Owen Barfield
Contextual Quote
"A fundamental premise of Barfield’s work was that there is a crucial distinction to be made between the history of ideas and the evolution of consciousness: “A history of thought, as such, amounts to a dialectical or syllogistic process, the thoughts of one age arising discursively out of, challenging, and modifying the thoughts and discoveries of the previous one” (Barfield 1965, p. 67). This is, for example, the way the history of philosophy is normally taught.
On the other hand, any method for approaching the evolution of consciousness must be quite different. What matters is not so much what people are thinking as how they are thinking, and how they are connected, in the greatest depths of their being, to what is happening in the world, both material and immaterial. Intellectual thoughts or theories about this or that are less relevant to the evolution of consciousness than the unconsidered habits of thought and the qualities of experience determining what they can think.
We need to notice, in particular, qualities of meaning. To focus on “propositional content”, as we think of it today, is to make the ancients into objects of ridicule by assuming that they were engaged in something like our own detached, self-aware habits of intellectual debate. We mistake their immediate perceptions for our own philosophically loaded thoughts, and so we discover in the ancients only confusion.
It was to evolutionary studies that Barfield continually returned as he illustrated, in a series of works spanning several decades, how the meanings of words “are flashing, iridescent shapes like flames — ever-flickering vestiges of the slowly evolving consciousness beneath them” (Barfield 1973, p. 75). He tried to show that the processes of evolution, while not determining the particular ideas of a given era, do circumscribe the kinds of things one can conceive and mean."
= Steve Talbott [1]
Discussion
1. Steve Talbott:
"Eighty years ago the philologist and semantic historian, Owen Barfield, warned us that a science straining toward what it imagines to be strictly material concepts will end up with abstract and general ones. That is, our pursuit of materialism will paradoxically estrange us from concrete, material reality (Barfield 1973, pp. 79, 83). The reason for this is that the world we know is a world of specific character, of particular, insistent presences, of expressive qualities — a world of smiling faces, fluttering leaves, resting cats, billowing clouds. In turning away from these presences, from these qualities — in seeking the denatured, inert, non-experienceable stuff of the scientist’s abstract imagination — we turn away from the one reality we are given.
It is only natural, then, that direct and careful observation of the world’s vivid, many-faceted character should yield more and more to one-dimensional measurement:
It must be admitted that the matter dealt with by the established sciences is coming to be composed less and less of actual observations, more and more of such things as pointer-readings on dials, the same pointer-readings arranged by electronic computers, inferences from inferences, higher mathematical formulae and other recondite abstractions. Yet modern science began with a turning away from abstract cerebration to objective observation! (Barfield 1963, pp. 10–11)
It is hardly disputable that science has in fact listed heavily toward the imperceptible, immaterial, and abstract. The essence of science, many declare, lies in the mathematization of reality, an opinion vastly more common than its necessary counterpart, which is the effort to characterize what sort of reality the mathematics refers to."
John Michael Greer:
"His map of this journey of consciousness is rather simpler than Wilber’s, however. The journey starts in a condition Barfield calls “original participation,” in which the human mind does not distinguish its own contents from its surroundings. In the state of original participation, there is no boundary between thoughts and things, mind and matter, and everything that is perceived by the senses is understood as having the same kind of inner life of experience and feeling that human beings have. Barfield’s summary is typically neat: “The essence of original participation is that there stands behind the phenomena, and on the other side of them from me, a represented which is of the same nature as me.”
If this sounds like the definition of enchantment I offered a month ago, there’s good reason for that; I modeled my definition on Barfield’s. He was talking about enchantment in the same terms I am, and he was alive to its spiritual dimensions in a way I’m not at all sure Wilber has ever been. The final sentence in his book, along these lines, offers another, even more precise definition: “the other name for original participation, in all its long-hidden, in all its diluted forms, in science, in art, and in religion, is after all—paganism.”
