Video Transcript: Aspects of Reality part 3 with Roy Clouser and Henry Reyenga
Henry - So I am having such a great time going back both to memory lane when I learned Herman Dooyeweerd aspects back in the 1980s, at Dordt College in Sioux Center, Iowa. And then having the privilege to be with Dr. Clouser, who actually studied with Dr. Herman Dooyeweerd in the late 60s and early 70s. Did his dissertation on Dr. Dooyeweerd. So we're talking about the aspects. And just to this is part three. And let me just go over what we talked about. We talked about the quantitative, we talked about the spatial, the kinetic, the physical, the biotic, the sensory, the logical, and now we're launching into the next one. And I'm curious if you can guess what it is, just make a guess. I like people just try to think about it. Like if they think about logical there with part one and part two, well, could it be the historical, historical
Dr. Clouser - special meanings to this. A lot of people think history means whatever happened in the past. Dooyeweerd points out, it does not. Most of what's happened in the past, we don't think is historically important. This has to do with human ability to take a natural material and form something new. Which also means to take human beings and form something new, right, such as a business, a school, a state, and so on.
Henry - The development of power, achievement, technology, techniques.
Dr. Clouser - So sometimes people have proposed it should really be called formative, or technical. It has to do with bringing about artifacts. And what people sometimes fail to realize, or think of very much is that human, social communities are also artifacts, people form them. So this has to do with the important formations that have taken place. History records the transmission of the power to form a culture, and culture is all the things that humans produce.
Henry – What do you call the term historic also deserve some common, though, is a similar familiar one. This is because so many people think of it as referring to everything that has happened in the past?
Dr. Clouser - Dooyeweerd gives an interesting example. Historians actually debated whether part of the Battle of Waterloo that needed to be recorded, was the farmers trying to harvest the crops that were in the way of the coming battle, they can see it. They're trying to get the crops out of the way. Is that part of the battle? Is that historically important, right? Most people would agree no, it was important to the, to the farmers. But it for as far as history is concerned, what's really important is who won the battle. It defeats Napoleon that ends his empire, Europe is repartioned out. Congress and the role that, but but not the farmers gathering their crops. But that happened. Unless there's some criteria for what's
important, historically, you end up saying that everything is history, and then just writing the history of anything takes as long to write as it took to happen.
Henry - There's a popular video game that many of you have probably looked at over the or your children, young children have played it's called civilization. And how civilization works is that you start at, like someplace way in the distant future. And then it goes through these various civilizations. And each civilization has a unique contribution to culture, like one culture, some fears about the technology of bronze, and another culture, fireworks, or gunpowder, or I believe are the Chinese. But anyway, if a culture developed it, that particular strength would be accented more for their power and development. So it's almost as if Dooyeweerd was the creator of the video game. What he did, rolling over in his grave now. Okay next, let's just go to linguistic, the social or the symbolic communication. So what's the linguistic aspect?
Dr. Clouser - and do notice how there's an order to these, because intuitively, I think everybody sees that, you'd have to be able to form concepts in order to plan what to do with a natural material, you'd have to be able to form natural materials, and and have some experience with that. And then form sounds or marks that you make to symbolically stand for other things. Now we have a language. And then that's going to make human social relations possible because humans are going to be able to communicate. And as one writer pointed out, it's almost more important that humans were able to talk to communicate to another human, what they were thinking about and what they were feeling internally. More important than being able to have a symbol that points to something else. This is tree and the book is over here. That's important. But it's more important to be able to communicate plans, feelings, objections, recommendations, then you have a real social bond.
Henry - Well, it's interesting that you know, before we talked the last session about active and passive and in language itself, you have the active voice, the passive voice, I mean language itself is that way where words are the acted upon or the word can act on.
Dr. Clouser - Active/Passive distinction borrows this from language, right applies it in other ways, as well. So people have and I made the point that many, a great many people think that logic only applies the only things that have logical properties are propositions and arguments. But note, if they have, if things have passive logical properties then they are distinguishable. conceivable, right? Unless they are, we can't use our logic to grasp them. So that's just as important, the ways in which things exhibit properties passively as well as actively.
