Owen Barfield:
The Evolution of Consciousness
Owen Barfield was born in London in 1898,
produced his first scholarly book (History
in English Words) in 1926, published the
decisively important Poetic Diction in 1928,
and, by his own testimony, has continued
saying much the same thing ever since.
It is certainly true that his work -- ranging
all the way to and beyond History, Guilt,
and Habit (1979) -- exhibits a remarkable
unity. But it is a unity in ceaselessly stimulating
diversity. Many will testify that they have
never seen him explore a topic except by
throwing an unexpectedly revealing light
upon it.
Barfield is identified, above all else, with
his numerous characterizations of the evolution
of consciousness. As a philologist, he pursued
his quarry through the study of language
-- and particularly the historical study
of meaning. I have already quoted his remark
that "the full meanings of words are
flashing, iridescent shapes like flames --
ever-flickering vestiges of the slowly evolving
consciousness beneath them." History
in English Words is one of the relatively
few attempts in our language to tell the
history of peoples as revealed in these flickering
word-shapes. Poetic Diction -- and, to one
degree or another, almost every subsequent
book Barfield wrote -- teases out of language
the underlying nature of the evolution of
consciousness.
Following the publication of his early works,
Barfield was forced by personal circumstances
to spend several decades as a practicing
lawyer. Never completely ceasing his scholarly
pursuits, he resumed them with extraordinary
fruitfulness after his retirement in the
1960s. In addition to writing such magisterial
and liberating works as Saving the Appearances
and Worlds Apart, he spent terms as visiting
professor at various American institutions,
including Drew University, Brandeis University,
and Hamilton College. Two of his most accessible
books (History, Guilt, and Habit and Speaker's
Meaning) consist of lectures delivered during
these appointments.
Barfield was a member of the Inklings, an
informal literary group that included C.
S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams.
While he never achieved quite the same popular
success as these friends, many regard his
work as the more deeply seminal. His influence
in scholarly circles has been all the more
remarkable for its quiet, unobtrusive, yet
profoundly transforming effect.
It is Barfield's conviction that how we think
is at least as important as what we think.
This makes reading him more than a merely
intellectual challenge. Nobel laureate Saul
Bellow has written:
We are well supplied with interesting writers,
but Owen Barfield is not content to be merely
interesting. His ambition is to set us free.
Free from what? From the prison we have made
for ourselves by our ways of knowing, our
limited and false habits of thought, our
"common sense." These, he convincingly
argues, have produced a "world of outsides
with no insides to them," a brittle
surface world, an object world in which we
ourselves are mere objects. It is not only
what we perceive but also what we fail to
perceive that determines the quality of the
world we live in, and what we have collectively
chosen not to perceive is the full reality
of consciousness, the "inside"
of everything that exists. /1/ I cannot attempt
to summarize Barfield's thought in even one
of the many disciplines within which he has
so productively exercised his iconoclasm.
But the following, all-too-arbitrary, and
by no means systematic collection of notes
on a few topics may help readers open an
acquaintance with one of the century's most
incisive thinkers, while also directing them
to the appropriate sources for a more thorough
familiarity.
The following selections present a mix of
direct quotation, paraphrases, and my own,
freely constructed summary statements. I
fear that some degree of misrepresentation
is inevitable, and here acknowledge that
all such misrepresentation originates solely
with me. /2/
The Origin and Development of Language
Languages, considered historically, bear
within themselves a record of the evolution
of human consciousness. (This is a theme
in virtually all of Barfield's works. But
see especially Poetic Diction /3/, Speaker's
Meaning, and Saving the Appearances.)
* * * * * * * The idea that the earliest
languages were "born literal" --
exhibiting purely material meanings that
were subsequently extended to the immaterial
through metaphor -- is confused and self-contradictory.
"What we call literalness is a late
stage in a long-drawn-out historical process."
Anyone who tries to retain the supposed literalness
of scientism "is either unaware of,
or is deliberately ignoring, that real and
figurative relation between man and his environment,
out of which the words he is using were born
and without which they could never have been
born." ("The Meaning of `Literal,'"
in The Rediscovery of Meaning and Other Essays)
* * * * * * * The meanings of words constantly
change. "All mental progress (and, arising
from that, all material progress) is brought
about in association with those very changes."
Radical progress requires challenging one's
fundamental assumptions, and the most fundamental
assumptions of any age are implicit in the
meanings of its words. Changes in meaning
occur through discrepancies "between
an individual speaker's meaning and the current,
or lexical, meaning." (Speaker's Meaning)
* * * * * * * Words can expand in meaning
-- so that they become more encompassing
-- or they can contract in meaning. Historically,
the latter process has dominated, so that,
for example, a single word combining the
meanings, "spirit," "wind,"
and "breath" in a unified manner
subsequently splits into three separate words,
each with a more restricted meaning. Narrower
meanings conduce to accuracy of communication,
and result from rational analysis. Broader
meanings support fullness of expression,
and result from imaginative synthesis. Communication
deals with the how, and expression with the
what. "Perfect communication would occur
if all words had and retained identical meanings
every time they were uttered and heard. But
it would occur at the expense of expression."
* * * * * * * The expansion of meaning through
poetic synthesis requires a strong, inner
activity. The contraction of meaning tends
to occur passively, through the "inertia
of habit."
(Speaker's Meaning)
* * * * * * * When we investigate actual
languages, we find them becoming more and
more figurative the further back we look.
What are now material meanings once had an
immaterial component ("matter"
itself goes back to a Latin word for "mother"),
and what are now immaterial meanings once
had a material component (a "scruple"
was once a sharp pebble -- the kind, Barfield
remarks, that gets into your shoe and worries
you). Originally, that is, all words -- all
meanings -- were exteriors expressing interiors
in an indivisible unity. This unity was simply
given by what Barfield calls "figuration,"
and was not consciously constructed. Our
own use of metaphor is made possible by the
fact that this unity has fallen apart; it
is no longer given, but must be grasped consciously
-- as it is whenever we apprehend an inner
meaning shining through an exterior "vehicle"
and construct a metaphor to convey this insight.
(Poetic Diction; Speaker's Meaning)
* * * * * * * The historical passage from
figure to metaphor marks the dissolution
of the given, inner/outer, immaterial/material
unity. This unity was not a unity of language
only, but of man's participation in the world
(or, equally, the world's participation in
man). With its dissolution, various antitheses
arose for the first time: inner and outer;
man and nature; words of immaterial meaning
and words of material meaning; subject and
object; what a word meant and what it referred
to; and even sound and meaning. The rational,
or analytic, principle operates to sharpen
these antitheses; imaginative synthesis overcomes
them. (Poetic Diction)
* * * * * * * Early language reflected a
unity of perceiving and thinking. This was
correlative to a lack of freedom: when the
thought is given in the percept -- when the
thought comes from without -- one is not
free in one's thinking. The world itself
lives upon the stage of one's consciousness.
