The Rediscovery of Meaning is a volume of a collection of essays by Owen Barfield listed here.
Here is a video on Owen Barfield and the meaning crisis. It includes many video clips discussing the history of knowledge from our modern Western perspective. Barfield notes the feeling of meaninglessness that was coming to prominence in the twentieth century and continues on. He asks:
How is it that the more man becomes able to manipulate the world to his advantage the less he can perceive any meaning in it?
The scientific revolution brought with it a time of regarding the universe as mechanical and mindless. We as subjects observe a lifeless objective universe whereas previously through Aristotle there was an understanding of a cosmos filled with intensions. Now any sign of will or purpose has been excluded from most of the history of the universe. The universe is understood using the language of mathematics.
We live in a mathematical universe in which secondary properties like love and beauty are an afterthought. We have become disconnected from the world. We now look out at a mechanical reality as far as our instruments can probe, we have come to regard our own selves as machines. Now even our thoughts are nothing more than wired circuits making and breaking in a few pounds of fleshy microchips and logic gates, All this energetic activity encased in the bony box which nods on the atlas in agreement with this conclusion, just like the nodding dog on the parcel shelf of your grannie’s car.
Blind mechanical laws rule.
Malcom Guite quotes Barfield,
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information, where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
We have, of necessity, become detached and alienated from nature. Guite and Barfield are asking us to learn from the previous participatory relationship, leave behind our exclusive onlooker consciousness, and to gain a participatory understanding with our new found individual self conscious awareness.
Our modern scientific knowledge gives us the letters of nature. Through participation we can form the words and begin to read the script of nature. And that is what Goethe was doing with his “gentle empiricism”. With our mind’s eye we become free from living in the moment and we can make connections that allow us to see the contexts which overcome the idolatry of a restrictive physicalism.
Grasp the knowledge gained by the modern scientific understanding and continue on. Learn to read the script and take the words seriously, “Tat Tvam Asi”, “Thou Art That”.
The video (from your second paragraph) is far too long. I’ll watch a few minutes.
To me, the whole idea is nonsense. From my perspective, the world is more meaningful than ever.
Is this a conservative vs. liberal kind of thing? Perhaps conservatives are losing meaning, because they have invested their ideas in the past (really, in an imagined past that never really was).
I do notice that conservatives are forever railing against materialism. Yet, if you look at their behavior, they actually live very materialist lives.
Or maybe this is a religious thing. Perhaps it is religious people mourning the growing recognition that their religion is absurd nonsense.
Boomer
[spit-take]
Aye, nostalgia ain’t what it used to be.
I guess Charlie’s penchant for Barfield stems from Barfield’s midlife crisis in forming an admiration for Rudolph Steiner. What else has Barfield ever done for us?
I managed about twenty seconds. Maybe Charlie could tempt us with a summary of the good points. (Some US guy talking for two hours about some dead minor English academic who has had practically no influence on philosophical thought? Promoting that is a tough sell!)
I was hoping the video would stimulate some productive discussion. But if nobody is willing to spend any time on watching it, it remains a forlorn hope.
I will try to comment on select points in the video when I have the time.
Well, there are distractions at the moment, though expecting people to sit through two hours of a talking head is a bit optimistic at the best of times.
But you’ve been a fan of Owen Barfield for some time. Is the sole reason that he develops a crush on Steiner?
Nothing has meaning, no matter what the definition of meaning is, unless you can preserve it…
Isn’t it why the wealthy give their money away for the so-called good causes to preserve their names when their time is up on this beautiful planet full of selfish and greedy people?
BTW: many wealthy Russians and Ukrainians had to leave everything that had some meaning to them and flee. Many of them had to leave their luxury life behind including their $200K plus car at the border to cross to Poland or other counties… Many wealthy people from Russia and Ukraine are no longer with us because their meaning disappeared when the war started…
Karl König, like the millions being displaced today, was a refugee. A Jew fleeing Austria just prior to the Second World War. In Britain, after spending some time in an internment camp, he founded the Camphill movement. “The Threefold Social Order”, was a lecture he gave on the 9th of August 1964 at Camphill, Newton Dee.
In this lecture he talks about Aristotle’s deep insight into the nature of man*. (It’s a bit long but I hope people take time to read the excerpt I have copied below.) Man is a zoon politikon, a social being. Man as a single being has no meaning, he is formed out of the society to which he belongs. König discusses the threefold nature of man. In the first years of life he learns to walk, to speak and to think. These are the fundamental steps in becoming a social being. And the threefold social order is founded on these steps. Regarding three spheres of society König says:
* Obviously by ‘man’ is meant as a general term for a person regardless of gender.
In Germany, after the First World War, Steiner’s ideas of forming a threefold social order were considered, but it never got off the ground. This was a missed opportunity in my opinion.
