Future, Present, & Past:



Speculative
~~ Giving itself latitude and leisure to take any premise or inquiry to its furthest associative conclusion.
Critical~~ Ready to apply, to itself and its object, the canons of reason, evidence, style, and ethics, up to their limits.
Traditional~~ At home and at large in the ecosystem of practice and memory that radically nourishes the whole person.

Oυδεὶς άμουσος εἰσίτω

Saturday, July 17, 2010

Owen Barfield (part 2: with Meillassoux &/or Harman)


[See here for part 1]

Barfield believed not only that human experience had evolved from a consciously participatory stage, through a stage in which participation was progressively waning from consciousness, to its current condition in which it is attenuated or even barely vestigial; he also thought that signs indicated that it would come, indeed might be already coming, to a next phase in which participation would re-awaken, but would depend more upon the will, upon intention and freedom. This is part of his inheritance from Steiner, who developed an account of the stages of life, a kind of secret history of the species, ascending up steps on the great chain of being. But for Steiner, this was not just a history of the human spirit, but of the world. Barfield too held that his reconstruction of the history of participation had ramifications for an account of history per se, human history and indeed natural history.

Now if you compare this timeline with the one I've tentatively suggested, you’ll note that Barfield treats participation as having faded considerably later—as late as the 19th century—than I tend to assume (I think the process started happening as early as the invention of the city-state, certainly by the end of the Bronze Age, that the prescient in Plato’s and Herodotus’ generation already had a sense of what was happening, that Plutarch’s story of the cry that went up, Great Pan is dead, and the falling-silent of the oracles, is in some measure about the end of participation.) This is not necessarily an inconsistency, since I also maintain that there was a movement, of which express philosophy was a part, to keep access to the participatory experience open; also because Barfield tends to be thinking of the experience of the “common man,” the group Nietzsche calls the “herd,” whereas I am thinking of his “exceptions” (which are busy chipping away at participation in the name of “progress”) and the few who are carefully sieving the bathwater. Still, these details remain to be sorted. If there is a history, and even a teleology (and I am not convinced that there isn’t), figuring out these threads will be part of the effort to make it intelligible.

These are significant details, but what I want to concentrate on here is something else. I closed the last post on the note that, on Barfield’s account, the evolution of consciousness had slowly turned the collective representations from consciously participated realities into what he calls idols, or, also, objects. Barfield does not think that participation has ceased (or indeed that it could); only that it has become unconscious. Like a number of others (Morris Berman comes to mind), he argues that the scientific revolution has occasioned (or is it only an index of?) a shift not only in our thinking but in our actual experience. Speaking of this shift, Barfield says:
If…a man of the Middle Ages could be suddenly transported into the skin of a man of the twentieth century, seeing through our eyes and with our ‘figuration’ the objects we see, I think he would feel like a child who looks for the first time at a photograph through the ingenious magic of a stereoscope. ‘Oh!’ he would say, ‘look how they stand out!’ (Saving the Appearances p 94)
This “standing-out” is figurative, of course, but Barfield is not the only one to have referred to it. A reader of Harman will recall that his ontology “splits” the object into two: a real object, withdrawn into itself, abjuring all contact; and a sensual object, rushing to meet every other, leaping forward to present its phenomenal aspects. Thus it might seem that what Barfield means when he speaks of idols, Harman means when he says “sensuous object.” But note that it is not the rushing forward, but the withdrawing back, the vacuum-sealed nature of the object “in itself,” that seems closer to what Barfield means when he speaks of the object “as an ultimate.” Indeed, Barfield might even have said (though here we again enter on extrapolation) that it is precisely the “tearing apart” of the object that is the last refusal of participation by thought; a paradoxical destruction of the object in the name of granting it autonomy.

