From postmodernity to final participation: talking Owen Barfield
Вставка
- Опубліковано 12 сер 2019
- Michael Leighty asks me, Mark Vernon, a range of questions from Barfield's attitudes towards postmodernism to his understanding of the power of story. We explore how language is an embodied activity and what Barfield meant by final participation. We ask what he has to say to readers of Plato and what he has to say to people seeking new grounds for faith in felt experience.
In short, it's a wide-ranging and I hope far-reaching conversation.
For more on my book, A Secret History of Christianity: Jesus, the Last Inkling and the Evolution of Consciousness click here - www.markvernon.com/books/a-sec....
This was a terrific conversation. I learned a ton. I'm still reading Mark's book as I grapple with other Barfield essays. Really helpful and wonderful stuff.
Great conversation! I just ordered your book.
Thanks
Awesome!
Thank you, Mark - brilliant and illuminating, as always.
I haven’t yet finished this conversation but just thought of something I wanted to ask you. Mark, I llistened recently to your discussion on the Unbelievable podcast. Thoroughly enjoyed it and of course have loved learning more about Owen Barfield. I haven’t read anything by him yet but have plans to do so. The more I hear about his ideas of consciousness and language the more interested I become. I wanted to ask you if you have ever heard of the children’s book Endymion Spring by Matthew Skelton.it was a favourite here with my youngest daughter and is very enjoyable for an adult as well. I think you might like it.....it’s about a conscious book. I love wandering through libraries and used book stores and this little gem of a book really captures the magic of the written word. I would love to be able to ask Matthew if he was a Barfield fan. I look forward to the rest of your conversation with Michael and I really enjoyed your conversation on Unbelievable.
I don't know that book. So double thanks!
'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - an inquiry into values' is more sophistry than formal metaphysics. A more structured description of the 'Metaphysics of Quality' can be found in his second book 'Lila - an inquiry into morals' (1991).
Loved zen and art
1:23:23 In order to enter the world of the apologetic style proofs for God/Faith is that you have to enter the mechanistic world.
"The price for the proof is that you get alienated." 100% Perfectly, concisely said.
That's a very short way to explain the problem with the modern Intellect of the Christian West.
"Reason is valuable when it points beyond itself." Yes!
C. S. Lewis talks about Steiner in surprised by joy as well
Thank you for your work. It has helped me to better understand Barfield. "O happy fall" comes from the Exsultet, sung at Easter Vigil Mass, my favorite part of that Mass.
“Pidgin maths” haha brilliant. I can totally relate to that.
Mark, have you met Kate Farrell? (www.katefarrell.com/) If not, I recommend you get in touch. She has edited a special issue of the Journal For Anthroposophy dealing with imagination, and Owen's work is a central thread through many of the contributions. Also, I knew Owen in London in the 80s, and would love to chat sometime about this remarkable man....
I'm no expert on Plato, but I have been working on the assumption that the inner cave of temporal experience and passion was set against immortal intellectual form beyond. In my mind, perhaps overly simplistically, this directly relates to the subject/object emotional/rational split that runs throughout Western cultures.
I don't think Plato had those dualisms, in fact, though many assume he did. Rather, for him reason is about discerning the intuitive (confusingly often called the intellectual in translations because the Latin intellectus includes a sense of the intuitive). So the two relate as levels of insight rather than opposites. I think you can go so far as to say that reason without intuition/imagination/inspiration is no reason at all, for Plato. It's what he accused the Sophists of.
@@PlatosPodcasts I see, it seems I am one of those people. It's self-evident that this intuition/pre-intellectual/imaginative/romantic/emotional sense is the source of an increasingly self aware/abstracting intelligence, and I appreciate these aspects are interrelated.
Having said that, there is a clearer point where thought takes on an independent form, into the realms of symbolic logic. Integers, syllogistic logic, and geometry being the more extreme examples. Once a certain self-referential coherence is achieved, the intuitive source is discarded; superseded by the fixed rational form.
For Plato, perhaps I should ask which is more 'real', intuitive direct experience or absolute rational form?
@@maudeeb The notion of self-sufficient reason, as you outline, didn't emerge until Francis Bacon and Descartes. I think it also requires a deliberate rupture with the intuitive, as it's far from a self-evident move and many challenge now it.
@@PlatosPodcasts I meant symbolic logic was a special case, whether a deliberate rupture or an inherent quality, once arrived at and reinforced by its relationship with the physical world though geometry and Newton, took on the characteristics of truth and objectivity; as insight into the underlaying form of reality. I'm not scholarly enough to know who to blame precisely, but it seems, to me, the momentum of this relationship between abstract logic and substance has led to the assumption, lamentably, we should/can circumvent or minimise the 'subjective' intuitive.
I see Blake's Newton as a wonderful description of this, and to bring it round full circle, who or what is the Ancient of Days?
@Mark Vernon
I'm reading Eric Fromm's "Marx's Concept of Man" these days, and I found this quote, which sounds eerily similar to Barfield's view. Have you explored the link between Barfield and (the young)
"Man, before he has consciousness of himself, that is,
before he is human, lives in unity with nature ( Adam and Eve in Paradise). The first act
of Freedom, which is the capacity to say "no," opens his eyes, and he sees himself as a
stranger in the world, beset by conflicts with nature, between man and man, between man
and woman. The process of history is the process by which man develops his specifically
human qualities, his powers of love and understanding; and once he has achieved full
humanity he can return to the
-64-
lost unity between himself and the world. This new unity, however, is different from the
preconscious one which existed before history began. It is the at-onement of man with
himself, with nature, and with his fellow man, based on the fact that man has given birth
to himself in the historical process. "
Arius Calpurnius PISO wrote the Bible Joseph Atwill
Crows
"Christianity being something that's done to you by Jesus"
That made me laugh out loud! 😂 It's so true! When I participated, or rather pretended to participate, in the catholic mass, I felt the same way. The dependence on priests makes me feel patronized.
Priests are called 'father' so yes, they are supposed to 'patronise' (pater means father.) Indeed, that seems strange, as if we're all children but they are somehow not! The 1st sentence you quote is funny indeed. Jesus was not a Christian. In fact, according to Biblical scholar Prof John Barton, none of the articles of faith are in the gospels & were compiled & expressed hundreds of years after Jesus' death at the council of Nicea. Several 'Christian' ideas are based on Saul of Tarsus' /aka Paul's ideas writings (S/Paul had never met Jesus, & famously fell out with those who had, supplanting their gospel with his gospel!!! - unless we take his 'vision' literally - even though his story of it changes within his own writings.) So it's all v unfounded & confusing. :\
@@blackbird365 Jesus said "I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me." Doesn't this make Jesus a Christian?
@@adoremus4014 You seem a little confused. Yeshua (Jesus) WAS the Christ - the Anointed One. You are quoting something claimed by Saul of Tarsus (later called 'saint Paul') who had never met Him & was preaching his own beliefs, some of which contradicted the disciples who had actually known & spent time with Jesus during his earthly life. Saul / Paul famously argued vehemently with St Peter, who HAD known & spent time with Jesus & on whom Jesus founded His church.
Saul (aka Paul) decided to stop persecuting Jesus' followers & to install himself as spokesman for Him after his conversion after Jesus' death & resurrection, long before Christianity as a religion existed. The whole system of Christianity developed hundreds of years later. The articles of faith were debated & decided upon at various councils of early 'church fathers', a very important one being that of Nicea. All the definitions & theological arguments of subsequent belief systems were made long after Jesus' earthly life, by men who hadn't known him.