Reading: Notes Chapter 12

1.    This refers, I repeat, to organized communities — those with official leadership, not to unorganized ones or ones with only charismatic leaders. So my use of the term “community” is not the same as the way it is used when we speak of, say, “the black community,” “the gay community,” or “the French-speaking community,” etc. From now on, therefore, I always use the term to mean a community with a recognized leadership, so that each kind and type of community will be seen as an artifact that organizes the social relation of authority in accordance with its foundational and leading functions.

2.    In this context, “religious” is used in the sense of “secondary” religious beliefs and practices as was explained in chapter 2. They are the communities whose structural purpose is to aid their members in achieving proper relation to whatever is believed to be divine.

3.   The account of social communities given so far has tried to stay as close to Dooyeweerd’s own as possible. But it should be noted that several thinkers who have attempted to develop it further have felt it necessary to introduce alternative distinctions and concepts so as to maintain its non-reductive stance. See, for example, M.D. Stafleu’s “On Aesthetically Qualified Characters and Their Mutual Interlacements,” Philosophia Reformata 68 (2003): 137-47. Stafleu and others also defend the position that there is a distinctly political aspect. These and other variations of the law framework theory are beyond the scope of this work, whose purpose is only to provide an introduction to how non-reductionist theories can be developed.

4.    Neither does the idea of an institution’s structural purpose commit us to saying that its purpose is always fully realized at every stage of historical development, or in every cultural setting. So Dooyeweerd says:

5.   This is a continuation of the point made in chapter 10 about the difference between the biblical idea of perfection and the idea of perfection derived from ancient Greek philosophy. There our reason for rejecting the traditional doctrine of God’s perfections was that the idea it employed is clearly the pagan Greek idea and not the biblical one.

6.    The best known objectivist theories, like those of Plato and Aristotle, have tried to get around this difficulty by regarding the nature of anything capable of violating a norm as strongly dualistic. The dualism is supposed to allow for the ability of a thing to act contrary to a norm by saying that the normative order is intrinsic to only one side of the duality and is disobeyed by the other side. The problem with this is that the two sides of the duality are then mutually exclusive in nature so that it is impossible to explain how they could form a union, let alone an individual unity. Cf. Dooyeweerd’s criticism in the New Critique, vol. 3, 10-18.

7.     I say “usually” because the theory of Thomas Hobbes is a notable exception. Hobbes started with an individualist position, but then argued that the best state people can make is one that allows no limits to governmental authority, leaving citizens no rights save self-preservation.

8.   Dooyeweerd also calls whole-whole relations “enkaptic relations” (New Critique, vol. 3, 627-784). I think it confusing, however, to use the same term for whole-whole relations in which neither is a sub-whole to the other as well as for relations in which one is a sub-whole to the other. So I have used the expression “whole-whole” for the first and retained “capsulate” only for the second.

9.    Aristotle, Metaphysics bk. Z, 1043a.

10.     Some Thomist thinkers have referred to what I am calling a ”hierarchical” view of society as the “subsidiary” view. See, e.g., Yves Simon, Philosophy of Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), and A General Theory of Authority (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1962). As will soon become apparent, our theory rejects the hierarchical view as an overall view of society, though it acknowledges hierarchy within the same community and between auxiliary communities formed expressly to support and serve another — e.g., an organization formed to raise money for a school or an orchestra. Thus the law framework theory recognizes that subsidiarity is a valuable principle for the internal operation of specific institutions. Taken in that way, subsidiarity can be combined with the sphere sovereignty idea for the whole of society to yield the basis for a powerful, theistically-based theory of society. But as the subsidiarity idea is well known, while sphere sovereignty is not, I will be concentrating in what follows on the latter.

11.     See Kuyper’s Stone Lectures given at Princeton, titled Calvinism (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1976). In this connection it is important to notice that while the sphere sovereignty theory explains the natures of social communities in terms of their qualifying aspects, this is not to say that once a community is formed it has proprietary rights over the aspect qualifying its leading function. Businesses do not have sole say in economic matters, any more than that it is only the state which is concerned with justice or only schools that may educate. The social spheres are constantly participated in by all people and all communities.

12.      Dooyeweerd points out that the failure to develop differentiated communities corresponding to the distinct social concerns of life is the hallmark of primitive societies. In them there is usually a single community, such as an extended family or tribe, which is the sole curator of all social interests. He gives an account of how such lack of differentiation has been overcome in history through what he calls the “opening process,” and of how that process is directed by religious belief. See New Critique, vol. 2, 68-72, 192 ff., and esp. 298-330).

13.     Though the state is qualified by its justitial leading function, it is further limited by having public justice, rather than every sort of justice, as its structural purpose. Its duty of enforcement does not, therefore, extend to such things as countermanding parents’ ideas of the proper bedtime for their children, or a church’s rules about who may participate in its sacraments, etc., even if those ideas are really unjust. This will become clearer when the type law for the state is explicated in the next chapter. It should also be noted that we accept here the traditional assumption that public justice includes governmental responsibility for public safety. Thus not only national defense and restraint of crime, but the inspection of planes, bridges, food, and medicines, and the policing of highways falls within this definition.