That last word all but gives away the show, of course. Barfield was a Christian—an exotic type of Christian, as he was an adherent of Rudolf Steiner’s quirky system of Christian occultism, but a Christian nonetheless. To him paganism could never be anything but an error of the past that the good people have now outgrown. The process by which it was outgrown, and the direction he thought that this process was destined to take in the future, was the entire subject of Saving the Appearances. Put another way, Barfield set out to take the classic Christian narrative of history from Eden to the New Jerusalem and make sense of it in philosophical terms.
That’s been tried many times, of course, but the way that he does this deserves respect. He starts by pointing out that modern science has utterly disproved the naive notion that what we perceive with our senses is what’s actually in front of us. Consider a rubber ball. Our senses tell us that it’s red, that it makes a squeaky noise when squeezed, and so on. What modern science has demonstrated is that these qualities—the red color, the squeaky noise, and the rest of it—are not part of the lattice of field-effects in raw spacetime that make up the ball in reality.
Instead, they are the result of two complicated processes. First, your senses interact with various things—photons, vibrations, and so on—that are deflected from their normal course by the lattice of field-effects in raw spacetime. This produces a set of perceptions: color, sound, and the like. Second, your brain assembles those perceptions into objects. It can assemble them inaccurately—that’s what happens when you look at an optical illusion, or when you mistake one thing for another thing. What this shows, in turn, is that the process by which we experience things in the world is a kind of thinking. Barfield gives a name to that kind of thinking: figuration.
Is it a rabbit or a duck? You can figurate it either way.
Alongside figuration, Barfield notes two other mental activities. The first is the activity of treating figurations as things outside ourselves, and thinking about their relations with each other; this he calls alpha-thinking. The second is the activity of thinking about the results of alpha-thinking, thinking about thoughts; this he calls beta-thinking. There are no hard barriers between these three kinds of thinking, and alpha-thinking in particular tends to slide across the line into figuration: if you’re used to thinking about a particular set of objects in a particular way, that habit will shape the way you figurate the perceptions that give rise to those objects.
In this way our ideas shape our reality. This is why, for example, people who speak European languages see orange as a distinct color between red and yellow, while people who speak some other languages do not—for them, red and yellow run right up against each other, and what we call “orange” is for them either a shade of red or a shade of yellow. In both cases, the figuration of color has been shaped by the product of alpha-thinking we call “language,” and the result is that speakers of these two groups of languages literally perceive the world differently.
To Barfield, this is the key to the evolution of consciousness. Throughout human history until the rise of the modern Western world, with one significant exception, people lived in a state of original participation: that is to say, they did not differentiate their thoughts about things from the things themselves, and therefore the world they experienced included their thoughts. When some ancient person experienced a tree or a mountain or a star as a conscious being gazing back at them, that was an actual experience, as real as the typical modern experience of tree, mountain, or star as dead matter with no life, consciousness, or meaning of its own. The ancients weren’t simply making up stories; they were describing the world as they experienced it.
The entire dynamic of history since ancient times, accordingly, was for Barfield the process by which this state of original participation broke down. The leading role in that dynamic, he says, was played by the Jewish people, whose traditional prohibition against image-worship Barfield sees as the decisive turn against original participation. He saw Christianity as picking up the same task and taking it further. As Christianity spread and ousted the older Pagan worship of the gods of nature, it forced people to let go of the habit of original participation and enter into what the disenchanted state we have been discussing, in which the natural world is experienced as a jumble of dead matter, and the difference between inner experience and the outer world became increasingly sharply drawn.
The dissolution of original participation and the coming of Max Weber’s “disenchantment of the world” is not the end of Barfield’s story, however. People in European societies achieved the complete abandonment of original participation in the nineteenth century, a milestone marked by the triumphs of modern science, which made it impossible to avoid noticing the participation of the human mind in the creation of its own experiences. Barfield believed that humanity, with European humanity squarely in the lead, was moving beyond disenchantment toward a new state, that of final participation, in which human beings consciously put meaning and value into nature by means of creative imagination.
In Barfield’s view, this is the God-given goal of the entire process. While the state of original participation involved sensing the divine in nature, and the disenchanted state is that of not being able to sense the divine at all, people in the state of final participation will experience the divine presence exclusively in their own souls. Thus human beings will become co-creators with God. This is an immense challenge, Barfield freely admits, since the human imagination can be turned as easily to evil as to good, but his Christian faith convinces him that ultimately, in the words of Julian of Norwich, “all manner of thing will be well.”