The few powerful decision makers around the world lead us down a path that winds down to pits of Hell and the further down we go the harder it becomes to climb back out. Perhaps the majority of Russian troops hate the position they are in at present, fighting in this unjust war with so much suffering, but what choice do they have? I don’t think half of them have any clear idea as to why they are there. Who isn’t worried about how this will end?
I wonder what a Ukrainian refugee crossing the polish border, leaving loved ones and everything they possessed behind, would say about the meaning of life!
Would they see the world as more meaningful than ever?
It’s ‘Rudolf’.
If you asked, “What else has Barfield ever done for me?”, I would guess nothing but producing in you a feeling of mild animosity. This because I keep mentioning him and so nothing good can come from him. And I am only here to be criticized and anything I say or believe should be argued against. But that’s okay, it’s better than being ignored. 🙂
The more attached we are to possessions and self seeking pleasures, the greater the pain and suffering in having to give them up. This is Buddha’s dukkha and Christ’s words to his disciples. He tells them that in order to follow Him, i.e. find one’s higher self, they have to relinquish all that they hold dear.
Putin is doing the exact opposite and in so doing he will never achieve any kind of satisfaction. It’s my belief that the suffering he is inflicting on untold numbers of people will in the course of time become his own suffering.
The rediscovery of meaning involves the reappraisal of the knowledge that can be gained from a qualitative understanding of reality by which we can enhance learning. This can add an immense amount of understanding to the predominant system which lays such emphasis on our current quantitative science.
This way of knowing uses an imaginative knowledge. But not ‘imaginative’ in the sense of fantasy.
Malcolm Guite features heavily in the video linked to in the op. He is a hirsute, hobbit-like character who champions myths such as those of the Holy Grail. There is much wisdom to be found in tales such as these if they are allowed to resound in consciousness.
We discover meaning, not in the analysis of words on a page, but in how the voice speaking through the words resonate in our minds. Not in trying to analyze great prose and poems, but in the feelings we get from the words directly. We discover meaning, not in taking myths literally, but in the general truths contained in them. We discover meaning, not in the sight or smell of an individual flower alone, but in the context of its existence in time and connection to the whole of life.
As I see it, meaning is biological. Meaning is prior to there being words. Other animals can have meaning without language. We don’t discover meaning. We are born with meaning, and that meaningfulness grows as we learn more about the world.
Perhaps you can give an example. What meaning was lost from your life because of “modern scientific knowledge”?
Was it the task of science to provide that meaning in the first place? perhaps you have been fueling your life with meaning from the wrong source **cough cough** spiritual science **cough cough**?
Interesting comment, but it has little to do with what I was talking about. I was ignoring any abstract idea of ‘meaning’ and focusing on the actual sentences we are creating out of words here and now. The meaning does not lie in any physical pattern, it comes from me being able to interpret and comprehend your thoughts through what you are saying. I would have been able to do the same if you were speaking to me directly or over a video or phone call.
I can study the arrangement of pixels on the screen or ink on the page but they will tell me nothing of the meaning behind what is written. But through the way the words are arranged I can discover the meaning you, through your thinking mind, have expressed in the words. Your thoughts and my thoughts have become frozen in the written words.
Regarding your answer, I think you are trying to explain your thinking on the abstract notion of meaning in general.
Viktor Frankl has some wise words on a person’s search for meaning.
He thought it pointless to ask, “what is the meaning of life?” He advocated that we follow an individual pursuit of meaning as opposed to Freud’s pursuit of pleasure or Adler’s pursuit of power. We are individuals and as such the meaning we place on life should as individual as we are.
He liked to quote Nietzsche, “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.”
Plants do not need to pursue meaning in this way because they follow the laws of their kind without question. Animals are governed by instinct and act in accordance with the group to which they belong. They follow their instincts without feeling the need to ask, ‘why?’ Only we humans question and pursue goals as individuals.
And if we believe that we are born, we live, and then we die, and that is all there is to it, then life can seem to be pointless. This leads to the meaning crisis.
Corneel,
Barfield is developing a idea, very widespread in 19th and 20th century thought, that the rise of a mechanistic worldview has “disenchanted” the world, and that something needs to be done in order to “re-enchant” it or “recover” meaning which has somehow been lost
I don’t know exactly when this theme really gets underway, but most scholars date it to at least Max Weber’s “Science as Vocation” from 1922.
I think this whole idea is fascinating, as an episode in the history of ideas, because it has been explicitly and openly questioned by several recent historians of modernity (see here, here, and here). In particular I was fascinated by this argument that the disenchantment thesis must be understood not only in light of the rise of modern science but in light of European colonization.
A good example is the way that Goethe’s ‘Theory of Colours’ differs from Newton’s ‘Optics’. Newton’s experiments were designed to disregard the person performing the experiments whereas Goethe’s ‘Theory of Colours’ is inclusive of how light and colours affect the observer. He goes into detail as to the way that colours “are immediately associated with the emotions of the mind”.