In our own experience, perceiving and thinking
are separate. Perceiving (and not, incidentally,
thinking) is subjectively qualified. You
and I will see the same object differently,
depending upon our point of view. (We correct
for this through thinking.) But if perceiving
is subjectively qualified, it must have been
a rather different experience before the
subject and object fell apart -- that is,
when the subject was not yet what it is today.
As the history of language bears out, a kind
of thinking was already present in this early
experience of perceiving, and vice versa.
For Locke's picture of Adam at work on the
synthetic manufacture of language we have
to substitute -- what? A kind of thinking
which is at the same time perceiving -- a
picture-thinking, a figurative, or imaginative,
consciousness, which we can only grasp today
by true analogy with the imagery of our poets,
and, to some extent, with our own dreams.
(Poetic Diction; Worlds Apart)
* * * * * * * Language is a living and creative
power, from which man's subjectivity was
slowly extracted. The function of language
is to create that esthetic "distance"
between man and the world "which is
the very thing that constitutes his humanity.
It is what frees him from the world."
He is no longer a peninsula pushed out by
natural forces. He is a separated island
existing in a symbolic universe. Physical
reality recedes in proportion as his symbolic
activity advances. He objectivizes more and
more completely. But the symbols were the
product of his own inner activity in the
first place and they never really lose that
character, however completely his very success
in objectifying them may make him forget
the fact. Forever afterwards, in dealing
with things he is, as Cassirer puts it, "in
a sense conversing with himself." (Worlds
Apart)
* * * * * * * Languages today possess only
the faintest traces of the one-time unity
of sound and meaning. Those willing to look
"may find, in the consonantal element
in language, vestiges of those forces which
brought into being the external structure
of nature, including the body of man; and,
in the original vowel-sounds, the expression
of that inner life of feeling and memory
which constitutes his soul." All this
is consistent with the testimony of the ancients
that the primordial Word was responsible
for creation.
Still today, the invisible word is spoken
with a physical gesture, even if that gesture
has for the most part contracted into the
small organs of speech. One can at least
imagine how the gestures of speech were once
made with the whole body. This was before
man had become "detached from the rest
of nature after the solid manner of today,
when the body itself was spoken even while
it was speaking." (Saving the Appearances)
* * * * * * * "It was not man who made
the myths but the myths, or the archetypal
substance they reveal, which made man. We
shall have to come, I am sure, to think of
the archetypal element in myth in terms of
the wind that breathed through the harp-strings
of individual brains and nerves and fluids,
rather as the blood still today pervades
and sustains them." ("The Harp
and the Camera," in The Rediscovery
of Meaning and Other Essays)
Meaning and Imagination [This section is
abbreviated, since the same topic is touched
on in chapter 23, "Can We Transcend
Computation?" See especially the sections,
"The polar dynamic of meaning,"
and "So, then ... what is meaning?"]
* * * * * * * Imagination is the activity
by which we apprehend the "outward form
as the image or symbol of an inner meaning."
("The Rediscovery of Meaning,"
in The Rediscovery of Meaning and Other Essays)
* * * * * * * "Mere perception -- perception
without imagination -- is the sword thrust
between spirit and matter." It was what
enabled Descartes to divide the world into
thinking substance and extended substance.
But something more than mere perception occurs
when we look at or listen to a fellow being:
whatever our philosophical predispositions,
we in fact read his body and voice as expressing
something immaterial. We can, moreover, attend
to nature in the same way, although such
a reading of nature has been progressively
eliminated from our habits during the past
few hundred years. Strengthening the activity
of imagination is the only way to heal the
Cartesian sword-thrust. ("Matter, Imagination,
and Spirit," in The Rediscovery of Meaning
and Other Essays)
* * * * * * * From classical Greece to the
modern era there has been a broad transition
in esthetics from a passive psychology of
inspiration (mania, or divine madness, or
possession by a god or muse) to an active
one of imagination. This can be seen as
the transition from a view of art which beholds
it as the product of a mind, or spirit, not
possessed by the individual, but rather possessing
him; to a view of it as the product of something
in a manner possessed by the individual though
still not identical with his everyday personality
-- possessed by him, whether as his genius,
or as his shaping spirit of imagination,
or his unconscious mind, or whatever name
we may prefer to give it. His own, but not
himself. (Speaker's Meaning)
* * * * * * * The imagination has to do with
a certain threshold. "When we think
of an image or a symbol, we think of something
that is impassably divided from that of which
it is an image -- divided by the fact that
the former is phenomenal and the latter nonphenomenal."
And yet, there is an all- important relation
between the two. This relationship is one
of expression, and our grasping of it imaginatively
depends (unlike the older inspiration, which
entailed a kind of possession) upon the exclusion
of any "supernatural" crossing
of the threshold. ("Imagination and
Inspiration," in The Rediscovery of
Meaning and Other Essays)
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. /4/ (Worlds Apart; Saving the
Appearances)
* * * * * * * One way figuration is distinguished
from our normal, intellectual thinking about
things is that it synthesizes unities at
the level of the percept. Figuration gives
us the unanalyzed "things" of our
experience (raising us above the "blooming,
buzzing confusion"), and is not at all
the same as synthesizing ideas about things.
(Poetic Diction; 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.
The Evolution of Consciousness We fail today
to distinguish properly between the history
of ideas -- "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" -- and the evolution of consciousness.
The comparatively sudden appearance, after
millennia of static civilizations of the
oriental type, of the people or the impulse
which eventually flowered in the cultures
of the Aryan nations can hardly have been
due to the impact of notion on notion. And
the same is true of the abrupt emergence
at a certain point in history of vociferously
speculative thought among the Greeks. Still
more remarkable is the historically unfathered
impulse of the Jewish nation to set about
eliminating participation by quite other
methods than those of alpha-thinking [that
is, of thinking about things]. Suddenly,
and as it were without warning, we are confronted
by a fierce and warlike nation, for whom
it is a paramount moral obligation to refrain
from the participatory heathen cults by which
they were surrounded on all sides; for whom
moreover precisely that moral obligation
is conceived as the very foundation of the
race, the very marrow of its being. (Saving
the Appearances)
* * * * * * * An analogy may help. The changes
in our ideas about, say, the economics of
transport and commerce over the past several
centuries have no doubt resulted in part
from the impact of idea upon idea. But another
cause of these changes lies in the altered
nature of transport and commerce themselves.
That is, the thing about which we form ideas
has evolved. (Speaker's Meaning)
When it comes to human consciousness, we
tend to forget the second possibility. Yet,
here in particular we should expect this
possibility to predominate. "Ideas [about
human consciousness] have changed because
human consciousness itself -- the elementary
human experience about which the ideas are
being formed -- the whole relation between
man and nature or between conscious man and
unconscious man -- has itself been in process
of change." (Speaker's Meaning; Saving
the Appearances)
Thus, the transition from a psychology of
inspiration to one of imagination (see above)
reflects a changing relation between man
and the sources of what we now call creativity.