I would not go so far, myself; and it is possible that Barfield would not either, for as we have seen, he also affirms the existence of something with which consciousness collaborates, “the unrepresented” (or to use the Epicurean term by which he also calls it, “the particles”), in the construal of collective representations. Moreover, there is something acknowledgedly problematic about “the unrepresented” in Barfield’s thought. (From a Lacanian perspective, one might say, well yeah: it’s the Real.) In the preface to the second edition, Barfield acknowledges:
the need was to express in language the view that our immediate awareness is a system of representations of something of which we are not immediately aware, but to which the representations are correlative—and to do so without characterizing or identifying the something, and therefore without predicating anything of it beyond its place in the system. To refer to it as ‘the represented’ would be misleading because that might mean simply the representation itself. On the other hand to refer to it as the unrepresented might admittedly be confusing, since it is dealt with throughout as though its whole function is precisely to be represented. It is thus apparently a contradiction in terms. I see the difficulty, but I have seen no way around it. (S.A. p7)
This is a difficulty of the presentation of Barfield's thinking, not what he is thinking about, but it is worth stopping over. One of the snags we hit here, of course, is what is expressed in the words, “its whole function is... to be represented.” It is not a foregone conclusion that Barfield means something inherently or irreducibly “anthropocentric” here, as if his in-itself somehow has an ontological telos involving the minds of human beings. But it is hard to avoid this impression (and after all, when you adhere to a philosophy called “Anthroposophy,” chances are there’s some anthropo involved.) I have reservations about this aspect of his thought.

“A long time coming,” some of you might be thinking, those of you who started getting impatient with Barfield when I noted he wore “correlationism” (not that exact word, but damn near close enough) as a badge of honor. But this is just what interests me about Barfield; far from trying to skirt the difficulties of a correlationist stance, Barfield embraces and seems to push them to their limit. This makes him a strange inversion of Meillassoux, to whom I now come.

Meillassoux’s After Finitude begins, as many will already know (and if you don’t, and you care about philosophy, you owe it to yourself to read this book; elegant, eminently readable, succinct, funny, engaging, infuriating in places), first with a description of correlationism, and then a sort of reduction: the argument from the “ancestral.” This is Meillassoux’s word for whatever transpired in the physical universe before the advent of humanity.
Consider the following ancestral statement: ‘Event Y occurred x number of years before the emergence of humans.’ The correlationist will in no way intervene in the content of this statement….he will simply add—perhaps only to himself, but he will add—something like a simple codicil…: event Y occurred x number of years before the emergence of humans—for humans. …[C]orrelationism postulates that there are at least two levels of meaning in such a statement: the immediate, or realist meaning; and the more originary correlationist meaning, advocated by the codicil. What then would be a literal interpretation of the ancestral statement? The belief that the realist meaning of the ancestral statement is its ultimate meaning….[T]he retrojection which the correlationsit is obliged to impose upon the ancestral statement amounts to a veritable counter-sense with respect to the latter: an ancestral statement only has sense if its literal sense is also its ultimate sense..If one divides the sense of the statement, if one invents for it a deeper sense conforming to the correlation but contrary to its realist sense, then far from deepening its sense, one has simply cancelled it. (After Finitude pp13-17)
Now, I said before that when reading Barfield, one comes across the assertion that “consciousness is correlative to phenomena” so often that one starts to think Meillassoux has read Barfield. (Saving the Appearances was published in 1957; Apres la finitude in 2006.) I don’t actually assert that this must be so, but Barfield, while he is not meeting Meillassoux’s arguments head-on, is certainly formulating them (so expressly that it feels, frankly, a little uncanny to read) a full half-century before Meillassoux formulates them; only Barfield seeks to make a virtue of what Meillassoux would reject:
A history of the “world,” as distinct from a history of the unrepresented, must clearly be a history of phenomena, that is, of collective representations. But before this part of the subject is approached, it will be well to consider briefly the bearing of this truth on what is sometimes called pre-history. I mean, in particular, the history of the earth before the appearance on it of human beings. …the prehistoric evolution of the earth, as it is described for example in the early chapters of H.G. Wells’ Outline of History, was not merely never seen. It never occurred. Something no doubt occurred, and what is really being propounded by such popular writers, and so far as I am aware, by the text-books on which they rely, is this[:] that at that time, the unrepresented was behaving in such a way that,if human beings with the collective representations characteristic of the last few centuries of western civilization had been there, the things described would also have been there.
This is not quite the same thing.
(S.A. p37)
“Not quite,” indeed. To Meillassoux’s question, “Did the accretion of the earth happen, yes or no?” Barfield already, 50 years earlier, gave the answer Meillassoux finds so maddening, “Yes and no.” But not for the reasons Meillassoux thinks the correlationist must have. For in fact, Barfield asserts, that it is not a Kantian or para-Kantian dialect but science which compels this answer:
We have chosen to form a picture, based very largely on modern physical science, of a phenomenal earth existing for millions of years before the appearance of consciousness. This same physical science tells us that the phenomenal world is correlative to consciousness. (S.A. p135)
We may quarrel with Barfield’s understanding of “modern physical science.” He was not himself a physical scientist, and in any case the science he relied upon was that of the first half of the 20th century—though little has changed since then as far as the sub-microscopic realm is concerned; we are still faced with a détente between relativity and quantum mechanics. (It is also important to note that Barfield is not talking about the famous or infamous Copenhagen interpretation according to which certain quantum parameters have no specific values unless measured; he means simply that of Eddington’s two tables—the one that is solid enough to eat or write at and the one that is mostly empty space—the first one is phenomenal, which means very strictly an appearance, i.e., an appearance to someone.) Or we may quarrel with Barfield’s application of these findings to his retrospective scenario. In any case, he certainly cannot be accused of having either evaded, or been nonplussed by, the issue Meillassoux raises. Meillassoux says that the correlationist recasts the ancestral statement in a way that bleeds it of meaning, while obscuring this fact. Barfield rejoins that it is the “literal” ancestral statement that is obscure, because it conceals that it depends upon particular collective representations.
For those hypothetical ‘human beings with the collective representations characteristic of the last few centuries of western civilization,’ we might choose to substitute other human beings—those, for instance, who lives one or two or three or more thousand years ago. We should then have to write a different pre-history altogether.(S.A. p 37. My emphasis.)
This dovetails with another of Barfield’s points, which I mentioned in the previous post: namely, that the very recourse to interpretive categories, any division of interpretation into a “literal” any another, is itself changed in the degree to which the consciousness making the distinction is conscious of participation or not. Barfield does not mean (I think) that such a reconstruction of pre-history (in terms of “our” representations) is nonsense; only that it is a model, and not “the truth.” One can parse this in terms of revisability, but Barfield means more than just that scientific accounts are open to modification; he seems to mean that there could be could be co-existent accounts, say “participatory” and “non-participatory” accounts, that were somehow equally valid. This is obviously a very complex and very problematic argument, but it can’t be rejected out of hand.

