The Oxford English Dictionary definition of Positivism is a philosophical system recognising only that which can be scientifically verified or which is capable of logical or mathematical proof, and therefore rejecting metaphysics and theism.
To be more exact - Positivism is itself a metaphysical assumption - and that assumption is as above. This despite that Positivism explicitly denies the meaningfulness and/or validity of metaphysics. In sum, that denial of metaphysics and its 'replacement' by science/ logic/ mathematics, is itself precisely a metaphysical (not scientific, not logical, not mathematical) assumption.
On this clear and deadly contradiction is built modernity.
Positivism is modernity - in essence; it is what underpins and drives the modern way of thinking as it developed from ? the 1600s and which came to dominate by the late 1800s; and Positivism is solidly in place and totalitarian in all 'Western' developed societies.
The dangers of Positivism have been explicitly known since the Romantic era - for example in the works of William Blake and ST Coleridge.They knew, they predicted, exactly where it would lead, exactly the nature of the modern malaise. (Where they, and everyone else, fell short was in imagining the size, pervasiveness, addictiveness and influence of the mass media.)
Why is Positivism so dangerous? Because Positivism is anti-God, it is sin; it is indeed death... Literally - Positivism implies a necessarily dead world.
It is literally death because Positivism is a denial (and indeed ridicule) of the idea of reality as alive, conscious and purposive - thus Positivism is also the assumption that everything is dead; in the sense that there is asserted to be no real or significant difference between what is generally regarded as alive and what is 'known' to be dead.
Fro instance; Cosmology, Physics, Mathematics are abstract and they concern dead (that is un-alive/ non-conscious) phenomena. However, under Positivism; Biology, Psychology, Consciousness all ultimately reduce to Physics: therefore Biology, Psychology and Consciousness are concerned with dead phenomena.
So, what we conventionally regard as Life is actually (by assumption) an arrangement of dead things, and Consciousness is an illusion (just yet another arrangement of dead things). This is standard, mainstream public discourse - and is Positivist.
Positivism is death and Abstraction is death - when abstraction is assumed to be 'true' rather than a model of truth.
Yet our spontaneous (built-in) assumption is of universal life and consciousness. In our childhood origins, and in the belief of the earliest known civilisations, the assumption is that everything-is-alive - we inhabit an animated, conscious reality.
However, these assumptions are not articulated, nor analysed, nor defended - they are simply taken for granted: life is based-on them.
So - over history (and through our personal development) we went from dwelling in an animated-conscious universe to regarding ourselves as dead things inhabiting a dead/ meaningless/ purposeless reality. Our task is to return to animism but with full consciousness.
In sum: God's work of creation is a work of animation - it is a bringing to life and consciousness of the stuff of reality.
We used to experience this, but not know it; we currently deny and do-not-experience it...
Our task is to re-learn the reality of God's creation, to explain how and why reality is animate and conscious; to attain the level of consciousness in-which the consciousness, life, personification of reality becomes apparent.
(To use Owen Barfield's terminology - our task is to understand, choose and experience Final Participation.)
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query positivism. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query positivism. Sort by date Show all posts
Wednesday, 6 December 2017
Sunday, 10 December 2017
The demotivating effect of RUP...
Owen Barfield invented the term Residual Unresolved Positivism (RUP) to refer to a Positivist attitude which persisted unconsciously, unknown, and against the will of the person who held to it.
Positivism is the (usually implicit) belief system that all valid knowledge comes via the senses (and not, for example, from revelation or imagination) - it is sometimes called Scientism, and is the metaphysics which is mainstream in modernity - although usually only articulated by scientists with a bent for philosophy.
RUP can have a life-sapping effect - a demotivating effect - an alienating effect - the effect of draining meaning from life; and I experienced this myself over the past week and a bit during which I have been trying to finish a big theoretical paper on the subject of Group Selection in Biology (from the perspective of Systems Theory) - and when I have experienced a cumulative inner resistance, a dysphoric sense of boredom, futility and angst about the project. Yesterday I got to the point when I was unable and unwilling to proceed, and resolved to abandon the project for a while.
Today I cracked-open a newly purchased book - History, Guilt and Habit, by Owen Barfield, and read a couple of pages of the chapter on Evolution. Suddenly it became clear that I was suffering from the effects of Residual Unresolved Positivism - and I immediately felt cured: I also felt motivated, enthused and excited.
Until that exact moment, I had been wondering whether I was actually physically ill, with some subclinical infection or autoimmune disease or something - so profound was my demotivation. I felt that I ought to be getting on with the group selection paper, I couldn't; but I couldn't get myself to do anything else, because I felt I ought to be working on the paper...
The problem was quite simple. Because I was writing the paper for a biological audience, I was constrained by staying within the biological paradigm - which lies within positivism, and strictly excludes any religious or even metaphysical material.
(It would, in any case, be utterly self-defeating if it was included - since 99% (approximately!) of biologists are actively atheist, and would instantly write off anything even hinting at Christian assumptions.)
As always, when I am working on theoretical science, I was intensely absorbed in thinking about group selection, and indeed had been for some weeks. By this I mean devoting a level of sustained and recurrent time and effort to thinking about the problem, to a degree which most people have never done on any subject - because this is what is required for theoretical endeavour.
[For instance, I had been thinking on and off, and hard, about the nature of depression for about fifteen years before I made a breakthrough in 1999. Of course there is reading, observation and conversation (also sometimes experimenting) - as well as thinking. But for genuine theoretical work, the proportion of thinking to empirical input is several-fold in favour of just-thinking. Since thinking (and even reading!) does not count as an academic, scholarly or scientific activity (if an academic was to say they had been 'thinking a lot' recently, they certainly would be regarded as making a feeble excuse for doing nothing at all; this goes some way towards explaining the dire state of modern intellectual discourse.]
However, this focused intensity on Group Selection meant that I was trapping myself - for long intense, recurrent periods - inside the positivistic biological world view.
I was trapping myself therefore inside a world without meaning and purpose - a dead world without God.
And it was this which was cumulatively demotivating me - because it removed all genuine significance from my task (which by default just became a matter of ego, careerism and the like).
It just took attention to those few words from Owen Barfield to remind me of what was real and matters... and I was free!
(But modernity is implicitly and pervasively positivist; and most modern people never do acknowledge the falsity of positivism and the metaphysical realities I share with Owen Barfield - so presumably most people remain trapped inside a world of meaninglessness and purposelessness and are motivated only by ego, careerism and short-termist pleasure; without any hope of escape because they do not acknowledge anywhere they could escape-to.)
Positivism is the (usually implicit) belief system that all valid knowledge comes via the senses (and not, for example, from revelation or imagination) - it is sometimes called Scientism, and is the metaphysics which is mainstream in modernity - although usually only articulated by scientists with a bent for philosophy.
RUP can have a life-sapping effect - a demotivating effect - an alienating effect - the effect of draining meaning from life; and I experienced this myself over the past week and a bit during which I have been trying to finish a big theoretical paper on the subject of Group Selection in Biology (from the perspective of Systems Theory) - and when I have experienced a cumulative inner resistance, a dysphoric sense of boredom, futility and angst about the project. Yesterday I got to the point when I was unable and unwilling to proceed, and resolved to abandon the project for a while.
Today I cracked-open a newly purchased book - History, Guilt and Habit, by Owen Barfield, and read a couple of pages of the chapter on Evolution. Suddenly it became clear that I was suffering from the effects of Residual Unresolved Positivism - and I immediately felt cured: I also felt motivated, enthused and excited.
Until that exact moment, I had been wondering whether I was actually physically ill, with some subclinical infection or autoimmune disease or something - so profound was my demotivation. I felt that I ought to be getting on with the group selection paper, I couldn't; but I couldn't get myself to do anything else, because I felt I ought to be working on the paper...
The problem was quite simple. Because I was writing the paper for a biological audience, I was constrained by staying within the biological paradigm - which lies within positivism, and strictly excludes any religious or even metaphysical material.
(It would, in any case, be utterly self-defeating if it was included - since 99% (approximately!) of biologists are actively atheist, and would instantly write off anything even hinting at Christian assumptions.)
As always, when I am working on theoretical science, I was intensely absorbed in thinking about group selection, and indeed had been for some weeks. By this I mean devoting a level of sustained and recurrent time and effort to thinking about the problem, to a degree which most people have never done on any subject - because this is what is required for theoretical endeavour.
[For instance, I had been thinking on and off, and hard, about the nature of depression for about fifteen years before I made a breakthrough in 1999. Of course there is reading, observation and conversation (also sometimes experimenting) - as well as thinking. But for genuine theoretical work, the proportion of thinking to empirical input is several-fold in favour of just-thinking. Since thinking (and even reading!) does not count as an academic, scholarly or scientific activity (if an academic was to say they had been 'thinking a lot' recently, they certainly would be regarded as making a feeble excuse for doing nothing at all; this goes some way towards explaining the dire state of modern intellectual discourse.]
However, this focused intensity on Group Selection meant that I was trapping myself - for long intense, recurrent periods - inside the positivistic biological world view.
I was trapping myself therefore inside a world without meaning and purpose - a dead world without God.
And it was this which was cumulatively demotivating me - because it removed all genuine significance from my task (which by default just became a matter of ego, careerism and the like).
It just took attention to those few words from Owen Barfield to remind me of what was real and matters... and I was free!
(But modernity is implicitly and pervasively positivist; and most modern people never do acknowledge the falsity of positivism and the metaphysical realities I share with Owen Barfield - so presumably most people remain trapped inside a world of meaninglessness and purposelessness and are motivated only by ego, careerism and short-termist pleasure; without any hope of escape because they do not acknowledge anywhere they could escape-to.)
Monday, 26 November 2018
Traditionalist Christianity, Biblical inerrancy and their residuum of unresolved positivism
The deep and ineradicable problem with all forms of backward-looking, traditionalist Christianity is explained by Owen Barfield's idea of 'RUP' - the Residue of Unresolved Positivism.
Of course, understanding the full power of this critique depends upon accepting the idea that human consciousness has developed/ evolved; such that throughout Man's history possibilities are closed-off, as other possibilities emerge. Nonetheless the negative critique can be appreciated even without this; if we take into account what is known about the Hunter-Gatherer societies that preceded the agricultural - and if it is acknowledged that the conditions of H-G societies were closer to Man's natural and spontaneous behaviour.
Anyway; the insight is that all agricultural-based - or 'agrarian' - societies are a development from H-G conditions, and contain ways of life that are specific to them - they are an historically-contingent society, as we can now appreciate since we are aware of the H-G societies that preceded them and the post-industrial revolution/ modern societies that replaced them. The Agrarian are 'middle' societies. It is an historical fact that Christianity emerged and grew in developed-Agrarian societies - and many of its features were (either therefore or contingently) those of such Agrarian societies (and probably-therefore have declined since) - for example Christianity depends on literacy (which was not a feature of H-G societies), sedentary settlement, social-function hierarchy and specialisation - eg. a priesthood, an institutional church... and so on.
