal aspect must first be reduced to a genus proximum, viz. to the universal category of volition, as the teleological fundamental form of thought (teleological, because the content of consciousness is arranged here in accordance with the relation of a means to an end). This form of thought as such is supposed to be diametrically opposite to the causal mode of thought in physical science. Next the attempt is made to trace the juridical ‘differentia specifica’ as a specific ‘form of thinking’, in contrast with the category of social intercourse, on the one hand, and the moral, and the ‘religious’ categories on the other. Law is then characterized together with the norms of social intercourse as a socially binding kind of volition, (i.e. ‘socially’ in the usual, undefined sense of the word), and as such it is contrasted with religion and morality, which are assumed to concern individual persons only. Then, by means of the characteristic of ‘sovereignty’ (Selbstherrlichkeit), law is delimited from the supposed purely inviting nature of the rules of intercourse (which Stammler styles ‘convention’), and by means of the quality of inviolability it is marked off from arbitrariness. It is easily seen that both these ‘differentia specifica’ and the ‘genus proximum’ volition lack every kind of modal definiteness of meaning and are pseudo-logical concepts.

Thus the juridical aspect of human experience, as being a

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‘specific province of thought’, is actually wrenched from the cosmic inter-modal coherence of meaning. Instead, it is made into a species of a transcendental-logical genus, which in its turn is conceived only in an antithetic-logical relation with the natural-scientific category of causality.

The neo-Kantian student of ‘pure theory of law’, H. Kelsen, applies essentially the same kind of method to delimit the juridical aspect from other ‘provinces of thought’, although he deduces the separate juridical categories in a different way from Stammler's. He uses the method of genetical-logical thought characteristic of the Marburg School.

The delimitation of the phenomenological ‘regions’ in Edmund Husserl.

Modern phenomenology, too, insofar as it is founded by Edmund Husserl, does not rise above the essentially scholastic method of delineating the different spheres of its research according to genera and species. It delimits the ‘regions’ of the theory of science by carrying through this method in a very confusing way. Husserl gives the following definition:

‘Region is nothing but the supreme total generic unity belonging to a concretum; hence it is the essential unity which connects the highest genera relating to the lowest differences within this concretum. The eidetic extent of the “region” comprises the ideal totality of the concrete unified complexes of differences of these genera; the individual extent comprises the ideal totality of the possible individuals of such a concrete essence’¹.

Seen in this light, Kant's ‘synthetic basic concepts’ or ‘categories’ are conceived of as ‘regional basic concepts’ (‘essentially related to the definite region and its synthetic basic propositions’), and as many groups of categories are distinguished as there are ‘regions’ to be found.

1 Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenol. Phil. I. 30, 31:
‘Region’ ist nichts anderes als die gesamte zu einem Konkretum gehörige oberste Gattungseinheit, also die wesenseinheitliche Verknüpfung der obersten Gattungen, die den niedersten Differenzen innerhalb des Konkretums zugehören.
‘Der eidetische Umfang der Region befasst die ideale Gesamtheit konkret vereinheitlichter Komplexe von Differenzen dieser Gattungen, der individuelle Umfang die ideale Gesamtheit möglicher Individuen solcher konkreten Wesen.’

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Here, too, the scholastic method of delimiting the ‘regions’ according to the ‘genus proximum’ and the ‘differentia specifica’ reigns supreme, obscuring the boundaries of the different modal meaning-aspects. In order to get a very clear idea of this method in Husserl we would suggest reading only the 12th and the 13th sections of the Ideen. We refer especially to the following passage:

‘In this sense “meaning as such”, is the highest genus in the purely logical area of meanings(!); each definite form of a sentence or of a sentence-part, is an eidetic singularity; the sentence as such is a mediating genus. In the same way number as such is a supreme genus. Two, three, etc., are its lowest differences or particular eidetic units. In the material sphere(!) we find supreme genera like “thing as such”(!), sensory quality, spatial form, “experience as such”; the essential elements belonging to definite things, definite sensory qualities, spatial forms, experiences as such, are eidetic and material singularities of this sphere’¹.

1 ‘In diesem Sinn ist im reinlogischen Gebiete der Bedeutungen(!) “Bedeutung überhaupt” oberste Gattung, jede bestimmte Satzform, jede bestimmte Satzgliedform eine eidetische Singularität; Satz überhaupt eine vermittelnde Gattung. Ebenso ist Anzahl überhaupt eine oberste Gattung. Zwei, drei usw. sind deren niedersten Differenzen oder eidetische Singularitäten. In der sachhaltigen Sphäre(!) sind z.B. Ding überhaupt(!), sinnliche Qualität, Raumgestalt, Erlebnis überhaupt oberste Gattungen; die zu den bestimmten Dingen, bestimmten sinnlichen Qualitäten, Raumgestalten, Erlebnissen als solchen gehörigen Wesensbestände eidetische und dabei sachhaltige Singularitäten.’ (Ideen I, S. 25).

§ 3 - The criterion of the modal diversity of meaning and the problem of the denominator of comparison conceived as ‘the being of what is’ (sein des seienden)

It is a characteristic, and also an alarming phenomenon in the recent development of immanence-philosophy that the ultimate basis for the criterion of the modal diversity of temporal reality has been undermined. This is due to the influence of the process of spiritual uprooting in recent Humanism briefly outlined in Part I of the first volume.

It reveals a crisis in the religious fundamentals of Humanistic thought which is much more destructive than that which we have observed in the transitional period resulting in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. It implies that the faith in ‘reason’, as

[p. 19]

the origin of the being of temporal reality, has been shaken.

Kant's transcendental turning of theoretic thought to the Idea as the ‘being of what is’, as the root of reality, - a process that was completed in Hegel's absolute Idealism - has become extremely problematic to modern Humanistic thought. Critical self-reflection on the supposed supra-temporal root of temporal experience has disappeared in philosophic thinking under the over-powering pressure of historistic positivism.

The Humanistic self-consciousness has now become aware of the fact that it has been uprooted. Deprived of the apriori of the faith in ‘reason’, it gets dispersed in the diversity of meaning without being capable of concentration. At the most it seeks to regain its sense of freedom and of sovereignty in a ‘historic consciousness’ which frees the mind of all ‘dogmas’, or it tries to regain true freedom in a super-rational existentialistic attitude.

Dilthey's empirical and irrational historism, wanting to substitute the ‘vivo’ for the ‘cogito’ as its Archimedian point, thinks it can find the new foundation for philosophic reflection in historical life, which finds no resting-place and glides along with the historic process in its historic rhythm. This view is at the same time symptomatic of the apostasy from the spirit of German Idealism.

There are various modern attempts to find a new foundation for philosophic thought which bear the stamp of the decay of the former self-confidence.

Nicolai Hartmann, in his critical ontology, tried to build up a new metaphysics of knowledge, apart from any kind of idealistic or realistic apriori, by a critical examination of the contents of the gnoseological phenomenon. In this attempt the fundamental denominator of all the diversity of meaning is found in ‘being’ which, comprising both the knowing subject and its ‘Gegenstand’, was supposed to differentiate itself in various ontological spheres. But the old idealistic postulate to the effect that the root of temporal reality is to be found in the Idea of reason, has been ruthlessly abandoned. The cognitive relation has been degraded to ‘one of the many relations of “being”¹ and knowledge

1 Grundzüge einer Metaphysik der Erkenntnis (1921) S. 158:
‘Erkenntnis ist ein ontologisch sekundäres Gebilde. Sie ist eine von vielen Seinsrelationen, aber in deren Gefüge eine durchaus sekundäre und abhängige. Denn Erkenntnis ist zwar vom Sein des Gegenstandes und des Subjekts abhängig, dieses aber nicht von ihr.’
[‘Knowledge is ontologically a secondary figure. It is one of many relations of being, but in its structure it is always entirely secondary and dependent. For knowledge, it is true, is dependent on the being of the “Gegenstand” and the subject, but the latter does not depend on the former.’)

[p. 20]

is entirely at the mercy of a metaphysical ‘being’ which is inscrutable in its root and meaning.

In this way even the sense of the transcendence of the selfhood above temporal reality, however much it may have led to the absolutizing of the rational functions in idealistic metaphysics, has been lost.

‘Being’, as the basic denominator of reality with Hartmann, is an undefined, general notion (‘being as such’, ‘Sein überhaupt’), the expression of the decay of the religious self-reflexion in Humanistic philosophy¹.

1 cf. op. cit. page 148 ff., where the ‘notion of being’ as ‘the unity above the diversity’ is deprived of any definiteness of meaning.

The ‘being of what is’ in Greek and scholastic realistic metaphysics.

In this respect there is indeed a striking contrast between modern ontology and Aristotle's metaphysics as πϱώτη φιλοσοφία, as a theory of the ‘being of what is’ (τὸ ὄν ᾑ ὄν)². For here ‘being’ as a unity with its highest metaphysical principles (ἀϱχαί) is directly founded in reason as ἀϱχὴ τῶν αϱχῶν which is the origin of the ‘eternal truths’. It is not a generic concept here, but rather the noumenal ground of all generic concepts, and even exalted above the diversity of the categories³. In the primordial doctrine of the ‘being of what is’ all the first metaphysical basic concepts are treated.

Among the first transcendental determinations of ‘being’ are ‘the being true’ and the ‘being good’. ‘Being’ in an absolute actual sense is identical with the deity (the pure νοῦς, the ‘ens realissimum’ as it is called in scholasticism).

Even in Augustine ‘being’ and ‘truth’ are identified: Veritas est id quod est⁴.

In realistic Scholasticism ‘being’ is the highest of the ‘transcendentalia’.