None whatsoever. Surely, over the time we’ve been communicating here, you will have noticed that I quite often link to scientific writings to make the odd point? Modern science has done a great deal in providing us with the knowledge that helps us to understand the script of nature. It provides the words which allows us to interpret the language of nature.
Hey! That sounds nasty. Better get yourself a PCR test. 🙂
Such a versatile example it is too: You have referred to Goethe’s experiment very often. However, I do not see how Newton’s account of colour theory fails to provide meaning whereas Goethe’s account does. Could you try to explain within the context of this OP?
Then what meaning does “modern scientific knowledge” fail to provide that resulted in this current view of a mindless, mathematical and mechanical universe?
Note that I have asked very similar questions before. Either I am lacking the capacity to understand what you are telling me or you are not clearly articulating what is irking you about the current state of affairs.
This is new to me, but I am quite sympathetic to the idea that the “magic” has not gone, but has transformed into new narratives that suit our modern needs. We have always been a storytelling people.
We are probably talking past one another.
For me, meaning is in our engagement with reality, and I do not see that as at all abstract. You seem to see meaning as a property of words, and I do think that is abstract and a poor way of thinking about language.
For myself, I see science as enhancing our engagement with reality. However, some people seem to see science as just abstract rules, and I can see how that might diminish meaning.
You seem to think that standard linguistics is a poor way of thinking about language.
But I think that nominalists have little idea what meaning is. They also have little idea what concrete or abstract is. Nominalism is basically a denial of meaning, so it provides no insight into it.
In December 1964, Karl König gave a talk, “The Archetypal Phenomenon of Social Science”. He referred to how Steiner had first characterized what had entered the world since the publication of “The Communist Manifesto”. We should be aware that there is a fundamental facet of human nature in that when social drives are instigated then there will also arise anti-social drives. There is always a polarity.
From the talk König says:
In the midst of Advent he spoke about Advent and the second aspect of it. Christmas with its message of peace among men has its opposite pole with the Easter story which brings earthly death:
In the individual human Ego a light begins to shine within the darkness of ‘agnostic materialism’.
The current situation reminds us that we are still firmly within “the war to end all wars”.
Barfield was developing an idea of the evolution of consciousness over our historical period. In our journey out of ‘original participation’ modern science has bought us to the highest point of ‘alpha-thinking’, which is brought about by our ‘onlooker consciousness’
He studied two personalities which he believed were beginning to develop a way of experiencing the world which was moving beyond the predominant onlooker consciousness to more participatory methods. These were Goethe and Coleridge. But there was a polarity in their way of working. They were coming from opposite positions towards the same unified end. Goethe had little interest in the study of thinking, he was a very careful observer of nature. On the other hand, Coleridge was deeply involved in thinking about thinking.
Goethe’s route lead to an apprehension of, for example, the ‘urplfanze’, Coleridge’s route to the ‘idea’. These are no different, they are the same thing.
This is not to say that the alpha-thinking, the detached observation championed by science is irrelevant, pointless, or in any way unnecessary.
Alpha-thinking:
And further, regarding alpha-thinking Barfield tell us:
According to Newton’s way of thinking, colours are supposed to be contained within white light. But ‘colour’ is seen as a subjective response to the movement of ‘particles’ or waves which are nothing like ‘colour’. It is illogical to speak of colour as somehow hidden within colourless light. All that can be spoken of is wavelike or particulate movements of some, hard to define, entities.
When someone describes an animal or plant in terms of colour to anyone who has not actually seen the specimen, the description will be full of meaning from the listener’s own experience of the world. If they describe them in terms of various wavelengths or frequencies they will not be conveying anything particularly meaningful.
Any person who does not understand that the experimenter cannot be disregarded in any experiment will be fooling themselves. An attempt to ignore the first person perspective leaves a gaping hole. By using ‘wavelength’ or ‘frequency’ in describing colour, we are transferring to a world imagined to be beyond our experience, processes which we have borrowed from sense experience.
I accept responsibility for my lack of clarity. And that is why I link to people such as Barfield, who, I believe, can explain things much better than I can. I know that it might take a bit of effort to understand their position and there are many people who do not believe that it’s worth bothering with.
But if they do want to argue against any position and wish to present a strong case then they will need to work on understanding that position.
Sure they are, provided that the recipient is interested in such things. For example, blue tits have crowns that reflect light in the ultra-violet part of the spectrum. The colour “ultraviolet” itself is meaningless to us since humans cannot see UV radiation but the phenomenon is full of significance to the birds who can see UV and also to the human ecologists that study them. Hence, those descriptions acquire meaning when the observer is able to make relevant associations.
What I think you mean is that Newton’s description of colour is meaningless to you because you believe descriptions in terms of wavelengths are irrelevant to your everyday experience of the world. However, you will find out that you are wrong when you neglect to rub on some sunscreen before you expose yourself to harmful levels of invisible UV radiation.