Furthermore, Christianity emerged and grew in societies where people were less able to attain direct contact with the 'spirit world' than H-G societies, and less 'animistic' than these societies; but much more spiritual and animistic than modern societies.
To put it another way, the agrarian Christian societies were not as positivistic/ materialistic/ reductionist as modern societies, but far more positivistic than H-G societies. This Agrarian positivism is evident in - for example - their highly systematised, formal, abstract theology; their dependence on literacy with its requirement for interpretation, memorisation, analysis and synthesis of texts; the existence of specialised systems of law and philosophy - and so on.
For instance; any system of Christianity based-upon the textual inerrancy of The Bible (which underpins much 'evangleical' Christianity of the post-industrial modern era) is significantly positivistic.
In other words, all backward-looking traditionalist Christian systems have a great deal of positivism in them - a great deal of materialism; with the consequent distance from the livingness of the world, the experience of the spirit realm and instead the experience of alienation (only sometimes and temporarily overcome in specialised situations such as ritual and prayer).
If it is agreed that we moderns need to get beyond positivism/ materialism, going back to traditionalism, going back to The Bible, just Will Not Work. We would need to do something more, and different.
Of course, understanding the full power of this critique depends upon accepting the idea that human consciousness has developed/ evolved; such that throughout Man's history possibilities are closed-off, as other possibilities emerge. Nonetheless the negative critique can be appreciated even without this; if we take into account what is known about the Hunter-Gatherer societies that preceded the agricultural - and if it is acknowledged that the conditions of H-G societies were closer to Man's natural and spontaneous behaviour.
Anyway; the insight is that all agricultural-based - or 'agrarian' - societies are a development from H-G conditions, and contain ways of life that are specific to them - they are an historically-contingent society, as we can now appreciate since we are aware of the H-G societies that preceded them and the post-industrial revolution/ modern societies that replaced them. The Agrarian are 'middle' societies. It is an historical fact that Christianity emerged and grew in developed-Agrarian societies - and many of its features were (either therefore or contingently) those of such Agrarian societies (and probably-therefore have declined since) - for example Christianity depends on literacy (which was not a feature of H-G societies), sedentary settlement, social-function hierarchy and specialisation - eg. a priesthood, an institutional church... and so on.
Furthermore, Christianity emerged and grew in societies where people were less able to attain direct contact with the 'spirit world' than H-G societies, and less 'animistic' than these societies; but much more spiritual and animistic than modern societies.
To put it another way, the agrarian Christian societies were not as positivistic/ materialistic/ reductionist as modern societies, but far more positivistic than H-G societies. This Agrarian positivism is evident in - for example - their highly systematised, formal, abstract theology; their dependence on literacy with its requirement for interpretation, memorisation, analysis and synthesis of texts; the existence of specialised systems of law and philosophy - and so on.
For instance; any system of Christianity based-upon the textual inerrancy of The Bible (which underpins much 'evangleical' Christianity of the post-industrial modern era) is significantly positivistic.
In other words, all backward-looking traditionalist Christian systems have a great deal of positivism in them - a great deal of materialism; with the consequent distance from the livingness of the world, the experience of the spirit realm and instead the experience of alienation (only sometimes and temporarily overcome in specialised situations such as ritual and prayer).
If it is agreed that we moderns need to get beyond positivism/ materialism, going back to traditionalism, going back to The Bible, just Will Not Work. We would need to do something more, and different.
Thursday, 23 November 2017
Joseph Campbell and RUP (Residual Unresolved Positivism)
BILL MOYERS: Do you ever have the sense of… being helped by hidden hands?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: All the time. It is miraculous. I even have a superstition that has grown on me as a result of invisible hands coming all the time – namely, that if you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in your field of bliss, and they open doors to you. I say, follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.
Owen Barfield described a common phenomenon among spiritual people he named RUP - Residual Unresolved Positivism. In essence, he meant that such people suppose that they have transcended materialism and become spiritual, but have not really done so. It is the difference between theory and practice, or between explicit belief and implicit habits - in theory they believe that spirit is primary but in practice they continue habitually to depend on materialist metaphysical explanations.
In the passage quoted above, Joseph Campbell reveals a failure to follow-through his beliefs to their conclusions. (I can confirm that this is true of the whole span of his writings, not just this particular passage). He describes how, when a person follows his Bliss (by which he means his deepest inner convictions - get translates the term from a Hindu doctrine of five 'sheaths' of the person - Bliss is the most fundamental sheath)... then Life will arrange-itself around the fulfilment of this need.
Campbell was known as a spiritual writer on the subject of mythology; but his bottom line explanations were derived and adapted from Carl Gustav Jung (e.g Campbell edited a popular anthology The Portable Jung, he attended conferences and met Jung and some of his early books were issued by Jung's publishing house).
For Jung, and for Campbell, spirituality and myth were ultimately a matter of psychology, and psychology was ultimately about human gratification during mortal life. The difference between Jung and other psychologists and psychiatrists is that the mainstream were aimed at therapy (alleviation of pathology) while Jung aimed at positive enhancement of a person's sense of meaning and purpose in Life... however, in the end this meaning-purpose were simply feelings.
For whatever reason, Jung and Campbell both stopped short of a religious metaphysical basis for their beliefs. So, in the passage quoted above, Campbell defensively refers to his belief as a 'superstition' even though he believed it and based his life upon it. He regarded living for Bliss as better than living for money or status, but could not justify this except in terms of making people feel better (overall and in the long term).
Campbell felt that a person living for and from their Bliss would experience meeting important people and having doors-open for their destiny - but presented this as an empirical observation, merely; and did not explain why or how this should happen - why, specifically, 'the world' should arrange-itself (in multiple extremely complex and interacting ways ) to enable a person to follow their Bliss, or destined 'track'...
One of Campbell's problems was a deeply rooted anti-Christianity, in reaction to his upbringing in a very literalistic, exclusive and hard-line (all-or-nothing) Irish Roman Catholicism. Yet if Campbell had responded to Christianity with the depth and flexibility he allowed for other religions, he might have seen that Bliss could coherently be regarded as God-within-us (God immanent). And Campbell might have seen that if indeed Life does arrange itself around the true destiny of an individual human being, then this implies a personal God of great power, who loves each person as an individual and intervenes in the world to help them follow their proper 'track'.
Much the same applies to Jung's concept of synchronicity - which is what Campbell is rephrasing here. If indeed reality arranges for individual people to have 'meaningful coincidences', then it also implies a personal God who is doing the immense job of arranging multiple factors, for the good of specific persons.
In the case of Jung and Campbell, I think we can see that their unresolved positivism is quite extreme - since they lack even a spiritual metaphysics; hence they both end-up making thoroughly materialist and this-worldly analyses and recommendations.
But for those of us who try-to live by a genuinely spiritual and Christian metaphysics, there is still a major problem of RUP - since we live in a world with a materialist and this-worldly metaphysics; and it is this modern world that socialises, trains, educates and entrains our habits of thinking.
In the end and under such circumstances; we all find that a thorough-going, 100-percent spiritual Christianity is impossible; and we can only manage a partial and intermittent consistency between our metaphysics and our habitual thinking.
Our need, then, is to repent our failures; and to take seriously, learn from, and try to amplify our successes at transcending positivism and fully-living-by what we theoretically believe.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL: All the time. It is miraculous. I even have a superstition that has grown on me as a result of invisible hands coming all the time – namely, that if you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in your field of bliss, and they open doors to you. I say, follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.
From The Power of Myth - interviews with Jospeh Campbell by Bill Moyers - book and PBS documentary, 1988.
Owen Barfield described a common phenomenon among spiritual people he named RUP - Residual Unresolved Positivism. In essence, he meant that such people suppose that they have transcended materialism and become spiritual, but have not really done so. It is the difference between theory and practice, or between explicit belief and implicit habits - in theory they believe that spirit is primary but in practice they continue habitually to depend on materialist metaphysical explanations.
In the passage quoted above, Joseph Campbell reveals a failure to follow-through his beliefs to their conclusions. (I can confirm that this is true of the whole span of his writings, not just this particular passage). He describes how, when a person follows his Bliss (by which he means his deepest inner convictions - get translates the term from a Hindu doctrine of five 'sheaths' of the person - Bliss is the most fundamental sheath)... then Life will arrange-itself around the fulfilment of this need.
Campbell was known as a spiritual writer on the subject of mythology; but his bottom line explanations were derived and adapted from Carl Gustav Jung (e.g Campbell edited a popular anthology The Portable Jung, he attended conferences and met Jung and some of his early books were issued by Jung's publishing house).
For Jung, and for Campbell, spirituality and myth were ultimately a matter of psychology, and psychology was ultimately about human gratification during mortal life. The difference between Jung and other psychologists and psychiatrists is that the mainstream were aimed at therapy (alleviation of pathology) while Jung aimed at positive enhancement of a person's sense of meaning and purpose in Life... however, in the end this meaning-purpose were simply feelings.
For whatever reason, Jung and Campbell both stopped short of a religious metaphysical basis for their beliefs. So, in the passage quoted above, Campbell defensively refers to his belief as a 'superstition' even though he believed it and based his life upon it. He regarded living for Bliss as better than living for money or status, but could not justify this except in terms of making people feel better (overall and in the long term).
Campbell felt that a person living for and from their Bliss would experience meeting important people and having doors-open for their destiny - but presented this as an empirical observation, merely; and did not explain why or how this should happen - why, specifically, 'the world' should arrange-itself (in multiple extremely complex and interacting ways ) to enable a person to follow their Bliss, or destined 'track'...
One of Campbell's problems was a deeply rooted anti-Christianity, in reaction to his upbringing in a very literalistic, exclusive and hard-line (all-or-nothing) Irish Roman Catholicism. Yet if Campbell had responded to Christianity with the depth and flexibility he allowed for other religions, he might have seen that Bliss could coherently be regarded as God-within-us (God immanent). And Campbell might have seen that if indeed Life does arrange itself around the true destiny of an individual human being, then this implies a personal God of great power, who loves each person as an individual and intervenes in the world to help them follow their proper 'track'.
Much the same applies to Jung's concept of synchronicity - which is what Campbell is rephrasing here. If indeed reality arranges for individual people to have 'meaningful coincidences', then it also implies a personal God who is doing the immense job of arranging multiple factors, for the good of specific persons.
In the case of Jung and Campbell, I think we can see that their unresolved positivism is quite extreme - since they lack even a spiritual metaphysics; hence they both end-up making thoroughly materialist and this-worldly analyses and recommendations.