2 Metaph. IV (I) 1, 1003 a 22: ἔστιν ἐπιστήμη τις ἣ ϑεωϱεῖ τὸ ὄν ᾑ ὂν ϰαὶ τὰ τούτῳ ὑπαϱχοντα ϰαϑ᾽ αὑτό.

3 Metaph. IV (I') 3, 1005 a 27. Praedicam. C. 1; Metaph. X (I) 2, 1054 a 13.

4 Soliloqu. I, II, c. 5, PL. 32 Sp. 889.

[p. 21]

Thomas Aquinas in his first article of the Quaestiones disputatae de veritate calls ‘being’ the first and best known basic concept, to which all other notions lead back, because the intellect only determines the ‘modes of being’¹.

In his Summa Theologiae absolute ‘being’ is also identified with metaphysical (non-arithmetical) unity, which is in accordance with the Aristotelian way of thinking. Unity and plurality, the whole and its parts, and the basic notions resulting from them, together with potentiality and actuality are counted among the most universal and fundamental grounds of being².

In many respects the same view is held by Duns Scotus, who (with Avicenna, Albertus Magnus and Thomas) calls ‘being’, as ‘transcendens’, the first object of the intellect, from which the universal determinations of ‘being’ such as verum, bonum, etc., are derived as secondaries³.

So in realistic metaphysics we invariably find ‘the being of what is’ conceived of as the rational ground of all diversity of meaning; and the fundamental notion of ‘being’ is connected as closely as possible with the supreme principles of reason, on which the whole system depends.

In the case of Hartmann, on the other hand, ‘being’ taken in an ontological sense is entirely detached from the Ἀϱχή and the Archimedian point, and therefore, philosophically speaking, it is a notion formed for the occasion, created in order to get out of a scrape.

The cognitive subject may be posited as the ‘Reflektionspunkt’ of ‘being-in-itself’ by Hartmann⁴, but the really transcendental direction towards transcendence has been lost.

The ‘being of what is’ has changed from an ‘ens nobis notissi-

1 Quaest. disp. de veritate qu. 1, art. 1. c.: ‘Illud autem quod primo intellectus concipit quasi notissimum et in quo omnes conceptiones resolvit, est ens, ut Avicenna dicit in principio metaphysicae suae.’

2 Summa Theol. I. qu. art. 2. c. j^o. Expos. in Metaph. Prol.: ‘Unde et illa scientia maxima est intellectualis quae circa principia maxime universalia versatur. Quae quidem sunt ens et ea quae consequuntur ens, ut unum et multa, potentia et actus.’

3 Quaest. sup. Metaph. I, IV, q. 1 (Opera Omnia, Paris): ‘Primum obiectum intellectus est ens ut commune omnibus.’ Ib. I. VI qu. 3: ‘Cum autem quodcumque ens sit per se intelligibile et nihil possit in quocunque essentialiter includi nisi ens, sequitur quod primum obiectum intellectus erit ens. Quascunque autem rationes transcendentes, quae sunt quasi passiones entis ut verum, bonum etc. sunt posteriores primo obiecto.’

4 Ib., p. 201 fl.

[p. 22]

mum’ into an agnostic ‘asylum ignorantiae’, turned away from the selfhood; and in this unknown ‘being’ the root, the ground of the ‘being’ of the selfhood, has been concealed.

Thus the truly basic notion of ‘being’ in realistic metaphysics has evaporated into an unqualified generic notion, whose diversity is delimited only by ‘differentia specifica’.

The ‘being of what is’ as a philosophical basic denominator in Heidegger's ‘Sein und Zeit’.

Martin Heidegger, in his philosophy of existence, has thrown a great deal of energy into the investigation of the ‘being of what is’ in order to arrive at self-reflection, in the midst of the universal decay of self-confidence. In him, just as in Hartmann, ‘being’ ultimately remains an unqualified generic notion in its function as the common denominator of comparison for all diversity of meaning. But behind this unqualified notion the true philosopher seeks the ‘being of what is’ as a hidden deity which has left Western philosophy after the period of the Ionian philosophy of nature¹. He vehemently turns on the old metaphysical equation of being and non-differentiated (rational) unity, because here ‘being’ is conceived of as a ‘ständige Vorhandenheit’² (a constant datum), in fact as an Archimedean point (in the hypostatized ratio).

With this Heidegger attacks the foundation of the whole of ancient and modern metaphysics, which on the basis of reason wanted to gain access to the ‘being of what is’, to the being of the selfhood as well as to that of the reality of nature. But he also turns against the naturalistic surrender of the idea of being to the blind facts of nature.

Human existence (Dasein) has been ‘thrown into the world’ (in der Welt geworfen, i.e. into the given reality of ‘nature’), which as a blind ‘Vorhandenes’ binds its inner freedom. Given ‘being’ is meaningless, because it is not the internally identical, not the selfhood.

This ‘Geworfenheit’, the being thrown or ‘thrownness’ of the selfhood into the meaningless, is its state of rejection (‘Verworfenheit’), its falling away into nothingness.

Only in its awareness of the nothingness of being, in its fear

1 This theme is especially developed in Heidegger's book Holzwege der Philosophie.

2 Translator's note: German ‘vorhanden’ means ‘at hand, present, given, existent in the usual sense of the word.
H.D.J.

[p. 23]

of death, does the ‘Dasein’ (the ex-sistent selfhood) turn in upon itself and reflect on its freedom, in order ‘das Dasein enthüllend zu entwerfen’ (to project its finite existence, revealing it in its inner essence) in the movement of historical existential time.

Thus, the selfhood is sought in reflecting historical being and it is distinguished from the given, static being of ‘nature’, the ‘ontical being’ which has no selfhood.

Historical existential being in its reflected or ontological sense, must be distinguished from the ontical being of nature, and it is here for the first time that the problem of being as the common denominator for the diversity of meaning crops up. For Heidegger it stands to reason that this common denominator itself must not remain dispersed in the diversity of meaning. But with him the idea of being as the philosophical basic denominator of temporal reality can no longer have the rational analogous character it possessed in realistic metaphysics. And so with Heidegger, just as with Nicolai Hartmann, the idea of being evaporates into a meaningless notion of genus, from which the fundamental diversity of meaning between the ontical being of nature and the free historical ‘Dasein’ (the existential being) can be gained only by means of the addition of differentia specifica.

‘In what other way,’ says Heidegger, ‘is the difference to be conceived between historicity and the ontic, and how can it be grasped in categories? We can only subsume the ontic and historicity under a more general unity, enabling us to compare and distinguish them. But then we must become alive to the following facts:

1 -	the question about the meaning of historicity is an ontological problem, an inquiry into the structure of being of historical existence;
2 -	the question about the ontic being is an ontological one about the structure of being of what is not in conformity with existentiality, about what is “at hand”, “present”, “given” in the widest sense;
3 -	the ontic is only one department of “what is”. The idea of “being” comprises both the ontic and historicity. It is this idea that must be capable of generic differentiation’^1.

1 Sein und Zeit (1927) p. 403: ‘Wie anders soll Geschichtlichkeit in ihrem Unterschied vom Ontischen philosophisch erfasst und “kategorial” begriffen werden, es sei denn dadurch, dass “Ontisches” sowohl wie “Historisches” in eine ursprügliche Einheit der möglichen Vergleichseinsicht und Unterscheidbarkeit gebracht werden? Das ist aber nur möglich, wenn die Einsicht erwächst:

1 -

Die Frage nach der Geschichtlichkeit ist eine ontologische Frage nach der Seinsverfassung des geschichtlich Seienden;

2 -

die Frage nach dem Ontischen ist die ontologische Frage nach der Seinsverfassung des nicht daseinsmässigen Seienden, des Vorhandenen im weitesten Sinne;

3 -

das Ontische ist nur ein Bezirk des Seienden. Die Idee des Seins umgreift “Ontisches” und “Historisches”. Sie ist es, die sich muss “generisch differenzieren” lassen.’

[p. 24]

The last few sentences in this quotation are very characteristic. ‘Being’ as a common denominator of comparison has become an unqualified idea. It bears the same relation to the fundamental diversity of meaning of ‘nature’ and history as the genus-concept to its ‘differentia specifica’. It is no longer an Archimedean point. The selfhood has been uprooted. Only in its dread of ‘Nothingness’, in its freedom to project its existence in the ‘Sorge’ (concern) and the existential awareness of death is it distinguished from the meaningless world (i.e. das Vorhandene, or things as given by nature), and does it transcend the latter.

The Humanist personality-ideal with its proud claims to sovereignty and freedom has met its doom in a philosophy of death, in which the selfhood can only come tot itself in ‘concern’ (‘Sorge’)¹ in projecting its future towards death.

With Heidegger the selfhood is exclusively free in its ‘anticipatory running forward (in hermeneutical reflection) to death’ (‘vorlaufen in den Tod’), it is the authentic self (‘eigentlich selbst’) only in its fundamental isolation by the silent dreadful resolve to accept the fate of its existence² a resolve in which

1 Heidegger's ideas of ‘Dasein’ (= human existence), ‘Zeit’ (= time) and ‘Sorge’ (= concern) as the essence of the selfhood, including the definition of ‘Dasein’ as ‘Zeit und Geschichtlichkeit’ (= time and historicity) show a striking resemblance to Spengler's Treatise on ‘Schicksalsidee und Kausalitätsprinzip’ (=The idea of Fate and Causality). This part of Der Untergang des Abendlandes, Bnd. I, S. 164-221, is worth reading in this connection.
As far as I know this agreement between the two thinkers has not yet been pointed out. Notwithstanding the fact that their conceptions of ‘historic being’ are widely different, they are at one in their irrationalist historical attitude.