In my view, we are enriching our experience by increasing our understanding of the underlying processes. That is the magic of our days.
Not so much. Mostly I gain some understanding if KN bothers to put things into context.
This doesn’t seem right to me. The utterance “cardinals are bright red birds” will mean the same thing, regardless of who utters it, or if they have ever seen cardinals, or even if they have ever seen the color red.
It is true that someone who knows what cardinals look like will be able to correctly label some bird that they see as being a cardinal. And they would be better able to do so if they have seen cardinals in real-life, as distinct from paintings or photographs, because they will be more familiar with what cardinals look like from different perspectives, at different distances, in different kinds of lighting, and so on.
But this has nothing to do with meaning, at least not in the sense of linguistic meaning. Which may not be what you’re trying to talk about.
It depends on what we’re trying to talk about. If we’re doing epistemology or philosophy of science, then yes, we need to include the experimenter or observer themselves in our description of the total situation.
But the structure of modern scientific practices is that they function as iterated error-filtration mechanisms, from operationalization of concepts to experimental design to peer review. In this process, the individual biases of the scientists are progressively removed from the description of what is going on in the world.
This is, of course, an incomplete or partial process: a completely adequate grasp of how the world really is will always be beyond our finite cognitive powers. (That is, if Kant is right about our cognitive powers being finite. This is worth mentioning because Hegel’s critique of Kant begins with a critique of the assumption that our cognitive powers are necessarily finite.)
I don’t think this is right. This way of putting things confuses both (1) the difference between metaphor and analogy and (2) the difference between how theories are constructed and how they are verified.
In re: (1) metaphors are transfers of meaning from one domain to another, e.g. “the early bird gets the worm.” There is no reason to believe that birds that eat earlier in the day eat better than birds that eat later on, but it’s a metaphor for the importance of beginning one’s work day earlier, in order to be more productive.
Analogies aren’t like this, because in analogical reasoning we are very careful to specify how the analogy is imperfect or breaks down. When Niels Bohr used the solar system as a model for the hydrogen atom, he was reasoning by analogy: that there are respects in which the relation between the sun and planets is like the relation between the atomic nucleus and the electron shell.
When early physicists used the concept of “wavelength” to describe light, they were reasoning analogically, not metaphorically: they were saying that there are respects in which light has structural properties similar to those of water. (This is why they were compelled to posit the ether as a medium through which light waves propagated. When it when confirmed that there is no such thing as ether, the concept of “wavelength of light” had to be revised.)
Scientists expand upon existing conceptual frameworks through analogical reasoning, and this is crucial for the progress of science. There is nothing illicit about it, and it is importantly distinct from the role of metaphor, which is central to poetry and art.
But how scientists devise new concepts is one thing, and how they confirm them is quite another. The process of testing a new model involves operationalizing the relevant concepts, deciding which elements of the model will be treated as parameters and which as variables, making sure that the experiment will manipulate the variables that we intend to manipulate, etc. All this is painstaking and difficult intellectual and manual labor. (Very few philosophers of science have reflected on the fact that one difference between philosophy and science is that philosophy does not involve any manual labor, whereas science does.)
The result of scientific practice will be (if all goes well) the construction of highly confirmed models of some domain of phenomena in which concepts like “wavelength” and “frequency” have the meaning that they do because of the mathematical formalization of those concepts and the body of data that systematically tie those equations to specific experimental procedures.
The origin of those terms in sense-experience is, so to speak, a ladder that is kicked away after we have climbed up it.
Yes, we probably are.
In my opinion we attain meaning by the merging of concepts with that which is perceived. Concepts are not words and are not contained within words. A concept is a living inner experience. As soon as we try to define it in words we are no longer talking about the experience.
Neil Rickert: For myself, I see science as enhancing our engagement with reality. However, some people seem to see science as just abstract rules, and I can see how that might diminish meaning.
Science gives us an enhancement of meaning when it connects and unifies our initial fragmentation of reality. i think science is an activity which is not just carried out by professional scientists. Anyone who studies the world in order to understand it is engaging in science. I don’t think we are in complete opposition.
I see this as a confusion between concepts and experience. I would say that is quite central to my view that concepts are words, or more precisely, concepts are rules that govern the use of words. To grasp a concept is to know how to use a word in a sentence that can be understood by a speaker of the same language.
This is not to deny that there is a non-conceptual dimension to experience, though I am not enthused about theories of phenomenal content that strip away all psychological function. (That is to say, I don’t believe in ‘qualia” in Chalmers’ sense.)
Assuming that there’s any “initial fragmentation of reality,” which I quite reject.
One need not have a professional certification in order to practice science, but science is not the same thing as merely “studying the world in order to understand it.” Science is not just natural history or describing what one sees — science is about testing one’s ideas about the world against how the world is in order to make those ideas more closely resemble how the world is.