But for those of us who try-to live by a genuinely spiritual and Christian metaphysics, there is still a major problem of RUP - since we live in a world with a materialist and this-worldly metaphysics; and it is this modern world that socialises, trains, educates and entrains our habits of thinking.
In the end and under such circumstances; we all find that a thorough-going, 100-percent spiritual Christianity is impossible; and we can only manage a partial and intermittent consistency between our metaphysics and our habitual thinking.
Our need, then, is to repent our failures; and to take seriously, learn from, and try to amplify our successes at transcending positivism and fully-living-by what we theoretically believe.
Saturday, 27 January 2018
The opposite of abstract is personal
This is the essence of what I am currently trying to get across - a break point with the usual way of considering things.
Abstraction (pretty much) IS Positivism... and Positivism is what we are trying to escape. This, at least, is the case when Positivism is reconsidered as meaning Abstraction.
We start out as Personal - when we are children. As human culture (so far as we know) started out as personal - animistic, anthropomorphic, everything alive, conscious, personal.
Abstraction was introduced by (?) the Ancient Greek philosophers, and it grew initially in and from a situation of unconscious and spontaneous personalism. Thus the AG's advocated abstraction, but they were (by our modern Western standards) very animistic in their thought, behaviour and language (this last being well attested by Owen Barfield in his 1928 book Poetic Diction and elsewhere).
Since then Western Culture has become more abstract and less personal until now public life is wholly abstract - to the point that even in the Mass Media the personal is wholly abstract... that is my interpretation of the identity politics which has taken-over in the past 50 years: even people are now wholly (abstractly) representative of the class/ sex/ non-sex, race, religion of whatever. (As in the foundational feminist phrase The Personal Is Political.)
OK, it may be agreed that modernity is too abstract - a matter of models and symbols... but most people would regard The Concrete as the Opposite of The Abstract; I'm here pointing out that it is the Personal which is opposite.
So we must apparently become Personal instead of Abstract - but, I would emphasise, Not by trying to go back to being unconsciously and spontaneously and passively Personal, like a child or a putative simple hunter gatherer...
This times and in the future it much be a choice, a choice or decision that must be consciously and freely made. We need to decide that Personal is how things Really are: that deep-down and objectively things are ultimately Not abstract, but that they Are instead personal.
So we live in a reality, a universe, a world, where things are persons, things are beings - beings are persons... at bottom and root we have living and conscious beings.
This entails that mathematics, physics, chemistry and biology are not really real; these are (more or less use-full) simplified (= ultimately and always false) models.
(Same applies to the abstractions of managerialism - all those processes, measures, stats and targets - they aren't The Bottom Line they are plain wrong.)
It's a big change I am asking and advocating; but I think this is exactly what is demanded, what we need to do - by divine destiny. It's where we are all going, sooner (this mortal life) or later (after mortal life)... although we can, of course, always deny it; because we can (we are free to) deny anything...
Abstraction (pretty much) IS Positivism... and Positivism is what we are trying to escape. This, at least, is the case when Positivism is reconsidered as meaning Abstraction.
We start out as Personal - when we are children. As human culture (so far as we know) started out as personal - animistic, anthropomorphic, everything alive, conscious, personal.
Abstraction was introduced by (?) the Ancient Greek philosophers, and it grew initially in and from a situation of unconscious and spontaneous personalism. Thus the AG's advocated abstraction, but they were (by our modern Western standards) very animistic in their thought, behaviour and language (this last being well attested by Owen Barfield in his 1928 book Poetic Diction and elsewhere).
Since then Western Culture has become more abstract and less personal until now public life is wholly abstract - to the point that even in the Mass Media the personal is wholly abstract... that is my interpretation of the identity politics which has taken-over in the past 50 years: even people are now wholly (abstractly) representative of the class/ sex/ non-sex, race, religion of whatever. (As in the foundational feminist phrase The Personal Is Political.)
OK, it may be agreed that modernity is too abstract - a matter of models and symbols... but most people would regard The Concrete as the Opposite of The Abstract; I'm here pointing out that it is the Personal which is opposite.
So we must apparently become Personal instead of Abstract - but, I would emphasise, Not by trying to go back to being unconsciously and spontaneously and passively Personal, like a child or a putative simple hunter gatherer...
This times and in the future it much be a choice, a choice or decision that must be consciously and freely made. We need to decide that Personal is how things Really are: that deep-down and objectively things are ultimately Not abstract, but that they Are instead personal.
So we live in a reality, a universe, a world, where things are persons, things are beings - beings are persons... at bottom and root we have living and conscious beings.
This entails that mathematics, physics, chemistry and biology are not really real; these are (more or less use-full) simplified (= ultimately and always false) models.
(Same applies to the abstractions of managerialism - all those processes, measures, stats and targets - they aren't The Bottom Line they are plain wrong.)
It's a big change I am asking and advocating; but I think this is exactly what is demanded, what we need to do - by divine destiny. It's where we are all going, sooner (this mortal life) or later (after mortal life)... although we can, of course, always deny it; because we can (we are free to) deny anything...
Monday, 26 July 2021
Residual Unresolved Leftism
It is a feature of the spiritual war nowadays that The Enemy (i.e. those on the side of Satan, against God) are dispersed in many places, deny any self-definition; and indeed are just part of normal, mainstream 'public opinion' as revealed in officialdom, institutions and the media,
It is sometimes said that this makes evil difficult to discern - on the assumption that the evil is hidden among the good, in many and changing forms, under many and changing names and deceptive rhetoric...
But the truth is that evil is very easy to discern nowadays; indeed evil has never been easier to discern IF the line dividing good from evil is drawn in the right place.
The problem that many people have in discerning evil is that they are retaining too much evil in their own assumptions, in their own world view.
They are (in effect) trying to use a line between good and evil, when that line has been positioned such as to include evil; therefore they find the discernment to be difficult and unsure.
This is seen, for example, in what Owen Barfield termed RUP - Residual Unresolved Positivism - something to which everyone brought up in The West is prone.
RUP is a matter of retaining 'materialist', 'scientistic', 'reductionistic' assumptions that were unconsciously absorbed in childhood and adolescence, are invisible to normal introspection, and which have become habitual framers of thinking.
This happens when we consciously oppose positivism, wish for a fully-spiritual life, yet keep un-consciously falling back into positivistic ways of regarding the world; therefore we sometimes fail to detect (and may end-up supporting) positivism when it is being deployed by the powers of evil.
Another - just as common and related - problem is RUL - Residual Unresolved Leftism.
The assumptions of Leftism (e.g. Leftist concepts of equality, social justice, diversity, environmentalism, antiracism, feminism, sexual revolution, the mainstream hedonic utilitarian morality etc) is pervasive in public discourse as background assumptions.
Very few people in The West are altogether free of these false, tendentious, evil-tending ideas - and Christians, as much as most, often cherish such ideals - or try to do so.
RUL therefore confuses our discernment of evil; since Leftism has been a major (probably The major) strategy of evil in the modern world.
Thus there is evil at work in the world and impinging upon our personal lives, yet because some evil in our-selves matches that external evil, we fail to recognize its true nature.
With RUL, the line has been drawn wrongly; too close to evil - not including all of evil; with some evils left-over on the side of good; so discernment begins to seem difficult, complex...
We become confused, disorientated, unsure of what to do and what to reject.
But the difficulties and complexities are an artefact of the line being drawn in the wrong place - due to Residual Unresolved Leftism. If we can identify and repent all of our Leftist assumptions, the task of discernment is revealed as simple - indeed it has probably never been simpler than Now!
But another difficulty is that when the line between good and evil has been drawn correctly, and discernment is swift and decisive - it will be found that most of the world, and pretty much all of officialdom, major institutions, and the mass media - are on the side of evil.
It will also be found, more disturbingly, that most people are on the side of evil; which means that most individual persons we encounter will support the side of evil - will be cooperating-with and probably defending/ advocating/ working-for the powers of evil.
And this applies even in Christian churches and among the leadership of Christian churches; because being on the side of evil is not about one's majority or average beliefs.
Even one Leftist belief or assumption suffices to corrupt; because (as of 2020) the tendency of institutions and their choice between good and evil sides may be dictated by a single Leftist belief (such as the Litmus Tests).
This may be disturbing, unfamiliar, and often demoralizing.
Yet we should remember that with normal Christianity; any single unrepented sin - no matter how 'small' - is sufficient to cause damnation; because we only truly desire Heaven when we are prepared to give-up all sin for it. Heaven is a place without sin; and nobody can enter it who has not repudiated sin.
Here on earth, something analogous applies to the sins of Leftism. To be on the side of God, persons and institutions must reject the devil and all his works.
This does not mean any kind of impossibly perfect standard of behaviour - but repentance - which is the correct detection and identification of sin as sin -and the 'in principle' willingness to discard it.
Perfection of thoughts and values is impossible in this mortal earthly life; but repentance is always and everywhere open to any person or institution.
Residual Unresolved Leftism is a serious problem because sin is unrecognized, is indeed defended and advocated; and the consequence is that perception of discernment as difficult and uncertain - in a world where in fact evil is more naked and extreme than ever before.
So, if you are confused, and find evil difficult to discern; look within for those unrepented sins which are probably the source of the problem.
One great and immediate advantage of eliminating Residual Unresolved Leftism is that we attain clarity about the spiritual war of this world; and can set-to on the task of fighting that war instead of being enmeshed in confusion.
Such clarity of discernment is liberating, exciting, and motivating! Which is just what most-people most-need in a world such as this.
Wednesday, 29 November 2017
The problem of RUP
I was reflecting on Owen Barfield's shorthand term of RUP, meaning Residual Unresolved Positivism, by which he pointed out that those who accurately diagnose the spiritual malaise of modernity nonetheless continue to live-by positivistic, materialistic, reductionist, scientistic assumptions - and this comes-through again and again in the person's thinking, writing and actions.
One example Barfield gave was Jung, who said and wrote many contradictory things - Barfield diagnosed the root of this problem as partly the persistence of many positivistic features of which Jung seemed unaware; plus Jung's compromising wish to communicate-with and be-valued-by a positivistic world.
We need to be aware of such matters - because the thinking, writing and doing of most writers and philosophers of the modern condition is likewise compromised - and we need to avoid being misled by this. To avoid absorbing their confusion and errors, we need to distinguish the points where other-people are failing to live consistently by their most considered assumptions.
