Herman Dooyeweerd's philosophical collaboration with Dirk Vollenhoven

What is it about?

Reformational Philosophy is about a systematic understanding of the whole of life and the created order from a Christian perspective. Two key figures in the systematic development of this were Herman Dooyeweerd (1894-177) and Dirk H. Th. Vollenhoven (1892-1978), both of whom worked within the tradition of Abraham Kuyper (1837 -1920), the father of Reformational philosophy. This article builds on my previous article on Dirk H. Th. Vollenhoven and provides an overview of the development of the systematic philosophy of Herman Dooyeweerd, both in the convergences arising from the conversation of the two brothers-in-law and long-term colleagues and in their divergences. Their convergences were grounded in their common vision, which they together had arrived at in their conversations of the early 1920s and elaborated through the course of their professional lives. In the late 1920s, Dooyeweerd’s quest for a supratemporal vantage point—his First Way—led to a divergence between their positions, which continued into subsequent decades and was not ameliorated by Dooyeweerd’s development of his Second Way of transcendental critique. Vollenhoven did not engage with this but instead developed his consequential problem-historical method, which might be regarded as a Third Way, identifying the ground types that variously underly the patterns of Western and possibly all philosophical thought. Their diverse insights on the relational character of philosophy can be seen as complementary, with Dooyeweerd focusing on the súbject-object relations themselves and conceiving of individuals in terms of the structuring of those relations (hence his pervasive use of the term individuality structures) and Vollenhoven starting with individuals and seeing relationships as the composite directions between those individuals. Overall, Dooyeweerd's partnership with Vollenhoven was long and fruitful, and over the course of their long joint tenure at the Vrije Universiteit, and before and after that, their combined achievement was both significant and remarkable.

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Why is it important?

The philosophical development of Herman Dooyweerd and Dirk Vollenhoven has tended to be addressed separately. However, I argue that the close cooperation between the two philosophers was critical in the formulation of a thoroughgoing systematic Reformational philosophy. The philosophical conversation between the two persisted, despite critical divergences, largely aired privately. Their respective insights remained a source of mutual stimulus and complementarity foundational for Reformational philosophy.

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