A few of my thoughts:
I think the rise of nominalism is an inevitable consequence of the coming of materialism. We look into the world and see things ‘out there’ and attach names to them. But reality is not a collection of ‘things’, it is a unified whole within which there are a multitude of processes in interrelated activity. The name ‘tiger’ does not just signify a large striped animal that would eat you if it got the opportunity. It signifies all animals of that kind plus their place within the whole of nature. It entails and incorporates many concepts including organic growth, sentience, carnivore, endothermy, and many more.
The meaning of ‘tiger’ varies depending on the breadth of knowledge of the person hearing the word and the context in which it is used.
CharlieM,
I don’t think this is quite right — at least not in line with how most philosophers use these terms.
Whether the ultimate reality of realty is pluralistic (many things) or monistic (one thing), or whether pluralism is atomistic or holistic, is a separate issue from nominalism vs realism about universals.
A holistic pluralist would be someone who thinks that individual things can only be understood in terms of their various relations (and many different kinds of relations!) — whereas an atomistic pluralist would be someone who thinks that the ultimate, basement level constituents of reality can be understood in terms of their intrinsic properties alone.
By contrast, the issue of nominalism is whether or not terms referring to kinds denote realities distinct from the realities of particulars. So the issue isn’t whether or not “tiger” refers to individuals per se or necessarily involves their manifold ecological, physiological, and evolutionary contexts.
Rather it involves whether the word “tigerhood” — the essence of being a tiger, being the kind of thing that being a tiger is — refers to something ontologically distinct from the plurality of all actual and possible tigers, past, present, and future.
Nominalism is the position that “tigerhood” does not refer to something ontologically distinct from the plurality of all actual and possible tigers. Rather, it is the name of the collection of all actual and possible tigers.
That’s quite separate from whether we understand particulars in atomistic or holistic terms.
One can be a nominalist about kinds or essences and also be a holistic pluralist and even also think that holistic pluralism (all particulars are bound up in hugely complex contextual relations) implies monism (ultimately, there is only one thing or substance). I think that was Spinoza’s position.
“Ultraviolet” is certainly not meaningless to us. We may not be able to perceive ultraviolet radiation directly but most of us know of the dangers of excessive exposure to it. And I remember a long, long time ago strutting my stuff in the disco, making a fool of myself, and every speck of dust on my jacket contrasted against the dark material under the uv lights.
Of course from the point of view of a female blue tit, ultraviolet wavelengths are meaningless, but the perception of the caps of males does have meaning. They see the ultraviolet colour, not the wavelength. This is no different from dogs and many other animals being able to hear higher frequency sounds beyond the human range.
You are not grasping the difference I am trying to highlight between Goethe’s and Newton’s ways of explaining colour. Goethe wished to remain within the experience without speculating on what if anything lay beyond what was experienced. Newton began by speculating that light was particulate and carried out experiments in order to demonstrate that this was the case.
Goethe was well aware that sunlight produced colours when interrupted by matter, and that it also produced heat and chemical effects.
There is nothing wrong with describing the processes in mathematical terms, but thinking that this mathematical description is the actual reality is what Barfield had termed idolatry.
I’m not surprised that you can make little sense of Barfield. His grandson has said that he has spent most of his life trying to understand what he was saying and he has only recently began to understand. He was advised to read “Saving the Appearances” when he was seventeen. But he could not make much of it at that time.
At least Kantian Naturalist is providing you with some fruitful thoughts. So your time is not entirely wasted.
That is lovely. Do you really believe you were seeing light from the UV part of the spectrum?
Yes, and you argue that Goethe’s method provides us with meaningful knowledge whereas Newton’s method, while providing us with great insight into the nature of electromagnetic radiation, paints a picture of the universe that is ultimately mechanical, mathematical and therefore meaningless. This I understand to be your position. Correct?
I am still trying to figure out what difference in “meaning” you perceive there to be between those methods. The way you present it now led me to believe you consider observations that remain close to sensory experience to be more meaningful because they are closer to our experienced reality, whereas conclusions that follow from abstracted or mathematical models are detached from reality because they cannot be directly experienced. So our “reality” is what we directly experience and that is what you consider to be meaningful? Is that what you are saying?
Actually, I was hoping you would try to follow their example in bringing greater clarity to your arguments. If you really understand the points that Barfield was making, you should be able to briefly paraphrase.
I painted a rather vague scene.
What if over the phone you order a rose to be sent to a loved one. The florist says, “I will send this beautiful red rose right here which I will send as you requested.” You have a picture of the rose in your mind. If the florist had said, “I will send this beautiful rose coloured around 700 nanometers”, that complicates matters. Now you might need to perform a mental exercise of connecting that information to a specific colour, but your mental image will still be of a red rose. You now have a mental picture plus an extra detail accompanying the mental picture. There is nothing wrong with that unless you take this mathematical construct to be more real than the actual mental picture.
