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.
The book can be ordered or downloaded in its entirety from this website.
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