Henry - Now we're talking about like, philosophers and ideas that reduce aspects. So if I go back to historical actually and look at that. Let's look at that real quick. Is there any philosopher who reduced the last one, we talked about the historical?
Dr. Clouser - Who wants to say this was the key? Yeah, yes. Yes, in fact,
Henry - I mean, try and guess who it was. I'm going to guess. Okay. You guys think that I don't know this from 30 years ago, and I could be wrong. I'm being vulnerable everybody. I am being transparent Hegel.
Dr. Clouser – Oh, no. Not doing linguistic.
Henry – No, history.
Dr. Clouser – Historical, oh, excuse me. Oh, so I'm backing up. Alright. And he has the great all encompassing mind. Okay. All right, which equals God, in under some circumstances, and it includes everything. But the process by which it comes to self realization. He says is history. History, therefore encompasses all reality.
Henry - So I got it right? Yeah. Did you see that everybody? I got this right. And you actually didn't think I was gonna get it? Right. And I know, you didn't think that I got it. Right. So historically,
Dr. Clouser - another version of it. Okay, present today, for epistemology for a general theory of knowledge. Okay, there are a number of thinkers who argue that we create language, language creates our experience. So we create our
experience. So we're not finding things that are true independent of us. Give up that stuff about truth. We can't go back to linguistics now.
Henry - The next. Okay, so I got it right on historical and now on linguistick? Dr. Clouser - Yeah, but that's the connection between the two. Henry - Oh, so there's like this one plays with each other.
Dr. Clouser - We have the form of, formitive power, one of the things we form is language. Okay. So they're called historicists. So all the all the things that we believe are we have produced,we actually produce our own experience, our
experience is produced by our language. That's what allows us to think of things the way we do in the past and we form therefore, we form our world.
Henry - So in a sense, that group of people are a partnership between the historical aspects and the linguistic.
Dr, Clouser - Yeah, sure.
Henry - Okay. So what group is that again?
Dr. Clouser - Well, modern pragmatism does that. Not to pick on anybody in particular, but his initials are Richard Rorty. Richard Rorty, it says, says things just exactly like what I just described.
Henry - But hold on. So the linguistic, sometimes I have a hard time getting the idea of symbol. And then there's a whole question of nominalism. And realism and word. I mean, okay, we're launching into this. I mean, bear with me. So we're launching into that. So nominalism, name language, when it's called?
Dr. Clouser - Well, that has to do with universals. It's an old old problem and was raised, even before Plato, but Plato's famous for his treatment of it, okay. How's it come about? That we can recognize this object that object the other
object, objects can only be in one place at one time, but they're they exhibit qualities that are in many places at once? What kind of a clear thing is that? There are many blue things that are my square things. And how do we recognize all the blue things as blue? Now his famous theory was, there's another dimension to reality, and in this other dimension there is, there are perfections. There's the Perfect Blue, there's the perfect square, there's the perfect chair, there's the perfect, whatever. And all the stuff that we experience in this world are imperfect copies of the perfections in Plato's great barnyard in the sky. So and he puts all of mathematics there, all the numbers, all the fractions, lines, points, triangles and perfect circles, things we never see. In this world, there's never a perfect circle we can draw. Right? And how do we get the idea? Well, our minds are in tune with this world of perfection. Well, those are universals. That's his theory of universals. What that means? What all the instances when you use the same term for many, many individuals, you're naming a Universal property property held by more than one thing at the same time. And his answer to how we can how that can happen is that they're all copying the perfect the perfect model for what is green or red or square, or whatever in this other world. A nominalist says, no, no, no, this other world is all ridiculous. Forget it, we do not ever experience the same property. Properties are just like things they are individual. They're only in one place at one time,
nothing shares the same shade of blue. Note, I don't know three to three, very relativistic.
Henry - So this says the Historical Linguistics,
Dr. Clouser - what's common to the many individuals that we talked about, it's only the linguistic name we give them. That's the only thing. That's where you get nomina, name, name. So one of the early ones says, The Universal is nothing but the breath of a voice, pronouncing a name. So we say blue what do all the blue things have in common. Nothing in them, that we call them, all that same name. That's, that's instead of Plato's other world. We, by the way Dooyeweerd gives a very powerful critique of both those views. Okay. They're both eminently rejectable.
