Law (Law-Promise)

Law is what enables and guides.

• Laws enable things to occur and function. The physical law of gravity enables planets to circle suns and people to stay on the ground. The lingual laws enable language to occur.

• Laws guide our functioning towards Good. The fundamental laws of the lingual aspect urge us to inform rather than mislead or deceive. It is mainly from the biotic aspect onwards that we can differentiate harm from good, and hence meaningfully say that laws guide. (It would be odd to say that the law of gravity guides humans to stay on the ground!)

Law was very important to Dooyeweerd. Indeed, he gave law such as important place that, in his New Critique, he refers to it over 1500 times (only meaning, at over 3000 references, is more). Aspects are "spheres of law" and law, Dooyeweerd maintains, is the 'boundary' between the Divine and the Creation.

The laws of each aspect are very different from each other, and cannot be reduced to each other. Those of the earlier aspects are determinative, while those of the later aspects allow some freedom of response.

Dooyeweerd's notion of Law is very different from that of liberal humanism, which sees law as constraint. Instead, Dooyeweerd saw Law as that which enables meaningful happenings, and that which defines which happenings are meaningful and good. Things happen, not by virtue of being-caused but by virtue of entities responding as subject to this framework of law. By this means entities have genuine Freedom.

This kind of fundamental law, different in each aspect, is NOT the same as government laws or social norms, but something much deeper (and indeed which enables governments to think up laws and social norms to come into being. In a sense, we are 'at home' in law; we live and move and have our being in what might be called an ocean of law. I tend to see this kind of Law as the Gift of the Creator to the Creation to enable it to Exist and Occur apart from (though always depending on) the Creator. This Law is not just "You should do X" but rather takes the form of

"If you do X then Y will result."

In this sense, Law is more like Promise. Hence I like to refer to it as 'law-promise', though Dooyeweerd himself did not use that term.

By means of response to aspectual Law things come into being; see our discussion of Dooyeweerd's entity theory.

Law Side and Fact / Subject Side

• For example, when something obeys the law of gravity (part of the laws of the physical aspect), something physical happens. The planets and pebbles respond to the law of gravity.

• For example, when someone uses language, they are responding to laws of the lingual aspect, and something lingual occurs and comes into being that was not there before. (See especially the belief of de Saussure.)

To Dooyeweerd, the Creation has not one but two 'sides'. Law side is constituted of the law-framework we are discussing here. The subject side (sometimes called entity side) comprises all the things, beings, events, processes, happenings, and the like that actually exist or occur in past, present and future - what we normally think of as the universes of our experience.

The subject side is subject to the law side and it is that very subjection to law that constitutes being a subject in the other sense, as a centre of action.

Note: this emphasis on the Law Side of the cosmos explains the rather clumsy name 'Cosmonomic' that was given to the philosophy. In fact, law is seen as boundary between God and the cosmos. See also our discussion of the philosophical implications of the notion of creation.

Aspectual Law

(For this, Klapwijk (2008, p.120, note 10) uses the term 'idionomic' (having laws of its own) rather than `autonomous' (setting its own laws): the latter term suggests not only the intended irreducibility of the laws, but also an independence that runs counter to the interrelatedness of reality.)

The laws of earlier aspects are determinative, while those of later aspects are normative. They latter provide basic kinds of norms for living. In general it may be said that the human aspects (from analytic to pistic) are normative, while the first four aspects are largely determinative. The determinativity of the physical aspect is what gives rise to reliable causality.

Law implies norms, and the difference between Good and Evil. In the normative aspects, we have freedom both within the laws of an aspect and also to go against it. The former is Good and the latter, Evil. This is the basis for a Dooyeweerdian theory of ethics and is discussed further under the Shalom Principle.

Aspectual Law is Not Social Norm

"For there are 'made' laws, 'discovered' laws, but also laws - a truth for all time. These are more or less hidden in the reality which surrounds us and do not change. Not only science but art also, shows us that reality, at first incomprehensible, gradually reveals itself, by the mutual relations that are inherent in things."

In terms of Dooyeweerd's own thought, we might explain the differences in types of law and norm as follows:

• Aspectual laws can never be fully known (see why).
• However, we can come to know them to some extent (both explicitly and tacitly); this constitutes our knowledge of aspectual law. This knowledge is always partial.
• A community might emphasize certain of those it has knowledge of as important (either validly because of cultural conditions, and/or invalidly because of human arrogance or unconcern). These become the social norms of that community. They are created by human selection: functioning in the analytic aspect.
• Codified laws and written rules are an attempt to cast the social norms written in precise form by functioning in the lingual aspect.

References