Maarten Verkerk, Gerrit Glas, and Suzan Sierksma-Agteres, The Intellectual Legacy of Herman Dooyeweerd 1894–1977: A Hopeful Philosophy for Our Time. Translated by David Hanson. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2025. 272 pp.
I was first introduced to Herman Dooyeweerd’s philosophy just over half a century ago and almost immediately took to it. This was in spite of its contents being locked within the confines of a dense prose likely to put off the uninitiated or fainthearted. Although I would eventually write a dissertation on his political thought, I often found myself wishing that Dooyeweerd had possessed the wittiness of a G. K. Chesterton, who once observed that the madman is not someone who has lost his reason, but someone who has lost everything except his reason (Chesterton, Orthodoxy). This clever adage has always struck me as a Dooyeweerdian insight of the first order, given the Dutch philosopher’s obvious esteem for what he calls naïve experience and others call intuition. Incalculable harm has been done throughout recent history by intellectuals who have become enamoured of their own reasoning at the expense of sound judgement borne of a fuller human experience.
But how do we communicate all this to a popular audience—to the very people whose intuitive grasp of reality Dooyeweerd claimed to honour? This is what the book under review attempts to do. Maarten Verkerk, Gerrit Glas, and Suzan Sierksma-Agteres have given us a winsomely constructed account of his philosophy in seventeen fairly brief chapters with an attractive format boasting many visual illustrations throughout.
The obstacles to an easy comprehension of Dooyeweerd’s thought are many. Above all, his working vocabulary is a mix of familiar terms with idiosyncratic definitions and outright neologisms. (When was the last time you heard someone use pistical in a sentence?) The book’s first chapter, for example, is devoted to meaning, a word that one assumes would speak to everyone. But for Dooyeweerd, meaning is to be distinguished from being, the latter belonging to God alone and the former to the created cosmos. “Reality is intrinsically meaningful because it reveals God and points towards Him” (15). The authors of this book quite nicely cut through the jargon and ably communicate the truth that Dooyeweerd attempts to get across with this basic distinction. Of course, Dooyeweerd might have used more immediately comprehensible terms in his philosophy, but he was evidently concerned not to mislead readers into assuming that such usage would reflect the pagan, dualistic, and humanistic worldviews standing at their origin.
But perhaps the greatest obstacle to accepting Dooyeweerd’s systematic approach to the cosmos is his assertion that all theoretical thought has religious foundations. No theory is religiously neutral, and it inevitably reflects the ultimate commitments of the theoretician. This is something of which the modern world could not easily make sense, because for several centuries we had been conditioned to assume that the scientific method is the source of truth and that claims to knowledge apart from it lack certainty and are thus less trustworthy. Of course, Dooyeweerd is not the first person to recognize the influence that personal commitments have on theoretical activity, and more recent thinkers have come onside in our postmodern era. But his uniqueness lies in his simultaneously rejecting the historicism that so often accompanies this recognition.
The authors do not shy away from criticism, which is appropriate in any assessment of someone’s work. The elephant in the room—and Dooyeweerd could easily subject such an elephant to modal analysis—is his somewhat thorny relationship with theology and theologians. Dooyeweerd rightly criticizes a scholastic theology that views God as an object of theoretical examination—“the supposed study of God’s ‘being’” (142). But the authors take him to task for having built so high a wall between philosophy and theology “that it also affected the relationship between philosophy and Christian faith” (147). For Dooyeweerd God’s sovereignty appears to come at the expense of his “willingness to suffer weakness and brokenness in advancing his purposes of compassion, redemption and love” (147). Readers can judge for themselves whether this is a fair critique.
One element the authors have not addressed, although this lack is by no means peculiar to them: while Dooyeweerd famously eschewed apologetics, I have come to believe that his philosophy actually carries the seeds of a powerful apology for the Christian faith, thus far unexplored, as far as I can tell. Perhaps one day someone will connect the dots for us.
I cannot overlook the unique arrangement for making this book as widely available as possible. Few books come with this statement: “Some rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, any part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means . . . .” Indeed, the entire book can be downloaded for free as a PDF, but this means that the physical book is prohibitively expensive at over $100 or $200 (US), depending on the vendor. As a reviewer, I was pleased to receive a hardbound copy of the book, which I personally find easier to read than an electronic document.
I am pleased to recommend this book to prospective readers wishing to acquaint themselves with an admittedly difficult philosophy. There is, of course, no substitute for reading Dooyeweerd himself, but we now possess in this book a valuable secondary introduction to his thought.
David Koyzis is the author of Political Visions and Illusions and lives in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.