(https://www.ecosophia.net/against-enchantment-2-owen-barfield/)
Owen Barfield on Participation
Defining Participation
"Participation is the extra-sensory relation between man and the phenomena."
The world as immediately given to us is a mixture of sense perception and thought. While the two may not be separable in our experience, we can nevertheless distinguish the two. When we do, we find that the perceptual alone gives us no coherence, no unities, no "things" at all. We could not even note a patch of red, or distinguish it from a neighboring patch of green, without aid of the concepts given by thinking. In the absence of the conceptual, we would experience (in William James' words) only "a blooming, buzzing confusion." (Poetic Diction; Saving the Appearances)
"The familiar world -- as opposed to the largely notional world of "particles" which the physicist aspires to describe -- is the product of a perceptual given (which is meaningless by itself) and an activity of our own, which we might call "figuration." Figuration is a largely subconscious, imaginative activity through which we participate in producing ("figuring") the phenomena of the familiar world. (A simple analogy -- but only an analogy -- is found in the way a rainbow is produced by the cooperation of sun, raindrops, and observer.) How we choose to regard the particles is one thing, but when we refer to the workaday world -- the world of "things" -- we must accept that our thinking is as much out there in the world as in our heads. In actual fact, we find it nearly impossible to hold onto this truth. In our critical thinking as physicists or philosophers, we imagine ourselves set over against an objective world consisting of particles, in which we do not participate at all. In contrast, the phenomenal, or familiar, world is said to be riddled with our subjectivity. In our daily, uncritical thinking, on the other hand, we take for granted the solid, objective reality of the familiar world, assume an objective, lawful manifestation of its qualities such as color, sound, and solidity, and even write natural scientific treatises about the history of its phenomena -- all while ignoring the human consciousness that (by our own, critical account) determines these phenomena from the inside in a continually changing way". (Worlds Apart; Saving the Appearances)
"Our language and meanings today put the idea of participation almost out of reach, whereas the reality of participation (if not the idea) was simply given in earlier eras. For example, we cannot conceive of thoughts except as things in our heads, "rather like cigarettes inside a cigarette box called the brain." By contrast, during the medieval era it would have been impossible to think of mental activity, or intelligence, as the product of a physical organ. Then, as now, the prevailing view was supported by the unexamined meanings of the only words with which one could talk about the matter."
(Excerpts collated at http://www.praxagora.com/~stevet/fdnc/appa.html; More about Barfield at http://owenbarfield.com/)
Evolution of Participation
Summarized by Gil Agnew at http://newinnergy.com/blog/?p=11
“Owen Barfield. British barrister and philosopher, said we’ve had two great stages of consciousness in human history, and of course it’s always generalizations, but … it rang true for me. First stage of human consciousness, hunter-gatherer … consciousness. We had intimate participation with the natural order. We were a part of it. But we had no sense of self. We revered the generativity of nature.
Second stage of history, we reduced nature from a generative force, including our own nature, to a … productive force. And that’s the great break in consciousness, from generativity … to productivity. And in the process, we learned, from Neolithic agriculture until today, the end of the pyrotechnical era, the nuclear era, we learned how to detach ourselves from nature, control it from a distance, and in the process we developed a sense of “I‿ and “it.‿ The self emerged in history. We became … the captains of our fate. But in the process, we lost intimacy. We lost the sense of participation. We lost the early bonds of generativity.
What’s the third stage of consciousness? A transformation to a species understanding, which is … a self-aware choice. By volition, not by fear as the early Paleolithic tribes, but a self-aware choice by volition, for a generation to reclaim a sense of participation with the community of life. We maintain our individuality, we don’t go back to the pre-modern moment. We maintain our sense of self because that provides us with the opportunity, the challenge, the responsibility, to make decisions. And the decision we make is to reclaim our relationship to the generativeness of the creation. Self. Community. Future generations. Our children’s world.‿"