What once came from without must now be taken
hold of from within.
* * * * * * * The balance in figuration between
what is given to us from without and what
we contribute from within has changed radically
over the course of history. For earliest
man, nearly all the activity of figuration
came from without -- which is another way
of saying that the "inside" of
things was experienced more "out there"
than "in here." (Which also implies
that "out there" was not quite
so out there as it has become for us.) The
perceiver was directly aware of the beings
constituting this inside -- an awareness
we badly misinterpret if we take it as an
erroneous theorizing about things. Today,
on the other hand, we contribute to the inside
of things -- we participate in them -- from
within ourselves, and we are largely unaware
of the contribution. Our primary, conscious
mode of thinking is a thinking about things.
(Saving the Appearances)
"Whether or no archaic man saw nature
awry, what he saw was not primarily determined
by beliefs. On the other hand ... what we
see is so determined." This is the reverse
of what is generally supposed. (Saving the
Appearances)
* * * * * * * The participation of primitive
man (what we might call "original"
participation) was not theoretical at all,
nor was it derived from theoretical thought.
It was given in immediate experience. That
is, the conceptual links by which the participated
phenomena were constituted were given to
man already "embedded" in what
he perceived. As noted above, his perceiving
was at the same time a kind of thinking;
thinking occurred more in the world than
in man. Perceiving and thinking had not yet
split apart, as they have for us. Moreover,
what was represented in the collective representations
also differed for primitive man:
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. Whether
it is called "mana," or by the
names of many gods and demons, or God the
Father, or the spirit world, it is of the
same nature as the perceiving self, inasmuch
as it is not mechanical or accidental, but
psychic and voluntary. (Saving the Appearances)
* * * * * * * "For the nineteenth-century
fantasy of early man first gazing, with his
mind tabula rasa, at natural phenomena like
ours, then seeking to explain them with thoughts
like ours, and then by a process of inference
`peopling' them with the `aery phantoms'
of mythology, there just is not any single
shred of evidence whatever." (Poetic
Diction; Saving the Appearances)
* * * * * * * "Interior is anterior."
Both ontogenetically and phylogenetically,
subjectivity is never something that was
developed out of nothing at some point in
space, but is a form of consciousness that
has contracted from the periphery into individual
centers. Phylogenetically, it becomes clear
to us that the task of Homo sapiens, when
he first appeared as a physical form on earth,
was not to evolve a faculty of thought somehow
out of nothing, but to transform the unfree
wisdom, which he experienced through his
organism as given meaning, into the free
subjectivity that is correlative only to
active thought, to the individual activity
of thinking. (Speaker's Meaning)
* * * * * * * On the significance of memory:
Just as, when a word is formed or spoken,
the original unity of the "inner"
[that is, not yet spoken] word is polarized
into a duality of outer and inner, that is,
of sound and meaning; so, when man himself
was "uttered," that is, created,
the cosmic wisdom became polarized, in and
through him, into the duality of appearance
and intelligence, representation and consciousness.
But when creation has become polarized into
consciousness on the one side and phenomena,
or appearances, on the other, memory is made
possible, and begins to play an all-important
part in the process of evolution. For by
means of his memory man makes the outward
appearances an inward experience. He acquires
his self-consciousness from them. When I
experience the phenomena in memory, I make
them "mine," not now by virtue
of any original participation, but by my
own inner activity. (Saving the Appearances)
* * * * * * * The possibility of a new kind
of participation -- what we might call final
participation -- was glimpsed by the Romantics
when they concluded that "we must no
longer look for the nature-spirits -- for
the Goddess Natura -- on the farther side
of the appearances; we must look for them
within ourselves." In Coleridge's words:
We receive but what we give / And in our
life alone does Nature live. Original participation
"fires the heart from a source outside
itself; the images enliven the heart."
In final participation, "it is for the
heart to enliven the images." (Saving
the Appearances)
* * * * * * * We can understand the relation
between final and original participation
only when "we admit that, in the course
of the earth's history, something like a
Divine Word has been gradually clothing itself
with the humanity it first gradually created
-- so that what was first spoken by God may
eventually be respoken by man." (Saving
the Appearances; Worlds Apart)
Science and the Future Modern science began
with the conscious exclusion of so-called
"occult" properties -- those qualities
imperceptible to the physical senses. Subsequently,
the remaining, physically observable qualities
were divided into two groups -- primary and
secondary -- depending on whether they were
felt to reside in the world or in man. Eventually,
it turned out that all qualities were "subjective,"
and the hardest sciences therefore devoted
themselves solely to the quantitative, measurable
aspects of the world. The phenomena, in their
qualitative fullness, were ignored as subjective.
Before the Scientific Revolution, qualities
were felt to reside both in nature and in
man. Man, as a microcosm, was a reflection
of the macrocosm. The dispositional qualities
of the planets were also dispositional qualities
of man. The four elements of nature were
not exclusively objective, and the four humors
of man were not exclusively subjective.
It is odd, then, to call the pre-Copernican
world "anthropocentric."
We have just been seeing how the qualities
formerly treated as inherent in nature have,
as far as any scientific theory is concerned,
disappeared from it, and how they have reappeared
on the hither side of the line between subject
and object, within the experiencing human
psyche; how we conceive ourselves as "projecting"
qualities onto nature rather than receiving
them from her. Is that any less anthropocentric
than the Aristotelian world-picture? I would
have thought it was more so. ("Science
and Quality," in The Rediscovery of
Meaning and Other Essays)
* * * * * * * The qualities of things, "which
we classify as subjective, but which look
so very much as if they actually belong to
nature," are in fact "the inwardness
of nature as well as of ourselves."
Not that we consciously devise these qualities;
our participation in them is largely unconscious.
("Science and Quality," in The
Rediscovery of Meaning and Other Essays)
* * * * * * * "What will chiefly be
remembered about the scientific revolution
will be the way in which it scoured the appearances
clean of the last traces of spirit, freeing
us from original, and for final, participation
.... 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."
(Saving the Appearances)
* * * * * * * When man first begins thinking
about the phenomena, he still largely participates
in them. This thinking, therefore, becomes
entangled in error and confusion, for it
is an attempt to gain an objective stance
before one has gotten free of the web of
meaning by which one is bound to things.
Over time, however, this kind of thinking
is a primary means by which the disentanglement
-- the freedom from things -- is achieved.
(Saving the Appearances)
Effective manipulation of things (from surgery
to computation) is one of the gifts of science,
as is a habit of disciplined and accurate
thinking. So also is the selfless and attentive
devotion to nature that only became possible
with our separation from nature.