In a nutshell - with RUP there is a significant gap between the metaphysical assumptions we wish to hold; and the metaphysical assumptions that we have unconsciously absorbed from socialisation and propaganda. Our new and improved metaphysics may simply be an aspiration; our true belief (that which we live by )
However, the mote in the eye of another is easier for us to acknowledge than the beam in our own eye; and all of us who are trying to move beyond alienation and materialism into Final Participation are only-partially successful (at best). Most of our thinking is not primary, but automatic; and our alienation is often relieved (temporarily) merely by lapsing into the passivity and unconsciousness of Original Participation rather than actively, consciously, thinkingly moving-forward.
The answer is not to aspire to eliminate 'positivism' - because that is not possible - but to learn from the RUP problems of others to diagnose, to notice and acknowledge, our own inevitable, frequent deficiencies.
In other words - we should probably not be aiming to attain perfection of Final Participation as a powerful and permanent state - since this is (at present, for us) impossible; as to recognise and repent our own failures to do this.
This is, indeed, the core Christian response to our own weakness and corruptibility.
A Man's mortal life is trial, error and repentance - with repentance the worst sins are washed away, without repentance the slightest lapse or deficiency may be enough to damn us by a pride-full insistence that we have not erred: thereby such error becomes built-into our self-understanding.
One example Barfield gave was Jung, who said and wrote many contradictory things - Barfield diagnosed the root of this problem as partly the persistence of many positivistic features of which Jung seemed unaware; plus Jung's compromising wish to communicate-with and be-valued-by a positivistic world.
We need to be aware of such matters - because the thinking, writing and doing of most writers and philosophers of the modern condition is likewise compromised - and we need to avoid being misled by this. To avoid absorbing their confusion and errors, we need to distinguish the points where other-people are failing to live consistently by their most considered assumptions.
In a nutshell - with RUP there is a significant gap between the metaphysical assumptions we wish to hold; and the metaphysical assumptions that we have unconsciously absorbed from socialisation and propaganda. Our new and improved metaphysics may simply be an aspiration; our true belief (that which we live by )
However, the mote in the eye of another is easier for us to acknowledge than the beam in our own eye; and all of us who are trying to move beyond alienation and materialism into Final Participation are only-partially successful (at best). Most of our thinking is not primary, but automatic; and our alienation is often relieved (temporarily) merely by lapsing into the passivity and unconsciousness of Original Participation rather than actively, consciously, thinkingly moving-forward.
The answer is not to aspire to eliminate 'positivism' - because that is not possible - but to learn from the RUP problems of others to diagnose, to notice and acknowledge, our own inevitable, frequent deficiencies.
In other words - we should probably not be aiming to attain perfection of Final Participation as a powerful and permanent state - since this is (at present, for us) impossible; as to recognise and repent our own failures to do this.
This is, indeed, the core Christian response to our own weakness and corruptibility.
A Man's mortal life is trial, error and repentance - with repentance the worst sins are washed away, without repentance the slightest lapse or deficiency may be enough to damn us by a pride-full insistence that we have not erred: thereby such error becomes built-into our self-understanding.
Friday, 8 December 2017
Leftism is the major modern type of RUP
To be a political Leftist is almost ubiquitous in the modern West.
This is not a matter of mainstream political discourse, which sees Liberal/ Socialist/ Labour/ Democrat parties as Left Wing and Libertarian/ Conservative/ Republican/ Fascist parties as Right Wing - because all of these are Left Wing in the deep sense that all are essentially secular, this-worldly and utilitarian.
All mainstream modern Western politics regards the main business and justification of politics to be to make mortal life happier or less full of suffering for many or most people - or, at least, for a favoured sector of the population.
This contrasts with the politics of the traditional religious past (with some significant degree of Original Participation) and the aimed-politics of the future (Final Participation) which takes a perspective of life beyond our mortal life, and regards divine destiny as the ultimate standard for judgement.
Thus, all modern politics is both Leftist (not religious) and also Positivist (because implicitly denying the importance and/ or reality of non-perceptual/ spiritual reality.
In sum Leftism is built-upon Positivist assumptions; therefore to be a Leftist is to be Positivist; therefore to be Leftist is to be anti-religious - and therefore anti-Christian - in your basic assumptions concerning the very nature of reality.
This has created a difficult and deadly problem of what Barfield termed RUP, the residuum of Unresolved Positivism in people who believe they are primarily spiritual. Leftism just-is a residue of postivism.
This means that in practice it can be seen that even people who aspire to a primarily spiritual and/ or religious life-perceptive are actually functioning within a worldly and utilitarian set of basic priorities.
Even when Leftists sincerely try to be religious and spiritual - they fail over the Long run; because their metaphysical assumptions are continually and continuously undermining their religious and spiritual aspirations.
In other words, spiritual and religious people are nearly-always in practice guilty of organising their beliefs and practices around socio-political priorities - which are of the mainstream type, hence Leftist.
And since Leftism is the water in which they swim, they are seldom even aware of the conflict within themselves - and respond by fitting everything-else around their unresolved, unacknowledged residual positivism...
This is not a matter of mainstream political discourse, which sees Liberal/ Socialist/ Labour/ Democrat parties as Left Wing and Libertarian/ Conservative/ Republican/ Fascist parties as Right Wing - because all of these are Left Wing in the deep sense that all are essentially secular, this-worldly and utilitarian.
All mainstream modern Western politics regards the main business and justification of politics to be to make mortal life happier or less full of suffering for many or most people - or, at least, for a favoured sector of the population.
This contrasts with the politics of the traditional religious past (with some significant degree of Original Participation) and the aimed-politics of the future (Final Participation) which takes a perspective of life beyond our mortal life, and regards divine destiny as the ultimate standard for judgement.
Thus, all modern politics is both Leftist (not religious) and also Positivist (because implicitly denying the importance and/ or reality of non-perceptual/ spiritual reality.
In sum Leftism is built-upon Positivist assumptions; therefore to be a Leftist is to be Positivist; therefore to be Leftist is to be anti-religious - and therefore anti-Christian - in your basic assumptions concerning the very nature of reality.
This has created a difficult and deadly problem of what Barfield termed RUP, the residuum of Unresolved Positivism in people who believe they are primarily spiritual. Leftism just-is a residue of postivism.
This means that in practice it can be seen that even people who aspire to a primarily spiritual and/ or religious life-perceptive are actually functioning within a worldly and utilitarian set of basic priorities.
Even when Leftists sincerely try to be religious and spiritual - they fail over the Long run; because their metaphysical assumptions are continually and continuously undermining their religious and spiritual aspirations.
In other words, spiritual and religious people are nearly-always in practice guilty of organising their beliefs and practices around socio-political priorities - which are of the mainstream type, hence Leftist.
And since Leftism is the water in which they swim, they are seldom even aware of the conflict within themselves - and respond by fitting everything-else around their unresolved, unacknowledged residual positivism...
Friday, 26 July 2024
Residual Unresolved Collectivism (RUC)
Francis Berger: " I don't think speculating about consciousness development at the collective level is necessary or even helpful now."
My comment (edited): This articulates something that has been nagging at me for a while. In particular, I increasingly feel that the account of development of consciousness is valid for the past - and it is important to recognize that people have Not always been the same as now, nor are people the same everywhere at any particular time.
But the Steiner/ Barfield theory of the Evolution of Consciousness went badly wrong in being used as a predictor.
Thinking further about this exchange, I realize I have been guilty of significant Residual Unresolved Collectivism (RUC).
In other words; while in-theory realizing that there is no legitimate optimism to be derived from expecting Good Leadership the The West or any of its constituent nations, institutions or churches; I still retain a residual expectation that there is a desirability hence need for some kind of communal or group-based spiritual awakening of the necessary kind.
It is Residual because my habitual practice of thinking is different from what I believe (and even know) must be the case: the collectivism is left-over from an earlier set of assumptions and practices.
And, to this extent, my habits sabotage my intentions.
RUC is closely analogous-to, and indeed related-to, other left-over forms of wanting and thinking that I have previously described: Residual Unresolved Positivism (which I got from Owen Barfield), and Residual Unresolved Leftism.
In other words; just as we have habits of considering the world as primarily material/ physical and abstract (e.g. as models) in terms of its reality and causes; and just as our values nowadays tend habitually to begin with leftist assumptions (such as equality, pacifism, antiracism) -- and just as these are difficult to eradicate even when that is our priority...
So, we tend to think about the human world primarily in terms of large human groupings; and understand the individual as a consequence of such groupings.
The collective is how we analyze and understand problems; and the collective is where we seek for (or, at least hope-for) answers.
Collective thinking is, indeed, woven-into Christianity from its historical basis; especially in the Old Testament where most things are conceptualized in terms of "a people": the nation (tribe) of Israel.
Even many relatively recent and current forms of Christianity (such as Mormonism) have usually adopted collective explanations of God's motivations, and tried to recreate collective dealings-with God - including envisaging salvation - and theosis - in collective terms of God's dealings with A People.
As I have often explained on this blog over the past decade; this I regard as untrue for this time and place; and counter-productive in relation to what Christians (as the individuals we actually-are) ought to be doing here-and-now.
I believe that we cannot, and should not attempt to, live collectively in terms of our relationship to God, Jesus Christ and the Holy Ghost - but should take personal responsibility, and should act, now, from our-selves to do what is right and necessary (rather than waiting and hoping for some collective grouping to tell us what to do, and support us in the doing).
I hope that now I have - with some help from Francis Berger! - been able to recognize and give a name to this tendency; I may begin to eradicate it more fully from my metaphysical assumptions and habits of thinking.
Saturday, 16 December 2017
The priority of metaphysics
For the past century and a half, metaphysics (the philosophy of ultimate assumptions concerning the nature of reality) has been ignored, ridiculed, asserted to be unnecessary; and the philosophical focus has been on epistemology - that is, the question of knowledge (how we can known anything, or know any specific thing).
Thus, it has been common since Logical Positivism for modern thinkers to claim - incoherently - that do not have any metaphysical assumptions, but 'instead' base their beliefs on 'evidence' (thereby including the assumption that they already-know what counts as valid evidence and they already-know to interpret it validly...).
Anyway - we should acknowledge that metaphysics is necessary, and an explicit metaphysics is necessary in modernity because metaphysics Will Be Challenged.
So - anyone can state a basic assumption, something about which we say: It Just Is; and the proper question is how may metaphysical assumptions be evaluated?
Ultimately personal evaluation is an intuitive process, by which our true-self (our real-divine self) grasps the proposition entire and makes a solid evaluation. But that comes at the end of a process of clarification - that is, we need to come to that state of simplicity and clarity before we can evaluate it as-a-whole.
One help is to assume the truth of the assumption, then ask: Does this assumption make sense of the fact that I know it?
(In other words, does this metaphysics support a coherent epistemology?)
If the assumption is (assumed to be) true,
Then could we, personally, know-that it was true?
Many metaphysical assumptions cannot sustain an epistemology by which they could be known.
