How to be a productive iconoclast according to Owen Barfield
How to be a productive iconoclast according to Owen Barfield
[009] Unlocking the mind's powers of imagination to break the idols gripping our thought
How do drops of water and sunlight turn into a rainbow?
Modern physics tells us that the world has a fine micro-structure invisible to the senses and quite unlike the world known by common sense. There's nothing "there" but particles and fields, described by mathematical relationships which, by the way, make more accurate predictions than any other scientific theory.
But ordinary experience shows us a world full of rainbows. A rainbow is only one example, of course. The world is full of sounds of music and bird-song, scents of baking bread, tastes of sweet fruit and salty meat, and textures of smooth silk and rough sandpaper, and much more.
Where does all that come from if the reality is nought but particles and force-fields?
That's the puzzle that Owen Barfield poses to the reader in Saving The Appearances.
Any good materialist will tell you that the experiences we take for granted in waking consciousness are mere illusions.
Common sense experiences, they tell us, are pictures woven together by a brain desperate to keep you alive in a hostile universe. But that story won't do.
An illusion supposes a difference between what appears and the true reality hidden behind it. Physics has nothing to say about appearances or reality. That difference matters to us, up here with our rainbows and sweet fruits. If we are deceived by our experiences, then who is being fooled?
Materialists get so lost in the weeds of physics that they forget there's a whole world—including every other science—out here. Forgetting this fact is not the same thing as explaining it away with the cleansing fire of science.
But mostly we just get on with things. Physicists keep doing physics in the lab, the rest of us go on living with rainbows and bird-calls, and we don't pay much attention to the gaping wound separating the two realities.
Owen Barfield was deeply interested in the gap between physics and ordinary experience.
How is it that our brushes with the world, which seem to be a matter of cause-and-effect acting on the sense organs, could transform into phenomena, like the experience of a color or sound?
This is no trivial problem. We can get from rays of light to stimulation of retinal nerves without much trouble. After that step, something has to turn the jostling of nerve-endings into an experience of color and shape. To explain how a stop sign can look red and octagonal, we need more than a description of particles banging into other particles.
The experience of red is not the same thing as whatever causes you to see red.
Part of the problem is that materialism hasn't come to terms with the consequences of modern physics.
Physics shows us a world built of a microscopic structure made up of "particles".
Yet the word "particles" isn't up to the job, since our best physical theories aren't dealing with particles in the classical sense.1
It isn't clear what quantum physics deals with, if there is any "what" at all beyond the complicated mathematical machinery. The mathematical formalism at the heart of quantum theory is stunningly effective at predicting the behavior of sub-atomic entities, while telling us nothing about how the world is "underneath" the symbols.2
What is clear is that the notions of "matter", "energy", and "fields", which materialists happily use for their own purposes, aren't part of the inventory of basic building-blocks. The ground-floor of nature isn't any kind of material substance subject to time and causality. Those are appearances.
What is real, according to physics, is whatever the "particles" are, fully independent of what appears to human minds.
If we take physics at face value, we must conclude that our knowledge of reality is a system of collective representations. The sciences are collective representations, as are history, literature, poetry, and any other catalog of systematic knowledge summarizing how the world appears to us. Writes Barfield:
It is only because of the thinking that we do, and have done in the past, from childhood on, that when we look around us, we do not stare uncomprehendingly at a chaos of unrelated impressions, but perceive an ordered—a coherent world of beings, objects and events—a world which, to some extent at least, we can already say we know.
Well and good. So how do we get those representations, or appearances, from the alien universe described by the mathematical micro-structure of physics?
How the mind squeezes rainbows out of water droplets
The transformation is the product of a special form of mental activity Barfield calls figuration. The appearance of a red thing as red is a representation produced by the mind, out of the raw material furnished by the senses.
Though figuration is a kind of mental activity, it is not the same as thinking proper. Thinking is what we do with the representations formed by figuration. (Although the border between figuration and thinking is porous and contestable, with interesting consequences we'll see shortly.)
Figuration passes representations "up the ladder" for thinking to work with. This leads Barfield to a conclusion with a profound effect on our most basic beliefs about our world.
The relationship between the mind and nature was not always the same.
In past ages, human beings experienced reality in wildly different ways than we do today. In speaking of ancient Greeks, Egyptians, Babylonians, or the archaic civilizations that predate them by untold millennia, we are tempted to read them as if they thought like us and shared our goals and outlooks on reality.
Based on evidence from a variety of sources, however, we can see that ancient peoples did not think about or experience reality as we do. The belief that our habits and modes of experience are universal and timeless is a mistake. Ancient peoples were not dumber or less-educated versions of modern people. Our ancestors lived in a different reality, one organized around different relationships between mind and nature.
