tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1651908162607091292.post2967434459222345526..comments2024-01-05T01:21:21.702-08:00Comments on <center>SPECULUM CRITICUM TRADITIONIS</center>: Owen Barfield (part 2: with Meillassoux &/or Harman)skholiasthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05410057905377189336noreply@blogger.comBlogger11125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1651908162607091292.post-44890121470195657452011-03-24T13:46:30.588-07:002011-03-24T13:46:30.588-07:00Also related to what I was attempting with the ter...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. <br /><br />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.<br /><br />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. <br /><br />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. <br /><br />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.John JMesserlyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08178971263644045142noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1651908162607091292.post-61326384773446447902011-03-24T07:31:05.178-07:002011-03-24T07:31:05.178-07:00John,
welcome to the comments. I apologize for th...John,<br />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. <br /><br />To answer (maybe too cursorily) some of your direct questions; I do not take B. to be anthropocentric, but I take him to <i>risk</i> being correlationist. I know he offers a critique of old-fashioned Idealism (a la Berkeley) though he also expressly states he is <i>not</i> 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 <i>how things look</i> 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 <i>per se</i>, and I suspect Heidegger says Dasein instead of "Man" for a reason.<br /><br />Your interesting termite example reminds me of the tick in von Uexküll, or <a href="http://networkologies.wordpress.com/2010/05/22/potential-objects-ooop-networks-and-perspectival-relationalism/" rel="nofollow">Chris Vitale's questions</a> about the electron passing through the frog.<br /><br />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 <a href="http://johnjmesserly.blogspot.com/2011/03/theory-of-everything-what-barfield.html" rel="nofollow">precis of Barfield</a>, by the way, is helpful. People reading this should go check it out.skholiasthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05410057905377189336noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1651908162607091292.post-79932421542160007872011-03-23T20:37:18.651-07:002011-03-23T20:37:18.651-07:00I would like to understand your intended meaning c...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? <br /><br />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.<br /><br />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?<br /><br />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"). <br /><br />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.John JMesserlyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08178971263644045142noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1651908162607091292.post-73939871515588578772011-03-23T07:39:10.277-07:002011-03-23T07:39:10.277-07:00This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.John JMesserlyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08178971263644045142noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1651908162607091292.post-45832272999162818742010-07-21T14:29:36.017-07:002010-07-21T14:29:36.017-07:00Is "part of the attraction to OOO...the attem...Is <i>"part of the attraction to OOO...the attempt to wish oneself into participation by having a philosophy which supports it"?</i> 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.skholiasthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05410057905377189336noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1651908162607091292.post-5118183771274110322010-07-21T09:14:20.361-07:002010-07-21T09:14:20.361-07:00omb~ You lost me at the penis bone(baculum).omb~ You lost me at the penis bone(baculum).dy0geneshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12265699357881251867noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1651908162607091292.post-62716343935409966332010-07-21T07:07:06.204-07:002010-07-21T07:07:06.204-07:00One wonders whether part of the attraction to OOO ...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. <br /><br />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!ombhurbhuvahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07789523088428270027noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1651908162607091292.post-74098674119129580422010-07-20T15:54:44.075-07:002010-07-20T15:54:44.075-07:00D~~ just on the quantum physics question--while I ...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 <i>a la</i> Jung) are at least incipiently "conscious" simply <i>qua</i> encounter.<br /><br />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.skholiasthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05410057905377189336noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1651908162607091292.post-91140470716165580992010-07-20T09:54:30.719-07:002010-07-20T09:54:30.719-07:00Absolutely the most interesting blog I know of.
I...Absolutely the most interesting blog I know of.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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?<br /><br />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.dy0geneshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12265699357881251867noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1651908162607091292.post-36432598926495866982010-07-20T09:02:10.927-07:002010-07-20T09:02:10.927-07:00Note too that while B.'s 'idols' have ...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.skholiasthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05410057905377189336noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1651908162607091292.post-73044693689674396842010-07-19T23:17:43.238-07:002010-07-19T23:17:43.238-07:00I take from what you write that Barfield's err...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.ombhurbhuvahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07789523088428270027noreply@blogger.com