Henry - Why are they religious?
Dr. Clouser - Okay, I didn't say they were religious I said they were rejectable. Henry - well rejectable, but I'm just calling them Religious,
Dr. Clouser - Neither one of them will fly. Well, in the early thinkers, like Plato, Plato not only wants there to be these universal exemplars in the other world, that things in this world copy, but they're divine, they play a role that's partly a substitute for God, they're eternal, uncreated changeless. And they have a great
influence in making this world what it is. There's a world of space and matter in it in Plato's ontology, but it would be total chaos. Unless the form world impressed itself unless the world of the perfections and the laws of mathematics impress order onto the world. And the only reason this world comes out to be imperfect copies of these things, is the matter that you have to work with is so intrinsically imperfect, it can't hold the reason they can't perfectly reflect the universe. So universal wil start out. And part of their role is religious. And Plato, when he called them forms in rather than universal calls them forms, and he says there is a highest one, the highest form, the form of what it is to be a form, I guess. Right, right. And he calls it the God and father of all things. He's not shy at all about
Henry - the term from a distant past. Just came back to my brain and it's somehow in the category of Plato, the unmoved mover, that plane
Dr. Clouser - that's Aristotle.
Henry - that's Aristotle. Okay. I'm with the Greeks. Okay, don't judge me too quickly. You didn't even know that. Okay? It's so that
Dr. Clouser - Plato's most famous student. for him, for Aristotle, too, there is a huge difference between matter in space, which would be chaotic, were not for the orderliness of the mathematical truth, especially logical that impress themselves there and bring about a cosmos rather than a chaos. For Aristotle that that impression happens here. This is our world, and it's at the center of the universe. Because it's the worst place in the universe, not the best. It's like the dream where all the refuse goes. And every layer of the universe as we go out from Earth has more and more rationality, less and less matter, until finally you come to the realm that's inhabited only by thought Thinking itself, Whoa, the perfect, the perfection, the logical perfection here. He calls that God. He also calls it the unmoved mover. What he means is it's changeless. And it brings about change, not by exercising an effect on, a direct effect the way we usually think of one thing producing change in another, but only because all of the things in this course part of reality, the course part of the universe, so strives to be like that. So without changing itself, it changes other things because they're attractive.
Henry - Now, one thing I noticed in the case, we talked about logical, historical, and linguist, linguistic, just the last three. And when you're talking like this, you really see the connections, all kind of working themselves out to be absolutely
absolutizing, so you got Aristotle, there's logic, there's the history, there's the development, there's linguistic naming, is that real, not real, Plato, all of it is fascinating how that though the Greeks were centuries ago, Dooyeweerd sees aspects that other philosophers have reduced one aspect or another?
Dr. Clouser - Yes, of course, what Dooyeweerd wants to do we start philosophy on the basis of the knowledge we have of God in Christ. And that means that all of the properties and laws that we find in creation, the kinds of properties and the laws that we find in creation have been created, called into being by God. None of them are God's uncreated originating being that transcends all of that, because he brought all that into existence. God enters into his creation, however, and takes on these characteristics, takes them into himself, often, eternally. I mean, that doesn't mean there's a time when God didn't have it, and began to God, there never was a time God wasn't wise. But Proverbs 8 says that wisdom is His creation, right, even wisdom, so I think that's a model for the way to understand how God possesses his attributes. And I think that model, I call it an incarnational model, in the same way, as God took the real, the person of Jesus Christ, who is a creation, he was a human being, into himself, so that Christ becomes the human side of God, God becomes the divine side of Christ.
So God took into himself, characteristics of personality, for example, and be able to know things in the world and to react and interact with human beings. So rather than to than say, oh, no, God just has perfections. And that's it. And he doesn't really love anybody. He doesn't really get pissed off at anybody. No, he gets really angry. He really loves people He grieves when they do evil. He rejoices when people repent. The Scripture affirms all of that. And the people that identify God with a platonic perfection say no, he doesn't.