We could discuss the accuracy of the statement, “cardinals are bright red birds”, without ever having to wrestle with concepts such as wavelength or frequency.
Obviously I’m talking about meaning in more than just linguistic terms. We experience concepts in more than just words, in the same way that words can never fully capture our outer sense experiences.
Steiner from “The Philosophy of Freedom, chapter 7, Are There Limits to Knowledge?
Our way of gaining knowledge, far from giving us a representation of some unknowable world out there, gives us a progressive knowledge of direct reality.
Thinking is neither subjective nor objective, it is beyond these concepts which are themselves the product of thinking.
The C.S.Lewis scholar Michael Ward had had this to say about the relationship between Barfield and Lewis:
“Objective” experiments might give us a partial view, such as the physical properties of the entity being examined, but that is only a limited aspect of their reality.
CharlieM,
I don’t think Steiner’s ideas really make sense, taken by themselves or as a reading of Kant.
As I see it, Kant’s project was a brilliant attempt and colossal failure, based on the deep recognition that cognitive experience of objects involved both a moment of receptivity (wherein objects affect us) and a moment of spontaneity (wherein we affect objects).
But without a coherent idea of a feedback loop, he could not adequately account for the dynamical organization of our to-and-fro engagement with objects.
Instead, he took up both Hume’s theory of sense-impressions and Leibniz’s theory of rational agency, and attempted to merely glue them onto each other and call them unified.
He did not call into question Hume’s fundamental error, which is to sever perception from movement. Nor did he question Leibniz’s fundamental error, which is to conceptualize rational cognition from an egocentric perspective.
Because he did not recognize that perception and movement are almost completely inseparable, Kant could not find spontaneity in sensible intuition itself. Therefore he had no choice but to locate spontaneity in rational cognition, and this led to his thinking about spontaneity in terms of the use of rules.
Needless to say, I do not think one can correct the errors of both empiricism and intellectualism simply by insisting on both being right. What was required was a much more pervasive re-thinking of the very nature of experience and of reasoning — which is indeed what happened (and is continuing to happen today).
It is true that there’s a conceptual connection between the distinction between sensibility and the understanding and the distinction between knowable phenomena and unknowable noumena, but I’m not sure Steiner locates it in the right place.
The connection between these distinction is simply this: we cannot deploy qualitative, causal, and modal vocabulary without anchoring that vocabulary with indexicals such as “here”, “now,” “this,” “that,” “you”, “he”, etc. But indexicals always presuppose locating oneself relative to objects and other subjects within a spatio-temporal array. In the absence of a spatio-temporal framework, no indexicals can be located and therefore we cannot use any qualitative, causal, or modal vocabulary.
To this line of thought, in itself completely cogent and sound, Kant adds the further idea that space and time are nothing but the basic structure of our ability to be affected by objects.
It is this move which comprises the essence of Kant’s transcendental idealism, and that is where things go off the rails.
It is only with this move that Kant can then insist that qualitative, causal, and modal vocabulary are restricted to objects as they affect our senses, and therefore objects — when considered independently of how they affect our senses — cannot be labeled, described, classified, and explained.
As I see it, it is because Kant inherited Hume’s separation of perception and movement that Kant was unable to realize that time and space are the basic structure of how the mind is affected by objects because the mind is necessarily embodied.
Since the body is necessarily a spatio-temporal component within a larger and more encompassing network of causal and modal relations amongst other spatio-temporal entities, insisting on the essential embodied nature of human cognitive would have allowed Kant to hold onto the Good Thought (no cognitive maps without indexicals) while rejecting the Bad Thought (no knowledge of things in themselves).
But, giving up on the Bad Thought would also mean giving up on the very heart of the entire project, which is to restrict knowledge to make room for faith, and make it intellectually defensible to at least conceive of a personal and transcendent God, the libertarian freedom of the will, and the immortality of the soul.
And that is what it would mean to naturalize Kant. (Hence my nom de plume.)
Metaphors are deeply embedded in our language. We can hardly utter a sentence without using metaphorical language. If I said, “There is hardly a breath of wind today”, I would be using breath metaphorically. In ancient times when language had more of a living quality, breath would not have stood for wind because they were both regarded as one, as being the same thing fundamentally. They did not mean it metaphorically, they just meant it.
What I meant in that sentence is that we abstract terms from physical sense experiences and link them to things that we consider to be objectively separate from us. In order to have a mental picture of a light wave a person might picture the transverse waves created by a pebble on a still pond or something similar.
We have moved one step away from our direct experience of colour to an imagination of something that has been added to the colour experience. At this stage I’m not concerned if the addition is justified or not. Goethe was not concerned with this type of speculation. He was more interested in the colour experience itself and what it was telling him.
