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Comparision between Heidegger's and Dooyeweerd's Thought

This page briefly compares some of Heidegger's and Dooyeweerd's ideas. Just started - growing and developing - it has

a table of comparison,
a brief appreciation of both Heidegger and Dooyeweerd, with Dooyeweerd's own appreciation of Heidegger,
several vignettes of comparison, which are short pieces on:
a list of Dooyeweerd's own comments on Heidegger from his index.

Also, Rudi Hayward has written a dissertation on Heidegger, that he has allowed us to have, in which he makes some comparison with Dooyeweerd.

Warning: Heidegger's Being and Time is, apparently, even more difficult to understand than Dooyeweerd's New Critique. (Actually I find it easier - which probably means I have completely misunderstood it!) So please correct us if we have misunderstood Heidegger.

Legend has it that Dooyeweerd obtained Being and Time soon after it was published in 1927, and then read it thirteen times before he made any claim to understand it. His own copy, heavily marked in margin and underscored, is housed in the library of the Toronto Institute for Christian Studies. [Source: Wolters, 1985] So his comments on Heidegger are probably worth something.

Table of Comparison

Heidegger	Dooyeweerd Agrees	Dooyeweerd Disagrees/ Takes Further
Starting point: not the 'thinking I', but 'existence' that precedes thinking and is present in it.	Starting point: not the 'thinking I', but 'law' that precedes thinking and is present in it.	Law/meaning rather than existence.
Sees only entity-side (things, events)		law-side + entity-side
'worlding'	Law-framework	-
'being-in-the-world' the 'meaning of being'	Law-framework in which being is. "Meaning is the Being of all that is created."	Hdg's conclusion was Dooy's starting point. Dooy asked what the world is like starts with Meaning r.t. Being.
Da-sein ('there-being')	"Nothing exists in isolation."	Interconnectedness is not only in entity-side but also in law-side, and also to Divine.
'power-to-be'	The enabling that aspects provide
'Being itself' (without 'there') expresses itself in human thought (of 'later' Hdg)	Analytic functioning generates isolated objects.	But that is not 'Being itself'. It is only being in the analytic aspect. There is no 'being itself' within creation.
The thinking person is where Being can come out into the open. [Schuurman:85]	Person functioning in analytic aspect distinguishes things, and also makes the structure of law-side visible.	-
Structures of all being become visible through the meditation of self. [Schuurman:85]	Structures may be analysed theoretically via higher abstraction.	Structures are visible to lower abstraction
'Being itself' not static but dynamic. It is event. 'Historical'.	Distinguishing is event. What we distinguish is not static; it is under our control.	(Note: Dooyeweerd sees 'historical' as of formative aspect.)
Everyday being is 'inauthentic' [Schuurman:84]	Everyday being is not theoretically analyzable.	Everyday being is the more authentic. See vignette.
Ge-stell	?? Multi-aspectual disclosure ??	-
Essence (Wesen)	?? Qualifying aspect ??
Technicity not only as utility but 'revealment'.	Technicity: our functioning in formative aspect. cf. Strijbos' 'Disclosive Systems Thinking'.
"Designing is not unlimited possibility. The being of man is radically limited in its 'power-to-be'. Man is 'thrown' into a 'beginning situation'." [Schuurman:84]	The aspects guide what we are, do, design, normatively.
"Man is 'thrown' into a 'beginning situation'." [Schuurman:84]	We are interconnected and we function historically.	But our thrownness is not only into the entity-side ('situation'), but also the law-side.
Humanity's 'compulsory fate': Humanity is 'sent' forth to 'reveal'.	Humanity's 'Cultural Mandate'.	Sent forth by God, r.t. by 'fate'. Maybe Hdg was discovering the God-given without allowing himself to think in those terms?

I have a picture of us all living and existing within a porcelain sphere, thin-walled, beautiful but immeasurably strong. Most of us give thougnt to the contents around us within the sphere but little thought to the sphere itself. But Heidegger was not content, and explored until he reached the edge, the inner surface of the wall of the sphere. He examined the surface and tried to explain it as a given. Few have done as he did.

Dooyeweerd also gave thought to the sphere. But he saw beyond and through it. Not clearly, he felt a warmth that radiated from a source outside, and discerned a light that permeated through its thin walls. He took as a given not the sphere itself but the transcendent maker of the sphere, and thereby saw the sphere and all inside it as of infinite value.