Henry - One more thing about linguistic that I find fascinating. Okay, so the internet, the worldwide web, if you were to say, what is the sort of glue that holds Google together, it's the linguistic, it's the keywords. It's the relevant searches, search for language, the language that solves the problem, the information age, and these start becoming closer to who people are and how they operate with our smartphones and how they operate. So we have this beautiful language that's now becoming sophisticated and others algorithms written about the words and and how people feel a lot of this is irrelevant stuff for a day. Dooyeweerd could not have dreamed about an aspect like this could be so functionally relevant.
Dr. Clouser - In his terminology, a smartphone is an artifact that we produce. It's made of natural materials, we form them yes. So that this is a formative product. And it's linguistically qualified, because that that is its intrinsic purpose, is to be able to see it and say, you now convey
Henry - like and get my phone out. And they talk right back to interesting. Next one is social, social interaction. Now hold on a second. That's an aspect of reality. That's just something we do. How we
Dr. Clouser – Well sure but we do it in a specific way. This doesn't mean social in the thick sense that everything from here on is. This is the beginnings. Humans, once they have language can interact socially, in such a way that They have status, they have social position. Some people have authority, some don't. Okay, so he points out that a house is a formative object that we create. If it's more than just a hut or a lean to if it's actually got rooms, usually the rooms exhibit the social status of the people that use them. So the master bedroom is bigger,
Henry – So for western culture the Master Bedroom is bigger. Dr. Clouser - Well, that tends to be true in most cultures.
Henry – Parents, you know, the elders have status. It's even in the architecture.
Dr. Clouser - If you just have a tent. That doesn't apply. But but the buildings themselves betray or exhibit this business of social ranking right? One of the chief properties to social property I think is respect, right? And whether that's branded or it's denied, and people can get very upset about that kind of thing.
Henry - whether it's rude and what's not restaurant rude, not really when people cite you, we have that people smart class because we're putting you in tune with what is socially out there so that you do well as a leader.
Dr. Clouser - And there are standards of courtesy. We all know that those differ very much from place to place. But the point is people have them. They're not without them. Where there are other humans, there are such things.
Henry - I have a good story, I think and see if it applies if it doesn't, it's just a good story. So at one of the churches, actually the church with Dr. Feddes, we actually had a buggy driver at the local race track. Now, you know, none of us are into gambling or anything like that. So I'm kind of on thin ice to tell the story but I'll tell you anyway. Okay, so any he that was his job, and he and his wife came to know the Lord. But he's been at that for 20, 30 years, riding rural buggies. And so I was talking to him one time, and we're talking about the horses. So he was talking about this horse and everything. And then and then he said well, that one went Amish. And then he talked about this one, and then that one went Amish. Amish? Like how does the horses go Amish? Well, he said, Brother Joseph, wants to have a faster horse than brother Henry. So what they do is, they come to the racetrack and buy the horses, the faster horse, the faster horse, they pay cash. In fact, they're some of the best buyers of the horses. So the social connection between brother Joseph and brother Roy and brother Henry, we both want a horse that's just a little faster than the next guy. And Amish, they don't have cars, right, but they want to if they're going to have one horse, that they want to be the fastest horse. Is that? So that's sort of what we're talking about. We have a social, you know, there's rules in that social laws within the social laws within certain social classes,
Dr. Clouser - And speak of the Amish they have it in spades. I mean, you is they have their protocols and if you violate it, right. Nobody will talk to you. That's your shunned. Right? Right. Right. And that's a social stigma, to be shunned.
Henry – Right. Now, many of you are entering ministry, and you're you come out of a certain strata. And you're here doing bi-vocational ministry and as you lead people, you'll come with various, a diversity of people that will come and follow
because the whole world needs Christ. What did you say at dinner about? Luther, he said something about a lion or a cat or something like that?
Dr. Clouser - As he said, The Gospel doesn't need to be defended. It's like a lion, it just needs to be let loose.
Henry - It just needs to be let loose. So you are going to let the gospel loose. But as the gospel was forward, you will find that many people that are not even in your social class will start to coming connect, getting a connection to you because the gospel has changed their life. And it's important that the social understanding is with them as leaders.