2 Sein und Zeit, p. 323: The German text reads: ‘in der ursprünglichen Vereinzelung der verschwiegenen, sich Angst zumutenden Entschlossenheit.’

[p. 25]

the selfhood of its own free choice abides in nothingness (in das Nichts hinaushält)¹, accepting its ‘thrown-ness’ (Geworfenheit) in nothingness as its guilt.

The ‘being of what is’ (das Sein des Seiendes) is indeed the supremacy of Non-Being (- nothingness), into which the selfhood as Dasein (= the being there, i.e. human existential life) has been thrown in the movement of historical time, which originates from its own essence, and which it realizes with dread in so far as it really comes to itself.

In the comparative denominator, conceived of as the ‘idea of Being’, the fulness of meaning of reality is absent. The latter can never be related to its temporal diversity of meaning as the genus to its species.

1 Was ist Metaphysik?,, p. 26.

§ 4 - Meaning as the basic denominator in immanence-philosophy and the ground for the distinction in this philosophy between meaning and reality as merely having meaning.

In the light of our transcendental basic Idea the criterion of the modal diversity of the law-spheres can only have for its transcendent created foundation the religious fulness of meaning as embodied in Christ, as the new root of our cosmos.

The sinful subjectivity of temporal reality, as will be presently explained in greater detail, has its sinful mode of being as (apostate) meaning only by virtue of the religious fulness of meaning of divine law, without whose determination and delimitation sinful reality would have no meaning and hence no existence or being.

The religious fulness of meaning (in no way self-sufficient, but wholly dependent) is the meaning-ground of all created existence.

This conception of meaning was defended in the Prolegomena of vol. I, where we repudiated any possible misinterpretation of our philosophy as a kind of symbolical idealism, a kind of meaning-ism.

Now the moment has come for a definitive comparison of this conception of meaning with that of immanence-philosophy.

It is remarkable that in Humanistic philosophy there has never been so much talk of ‘meaning’, of ‘rendering meaningful’, of

[p. 26]

‘interpreting meaning’, as in recent times. And this is happening at the very moment when the former foundations of the idea of ‘being of what is’ - as established in the Humanistic cosmonomic Idea by the ideals of science and of personality - are being relativistically dissolved.

In the earlier phases of immanence-philosophy the metaphysical idea of being as the basis of the modal diversity of meaning appeared to be founded in the hypostatizing of reason.

Meaning was abstracted from its true religious fulness and from the real Archè. Being, as the ultimate metaphysical idea of reason, is indeed the being of a reason that has been made self-sufficient and independent, the ‘Vernunft’, the νοῦς, in which the selfhood thinks it has found its Archimedean point.

In post-Kantian freedom-idealism the Idea becomes the only ground of being in a more and more radical sense; it contains the totality of meaning which it expands [in the modal diversity] through its dialectical self-development within time.

The metaphysical basis for the distinction between meaning and reality in immanence-philosophy.

In ancient idealistic metaphysics there is, however, always some μὴ ὄν in temporal reality as a counter-instance opposed to the true being, the rational ground of meaning. It is the ἄπειϱον, the ὕλη (formless matter), the principle of becoming and decay. It is a constitutive element of the phenomenal sensory perceivable world. Nevertheless the phenomenon shares in the true ‘Being’ (οὔσια), and in this way becomes meaningful only through its relation to the latter (cf. the μέϑεξις in Plato and his doctrine of temporal, changeable reality as a γένεσις εἰς οὔσιαν). In Aristotelian metaphysics the phenomenon shares in the true being by means of its immanent essential form, which actualizes matter and has a teleological relation to the Deity as pure actual Form. The latter was identified with absolute theoretical thought having only itself as object (νόησις νοησέως).

Thus it was conceivable that temporal reality derives its meaning solely from reason without being itself meaning.

In pre-Kantian Humanistic metaphysics the distinction between phenomenon and noumenon continues to play its dominating part, and the true ground of Being is found in divine creative mathematical thought.

[p. 27]

‘Nature’ as meaningless reality in Fichte and the South-Western German school of neo-Kantianism.

When Kant ascribes primacy to the ideal of personality, and attributes to the Idea as noumenon a practical-moral sense, the true ground of being of temporal reality can no longer be found in mathematical thought. In Fichte ‘nature’ as ‘phenomenon’ becomes the dialectical counterpole of the free I-ness, a dialectical negation (the non-ego) which - being meaningless in itself - acquires meaning only through its relation to the Idea, (as the material for the fulfilment of duty).

In the neo-Kantian philosophy of the South-Western German school this conception of meaning is carried through in its pregnant sense, but at the same time Kant's practical ethical metaphysics is given up. The practical Idea turns into an absolute, extra-temporal valid value, which as such is elevated to the transcendent ground of all temporal meaning.

The empirical reality of ‘nature’, as conceived of by natural science, is meaningless in itself; however, it assumes meaning through its relation to value, a relation which has not an ontological sense, but can be effectuated only by the judging subject in a synthetical act of consciousness. Thus the immanent ‘Akt-Sinn’, accomplishing a subjective synthesis of reality and value, finds its ultimate ground in the transcendent meaning: viz. in value.

Meaning in Husserl's phenomonology.

In Husserl's phenomenology, meaning also remains ‘ideal’. At least in the Logische Untersuchungen the words ‘meaning’ (Sinn) and ‘signification’ (Bedeutung) are used promiscuously. The phenomenologist seeks to restrict himself to the data by exclusively directing his intuitive gaze to the intentional acts of consciousness with their entire contents. From this point of view meaning becomes identical with the intentional relationship of the absolute, pure ego to the ‘Gegenstand’ intended in the act of consciousness. It becomes identical with the ‘reine Aktwesen’ both as regards its subjective noetic (= rendering meaningful) and its objective noematic (= possessing meaning) aspect¹.

1 Ideen I, p. 185: ‘Ahnlich wie der Wahrnehmung hat jedes intentionale Erlebnis - eben das macht das Grundstück der Intentionalität aus - sein ‘intentionales Objekt’, d.i. seinen gegenständlichen Sinn. Nur in anderen Worten: Sinn zu haben, bezw. etwas ‘im Sinne zu haben’ ist der Grundcharakter alles Bewustseins, das darum nicht nur überhaupt Erlebnis, sondern Sinnhabendes, ‘Noetisches ist.’ [Just as observation, every intentional experience - and this very fact forms the fundamental element of intentionality - has its ‘intentional object’ i.e. its objective meaning. Or in other words: ‘to mean’ or ‘to intend’ is the fundamental character of all consciousness, which for this reason is not merely experience, but something that has meaning, something ‘noetic’.]

[p. 28]

In a typical absolutizing of the phenomenological attitude the transcendental noetic consciousness is conceived of as the absolute consciousness. The absolute consciousness with its immanent intentional content is held to form the residue of the methodical ‘destruction of the world’ (Weltvernichtung) which phenomenology pretends it can effect by a methodical ἐποχή of the entire natural attitude of experience, including its appreciative function¹. The Greek word ἐποχή (epochè) here means: putting in parentheses, replacing the naïve attitude by the theoretical-phenomenological one without neglecting anything of the real content of the intentional act of consciousness.

‘All real units are “units of meaning”. Units of meaning presuppose the noetic consciousness, which on its part is absolute and does not owe its existence to another noesis’².

Meaning is consequently conceived of by Husserl as the intentional content of an ‘act of consciousness’ (Bewusstseinsakt), which content, characterized through ‘intentions of the act’, is sharply distinguished from purely sensory impressions (Empfindungen), in the same way as Brentano distinguishes them. These sense impressions can at the most be objects of intentions³.

‘Every Noema,’ says Husserl, ‘has a content, viz. its “meaning”, and through this it refers to its Gegenstand’⁴. Hence: meaning is ‘the intended as such’ in the intentional experience, and as such it can be fixed eidetically, i.e.: by means of the logical identification of its eidos (essence) abstracting all the individual possibilities of variation, as the nucleus of the noema, i.e. as the kernel of the intended ‘Gegenstand’. Meaning as the noematic kernel is then sharply distinguished from the apperceptional meaning (‘Auffassungssinn’, i.e. the intending of a ‘Gegenstand’ in observation, imagination, remembrance, etc.) and the latter is also considered as an essential element in the full ‘noema’. Finally, meaning is spoken

1 Ideen I, S. 91 ff.

2 Ideen I, S. 106. ‘Alle realen Einheite sind “Einheiten des Sinnes”, Sinneseinheiten setzen sinngebendens Bewusstsein voraus, das seinerseits absolut und nicht selbst wieder durch Sinngebung ist.’

3 Log. Unters. II, I (2e Aufl.), S. 391 ff.

4 Ideen I, S. 267: ‘Jedes Noema hat einen “Inhalt”, nämlich seinen “Sinn” und bezieht sich durch ihn auf seinen Gegenstand.’

[p. 29]

of as the ‘noematic kernel in the mode of its fulness’ (‘im Modus seiner Fülle’), in which meaning is not only conceived in the intention of the ‘Gegenstand im Was’ (the object in the what), but also in the intention of the ‘Gegenstand im Wie’ (the object in the how) e.g. the different ‘Klarheitsfüllen’ ((fulnesses of clarity), i.e. in the intended concreteness of the noematic meaning¹.

1 Ideen I, S. 273.

The subjectivistic view of meaning in Paul Hofmann.

A purely subjectivistic notion of meaning is advocated by Paul Hofmann, an adherent of the phenomenological school derived from Dilthey's vitalistic philosophy. It forms a contrast with Husserl's conception of meaning as something objective (objektives Wesen) offering itself to the pure phenomenological intuition. ‘Thing means “object”. Meaning, however, is that in which or through which I experience a thing (knowing it and in every respect always valuing it also), i.e. that which, in contradistinction to its “own” object, is no longer experienced as object, and cannot be conceived of as object without any residue. Just as “meaning” is the opposite of “thing”, “Verstehen” is the opposite of “Schauen” (i.e. having the intended thing itself)’².