The notion of nature apart from the mind evolved along with human consciousness. Yet our ways of thinking blind us to that historical dimension. When when our common sense tells us that the qualities of experience are within us, created by the activity of the mind or brain, and not in things, we don't question it.
The fuzziness of these two words "mind" and "brain" is a clear example of the confusion.
The brain belongs to the order of things. The mind is the being for whom appearances appear, the subject of the phenomena. That we now find it so easy and natural to substitute these terms for each other shows that our "common sense" doesn't fully get the difference.
We talk about the object as if it has subjective experiences, and we talk about having experiences as a material fact. We may as well talk about five-sided squares.
I've stressed that our recent obsession with AI, and with technology in general, has the effect of transforming us into mechanical beings. The evolution of common sense toward mechanical forms and concepts is a symptom of the tendency Barfield describes.
The question is, why? How did our own deepest sense of self come to straddle an unstable place between an objective brain and a subjective mind?
Part of the trouble is the flat difficulty of dividing words from things.
Contrary to Alfred Korzybski's famous map/territory analogy which came under gentle fire last week, things are never just things which can be effortlessly distinguished from mere words. Things are phenomena that appear for us, and in that sense they are not the words, true enough. But the observer always brings a contribution to the appearance through the process of figuration.
The difference between words and things is an appearance. Any attempt to carve up the world of appearances on the basis of being a thing or being a word is getting ahead of the matter, which is one point I made in my discussion of Korzybski's metaphor. His tidy separation of maps from territories hides the fact that many of our maps are part of the territory and vice-versa. That he was so close to being right makes this point difficult to see for the lazy and unserious reader.
While the confusion is partly due to the language, the full blame has to go to our attitudes toward the words.
Not only are we overly literal about the meaning of words; we insist on taking the literal dimension as primary. When our ideas present a world of independent things, we take them at face value rather than the ideas that they are. This is more than a trick with words. It is a habit of mind.
We no longer experience our representations as products of the mind; we no longer experience ourselves as participating in the appearances as our remote ancestors once did.
Barfield likened this to idolatry. We worship idols of the mind.
I believe it will seem very strange to the historian of the future that a literal-minded generation began to accept the actuality of a 'collective unconscious' before it could even admit the possibility of a 'collective conscious'—in the shape of the phenomenal world.
The world of appearances is a product of our mental processes, yours and mine and all of ours together.
But that world of appearances does not appear as an appearance.
Our obsession with the literal blinds us to the influence of our own mental activity on the creation of the world. We don't experience our collective representations as ways of seeing the world.
What can we do about of our modern idolatry?
This world of outsides with insides to them, which we perceive around us and in which we dwell is not something unshakably and unalterably given, but is largely the product of the way we collectively and unconsciously think. It is correlative to our mental habit.
Our common sense "has come to accept and value the outer for its own sake only and not as the manifestation or garb of another and immaterial component. Reality is assumed to consist of things, not of images."
Reality for us is things, not images.
How we see the world depends a great deal on how we imagine it. How we imagine the world, as individuals, depends a great deal on our habits and customs of thought.
Knowing this is the necessary first step to doing anything about it.
There’s a current flowing from the 19th century Romantics, Coleridge and Goethe in the main, through to these ideas. Barfield follows their lead in making the case for renewing your appreciation of art, as witness and creator, in its power to direct, train, and open up the imagination to new possibilities.
Today’s obsession with the technology of science is grounded in a belief in the unchanging relation of humans and nature. The spectator self, which I have argued is an error common to the sciences of mind and Artificial Intelligence, is symptomatic of that idolatrous belief in materialism. (The punchline being that quantum physics has no ontology apart from whatever human interpreters give it, and so strictly speaking, “following the science” undermines belief in materialism.)
Break the idols. Recognize the appearances for the images that they are.
Thought and imagination are not opposed to reality. The mind is our path into reality.
The rainbow is there, really there, not despite our subjective contributions to it but because we participate in its reality.
-Matt
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"The atoms, protons, and electrons of modern physics are now perhaps more generally regarded, not as particles, but as notional models or symbols of any unknown supersensible or subsensible base," writes Barfield.
To avoid these difficulties, Barfield suggests the term "unrepresented" as an alternative. But this brings problems of its own. For a thing to be unrepresented is to lie outside of our representations, that is, outside of the mind. But if we refer to it in words, or place it among the phenomena along with matter and energy, then it is not unrepresented. The paradox of thinking about what may lie beyond some conjectured limits of thought is quite old, and since no one has made any real headway in solving it, we may as well proceed as if it were not there.