* * * * * * * On the other hand,
our very love of natural phenomena "for
their own sake" will be enough to prevent
us from hastily turning a blind eye on any
new light which can be shed, from any direction
whatsoever, on their true nature. Above all
will this be the case, if we feel them to
be in danger. And if the appearances are,
as I have sought to establish, correlative
to human consciousness and if human consciousness
does not remain unchanged but evolves, then
the future of the appearances, that is, of
nature herself, must indeed depend on the
direction which that evolution takes. (Saving
the Appearances)
* * * * * * * The notion of evolution, or
development, has become central to many of
the sciences -- and rightly so. But this
idea remains badly distorted by the peculiar
conditions of its birth. The phenomena, or
collective representations, during the middle
of the nineteenth century (when Darwin wrote)
were objects. "To a degree which has
never been surpassed before or since,"
man did not consciously participate in these
phenomena. At that time,
matter and force were enough .... If the
particles kept growing smaller and smaller,
there would always be bigger and better glasses
to see them through. The collapse of the
mechanical model was not yet in sight, nor
had any of those other factors which have
since contributed to the passing of the dead-centre
of "literalness" -- idealist philosophies,
genetic psychology, psychoanalysis -- as
yet begun to take effect. Consequently there
was as yet no dawning apprehension that the
phenomena of the familiar world may be "representations"
in the final sense of being the mental construct
of the observer. Literalness reigned supreme....
For the generality of men, participation
was dead; the only link with the phenomena
was through the senses; and they could no
longer conceive of any manner in which either
growth itself or the metamorphoses of individual
and special growth, could be determined from
within. The appearances were idols. They
had no "within." Therefore the
evolution which had produced them could only
be conceived mechanomorphically as a series
of impacts of idols on other idols. (Saving
the Appearances)
* * * * * * * All real change is transformation.
For transformation to occur, there must be
an interior that persists as well as an exterior
that is transformed. Otherwise, one would
have only bare substitution. There would
be nothing undergoing the transformation.
Nineteenth-century atomism -- which continues
to dominate the popular imagination (and
even the prosaic imagination of most scientists)
-- was in this way essentially a description
of substitutions. It therefore could not
grasp evolution as a transformative process.
But to speak of an interior that persists
is to speak as much of beings as of things.
That, perhaps, accounts for the popularity
of impersonal terms like "pattern"
and "gestalt." They shield us from
what we prefer not to recognize. "We
glimpse a countenance, and we say hurriedly:
`Yes, that is indeed a face, but it is the
face of nobody.'"
(Unancestral Voice)
* * * * * * * The move from a participated
world to the nonparticipated world of nineteenth-century
science carried man from an organic relation
to the cosmos to a purely spatial, mathematical
relation. The view of man as a microcosm
placed at the center of the macrocosm (much
as the heart was the center -- but certainly
not the mathematical center -- of man) gave
way to an arbitrary coordinate system, with
the eye fixed at the origin. That perfect
instrument of perspective, the camera, "looks
always at and never into what it sees. I
suspect that Medusa did very much the same."
("The Harp and the Camera," in
The Rediscovery of Meaning and Other Essays;
Saving the Appearances)
* * * * * * * The classical physicist still
viewed transformation in nature as essentially
qualitative, and he sought the unchanging
entities underlying the observed transformations.
But this enterprise was called into question
by later developments, including the formulation
of the field concept, which "meant abandoning
the old assumption that the laws governing
large-scale phenomena are to be deduced from
those governing matter at the microscopic
level. [It was] at least as true to say that
the behavior of the particle was determined
by the field as it was to say that the nature
of the field was determined by the behaviors
of particles." The seemingly unavoidable
insertion of a principle of randomness --
unlawfulness -- at the submicroscopic level
was another jolt. (Unancestral Voice)
Such developments lead to questions about
the role of models in physics. Must we either
be content with unsullied mathematics, or
else resort to "crude," constructional
models (such as pictures of the atom as miniature
solar systems)? A middle way may be indicated
by what is known of the working of the imagination.
In particular, three features widely recognized
as belonging to the imagination may prove
relevant to the physicist:
Imagination directly apprehends the whole
as "contained" in the part, or
as in some mode identical with it. Imagination
... apprehends spatial form, and relations
in space, as "expressive" of nonspatial
form and nonspatial relations. Operating
... anteriorly to the kind of perception
and thought which have become normal for
fully conscious modern man, [imagination]
functions at a level where observed and observer,
mind and object, are no longer -- or are
not yet -- spatially divided from one another;
so that the mind, as it were, becomes the
object or the object becomes the mind. (Unancestral
Voice) Unfortunately, however, those who
pursue physics and those who have investigated
imagination typically have little to do with
each other.
* * * * * * * The radical, Cartesian split
between mind and matter is more commonly
complained of than escaped. A true escape
would require that I become a different kind
of human being.
To renounce the heterogeneity of observed
from observer involves, if it is taken seriously,
abandoning the whole "onlooker"
stance, upon which both the pursuit of science
and modern language-use in general are based;
it means advancing to awareness of another
relation altogether between mind and matter.
If we had actually made the advance, we should
have become naturally, unforcedly, and unremittingly
aware that the mind cannot refer to a natural
object without at the same time referring
to its own activity. And this in turn would
require an equally unforced awareness not
only that scientific discovery is always
a discovery about language, but also that
it is always a discovery about the self which
uses language. ("Language and Discovery,"
in The Rediscovery of Meaning and Other Essays)
* * * * * * * Scientists are wont to boast
of the objectivity of their discipline. There
is good reason for this, but "is there
any need to make quite such a song and dance
about it?" Objectivity should pose no
great difficulty when we're dealing with
matters from which we feel wholly disconnected
personally. "To put it rudely, any reasonably
honest fool can be objective about objects."
It must be a different matter altogether,
should we be called on to attend, not alone
to matter, but to spirit; when a man would
have to practice distinguishing what in himself
comes solely from his private personality
-- memories, for instance, and all the horseplay
of the Freudian subconscious -- from what
comes also from elsewhere. Then indeed objectivity
is not something that was handed us on a
plate once and for all by Descartes, but
something that would really have to be achieved,
and which must require for its achievement,
not only exceptional mental concentration
but other efforts and qualities, including
moral ones, as well. ("Language and
Discovery," in The Rediscovery of Meaning
and Other Essays)
* * * * * * * The line between unconscious
figuration (by which "things" are
made) and conscious thinking about things
is not fixed and inviolate. Not only, in
our thinking about things, do we progressively
bring their constitutive thinking to consciousness,
but also, our thinking about things sinks
down, over time, into our unconscious manner
of experiencing those things -- that is,
into our figuration. I may first have to
learn that the sound I hear is a thrush singing;
but, eventually, I will no longer hear a
sound and then conclude that a thrush is
singing, but rather will simply "hear
a thrush singing." How I think has worked
down into how I perceive. (Poetic Diction;
Saving the Appearances)
* * * * * * * A true science would lead us
toward a more conscious figuration, whereby
we would take responsibility for the world
from the inside. The "particles"
are abstract constructs filling in where
we have not yet succeeded, via figuration,
in producing phenomena. That is, the realm
about which we theorize with talk of particles
and such is the collective unconscious, and
is contiguous, so to speak, with that other
part of the collective unconscious from which
the familiar world of collective representations
arises through figuration.