Hoffmann, too, reverts to a ‘pure I’ in the sense of a pure (no longer objectifiable) ‘Erleben’ (experience) which he explicitly conceives of as a limiting concept. However, he does not want to hypostatize meaning³. Rather he wishes to consider it as existing exclusively in the subjective sphere, as a ‘mode of pure experience’ (reines Erleben) that understands itself. Thus ‘meaning’ becomes the opposite of any kind of ‘Gegenständlichkeit’. This phenomenological ‘vitalistic philosophy’ attempts to identify meaning and transcendental experience without per-

2 Paul Hofmann: Metaphysik oder verstehende Sinn-Wissenschaft (1929), S. 3: ‘Sache heisst “Gegenstand”, Sinn aber ist dasjenige, in dem und durch das ich einen “Gegenstand” oder eine Sache erlebe (wissend und allerdings auch stets zugleich wertend), was also diesem “seinem” Gegenstand gegenüber jedenfalls nicht mehr als Gegenstand erlebt wird, und was überhaupt nicht ohne Rest als Gegenstand gefasst werden kann. Wie nun Sinn das Gegenteil von Sache, so ist Verstehen das Gegenteil von Schauen, d.h. von die-Sache(vermeintlich)-selbst-haben.’ Cf. his study Das Verstehen von Sinn und Seine Allgemeingültigkeit (Jahrbuch für Charakterologie VI).

3 As Husserl does, (and, according to Hofmann, as Heidegger does, too) by elevating meaning to an ideal ‘für sich seiendes objectives Wesen’ (an ideal objective essence in itself).

[p. 30]

ceiving that this ‘reines Erleben’ (pure experience) itself, in its opposition to all temporal reality, results in a theoretical hypostasis, and as such is abstracted from true self-reflexion.

What is the meaning of a ‘reines Erleben’ (pure experience) of which nothing can be said but this negation that it is opposed to all matter-of-factness, to all ‘Gegenständlichkeit’ (identified with objectivity)?

It is typical for Hofmann to call his philosophy, as the science of meaning, ‘Logology’¹. It was intended as the science ‘vom Sinne überhaupt’ (of meaning as such) and this concept of ‘Sinn überhaupt’ we shall make acquaintance with as a logicist, and therefore meaningless, generic concept.

1 Op. cit. p. 61.

A more detailed explanation of our own conception of meaning.

At the present stage, our discussion of the above-mentioned Humanistic views of meaning will suffice, and we shall now expound our own conception in greater detail.

The question: what is meaning? cannot be answered without our reflecting on the Origin and unity of all temporal meaning, because this answer depends on the cosmonomic Idea of philosophical thought. Not a single temporal structure of meaning exists in itself (an sich). That which makes it into meaning lies beyond the limit of time. Meaning is ‘ex origine’ the convergence of all temporal aspects of existence into one supertemporal focus, and this focus, as we have seen, is the religious root of creation, which has meaning and hence existence only in virtue of the sovereign creative act of God.

The fulness of meaning is implied in the religious image of God, expressing itself in the root of our cosmos and in the splitting up of that root in time.

This religious fulness of meaning, given only in Christ, as the new root of creation, is not an abstract ‘eidos’, not an ‘Idea’, but it implies the fulness of created reality, again directed to God.

Especially in accordance with the Christian confession about Creation, the Fall into sin, and Redemption, it will not do to conceive of created reality as merely the bearer of meaning, as possessing meaning, as is done in immanence-philosophy.

[p. 31]

Such a conception remains founded in an Idea of the ‘being of what is’, which is incompatible with the radically Christian confession of the absolute sovereignty of God, the Creator, and of the fulness of created meaning in Christ. It is especially in conflict with the view resulting from the Christian attitude, stating that no single aspect of the meaning of reality may be depreciated in favour of certain absolutized aspects. There is an after-effect of the form-matter-scheme of immanence-philosophy discernible in the distinction between reality and meaning. In particular it is the opinion that ‘meaning’ would be exclusively ideal, supertemporal and abstract - a view found again in Theodor Litt's conception of thinking in the so-called cultural sciences - which is the foundation of this distinction.

Husserl thinks he can carry ad absurdum the view that natural reality itself would be meaning, by means of the simple remark: meaning cannot be burnt down like a house. And again this remark is founded in the concept of matter and the (semi-Platonic) concept of form of immanence-philosophy: the sensory impressions of nature are ‘merely factual reality’; meaning, however, is the ‘eidos’, the ideal ‘Bedeutung’ (signification). But, in the Christian attitude the Archimedean point is radically different from that of immanence-philosophy. If it is admitted that all the aspects of reality are aspects of meaning, and that all individual things exist only in a structure of meaning, so that the burning house itself, as regards its temporal mode of being as a ‘thing’, has an individual temporal structure of meaning, then Husserl's remark loses all its value.

If created things are only the bearers of meaning, they themselves must have another mode of being different from that of the dependent creaturely existence referring beyond and above itself, and in no way self-sufficient. Then with immanence-philosophy it must be possible to abstract meaning from reality.

Then we fall back into the form-matter-scheme of immanence-philosophy in whatever different varieties and shades of meaning it may be propounded. Then the religious fulness of meaning of our created cosmos in Christ must be an abstract value or a transcendental Idea and nothing more.

But, if ‘meaning’ is nothing but the creaturely mode of being under the law, consisting exclusively in a religious relation of dependence on God, then branding the philosophy of the cosmonomic Idea as a kind of ‘meaning-idealism’ appears to be based on a fundamental misunderstanding.

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I trust I have precluded once for all this misconception, which has arisen in a quarter so congenial to this philosophy.

The struggle to shake off the fetters of the basic schemes of immanence-philosophy from our thinking is an extremely difficult task, and it is quite explicable that there may arise some misunderstandings.

Should there be some misconception on my part, and should it be possible on biblical grounds to show that (religious) meaning is not the mode of being of created reality, I shall not for a moment hesitate to revise my conception on this point. If I see aright, however, the difference on this head between my view and that of Stoker, mentioned in the Prolegomena, is of a provisional character and is connected with the question raised by him, if Christian philosophy can indeed do without the concept of substance. Now I stick to my opinion that this question can only be considered to some purpose, if beforehand the preliminary question has been answered: What is the creaturely mode of being, what is the being of all created existence? The answer to the latter question is of primary importance; for the sense in which a new concept of substance, if any, is to be taken, depends on this answer.

And that is why I believe that it is not right to criticize the conception of meaning as the creaturely mode of being by means of a concept of substance of which the meaning has not been further defined.

The ‘problem of substance’ cannot be discussed in more detail before the investigation of the structures of individuality of temporal reality. We have observed that the theory of the modal law-spheres must have precedence for purposes of method.

But both the theory of the law-spheres and that concerning the structures of individuality must be founded in an Idea of the mode of being of creaturely reality as such, an Idea that is implied in the transcendental basic Idea.

Meaning in the fall of man.

There remains, however, another central problem of extreme importance: As regards his human nature, Christ is the root of reborn creation, and as such the fulness of meaning, the creaturely Ground of the meaning of all temporal reality. But our temporal world in its apostate religious root lies under God's curse, under the curse of sin. Thus there is a radical antithesis in the subject-side of the root of the earthly cosmos. It may be that this

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antithesis has been reconciled by the Redemption in Jesus Christ, but in temporal reality the unrelenting struggle between the kingdom of God and that of darkness will go until the end of the world. The falling away from God has affected our cosmos in its root and its temporal refraction of meaning. Is not this a final and decisive reason to distinguish meaning from reality? Does not the radical antithesis between the kingdom of God and that of darkness, which our transcendental Idea itself also recognizes as fundamental for philosophic thought, compel us to accept an ultimate dualism between meaning and reality?

Is sinful reality still meaning? Is it not meaningless, or rather the adversary of meaning, since meaning can only exist in the religious dependence on its Origin?

Here we indeed touch the deepest problem of Christian philosophy. The latter cannot hope to solve it without the illumination of Divine Revelation if it wants to be guaranteed from falling back into the attitude of immanence-philosophy.

I for one do not venture to try and know anything concerning the problem that has been raised except what God has vouchsafed to reveal to us in His Word. I do not know what the full effect of unrestrained sin on reality would be like. Thanks to God this unhampered influence does not exist in our earthly cosmos. One thing we know, viz. that sin in its full effect does not mean the cutting through of the relation of dependence between Creator and depraved creation, but that the fulness of being of Divine justice will express itself in reprobate creation in a tremendous way, and that in this process depraved reality cannot but reveal its creaturely mode of being as meaning.

It will be meaning in the absolute subjective apostasy under the curse of God's wrath, but in this very condition it will not be a meaningless reality.

Sin causes spiritual death through the falling away from the Divine source of life, but sin is not merely privatio, not something merely negative, but a positive, guilty apostasy insofar as it reveals its power, derived from creation itself. Sinful reality remains apostate meaning under the law and under the curse of God's wrath. In our temporal cosmos God's Common Grace reveals itself, as Kuyper brought to light so emphatically, in the preservation of the cosmic world-order. Owing to this preserving grace the framework of the temporal refraction of meaning remains intact.

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The Christian as a stranger in this world.

