Religious Ground Motive - The Nature/Freedom RGM of The Enlightenment

The Nature/Freedom RGM of The Enlightenment

The spiritual warfare to displace a pock-marked Christianity from its formative power over society and daily life, also individual consciences, was an RGM called "the Enlightenment." From early on and throughout its development, the Enlightenment was itself torn within by two contending devotions. One was the devotion to Nature, conceived as a deterministic universe a Nature-only earthly existence and a mundane life often struggling to overcome a sense of banality and ennui; the other was the parallel and antagonistic devotion to an absolutized quest from Freedom. In Dooyeweerd's view, this internal struggle has tossed European, and then Western thought more widely conceived, back and forth, as though it were on a swinging pendulum that first favoured one of the two absolute values, then devolving along its trajectory to a bottom-most point, only to climb again to the opposite highpoint of the ever-recurring swing between Nature and Freedom. Dooyeweerd held that all prominent philosophers attempted to account for both sides of this dualistic RGM, but usually have explained one of the options in a minor key in terms of the other which then would constitute the major key for the given philosopher. The shifts of the internal dynamics of the Enlightenment RGM, however, are not philosophical shifts alone. Philosophy only gives a certain formal theoretical expression to the cultural tension of its three-hundred-or-so years as the hegemonic religious ground motive of Western culture, to the present. In this situation, Jews and Christians have had to find their ways of surviving within the continuously expanding Enlightenment culture that brought both Hitler and Stalin to power in the most devastating ways.