Dr. Clouser - Yes. And, of course, the Christian understanding of that is that there are definite limits to this idea of social prestige and how much give according to that what's praised in Scripture is that people do not regard someone else's social status and treat them all alike and the insistence that the church do that. Right. So you're not kissing up to somebody who just because they're wealthy
Henry - or you're not getting in ministry to manipulate them is to serve everyone the same. That's right. Is there anybody that reduced the social aspects, you can think of?
Dr. Clouser - well, there's no one that said all reality is social, or all knowledge is founded there. No, I don't know of that.
Henry - It's just everywhere.
Dr. Clouser – Yeah. And it's amazing isn't it. I was just thinking Jesus gives this one illustration? He says one time to His disciples, when you go to a feast, where do you look to see the most important people? You look at the head table. No, it's the waitress because she's serving people. pretty radical.
Henry - okay. So, sociology, is sociology social?
Dr. Clouser - Sociology, as that term is used for discipline includes a great deal more than the social, yes, all right. So, we should be clear, it kind of has its own ground there, it starts there, but almost immediately goes to relations between the social and other other aspects of our society. It goes to considering issues in the law or in ethics, or in art, or and these are all other aspects. So generally speaking, people who call themselves sociologists, are concerned with these
basic social issues, but then applying them elsewhere. It's not restricted to society.
Henry - Right. But I bring that up, because sociology is a science of the study of the social.
Dr. Clouser – But that almost has no delimitation, since its practice.
Henry – I see, it was like anything to do with human interaction is studied. Economic, the frugal use of resources. So this is not just business here. This is an economics
Dr. Clouser – That's right. It's how things exhibit economic worth. And that something has to be scarce to be economically valuable. So if, if air is plentiful for everybody, and nobody gets charged for clean air yet, then it's not worth anything, nobody will pay for it. Right? But if, if a resource is limited, right, people used to think things such as gold and diamonds are very limited, therefore the rare, rare, rare, rare gems, therefore the price goes up. And what we're what Dooyeweerd's emphasis here is to see that the Principles of Economics, the law of supply and demand, diminishing returns and the like, apply to everything in creation, right? Everything has an economic has economic and economic side to it. So a church is not a business, it's not there to make a profit, but it has a business side to it. So does a state, so does a family, a business is right there. In the middle of economic, they're there to make a service or a product that they can sell and provide a living for their employees and make a profit make a profit.
Henry - You know, a lot of families don't see how the economic relates there. We have some classes on life skills. Enterprise 101. Dr. Feddes has been working on a class that will be on soon maybe by the time you see this down the road that class will already be up about life skills. And a lot of it refers to the frugal use not only of money, but of time and space. There's a lot to successfully living in the world. And the economic is not just reduced to money. What about an absolutizer? Who absolutizes economics? I'm guessing it's Marx but
Dr. Clouser - actually Marx is a materialist. Okay, so he calls himself a dialectical materialist. Marx's position is roughly there is matter, matter is ultimate, it's uncreated. It's the metaphysically ultimate reality
Henry - But he talks about people who have more people have less
Dr. Clouser - but matter has within it an intrinsic law of development, the dialectical
Henry – The dialectical. Write that down and there will be a quiz question. Okay, go ahead.
Dr. Clouser - So, there's one principle it evokes it's opposite, they come in conflict and they produce something new. These then split apart and do the same thing. Okay, that's rough, but that's right. Yeah. Until you get living things and then you get humans and humans are to be understood as beings that are, what they are because of what they do for a living, what qualifies a human being is his work. So work and the economic exchange, the work for, for money or for goods, characterizes all of human society and his claim is that that whatever form the human society takes in the forms of work and exchange of goods determines the kind of society you get and the beliefs that people will hold. So all beliefs from social on are the products of the economic system in which they arise. That way,
Henry – How resources are dispersed in a culture
Dr. Clouser – determine what people believe and he thought that there was no fixed human nature. So that if you got the right kind of society in which everybody shared everything, and they didn't compete for economic goods, the whole idea of private ownership would just disappear in the generation. So because people are infinitely malleable there, if we can really make people to be good communist people, where they just naturally share everything, rather than competing, to have more.
Henry - So his belief was in the goodness of humanity.