Although the fallen earthly cosmos is only a sad shadow of God's original creation, and although the Christian can only consider himself as a stranger and a pilgrim in this world, yet he cannot recognize the true creaturely ground of meaning in the apostate root of this cosmos, but only in the new root, Christ. Any other view would inevitably result in elevating sin to the rank of an independent counter-power opposed to the creative power of God¹. And this would result in avoidance of the world, an unbiblical flight from the world. We have nothing to avoid in the world but sin. The war that the Christian wages in God's power in this temporal life against the Kingdom of darkness, is a joyful struggle, not only for his own salvation, but for God's creation as a whole, which we do not hate, but love for Christ's sake. We must not hate anything in the world but sin.

1 In his Kirchliche Dogmatik Karl Barth has tried to escape this consequence by deriving the positive power of sin from the ‘Divine No’ placed over against His ‘Yes’ with respect to His creative act. But this dialectical solution of the problem results in a dualistic (at the same time positive and negative) conception of creation.
The Divine ‘No’ cannot explain the power of sin, which as such is derived from creation itself, as we have stated in Vol. I.
The idea of a negative creation is destructive to the Biblical conception of the integral Origin of Heaven and earth, because it implies that sin has a power outside creation in its positive sense.
Creation itself implies the Divine ‘No’ with respect to sin in its negative sense as ‘privatio’.

The apostate world cannot maintain any meaning as its own property in opposition to Christ. Common Grace.

Nothing in our apostate world can get lost in Christ. There is not any part of space, there is no temporal life, no temporal movement or temporal energy, no temporal power, wisdom, beauty, love, faith or justice, which sinful reality can maintain as a kind of property of its own apart from Christ.

Whoever relinquishes the ‘world’ taken in the sense of sin, of the ‘flesh’ in its Scriptural meaning, does not really lose anything of the creaturely meaning, but on the contrary he gets a share in the fulness of meaning of Christ, in Whom God will give us everything. It is all due to God's common grace in Christ that there are still means left in the temporal world to resist the destructive force of the elements that have got loose;

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that there are still means to combat disease, to check psychic maladies, to practise logical thinking, to save cultural development from going down into savage barbarism, to develop language, to preserve the possibility of social intercourse, to withstand injustice, and so on. All these things are the fruits of Christ's work, even before His appearance on the earth. From the very beginning God has viewed His fallen creation in the light of the Redeemer.

We can only face the problem of the effect on temporal meaning that the partial working of the falling away from the fulness of meaning has in spite of common grace, when we have gained an insight into the modal structures of the law-spheres within the temporal coherence of meaning. But - and with this we definitively reject any separation of meaning from reality - meaning in apostasy remains real meaning in accordance with its creaturely mode of being. An illogical reasoning can occur only within the logical modality of meaning; illegality in its legal sense is only possible within the modality of meaning of the jural sphere; the non-beautiful can only be found within the modal aspect of meaning of the aesthetic law-sphere, just as organic disease remains something within the modal aspect of meaning of the biotic law-sphere, and so on. Sin, as the root of all evil, has no meaning or existence independent of the religious fulness of the Divine Law. In this sense St Paul's word is to be understood, to the effect that but for the law sin is dead¹.

All along the line meaning remains the creaturely mode of being under the law which has been fulfilled by Christ. Even apostate meaning is related to Christ, though in a negative sense; it is nothing apart from Him.

As soon as thought tries to speculate on this religious basic truth, accessible to us only through faith in God's Revelation, it gets involved in insoluble antinomies. This is not due to any intrinsic contradiction between thought and faith, but rather to the mutinous attempt on the part of thought to exceed its temporal cosmic limits in its supposed self-sufficiency. But of this in the next section. For thought that submits to Divine Revelation and recognizes its own limits, the antithesis in the root of our cosmos is not one of antinomy; rather it is an opposition on the basis of the radical unity of Divine Law; just as in the temporal law-spheres justice and injustice, love and hatred

1 Rom. 7:8: χωϱὶς γὰϱ νόμον ἁμαϱτία νεϰϱά.

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are not internally antinomous, but only contrasts determined by the norms in the respective modalities of meaning.

The religious value of the modal criterion of meaning.

If created reality is to be conceived of as meaning, one cannot observe too strictly the limits of the temporal modal law-spheres in philosophic thought. These limits have been set by the cosmic order of time in the specific ‘sovereignty of the modal aspects within their own spheres’.

Any attempt to obliterate these limits by a supposedly autonomous thought results in an attack upon the religious fulness of meaning of the temporal creation.

If the attempt is made to reduce the modal meaning of the jural or that of the economic law-sphere to the moral one of the temporal love of one's neighbour, or if the same effort is made to reduce the modal meaning of number or that of language to the meaning of logic, it must be distinctly understood that the abundance of meaning of creation is diminished by this subjective reduction. And perhaps without realizing what this procedure implies, one puts some temporal aspect of reality in the place of the religious fulness of meaning in Christ. The religious value of the criterion of meaning is that it saves philosophic thought from falling away from this fulness.

§ 5 - The logical aspect of the modal criterion of meaning and the method of antinomy.

The principium exclusae antinomiae in its relation to the logical principle of contradiction.

In § 1 of this chapter the theoretical character of the criterion of a modal law-sphere was given prominence and reference was made to the logical side of this criterion.

The modal aspects are implicitly included in naïve experience. Their ‘ex-plication’, the theoretical unfolding of the functional modalities of meaning from what has been given in the naïve attitude, is a task of philosophy, which has to make use of theoretical analysis and synthesis. Insight into a real synthesis of the logical function of thought with a non-logical aspect of experience can only be acquired on the condition of respecting the specific modal limits of the different law-spheres, including the logical one. Every attempt to erase these limits by a supposed autonomous theoretical thought results in theoretical antinomies. By laying bare such antinomies in immanence-philosophy, we

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apply a method of criticism whose efficiency can be denied only by those who employ a dialectical logic either to overcome the ultimate antithesis in their religious starting-point by a pseudo-theoretical synthesis, or to project this basic antinomy as an unconquerable contradiction into temporal reality itself.

The method of antinomy has continually been applied in our critical treatment of the development of the basic antinomy between ‘nature’ and ‘freedom’ in Humanistic philosophy; but the special use of this method in the theory of the modal law-spheres has not yet been brought to light.

The nature of the theoretical antinomy. The principium exclusae antinomiae.

What is the nature of a theoretical antinomy? Antinomy literally means a ‘contradiction between laws’. Plutarch uses the term in a juridical sense to denote an inner conflict in positive law, revealing itself in the fact that two opposing parties can explain the law in their own favour.

It is especially the original relation of antinomy to law (of course in this case taken in its fundamental cosmological sense, and not in a modally jural application) that makes it necessary to give all the more prominence to its essentially subjective character of being opposed to law. It is not the law itself, in its basic meaning of the cosmic order of the modal law-spheres that can be antinomic, nor can the laws of the different modal aspects contradict one another. But all theoretical antinomies are caused by theoretical thought involving itself in self-contradiction in theoretical judgments, because it forms an erroneous conception of the coherence in the modal diversity of the laws, thereby giving rise to a seeming mutual incompatibility of the latter.

Antinomy in its inter-modal character may not be identified with the intra-modal relation of contrariety.

Antinomy in this inter-modal theoretical sense ought to be sharply distinguished from the intra-modal relation of contrariety, including logical contradiction. Contraries like logical - illogical, polite - impolite, beautiful - ugly, lawful - unlawful, moral - immoral, belief - unbelief, and so on, present themselves within the same modal aspect of meaning. They do not contain a real antinomy between different modal law-spheres.

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In its theoretical character the latter implies a logical contradiction; but a logical contradiction as such is not an antinomy in the inter-modal sense here intended, referring as it does to the transcendental Idea concerning the mutual coherence of meaning between the different modal aspects of experience.

Antinomy in the sense of a seeming contradiction between the essential laws of different modal aspects of meaning is refuted by the Idea of cosmic order. Anyone who accepts the cosmic order of time regulating the coherence of meaning between the laws of different modal spheres, cannot acknowledge any theoretical justification for antinomy. The transcendental Idea of cosmic order implies the principium exclusae antinomiae.

The essentially antinomic character of all speculative thought. The antinomy of the sole causality of God in speculative theology.

If theoretical thought is indeed bound by the temporal coherence of meaning of the modal law-spheres, any attempt on the part of this thought to overstep the limit of the cosmic order of time must lead to antinomy. For this reason all speculative thought is necessarily antinomic.

Our thought cannot really exceed the cosmic limit of time. What actually takes place in speculative thought is not an antinomic conceptual comprehension of the supertemporal, but merely a theoretical eradication of the modal limits between the temporal law-spheres by making certain modal aspects absolute.

Take for instance the notorious antinomy of speculative natural theology with its notion of the ‘unconditional ultimate causality of God’ proceeding from the impossibility of a regressus in infinitum in the empirical causal relations. This notion lands us in an insoluble contradiction with man's personal accountability for his actions, since it makes God the ultimate term of a series of causes and effects which must be conceived as continuous and leaving no single hiatus in the causal chain.

For, if any hiatus would be allowed in the temporal chain of causes and effects, by the introduction of ‘free causes’, in the sense of subjects of normative imputation, the whole argument would lose its foundation.

This argument starts from ‘material’ sensory perceivable effects and from these effects seeks to find the causes. It is impossible in this empirical way to find a free cause as the subject

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of normative imputation. The cause which can explain the effect must itself be the effect of another cause and so on.

It is not necessary that the causal relations found in this way are conceived of in a mechanical sense. But they cannot be of a normative character, because the normative imputation of an effect to a subject as its cause implies that the acting subject itself is a final point of reference in the normative aspects of the causal relation¹.

1 Cf. my treatise The modal structure of the juridical causal nexus, Mededeling Ned. Kon. Akademie van Wetenschappen (Nieuwe Reeks dl. 13, 2e ed. 1950).

The Thomistic proofs of the existence of God.