But we have a choice. Instead of raising
the unconscious to consciousness through
an enhanced figuration, we can continue reducing
consciousness -- as manifested in the phenomena
-- to unconsciousness. As I noted above (n.
4), "by means of abstraction, we convert
the world into the merely notional, or nonphenomenal"
-- that is, into "particles."
So far at all events as the macroscopic universe
is concerned, the world itself on the one
hand and the way we perceive and think it
on the other hand are inseparable. It must
follow from that that, if enough people go
on long enough perceiving and thinking about
the world as mechanism only, the macroscopic
world will eventually become mechanism only.
("Science and Quality," in The
Rediscovery of Meaning and Other Essays;
Saving the Appearances)
* * * * * * * "To be able to experience
the representations as idols, and then to
be able also to perform the act of figuration
consciously, so as to experience them as
participated; that is imagination."
Speaking through a character in his fictionalized
treatise, Unancestral Voice, Barfield summarizes
the development of language:
Language was, for him, an outstanding example
of the past surviving, transformed, in the
present .... You had to see the origin of
language as the self-gathering of mind within
an already mind- soaked world. It was the
product of "nature" in the sense
that the meanings of words, if you approached
them historically, could all -- or as nearly
all as made no difference -- be shown to
be involved with natural phenomena. Moreover,
interfusion of the sensuous (sound) with
the immaterial (meaning) was still, even
today, its whole point. Yet it was certainly
not, in its earlier stages, the product of
individual minds; for it was obviously already
there at a stage of evolution when individual
minds were not yet. He had no doubt of its
pointing back to a state of affairs when
men and nature were one in a way that had
long since ceased. Even now, even in our
own time, there was the mysterious "genius
of language" which many philologists
had detected as something that worked independently
of any conscious choices. On the other hand,
you could see that, as time went on, language
did come to owe more and more to the working
of individual minds. However you looked at
it, you could not get away from the fact
that every time a man spoke or wrote there
was this intricate interfusion of past and
present -- of the past transformed, as meaning,
with the present impulse behind his act of
utterance.
* * * * * * * "The appearances will
be `saved' only if, as men approach nearer
and nearer to conscious figuration and realize
that it is something which may be affected
by their choices, the final participation
which is thus being thrust upon them is exercised
with the profoundest sense of responsibility,
with the deepest thankfulness and piety towards
the world as it was originally given to them
in original participation, and with a full
understanding of the momentous process of
history, as it brings about the emergence
of the one from the other." (Saving
the Appearances)
References
1. From dust jacket of Barfield, 1979.
2. Quotations from The Rediscovery of Meaning
and Other Essays, Speaker's Meaning, Poetic
Diction, Worlds Apart, Saving the Appearances,
and Unancestral Voice used by permission
of Wesleyan University Press.
3. I try to indicate one or two books in
which each idea receives considerable treatment.
The first publication listed after quoted
material is the source of the quotation.
In a few cases, where the given idea thoroughly
pervades all of Barfield's work, I offer
no citation at all. Unavoidably, given the
unity of Barfield's work, there is something
slightly arbitrary about many of the citations
that are provided.
4. What enables us to switch between these
two contradictory stances without acute discomfort
is our long training in seeing the familiar
world through a veil -- a mathematical grid
of abstraction. By means of abstraction,
we convert the world into the merely notional,
or nonphenomenal. In fact, the particles
can be seen as the endpoint of this process.
As a result, the qualities of things have
by now become dim enough in our experience
to lead philosophers to question whether
they have any sort of reality at all.
THE CASE FOR ANTHROPOSOPHY
INTRODUCTION by Owen Barfield
The prolonged historical event now usually
referred to as "the scientific revolution"
was characterised by the appearance of a
new attitude to the element of sense-perception
in the total human experience. At first as
an instinct, then as a waxing habit, and
finally as a matter of deliberate choice,
it came to be accepted that this element
is, for the purposes of knowledge, the only
reliable one; and further that it is possible,
and indeed necessary, to isolate, in a way
that had not hitherto been thought possible,
this one element from all the others that
go to make up man's actual experience of
the world. The word "matter" came
to signify, in effect, that which the senses
can, or could, perceive without help from
the mind, or from any other source not itself
perceptible by the senses.
Whereas hitherto the perceptible and the
imperceptible had been felt as happily intermixed
with one another, and had been explored on
that footing, the philosopher Descartes finally
formulated the insulation of matter from
mind as a philosophical principle and the
methodology of natural science is erected
on that principle. It was by the rigorous
exclusion from its field, under the name
of "occult qualities", of every
element, whether spiritual or mental or called
by any other name, which can only be conceived
as non-material, and therefore non-measurable,
that natural knowledge acquired a precision
unknown before the revolution - because inherently
impossible in terms of the old fusion; and,
armed with that precision (entitling it to
the name of "science"), went on
to achieve its formidable technological victories.
It is the elimination of occult qualities
from the purview of science that constitutes
the difference between astrology and astronomy,
between alchemy and chemistry, and in general
the difference between Aristotelian man and
his environment in the past and modern man
and his environment in the present.
When two mutually dependent human relatives
are separated, so that, for the first time,
one of them can "go it alone",
there may be drawbacks, but it is the advantages
that are often most immediately evident.
By freeing itself from the taint of "occult
qualifies", that is, by meticulously
disentangling itself from all reference,
explicit or implicit, to non-material factors,
the material world, as a field of knowledge,
gained inestimable advantages. We perhaps
take them for granted now; but the men of
the seventeenth century - the members of
the Royal Society for instance - had a prophetic
inkling of what the new liberty promised.
You have only to read some of their pronouncements.
For them it was an emotional as well as an
intellectual experience. "Bliss was
it in that dawn to be alive..."
But when two people separate, so that one
of them can go it alone, it follows as a
natural consequence that the other can also
go it alone. It might have been expected,
then, that, by meticulously disentangling
itself from all reference, explicit or implicit,
to material factors, the immaterial, as a
field of knowledge, would also gain inestimable
advantages. That is what did not happen.
But it will be well to state at once that
it is nevertheless precisely this correlative
epistemological principle that is the basis
of Rudolf Steiner's anthroposophy. It belongs
to the post-Aristotelian age for the same
reason that natural science does; but in
the opposite way. Thus, the parallel terms,
"spiritual science" and "occult
science", which he also used, do not
betoken a fond belief that the methodology
of technological science can be applied to
the immaterial.