Goethe did not wish to use either metaphors nor analogies. He wanted to describe as exactly as possible what he experienced. When he eventually obtained a prism, he began to play with it under all sorts of conditions and noted what he saw. It was against his way of doing things to set up artificial conditions and then to form theories from such narrow conditions. He noted that colour did not arise from light, it was produced by the occasions when light was interrupted by a turbid medium. There had to be this polarity between light and darkness. Colour was the effect of this interaction.
Hans-Georg Hetzel stated that, “without turbidity there are no colors. This is a great, but not sufficiently regarded, insight of Goethe.”
The tying of “wavelength” and “frequency” to light and colour is not a firm one to one relationship. It is less than exact.
That concepts are not words is clear from the fact that when Euclid speaks to us about triangles we share the same concept no matter which language we express ourselves in. But the concept “triangle” is beyond words.
I have an external experience of a triangle drawn on a piece of paper. This experience is individual and personal to me. I do not share this experience with any other person. The concept triangle in my experience is universal, it is the same no matter who grasps it. It is not somewhere in my head because it is not determined by space or time. The drawn triangle and the concept triangle highlight the difference between becoming and being.
If reality was not initially fragmented for you, then you would always have known the connections between that which you perceive. You would always have known that clouds and ice and water are different states of the same substance. Reality is not itself initially fragmented, but by our very nature we see it as fragmented.
Barfield wrote:
Perhaps you will have some agreement with his words. One major aspect of our world that science has come to recognize is that the cosmos and everything we perceive around us is transient. It is a world of becoming.
The fact that we can translate from one language to another does not show that concepts are beyond words. It shows only that we can set up rules about how a pattern of linguistic usage in one language can be systematically coordinated to a pattern of linguistic usage in another language.
The example of triangle is particularly weak for the kind of case you’re making because the Greek word is “trigono”, just like “polygon”. (It’s a nice question as to why we use the Greek words for polygons at five angles and above but use the Latin “triangle” and “square”. I don’t know. English is weird!!)
The fact that the Greek word “trigono” and English word “triangle” mean the same thing is about as mysterious as the fact that Spanish word “burrito” also has a meaning in English.
This example abstracts away from the whole social process of how you learned what triangles are, how to draw them, the historical process whereby your parents and teachers acquired information about how to care for you, raise you, teach you, the historical process whereby it was decided that knowing how to draw a triangle is a skill that children should be able to perform, and so on.
In other words, the very distinction you are making between “being” and “becoming” relies on abstracting away from becoming. What you call “being” is an abstract concept, without real meaning.
From the fact that I don’t directly perceive all real causal relations, it doesn’t follow that I don’t perceive reality as unified in some respects. A lot of empirical research begun by the Gestalt psychologists shows that we perceive objects as determinate figures that stand out against a less determinate ground or field. Optical illusions such as the famous duck-rabbit play off this by shifting what counts as figure and what counts as ground.
Nope, none at all. Barfield ignores that the creative work of imagination is itself a biological, social, and psychological activity, so it’s not something that can be treated a priori relative to the world as we experience it. And what we experience is not ‘bare percepts’ but things. We may find it useful to introduce talk of ‘bare percepts’ in the process of analyzing experience — but also we might not.
That’s not quite right, since modern Western science began as the search for invariant, underlying laws that explain the transience that we experience.
It has only been rather recently that we have learned that even the invariant structures modeled by our theories of fundamental physics are themselves contingent and In one sense transient (since they hold only for as long as the universe itself exists).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Ton_beau_de_Marot
read that book Charlie. Might be useful…
In a series of lectures, Human and Cosmic Thought, Steiner discusses the contrasts between realism and nominalism as argued over by the medieval Scholastics.
Lecture 2 argues for the justification for both of these positions. Nominalism is quite correct when numbers are thought of. Individual numbers exist but not numbers in general. Number as a concept has no real existence. But when we think of individual tigers, they would not exist without the genus panthera. Realism is justified in the case of tigers. Individual tigers have no reality outside of the wider whole to which they belong.
Steiner:
Regarding cats: many people call their pet cat, ‘Simba’. The generalization ‘Simba’, has no real meaning as compared to the generalization ‘cat’.
Steiner distinguishes twelve philosophical positions, materialism, mathematism, rationalism, idealism, psychism, pneumatism, spiritism, sensationalism, phenomenalism, realism, dynamism, and monadism. There is a multitude of positions that can be adopted but these he lays out as the basic representatives of them all.
As in the case of nominalism and realism above all of these are justified in certain contexts.
I think many of today’s scientific realists are actually nominalists in the medieval scholastic sense.
I appreciate your input here. You have inspired me to think more about the relationship between unity and multiplicity. In my opinion what we envision as a multiplicity can be seen as a unity on a higher level, but this doesn’t always have to be the case.
I don’t believe I can see light in any sense. All I can see is its effects.