The first and second Thomistic-Aristotelian proofs of the existence of God as unmoved Mover handle the concept of causality in the metaphysical sense of the Greek form-matter scheme.

Causality is conceived here in the transcendental-analogical sense of the fundamental concept of being, with its general transcendental determinations of matter and form, actuality and potentiality. This implies that the causal relation is used without any synthetical determination of its modal meaning.

In the Aristotelian principle: Omne quod movetur ab alio movetur, ‘movement’ is meant in the analogical sense of a transition of matter to form, and of potentiality to actuality.

As long as this principle is handled in its purely metaphysical sense, the argument based on it cannot prove anything, because it contains only a theoretical logical explanation of the consequences implied in the religious pre-supposition of the form-matter motive in its Aristotelian conception².

As soon, however, as it is related to human experience of movements in the temporal world, it is no longer possible to use the concepts of movement and causality in an undetermined analogical sense.

In this case it becomes necessary to define the events arranged in the chain of causes and effects which are supposed to demand an unmoved Mover as the ultimate cause. And now theoretical thought cannot escape from defining the modal and typical sense of its concept of causality.

If it is possible to arrange a series of different natural events

2 Cf. my treatise The Transcendental Critique of Theoretical Thought and the Thomistic Theologia Naturalis (Phil. Ref. 17 Year 1952, p. 151 ff).

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and human actions in the same chain of causes and effects which would be infinite without assuming God as the ultimate cause, the normative aspects of causality must be eliminated on the grounds explained before.

As to the remaining aspects it must be stated that - if they are irreducible to each other - their inter-modal relation cannot be a causal one.

Consequently, it is necessary to define the modal aspect of causality meant in the empirical-theoretical argument.

But, by making God the absolute or ultimate cause of a theoretically abstracted modal series of causes and effects, this modal aspect is absolutized because of its being related to the absolute Origin outside of its inter-modal coherence with the other aspects and outside of the religious centre of human existence. And so the antinomy between ‘causality’ and normative responsibility of man is inescapable.

It does not matter whether causality is conceived of in a metaphysical-mechanical sense, or in a metaphysical-biological or in a metaphysical-psychological one; in either case it is inevitably in conflict with the modal meaning of the normative aspects of human behaviour, as soon as it is brought to bear on the latter. If, for example, an instance of rational human behaviour were capable of an entirely mechanistic explanation, there would not be any foundation for normative juridical or moral accountability.

Human action, however, is incapable of being enclosed in certain aspects of reality in a purely functionalistic way, since insofar as it is human behaviour, it takes its origin in the religious root of human existence.

To the extent that a human ego is qualified as the super-modal cause of his actions, we speak about causality in the transcendental sense of the radical unity of all its temporal modalities, which refers to the religious concentration-point of human existence beyond all and any modal diversity of meaning. This human ego cannot be arranged in a mechanical or psychological causal series.

And insofar as we continue to speak of God being the ultimate cause, we can do so only in the sense of the transcendental Idea of the Origin of all meaning, if we want to avoid the errors of speculative immanence-philosophy. God can never be the ultimate cause in a mechanical or other modal series of causes and effects. Rather He is the Origin of causality in the temporal

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coherence and radical unity of all its modal aspects. A purely modal causality cannot refer to a real process, but only to a theoretical abstraction.

It has already been discussed in the Prolegomena that both Ideas (that of the radical unity and that of the Origin), contained in the transcendental basic Idea, are conclusive evidence of the fact that theoretical thought is not self-sufficient, not even in its own sphere, and that it is necessarily determined by the religious root of existence. Antinomy arises in the first place through ignoring this religious determination and dependence of theoretical thought, because this thought sets out to interpret God's causality or that of human volition in a functionalistic way. That which is one in the full sense of the word in the totality of meaning and in the Origin of all meaning respectively, turns into a contradiction between two modal functions of meaning, if interpreted functionalistically; the reason is that these two functions are made absolute in theoretical thought (e.g., mechanical causality and moral responsibility).

Any one who thinks he can solve such a speculative antinomy by granting man a certain measure of independence and freedom in his relation to God as ‘prima causa’ has not understood the true origin of this antinomy in speculative philosophy. For the speculative concept of cause (which implies an absolutization of a non-normative modal aspect of meaning as soon as it used in an argument which is based on a continuous series of causes) does not bear any limitation in its supposed applicability to the Absolute Origin of the cosmos.

If God, as a supposed unmoved Mover, is thought of as the ultimate cause in a purely mechanical series of causes and effects, His causal activity must be conceived in an absolute mechanical sense which has no room for any human responsibility. And the same consequence, viz. the exclusion of human responsibility, is implied in the absolutization of any other non-normative aspect of a causal process.

The source of the contradiction lies in this absolutizing itself. For human thought it is absolutely impossible to form a defined concept of causality in the supertemporal fulness of meaning or in the sense of God's creative act. Impossible, because human thought is bound within the limits of the temporal coherence of meaning.

Only in the transcendental Idea referring to the totality of meaning and to the Ἀϱχή can human thought be concentrated

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towards that which passes beyond its immanent boundaries.

That's why St Paul's words are full of wisdom when he answers those who speculate on causality with reference to the will of God. ‘Thou wilt say then unto me, why doth He yet find fault? For who hath resisted His will?’ ‘Nay, but, O man, who art thou that repliest against God?’ This answer is a direct dismissal of speculative thought and it does not enter into the false method of posing problems used by speculative philosophy.

To philosophical thought, concentrating on Christ and on God Who reveals Himself in Christ, this speculative way of posing the problem of causality is simply impossible. Only abstract speculative theoretical thought can take it seriously.

Thus the theoretical antinomies of speculatieve thought after all prove to be antinomies related to the transcendental Idea of the inter-modal coherence between the different law-spheres.

In the same way the basic antinomy in the Humanistic cosmonomic Idea between the ideals of science and of personality appeared again and again to lead to a theoretical antinomy between mechanical causality and moral freedom.

Kant's conception of the nature and the origin of the theoretical antinomies.

The problem concerning the origin of the specific theoretical antinomies has been raised also from the immanence-standpoint. Kant, the founder of the theory of the antinomies in modern thought, is of opinion that their origin lies in the abuse of the theoretical, cosmological Ideas of reason outside of the scope of all experience. The theoretical Idea of reason is nothing but a regulator for the use of our understanding, without having any constitutive function in human knowledge. It stimulates the understanding to carry thought beyond every condition discovered in an empirical phenomenon, and to refer it to the totality of conditions. This totality is never given in experience, since it is to be conceived of as absolute, self-sufficient, unconditioned.

The Idea of reason viewed thus, is nothing but the category of thought freed from the limits set to it by experience; it is the ‘bis zum Unbedingten erweiterte Kategorie’ [the category that has been extended to the unconditional].

Only the ‘categories’ in which the synthesis contained in them form a series, are alleged to be capable of such ‘extension

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into the absolute’. And in this way Kant concludes that there are no more than four cosmological Ideas of reason (in accordance with the four points of view of Kant's table of categories).

These transcendental Ideas ought to be used theoretically only in such a way that they always urge the intellect, tied down to (sensory) experience, to add new determinations to those already found for some phenomenon. They are to be handled in such a way that they set an endless systematical task to theoretical knowledge.

If, however, the Idea is used as a metaphysical ‘thing in itself’ to which the categories of the understanding are applied as logical determinations without the aid of any sensory experience - as was done in rationalistic metaphysics - then reason inevitably gets involved in ‘a dialectical illusion’. It sets up propositions that can neither be proved, nor be disproved by (sensory) experience. The remarkable thing in this ‘dialectical illusion’ is that the thesis as well as the anti-thesis can be conceived without either of them being self-contradictory. They can both appeal to equally valid grounds of reason, but they contradict each other diametrically, notwithstanding. This is how in Kant the theoretical antinomies arise, whose number, according to him, is restricted to that of the cosmological Ideas. There are four of them, distinguished into two mathematical antinomies, relating to the limitedness or illimitableness of the world in time and space and to the infinite or the finite divisibility of matter; - and two dynamic antinomies, relating to the possibility or the impossibility of causality through freedom in the events of the world, and to the existence or the non-existence of the deity as the ens realissimum.

As appeared in the second part of the first volume, this Kantian conception of the nature and the origin of the theoretical antinomies is entirely dependent on the Kantian dualistic cosmonomic Idea with its isolating separation between the realm of experience (of nature) and that of super-sensory freedom.

In this dualism the fundamental antinomy between the ideal of science and that of personality is concealed. And this antinomy in Kant crystallized itself into the isolating separation between the theoretical realm of the understanding, restricted to the phenomenon, and the practical realm of reason, bearing on the super-sensory sphere of the absolute normative Ideas (noumena).

It is to be understood that Kant must find the origin of anti-

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nomy in the obliteration of the boundary lines between the transcendental Idea and the intellectual concept of a ‘Gegenstand’. The theoretical Idea can only refer in a theoretically transcendental sense to the transcendent root of temporal reality. To Kant this root is the Idea of the ‘homo noumenon’, the autarchic legislator of moral freedom. But the theoretical Idea may not itself pretend to be a ‘Ding an sich’, as the metaphysics of the mathematical science-ideal before Kant wanted it to do.

The origin of the special theoretical antinomies in the light of our transcendental basic Idea.

Anyone who has understood the importance of the transcendental basic Idea will no longer hold that Christian philosophy can agree with this Kantian view of the nature and origin of antinomy. But this need in no way be an impediment for us to recognize the elements of truth implied in Kant's extremely penetrating doctrine of the dialectic of pure reason.