Dr. Clouser – It's not so much the goodness, because you can be corrupted by capitalist society, and then want more and more and more and more and then you'll be the evil guy. So it's deterministic. He's got this is these are the causes, it all comes from matter But once you get to
Henry - Matter is the highest.
Dr. Clouser - That's the, that's the divine reality, self existent that generates everything else. But for the explanation of human human life. As soon as you come to social and economic, you get a society you have exchange of goods by means of work, and then one stage that that can't help by going through is owners and workers, right. But then that's got to be overcome, because that's
way inferior to just not competing with each other, sharing all the goods and everybody's happy. And it really was that idealistic. Unrealistic,
Henry - unrealistic and utopian, we call it sometimes. Now on the economic, there's a lot of ways to think about this. In ministry, you bi-vocational you must have the frugal use of resources to be able to even do ministry, if you're doing web marketing, nowadays, they have like, they give you analytics so that you can frugally use the resources to know if your your site is even relevant is even getting hit or interested in, too. So you know, this, you think about what Dooyeweerd did, It has not just philosophic ramifications. But as we're talking about, through these presentations, there's so many meaning moments I get whoa, you know, one of the things that, you know, my father was Dutch and everything about being raised was the frugal use of resources in moderation. And, and that was Michigan, that's where we live. And it's fascinating, one fruit of that is that it's a very prosperous people. The second most influential people in the United States are in this area, and they give to the kingdom and we're grateful for that. But I will tell you, the most of them considered themselves poor their entire life. Because of that frugal, you know, I'm not, I'm gonna pinch a penny. But it actually there's a good side to that, of course, there's you can overdo that anything can be overdone.
Dr. Clouser - So even the Vanderbilts thought they were Dutch?
Henry - I don't know, they might have been American Dutch. Okay, so this one, the how do you pronounce that?
Dr. Clouser - Justitial. This has to do with justice. It has to do with the fact that once we get a society we and we are exchanging goods and so on the whole matter of what's fair in dealing with other people, comes really to the for and exerts its force in human life and thinking and society. So we do experience some things as fair and just and others as outrageously unfair and unjust. And so this is what leads to the establishment of the State as an institution. There's confusion in the United States, we call the divisions of the national state, states. So it's confusing. But the traditional term for the political institution is the state and the government is the ruling body in the state. Okay, so now, what's the what's the nature of the state? Well, we analyze
Henry - the pursuit of happiness is Liberty
Dr. Clouser - it's to establish an order of public justice, right? What Dooyeweerd put it.
Henry - Now Jefferson kind of picked up on you know, like, the purpose of the state and, you know, rights
Dr. Clouser - he says, the purpose of government is to pass laws to protect rights.
Henry – Right. I mean, everybody knows that.
Dr. Clouser - We have to he, he says it's self evident that people all men are created equal and they have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and what
Henry - do you have a problem with?
Dr. Clouser – I do.
Henry - Oh, my God, here we go. Okay, so you Africans out there who are watching this, we have a little bit debate here about Thomas Jefferson, one of our founding fathers,
Dr. Clouser - Jefferson takes Christian ideas. And he flips them, he turns them upside down from the way they had been believed for centuries. The Christian position wasn't people are born with rights sticking in them like feathers in an eagle, it's that God had built laws into creation, such as the principle be just to others be loving to others, but particularly now we're talking about the justice to treat one another fairly and justly. Okay. And that's what gives us rights, because the laws are God's laws, and they govern all of reality, we have the right to be treated justly by other people, because they have the obligation to be just to me, as I do to them. So it's not that the rights are first and we make the laws to protect them. It's since the laws are already there, and we're born under them. And that's why we have rights. And if you think that's a silly distinction,
Henry - I mean, I feel sort of it is I can't quite see that big of a difference.
Dr. Clouser - But but here's the here's the difference. If it's the laws that are primary and the rights are the result, then you cannot sensibly argue over who has rights and who doesn't. Everybody will, because laws are universal, they govern the whole creation. All our debates, so you can't have a society in which you say, Indians don't have any rights, blacks don't have any rights. Women don't have any rights.
