From: Scott Roberts (jse885@localnet.com)
Date: Tue Jun 14 2005 - 14:46:21 BST
Paul,
(I've changed the subject line, was Barfield or Garfield?, since the only
Garfield's I am aware of are an ex-US President, and a comic strip cat. If
you had some other meaningful allusion, let me know.)
--- Scott:
--- Barfield's discussion of the decline of original participation and the
--- goal
--- of final participation is just that (origin and exit).
--- Bo continued:
--- There were
--- certainly plenty thinkers who lamented the enigma; why reality
--- was thus divided; why we are locked inside our mind with no
--- hope of knowing the "Ding an Sich", but not putting the bell on
--- the cat like Pirsig did.
---
--- Scott:
--- Pirsig's belling of the cat fails, due to his failure to come to grips
--- with
--- language and intellect. Barfield succeeds.
Paul: Barfield -- "When particles of rain, rays of light and our watching
eyes are appropriately disposed, we see a rainbow. In the same way, given
the existence of the particles and the presence of human beings on the
earth, there arise collective representations, or in other words the
phenomena which we call 'nature'." [Owen Barfield, p36, Saving the
Appearances]
On his use of 'particles' --
"I tried to preserve neutrality...by referring to objective reality (that is
to say, reality insofar as it is independent of our awareness of it),
whenever such reference became necessary, sometimes as 'the particles' and
sometimes as 'the unrepresented'....The use of the term 'particles' was not
intended to connote their crude material existence (which some scientists
doubt or deny)....The need was to express in language the view that our
immediate awareness of nature is a system of 'representations' of something
of which we are *not* immediately aware, but to which the representations
are correlative" [Owen Barfield, Introduction to the Wesleyan Edition,
Saving the Appearances]
Barfield's whole thesis spins on the idea of representations (phenomena -
appearance?) that are correlative to something we are not immediately aware
of (particles - reality?)? I'm no Barfield scholar, for sure, but from what
I've read (Saving the Appearances) I'm not so sure that "Barfield succeeds"
any more than Kant did.
Scott:
Do you deny that there is a difference between what we perceive with our
senses and what we know about the inorganic universe? The former is a matter
of wind in our face, trees, and rainbows, while the latter is a matter of
moving air molecules and photons. Barfield is only emphasizing that naive
realism doesn't work, yet we presuppose it when we talk about anything other
than physics, e.g., in thinking about evolution. It is not Kantian, in that
Barfield argues that we do in fact know things about what is "behind" the
sense experiences. That knowledge is a matter of concepts, and it is only
the modernist nominalist bias that leads to Kant. By nominalism, I mean the
assumption that the conceptual universe is something that developed --
somehow -- in human beings only. It should be obvious that nominalism and
SOM are mutually dependent. This assumption arose from *forgetting* that
what we now call "nature" is a system of representations, a system that
changes as consciousness evolves.
So if you truly want to move beyond SOM, you had better question nominalism.
- Scott
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