Dooyeweerd's Appreciation of Heidegger

Dooyeweerd held Kant in high regard - but he seems to have held Heidegger in even higher regard. He said [NC III:525]:

"Heidegger here shows a much deeper insight into the real problems of the cognitive synthesis than Kant's most articulate modern followers. The latter simply eulogize Kant's discovery of 'the synthetical character of all objective knowledge' and his 'Copernican deed', without penetrating to the crucial questions implied in his transcendental idealism. Perhaps Heidegger's superiority in this respect is due to the fact that, however much he may start from the philosophical immanence-standpoint, he approaches Kant from the modern state of decline of the Humanistic ideals of personality and science. In Kant these two still function as the unshakable pillars of his cosmonomic Idea. His faith in the autonomy of theoretical reason caused him to overlook the most fundamental problems of a transcendental critique of human knowledge. Heidegger, who is no longer biased by this dogmatic prejudice, was confronted with the real problem of the inter-functional synthesis and tries to solve it in his own way, though he ascribes this solution to Kant himself. // Heidegger's interpretation of Kant changes that philosopher's thought considerably both as to its foundation and its essence. And yet Heidegger's book [Being and Time] is extremely valuable as an attempt to think out the problems of Kant's Kritik der reinen Vernunft with regard to the fundamental chapter on the 'synthesis'."

Vignettes

On Time

According to Wolters, Dooyeweerd's notion of cosmic time has a lot in common with Heidegger's. Both are centred on continuity. But must wait for more. According to Dooyeweerd [NC II:525] (I have not read Heidegger himself on this) "Time as 'pure intuition' and 'pure self-affection' is the essence of the finite human selfhood." But, to Dooyeweerd, the relationship between time and selfhood is different.

See comparison between Heidegger and Dooyeweerd on time on the Time page.

On Being of God and Creatures

As I understand it, Heidegger tried to ask "Why is there anything rather than nothing?", including even the Being of God in his question. But Dooyeweerd held that the Being of God and that of creatures cannot be brought together under the same metaphysical notion. If God is Creator, the bringer into Being, then he creates the very possibility of Being as we know it, and hence his own Being cannot be of this type. There is absolutely no justification for presupposing the two types of Being are in any way the same.

On Being in Everyday Experience

For Heidegger, paradoxically, the everyday ends up meaningless. As Rudi Hayward puts it:

"This is the ambivalence of the everyday, at one point it gives us critical leverage over rational metaphysics and yet it ends up in its traditional role of the superficial, and vague covering which obscures the deeper truth of being."

But for Dooyeweerd, the everyday was pulsing with meaning and significance, because it is multi-aspectual functioning and it is the aspects that make its meaning. Rudi Hayward says:

"Dooyeweerd understood reality to be a complexity of meaning; not only do entities exist within a referential framework, as with Heidegger, but also basic modes of meaning depend and relate to each other in a coherence of references. Dooyeweerd writes that "every aspect of experience expresses within its model structure the entire temporal order and connection of all the aspects", and so all of the modes of experience, "in spite of their mutual irreducibility - are interrelated in an unbreakable coherence of meaning." Modes of meaning do not exist in themselves, instead they are only to be thought of in connection with actual beings, in this way Dooyeweerd rejected all ideas of substances or things in themselves that somehow stand behind everyday experience."

On 'Worlding'

Dooyeweerd's notion that aspects pertain and transcend humanity is not unlike Heidegger's notion of 'worlding' of things, by which a thing is what it is, for example a pen is a pen rather than a piece of plastic by virtue of writing. Though this relates to Dooyeweerd's theory of entities, what is relevant here is that Heidegger wanted to move away from an anthropocentric notion of pen as merely a tool for humanity, to something beyond, namely writing as such - which is very similar to Dooyeweerd's lingual aspect. The lingual aspect pertains, including its possibility of offering 'penness' to the Cosmos, beyond the needs or aspirations of humanity. So, similarly, do all the other aspects, and Dooyeweerd thus might lend richness to Heidegger's idea of 'worlding'.

Dooyeweerd's Comments on Heidegger from Index

These are Dooyeweerd's comments on Heidegger found in the index of NC volume IV, with volume and page number, so you can look them up. As yet, I have neither sorted nor categorized them.

