Video Transcript: Relations, Natural Things, and Artifacts

Last time, we talked about the nature of artifacts, and I pointed out that they have a different nature from natural things, in that artifacts can have as their leading function, some properties of the laws of some aspect that is, in which they function only passively. natural things are not like that their nature is qualified by the only by the aspects in which they function actively. And this becomes important for social theories, because human communities are artifacts, people combine people to form a business, a school, a church, a labor union, any number of social institutions. And that's what where we're headed, we're going to end up applying these new concepts that we've derived from Dooyeweerd's ontology, in order to get a theory of the state. And it too is a social institution, it's the institution that is, has as its purpose, the establishment and maintenance of a public legal order. Now, the term state can be confusing to people who live in the United States, because in that country, the subdivisions of the whole nation are called states. So it's confusing. But traditionally, the word state in English has meant the political institution in society, the ruling, part of which is the government. That's where we're headed with all this. You can keep that in mind as we go. Now one of the important things that comes up when we look at social institutions, and how they're qualified, their foundational function, and their leading function is whether or not the people who participate in them are parts of the whole are human beings, parts of the state, are they parts of a family parts of a church. And our Christian theory wants to vehementally reject that idea. Human beings are not just parts of any social institution. What then is their relationship to the rest of the institution. And that's what we're going to deal with. Today. The classical definition of one thing being part of another was given by Aristotle, x is a part of y if x plays a role in the internal organization of y, and cannot come into existence, apart from y, that's the traditional definition. So for example, a cell is part of a plant. The cell can't come into existence or function apart from the plant. And it plays a role in the internal organization of the plant. It works fine for cells and plants. But it doesn't work fine for humans, and say their relationship to the state as an institution and to the government as a ruling body in the state. We need another kind of relationship between them in order to understand the true nature of what's going on there. So Dooyeweerd has proposed the concept of capsulate wholes, he calls this an encaptic relation. There are some times that wholes are formed, not by parts, but by sub wholes. Entire things that can exist apart from the relationship from the greater whole, but which do play a role in the internal organization of it. I gave some examples of that before, I'll repeat them and apply them to this point. Now. A bird can swallow a small stone that can go into his gizzard and help grind his food is certainly taking part in the internal process of the bird. We could argue whether it really has a role in it in its internal organization seems to me that it does. Nevertheless, it's not a part of the bird. And of course, the traditional definition it wouldn't be either because the stone can exist apart from the bird, whereas the cell can't exist apart from the plant. And an encaptic relation or a capsulate relation is one in which the one whole or many wholes combined to form a larger, we could call it a super whole, a larger whole and without ever being parts of it. So that's what we want to say about social communities. First of all they are artifacts, looks like we need something else to go here because humans form them. Secondly, if they are artifacts, they have a foundational and a leading function. We're going to say that for the state, for the political institution, the foundational function is historical people come together, they in a state. And they acknowledge a leadership of that state, they acknowledge an authority. And the leading function is justice. Aristotle got it right. Justice is the bond that binds men into states. Then the question arises are the citizens of the state parts of the state, and people like Aristotle, and Karl Marx said yes, they are, they're parts of the state, because they function in its internal organization. And they cannot come into existence or function correctly apart from the state, this is a collectivist view of the state. The the whole is, has priority over any individual part. Aristotle even makes the argument that just as a doctor will sacrifice a part of your body, in order to save the rest, it may be necessary to sacrifice individuals to save the entire state. Marx explicitly says that he defines justice as whatever will preserve the state. Christians ought to see red flags when they hear that kind of stuff. On the other hand, there's the other extreme, and that's individualism. The individualistic view of this says, the individuals are prior they come first, solitary, all sovereign individuals independent, come together, meet and contract to form a state. Almost no states have ever been made that way. But that's the way the theory goes. That that's what is really going on, if we could know how states originated, at first. But we have now, not only to take into consideration, the foundation or leading functions, but the relation of citizens. To more coming to the state. It's not going to be any different from the relations of individual human beings, to any other organization, either. Human beings are not parts, mere parts of any institution, such as the institution is more important. It is what the humans depend on. There are other kinds of relationships too that that are not part whole, there's a certain kind of bee and a certain kind of plant, the plant can exist without the bees pollinating them, and the bees can't exist without those plants, because that's the only only kind of that supplies the food that they eat. So that's a symbiotic kind of relation in that relation two things have capsulate relation but do not combine to form a whole. So there are capsulate relations that form new wholes are ones that don't but express some other kinds of relationship. So this is an important distinction for getting straight. What's wrong with the two main theories that have held the field for so long. And I'm going to put those over here. Collectivism. This says that the institution is primary, it produces the individual members, the members can't really exist or function apart from the whole. Aristotle even adds that any human that separates himself from the rest of society and isn't a member of a state is either a beast or a god, but not a human. Either that person is subhuman. Because that person was outside of the state, and all that it affords, primarily justice, but then other cultural advantages, or that person is superhuman, and a god. If a person is like that, Aristotle recommends that that person be banished from the state. That's collectivism individualism goes the other