Gennn Friesen has updated his Studies related to Herman Dooyeweerd site with a large paper on 'Imagination, image of God and wisdom of God: theosophical themes in Dooyeweerd's philosophy' (It is also available as a pdf here.)
The Dutch Christian philosopher Herman Dooyeweerd (1894-1977) is more relevant today than ever before. Postmodernism is questioning the validity of modernism’s rationalistic and dualistic thought. It attempts to fully temporalize all of humanity’s existence and concerns, and it rejects any role of the transcendent. And in its emphasis on our historical constructs of reality, postmodernism has relativized all values, leaving both our everyday praxis and our theoretical thought without any foundations. Postmodernism is acutely aware of this lack of foundations. A key postmodern theme has been the discovery of what many call a post-critical (or post-liberal) position concerning the possibility of a re-enchantment of life and of the cosmos, based, in part, on a hermeneutics of retrieval. But just what is it that postmodernism is seeking to retrieve? And how do we re-enchant our world after the devastation to the foundations caused by the hermeneutics of suspicion?
I believe that Dooyeweerd’s philosophy, and in particular his ideas of imagination, help us to answer these questions. For Dooyeweerd, our acts of imagination do not only play a role in our aesthetic and artistic creations. Imagination is also fundamental to our act of perceiving the world, and to both our pre-theoretical and our theoretical knowledge. In our acts of imagination, we retrieve the wisdom of the past, a wisdom that reflects God’s Wisdom or Sophia. This is therefore an answer to one problem posed by postmodernism.
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