This would incline me to reject them - how about you?
*
Most mainstream metaphysical assumptions are incoherent wrt. epistemology. As examples:
If natural selection is assumed metaphysically true, as the only and sufficient explanation of Man; then human reason must be a product of natural selection; which means that human reason can never know anything (because natural selection is about differential fitness, not about truth).
If it is assumed that the universe is assumed to be a combination of randomness and determinism; then we personally could never know this - because we personally would be a combination of randomness and determinism and could never know anything. The universe might actually Be random/ determined - but if so, we personally could never know that.
Thus, it has been common since Logical Positivism for modern thinkers to claim - incoherently - that do not have any metaphysical assumptions, but 'instead' base their beliefs on 'evidence' (thereby including the assumption that they already-know what counts as valid evidence and they already-know to interpret it validly...).
Anyway - we should acknowledge that metaphysics is necessary, and an explicit metaphysics is necessary in modernity because metaphysics Will Be Challenged.
So - anyone can state a basic assumption, something about which we say: It Just Is; and the proper question is how may metaphysical assumptions be evaluated?
Ultimately personal evaluation is an intuitive process, by which our true-self (our real-divine self) grasps the proposition entire and makes a solid evaluation. But that comes at the end of a process of clarification - that is, we need to come to that state of simplicity and clarity before we can evaluate it as-a-whole.
One help is to assume the truth of the assumption, then ask: Does this assumption make sense of the fact that I know it?
(In other words, does this metaphysics support a coherent epistemology?)
If the assumption is (assumed to be) true,
Then could we, personally, know-that it was true?
Many metaphysical assumptions cannot sustain an epistemology by which they could be known.
This would incline me to reject them - how about you?
*
Most mainstream metaphysical assumptions are incoherent wrt. epistemology. As examples:
If natural selection is assumed metaphysically true, as the only and sufficient explanation of Man; then human reason must be a product of natural selection; which means that human reason can never know anything (because natural selection is about differential fitness, not about truth).
If it is assumed that the universe is assumed to be a combination of randomness and determinism; then we personally could never know this - because we personally would be a combination of randomness and determinism and could never know anything. The universe might actually Be random/ determined - but if so, we personally could never know that.
Tuesday, 10 April 2018
The Inklings and the completion of Romanticism
Barfield's understanding of Romanticism as an uncompleted destiny is of primary importance to an integrated view of The Inklings. Barfield articulated this very clearly in Romanticism Comes of Age (1944) as well as subsequent books; but none of the other Inklings seems to have understood or been-persuaded-by the argument.
(Probably they were put-off by the fact that Barfield drew much of his understanding from Rudolf Steiner, and referenced Steiner's work frequently. Because although Steiner was certainly a genius of world historical importance (Barfield seriously and coherently compared him with Aristotle); he was also wrong about most things, most of the time - and in a peculiarly gratuitous and overwhelmingly prolix fashion.)
In a nutshell, Barfield saw Romanticism as a necessary but unfinished, indeed corrupted, development of human consciousness. Therefore, he saw the only viable option for modern Man as the completion of this change.
What happened to Romanticism, according to Barfield, was that it arose in the late 1700s and initially was taken forward very promisingly in practical terms by Wordsworth and Blake in England and Goethe in Germany; and was very fully theorised by Coleridge... but that it was soon diverted into modernism - that is metaphysical materialism/ positivism/ reductionism/ scientism - in the forms of varieties of atheism, political radicalism and sexual revolution.
By contrast, although both Tolkien and Lewis embodied Romanticism in much of their work, and were anti modernism in all the forms described above - they advocated and adhered a return to pre-modern states: Traditionalism.
In sum, rather than moving-through Romanticism to a new form of consciousness (along the lines theorised by Coleridge); Tolkien and Lewis attempted to fuse Romanticism and Tradition, or perhaps to use Romanticism as a means for returning to Tradition.
The completion of Romanticism is therefore still an uncompleted project! Indeed, the whole issue has proven to be very difficult to discuss at all. Coleridge never succeeded in making himself understood by anybody! - arguably until Barfield himself brought together and interpreted many scattered passages (e.g. especially in What Coleridge Thought, of 1971).
It is no mystery to me why the project of Romanticism remains uncompleted - to complete Romanticism requires:
1. A rapid (not incremental) and wholesale (not partial) replacement of fundamental metaphysical assumptions concerning the basic nature of reality. And...
2. This task must be done actively, voluntarily and explicitly by each person as an individual.
By contrast, the modern prevalent perversion of Romanticism (i.e. atheist, materialist, leftism) was introduced incrementally, unconsciously, by mass influences and in a top-down fashion; such that the whole system of modern Western thinking is commonly unrecognised and denied, is incoherent and self-destroying, is dishonest and relativistic.
Could Tolkien and Lewis have followed where Barfield was leading? It is hard to imagine - since they would need to be convinced of the impossibility of Traditionalism and also of the possibility, and goodness, of completing Romanticism. They would need to acknowledge that Romanticism was, in its original impulse, not merely a 'reaction' to industrialism and materialism; but an embryonic new form of consciousness. Romanticism-completed would (even without Steiner) also have struck at the particular self-definitions of Tolkien and Lewis's different, but in this respect similar, definitions of Christianity in terms of creeds, institutions, and authority...
Tolkien and Lewis would therefore surely have found it difficult to distinguish between Barfield's suggestions for a completed-Romanticism and the modernism they opposed root-and-branch. Nonetheless, we can - looking back on the Inklings and perceiving them as a spiritually-coherent group who themselves had a destined role to play in the development of Western consciousness - ourselves do the work that Tolkien and Lewis could not, and would not have done.
Which is to complete Romanticism with the help of their imaginative literature.
(Probably they were put-off by the fact that Barfield drew much of his understanding from Rudolf Steiner, and referenced Steiner's work frequently. Because although Steiner was certainly a genius of world historical importance (Barfield seriously and coherently compared him with Aristotle); he was also wrong about most things, most of the time - and in a peculiarly gratuitous and overwhelmingly prolix fashion.)
In a nutshell, Barfield saw Romanticism as a necessary but unfinished, indeed corrupted, development of human consciousness. Therefore, he saw the only viable option for modern Man as the completion of this change.
What happened to Romanticism, according to Barfield, was that it arose in the late 1700s and initially was taken forward very promisingly in practical terms by Wordsworth and Blake in England and Goethe in Germany; and was very fully theorised by Coleridge... but that it was soon diverted into modernism - that is metaphysical materialism/ positivism/ reductionism/ scientism - in the forms of varieties of atheism, political radicalism and sexual revolution.
By contrast, although both Tolkien and Lewis embodied Romanticism in much of their work, and were anti modernism in all the forms described above - they advocated and adhered a return to pre-modern states: Traditionalism.
In sum, rather than moving-through Romanticism to a new form of consciousness (along the lines theorised by Coleridge); Tolkien and Lewis attempted to fuse Romanticism and Tradition, or perhaps to use Romanticism as a means for returning to Tradition.
The completion of Romanticism is therefore still an uncompleted project! Indeed, the whole issue has proven to be very difficult to discuss at all. Coleridge never succeeded in making himself understood by anybody! - arguably until Barfield himself brought together and interpreted many scattered passages (e.g. especially in What Coleridge Thought, of 1971).
It is no mystery to me why the project of Romanticism remains uncompleted - to complete Romanticism requires:
1. A rapid (not incremental) and wholesale (not partial) replacement of fundamental metaphysical assumptions concerning the basic nature of reality. And...
2. This task must be done actively, voluntarily and explicitly by each person as an individual.
By contrast, the modern prevalent perversion of Romanticism (i.e. atheist, materialist, leftism) was introduced incrementally, unconsciously, by mass influences and in a top-down fashion; such that the whole system of modern Western thinking is commonly unrecognised and denied, is incoherent and self-destroying, is dishonest and relativistic.
Could Tolkien and Lewis have followed where Barfield was leading? It is hard to imagine - since they would need to be convinced of the impossibility of Traditionalism and also of the possibility, and goodness, of completing Romanticism. They would need to acknowledge that Romanticism was, in its original impulse, not merely a 'reaction' to industrialism and materialism; but an embryonic new form of consciousness. Romanticism-completed would (even without Steiner) also have struck at the particular self-definitions of Tolkien and Lewis's different, but in this respect similar, definitions of Christianity in terms of creeds, institutions, and authority...
Tolkien and Lewis would therefore surely have found it difficult to distinguish between Barfield's suggestions for a completed-Romanticism and the modernism they opposed root-and-branch. Nonetheless, we can - looking back on the Inklings and perceiving them as a spiritually-coherent group who themselves had a destined role to play in the development of Western consciousness - ourselves do the work that Tolkien and Lewis could not, and would not have done.
Which is to complete Romanticism with the help of their imaginative literature.
Tuesday, 10 May 2022
Re-reading What Coleridge Thought
I am currently re-reading various Owen Barfield works, including What Coleridge Thought (1971); which had a massive impact when I last read it in 2016. This reading led eventually to my still current metaphysical system (based on the eternal existence of Beings).
Both in 2016 and now, I gave the fullest and most active attention to my reading; which for me entails reading, in a cafe, at the 'best time of day' for me - which is before 11.00 am. I sit wit the book on one side and a notebook on the other; and read a bit but keep breaking-off to write comments in the notebook about as much as I read. And I take as long as it takes to work through the book in this way.
When I first read this book, I was mainly trying to understand 'what Coleridge thought'; but this time I am comparing this with the ways in which I have extended or modified my own philosophy - in which I was triggered by the ways in which I regarded Coleridge as 'dead right' and the ways in which I felt he was still captive to the philosophy he had learned as a younger man.
In particular, Coleridge (and indeed Barfield) seem to me to suffer - to a relatively worse degree than I do myself - from what Barfield termed Residual Unresolved Positivism. Coleridge was a great genius pioneer, and was making a trail for the first time; such that things were made easier for those who followed.
(Including that Coleridge had, by his work, permanently affected and added-to the world of divine creation - which we can now discover intuitively for ourselves - if we are able to ask the right questions.)
Thus, Coleridge's extremely abstract and difficult exposition of 'polarity' or 'polar logic' and of his schemata for describing human mental activity, can be simplified greatly (I believe) by the simple assumption of having the metaphysical assumption that the 'basic unit' of reality are Beings, which have properties such as life, consciousness and purpose - and who are 'defined' as existing through-time - which means that we should eschew discussing them without reference to time and transformation.
I have found this to be (so far) extremely powerful and satisfying - partly because it is an explicit elaboration of how I recall seeing the world as a young child; and it chimes with my understanding of the 'animism' of hunter-gatherer tribal people.