route. This says it's the individuals that are primary. They somehow come into being apart from any community of humans, and they are perfectly capable of maintaining themselves as solitary individuals. The name that's most famously associated with that view is Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes postulates that at the very beginning of the human race, there were just solitary individuals. He doesn't even envision marriage or family. He just, they're solitary individuals, they're in some kind of landscape. They hunt for their food. They have sex whenever they bump into each other. And that's how the race continues. And for the, for the insofar as they are concerned, they don't really need any organization, there is no collective group that they must have to think about that for moments that really plausible. It we all know it takes at least two humans to make another one. We've got to have some kind of community there. But think about what he's suggesting, is it plausible that individuals can just walk into a landscape and do just fine without the help of any other individuals. That view was made popular by the novel, Robinson Crusoe. But when you think about it, it's not all that plausible. Imagine yourself now, put into some environment, you've never been there before. There are no other humans. Maybe it's an island someplace that's uninhabited, and you are placed there. And the object is to see if you can survive. You have, are not allowed to have anything that's produced by human society either. Because for Hobbes, there was no society. So each person, if they wore anything, would have to make their own clothes does have to find their own food, and so on. So now you are placed on this island, completely naked? And without any tools, or remnants of civilization? How are you going to survive? Do you think that would be easy? What do you need to do? First, you need to make a weapon, because there may be an animal hunting, you do need to make shoes because it really hurts to walk very much. If you find water is it pure? Can you drink it? You find berries, can I eat them? Or will they poison me. And now imagine that we put several people on this island. This is Hobbes picture. And they're going to want all be wandering around trying to do the same thing, guard themselves, arm themselves feed themselves. Just how successful you think that would they would make that. Especially if they bumped into one another, and each considered the other competition. It's dreaming to suppose that people could exist as solitary individuals, apart from anything produced by humans, a larger group of humans working together to produce it. That's what individualism claims, Hobbes picture then he goes on to say, the solitary individuals who are self sufficient, come together. Finally, because that life is pretty unpleasant. He has a famous line about it. Life and in the state of nature, the way people first came in, when people first came on the scene is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. And so they contract together to make a state, they contract together to give somebody  that they choose the authority to make laws and to rule. And now, instead of being a war of all against all, in which he has another famous comment that man is a wolf to men, instead of that we can avoid all that by giving up all our rights to the state, and having this newly created authority, exercise complete, unrestrained power, to make laws and enforce them. That's the picture he recommends. And I think that most of us, from our own Christian background already have an instinctive revulsion to that. An all powerful state. That's not what we want to hear. So Locke picks up individualism much later, and tries to make it a lot more friendly than that. People contract together to create a state and to give the state authority but the state only has whatever authority the rest of the people choose to give it. And they designate what that is. So the state in Locke's view isn't so all encompassing and totalitarian, but it's reduced a little more than a security company. People have the authority to use force to enforce laws, and the laws are there just to protect your life and your property. If there's no broader view, such as what we get from scripture, that the better thing would be to have the state create an order that has to do with public justice and has to do with far more than just protecting your property. It has to do with relations between humans reducing strife, giving ways for conflict resolution, and all sorts of other law besides protecting property. So these two theories, then both come out with a view of human beings that we're going to argue is not correct, and can't be sustained. This says it's the group that's primary. So the individuals, if necessary, must be sacrificed for the good of the group. And as I said, Marx even defines justice as whatever preserves the individuals in order to avoid that say, No, it's not the group, it's the individual that's primary, and individuals freely contract together to make whatever institutions they have. It's called the contract theory of the state, not surprisingly. So which of these is more Christian? Which of these is what Christians ought to be saying? Dooyeweerd says, Neither one, they're both false. Now, you might say, wait a minute, wait a minute. If the group isn't primary, because it produces individuals, or the individuals aren't primary, in that they produce any groups, any communities? Then what is it? This argument, if it didn't have such serious consequences, might almost be funny. It sounds like the question Which came first the chicken or the egg? And it's a lot like that. But what is the biblical answer to this? How does there come to How Did there come to be humans, in organizations? In communities? Well, the the answer in Scripture is that neither one creates the other God creates them both simultaneously. So God brings it out, there are human beings, but they're not just the solitary human beings things are about that there are human beings already in relationships, already in marriages, already in families. So neither the group produces is sole producer, the individual or the individual, the group, God is the creator of both. There's a text in the scripture that says God sets solitary individuals in families. That's the that's the prescription, but that's the way it began. So, both of these rests on imagined fantasies on stories about how humanity may have originated and the biblical story is different from both of them. So, what we want to say here is that when citizens have a relationship with the state and they do they do not have it as parts not a part of a greater whole but some wholes that are members of the greater whole so we are distinguishing here being a part of have a greater whole eand being a sub whole in a greater whole and that's what he what I'm calling a capsulate relationship. And this is our proposal for understanding how humans relate to the communities in which they are in which they are members or sub wholes. Why don't we stop there and give you a chance to think this over, and we'll come back and continue it