Kant's controversy with speculative metaphysics in general, and with speculative divinity in particular, retains its fundamental value, insofar as he had an insight into the fact that theoretical antinomies must be founded in a certain speculative overstepping of the limits of theoretical thought. Especially his criticism of the speculative use of what he styles the category of causality is in this respect a proof of his genius.

In a positive sense this doctrine of the antinomies, however, is useless to us, because of the conception of experience and the Idea of the transcendent root of temporal reality that forms its basis.

And precisely Kant's identification of the reality of temporal experience with its sensory and logical aspects is a source of inner antinomies, just as is his absolutizing of the moral aspect of meaning to the transcendent noumenon. It will appear that philosophical thought cannot avoid antinomies by simply separating the concepts of natural science from the normative ones.

It is not even possible to ward off antinomy by observing the modal limits between the various law-spheres without recognizing the mutual cosmic coherence of meaning between them.

We have discovered the true origin of the antinomies in a subjective turning away on the part of theoretical thought from the cosmic order of time. This order is the foundation of the

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inner sovereignty of the modal aspects within their own spheres, in their inter-modal coherence of meaning.

The special theoretical antinomy must consequently be due to a subjective violation of the modal sovereignty of the different law-spheres by theoretical thought.

Insofar as theoretical thought tries to avoid the antinomies that have arisen in this process, by separating and isolating a phenomenal and a noumenal world, embracing two different groups of mental functions (‘nature’ and ‘normative freedom’ in Kant), the antinomies are not really removed. The absolutized complexes of functions, dualistically separated from one another, cannot but cancel and exclude one another by this isolating separation.

In how far the antinomies are caused by a disregard of the meaning of the modal theoretical Ideas, can appear only in a later part of our work, in which the relation of the concept of a meaning-modus to the modal Idea will be explained in the light of our transcendental basic Idea. It will then appear that there must be as many classes of theoretical Ideas as there are modal law-spheres in temporal reality.

In any case it ought to be clear that the number of possible theoretical antinomies is much larger than Kant assumed in his ‘Dialektik der reinen Vernunft’, and that the first three of the four that Kant formulated and examined, can be entirely explained by the causes indicated by us. The fourth (oriented to the ontological proof of God's existence) cannot be recognized as a special kind of antinomy, because it touches on the Idea of the Origin in the foundation of all philosophy. On the basis of Kant's cosmonomic Idea it can be reduced to the specific antinomy between the causality of nature, on the one hand, and morality, on the other.

Antinomies are bound to ensue from the attempt to wipe out the limits of meaning between the mathematical aspects of number and space; hence by either assuming the actual continuity of the approximative functions of number (the infinitesimal and the infinitely large number resulting from the continuous series of real numbers), or by resolving space into a collection of points conceived of as real numbers. Antinomies are bound to ensue from the attempt to reduce the modal mathematical aspect of motion to that of the original spatiality, or to resolve the energy-aspect of matter into a spatial collection of points (the antinomies of Zeno; the race between

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Achilles and the tortoise, the flying arrow; Kant's second antinomy of the composition of matter). Antinomies must arise if we think the modal aspect of energy to be determined by the mathematical aspect of space (a more exact statement of Kant's first antinomy between the Ideas of finite and infinite ‘world-space’). There arise necessarily antinomies, when it is attempted to enclose human activity entirely in its physical aspect (the antinomy between mechanical causality and normative responsibility in the various normative aspects of meaning; a more exact statement of Kant's third antinomy). Antinomies must of necessity ensue from the attempt to reduce the original (mathematical) aspect of spatiality to the sensory (objective psychical) space of sight or touch (this antinomy has been examined in the first volume in our chapter on Hume's psychologizing of mathematics)¹.

By ignoring the modal limits marking off the aspect of sensory feeling from that of logical analysis, one ends in antinomies (we refer again to Hume's psychologizing of logical thought). The same result will follow from a logicizing of the jural aspect (cf. the antinomies of Kelsen's so-called ‘reine Rechtslehre’, analysed in my Inaugural Address ‘De Betekenis der Wetsidee voor Rechtswetenschap en Rechtsphilosophie’, 1926).

Theoretical thought is confronted with antinomies when it breaks through the boundaries between the juridical aspect of retributive justice and that of moral love, and so on.

In developing the special theory of the law-spheres, we shall systematically examine the antinomies arising from the theoretical violation of the modal boundaries of meaning. But in the general theory of the law-spheres we shall also have continually to apply the method of antinomy.

The cosmic order is maintained when theoretical thought, failing to recognize the modal sphere-sovereignty of the various aspects of reality, gets involved in inner contradictions, revealed as logical contradictions in the logical aspect of the theory. Every theoretical antinomy is at bottom founded in a subjective turning of theoretical thought against the cosmic order underlying also the laws of logical thinking.

1 Vol. I, Part II, p. 238 ff.

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The cosmological principium exclusae antinomiae is not identical with the logical principle of contradiction, but the former is the foundation of the latter.

The principium exclusae antinomiae is therefore by no means identical with the logical principium contradictionis, but rather its foundation.

Without the cosmic order of the law-spheres there is no possibility of logical thought, so that the logical principium contradictionis would be meaningless but for the cosmological principium exclusae antinomiae safeguarding the sphere-sovereignty of the modal aspects of reality within their inter-modal coherence of meaning. This especially distinguishes our theory of antinomy from that of the Kantian doctrine. According to Kant thesis and antithesis are separately conceivable without any inner contradiction. The antinomies, consequently, can in his view be reduced to merely logical contradictions, to a simple conflict between subjective thought and the logical principium contradictionis, which does not allow two contradictory logical judgments to be true at the same time and in the same respect.

From this logicizing of theoretic antinomy it appears most clearly that Kant tried to emancipate theoretical thought from the cosmic temporal order. This is why he has lost sight of the real states of affairs. The thesis about matter being limited by mathematical space (or vice versa the thesis of mathematical space being limited by matter); the thesis as to the infinite divisibility of matter; and that about the exclusively mechanical determination of human actions, are intrinsically antinomic in a cosmological sense. The immanence-standpoint itself is the origin of all cosmological antinomies (‘cosmological’ is here taken in the sense of our all-sided basic Idea of the cosmos, and not in the Kantian sense of the word).

Not before our analysis of the modal structures of the law-spheres can it be explained how immanence-philosophy is seemingly able to find a point of contact in these very structures for its theoretical violation of the boundaries between the modal aspects, from which the specific antinomies originate.

Antinomy plays havoc with the immanence-standpoint, affecting it in its very root, viz. in its dialectical religious basic motive. In the last instance it is due to the turning away of meaning from its true Origin, and to the emancipation of theoretical thought from the cosmic order of time in which the coherence of meaning is founded.

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The method of antinomy tries to bring to light the consequences of this apostasy for theoretic thought. It is therefore pre-eminently a method of immanent criticism, because it tries to penetrate into other systems of philosophy along the lines of their own cosmonomic Idea. That is to say this method starts from their own pre-suppositions, and so lays bare the origin of the antinomy that has been brought to light.

The method of antinomy should consequently not be used exclusively from the viewpoint of the Christian cosmonomic Idea. As a method of criticism of immanence-philosophy it should enter into the transcendental basic Idea that forms the foundation of the system whose inner antinomies are to be discovered.

The analytical criterion of a modal law-sphere.

The method of antinomy is, however, not only useful in the discussion with immanence-philosophy. As a critical method it is still more important in the positive development of our own philosophic thought.

On the basis of our transcendental Idea of the cosmic time-order this method postulates analytical purity in concept-formation, and thereby requires an analytical criterion for distinguishing the modalities of meaning.

This analytical criterion has no more than a dependent function in the theory of the law-spheres. It wards off impure analyses of meaning, and especially has the task to guard against any method which results in levelling the specific modal aspects by means of concepts that are supposed to possess generic universality of meaning (the method of finding a genus proximum and the differentia specifica).

The analytic impurity of such pseudo-generic and pseudo-specific concepts is to be demonstrated by showing their multiplicity of meanings. The concrete importance of this logical criterion cannot appear until we are acquainted with the method of analyzing the modal structures of the aspects. In the present context we are only concerned with the value of the method of antinomy with respect to the discovery of the material (synthetical) criterion of a modal law-sphere. Here this method acquires an heuristic function. If we are in doubt whether the fundamental concepts of jurisprudence, economics, historical science, and so on, are related to specific modal aspects of human experience and empirical reality, we may try to reduce them to the fun-

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damental concepts of other sciences whose modal fields of research have already been defined. When this attempt leads to specific insoluble antinomies, a negative proof has been given of a theoretical violation of the modal boundaries between irreducible law-spheres.

By applying this method to legal theory I was able to establish that the fundamental juridical concepts of causality, volition, power, interpretation etc. must have an irreducible modal juridical sense, since they do not permit themselves to be reduced to analogical concepts of other sciences without involving juridical thought in antinomies. But, because they are also used in other sciences - a state of affairs which refers to the inter-modal coherence of meaning between the different aspects - it is necessary to seek for the orginal juridical meaning-moment which alone can guarantee them their modal juridical sense. Here we are confronted with the modal structures of the aspects, which will be examined later on.

§ 6 - The cosmic temporal order in the succession of the law-spheres. Substratum-spheres and superstratum-spheres.

The modal structures of the law-spheres, as to their law-side and their subject-side, exhibit an order of increasing complication in accordance with the order of succession of the spheres in the temporal coherence of meaning.

Since Descartes the Humanistic science-ideal has assumed that there is a logically continuous order of the sciences investigating the different aspects of empirical reality. This order is supposedly determined by the increasing complication of one and the same method of thinking. In the terms of the neo-Kantian Marburg School this order is created by a logical process from which new categories of thought continually derive.

