Original: https://www.geheugenvandevu.nl/application/files/9016/1582/1065/Hoeven_Jvd_IMHDC.pdf
Johan van der Hoeven (* December 6, 1932 – † April 29, 2015)
At the end of April, VU philosopher Johan van der Hoeven passed away. He was affiliated with what was initially the Central Interfaculty and from 1987 onward the Faculty of Philosophy between 1963 and 1998. Van der Hoeven was associated with Calvinist philosophy, but he was not a rigid representative of it. He was neither a simple apologist but rather a searching and probing philosopher with a strong interest in the philosophy of his time.
Anyone reflecting on the life of Johan van der Hoeven is first struck by the remarkable course of his studies. Van der Hoeven was born into a simple Reformed family. His father was first a warehouse manager at a shipping company and later at a machine factory, as we learn from the excellent biographical and intellectual sketch that Henk Woldring provided of him in Een handvol filosofen. Geschiedenis van de filosofiebeoefening aan de Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam van 1880 tot
2012. [A Handful of Philosophers: History of Philosophy Practice at the Free University in Amsterdam from 1880 to 2012.] In his early years, Van der Hoeven was captivated by the appearance of theologian Klaas Schilder, the man who brought new vigor to the Reformed Churches in the Netherlands in the 1930s—though that vigor led to tensions and ultimately a church schism during the Second World War. Van der Hoeven went to study theology at the Theological College on Broederweg in Kampen, but he soon felt distant from Schilder’s scholastic theology. And perhaps Schilder’s polemical attitude, in which theology and life were about “all or nothing,” did not suit Johan van der Hoeven’s irenic character at all.
Be that as it may, after some time Van der Hoeven called it quits in Kampen and left for Leiden, where he studied philosophy under, among others, Ferdinand Sassen, who combined a professorship with a priesthood in the diocese of Limburg. The Calvinist Van der Hoeven found his true mentor in J.P.A. Mekkes, who taught as a special professor of Calvinist philosophy in the liberal Leiden. Mekkes belonged to the “second generation” representatives of Calvinist philosophy, although he was a contemporary of the founders H. Dooyeweerd and D.H. Th. Vollenhoven. Mekkes, as Van der Hoeven recounted in an interview, struck him with “a unique combination of profundity, acuity, and finesse.”
Especially that finesse seems to have impressed him. S.U. Zuidema and K.J. Popma, also “second generation” representatives of Calvinist philosophy, were, for all their acuity, more angular and polemical. While Mekkes mainly followed in the footsteps of Dooyeweerd’s legal philosophy, Van der Hoeven shared with Zuidema a great interest in “thinkers of this time,” to cite the influential trilogy published by Zuidema in the 1940s and 1950s. Zuidema devoted no less than two inaugural lectures to the thought of phenomenologist and existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre, whose atheism he combated fiercely in prose that was as armored as it was readable.
Van der Hoeven also came to the subject of his first major book, his dissertation Kritische ondervraging van de fenomenologische rede [Critical Interrogation of Phenomenological Reason] (1963), through Sartre. Sartre had published Critique de la raison dialectique in 1960, in which he described his turn from existentialism to Marxism. Thus, phenomenology, half a century after its inception, remained in motion. With a grand gesture, Van der Hoeven grouped the phenomenologists Edmund Husserl, Max Scheler, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty together and analyzed the differences and similarities between the thinkers.
It may be rare for a dissertation that Van der Hoeven provided it with an I [one]. He was namely firmly intending to write a sequel. Sartre had provocatively claimed in Critique de la raison dialectique that Marxism was the philosophy of his time. Van der Hoeven planned to pick up the gauntlet, but then to counter it with his deeply rooted Christian life conviction. “Prospect exists, in our conviction, only with a living awareness of the enduring calling that is assigned to philosophizing from a Higher Hand than that of a (however) ‘practical’ Reason” (italics Van der Hoeven).
However, nothing came of that plan. His dissertation remained unfinished. But what an “unfinished”… Many would sign up to write a profound dissertation like his. Incidentally, it can be noted that Van der Hoeven here shared something with his counterpart Sartre, whose oeuvre was teeming with unfinished works.
Van der Hoeven later once remarked that work of longer duration did not come easily to him. In the foreword to a collection with the title typical of him, Peilingen. Korte exploraties in wijsgerig stroomgebied [Soundings: Short Explorations in Philosophical Currents] (1979), he wrote: “The writer feels himself one of those who, under the impression of the overwhelming and very complex problems of our time, no longer get around to an all-encompassing consideration or discussion, but still need reflection and active participation in the broad process of that reflection.” Van der Hoeven was not a philosopher like Hegel, Marx, or Dooyeweerd—men who designed a system of thought and subsequently gained a following of adherents. But he was also not an apologist like Hendrik Jan van Eikema Hommes, who exhausted himself in the exegesis of the work of the Dooyeweerd he admired.
Van der Hoeven did not remain stuck in the school from which he emerged, although he wrote a profound reflection on Philosophia Reformata, the journal of reformational philosophy, and did not shy away from reflection on “Grondmotieven van de beschaving.” The term ground motifs made it clear once again to the knowledgeable that Van der Hoeven philosophized Calvinistically. But in his own way and, as said, with an open eye for the thinking of his time. Lectures in philosophy for students of psychology and pedagogy tempted him to write a critical exposition on psychologist B.F. Skinner, whom he accused of an extreme view of humanity, in which there was too little room for “real determination and real freedom” of man. And he wrote about the origin of Marx’s thinking, in which his “root-pulling” again showed his indebtedness to the Calvinist way of thinking.
Although by his own account not a man for a great work, that was too modest of the philosopher who, upon his farewell in 1998, was presented with a collection by his students (Van der Hoeven was first promoter in twelve promotions) titled Lifelike and Modest. For a few years before his farewell, Van der Hoeven surprised with De aantrekkingskracht van het midden. Historisch-kritische studie over een westerse denkwijze [The Attraction of the Middle: Historical-Critical Study on a Western Way of Thinking] (1994). From it emerged once again the remarkable constant in Van der Hoeven’s work, who from his dissertation onward occupied himself with thinking in oppositions in the Western world. A thinking that was simultaneously aimed at totality. The title was therefore not a bland platitude where “the truth lies in the middle.” On the contrary, where thinking in oppositions and in totality touch each other, there Van der Hoeven signaled tension. And that tension made Western thinking attractive to Van der Hoeven.
Something must be added to that. Van der Hoeven was a true Bible reader. This showed once again that he never denied his early calling as a preacher. He became increasingly impressed by the Jewish character of the Bible. Reading Martin Buber deepened his “Jewish” reading of the Bible and also led him to discover Jewish thinkers. Buber had been condescendingly dismissed by Herman Dooyeweerd as an “existentialist.” It may be indicative of Van der Hoeven’s intellectual independence that he charted his own course here and read Buber anyway.
Writer Harry Mulisch [(1927-2010)] once remarked that the Netherlands has virtually no philosophers but mainly “philosophologists,” people who explain and popularize the great thinkers from abroad. That may be largely true (although Dooyeweerd is an exception to this rule), if Johan van der Hoeven can be characterized as a philosophologist at all, then as a philosophologist with an independent mind who left behind a refined oeuvre, from which speaks an unflagging curiosity about the thinking of his time.
Wim Berkelaar May 28, 2015
allofliferedeemed 