(The use of this word "technological"
is not intended to imply that science, as
we have it, is valuable only for the purpose
of technical manipulation and construction.
It does imply that its cognitive value, as
"natural" science, is limited to
the extent to which nature is governed by
physical laws. The fond belief referred to
is of course the assumption underlying the
"favourite objection", to which
Section VI replies.)
The methodology of technological science
is, rightly, based on the exclusion of all
occult qualities from its thinking. The methodology
of spiritual science is based on an equally
rigorous exclusion of all "physical
qualities" from its thinking. That is
one of the things I hope this book will help
to make clear.
What did happen was well expressed by Samuel
Taylor Coleridge, when he pointed out in
his Aids to Reflection that Descartes, having
discovered a technical principle, which "as
a fiction of science, it would be difficult
to overvalue", erroneously propounded
that principle as a truth of fact. (The principle
in question was the necessity of abstracting
from corporeal substance all its positive
properties, "in order to submit the
various phenomena of moving bodies to geometrical
construction".) And of course the same
point has since been made by A. N. Whitehead
and others. But Coleridge could also points
prophetically, in another place, (Letter
to William Wordsworth, 30 May,
1815) to
"the necessity of a general revolution
in the modes of developing and disciplining
the human mind by the substitution of Life,
and Intelligence (considered in its different
powers from the Plant up to that state in
which the difference of Degree becomes a
new kind - man, self-consciousness - but
yet not by essential opposition) for the
philosophy of mechanism which in everything
that is most worthy of the human Intellect
strikes Death, and cheats itself by mistaking
clear Images for distinct conceptions..."
The necessity for such a revolution, he said,
arises from the fact that, for self-conscious
man, although to experience a world of corporeal
substance as existing quite apart from his
thinking self is "a law of his nature,"
it is not "a conclusion of his judgement".
That this is indeed the case hardly needs
arguing today, since it has become the discovery
of technological science itself. Whether
we go to neurology or to physics, or elsewhere,
we are confronted with the demonstrable conclusion
that the actual, macroscopic world of nature
- as distinct from the microscopic, submicroscopic
and inferred world of physical science -
is (as, for instance, the biologist, Professor
Marjorie Grene, puts it in her book The Knower
and the Known) "mediated by concepts
as well as presented through the senses".
What is remarkable is the rapidity with which
the presence of this Trojan Horse in the
citadel of its methodology was detected by
technological science itself, as it was progressively
realised that everything in nature that constitutes
her "qualities" must be located
on the res cogitans, and not the res extensa,
side of the Cartesian guillotine. But this
is as much as to say that those qualities
are, in the technological sense, "occult";
and it could be argued without much difficulty
that any science which proposes to enquire
into them must also be "occult"
- unless it is content to do so by extrapolating
into the psyche a theoretical apparatus applicable,
by definition, only to subject-matter that
has first been sedulously dehydrated of all
psyche.
Yet this last is the approach which the methodology
of natural science, as we have it, renders
inevitable. If you have first affirmed that
the material world is in fact independent
of the psychic, and then determined to concentrate
attention exclusively on the former, it does
not make all that difference whether or no
you go to the behaviouristic lengths of explicitly
denying the existence of psyche. Either it
does not exist or, if it does exist, it is
occult and must be left severely alone. In
any case you have withdrawn attention from
it for so long that it might as well not
be there, as far as you are concerned. For
the purpose of cognition, it will gradually
(as the author puts it on page 77) have "petered
out".
Moreover this continues to be the case even
after the failure of science to eliminate
psyche from the know-able world has become
evident. The demonstrative arguments of a
Coleridge, a Whitehead, a Michael Polanyi
are perforce acknowledged; but the acknowledgement
remains an intellectual, not an emotional
experience. The Trojan Horse certainly does
seem to be there, and in rather a conspicuous
way; but the necessary traffic-diversions
can be arranged, and it is much less embarrassing
to leave it standing in the market-place
than to get involved.
There is however one experience inseparable
from the progress of natural science, which
is apt to be an emotional as well as an intellectual
one. And that is the fact that the exclusion
of the psychic, as such, from matter of science
entails recognition of the limits of science.
This is, of course, the opposite experience
from the one that enthralled the scientists
of the seventeenth century. They rejoiced
in a conviction that all the boundaries had
gone and the prospects opened up to human
knowledge had become limitless. Whereas,
more and more as the nineteenth century progressed,
it was the opposite that was stressed. "Ignorabimus."
We shall never know. There are limits beyond
which, in the very nature of things, the
mind can never pass.
One of the things heavily stressed by Steiner
(in Section I and again more specifically
in Section III) is the significance, from
the point of view of anthroposophy, of precisely
this experience, and not so much in itself
as for what it may lead to. The more monstrous
and menacing the Horse is felt to be, towering
there and casting its shadow over the centre
of the town, the more ready we may be to
begin asking ourselves whether there may
not perhaps be something alive inside it.
This experience can be an emotional, and
indeed a volitional one, because it involves
a frustrating, if suppressed, conflict between
the scientific impulse, which is a will to
know and a refusal to acknowledge boundaries
except for the purpose of overthrowing them
- and the scientific tradition, followed
for the last three hundred years, which has
ended in itself erecting boundaries that
claim to be no less absolute than the old
theological ones it did overthrow.
In developing his contention that the shock
of contact with these self-imposed limits
of knowledge may itself be the necessary
first step towards breaching them, the author
refers in particular to two German writers,
F. T. Vischer and Gideon Spicker. It would
be a mistake to conclude from this, or from
the nineteenth century idiom of the quotations,
that the theme is out of date. The boundaries
are still there and are still felt. The substance
is the same, whether it is Gideon Spicker
pointing out that
"every one, without exception, starts
from an unproven and unprovable premiss,
namely the necessity of thinking. No investigation
ever gets behind this necessity, however
deep it may dig. It has to be simply and
groundlessly accepted..."
or Bertrand Russell, in Human Knowledge:
Its Scope and Limits, conceding that the
foundation, on which the whole structure
of empirical science is erected, is itself
demonstrably non-empirical:
"If an individual is to know anything
beyond his own experiences up to the present
moment, his stock of uninferred knowledge
must consist not only of matters of fact,
but also of general laws, or at least a law,
allowing him to make inferences from matters
of fact... The only alternative to this hypothesis
is complete scepticism as to all the inferences
of science and common sense, including those
which I have called animal inference."