Immanence-philosophy has never posed the problem of a cosmic order of succession of modal law-spheres, with their specific sphere-sovereignty, intersecting the whole of temporal reality, its pre-logical aspects as well as its normative functions. And immanence-philosophy never could raise this problem, because it proclaimed philosophic thought to be self-sufficient, thereby necessarily eliminating the temporal order and inter-modal coherence of the law-spheres. This explains the unmethodical character especially of its treatment of the coherence between the normative aspects of reality.

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If our cosmonomic Idea really supplies a reliable νμόϑεσις for philosophic thought, the Idea of the meaning-coherence in the cosmic order must also be an Idea of the temporal order of succession of the modal law-spheres. It may then be asked what is the exact position of each of the latter in this temporal arrangement of aspects. Naturally, ‘position’, in this case does not refer to any spatial relation, but it means the relation to the cosmic order of time.

We have seen that the meaning-modalities of the law-spheres cannot be identified with ‘categories of thought’ in the sense of Kantian or neo-Kantian epistemology. Since we have rejected any such identification, the problem of the analysis of the modal structures of meaning of the different aspects and their subsequent synthesis has become the problem of their analysis from the fulness of their temporal coherence of meaning.

Our transcendental basic Idea does not allow of any arbitrary theoretical delimitation of these modal aspects. This implies the necessity of finding a new method of concept-formation, since the current methods neglect the modal meaning-structures.

When, for instance, did immanence-philosophy ever attempt to find the modal meaning of the juridical sphere by analyzing it from the cosmic coherence between all the modal aspects of experience, including the pre-logical modalities? When has this ever been done in earnest in the case of the modal meaning of the logical sphere, or the aesthetic, the historical, the moral sphere, or that of faith?

Because of the very nature of its philosophical basic denominator for the comparison of the different modal aspects immanence-philosophy was incapacitated to pose the problem correctly. We refer to the disturbing influence on the formation of concepts exercised by the form-matter scheme, or by the disruption of the integral empirical reality into a noumenon and a phenomenon, and by the reduction of this reality to a merely ‘physico-psychical’ world.

Our hypothesis maintains the unbreakable inter-modal coherence of meaning between all experiential aspects. It implies the following methodical rules: The modal meaning-aspects of reality, enclosed in law-spheres, are not scattered about arbitrarily in a sort of chaotic disorder. On the contrary, they are arranged in the order of cosmic time, in a cosmic succession of prior and posterior. And this order of succession must be detec-

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ted by a careful examination of the functional-modal structures of the law-spheres themselves.

The philosophy of the cosmonomic Idea does not proclaim this hypothesis as a gratuitous assertion, - a charge made by the Dutch philosopher J.P. van Mullem in his neo-Kantian period, before he penetrated to the quintessence of this philosophy¹. On the contrary, it is essential for this philosophy to account for the ‘place’ of each modal law-sphere by an exact analysis of its structure. It must, however, be borne in mind that we are not concerned with a certain ‘arrangement of the classes of knowledge’ in the sense intended by the above-mentioned writer, and as it occurs in the writings of the neo-Kantian Görland². Our real aim is much rather to show how one sphere is founded on the other according to their modal structure of meaning in the cosmic temporal order³.

The earlier modal spheres are the foundation of all the later modal aspects in an irreversible coherence of meaning. In the future this cosmic temporal relationship will be designated in such a way that the spheres forming the foundation of a certain modal aspect are called the substratum-spheres of the latter, and

1 Analogon des Levens. Annalen der critische phil. 2 (1932) 1 p. 131/2. Dr. van Mullem acknowledged his fundamental misunderstanding of the theory of the law-spheres in an ample correspondence and he has presented a remarkable elaboration of this theory, projected by himself.

2 Görland, Prologik, p. 347, where this writer argues that ‘with increasing clarity and conciseness a certain order of succession has been created among the special sciences, which as a rule cannot be arbitrarily changed.’ [‘mit wachsender Deutlichkeit und Bündigkeit sich eine Reihenfolge unter spezifischen Wissenschaften sich herausgebildet hat, die allgemein sich nicht beliebig ändern läszt’].

3 This is also the cardinal point of difference between the theory of the modal law-spheres and the theory of the ‘spheres of being’ developed by Nicolai Hartmann after the publication of my first Dutch trilogy. The ‘ontological categories’ of Hartmann have nothing to do with the essential ‘modal structures of meaning’. The latter pre-suppose the integral temporal coherence of meaning between all the modal aspects of empirical reality. Hartmann's ‘spheres of being’ are not conceived of as modal aspects of meaning. His dichotomy between material being and ideal being (geistiges Sein) is ruled by the dualistic cosmonomic Idea of Humanist thought. And so is his ‘Ethics’, conceived of as ‘materielle Wertphilosophie’. This may suffice to refute the really surprising thesis of D. Jellema, Ph.D. of the University of West Virginia, according to which the theory of the modal spheres is an accommodation of Hartmann's ‘Schichtentheorie’ to the Christian standpoint. (Cf. his article Dooyeweerd and Hartmann in Calvin Forum, May 1954).

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those which appear to have a later place in the cosmic order of time are indicated as its superstratum-spheres.

The two terminal spheres.

There must, however, be two terminal spheres in the cosmic order. The first has no modal substratum and the second has no superstratum. When distinguishing substratum-spheres from superstratum-spheres, we follow the cosmic order of time only in one definite direction (i.e. starting from the first terminal sphere of our cosmos). This reveals to us that the relationship between the foundation and its superstructure is essential in the inter-modal coherence of the modal structures of meaning. For the present it will be assumed that this relationship is irreversible. Later on the correctness of this hypothesis will be shown in detail. It should not be forgotten, however, that our Idea of cosmic time must point in the transcendental direction towards the selfhood that transcends time. Otherwise we run the risk of apostasy from the fulness of meaning.

The Scriptural conception of order in creation.

The Scriptures reveal God's act of creation. In their statement of this basic truth, which transcends all theoretical thought, they do not primarily appeal to certain temporal cognitive functions of man, but to ourselves in the religious root of our existence. They do not use theoretical scientific concepts, but by means of their central basic motive they appeal to the heart of man in the language of naïve experience.

And then they impress two things in our minds: man does not make his appearance in time until the whole foundation for the normative functions of temporal reality has been laid in the creation; and at the same time: in man the whole ‘earthly’ temporal cosmos finds its religious root, its creaturely fulness of meaning. Adam's fall into sin is the fall into sin of the whole ‘earthly’ world, which is not independent of the religious basic relation between God and the human race (in any of its temporal functions).

For that very reason the metaphysical conception of a natural reality in itself, independent of man, is un-biblical. The religious basic motives which gave rise to it, are incompatible with the Biblical one.

When, from the Thomistic metaphysical standpoint, ‘natural reality in itself’ is related to God as its ultimate cause and

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end, it is forgotten that God has created the earthly cosmos in central relation to mankind and that, according to Holy Scripture, He does not look upon this cosmos apart from the heart of man.

And when this metaphysics ascribes ‘objective’ qualities of a sensory, logical, aesthetic and ethical character to natural things in themselves, it is forgotten that these ‘objective’ functions have meaning only in the subject-object relations of human experience; and the subjective functions of this experience cannot be ascribed to God, but are focussed in the human ego as their religious centre. In other words, the transcendental Idea of the Origin implies a transcendental Idea of the human ego as the religious centre of the empirical world.

The relation existing between the law-spheres, indicated here as the relation between foundation and superstructure, is not explicitely mentioned by Divine Revelation, because this Revelation does not set forth a philosophical theory about the temporal structures, but aims at the religious pre-suppositions of the latter. Since these pre-suppositions determine the contents of the cosmonomic Idea, the Idea of Creation in its Biblical sense keeps guiding our philosophic thought, when in theoretical knowledge we try to penetrate to the modal structures of meaning.

According to the temporal relationship between foundation and superstructure in the cosmic world-order, man is not there before the things of inorganic nature. But, viewed from the supertemporal creaturely root of the earthly world¹, this inorganic nature, just as the vegetable kingdom and the animal kingdom, has no existence apart from man, and man has been created as the lord of the creation.

1 This is what in Genesis I is called the ‘earth’ in its contradistinction to the ‘Heavens’, viz. the temporal world concentrated in man.

The foundational and the transcendental direction in the cosmic order of time.

But then it must also be possible to follow the cosmic order of time in the reverse direction, and to approximate the coherence of meaning of the modal law-spheres by starting from the second terminal sphere, which we shall come to know as the sphere of faith. This reverse temporal direction cannot change the relationship between substratum and superstratum, but it is directed towards the religious root of our cosmos, in which the selfhood

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participates in its transcendence beyond cosmic time. Under the guidance of the Idea of the totality of meaning philosophic thought is turned in a truly transcendental direction when it is recognized that the modal structure of the temporal modal spheres necessarily points to the religious fulness of meaning. This transcendental direction will appear when philosophical reflection starts from the second terminal aspect of our cosmos, and follows the modal spheres in the reverse order. It is the religious fulness of meaning that forms the foundation of all its modal refractions in cosmic time. If this Idea of the totality of meaning is to be actually maintained in philosophic thought, there must be a strict correlation between the two different directions of time, which for the present will be called the foundational and the transcendental directions. It is only the Biblical religious basic motive that gives the view of time the ultimate direction to the true fulness of meaning intended by our cosmonomic Idea. But we have not yet arrived at theoretical knowledge of the temporal order in the modal structures of meaning. We have done no more than giving our thought its ὑπόϑεσις by means of the cosmonomic Idea in subjection to Divine Revelation.

Only in the theoretical analysis of the modal structures of meaning can it appear what scientific consequences are implied in the preliminary conception of our transcendental Idea of time as the Idea of the cosmic order of succession of the modal law-spheres.