I:4 - Heidegger's definition "das Sein des Seienden" and Dooyeweerd's "Meaning is the mode of being of all that is created" (note)
I:27 - time is historical and has a dialectical existential meaning
I:111 - the being of the ego is understood as the reality of the res cogitans (thinking substance)
I:112 - He accepts the static conception of reality with respect to the 'given world of things' and rejects this conception as to 'free personality' or 'free human existence'
I:112 - He moves in the paths of immanence philosophy
I:112 - his Archimedean point is in 'existential thought', thus making the 'transcendental ego' sovereign
II:22 - Heidegger's notion of 'being'; he opposes the old metaphysical equation of 'being' and non-differentiated unity
II:22 - 'das Vorhandene'
II:22 - 'Dasein'
II:22 - Geworfenheit, Vervorfenheit
II:23 - das Nichts; Angst;
II:23 - 'ontical being' has no selfhood; historical existential being; Dasein or existential being.
II:24 - Zeit; Sorge; running forward to death; Entschlossenheit;
II:24 - Heidegger and Oswald Spengler's Der Untergand des Abendlandes
II:492-3 - Heidegger's interpretation of Kant's Kritik der reinen Vernunft; According to Heidegger, KdrV is not concerned with epistemology, but it relates to ontology, at least in its first edition
II:505 (note) - Heidegger holds that Kant did not deduct the categories from the table of judgments
II:515 - Heidegger acknowledges that the operation of the productive imagintion on sensibility is ascribed by Kant to logical thought
II:520 - [To Heidegger] Kant's chapter on the schematism is the central part of the whole work
II:521 - the synthesis is called imagination, but it is the understanding
II:522 - the unity of sensibility and thought cannot be understood or even made a problem;
II:522 - Heidegger distiguishes sharply between epistemology and ontology (Sein des Seienden)
II:524 - Heidegger's maxim for interpreting a philosophical system; its relative truth; the guiding idea should be that of the system under investigation;
II:524 - Heidegger views Kant from the irrationalistic historicistic idea of existentialism; this is an arbitrary policy;
II:524 - he admits that he has recourse to violence;
II:524 - he identifies Kant's 'transcendental imagination' with Dasein; the synthesis is ontological;
II:524 - human life is at the mercy of 'das Vorhandene' but rises above it through understanding das Vorhandene; for this purpose Dasein designs an a priori image of what is;
II:524 - the problem of synthesis is: how can a finite being know the 'being' of what is 'beforehand'?
II:525 - Heidegger's transcendence of the selfhood is only that of Dasein above das Vorhandene; its essence is time as pure intuition; transcendental imagination is the formative medium of the two stems of knowledge, viz. intuition and thought
II:526 - Heidegger does not recognize the cosmic coherence, and seeks the selfhood in the temporal historical Dasein
II:527 - the phenomenon is object, 'Gegenstand', das Vorhandene in nature, the 'm� on';
II:527 - the synthesis of the transcendental imagination gives it ontical being;
II:527 - the possibility of ontological synthesis remains unexplained;
II:527 - Kant still held the selfhood to be be supra-temporal;
II:527 - reality is only accessible in the theoretical abstraction of the 'Gegenstandliche'
II:528 - Kant on intuition, imagination, logical though, as a threefold unity of time;
II:528 - Heidegger bolds time to be the cogito; pure receptivity; self-affection
III:30 - Existence and Being
III:5 - Heidegger's existentialism used by August Brunner
III:781 - Heidegger seeks an immediate approach to the innermost sphere of man's temporal existence;
III:781 - the Existentials (care, dread, concern)
Dooyeweerd's references to Heidegger's works:
- I:111, II:22-4,524 - Sein und Zeit
- II:22 - Holzwege der Philosophie
- II:25 - Was ist Metaphysik?
- II:520-5,527-531 - Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik

This page is part of a collection of pages that links to various thinkers, within The Dooyeweerd Pages, which explain, explore and discuss Dooyeweerd's interesting philosophy. Email questions or comments would be welcome.

Number of visitors to these pages: Counter . Written on the Amiga and Protext.

Created: 10 July 2003 Last updated: 25 July 2003 legend, time, being; Index, link to Rudi Hayward. 21 August 2003 table comparison started, with 'porcelain sphere'. 20 September 2003 Dooyeweerd's appreciation of Hdg; reordered sections. 23 September 2003 link to time#hdg. 17 June 2010 new .nav, .end, rid unet.