The critic has a different route open; one might instead counter that the core sense of the scientific statement has to do not with phenomena at all (no secondary qualities), but only, as Meillassoux argues, what can be entirely mathematicized. But in this case, he is referring to what Barfield means by “the unrepresented:”
[A]long with the recent tendency to implicate the observer again in the phenomena, there goes the tendency of physicists to give up alpha-thinking about phenomena and occupy themselves as mathematicians, only with the unrepresented. (S.A. p43)
In other words, the mathematical formalization prized by Meillassoux, Badiou, and others, is already acknowledged by Barfield to pertain to what is behind the phenomena. If Barfield is recasting scientific reductionism, wresting it to mean something else than its “literal” meaning, he is doing so quite self-consciously. Now the fact does remain that Barfield, as an avowed correlationist, strains to think the correlation itself; but he clearly must hold that this correlation pertains before there is any conscious organism. This causes him to back into a kind of idealism:
The phenomena attributed to these millions of years are…in fact, abstract models or ‘idols of the study.’ We may compromise by calling them ‘possible phenomena’….but…it is highly fanciful, if not absurd, to think of any unperceived process in terms of potential phenomena, unless we also assume an unconscious, ready to light up into actual phenomena at any moment of the process. (S.A. p135)
I take this to show that while Barfield does begin from a reductionist starting-place, he clearly pushes reductionism against itself.

One final word before I close this post—too soon to remotely do Barfield justice, but still, I hope, having shown him to be pertinent not only to the thinking-through of the relevance of participation, but to a number of current metaphysical debates. Barfield is a deceptively “popular” sounding writer. His man-in-the-street style (as close as was possible for his subject) and his brevity should not be mistaken for a lack of sophistication. Barfield may have believed some odd things, but he didn’t hold them in any simple-minded way.