The abiding question is, how we choose to
react to the boundaries. We may, with Russell
and the empiricists, having once conscientiously
"shown awareness" of them, proceed
henceforth to ignore them and hope, so to
speak, that they will go away; or, with the
linguistic philosophers, we may flatly decline
to look at them; or we may wrap ourselves
in the vatic "silence" of a Heidegger
or a Wittgenstein or a Norman O. Brown to
be broken only by paradox and aphorism, or
fall in behind the growing number of distinguished
enthusiasts for metaphor, symbol and myth;
or, with the scientific positivists, we may
resign ourselves to the conviction that there
is really no difference between knowledge
and technology; we may even perhaps attempt
some new definition of knowledge along the
lines of the groping relativism, or personalism,
of Karl Popper or of Michael Polanyi. But
how far all of these are from the vision
that was engendered by the scientific impulse
in its first appearance among men! Steiner,
as will be seen, advocates a different response,
and one which, it seems to me, is more in
accord with the fateful impulse itself, however
it may differ from the methodology and the
tradition which that impulse has so far begotten.
At intervals through the ensuing pages the
reader will encounter a passing reference
to, and sometimes a quotation from, the German
philosopher and psychologist, Franz Brentano.
Here too he may be inclined to form a hasty
judgement that the book is unduly "dated"
by them. But here too it is the substance
that matters, and that is far from being
out of date. What that substance is, it is
hoped, may be sufficiently gathered from
the book itself. Brentano is however so little
known to English readers that I have thought
it best to omit from the translation that
part of it which amounts to an exegesis of
his psychology. There remain two points to
which I wish to draw attention here.
In a short section entitled "Diremption
of the Psychic from the Extra-psychic in
Brentano" (also omitted) the author
briefly capitulates the former's refutation
of a certain influential and still widely
accepted psychological fallacy: namely, that
the degree of conviction with which we treat
a proposition as "true" (and thus,
the existential component in any existential
judgement) depends on the degree of intensity
- the "passion" (Polanyi's word.)
- with which we feel it. This, says Brentano,
is based on an impermissible analogy ("size")
between the psyche itself on the one hand
and the world of space on the other. If conviction
really depended on intensity of feeling,
doctors would be advising their patients
against studying mathematics, or even learning
arithmetic, for fear of a nervous breakdown.
What it in fact depends on, adds Steiner,
is an inner intuition of the psyche neither
similar nor analogous, but corresponding
in its objectivity, to the psyche's outer
experience of causality in the physical world.
And this experience is considered elsewhere
in the hook, for instance in Sections VII
and VIII.
The other point concerns Brentano's relation
to the present day. It is not always the
philosopher whose name is best known and
whose works are still read, whose influence
is most abiding. Brentano was the teacher
of Edmund Husserl, who acknowledged that
teaching as the determining influence in
his intellectual and vocational life; and
without the Phenomenology of Husserl, with
its stress on the "intentionality"
or "intentional relation" in the
act of perceiving, there is some doubt whether
Existentialism would ever have been born.
Thus, while from a superficial point of view
the relation to Brentano, which certainly
pervades the book as a whole, may be felt
as a dating one, for anyone at all acquainted
in detail with the history of western thought
it can have the consequence of bringing it
almost modishly up to date.
Steiner´s Von Seelenrätseln (of which what
follows is a partial translation) is not
a systematic presentation of the philosophical
basis of anthroposophy. For that the reader
must go to his The Philosophy of Freedom,
or Goethe's Theory of Knowledge (in German),
or Truth and Science; and perhaps especially
the last. The Foreword to Von Seelenrätseln
does in fact describe it as a Rechtfertigung
- vindication - of anthroposophical methodology;
but my choice of a title for these extracts
came from the impression I had myself retained
of its essential content after reading the
whole and translating a good deal of it.
Steiner's Von Seelenrätseln was published
in 1917, the year of Brentano's death; and
its longest section (here omitted) amounts,
as its title, Franz Brentano (Ein Nachruf),
suggests, to an obituary essay. Steiner had
always, he says in a Foreword, been both
an admirer and an assiduous reader of Brentano
and had long been intending to write about
him.
The main body of the essay is thus a patient
and detailed exposition, supported by quotations,
of Brentano's psychology, in which the word
"judgement" is used to name that
intentional relation between the psyche and
the extra-psychic, or physical world, which
enables it either to reject a representation
as subjective or to accept it as objective.
This "judgement" is an exclusively
psychic activity, and must be sharply distinguished
as such from both representations and feelings.
As the essay proceeds, Steiner makes it clear
that he sees Brentano's emphasis on intentionality
as a first step in the direction of that
psychological elimination of "physical
qualifies", to which I have already
referred. And he suggests that the only reason
why Brentano himself could not take the logically
indicated second step (which must have carried
him in the direction of anthroposophy) was
that at the very outset of his philosophical
career, following Emmanuel Kant, he had irrevocably
nailed his colours to the back of the Cartesian
guillotine, by accepting the axiom that concepts
without sensory content are "empty".
Is this why today, although we have a philosophical
and an ethical existentialism, and now even
an existential psychology, we have as yet
no existential epistemology?
This essay is immediately preceded by a lengthy
response in detail to a chapter in a then
recently published book by Max Dessoir, and
that in its turn by the introductory essay
entitled Anthropology and Anthroposophy,
which also forms the opening section of the
book now presented to English readers. The
arguments against including Max Dessoir über
Anthroposophie seemed to me to be the same,
only a good deal stronger, than those against
including the Brentano obituary.
Steiner felt bound to go into Dessoir's chapter
in some detail, because it echoed irresponsibly
a number of flagrant misunderstandings, or
misrepresentations, of anthroposophy that
were current in Germany at the time. Briefly,
Dessoir's arguments are all based on the
assumption that anthroposophy ignores the
principles of natural science and must collapse
as soon as it is confronted with them; whereas
Steiner's real argument is, as he himself
formulates it in the Foreword, that "either
the grounds for there being such a thing
as anthroposophy are valid, or else no truth-value
can be assigned to the insights of natural
science itself". What he disputed was
not facts, but hypotheses which have come
to be treated as facts. I have omitted the
Foreword; but the argument, so formulated,
is sufficiently apparent from the rest of
the book.
The remainder of Von Seelenrätseln consists
of eight Commentary Notes (Skizzenhafte Erweiterungen)
of varying lengths, each referring specifically
to a different point in the text, but each
bearing a title and all of them quite capable,
it seems to me, of standing on their own.
Seven of them appear here as Sections II
to VIII, and I have already borrowed from
the eighth (Diremption of the Psychic from
the Extrapsychic in Brentano) for the purposes
of this Introduction.
We are left with a book rather less than
half the length of the original and requiring,
if only for that reason, a different tide;
but still with a book which I have thought
it important to make available, as best I
can, in the English tongue; and that not
only for the general reasons I have already
suggested, but also for a particular one
with which I will conclude.