Henry - So we're arguing all these groups that have rights, because it says we have rights but really, if the law says that all are treated fairly. And this is the word all.
Dr. Clouser - Yeah. I have there's a line in the, in my first book, when I'm explaining this, and I said, this means that the Christian view of government is the government should not favor Christians, or anybody else. Governments should be as even handed in it's treatment of all citizens as it can possibly be.
Henry - That's public justice.
Dr. Clouser - Yes. Public Justice.
Henry - Interesting. Can anybody absolutize this aspect?
Dr. Clouser - No, I mean, there are people that have emphasized its importance that starts even with Aristotle and Plato. And Aristotle says justice is the bond that binds men to states. And elsewhere, he calls humans, a political animal meaning someone who's concern is justice and wants to wants to see that enforced means that you're safe in your person. In your possessions and your family.
Henry - Okay, the aesthetic. We're almost done here. Harmony, surprise, fun. What is that about?
Dr. Clouser - That's still controversial. A lot of people think the aesthetic has to do with what is beautiful. Yeah. I think what is beautiful is part of it. But it doesn't characterize the whole aspect. Right? And Dooyeweerd thinks that, too, it doesn't do that. We often are fascinated by something like a Gargoyle, but it's not beautiful. Or to be a little more gruesome, an accident site can be fascinating. We just can't take our eyes off it even though it's also disgusting. okay. Others of his followers have proposed other things Dooyeweerd said it was harmony, but I don't know how harmonious the gargoyle is. Harmonious with what.
Henry - Is that really just like a created one? Like,
Dr. Clouser - no, we have an aesthetic sense. Okay. And it's exhibited
Henry - I see the thing is beautiful, we've noticed, I always say that a great Facebook ad has to be noticed. And it can be noticed in a lot of dimensions from beauty to emotion. There's something if it's not, people won't even click it.
Dr. Clouser - But well, this, this includes beauty and has to be more than that. So I tried one time I wrote a little essay. And I proposed that the central meaning of this was what we enjoy, enjoyment, which is not just a feeling because when I look at the accident, I can feel repulsed but in a sense I still enjoy looking at it. And in that way it will also include not only the fine arts but sports why do we Why do we like to go to a ballgame we enjoy seeing people compete and show us spectacular with a possibility
Henry - like in the area of like story a good book. Like, you know story would like often takes us out of our world. And and we talk a lot of times and the interesting speakers have the metaphors and stories in their interesting to listen to. I've had you have had in my life for almost two weeks now. It's like, You're interesting
because you see the creative side of the story and I'm just saying and really in all of life has that aspect.
Dr. Clouser - Yes, everything has is potentially has their aesthetic value, one way or another now we call something a work of art. When that piece, whatever it is a piece of music, a painting is actually quantified by the terms of the aesthetic aspect. That's the one in which it functions as the highest one in which it functions and so on. It gives away more of a, that's a key to its nature. So you take a piece of stone, and whatever aesthetic value, it has very limited, right? And then you carve a beautiful statue out, right? And everybody says, wow, there's Michelangelo's David, yes.
Henry - Okay, so there's an ethical, you wrote that ethical aspect, as a term is used here to have norms concern with loving or benevolence.
Dr. Clouser - Okay, that's better than self giving. It doesn't mean just self giving love. That's the kind of love that the New Testament describes God is having for us. But the commandment here about this as an aspect of our life is more follows the second commandment, you shall love your neighbor as yourself. Now that includes yourself. Not just self giving. It's not just altruistic. Your not to sacrifice my own good for somebody else.
Henry - Yeah, well, we wrote down that from Wikipedia, Wikipedia. Correction,
Dr. Clouser - I love my neighbor, as much as I do myself, nothing wrong with loving myself. And I balanced my good with my neighbors. If Surely, if I can give up something that's relatively minor to me, and a great benefit to my neighbor, then it's something I should do. When it gets a lot closer, maybe I'm not quite sure what to do here. If it's the reverse, I would have to suffer greatly in order to
give my neighbor something very insignificant. I don't have any obligation to do that at all. love my neighbor as myself. So it's so powerful.