So, this time of reading, I am fitting Barfield's understanding of Coleridge into my own understanding - which is, in a sense, the opposite of what I did first-time-through.
Sunday, 6 October 2019
RUP in another guise: The problem of residual abstraction (maths, geometry, physics) in philosophical/ theological thinking
This is a really, really Big problem! What is more, it affects the very best and most important thinkers and writers in my pantheon of influences for Romantic Christianity - Steiner, Barfield, Arkle...
The problem is that the understandings and explanations of such people are/ remain rooted in abstract phenomena - despite that these are intending to advocate a personal, 'animistic', 'anthropomorphic' metaphysics.
Their basic idea is that reality is a matter of Beings in Relationships... That the ultimate entities are Beings (alive, conscious, purposive) and that what holds things together and provides structure is the relationships of these Beings.
Yet ni advocating a metaphysics of Being and Relations; these authors fall back, again and again, into abstraction; into the use of examples drawn from physics, geometry and mathematics.
eg. Steiner in Philosophy of Freedom develops his argument wholly abstractly, in terms of categories of percept and concept, and his example is the geometrical figure of the triangle.
Barfield uses physics as his primary mode of explanation; the rainbow is his most famous example; and he calls his new way of thinking 'polarity' which he describes relationships between beings in abstract-mathematical-physics ways - using magnetism and electricity as explanations.
Arkle's main book, A Geography of Consciousness, uses geometrical and physics graphs, tables and diagrams to explain his 'system' - despite that he explicitly asserts everything is alive and conscious.
This could be regarded as a prime example of Residual Unresolved Positivism (RUP) as described by Barfield - and the fact that Barfield himself was prone to it (as was his Master, Steiner) shows how difficult it is to shake-off. This difficulty is most apparent in Barfield's most deep and rigorous book - How Coleridge Thought - when the clash of perspectives is the source of greatest difficulty in understanding the argument. Barfield seems unaware of how his abstractly-structured schemes are so fundamentally at-odds-with what he is trying to prove using these schemes. The key term 'polarity' is mathematical and derived from magnetism (later electricty) - and as difficult to understand intuitively as most such ideas are.
The problem is so old that it can seem inevitable - it goes back to the ancient Greeks, who nearly always used (the ancient equivalent of...) physics as the basis of their metaphysics - with principles such as fire or water underlying 'everything'.
Another example is that 'form' is taken as primary (as with Plato, Aristotle and Aquinas) - and 'form' is conceptualised in geometric terms and often using geometrical examples. (A modern instance is Sheldrake's morphogenetic fields.)
Whereas the primary reality is actually A Being, not A Triangle; is a Being's motivation, not a force or principle.
This abstraction then leads on to the problem (the error) of regarding Time as... optional. The delusion that Time can be set aside, redefined etc. When a world is seen as abstract as its reality and bottom line - then Time loses its function; indeed Time becomes a nuisance!
Yet, if the world is of Beings, beings exists In Time, and only In Time. In cross-section, there are no Beings - because in a 'zero' timescale there is no Life, no Consciousness - if Life and Consciousness are primary, then there is and always must be Time...
Thus one error leads on to another,
But what this does show is the need for further work for Romantic Christianity; because Steiner, Barfield, Arkle are all in error by using maths/ geometry and physics as their models and explanations.
There us work to be done to restate their arguments in terms that are coherent with the conclusions of their arguments.
The good news is that - when thus restated - the metaphysics and theology of Romantic Christianity becomes something intuitively understandable by a child; rather than requiring advanced training in the natural sciences.
The problem is that the understandings and explanations of such people are/ remain rooted in abstract phenomena - despite that these are intending to advocate a personal, 'animistic', 'anthropomorphic' metaphysics.
Their basic idea is that reality is a matter of Beings in Relationships... That the ultimate entities are Beings (alive, conscious, purposive) and that what holds things together and provides structure is the relationships of these Beings.
Yet ni advocating a metaphysics of Being and Relations; these authors fall back, again and again, into abstraction; into the use of examples drawn from physics, geometry and mathematics.
eg. Steiner in Philosophy of Freedom develops his argument wholly abstractly, in terms of categories of percept and concept, and his example is the geometrical figure of the triangle.
Barfield uses physics as his primary mode of explanation; the rainbow is his most famous example; and he calls his new way of thinking 'polarity' which he describes relationships between beings in abstract-mathematical-physics ways - using magnetism and electricity as explanations.
Arkle's main book, A Geography of Consciousness, uses geometrical and physics graphs, tables and diagrams to explain his 'system' - despite that he explicitly asserts everything is alive and conscious.
This could be regarded as a prime example of Residual Unresolved Positivism (RUP) as described by Barfield - and the fact that Barfield himself was prone to it (as was his Master, Steiner) shows how difficult it is to shake-off. This difficulty is most apparent in Barfield's most deep and rigorous book - How Coleridge Thought - when the clash of perspectives is the source of greatest difficulty in understanding the argument. Barfield seems unaware of how his abstractly-structured schemes are so fundamentally at-odds-with what he is trying to prove using these schemes. The key term 'polarity' is mathematical and derived from magnetism (later electricty) - and as difficult to understand intuitively as most such ideas are.
The problem is so old that it can seem inevitable - it goes back to the ancient Greeks, who nearly always used (the ancient equivalent of...) physics as the basis of their metaphysics - with principles such as fire or water underlying 'everything'.
Another example is that 'form' is taken as primary (as with Plato, Aristotle and Aquinas) - and 'form' is conceptualised in geometric terms and often using geometrical examples. (A modern instance is Sheldrake's morphogenetic fields.)
Whereas the primary reality is actually A Being, not A Triangle; is a Being's motivation, not a force or principle.
This abstraction then leads on to the problem (the error) of regarding Time as... optional. The delusion that Time can be set aside, redefined etc. When a world is seen as abstract as its reality and bottom line - then Time loses its function; indeed Time becomes a nuisance!
Yet, if the world is of Beings, beings exists In Time, and only In Time. In cross-section, there are no Beings - because in a 'zero' timescale there is no Life, no Consciousness - if Life and Consciousness are primary, then there is and always must be Time...
Thus one error leads on to another,
But what this does show is the need for further work for Romantic Christianity; because Steiner, Barfield, Arkle are all in error by using maths/ geometry and physics as their models and explanations.
There us work to be done to restate their arguments in terms that are coherent with the conclusions of their arguments.
The good news is that - when thus restated - the metaphysics and theology of Romantic Christianity becomes something intuitively understandable by a child; rather than requiring advanced training in the natural sciences.
Friday, 22 December 2017
Bureaucracy and the positivism of thinking
If primary thinking is our unbounded scope, the opposite applies to the thought-world we inhabit in modern society.
It began with Law - which sampled from infinite reality just a few aspects for attention, and dealt with them according to standard procedures. When one is operating within Law, within the legal 'system' - and if one is competent - one is alienated from reality and from the processes of Life.
Law deals with a biased and ultra-simplified model of life - thinking as a lawyer is to think within this simple model and using only this simple model.
The same applies to all other professional discourses - medicine, the military, science (and all the sub-sciences); but the major alienating system nowadays is bureaucracy.
All bureaucracies - by their operational definitions and standard procedures - are and impose simplified and biased models of reality. And bureaucracies have extended into ever-more of life - and the different bureaucracies have linked-up via a huge increase in laws, regulations, subsidies, taxes, grants, monitoring, auditing etc. etc.
So the modern condition is to inhabit, and to think within and by the rules of, an almost-total bureaucracy - which has specialised sub-branches (such as law, medicine, science, the police, the branches of government, the mass media) - but which is incrementally converging into a single system, with a single set of master-priorities.
In a formal sense this convergence on master-priorities is not a bad thing - indeed it is a good thing: after all, the ideal is that all social systems be permeated and controlled by the master priority of Christianity (leaving-aside what specifically that would entail).
What is bad is that is two-fold:
Firstly and most obviously, the master priorities are evil. they are negative, destructive and ultimately inverting of Good.
But secondly they are simplified models of reality - and thus necessarily false and inadequate.
My focus on Primary Thinking is to emphasise that with primary thinking is a way of knowing the world that is unbounded and works by spontaneous, satisfying and intrinsically-valid processes.
Primary thinking ought to be the master priority - an un-alienated, participating way of thinking; not limited by professional or expedient boundaries - but inclusive of everything that is relevant and true; and - although limited in scope and precision - and in expression; intrinsically-valid within those bounds.
In sum: Bureaucracy is alienation; increase in bureaucracy is increase in alienation - consequently modernity is (from this reason alone - although there are others) already highly-alienated and becoming ever-more-so.
Was is more, the alienation is inescapable. The linked-unified bureaucracy is becoming ever harder to escape, as it absorbs ever-more of life - but even when it is escaped, the alternative thought worlds are almost-always narrow, partial, tightly defined, standardised in procedure and process...
Thus social media is not an escape from alienation, it is merely a different species of alienation. And that is the best we can manage - in modernity we take a break from one type of alienation by engaging in a different type of alienation - but the fact of alienation is constant.
Only if we practise an unalienated way of being - that is participation - can we escape alienation even for a moment. The first escape is into unconsciousness (sleep, trance, intoxication...) - but that is to cease to be fully-human (and anyway when we are truly unconscious, we do not know we have escaped alienation).
The importance of primary thinking is that in-it we escape alienation, and we enter and participate-in a world of unbounded scope and reality; we do not think within definitions nor according to procedures, but whatever is thought is spontaneous and true.
(Expressing the insights of primary thinking is, however, neither spontaneous nor true! On the contrary, it must be another model.)
Primary thinking is therefore intrinsically-gratifying, and self-reinforcing. It is also intrinsically self-validating - if we allow it to be.
The question each of us ought to examine is whether (and, related, why) such thinking is indeed to be considered as real.
It began with Law - which sampled from infinite reality just a few aspects for attention, and dealt with them according to standard procedures. When one is operating within Law, within the legal 'system' - and if one is competent - one is alienated from reality and from the processes of Life.
Law deals with a biased and ultra-simplified model of life - thinking as a lawyer is to think within this simple model and using only this simple model.
The same applies to all other professional discourses - medicine, the military, science (and all the sub-sciences); but the major alienating system nowadays is bureaucracy.
All bureaucracies - by their operational definitions and standard procedures - are and impose simplified and biased models of reality. And bureaucracies have extended into ever-more of life - and the different bureaucracies have linked-up via a huge increase in laws, regulations, subsidies, taxes, grants, monitoring, auditing etc. etc.
So the modern condition is to inhabit, and to think within and by the rules of, an almost-total bureaucracy - which has specialised sub-branches (such as law, medicine, science, the police, the branches of government, the mass media) - but which is incrementally converging into a single system, with a single set of master-priorities.