Still, what shall we say of his anthropocentrism, and his Anthroposophy? Meillassoux makes it clear that one of the great motives for his work is not just to combat mistaken (as he sees it) philosophy, but the practical results of these mistakes—results that cannot fail to arise, since “fideism is merely the other name for strong correlationism” (A.F. p48);
So long as we continue to believe that there must be a reason why what is, is the way it is, we will continue to fuel superstition, which is to say, the belief that there is an ineffable reason underlying all things. Since we will never be able to discover or understand such a reason, all we can do is believe in it, or aspire to believe in it. (A.F. p82).
This polemic of course is what motivates Meillassoux’s campaign against the notion of the limit of thought. One might think that he’s found a perfect target in Barfield, whose stranger positions are not spelled out in (and perhaps not entailed by) the arguments set forth in Saving the Appearances, but can certainly be glimpsed there. I have little to say about this, except that I believe that the quest for a raison d’etre for L’etre itself is not likely to be conjured away by recourse to equations. Barfield himself is quite explicit:
It would be rash to assume that there is no other approach than the mathematical one. Who can affirm, and on what evidence, that we may not also learn to approach the unrepresented by way of enhancing our figuration [as Goethe did], so as to make it a conscious process, as well as by the path of mathematical hypothesis? For sensation and figuration are the—at present—unconscious moment in which we actually meet the unrepresented (or at least encounter its resistance) in experience, as opposed to applying alpha-thinking to it afterwards. (S.A. p153)
This (ultra- or perhaps meta-Romantic) resistance to the Badiouan equation of matheme with reality, presumably, illustrates why I at any rate consider the musico-mathematical excurses of Plato, writing at a moment when the fading of participation seems to have become apparent, very significant. Plato does make use of the matheme, but always in a way that makes clear that he knows it is a construal, that it is a means of approximation. To a reader of Lacan, this can’t but intersect in provocative ways with Barfield’s recourse to the category of the unconscious. Barfield is (I think) thinking this along lines more or less like those of Schelling, especially the unfinished World-Ages project, which has a great deal in common with Barfield’s (and Steiner’s) sketch of the history of consciousness. (I don’t know how much of Schelling Barfield was familiar with, but he knew Coleridge backwards and forwards.) What one sees here, I think, is the incipient makings of a way out of Barfield’s anthropocentrism. This is a tendency that remains strong in him, and would need to be far more thoroughly critiqued than I’ve done here. But it is obvious that any “unconsciousness” that is imagined in the context of Meillassoux’s ancestral has to blow anthropocentrism right open. Here Harman’s polypsychism offers a helpful angle, as well. For if, a la Latour or Harman, every interaction, and not just those between human beings and the world, involves a mutual construal between parties, then in some sense an incipient psyche (or as Harman might say, an “inside”) is always potentially available. Barfield’s human-centric attitude then becomes simply a function of where he puts his emphasis (he is tracing the specific history, and perhaps destiny, of the human); a legitimate emphasis, but not where we are obliged to put ours, as we avail ourselves of the resources of his thought.

11 comments:

  1. I take from what you write that Barfield's error was to hold that in the ancestral there were no objects. This is not true for information makes objects of everything. The counter to that would be that salience is the result of a backward look. Yet their salience is our salience; plants invented sex if you like. I do not believe that the ancestral was mere coagulated complexity, there were strange attractors in the interstices of the 'event'. In the monist philosophy consciousness did not arise as a precipitate of complex events but is the being of events. Finally it seems that Barfield was a dualist whose epistemology ran ahead of his ontology as it tends to in modern times.

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  2. Note too that while B.'s 'idols' have clearly evolved--become foregrounded, as it were--Harman's objects have a perennial fourfold structure. If Barfield is right (or partly right), this structure itself must be thought of as in some way having shifted or evolved over time.

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  3. Absolutely the most interesting blog I know of.

    I have a lot of thoughts on these topics and much of it is new to me so I'll ruminate on it for a while.

    Briefly though, I wonder at the common assumption that quantum mechanics requires a human perceiver. When one measures the state of a quantum object one does it with other objects (say a photon). It seems much ado has been made of this uncertainty til measured. Objects perceive/measure each other all the time. No consciousness is necessary or implied. The ocean feels the gravity of our moon just as concretely as I see my surroundings. How or why we try to smuggle the human mind into this process baffles me. "Ancestral time" was when only objects were perceiving each other and we weren't around. I think you have to work pretty hard to make it more complicated than that. I agree that different minds will make up different narratives of that pre-human world. None are totally true because none are ever complete. But aren't we giving ourselves a little too much credit if we alone define truth?