Henry - They're really saying like, there's a certain difference between self interested in selfish. Yes, that's right. To be self interested means your image bearer of God, you have rights, you have responsibilities, you live your life that ultimately is to provide love for my neighbor, as I love myself.
Dr. Clouser - Now, one of the confusion. I should mention this before we leave. In the United States, there's a confusion of terminology that causes no end of messiness. And that is that when when we are discussing the law, right, not ethics but the law, justice. It's a common terminology in the law, to talk about things that are unjust, but no one's made a law against them as morally wrong. We should say, is there there juridically or with respect to justice, they're unjust, and there ought to be a law, but they call it morality. And that confuses the juridical sense of, of this with the moral sense, the strictly moral sense, we take to be from the second commandment, right? But first, the two great commandments to love God unlimitedly that's all our heart soul, mind, and strength. Our whole being is dedicated to God. No, no balance with my neighbor there's a balance. And so it has to do with love and hate. Right? So why is it an aspect of everything easily, it's easy. It's not just people we can love and hate. I had a suit I bought 40 years ago, I thought was really smart. I love that suit. Or somebody says, you know, I bought one of those cars, piece of junk from the day I got it gave me nothing but trouble. So it has to do with things as objects of love and hate with our obligation to others.
Henry - The act of it can be for a Christian bitterness sets in when hate goes deeper, and the lack of forgiveness, I mean, it even becomes into the religious, religious sphere of our lives or critical. So one more the last one, the fiduciary and the pistic. Okay. By the way, I'm gonna tell you what you wrote. What's your little this is what you wrote faith, vision, belief, trustworthy -ok. The term fiduciary is used to refer to the varying levels of reliability or trustworthiness a thing or person may have. This aspect is especially important in connection with human social relations with human social relations of all sorts, which disintegrates rapidly, where there is significant lack of trust.
Dr. Clouser - Right. So this is an aspect of everything, too. Things are trustworthy in many different respects. We usually single one, one main one out at a time, but sometimes not sometimes we want something to be trustworthy in this way, this way and this way, and so on, but we make judgments about that. Now this has a special relation to theology because what it is that people trust most, that is the thing they think, is the most trustworthy, it cannot fail, it always
turns out to be what they regard as divine, right, that's the self existent reality that generates everything else. So what they put the most trust in is has a correspondence to theology where we try to explain the Divinity belief of a person and it's run, right.
Henry - So there's almost a science aspect to this, and we study the science of the knowledge of God. Here in this area, I mean, you know, in a sense a lot. We talked about science and the earlier ones and
Dr. Clouser - be more careful to say, it's an investigation. You want to use science. It's a dangerous thing.
Henry - Hey. Well, I just like you, I'm just trying to make sense out of this.
Dr. Clouser - Call theology, the science of God. Okay. The the Orthodox Calvinist traditions, find that outrageous, okay, so outrageously make it an object of investigation is what the Object Object of investigation is his word, right. And we do try to take that apart, and, to the best of our ability, understand exactly what it's saying there, what teaching we can get from trying. But the fiduciary at large is an aspect of all things. So my, my car would make a very poor paperweight. But it's too big. But then, my little medallion, bronze medallion with a picture of a president on it makes a very nice paperweight. Some things are good,
Henry - like when they fit the situation, when they're appropriate, when they're trustworthy, because that's the appropriate remedy to a problem. That's also part of the fiduciary.
Dr. Clouser - And some people have suggested that the science of this short of theology, the short, short of the most, the most trustworthy of all, which is unconditionally trustworthy, right, in all the other respects would be probability. What's the probability that this will bring blessings? Stand out for the purpose I'm trying to use it?
Henry - Like purpose, even little purpose. Okay, so there you have it. The aspects of Christian philosophy from Herman Dooyeweerd. And I enjoyed this, I want to thank you for pleasure. I want to always have this discussion with a real Christian philosopher 30 or 35 years after I studied this, and I'm amazed at how much I remembered. You know, and I have my holes you saw, it's good, I have my issue. That's right. You know, and we have issues I have my issues. But this is just a wonderful thing that can be in your life, and it will start shaping your thought in your ministry or if you have a business, all of these things. So again, I
just thank you for the time that you shared, and we'll see what God's gonna do with this kind of insight.