In a formal sense this convergence on master-priorities is not a bad thing - indeed it is a good thing: after all, the ideal is that all social systems be permeated and controlled by the master priority of Christianity (leaving-aside what specifically that would entail).
What is bad is that is two-fold:
Firstly and most obviously, the master priorities are evil. they are negative, destructive and ultimately inverting of Good.
But secondly they are simplified models of reality - and thus necessarily false and inadequate.
My focus on Primary Thinking is to emphasise that with primary thinking is a way of knowing the world that is unbounded and works by spontaneous, satisfying and intrinsically-valid processes.
Primary thinking ought to be the master priority - an un-alienated, participating way of thinking; not limited by professional or expedient boundaries - but inclusive of everything that is relevant and true; and - although limited in scope and precision - and in expression; intrinsically-valid within those bounds.
In sum: Bureaucracy is alienation; increase in bureaucracy is increase in alienation - consequently modernity is (from this reason alone - although there are others) already highly-alienated and becoming ever-more-so.
Was is more, the alienation is inescapable. The linked-unified bureaucracy is becoming ever harder to escape, as it absorbs ever-more of life - but even when it is escaped, the alternative thought worlds are almost-always narrow, partial, tightly defined, standardised in procedure and process...
Thus social media is not an escape from alienation, it is merely a different species of alienation. And that is the best we can manage - in modernity we take a break from one type of alienation by engaging in a different type of alienation - but the fact of alienation is constant.
Only if we practise an unalienated way of being - that is participation - can we escape alienation even for a moment. The first escape is into unconsciousness (sleep, trance, intoxication...) - but that is to cease to be fully-human (and anyway when we are truly unconscious, we do not know we have escaped alienation).
The importance of primary thinking is that in-it we escape alienation, and we enter and participate-in a world of unbounded scope and reality; we do not think within definitions nor according to procedures, but whatever is thought is spontaneous and true.
(Expressing the insights of primary thinking is, however, neither spontaneous nor true! On the contrary, it must be another model.)
Primary thinking is therefore intrinsically-gratifying, and self-reinforcing. It is also intrinsically self-validating - if we allow it to be.
The question each of us ought to examine is whether (and, related, why) such thinking is indeed to be considered as real.
Thursday, 4 April 2019
Romantic Christianity - from the past to the future
One fundamental idea of Romantic Christianity is that we took a wrong turning in the past and therefore need to recover and reconnect with lost things - another fundamental idea is that when this recovery and reconnection is achieved, we will develop to a future that is new and has never previously been experienced anywhere in the world.
So, Romantic Christianity has an element that is conservative, or even reactionary; and another element that is radical, or even progressive.
This can be seen in its antecedents: those writers from whom Romantic Christianity intends to pick up the torch and carry it forward. These include William Blake, ST Coleridge and Novalis - authors who looked back and were also innovators. Authors who were deeply Christian, and also unorthodox or heretical.
But their work was not taken up by society, and was perhaps incomplete - or, at least, their task and project was lacking in that self-conscious, explicit awareness which we modern people (it seems) require to be sufficiently convinced by an idea that we can powerfully be motivated by it.
In particular; it is part of the intuitive conviction that leads to Romantic Christianity, that the destined future must be - can only be - one that is consciously known and voluntarily chosen. That, indeed, the only free choice is a conscious choice - and this is, of course, necessarily the choice of a single person.
Such an ideal of free individualism has not been seen at any time or place in the past... nonetheless, the conviction is that nothing else will suffice, here-and-now.
The idea of going back and reconnecting with this Romantic Christian impulse was, I think, only itself made fully self-aware and explicit by Owen Barfield (in the essays collected in Romanticism Comes of Age, from 1944) - although he could perceive that it was solidly implied by the work of Rudolf Steiner.
But the possibilities for Romantic Christianity have changed over the past two hundred years, and indeed over the past decades. When it began, there was the possibility that the whole of a national culture (or a substantial segment of one) might take-up the project of Romantic Christianity - that, for example, England might do so.
To be more exact, that English culture might recognise the incoherence and insufficiency of the ruling assumptions of materialism (aka. positivism, scientism, reductionism) and reconnect with the embryonic spiritual and Christian tradition it had incrementally, and very fully, abandoned throughout the 19th century.
Such a large scale self-transformation now seems to be impossible; or at least the trends are contrary. So the hope of Romantic Christianity has narrowed to the individual. It is a project that operates one person at a time, one soul at a time.
This might seem trivial - except that (unlike for materialism) for Romantic Christianity each soul is immortal and of unbounded value.
By contrast, any and all worldly gains are bounded by the decay, sin and death that are intrinsic to this mortal world.
A culture, society or planet is evanescent; but a soul lasts forever.
So, Romantic Christianity has an element that is conservative, or even reactionary; and another element that is radical, or even progressive.
This can be seen in its antecedents: those writers from whom Romantic Christianity intends to pick up the torch and carry it forward. These include William Blake, ST Coleridge and Novalis - authors who looked back and were also innovators. Authors who were deeply Christian, and also unorthodox or heretical.
But their work was not taken up by society, and was perhaps incomplete - or, at least, their task and project was lacking in that self-conscious, explicit awareness which we modern people (it seems) require to be sufficiently convinced by an idea that we can powerfully be motivated by it.
In particular; it is part of the intuitive conviction that leads to Romantic Christianity, that the destined future must be - can only be - one that is consciously known and voluntarily chosen. That, indeed, the only free choice is a conscious choice - and this is, of course, necessarily the choice of a single person.
Such an ideal of free individualism has not been seen at any time or place in the past... nonetheless, the conviction is that nothing else will suffice, here-and-now.
The idea of going back and reconnecting with this Romantic Christian impulse was, I think, only itself made fully self-aware and explicit by Owen Barfield (in the essays collected in Romanticism Comes of Age, from 1944) - although he could perceive that it was solidly implied by the work of Rudolf Steiner.
But the possibilities for Romantic Christianity have changed over the past two hundred years, and indeed over the past decades. When it began, there was the possibility that the whole of a national culture (or a substantial segment of one) might take-up the project of Romantic Christianity - that, for example, England might do so.
To be more exact, that English culture might recognise the incoherence and insufficiency of the ruling assumptions of materialism (aka. positivism, scientism, reductionism) and reconnect with the embryonic spiritual and Christian tradition it had incrementally, and very fully, abandoned throughout the 19th century.
Such a large scale self-transformation now seems to be impossible; or at least the trends are contrary. So the hope of Romantic Christianity has narrowed to the individual. It is a project that operates one person at a time, one soul at a time.
This might seem trivial - except that (unlike for materialism) for Romantic Christianity each soul is immortal and of unbounded value.
By contrast, any and all worldly gains are bounded by the decay, sin and death that are intrinsic to this mortal world.
A culture, society or planet is evanescent; but a soul lasts forever.
Tuesday, 12 February 2019
Implications of Steiner's great 1918 Zurich prophecy
As I keep revisiting Rudolf Steiner's now-validated century old prophecy; I realise that, although the prophecy is about Western society, and what it needed to do - but hasn't done; and although the prophecy has been fulfilled at this social level - its true implications are for the individual.
The prophecy was based upon an understanding of what would happen if Western man continued in the path of increasing materialism/ positivism, scientism/ reductionism in public discourse and private thinking - and we did continue.
The spiritual realm is now regarded as purely 'subjective' - hence not really real, hence without relevance for social living. Reality is mainstream-structurally-regarded as meaningless, hope-less, going-nowhere; and we our-selves as irrelevant.
It is, of course, a disaster that The West has made these choices; but the lesson of the prophecy was actually for individuals primarily - it was that we must (and must means must) develop our spiritual consciousness into new realms - more exactly into a 'animism of thinking': a recognition that ultimate reality consists of living, conscious, purposive Beings in a creation that has been transformed by Christ.
This means that the modern public discourse has become - in rejecting God, Christ and the Holy Ghost - (quite literally) insane - as well as calamitous and dull.
But this operates at the individual level - and the social level cannot budge without first the transformation of individual consciousness - and this transformation can only be done by conscious choice; it cannot be coerced or compelled; nor can people be induced to do it by unconscious manipulation/ propaganda/ habit-training.
We must now choose the Good - because evil is the default.
The the lesson of the true prophecy is for you, and me, and everyone as an individual. It tells us what we must do if we are to avoid the general fate of our society: mental sickness, despair and demotivation.
The prophecy was based upon an understanding of what would happen if Western man continued in the path of increasing materialism/ positivism, scientism/ reductionism in public discourse and private thinking - and we did continue.
The spiritual realm is now regarded as purely 'subjective' - hence not really real, hence without relevance for social living. Reality is mainstream-structurally-regarded as meaningless, hope-less, going-nowhere; and we our-selves as irrelevant.
It is, of course, a disaster that The West has made these choices; but the lesson of the prophecy was actually for individuals primarily - it was that we must (and must means must) develop our spiritual consciousness into new realms - more exactly into a 'animism of thinking': a recognition that ultimate reality consists of living, conscious, purposive Beings in a creation that has been transformed by Christ.
This means that the modern public discourse has become - in rejecting God, Christ and the Holy Ghost - (quite literally) insane - as well as calamitous and dull.
But this operates at the individual level - and the social level cannot budge without first the transformation of individual consciousness - and this transformation can only be done by conscious choice; it cannot be coerced or compelled; nor can people be induced to do it by unconscious manipulation/ propaganda/ habit-training.
We must now choose the Good - because evil is the default.
The the lesson of the true prophecy is for you, and me, and everyone as an individual. It tells us what we must do if we are to avoid the general fate of our society: mental sickness, despair and demotivation.
Tuesday, 19 December 2017
Bureaucracy and positivism
Bureaucracy is, along with the mass media, the most powerful form of intrinsic evil in the modern world (that is, bureaucracy - like the mass media - is intrinsically and always metaphysically Positivist, hence evil in its form - quite aside from intent, it is evil).
1. Operational definitions
Bureaucracy works by reducing life to operational definitions - which are always wrong; wrong because simplified and distorted (wrong even-when, as is exceedingly unusual, the intention behind making an operational definitions happens to be honest and competent).
2. Procedure
Bureaucracy works by assuming that correct procedure leads to correct outcomes; which is again false - since all procedure (like all operational definitions) is necessarily simplified and distorted.
Furthermore, most bureaucracies are indifferent whether any particular procedure will yield good outcomes even on average and under normal situations - this is not tested nor evaluated honestly, it is just assumed - and contrary evidence ruled-out on the basis of falling outside of operational definitions and procedure.
Thus far, we can see that bureaucracy operates on the basis of constructing a model of reality, and like all models this must-be simplified and distorted. Of course, from within the model errors, bad-outcomes and contradictions are invisible - however, there is a danger that the falseness of bureaucracy would be unmasked by a human being evaluating the whole-situation.