    I am also sympathetic to the idea of a new emerging sense of participation. When I see a tree I sometimes think of the atoms that make it up, or wonder what quantum states must be at play, or I think of its role in the ecology or its capacity of giving shade. I think I understand what you mean when you say that our objects "pop out" as I think we see them in more dimensions than our ancestors did. True I don't see them as attractive young women and potential consorts. We have lost that. But the efforts of those terrible reductionists have brought so much richness and detail to my perceptions that I find my self seduced into a new kind of enchantment.

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  4. D~~ just on the quantum physics question--while I am sure that Nature holds many more surprises in store for us, which will have to involve the squaring of quantum mech. w/ relativity for instance, I have never quite got the "quantum phenomena need consciousness" claim. Clearly they need a certain sort of "measurement," but this isn't quite the same thing, and certain attempts along "quantum darwinism" lines seem to make sense. The "need" for a conscious observer smells fishy (or wishful) to me, despite the fact that some very smart people have got behind it. However I am more sympathetic to the notion-- admittedly half-baked-sounding when put briefly-- that every casual encounter (and who knows, perhaps acausal ones a la Jung) are at least incipiently "conscious" simply qua encounter.

    As to those terrible reductionists, I can't hold too much against them-- they've given me, among other things, this here laptop on which I blog.

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  5. One wonders whether part of the attraction to OOO is the attempt to wish oneself into participation by having a philosophy which supports it, if it in fact does. The ambiguity is deliberate and hovers between - (a) the position of OOO on participation which (b) even if hospitable, is a correct view enough to precipitate one into participation mystique? Bring your own pencil.

    Here is where the category that if known is ignored or impugned by scientific rationalists viz the non-rational comes into focus. Barfield for whom this was his natural element would I expect not show up on their radar. The implicit argumentum ad baculum "I'm surprised at a clever person like you being taken in by such tosh" meaning to say that your position as a member of the Good Scientific Mental Hygiene institute is being reconsidered and downgrading is a possibility. The pity, the pity!

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  6. omb~ You lost me at the penis bone(baculum).

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  7. Is "part of the attraction to OOO...the attempt to wish oneself into participation by having a philosophy which supports it"? Well, certainly the first spoke of the eightfold path is "right view." But I am not sure that we can (yet) quite relate to the notion of a view being "right." We are still far too perspectivist. (This may, incidentally, be for the best, all things considered.) Moreover, I am not sure that any OOO does "support" participation, at least not inevitably. As I noted above, some ways of spinning it would make the tension between the phenomenal and the real object so absolute as to be a sort of vengeance upon the object for existing. I rather think that "views" are all partial and that whether they can precipitate one into any experience at all is a matter of interplay between personal temperament, "rightness" (and wrongness!) of the view, one's teacher, and the moment. And doubtless what substances one has ingested. Nietzsche would no doubt add, as a special category under temperament, the state of ones digestion.

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  8. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

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  9. I would like to understand your intended meaning concerning your description of some of Barfield's positions. To employ his metaphor of the Rainbow, do you mean that he is being "anthropocentric" in the sense that the metaphor casts Man in what he calls a directionally creator role?

    Are you saying that you believe that polypsychism provides a possible solution to the problem with this directionally creator relationship? My understanding was that Barfield thinks of any form of pantheism as a step backwards for consciousness motivated by a kind of romantic cultural nostalgia. If this not your understanding? Whether what Barfield is correct or not, the comparison with speculative realism seems to have omitted some few words regarding whether or not he also anticipated the polypsychism "solution", and what the nature of his objection was.

    Perhaps a thought experiment would surface additional depth of the clash of concepts I see in your post contrasting Barfield's position with the speculative realists. Consider the human representation of the particles that occupy the space where we see a table resting against a wall. Does the table have some sort of "ultimate" real object "essence" behind the appearances of the representation? Now consider our capacity for awareness transplanted into an evolved termite creature. Say these uber termites have a representation for the object that corresponds to the pine wood of the edge of the table with the pine wood of the wainscoting that the table touches as one contiguous object. Imagine this termite representation of the described wood object as a wood version of what miners call a "vein of coal". The boundaries of this object in the uber termite's case are very sharply defined: the glass tabletop and the steel legs of the table, the inedible cedar pegs joining pinewood sections and the plaster of the wall behind the pine wainscoting. Barfield would acknowledge this as a plausible account, correct? His account of the activity of collective representations is no more human centric than it is termite centric. Do the speculative realists have an account that also avoids anthropocentric bias? That is, does this "wood vein" have a "real object" behind it in the same way that the table has a "table object" behind it?

    To put it in language of object oriented terminology in computer science, my understanding of Barfield's view is that the unrepresented is polymorphic with respect to the goals and representations of the consciousness viewing it regardless whether that awareness is human or not. What we call objects are not projections on unreality, but representations used in the participation between an entity with consciousness and the unrepresented that is outside of the awareness of that consciousness. What Barfield believed was that a return to naive participation is a return to anthropomorphism because the objects that are assumed to possess psyche coincidentally are the same objects that are manifest in participatory relation to human or creatures with human like needs and sorts of interactions with the environment. Barfield made this sort of response to Berkeley's ultimate objects (page 38 of Saving the Appearances- the "difficult corollary").

    Certainly, the naive pattern of consciousness is easy to fall back into. Our neurological wiring is set up to model the intentionality of entities such as prey and predators. It is simple to apply these neural maps (or if you like, representations) to entities that have no awareness or consciousness, but whose activities could be modeled as those of an awareness with motives and desires.

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  10. John,
    welcome to the comments. I apologize for the delayed appearance of your two comments, which were unaccountably designated as spam. (Clearly, AI is not yet up on philosophy.) Your remarks are precisely the sort of engagement I was hoping to stimulate by cross-referencing Barfield w/ Speculative Realism. My response here will be brief and impressionistic, but I may manage something more extensive and precise in a post later.

    To answer (maybe too cursorily) some of your direct questions; I do not take B. to be anthropocentric, but I take him to risk being correlationist. I know he offers a critique of old-fashioned Idealism (a la Berkeley) though he also expressly states he is not doing metaphysics. In any case, in my book risking correlationism is not a mortal sin. I think correlationism is a great deal like geocentrism, to run with Meillassoux's account-- it is how things look to thought situated in a certain way-- a way that is partially internal to thought as such. I will try to sketch this out more later, but to my mind correlationism has little to do with anthropocentrism. I do not think the so-called "human-world split" is an interesting philosophical problem, though I agree that many philosophical problems get re-routed through it. As I've said before, I take Kant seriously when he claims to be talking about rational beings per se, and I suspect Heidegger says Dasein instead of "Man" for a reason.

    Your interesting termite example reminds me of the tick in von Uexküll, or Chris Vitale's questions about the electron passing through the frog.

    This is far too brief a rejoinder, but I wanted to get something up to acknowledge the receipt of your comment after it had been stuck in limbo. Your precis of Barfield, by the way, is helpful. People reading this should go check it out.

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  11. Also related to what I was attempting with the termite experiment- you may be aware of Thomas Nagel's thoughts on "What it is like to be a bat" (http://instruct.westvalley.edu/lafave/nagel_nice.html). Barfield mentioned the challenge of describing animal phenomenology in Saving the Appearances, but such investigation is consonant with the study of the evolution of the phenomenological world because of the analysis of alternate systems of representations.

    It is a great difficulty to get into the phenomenological skin of another, be that another period of time as Barfield did, or another species in Nagel's case. It is fundamental to communication in this ever diverse world of balkanized collective representations.

    For example, understanding "What is it like to be an Anthroposophist?" presented a challenge that even Barfield's wife had difficulty overcoming (if she ever did) except in pejorative terms. It is perhaps an auto immune response to foreign meme/representations that is embedded in latent tribalistic patterns that lurks in everyone’s minds. This difficulty in thinking the thoughts of another without necessarily believing them in order to perceive the meaning there is indeed a difficult art. Many of those interested in Barfield quickly lose interest when they come to grips with the central importance he assigned to Steiner. Many cannot imagine the anthroposophist's world except in pejorative (eg. "delusional") terms.

    That's the great mystery of the significance of Love as another sort of path of connection to a meaning outside of one's awareness. Wordless, conceptless connection. Coleridge made this connection (perhaps Steiner as well) sometimes even in theological terms. Loving the mate as a means of traversing the chasm without the limitations of thought or word, becomes the model of the same sort of means of traversing the chasm between man and God.

    On a clerical note, I assumed the first post at 7:39AM was lost due to some glitch. The second is a newer version, so the first can be deleted. Thanks.

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