Descartes
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For Barfield, the philosophy
of René Descartes was
almost an inevitability --foreordained by the evolution
of consciousness:
The historical
student of words and their meanings [and Barfield himself was, of course,
just such a student] could almost predict, apart from any other source
of knowledge, the appearance at about this time [the 17th century] of some
philosopher who would do intellectually to the cosmos what Copernicus
and Kepler had already done astronomically--that
is, turn it inside out. And in Descartes, with his doctrine of "Cogito,
ergo sum," we do, in fact, find just such a philosopher. His influence
was immense. Practically all philosophy since his day has worked outwards
from the thinking self rather than inwards from the cosmos to the soul.
(HEW 165)
Though an historical
creation, the Cartesian world view came to be seen as common sense, as
central to what Allen Wheelis
calls our "scheme of things." