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

[p. 331]

Chapter IV
The universality of the aspects within their own spheres and the intermodal disharmony in the process of disclosure on the law-side of the law-spheres.

§ 1 - The universality of the modal aspects within their own spheres

The sphere-sovereignty of the modal aspects of reality has its counterpart in the universality of each aspect within its own sphere.

The term ‘sphere-universality’ is intended to signify that the modal meaning-structure in each aspect gives expression to the entire coherence of meaning of all the law-spheres.

This is made possible by the retrocipations and anticipations in each meaning-modus. Immanence philosophy could not help misinterpreting this state of affairs, because of its failure to grasp this universality in relation to the modal sphere-sovereignty.

Why the different attempts at absolutizing seem to be acceptable.

The universality of each modal aspect within its own sphere may also explain the apparent success of the various absolutizations in immanence philosophy.

David Hume, e.g., resolves the whole of given reality in impressions of feeling, or ‘perceptions’. He calls out: ‘Let us chase our imagination to the heavens, or to the utmost limits of the universe; we never... can conceive any kind of existence, but those perceptions... This is the universe of the imagination’¹ (Italics are mine). In this exclamation we distinctly hear his conviction that he has discovered an undeniable state of affairs.

1 A Treatise of Human Nature I, Part II, Sect. VI.

[p. 332]

And indeed, whatever the critical transcendental philosophy might have to say against Hume, the thesis that in ‘feeling’ the universe expresses itself in the whole of the cosmic meaning-coherence is irrefutable. The analysis of the meaning-structure of the law-sphere of feeling in the retrocipatory and in the anticipatory direction of time confirms the universality of this meaning-modus in every respect.

This structural analysis of the psychical modality does full justice to the kernel of truth in Hume's psychologistic conception. At the same time it lays bare the fundamental error of his psychologistic absolutization, whereas the Kantian epistemological criticism touches the root of this absolutization so little that it becomes itself guilty of absolutizing the transcendental-logical structure of thought.

The universality of the modal meaning of feeling implies that the psychical law-sphere is not self-sufficient. This universality is only possible as a modal universality of the aspect within its own sphere. Its absolutization is equal to its theoretical cancellation.

Therefore, Hume's epistemological psychologism destroys itself if it is consistently thought out. The epistemological thesis that the whole universe is given us only in psychic ‘perceptions’ cannot be correct. For nothing is given in theoretical abstraction.

The modal meaning of feeling itself cannot be given ‘an sich’ (in itself), i.e. apart from the cosmic meaning-coherence in which it can function only as psychical modus.

Psychologism may try to escape from the force of this argument by answering that here we are exclusively concerned with the problem whether or not we can be aware of anything outside our impressions of feeling. But the opinion that we are at least only conscious of our psychical perceptions, is equal to the denial of any possibility of being conscious of anything. This view results in a radical kind of epistemological nihilism. Being conscious of one's impressions of feeling implies the self-consciousness of the whole of the cosmic meaning-coherence. In this coherence, feeling only exists as a modal meaning-function that lacks self-sufficiency.

The appeal to a supposed absolute subjective pole of thought in the transcendental cogito cannot hit the heart of psychologism. In the Prolegomena we have disclosed the speculative trap in the conception of the self-sufficiency of the transcendental-

[p. 333]

logical function of thought. At bottom this self-sufficiency is open to the same criticism as the psychologistic view. A genuinely transcendental epistemological criticism necessarily reveals the self-insufficiency of the transcendental-logical function of thinking, both in theoretical self-reflection and with regard to the temporal intermodal coherence between the experiential aspects. This coherence only makes transcendental logical thought possible.

The really radical criticism of the conception of the ‘Unbedingtheit’ (the being unconditioned) of transcendental logical thought is the analysis of the structure of its universality of meaning within its own sphere. Such an analysis also explains the seeming plausibility of the transcendental-logicistic conception. But more about this later on.

In the same way we can show the fundamental error of historism, aestheticism, mathematicism, biologism, etc., viz. by a structural analysis of the universality of each of the law-spheres absolutized by them.

The Divine irony in the history of apostate philosophy.

The universality of each of the law-spheres within its own boundaries can only be seen in its true structure from the Christian transcendence-standpoint.

Immanence-philosophy continually goes astray, because in its Archimedean point lurks a primary absolutization of meaning. This absolutization is due to a misinterpretation of the universality of each law-sphere within its own limits. There is a Divine irony in the development of apostate philosophy, since the temporal world-order at first seems to justify every kind of theoretical absolutization in an equal measure. When viewed from the immanence-standpoint, is not historism as convincing as a logicistic or a psychologistical interpretation of empirical reality? Is not it an indisputable fact that in theoretical thought as well as in the life of human feeling is revealed the prevailing tendency of a special period of history? Is it not true that Hume's psychologism as well as Kant's transcendental philosophy bear the stamp of modern western culture? Hume asserts that the universe is given to us only in psychical impressions. Wherever we direct our gaze we are supposed to find nothing but ‘perceptions’. But cannot this music be transposed with equal justice into the key of the historical aspect?

Hume thinks he can start from some permanent uniformity

[p. 334]

of human nature. He places his epistemology outside the current of historical development. Is this not a false dogmatism when confronted with the indisputable universality of the course of historical development?

Indeed, historism cannot be dethroned solely with formally-logical arguments, no more than transcendental psychologism will capitulate to a logicistical transcendental philosophy.

Only the insight into the universality of the historical aspect within its own sphere reveals the fundamental error of historism and the grounds for its seeming plausibility.

The cosmic order passes an internal judgment on the theoretical absolutizations of immanence-philosophy, which invariably result in internal antinomies. We cannot interpret the Divine order on the basis of a self-sufficient and autonomous reason. Apart from the Divine Word-revelation, this order maintains the unfathomable silence of the Sphinx.

So long as πίστις remains closed to this Word-revelation, theoretical thought remains under the ban of mythology. The Divine world-order begins to appeal to us only when our heart and our function of faith are open to the voice of God's Word. Then we become aware of the religious foundation of that wonderful universality of each of the modal aspects. For only in the disclosed insight into this profound state of affairs does the Christian see the true connection between temporal reality and the Christian religion in the theoretical cognitive attitude.

In the pre-theoretic attitude of thought he ought to experience this relation immediately in faith apart from any theory. Anyone who, as a Christian thinker, has seen through the modal sphere-universality, cannot fall back into the nominalistic dualism between believing and thinking, and between ‘nature’ and ‘grace’. Every dualism of this kind makes the temporal modal functions self-sufficient with regard to their religious root. But there is nothing in time that can be set apart and by itself. The Idea of the universality of each aspect within its own sphere should be related to the process of disclosure in the temporal cosmic meaning-coherence in order to reveal its full import.

The new problem: The intermodal disharmony in the opening-process.

But at this very point Christian philosophy is once again confronted with the problem concerning the influence of sin on this process. If it were permissible for a Christian to choose a

[p. 335]

purely eschatological standpoint with regard to our sinful cosmos, the Idea of universal meaning-disclosure would no longer hide any internal tensions and antitheses.

The Idea of the fulfilment of meaning in Christ undoubtedly implies that in the specific universality of each law-sphere the opening-process gives temporal expression to the full religious abundance of God's creation both on its law- and its subject-side. In this world, however, this sphere-universality cannot unfold itself perfectly in accordance with the guidance of the religious fulness of meaning. The development is affected by sin, otherwise the refraction of the fulness of meaning in time would nowhere be experienced as disharmony. If there were no sin, the harmony among the law-spheres would be fully realized, just as in a perfect work of art. In such a work the ‘natural’ sides of the material are subjected to the guidance of the aesthetic structural function to such a degree that they no longer obtrude themselves as a disconcerting resistance. In their individual deepening of meaning and ‘spiritualization’, they are a pure expression of the artist's conception. Reality is, alas, different. The deification of the temporal meaning-aspects of the cosmos in apostate faith, expanded to free striving leadership, causes a fundamental disharmony in the opening-process.

In the previous chapter this disharmony was only considered in its modal historical sense. But we have now to examine it in the intermodal coherence of the different aspects of the process of meaning-disclosure.

If apostate faith gains the functional guidance in the opening-process, the subjection of the latter to the Divine world-order is not thereby cancelled. The Creator of Heaven and Earth maintains the functional-structural law-conformity in the disclosure of the temporal modal aspects against any human arbitrariness. If the Divine order in the temporal cosmos were not kept intact and elevated above any kind of human ὕβϱις, the manifestation of sin in time would not even be possible. For the whole of temporal reality would then burst like a soap-bubble. Does this mean that the effect of sin leaves the law-side of the creation entirely unaffected, and can only manifest itself on the side of the subject?

But such a view would be at variance with the structure of the cosmic order analysed in an earlier part of this work. For in all the normative law-spheres the νόμος has been laid down only in the form of a principle. These Divine ‘principia’

[p. 336]

have been left to human formation and positivizing in accordance with the modal structure of the law-spheres.

In the opening-process of the normative anticipatory spheres even the laws of the pre-logical aspects require this human intervention for their deepening of meaning. From the point of view of the structure of the temporal cosmos we can state that the disharmony in consequence of sin must necessarily also manifest itself on the law-side in the work of human formation and positivizing.

In this human interference the Divine structural principles are doubtless maintained and saved from human arbitrariness. Even the most impious law-maker or former of history can only form law or culture by the formation and positivizing of super-arbitrary principles founded in the order of creation¹. The formal abolishing of paternal authority by the first wave of the French Revolution was one of the many ‘paper decrees’ which, as an expression of human ὕβϱις, were swept away by what is very inadequately termed the logic of the facts. By setting aside the normative principles of law, morality or culture human arbitrariness can create a social chaos; it cannot create juridical, moral or historical norms in this way.

The human work of formation remains unshakably bound to the Divine structural principles of the normative law-spheres. But in this very work of formation and positivation the process of opening of the temporal meaning on the law-side cannot be carried out harmoniously, when in apostasy it has lost its direction to the religious fulness of meaning. Disharmony on the law-side is then inevitable, because the opening-process invariably moves in the direction of the absolutizing of certain meaning-moments.

It would be an illusion to think that this disharmony would not appear if the work of formation and positivation were only in the hands of Christians. For on the one hand, a Christian remains a thoroughly sinful creature, no better in himself than others. And on the other hand, the Christian former is bound to the history of mankind as a whole. In keeping with the entire structure of the Divine world-order, he cannot escape his historical position in a society in which the power of the civitas terrena is clearly revealed.

1 These principles are to be sharply distinguished from the subjective principles of political parties.

[p. 337]

Within the opening-process of temporal meaning the position of genuine Christianity is one of restless struggle. In its temporary defeats and victories Christianity bears witness to the sinful broken state of its existence and that of the entire earthly creation; its position is only justified through faith in Christ. In Him the struggle for historical power in the opening-process may become a temporal blessing for a corrupted and broken world. The Christian Idea of the opening-process, guided by the faith in Christ as the Redeemer, cannot detach itself from sinful reality in an idealistic optimism. This Idea would then become false and worthless to temporal life. It must rather remain broken in character, in spite of its direction to the Root of reborn humanity, to Christ Jesus and to the Sovereign Creator, Who is willing to be our Father in Him. Only in its eschatological expectation of the ultimate full revelation of the Kingdom of God can Christian belief rise above this broken state without losing its relation to the sinful cosmos. For the same reason the Idea of the universality of each of the aspects within its own sphere cannot be conceived in a purely eschatological sense; it should also be related to our sinful cosmos.

This Idea retains its normative transcendental direction to the consummation of meaning in Christ. But at the same time it should give us an insight into the disharmony that the process of disclosure shows in apostasy. Only in this way can we arrive at a satisfying conception of the Christian Idea of cultural development.

Attention should first be directed to the disharmony in the opening of meaning on the law-side of the normative aspects due to apostate faith. This theme can only be treated in an exemplifying way. Our examination will restrict itself to an analysis of the influence of faith in the mathematical Humanistic science-ideal upon the opening-process in the different spheres. It stands to reason that this influence could not fail primarily to reveal itself in the domain of science.

§ 2 - The guidance of the faith in the humanistic science-ideal in its mathematical conception as an impediment to the full disclosure of the idea of sphere-universality

The Idea of ‘mathesis universalis’, propagandized since Desartes, has had an enormous historical influence. In its conception of the universal significance of mathematics Humanistic thought was led by faith in the mathematical science-ideal.

[p. 338]

This Idea led Leibniz to the discovery of the differential and integral calculus, without which the enormous development of physics in the period immediately following would have been inconceivable. In its philosophical sense the Idea took a false direction, and because of the deification and logicizing of mathematical thought it showed a tendency to obliterate the modal boundaries between the law-spheres. But it is undeniable that, notwithstanding all this, it has considerably deepened the meaning of mathematical thought. The reason is that this Idea, though turned in a false direction by the subjective πίστις, was not a merely arbitrary creation of thought. It was determined on the law-side by the Divine world-order, in which the modal universality within their own spheres of the mathematical aspects and that of logical analysis is founded. But for this point of contact in the modal sphere-universality the logicistic Idea of ‘mathesis universalis’ would have never arisen, or it would have remained a phantasm, without any perspective of fruitful theoretical application.

The Idea of the mathesis universalis could only be fruitful insofar as the thinkers, guided by it, followed the anticipatory spheres of the modal aspects of number, space and movement. In the differential and integral calculus this was really the case. Disclosed mathematical thought directed itself to the internal anticipatory coherence that was to be revealed in the modal aspects mentioned under the guidance of deepened theoretical analysis.

The internal rigidity in the Idea of the mathesis universalis due to the misinterpretation of the universality of the aspects in their own spheres.

But at the same time there arose an internal rigidity in the disclosure of mathematical thought. This increasing rigidity was caused by the apostate direction of the Idea of the mathesis universalis. The rationalistic science-ideal was from the outset orientated to mathematical physics. In the logicizing of the modal aspects of number, space and movement, mathematics orientated to physics was in reality taken as the basis. This was also done in the attempt to approximate justice, morality and beauty by mathematical methods.

Leibniz, as has appeared in Part II of the first Volume, sought to construe even the world-order as a metaphysical-mathematical lex continui. This construction was oriented to the model of the

[p. 339]

infinitesimal calculus that was essentially bound to the analysis of a spatial or moving continuum. As a consequence, the unfolding of the insight into the true universality of the meaning of number, space, and movement within their own spheres was doomed to remain checked in the Humanist Idea of the mathesis universalis. Scientific thought, insofar as it followed the mathematical science-ideal, was not really free to conceive the transcendental Idea of the mathesis universalis in the sense of modal sphere-universality. The dogmatic faith in the sovereignty of mechanistically directed mathematical thought was bound to put arbitrary limits to the latter. It gave rise to the opinion that at this stage mathematics had reached its nec plus ultra.

This internal rigidity in the mathematical Idea is openly expressed in the period of the Enlightenment.

Diderot, for example, in his book De l'interprétation de la Nature (1759) makes the following statement: ‘I venture the thesis that, before a hundred years have elapsed, there will not be three great mathematicians left in Europe. This science has reached its acme, and it will remain essentially at the level to which Euler and Bernouilli, d'Alembert and Lagrange have raised it. They have established the pillars of Hercules above which nobody will rise.’

It is true that the development of mathematics in a comparatively short time exceeded the limits put to it by Diderot. But its prevailing typically logicistical direction does not offer any perspective for a genuine theoretical disclosure of the universality of the mathematical meaning-modi within their own sphere.

Mathematical thought is isolating itself to an increasing degree within the boundaries of relational logic. As ‘pure mathematics’ it seemingly scorns any orientation to the inter-modal meaning-coherence between the mathematical and the non-mathematical aspects. And it cannot be denied that logicism has achieved, and is still achieving, very great things. There is a further systematical-logical and symbolical disclosure of the mathematical spheres of meaning, and a considerable expansion of the principle of the economy of thought in mathematics.

On the other hand the logicizing of mathematics has also led to the modern crisis in the foundations of mathematics. In addition, nothing has been done for a theoretical disclosure of the biotic and various later anticipatory spheres in the modal meaning of number, space, and movement. The logicistical interpretations falsify the meaning of the theoretical fields of inquiry.

[p. 340]

As soon as they try to follow the logical creative motive of the science-ideal not only seemingly, but actually, they land in speculative constructions whose inner antinomies resist any attempt at solution.

The ‘set-theory’ for instance which, in the footsteps of Cantor, has developed the pseudo-concept of the transfinite numbers in the theory of Alefs, has built the latter on a speculative-constructive basis. It has evoked the sharp protest of various prominent mathematicians¹. And this protest was not unjustified.

1 Cf. the judgment of the famous intuitionistic mathematician H. Weyl in his oration Die Stufen des Unendlichen (1931), p. 14: ‘But we can now hardly believe that behind Cantor's theories there is anything tangible...... The criticism by H. Poincaré, B. Russell, Brouwer, Skolem, and others, have everywhere made scientists aware of the untenable logical positions from which the set-theory has started.’ [‘Aber wir können heute kaum noch glauben, dass hinter diesen Cantorschen Theorien etwas Faszbares steckt...... Durch die Kritik von H. Poincaré, B. Russell, Brouwer, Skolem, u.a. sind allmählich die Augen darüber aufgegangen, von welchen unhaltbaren logischen Positionen die mengentheoretische Methode ausgegangen is.’]

The Humanistic Idea of the mathesis universalis and biology.

Is it too great a risk to say that in the modal meaning of number and in that of space there must exist a biotic anticipatory sphere, which has remained hidden from the classical Humanist Idea of mathesis universalis?

Permit me then to quote a pronouncement made by a prominent biologist, who has broken with the mechanistic conception of the modal field of his inquiry. In his oration: Die organische Wirklichkeit und ihre Ideologien, delivered on the 3rd of February 1933, the Hamburg Professor Dr Meyer made the following remarks about the relation between biology and mathematics: ‘On the basis of mechanics it is quite impossible to gain a satisfactory theory of what is organic. The latter always presupposes a mathematical control of biological phenomena on the foundation of its own specific laws. This work cannot be accomplished by biologists only. The mathematicians must render them assistance, since the specific mathematics required for mathematicizing biological laws does not yet exist at present. It will be procured in the progress of our work, just as modern physics has had to create the new mathematics it required, entirely on its own account’².

2 ‘Auf mechanisischem Boden kann somit niemals eine befriedigende Theorie des Organischen gewonnen werden. Sie hat stets eine mathematische Bewältigung der biologischen Erscheinungen auf eigengesetzlicher Grundlage zur Voraussetzung. Diese Arbeit kann nicht nur von den Biologen geleistet werden, die Mathematiker müssen dabei helfen; denn die für die Mathematisierung der biologischen Gesetze erforderliche Mathematik existiert heute noch nicht. Sie wird ebenso im Verfolg unserer Arbeit geschaffen werden müssen, wie die moderne Physik sich die neue Mathematik, die sie brauchte allmählich selbst hat schaffen müssen.’
This report has been included in the ‘Jaarboekje van de Groningsche Natuurphil. fac. vereen.’ 26th year, 1933, p. 39.

[p. 341]

Meyer and Haldane, both representatives of the so-called holistic trend in biology, have tried to project such a biological mathesis. I am not competent to judge these projects critically. It seems that on the part of mathematicians they have met with little interest. But the attempt in itself is doubtless interesting from the viewpoint of the biotical anticipations in the mathematical aspects.

Biology should realize that physical methods of inquiry can only be sufficient for the investigation of the physical substratum of the organic-biotic aspect of reality. It will then with increasing emphasis insist on the desirability of a mathematics of specifically biological orientation.

The influence of the old mathematical-mechanistic science-ideal still prevents this insight from meeting with general recognition. From the standpoint of the so-called ‘pure mathematics’ it will be objected that the latter in any case can have nothing to do with such an as yet problematic kind of mathesis. Its task does not lie in the field of so-called ‘applied’ mathematics. But in this objection a fundamental misconception is expressed. It may be asked, how it was possible for the differential and the integral calculus, for the non-Euclidean geometries, the modern systematic set-theory etc., to be applied fruitfully in macro-physics, although they originated in the so-called pure mathematics. And why do they not offer any possibilities for a successful application in the specific domain of biology? The answer has to be: because the so-called ‘pure mathematics’ has been walled in under the guidance of the rationalistic-natural-scientific Idea of the mathesis universalis. It has been imprisoned in an absolutization and logicistic reduction of the mechanical, logical and symbolical anticipatory spheres in the modal meaning of number, space, and movement. It was even

[p. 342]

unable to provide quantum-mechanics with an adequate concept of space. Its logicistic constructions of the mathematical continua did not fit to the micro-dimensions of energy, no more than the differential- and integral calculus.

Doubtless, pure mathematics may not be required to enter the field of the experimental sciences. But the demand may indeed be made that it shall not cause the Idea of mathesis universalis to become rigid in a mechanistic logicism.

The Idea of modal sphere-universality does not lead to an obliteration of the boundaries between pure and applied mathematics. But it may stimulate mathematical thought to seek for new methods which can do justice to the anticipatory spheres of the mathematical modi in their rich diversity.

The Humanistic Idea of mathesis universalis and the social and juridical anticipatory spheres of the mathematical aspects.

There can also be no question of any real disclosure of the social and juridical anticipatory spheres in the modal mathematical aspects, so long as scientific thought remains under the guidance of the rationalistic-Humanistic Idea of the mathesis universalis. The Humanistic doctrine of natural law started with the postulate of dealing with the jural sphere ‘more geometrico’. It was tied down to an atomistic-mechanistic way of thought. As a result it could only construct the state and the other communities of human society according to a mechanistic mathematical schematism. The method started from a multiciplity of unconnected, atomistically constructed individuals in a hypothetical state of nature. Then came the mechanistic-mathematical construction of the civil state, as the totality of these individuals, instituted by means of contracts. This entire system of thought remains a document of the internal rigidity of the Idea of the mathesis universalis as it developed under the guidance of the naturalistic Humanistic science-ideal.

In recent times there have not yet been any symptoms of the mathesis universalis developing in a direction that would really be fruitful for juridical thought.

What Husserl's ‘reine Mannigfaltigkeitslehre’ has yielded for juridical theory, e.g. in the phenomenological ‘pure theory of law’ advanced by Fritz Schreier¹, does not exceed a barren kind of eidetic juridical logic. The latter is supposed to deter-

1 Fritz Schreier, Grundbegriffe und Grundformen des Rechts (Wiener staatswissensch. Studien Neue Folge, Bnd. IV, 1924. Cf. his statement, p. 33: ‘The juridical norm is an exact law, it is not on a level with the laws of physics but with those of mathematics.’ [‘Die Rechtsnorm ist ein exaktes Gesetz, sie steht nicht auf einer Stufe mit den Gesetzen der Naturwissenschaft, sondern mit den Gesetzen der Mathematik.’]

[p. 343]

mine the extent of formal possibilities lying at the foundation of any legislation. This is done by explaining the formal structure of every positive legal norm² whose fundamental conceptual elements are designed by letter-symbols. In this way four fundamental legal concepts are detected which are nothing but an arbitrary complex of analogical notions lacking any modal juridical determination. For the modal meaning-structure of the juridical aspect as such has been eliminated for the sake of turning pure legal theory into a branch of mathesis universalis. In accordance with Kelsen the positive legal norm is conceived as a logical proposition!

This entire trend of thought has taken over as a ‘Leitmotiv’ (leading motive) the pronouncement made by Hermann Cohen, the founder of the Marburg School of neo-Kantianism: legal theory is the mathematics of the social-cultural sciences (Mathematik der Geisteswissenschaften).

This sufficiently shows how little they have penetrated to the complicated problem regarding the inter-modal meaning-coherence between the mathematical and the juridical law-spheres. The reason why this is fatal to juridical thought is that legal theory can in no way do without the use of mathematical analogies. The lack of insight into the meaning-coherence between these analogies and the social and juridical anticipatory spheres of the mathematical aspects has led to fundamental errors in the juridical conception of social relations, in that of the legal person, the juridical object³, subjective right etc.

The individualistic juridical theory that has asserted itself in

2 This formal structure is circumscribed as follows: ‘Wenn der Tatbestand vorliegt, soll die Person bei Sanktion die Leistung erbringen’ (op. cit., p. 70). [The facts of the case being present, the person concerned ought to pay his debt under guarantee of a sanction.]
I refer to the critical analysis of Schreier's theory in my book De Beteekenis der Wetsidee voor Rechtswetenschap en Rechtsphilosophie (1926 publ. by J.H. Kok, Kampen), p. 69 ff.

3 In the same way the individualistic view of the rēs already led the Roman jurists into an impasse in cases where the multiplicity in the juridical subject-object-relations in which the same bodily rēs functions, had to be conceived. They started from the view that the rēs was entirely permeated by the subjective will of the subject which had full rights of property. Consequently, the jura in rē aliena could not but cause insurmountable difficulties to this individualistic conception of the juridical subject and the juridical object. The individualistic theory got into difficulties especially when the object of a jus in rē aliena is itself the object of another jus in rē. But of this in a later chapter.

[p. 344]

all these parts of legal doctrine was essentially based upon a mathematical-mechanistic way of thought.

And the so-called organological trend in the theory of corporations (Gierke c.s.) could only oppose a biologically oriented metaphysical view to this mechanistic-mathematical individualism. This school conceived the relation between the individual and the corporation in the schematism of the whole and its parts (in which the structural characteristics were levelled out). In the third Volume we hope to discuss this point in greater detail.

The Humanistic Idea of mathesis universalis in pure economics.

Doubtless, the mathematical science-ideal in its mechanistic orientation has had a seemingly convincing success in pure economics, especially in the theory of prices.

Economical theory owes it the first methodical reflection on the functional coherence of economic phenomena, and under its influence this theory has reached a high degree of systematical development. In monetary price, as an objective value-denominator, the numerical analogies of economic valuation and the economic anticipations of number present themselves in a pregnant way. And the mechanical analogies of price-movement and market equilibrium could not fail to give the mechanistic conceptions of pure economics a firm basis in the opinion of economists influenced by the classical Idea of mathesis universalis.

But on the other hand the one-sided mechanistic and logical orientation of this Idea has prevented pure economics from analyzing the very complicated structure of the mathematical and mechanical analogies in the economic aspect.

The modal boundaries between the relatively simple mechanical anticipations in the numerical, spatial, and kinematic aspects, on the one hand, and the extremely complicated kinematic and quantitative retrocipations in the economic law-sphere, on

[p. 345]

the other, were lost sight of. This resulted in a pseudo-natural scientific conception of theoretical economics which has caused fundamental antinomies in economic thought and a continuous tension between the ‘laws’ of pure theory and the factual side of the economic aspect. Though in our days these antinomies and tensions are clearly seen, especially since Eucken's famous analysis, mathematical theory proves to be able to express only a mechanistic view of the economic aspect, and no other.

This unsatisfactory state of affairs is only accentuated by qualifying pure theory as a logic of economic choosing. Here, too, the Humanistic Idea of mathesis universalis proves its rigidity, caused by its exclusive orientation to the classical mechanical mode of thought.

The rigidity in the aesthetic Idea under the guidance of the faith in the science-ideal. French classicism.

The Humanistic Idea of mathesis universalis, guided by the faith in the mathematical science-ideal, also imparted an internal rigidity to the aesthetic Idea of Humanism in the time of French classicism. We have never denied that the Idea of the mathesis universalis has caused Humanistic mathematical thought to develop enormously. Neither have we felt inclined to detract from Leibniz's genius as the discoverer of the differential and integral calculus. And there is not any need for us to agree with the opinion pronounced by Taine, who cannot see anything but impoverishment in the spirit of classicism. From the point of view of a critical conception of the history of the fine arts, this view is superficial to a high degree.

Even though it is necessary to gain an insight into the internal restraints put on the development of the aesthetic Idea under the guidance of the Humanistic science-ideal, one should beware of passing such an unhistorical judgment. The insight into the cosmic meaning-coherence between the aesthetic and the historical law-spheres should prevent us from doing so. The aesthetic aspect of a work of art has its historical analogy in the moment of its style. The great artists are shapers of style. And classicism is nothing but a typical style giving aesthetical expression to the prevailing spirit of a particular period of western culture. A style as such is not decisive with respect to the aesthetic value of an artistic creation. In every style works of genius may be produced and the period in which classicism developed historical power can also show them.

[p. 346]

But in the present context we are not treating of the artistic creations of classicism but its aesthetics, which gave theoretical expression to the style of classicism. It is the theoretical-aesthetic Idea, guided by the faith in the mathematical science-ideal whose internal rigidity we intend to demonstrate.

Descartes in his Regulae ad directionem ingenii had already extended the Idea of the mathesis universalis to music. The age-old conception of art as the imitation of nature, seemed to bridge the gulf between aesthetics and mathematical natural science. The basis of both nature and fine arts was sought in sovereign mathematical thought.

‘Les arts ont cela de commun avec les sciences,’ so Le Bossu in his Traité du poème épique (1675), ‘qu'ils sont comme eux fondés sur la raison, et que l'on doit s'y laisser conduire par les lumières que la nature nous a données’¹.

In Boileau's Art Poétique, published in 1774, the Idea of rationalistic classicism found its most representative expression, and the author was honoured as the ‘law-giver of Parnassus’.

I will follow Cassirer's² plan to show this aesthetic Idea from its strongest side, though indeed I see this strong side in a different light. In his Art Poétique Boileau wants to give a general theory of the various forms of poetry, just as the mathematician aims at a general theory of curves. In the differential quotient, the differential and integral calculus shows us with respect to a definite function the whole of the law of the possible variations in the curve belonging to it. This method requires the ὑπόϑεσις of the modal aspect of movement in the transcendental direction of time.

In the same way Boileau wanted to discover the aesthetic basic law which lies at the foundation of all special forms of poetry. This law was supposed to condition tragedy and comedy, elegy and epic, satire and epigramme, with their special laws of form.

Guided by the science-ideal, classicist aesthetics succeeded by analysis in penetrating to the functional character of aesthetic meaning.

1 Cf. Heinrich von Stein: Die Entstehung der neueren Asthetik (Stuttgart, 1886), pp. 25 ff. and 64 ff: [The fine arts have this in common with the sciences that they, just like the latter, are founded on reason, and that it is not allowed to let oneself be guided by anything else but by the lights that nature has given us.].

2 E. Cassirer: Die Philosophie der Aufklärung (1932), p. 384.

[p. 347]

It dïscovered the mathematical, logical and economical analogies in the modal aesthetic meaning-structure. It disclosed the aesthetic unity in multiplicity¹, and aesthetic economy. The latter requires the artist to abstain from ostentation, burlesque, and precocity in the style; it demands clear simplicity in the aesthetic content, frugality, manifesting itself in a careful selection of the means of expression.

Moreover, classicism discovered that the aesthetic meaning cannot be lodged in the psychical-emotional aspect of feeling. But it by no means denied that a work of art should also appeal to the imagination and to feeling. It did not conceive of the aesthetic aspect in the rigid primitive commitment to its substrata in nature, but in the transcendental direction of time, i.e. in a relative deepening of meaning. But, in spite of this relative deepening of aesthetic thought, the aesthetic Idea of classicism became rigid, guided as it was by the faith in the Humanistic science-ideal. As a result the modal aesthetic aspect was not conceived in its universality and specific sovereignty within its own sphere. It was seen as a specific expression of the logical-mathematical ‘ground of being’, supposedly differentiated in various ways in the psycho-physical aspects of nature and in the aesthetic modality.

In this sense the beauty of a poetic expression coalesces with its truth.

‘Rien n'est beau que le vrai, le vrai seul est aimable.
Il doit régner partout et même dans la fable:
De toute fiction l'adroite fausseté
Ne tend qu'à faire aux yeux briller la vérité’².

In the rationalistic-mathematical line of thought the individuality of a work of art changes into a subordinate function of aesthetic law-conformity. The individual internal structure of an artistic product is levelled out in a one-sided functionalistic-

1 Cassirer rightly points out (op. cit., 162 ff and 387) that the discovery of this mathematical analogy goes back on Leibniz who expounded it in great detail in his treatise Von der Weisheit.

2 [Nothing is beautiful but what is true; truth only is worth loving. It must reign everywhere, even in a fable. Of every fiction the dexterous untruth only tends to make verity shine forth.] Quoted by Cassirer, op. cit., p. 383.

[p. 348]

aesthetic way of thought. The artist's individuality is given some scope only in the form of his expression¹.

The mathematical and the economical analogies in the aesthetic meaning-structure are misinterpreted in that logicist-mathematical sense which gave so much offence to the ‘Storm and Stress’ and to Romanticism. And above all, the increasing rigidity in the aesthetic Idea of classicism appears when it tries to define the limits of art. These limits are not sought in the internal meaning of what is aesthetic, but in the adequacy of the linguistic expression of the aesthetic conception. If once a certain artistic form has achieved its individual expression in such a way that in it all other possible forms of expression as to truth, clarity, sobriety and pregnancy have been surpassed, then this artistic form has attained to a ‘non plus ultra’, to its absolute limit of perfection. Aesthetic economy is almost identified with linguistic and logical economy, and the aesthetic Idea is deprived of its modal sphere-universality.

This is brought out most clearly in the nominalistic conception of Condillac, who seeks the connection between artistic expression and science in their common relation to language.

Belles-lettres and science substitute signs for things, and they are only distinguished by the use they make of these signs. Scientific theory can signify one and the same object with the aid of different symbols. But one of these modes of expression will after all reach comparative perfection, because the state of things concerned will have been represented by it in the simplest formula.

‘The same “simplicity” is elevated to an ideal in classicist aesthetics: simplicity is held to be the corollary to genuine beauty, just as it is the corollary and the criterion of truth,’ Cassirer observes².

1 Cf. Gustave Lanson, Boileau (1892), pp. 131 ff. Cassirer tries to defend Boileau against the charge of having levelled the aesthetic individuality in favour of an abstract law-conformity. He apparently does not take offence at this restriction of the artist's originality to the form of expression only.

2 Op. cit., p. 390. We need not be surprised that Cassirer does not see the weakness of this theory in its principles but only in its elaboration. He has started from the mathematical science-ideal himself in his philosophical thought. ‘So paradox diese Behauptung auch erscheinen mag,’ he writes in this passage, ‘so lässt sich sagen, dass in dieser Hinsicht eine der wesentlichen Schwächen der klassizistischen Lehre nicht darin bestand, dass sie die Abstraktion zu weit getrieben, sondern viel mehr darin, dass sie sie nicht konsequent genug festgehalten hat.’ [Paradoxical as this view may seem, it may be said that the essential weaknes of the classicist doctrine is not that it went too far in its abstractions, but rather that it did not stick to them consistently enough.]
In what does this lack of consistency consist? In this, that classicist aesthetics clearly ‘slipped off from its scientific concept of the universal reason into the paths of a philosophy of ‘common sense’ which again and again based the ideal of reason on a ‘purely empirical criterion’.

[p. 349]

The rigidity in the Idea of development in the philosophy of history of the ‘Enlightenment’.

The Humanistic science-ideal, in the popular philosophy of the ‘Enlightenment’, underwent a shifting of accent during the eighteenth century. This made it possible for methodical theoretical investigation to turn to history too. It did so under the guidance of the faith in reason, which had shifted its point of gravitation in this sense. For the first time the philosophy of the Enlightenment formulated its philosophical Idea of historical development, which bore a perfectly secular stamp. It opposed this secular Idea of history to the Christian-Augustinian Idea of historical development that had prevailed up till that time. This secularized developmental Idea, mentioned already at an earlier stage of our investigation, will now be examined more closely in the light of the universality of the modal aspects, each in its own sphere. We shall point out the internal rigidity, bound to arise in the historical thought of the ‘Enlightenment’, because it was guided by the faith in the Humanistic science-ideal.

To recent investigations we owe wider and historically better-founded knowledge of the Enlightenment, supported by the documents, than was formerly possible under the influence of the haughty judgment passed on it by Romanticism.

While according full recognition to historical continuity, we have learned to pay attention to the difference between the 17th and the 18th centuries. In both the Humanistic science-ideal elevates ‘reason’ to the throne, but not in the same sense. We know now that the ‘Enlightenment’ of the 18th century cannot be accused of a lack of interest in history. In fact it broke new ground¹ for scientific historical research, on account of its

1 Dilthey's treatise: Das achtzehnte Jahrhundert und die geschichtliche Welt, first published in the Deutsche Rundschau of Aug. and Sept. 1901, now included in the Gesammelte Schriften, Bnd III (1927, pp. 209 ff, has paved the way for a better insight into the importance of the ‘Enlightenment’ for historical science. At present Cassirer may be mentioned with due respect.

[p. 350]

strongly ‘empirical-analytical’ spirit. We know that it was the genius of Newton and Locke, rather than that of Descartes which impressed the science-ideal of the time of the Enlightenment with its specific stamp. Nevertheless, in the opening-process during the supremacy of the culture of the Enlightenment, the faith in the sovereignty of natural scientific thought continued to prevail. The ‘Enlightenment’ saw this science-ideal embodied in Newton's Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica¹.

In consonance with this conception the philosophical Idea of historical development of the Enlightenment found its classical expression in Voltaire's Essai sur les moeurs et sur l'esprit des nations². It was the Idea of the steady progress of mankind through the evolution of scientific thought.

Reason is essentially uniform, super-temporal, and unchangeable. But in its ‘psychical’ shape, in its manifestation in human customs, morals and manners it passes through a historical process. In this it can only gradually shake off the burden of prejudices in tradition and ‘morality’. That's why history cannot be identified with the history of the states, a view still held by De Montesquieu. It should be conceived of as the history of ‘culture’ in the widest sense of the word. The meaning of history is the attaining to self-consciousness of ‘reason’ in overcoming all kinds of restraints caused by the prejudices of tradition³.

This eternal unchangeable human reason is the science-ideal, which, also in historiography, has to replace the theological-metaphysical search for final causes. Science has to explain historical phenomena from unalterable ‘empirical’ causes, which can be traced by means of psychological analysis.

The developmental Idea of the philosophy of history is thus shut off from the transcendental direction of time by the faith

1 Cf. Pope's lines:

‘Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night
God said: “Let Newton be” and all was light.’

2 The entire historical science of the Enlightenment followed in the path of Voltaire. In France, e.g., Turgot, Condorcet, Dupuis; in England, Robertson, Gibbon and Hume, while Bolingbroke's Letters on the Study and Use of History (1738) had been conceived in the same strain some time before them.

3 Cf. Cassirer's: Die Philosophie der Aufklärung, pp. 293 ff.

[p. 351]

in the self-sufficiency of natural scientific causal thought. The victory of the faith in reason of the Enlightenment is elevated to the ultimate phase of historical development.

The typical culture of the Enlightenment is the ‘non plus ultra’, above which history can never rise. This is the deeper ground of the fierce struggle that the ‘Aufklärung’ waged against the Christian interpretation of the meaning of history, which related the Idea of development to the kingdom of Christ in the consummation of times¹. It may be agreed that in this struggle the Enlightenment was partially in the right, when contrasted with a constructive theological view of history, such as that of Bossuet. In the conception of the latter the modal boundaries between theology and historical science were really not observed. The truth was ignored that the knowledge of faith can never function as a stop-gap, but only as a guide to scientific historical research. On the other hand, the view of history held by the Enlightenment had been infected by the naturalistic-rationalistic mentality. That's why, in spite of its admirable attempt at a genuine analysis of historical facts, it could not grasp the meaning of history in the temporal meaning-coherence.

A naturalistic concept of causality, used as a means to explain historical events from psychological causes, and misinterpreted in a rationalistic way, is useless in historical science.

It does not grasp the historical facts in their internal meaning; it is in conflict with the normative Idea of development applied in the historical thought of the Enlightenment itself. The basic antinomy between the ideal of science and that of personality was gnawing at the root of this view of history².

Cartesianism, with its a priori mathematical way of thought according to which true science can only consist in the tracing of eternal truths, was not at all able to form an Idea of historical development. In it historical development had to be considered as an accident, as a ‘phenomenon’ lacking rational sense. The Idea of the mathesis universalis in the absolutism of Descartes' mathematical science-ideal left room exclusively for exact mathematical thought. The Enlightenment could only rise above Descartes because its science-ideal was no longer oriented to deductive analytical geometry but to Newton's new physical

1 Ephesians 1, 10.

2 Cf. what Cassirer [op. cit., p. 335] says about the attempt undertaken by Voltaire in his Traité de Métaphysique (1734) to reconcile man's sense of liberty with the deterministic consequences of the science-ideal.

[p. 352]

method. For Newton had replaced the one-sided constructive method of mathematical thought in physics by a mathematical analysis of the physical functions of empirical reality. Instead of imposing arbitrary hypotheses on empirical reality, he had demanded the laws to be derived inductively from the physical phenomena themselves. Historical research should be subjected to the same rules of scientific exactness.

Psychological analysis, carried out according to the methods employed in natural science, was to be the organon of the science of history. This science was to be freed of any kind of theological and metaphysical speculation. And psychological analysis was introduced as a ‘pragmatic method’, representing the equivalent of the analytical mechanical method of physics.

Individuals became the elements of history. Social groups were supposed to be constituted by their conscious, systematic, calculating psychical interaction. This causal explanation, doing away with miracles as well as with Divine Providence, was confronted with an infinitely complicated network of human motives and forces. The need was felt to relate these complicated causal processes to a small number of invariable basic principles, found in the ideas of modern Humanistic natural law, ‘natural morality’, and ‘the natural faith of reason’, as a precipitation of the uniform rational human nature¹.

Any deviations from these invariable principles in history were explained as due to craftiness, tyranny, and cheating on the part of priests, or to stupidity and ignorance². And all progress in the development of civilization was ascribed to the gradual victory of the critical understanding over affects and prejudices.

1 Cf. Voltaire's statement in his Essai sur les moeurs, Chap. CXCVII, Oeuvres, XVIII, 425: ‘L'empire de la coutume est bien plus vaste que celui de la nature, il s'étend sur les moeurs, sur tous les usages, il répand la variété de la scène de l'univers; la nature y répand l'unité; elle établit partout un petit nombre de principes invariables; ainsi le fonds est partout le même, et la culture produit des fruits divers.’ [The realm of custom is very much vaster than that of nature; it extends over morals, over all usages; it creates variety in the scene of the universe. Nature creates unity there; everywhere it establishes a small number of invariable principles. In this way the foundation is the same everywhere, and culture produces a diversity of fruits.’]

2 Cf. Troeltsch: Die Aufklärung (included in his Ges. Schriften, Bnd IV) p. 353.

[p. 353]

Bayle's method of critical analysis of the facts in historical research.

This Idea of development, oriented to psychological analysis, was connected with Bayle's extremely shrewd critical method of establishing the facts. In his Dictionnaire historique et critique¹ he had applied the Cartesian methodical doubt of every opinion to historical tradition. He had gained the insight that historical facts have not been given to scientific inquiry, but that science has been set the task to analyse them. In a truly exemplary way scientific accuracy in establishing these facts was elevated by him to the methodical postulate of all real historical inquiry. He was guided in this by the sincere convinction that the historian can serve truth only by detaching himself from any bias of faith, education, and nationality.

There was, however, one thing he forgot: it was precisely that which is essential to a truly historical method of thought, viz. that the historian, as such, is not concerned with the ‘facts’ in an unqualified sense. History is concerned with the essentially historical aspect of the facts. Because of his scepticism Bayle himself had no room for an Idea of development in the proper sense of the word. But for this very reason he lacks any methodical standard to recognize the historical meaning of the facts established by his analysis. The result was that the scrupulous accuracy of his investigation really missed its aim and degenerated into an uncritical accumulation of antiquarian facts without any truly historical connection. That is why Cassirer's praise of Bayle as the ‘the logician of modern historical science’², cannot be accepted without considerable qualifications. It was only by a connection of Bayle's critical-positivistic method of establishing the facts with the rationalistic Idea of progress that the historical thought of the Enlightenment could acquire its characteristic stamp. This connection was quite natural since the two factors mentioned were indeed internally related in the typical spirit of the ‘Aufklärung’. And it cannot be denied that, guided by the science-ideal of the Enlightenment, historical thought developed in a critical direction as to the verification of facts. In a technical scientific respect it was superior to both the constructive-theological conception of historiography and to the diplomatical view. But, on the other hand, the philo-

1 Published for the first time at Rotterdam in 1695 and 1697 in two volumes.

2 Op. cit., p. 278.

[p. 354]

sophical Idea of historical development of the Enlightenment shows an internal rigidity that appeared to be disatrous to a real insight into historical connections. The Enlightenment was blind to the internal universality of the historical aspect within its own sphere, since it shut off its developmental Idea in its faith in the supreme power of natural scientific thought. The universality of history here becomes a merely extensive, geographical matter. Voltaire strove after accuracy in the description of details in the forms of the family-life, handicraft, and art of the nations. He based his work on extensive preliminary studies. But he nowhere approximates the inner historical spirit of the periods to which the Humanistic science-ideal was a stranger.

In consequence the description of the conditions in such periods shows merely an external exemplary character. Contrary to Cassirer's opinion, this result was not caused by a defect in the execution of the theoretical programme of Voltaire's historiography. It was the fundamental defect in the programme itself; it was a vitium originis of the entire developmental Idea in the historical view of the Enlightenment.

The method of a critical examination of the facts, and the Idea of historical development, are indeed indissolubly connected in the conception of the Enlightenment. Historical facts cannot be analysed according to a natural-scientific method, apart from every Idea of historical evolution. For they function, as such, within historical coherences of meaning which disclose themselves only if the historian has a theoretic insight into historical development. This insight is always guided by an Idea, which, after all, also influences the theoretical analysis of the facts.

§ 3 - Continued: the disharmony in the opening-process on the law-side, guided by the faith of the enlightenment.

The historical ‘explanation’ of the ideals of the Enlightenment, and the vicious circle in this attempt at explanation.

Under the influence of Historism it has become a habit in historical thought to ‘explain everything historically’.

Philosophical systems, theoretical ideas, the dogmas of the Church, political and economic principles and theories etc., everything is ‘explained historically’ after the manner of histo-

[p. 355]

rism, or at least, everything is understood so, if the idea of causal explanation has been abandoned. When the Enlightenment is viewed in its entirety, and when its historical influence is considered, it has become a sign of ‘good breeding’ to look upon its ideas as mere results of a certain historical development. In an essay on the Enlightenment Troeltsch calls this movement the product of particular relations and circumstances, a product entirely historically determined, as is proved by its very difference from the Enlightenment of antiquity. ‘The means of the latter are used by the moderns, but applied to a quite different material, so that quite different results are obtained.’ And he continues: ‘Its method has been determined by classical tradition and the new natural science; its contents by those elements of tradition which it considered to be the natural possession of every individual reason, which, however, were really the products of historical development’¹.

And so powerful is the influence of Historism on modern historical science that such a view is in general simply accepted as the only scientific possibility.

A truly radical opposition to the historicistic method and its pre-suppositions is scarcely to be found even on the part of Christian historians. And yet this entire scientific view of history is founded in a prejudice, which must come into an implacable conflict with the really Christian attitude of scientific thought. The philosophy of the cosmonomic Idea strikes at the heart of the historicistic conception of history by laying bare its religious-philosophic pre-suppositions. Thus it deprives this view of the illusion of working in a purely scientific way, the illusion of being unbiased.

Even in the case of a scientific thinker like Troeltsch the historicistic prejudice leads to mythological mystifications in

1 Troeltsch: Die Aufklärung: [‘ein durch und durch historisch bestimmtes Erzeugnis bestimmter Verhältnisse und Lagen (wie dies gerade ihr Unterschied zur Aufklärung des Altertums zeigt, deren Mittel von der modernen benutzt, aber auf einen ganz neuen Stoff angewendet wurden und daher ganz andere Resultate ergaben)... Ihre Methode ist durch die antike Ueberlieferung und die neue Naturwissenschaft bestimmt, ihr Inhalt durch diejenigen Elemente der Ueberlieferung, die sie als selbstverständlichen Besitz jeder individuellen Vernunft ansah, die aber in Wahrheit Erzeugnisse der geschichtlichen Entwieklung waren.’]
The essay appeared in 1897 and is included in ‘Aufsätze zur Geistesgesch. und Religionssoziologie’, herg. v. H. Baron 1925, in Bnd IV der Ges. Schriften, pp. 338 ff.

[p. 356]

order to camouflage the continual leaps in thought necessary to explain essentially non-historical meaning-structures in a purely historical way. In discussing the Humanistic theory of the ‘contrat social’ by means of which an attempt was made to construct the state independently of the Christian revelation, he observes: ‘The circumstances and the period necessitated this. The disagreement between actual political life and the requirements of revelation was either to be taken as the result of original sin, or was bound to lead to a restriction of the sphere of validity of revelation.’

Consequently, the historical conditions have created the idea of the social contract. But what was it that called these historical conditions into being? The answer is: ‘historical development’! By which the circle of mystification is completed. The insight into the sphere-universality of the historical aspect frees scientific historical thought of these mystifications. It brings home to us the fact that every truly historical problem points outside and above itself. In the functional structure of the normative opening-process the historical law-sphere is the foundation, but never the final completion.

The process of disclosure in the foundational direction of time could not start if it were not guided in the transcendental direction by essentially non-historical meaning-functions. In the last analysis it receives its religious direction from the struggle in the transcendent root of the cosmos.

We shall now briefly give an account of the contribution of the Enlightenment to the process of disclosure in western civilization, western economy, western juridical life, morality etc. From the outset one must be alive to the fact that the historical development of the power of the ideas of Enlightenment was only possible under the guidance of the Humanistic faith in the sovereignty of scientific thought.

Without faith not a single movement has ever succeeded in gaining formative power in history. We think we have sufficiently shown that πίστις cannot itself be historicized.

The opening-process in the historical law-sphere guided by the ideas of natural law of the Enlightenment.

The development of the historical power of the individualistic ideals of natural law of the Enlightenment first claims our attention. For it is generally acknowledged that these ideas, together

[p. 357]

with modern natural science, have had the greatest influence on the development of western civilization.

The ideas of natural law were juridical ideas of meta-historical meaning, guided by the faith in the science-ideal and that of personality in its rationalistic individualistic form. They owe the development of their historical power to a complex of factors that had been undermining the old foundations of the ecclessiastically unified culture since the late Middle Ages.

In my series of studies: In de strijd om een Christelijke Staatkunde, I have investigated these factors. In this development it is always in the last instance a question of human formative activity within the coherence of the differentiating cultural spheres. That is why only a concept of causality conceived in a truly historical sense can be usefully applied in such investigations.

The mighty influence of the theme of innate human rights, conceived by Locke, then expanded in the theory of the rights of men and citizens by Rousseau and the French Revolution, gave western culture during the next period a rationalistic-individualistic form.

The historical norm of individualization was positivized in a one-sided rationalistic-individualistic spirit under the primary guidance of this complex of ideas and the final guidance of the Humanistic faith in reason. On this historical basis also the normative principles of human intercourse, economy, justice, morality and faith were positivized in an anticipatory individualistic direction. The Ideas guiding historical development in the transcendental direction of time are as such still merely subjective. Only in the struggle for historical power between progress and tradition are they cleansed of their arbitrary subjectivity. Then the historical basis is laid for the positivizing of certain super-arbitrary normative principles in the post-historical law-spheres, on the condition that the Ideas concerned are really related to such principles.

For instance, Locke's conception of absolute innate human rights pertaining to natural law, although it became a guiding motive in the development of the historical power of the Enlightenment, was in itself a subjective theory, and as such not susceptible of real positivation in the legal order¹.

1 The entire conception of absolute rights of the individual is, as such, in conflict with the fundamental structure of any positive legal order. Every right is by nature relative.

[p. 358]

But the leading thinkers of the Enlightenment had to carry on an historical struggle for the power to form history. In this struggle the theory of human rights had to be adapted to the development of the historical conditions in which an immensely complicated set of formative factors were operative.

Only after new forms of culture had been created under the guidance of the ideas of Enlightenment, but accommodated to the historical principle of continuity, could the foundation be laid for a genuine law-formation along the lines of the truly super-arbitrary elements in the theory of natural law. In this the Enlightenment had to accomplish its own historical cultural task. In the legal field the opening-process was started by the rationalistic Idea of humanity stimulating the struggle for the recognition of the rights of man as such. Its contents had been derived from the Stoical idea of world-citizenship and from a secularization of the Christian ideas of freedom and personality. The medieval idea of the Corpus Christianum had fallen away from the truly religious meaning of the Biblical doctrine of the body of Christ. It identified the ‘Kingdom of God’ with an eclesiastical organization encompassing the whole of Christianity¹ and was given its death-blow by the historical development of the power of the Humanistic Idea of humanity, favoured by the increasing contact with non-Christian peoples. The idea of the natural rights of man definitively broke through the limits of the undifferentiated medieval conception of corporative law.

In this process Humanism could utilize the historical influence (formative power) that the ideas of the Reformation had gained in popular conviction. At this point the historical tendencies of the two great spiritual movements crossed each other; it is impossible historically to isolate the influence of the Enlightenment. But the typical direction that the process of disclosure takes under the predominating guidance of the Enlightenment, can certainly be indicated.

An individualistic and rationalistic utilitarian tendency penetrates into the codifications of the time of the Enlightenment under the influence of Christian Wolff² and Locke. This tendency is evidently to be traced back to the guidance of the Humanistic science-ideal in the positivizing of the juridical

1 About this point we shall have to say more in the 3rd volume.

2 Especially in the ‘Preussisches Landrecht’ (1794) projected by the Wolffian jurists Karl Gottlieb Suarez and E.F. Klein. The Austrian Civil Code of 1811 was more directly influenced by Kant.

[p. 359]

principles. The juridical principles positivized here were not ‘sinful’ and neither a creation of human arbitrariness, nor even completely new. For example, the principle of the freedom of contract had already been positivized by canon law and had been taken over by modern Germanic law under its influence.

This principle means a necessary disclosure of the juridical aspect in the modern development of trade and traffic when compared with the restriction to fixed types of agreements valid in Roman civil law, and with the primitive commitment to rigid symbolical forms.

But in canon law this principle had been conceived in its immediate connection with the ‘natural ethical law’, with the moral demand of keeping one's word. And for this reason the theory of canon law bound this principle to an elaborate doctrine of the ‘justa causa’, which the Church, as the guardian of the ‘lex naturalis’, was supposed to have the duty of interpreting. Add to this the manifold ways in which juridical life was bound to the corporative forms of medieval society. It is true that, because of their undifferentiated character, the latter were doomed to dissolution as soon as the process of differentiation and integration of western society proceeded. They gradually became antiquated since the commencement of modern times, but they were not definitively liquidated before the French Revolution. From the outset the rationalistic personality- and science-ideal, expressed in the Humanistic theories of natural law, fought a bitter struggle against all these restraints of individual liberty. Already Hugo de Groot detached the principle of natural law pacta sunt servanda from the justa causa¹.

In Hobbes' theory of natural law the Aristotelian-Thomistic doctrine of the ‘justum pretium’ is entirely given up. The distinction between justitia commutativa and distributiva, whose implied recognition of the difference between inter-individual law and communal law De Groot already could not understand on account of his nominalistic attitude, was almost cynically set aside. Constitutional law and civil law alike are reduced to the formalistic contractual principle².

Under the guidance of the faith in the science-ideal the Idea of private law became formalistic. Its whole content was reduced

1 Cf. De Jure belli ac pacis. Liber I. cap. IX, 10: ‘nam et sine ulla causa promissum naturaliter deberetur.’

2 Cf. my In den strijd om een Christelijke Staatkunde, I, XIV (Anti-revol. Staatkunde, 2e Jg. 1926, pp. 438 ff.)

[p. 360]

to the nominalistic and rationalistic conception of the principle of the liberty and equality of the individuals in inter-individual juridical relations of intercourse. ‘Justice of actions is by writers divided into commutative and distributive’, thus Hobbes in his Leviathan, ‘and the former they say consisteth in proportion arithmetical; the latter in proportion geometrical. Commutative therefore, they place in the equality of value of the things contracted for; and distributive in the distribution of equal benefit to men of equal merit. As if it were an injustice to sell dearer than to buy; or to give more to a man than he merits. The value of all things contracted for is measured by the appetite of the contractors: and therefore the just value is that which they be contented to give. And merit besides that which is by covenant, where the performance on one part meriteth the performance of the other part, and falls under justice commutative, not distributive, is not due by justice; but is rewarded of grace only. And therefore this distinction in the sense wherein it useth to be expounded, is not right. To speak properly, commutative justice is the justice of a contractor; that is, a performance of covenant, in buying and selling; hiring, and letting to hire; lending, and borrowing; exchanging, bartering and other acts of contract’¹.

1 Leviathan I, Chap. XV.

The relative disclosure of the economical law-sphere; the disharmony of this process under the guidance of the faith of the Enlightenment.

In this entire process the modern Humanistic view of natural law has already sealed its union with economic individualism. It was to expand in a mercantilistic spirit as long as it turned into state-absolutism. But soon it turned into the classical-liberal idea of the state of law (Rechtsstaat), first formulated by Locke, according to which the political association in terms of the social contract had no other purpose than the organized protection of the natural rights of property and liberty. This individualistic liberal conception of the rule of law was allied with the political program of the classical school of economics. The latter propagated its adage ‘laissez faire, laissez aller’, the unrestrained free play of the social forces in economic life. In this economic individualism economic life was strongly rationalized. The medieval forms of corporative life in the monopolistic guilds were shattered. They were calculated to fence in economic life, not to ex-

[p. 361]

pand it. Economic individualism gained its decisive victory under the leadership of the ideas of the Enlightenment and attained to theoretical reflection in the economic theories of the physiocrats and the so-called classical school of economics. By liberating the individual spirit of enterprise in the modern expansion of industry and trade it comes to mean a one-sided kind of meaning-disclosure of the inter-individual relations in the economic law-sphere at the expense of the communal relationships.

The economic law of supply and demand, which after the definitive abandonment of the medieval guilds was positivized as a basic norm for the economic determination of prices, was only a norm for the economic inter-individual relations in the modern freedom of exchange; just as the principle of contractual liberty was only adapted to the juridical inter-individual relations. But this economic norm oriented to a free market situation was presently to be denatured and absolutized¹ by the classical theory into an unalterable, pure, ‘natural law’.

In it the economic aspect on its law-side opened out in anticipation of the individualistically conceived rights of man, of the utilitarian autonomous rational morality and of the faith in the science-ideal. But the process of disclosure here showed a poignant disharmony. The excessive individualizing and rationalizing of the formative process, guided by the faith in the sovereignty of mathematical and natural scientific thought, resulted in the idolatry of the abstract individualistic idea of the ‘homo economicus’. And this idolatry also came to expression in the formation of the economic principles to positive norms. A hard-headed calculation of private profits became the only rule of conduct in economic life; it broke every bond with economic communal principles.

Just as the science-ideal was a continual threat to the personality-ideal, the individualistic rationalizing and technicizing of economic life was presently to reduce thousands of labourers to actual wage-slavery. Economic life had been delivered into the hands of the officially still ‘Christian’ bourgeois-mentality, permeated by the utilitarian spirit of the Enlightenment.

In the same way the individualistic principle of ‘natural law’ concerning liberty and equality in civil juridical intercourse,

1 Even in our days liberal economic theory has not yet really detached itself from this naturalistic conception of economic laws oriented to the Humanistic science-ideal.

[p. 362]

lacked a counterpoise in a private differentiated communal law of labour and a public social law. This was to cause the most painful material inequality in the position of the contracting parties. And yet - it was not the positivizing of the economic law of supply and demand, nor the rationalizing and individualizing of economic life in themselves that were sinful, but the mode in which they occurred. The curse in the opening-process on the law-side, proceeding under the guidance of the Humanistic faith in reason, was only the poignant disharmony in the excessive development of certain anticipatory moments of the economic aspect, at the expense of all the others. Considering this process from the point of view of its historical basis, we find an excessive increase of the formative power on the part of the cultural sphere of modern natural science, at the expense of the formative power of the other cultural spheres. This means a negation of the principle of cultural economy. Western culture could not bear this. When presently the consequences of the tyranny of the science-ideal began to appear in the course of history, a fulminating opposition on the part of the other cultural spheres to this hegemony was bound to come, in order to save the entire western civilization from ruin. Under the guidance of the ideas of romanticism, after the French Revolution had been liquidated, the Restoration-movement was to follow a seemingly historical, but indeed reactionary policy, which in its turn was to evoke the resistance of liberalism in the XIXth century.

And this liberalism itself could not fail to evoke the mighty reaction of socialism and communism.

§ 4 - Final remarks on the christian idea of cultural development.

To Humanistic philosophic thought the disharmony, manifesting itself even on the law-side of the opening-process in the sinful cosmos, changes into antinomy. This is the original antinomy in the two basic factors of the Humanistic cosmonomic Idea: the ideal of science and that of personality.

For the Christian philosophic consciousness, however, conforming to the fundamental structure of the Christian cosmonomic Idea, without compromising with immanence-philosophy, it is impossible to accept antinomies in the Divine worldorder, even in this sinful world.

The disharmony referred to manifests itself only as a defect in the opening-process under the curse of sin. For a Christian

[p. 363]

there can be no question of the inner antinomy that Humanism has to experience on seeing how human personality, claiming to be autonomous in its self-sufficient freedom, is being enslaved by its own rational creations. The Divine world-order is not itself antinomic when it avenges itself on every deification of temporal meaning by the disharmony caused on account of this apostasy in the opening process. No more is it antinomic when it causes philosophical thought to entangle itself in inner antinomies, as soon as this thought supposes it can ignore the Divine order.

This world-order binds the normative process of disclosure, in the foundational direction of time, to the historical formation of power. In the transcendental direction it binds the opening-process to the direction of faith, and at the same time the world-order points beyond and above all the temporal law-spheres to the religious radical unity of the Divine law. That is why truly Christian philosophic thought cannot discover any antinomy nor any paradox in the validity within a sinful world of the full religious demand of the Divine law. This law even remains in force in a world in which the temporal ordinances of the law-spheres through sinful human formation have been drawn away from their direction to the fulness of meaning of the Divine law. Holy and without any inner contradiction is the world-order, even when it binds the possibility of a defective positivizing of Christian principles to a historical basis of power and to the guidance of true Christian faith.

Holy and without inner contradiction is the world-order, when it avenges itself on the process of disclosure in which the civitas terrena has gained the power to direct the formation of history.

The defectiveness caused by sin in the root and the temporal refraction of meaning, has been expressed in our transcendental basic Idea itself in the struggle between the civitas Dei and the civitas terrena. It must therefore also naturally find its expression in our Idea of historical development, in our economic Idea, in our Idea of justice, of morals, of beauty, etc.

The Christian Idea of cultural development cannot be guided by an optimistic faith in the steady progress of civilization. It cannot be sacrificed to pessimistic relativistic Historism either. It remains ruled by the religious basic motive of the struggle between the civitas Dei and the civitas terrena in the temporal course of history, though eschatologically it remains directed to

[p. 364]

the ultimate victory of the Kingdom of God in Christ, to Whom has been given the fulness of power in the religious fulfilment of history.

The methodical application of the Christian Idea of cultural development in historical science.

The functional structure of the opening-process, in connection with the modal universality of the aspects, each in its own sphere, provides us with the insight into the only possible method of using this Idea of development in historical investigations. Our analysis has yielded a univocal criterion to distinguish between primitive and disclosed cultural spheres, which criterion is a necessary ὑπόϑεσις for historical science proper. We saw further that a real opening of the historical aspect is possible under the guidance of an apostate faith, and that in this case the process of disclosure must show its disharmonious character also on the law-side of the aspects. We have frankly to acknowledge that apostate movements have their special task in history when they have gained the power to form and to positivize deepened cultural principles of development. But this entire view of history implies a radical rejection of Historism. We have explained¹ that any true meaning-disclosure of history points beyond and above this aspect and is only possible in the universal temporal meaning-coherence of all the modal law-spheres.

The Christian Idea of development, therefore, cannot be narrow-minded. It recognizes any relative meaning-disclosure of civilization, even though positivized by anti-Christian powers. Every spiritual movement, having the power of historical formation has to fulfil its own task as an instrument in the hand of God. Our developmental Idea has broken with any speculative philosophical or theological construction of periods in cultural development. And above all, it continues to observe the inner tension between sinful reality and the full demand of the Divine law.

This demand is terrifying when we consider how much the temporal ordinances labour under the destructive power of the fall into sin. Terrifying also, when it puts before us our task as Christians in the struggle for the power of cultural formation.

1 Cf. our analysis of the universality of the aspect of history in its own sphere.

[p. 365]

For it makes a demand on us which as sinful human beings we cannot satisfy in any way. And it urges us, in the misery of our hearts, to seek refuge with Christ, from Whose fulness, nevertheless, a Christian can derive the confidence of faith to carry on the ceaseless struggle for the control of cultural development. This is the remarkable ‘nevertheless’ of Christian faith.

Christian philosophic thought has to fight shy of self-exaltation, because it is directed in its root to Christ. The whole struggle that positive Christianity has to carry on for the direction of the opening-process is not directed against our fellow-men, in whose sin we partake and whose guilt is ours and whom we should love as our neighbours. That struggle is directed against the spirit of darkness who dragged us all down with him in the apostasy from God, and who can only be resisted in the power of Christ.

As Christians we shall hate that spirit because of the love of God's creation in Christ Jesus.