One of the Commentary Notes (Section VII)
stands on rather a different footing, is
perhaps even in a different category, from
the others. At a certain point in the Brentano
obituary Steiner quotes from a previous book
of his own a passage in which he compares
the relation between the unconscious and
the conscious psyche to that between a man
himself and his reflection in a looking-glass.
In which case the notion that the actual
life of the soul consists of the way it expresses
itself through the body, would be as fantastic
as that of a man, regarding himself in a
mirror, who should suppose that the form
he sees there has been produced by the mirror.
Whereas of course the mirror is the condition,
not the cause, of what he sees. In the same
way, the ordinary waking experience of the
psyche certainly is conditioned by its bodily
apparatus; but "it is not the soul itself
that is dependent on the bodily instruments,
but only the ordinary consciousness of the
soul".
Now Section VII is, in form, a Note on this
sentence; and it is somewhat odd that Steiner
should have chosen a "Note" for
the purpose to which he applied it. For he
made it the occasion of his first mention
(after thirty years of silent reflection
and study) of the principle of psychosomatic
tri-unity. Moreover it is still the locus
classicus for a full statement of that same
"threefold" principle, which, as
every serious student of it knows, lies at
the very foundation of anthroposophy, while
at the same time it runs like a twisted Ariadne's
thread through nearly every matter selected
for scrutiny. Even those readers, therefore,
who are already too well convinced to feel
that any "case" for anthroposophy
is needed so far as they are concerned, will
probably be glad to have it available in
book form and in the English language. It
has once before been translated
- in 1925 by the late George Adams - but
his version was only printed in a privately
circulated periodical and has been out of
print for more than forty years.
It hardly needs adding that this Note in
particular will repay particularly careful
study. But there is one aspect of it, and
of the doctrine it propounds, to which I
feel impelled to direct attention before
I withdraw and leave the book to speak for
itself. If Section I is the statement, Section
VII strikes me as a particularly good illustration,
of the true relation between Steiner's anthroposophy
and that natural science which the scientific
revolution has in fact brought about. Although
he criticises, and rejects, a certain conclusion
which has been drawn from the evidence afforded
by neurological experiments, Steiner does
not attack the physiology developed since
Harvey's day; still less does he ignore it;
he enlists it. It is not only psychologically
(for the reason already given) but also technologically
that the scientific revolution was a necessary
precondition of anthroposophical cognition.
And this has a bearing on an objection of
a very different order that is sometimes
brought against it. I was myself once asked:
What is there in Steiner that you do not
also find in Jacob Boehme, if you know how
to look for it?
The content of Section VII (here called "Principles
of Psychosomatic Physiology") could
never have come to light in the context of
an Aristotelian physiology, a physiology
of "animal spirits", for example,
and of four "elements" that were
psychic as well as physical and four "humours"
that were physical as well as psychic, noone
quite saw how. If your need is to know, not
only with the warm wisdom of instinctive
intelligence, but also with effective precision,
you must first suffer the guillotine. Only
after you have disentangled two strands of
a single thread and laid them carefully side
by side can you twist them together by your
own act. The mind must have learnt to distinguish
soma absolutely from psyche before it can
be in a position to trace their interaction
with the requisite finesse; and this applies
not only to the human organism, but also
to nature as a whole. It is the case that
there is to be found in anthroposophy that
immemorial understanding of tri-unity in
man, in nature and in God, and of God and
nature and man, which had long permeated
the philosophy and religion of the East,
before it continued to survive (often subterraneously)
in the West in the doctrines of Platonism,
Neo-platonism, Hermetism, etc.; true that
you will find it in Augustine, in pseudo-Dionysius,
in Cusanus, in Bruno, in William Blake and
a cloud of other witnesses, of whom Boehme
is perhaps the outstanding representative.
It would be surprising if it were not so.
What differentiates anthroposophy from its
"traditional" predecessors, both
methodologically and in its content, is precisely
its "postrevolutionary" status.
It is, if you are that way minded, the perennial
philosophy; but, if so, it is that philosophy
risen again, and in a form determined by
its having risen again, from the psychological
and spiritual eclipse of the scientific revolution.
To resume for a moment the metaphor I adopted
at the outset of these remarks, it is because
the two bloodrelations were wise enough to
separate for a spell as "family",
that they are able to come together again
in the new and more specifically human relationship
of independence, fellowship and love.
Just how badly is it needed, a genuinely
psychosomatic physiology? That is a question
the reflective reader will answer for himself.
For my own part, to select only one from
a number of reasons that come to mind, I
doubt whether any less deepseated remedy
will ultimately avail against a certain creeping-sickness
now hardly less apparent from the Times Literary
Supplement than in the Charing Cross Road;
I mean the increasingly simian preoccupation
of captive human fancy with the secretions
and the excretions of its own physical body.
A few final words about the translation.
I have varied slightly the order in which
the Sections are arranged and in most cases
have substituted my own tides for those in
the original. The German word Seele feels
to me to be much more at home in technical
as well as non-technical contexts than the
English soul; and this is still more so with
the adjective seelisch, for which we have
no -equivalent except soul- (adjectival).
It is not however somewhat aggressively technical,
as psyche is. I have compromised by using
psyche and psychic generally but by no means
universally. Habits of speech alter fairly
quickly in some areas of discourse. Coleridge
apologised for psychological as an "insolens
verbum". The same might possibly have
been said of psyche in 1917, but hardly,
I think, today and still less tomorrow. The
mental or intelligential reference of Geist
- operating towards exclusion, even from
the subconscious imagination, of "physical
qualities" - is more emphatic than that
of spirit; and once again this is even truer
of Geistig and spiritual. I doubt if much
can be done about this; but I have sought
to help a little by rather infrequently Englishing
Geistig and Geist- (adjectival) as noetic.
The distinctively English mind and mental
sometimes appear to a translator of German
as a sort of planets in the night sky of
vocabulary and I have here and there adopted
them both in seelisch and in Geistig contexts.
And then of course there were those two thorns
in the flesh of all who are rash enough to
attempt translating philosophical or psychological
German - Vorstellung and vorstellen. This
is a problem that would bear discussing at
some length. But it must suffice to say that
I have mainly used representation and represent
(after considering and rejecting presentation
and present) occasionally substituting, where
the context seemed to demand it, idea and
ideation. The very meaning feels to me to
lurk somewhere between the English terms
- which is a good reason for using them both.
Other usages are based on similar considerations
and reflection. As to any habitual reader
of Steiner who may suspect that I have taken
too many liberties, I can only assure him
that, as far as I know, I have at least had
no other motive than a keen desire to do
the fullest possible justice to thoughtladen
sentences written by an Austrian in 1917,
but being read (as I hope) by an Anglo-Saxon
in and after 1970.
(From the first edition of The Case for Anthroposophy
(Rudolf Steiner Press 1970), extracts from
Von Seelenrätseln (1917) by Rudolf Steiner.)
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