Therefore to make the evil of bureaucracy impregnable requires:
3. Committee decision
Modern bureaucracy is ruled by committees which means that - since judgement is individual - all bureaucracies are non-moral which means immoral.
Even when an individual person is nominally in charge of an institution, he is regulated-by and can be over-ruled by, a committee.
We have created a world run only on the basis of necessarily-false models, in which ultimate authority is impersonal.
In place, therefore - everywhere, at the highest level - is a global, linked system of bureaucratic power without responsibility: we inhabit a system that is necessarily evil in form and effect.
1. Operational definitions
Bureaucracy works by reducing life to operational definitions - which are always wrong; wrong because simplified and distorted (wrong even-when, as is exceedingly unusual, the intention behind making an operational definitions happens to be honest and competent).
2. Procedure
Bureaucracy works by assuming that correct procedure leads to correct outcomes; which is again false - since all procedure (like all operational definitions) is necessarily simplified and distorted.
Furthermore, most bureaucracies are indifferent whether any particular procedure will yield good outcomes even on average and under normal situations - this is not tested nor evaluated honestly, it is just assumed - and contrary evidence ruled-out on the basis of falling outside of operational definitions and procedure.
Thus far, we can see that bureaucracy operates on the basis of constructing a model of reality, and like all models this must-be simplified and distorted. Of course, from within the model errors, bad-outcomes and contradictions are invisible - however, there is a danger that the falseness of bureaucracy would be unmasked by a human being evaluating the whole-situation.
Therefore to make the evil of bureaucracy impregnable requires:
3. Committee decision
Modern bureaucracy is ruled by committees which means that - since judgement is individual - all bureaucracies are non-moral which means immoral.
Even when an individual person is nominally in charge of an institution, he is regulated-by and can be over-ruled by, a committee.
We have created a world run only on the basis of necessarily-false models, in which ultimate authority is impersonal.
In place, therefore - everywhere, at the highest level - is a global, linked system of bureaucratic power without responsibility: we inhabit a system that is necessarily evil in form and effect.
Sunday, 10 December 2017
The Inklings 'group theology'
My ultimate reason for reading the Inklings is a 'spiritual advisers' - as a group, and not only as individuals, I believe they constituted an unique and profound Christian theology for our times.
My new-found, recent ability to understand and empathise with the work of Owen Barfield has led to some 'notion' of how the Inklings work as a complementary group - and how one might derive from this group a theological perspective which is not found in any one of them alone - and, furthermore, which would not be endorsed by any one of them.
What I am suggesting here is, then, something greater than (or at least different from!) the sum of the parts contributed by individual Inklings. And, to reiterate, I am aware than none of the four would be likely to affirm the final totality that I derive from their combination.
*
In other words, what I am doing here is making a judgement concerning the core contribution of each of the four main Inkling authors (CS Lewis, JRR Tolkien, Charles Williams and Owen Barfield) and assembling these into a single cohesive philosophy or 'ideology' - which includes elements of all four, each unique to that individual, yet combined in a complementary fashion.
(I also believe that each of these authors is abundantly worth individual study! So this synthesis is not meant to replace that study, but to provide an additional angle on them.)
I have already attempted to do this at various points on this blog, but without including as a vital participant - because I didn't previously understand what he was up-to. However, I now find that Barfield adds something which makes for a very different philosophy than when he is either left-out or regarded as merely confirmation of the other authors.
*
The Inklings work is mostly about imagination - and Barfield's unique contribution to the Inklings perspective is that imagination is potentially real knowledge - i.e. imagination may provide true knowledge about this world: this mortal life on earth and its meaning and purpose.
Without Barfield, there exists a gap between the Inklings account of imagination and the nature of religious, Christian, living. In other words, without Barfield, the Inklings cannot address and alleviate the problem of alienation in the modern world - the problem that we feel our subjectivity to be cut off from reality.
In sum, CSL, JRRT and CW all accept that there is a qualitative gulf between mortal life and Heavenly life - and that all men are in a state of exile. Barfield, by contrast, sees the difference as quantitative and the gap as something which can be closed - initially for brief periods, but with the possibility of an increasing and more sustained closeness between our 'everyday' modern mortal experience and a full participation-in and knowledge-of divine things.
Metaphysically, this is because Barfield is a follower of Rudolf Steiner who adhered to what he termed 'monism' - that there is ultimately one world, and that all the supernatural and ideal elements are, and are meant to be, in one world. This is in contrast to the kind of 'Platonism' seen in (especially) Lewis and Williams - where the real world is (and should be) transcendent; elsewhere, outside of mortal linear time and 3D space.
The element Barfield adds is therefore that imagination is (or can become) not only an analogy or symbolism, but actual knowledge of worlds that the other Inklings regard as higher and other.
Barfield also brings a very different understanding of the role of 'modernity' in terms of Christian history. Tolkien and Lewis see modernity as in essence a bad thing, a corruption - and would advocate a return to earlier modes of thinking. Williams is not far from this - but his Romantic Theology (his primary idea, in my view) is put forward as an optimistic future possibility - something that might revitalize Christianity and lead to a future of new and great achievements. But CW remains profoundly alienated with respect to the human condition: deeply pessimistic and dark in mood and spirit.
Barfield also regards modernity as deeply unsatisfactory - but sees it as a necessary transitional stage to a potentially greater, and ideal, future state of consciousness - superior to anything which has gone before: a 'grown-up' Christianity which combines the 'participation' in life of earlier phases of human existence with the self-aware, purposive, clear-headed and 'scientific' way of thinking of modernity. Barfield is therefore optimistic about human possibilities (although realistic about the fact that modernity seems to have rejected these possibilities and instead descended ever more deeply into materialism and positivism).
*
In sum, while Barfield's analysis and diagnosis of present spiritual problems is similar to CSL, JRRT and CW - his 'treatment' involves moving forward from this situation to a situation that is superior to any which have yet existed. This movement forwards (progression) is to be achieved by that 'evolution of consciousness' which constitutes Barfield's master idea; and the consciousness aimed-at is not the trance-like or dream-like ('shamanic' or classically mystical) states which are the focus of Lewis, Tolkien and Williams's interest - but by a self-aware, clear, purposive primary thinking of Man as a wholly-free agent.
This is seen as the mode of full, adult imagination; and it is the imagination of this state which constitutes our direct contact with reality - and the solution (however transitory) to modern alienation.
Much more can, and I hope will soon, be said on this theme of the Inklings Group-Theology - but that is enough for now!
My new-found, recent ability to understand and empathise with the work of Owen Barfield has led to some 'notion' of how the Inklings work as a complementary group - and how one might derive from this group a theological perspective which is not found in any one of them alone - and, furthermore, which would not be endorsed by any one of them.
What I am suggesting here is, then, something greater than (or at least different from!) the sum of the parts contributed by individual Inklings. And, to reiterate, I am aware than none of the four would be likely to affirm the final totality that I derive from their combination.
*
In other words, what I am doing here is making a judgement concerning the core contribution of each of the four main Inkling authors (CS Lewis, JRR Tolkien, Charles Williams and Owen Barfield) and assembling these into a single cohesive philosophy or 'ideology' - which includes elements of all four, each unique to that individual, yet combined in a complementary fashion.
(I also believe that each of these authors is abundantly worth individual study! So this synthesis is not meant to replace that study, but to provide an additional angle on them.)
I have already attempted to do this at various points on this blog, but without including as a vital participant - because I didn't previously understand what he was up-to. However, I now find that Barfield adds something which makes for a very different philosophy than when he is either left-out or regarded as merely confirmation of the other authors.
*
The Inklings work is mostly about imagination - and Barfield's unique contribution to the Inklings perspective is that imagination is potentially real knowledge - i.e. imagination may provide true knowledge about this world: this mortal life on earth and its meaning and purpose.
Without Barfield, there exists a gap between the Inklings account of imagination and the nature of religious, Christian, living. In other words, without Barfield, the Inklings cannot address and alleviate the problem of alienation in the modern world - the problem that we feel our subjectivity to be cut off from reality.
In sum, CSL, JRRT and CW all accept that there is a qualitative gulf between mortal life and Heavenly life - and that all men are in a state of exile. Barfield, by contrast, sees the difference as quantitative and the gap as something which can be closed - initially for brief periods, but with the possibility of an increasing and more sustained closeness between our 'everyday' modern mortal experience and a full participation-in and knowledge-of divine things.
Metaphysically, this is because Barfield is a follower of Rudolf Steiner who adhered to what he termed 'monism' - that there is ultimately one world, and that all the supernatural and ideal elements are, and are meant to be, in one world. This is in contrast to the kind of 'Platonism' seen in (especially) Lewis and Williams - where the real world is (and should be) transcendent; elsewhere, outside of mortal linear time and 3D space.
The element Barfield adds is therefore that imagination is (or can become) not only an analogy or symbolism, but actual knowledge of worlds that the other Inklings regard as higher and other.
Barfield also brings a very different understanding of the role of 'modernity' in terms of Christian history. Tolkien and Lewis see modernity as in essence a bad thing, a corruption - and would advocate a return to earlier modes of thinking. Williams is not far from this - but his Romantic Theology (his primary idea, in my view) is put forward as an optimistic future possibility - something that might revitalize Christianity and lead to a future of new and great achievements. But CW remains profoundly alienated with respect to the human condition: deeply pessimistic and dark in mood and spirit.
Barfield also regards modernity as deeply unsatisfactory - but sees it as a necessary transitional stage to a potentially greater, and ideal, future state of consciousness - superior to anything which has gone before: a 'grown-up' Christianity which combines the 'participation' in life of earlier phases of human existence with the self-aware, purposive, clear-headed and 'scientific' way of thinking of modernity. Barfield is therefore optimistic about human possibilities (although realistic about the fact that modernity seems to have rejected these possibilities and instead descended ever more deeply into materialism and positivism).
*
In sum, while Barfield's analysis and diagnosis of present spiritual problems is similar to CSL, JRRT and CW - his 'treatment' involves moving forward from this situation to a situation that is superior to any which have yet existed. This movement forwards (progression) is to be achieved by that 'evolution of consciousness' which constitutes Barfield's master idea; and the consciousness aimed-at is not the trance-like or dream-like ('shamanic' or classically mystical) states which are the focus of Lewis, Tolkien and Williams's interest - but by a self-aware, clear, purposive primary thinking of Man as a wholly-free agent.
This is seen as the mode of full, adult imagination; and it is the imagination of this state which constitutes our direct contact with reality - and the solution (however transitory) to modern alienation.
Much more can, and I hope will soon, be said on this theme of the Inklings Group-Theology - but that is enough for now!
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