Not quite. Mechanical understanding and explanations such as those of Newton are far from meaningless. If I use the analogy of a person, my thoughts may become a little clearer. I can get to understand in great detail the working of the body of a person, how her joints function, the flow of the circulatory system, and such like. This is equivalent to Newton’s research. But I can also get to know the person, share her thoughts, understand her biography. This would be equivalent to Goethe’s way of going about things.
What does your life mean to you? Would you describe it in terms of your physical makeup or in terms of your thoughts and achievements?
We can learn in the Goethean sense, not by proposing a theory and then trying to fit the theory with observation, but by carefully observing the subject under as many conditions as possible both in space and time.
Then we use what Goethe termed ‘exaktesinnliche phantasia’, exact sensory imagination. This is nothing like fantasy. It is the process of using the mind and memory to unify the impressions gathered by the senses to build up an image of the being under study which is more in keeping of its reality than any individual specimen can provide. It is a bringing together of outer and inner sense experiences.
Perhaps you should explain what you mean when you use the verb “seeing”. This looks like something from your private vocabulary again.
So “meaning” is determined by one’s personal affection for the study object? Do I understand that correctly?
Good. So Goethean’s method provides more meaningful knowledge because it provides a picture of the study object that is “more in keeping of its reality”. So now we only need to establish what you mean by “reality”. I still cannot shake the impression that you consider an observation to be more real when it is closer to our direct experience, simply because you find it easier to relate to that than to mathematical and abstract models. Surely you realize that reality is not dictated by your personal aversion to mathematical and mechanical descriptions?
I realize that Steiner’s ideas don’t make sense to you.
How would you describe this feedback loop?
Steiner didn’t see any such distinction because he did not agree that there is such a thing as unknowable noumena. In the act of grasping inner ideas in relation to outer phenomena, both the noumena and the phenomena are brought together to become known. The appearances are saved by our understanding of their necessary place in the apprehension of reality. Perception in isolation leads to illusion, awareness of the conceptual sphere on its own leads to illusion. Putting the two together leads to a grasp of reality.
It might take me a few more reads to get a better understanding of everything you have said here.
We need vocabulary to communicate concepts but do we need vocabulary to take hold a concept in our minds?
Meanwhile I’ll just say that I don’t think it justifiable to posit fundamental particles as being the things-in -themselves behind the objects of our sense perceptions.
Who claims that it should be mysterious? This is no more mysterious than in English we can refer to a square as a quadrangle, a quadrilateral or a tetragon. Of course ‘square’ and ‘triangle’ are not equivalent as squares are a specific class of tetragon. They are regular tetragons. The equivalent three sided figure to a square would be the equilateral triangle.
The concept ‘triangle’ is not dependent on the language used to communicate between individuals. The same concept can be grasped by anyone no matter which language they speak.
But it is interesting to think about how language changed during the evolution of Western civilization. Latin comes from a culture which brought about the foundation of our legal systems and our obsession with laws.
It takes nothing away from how I acquired my knowledge of triangles from a position of ignorance. My journey is following the path of Plato’s divided line. This is a necessary process if I am to know anything at all. My teacher would draw a figure on the blackboard and tell us that what she had drawn was a triangle. And I believed her. I had formed an opinion. Now I understand that, however accurate her drawing was, it was just an imperfect representation of a triangle. Now I am beginning to approach genuine knowledge.
But the unity you perceive is due to a combination of observation and thinking. The duck-rabbit illusion is a good example of this. The only way you can see this as either representing a duck or a rabbit is if you have a prior idea of what ducks and rabbits look like. It is through thinking that you can say to yourself that the drawing has an appearance similar to a duck.
But we both know that it is a cartoon image which has both duck-like and rabbit-like attributes. Through perception it is fragmented into either/or, but through thinking we understand it to be both, but in reality neither. I can see it as representing a rabbit but I know that if I wish I can just as equally see a representation of a duck.
My perception is confined to a period of time whereas my reasoning transcends this restriction. The duck-rabbit illusion may be a visual illusion but it is not an illusion for my understanding.
Then you are not understanding what Barfield was saying. He is not talking about how matter is created, he is talking about how knowledge is created. He would agree with you that at no point do we experience bare percepts. But using our imagination we can strip everything else of and arrive at an understanding of bare percepts. (Barfield was using ‘imagination’, in the Steinerian/Goethean sense.)
The world as we see it is a world that has been created by the thinking of modern Western humans. It is not the same world as that created by ancient Indian thought, or created by ancient Greek thought. And our understanding of the prehistoric world is not in any way objective. It is a world as seen through the minds of twenty first century humans. But if we are still around in a few millennia the world will be seen in a different way to the way we see it.
In order for you to claim that imagination has a biological component, first you will have had to have thought about it. The sphere of understanding that you have created for yourself with the help of others begins with thinking. There is no way round it.
In what way does that contradict what I said?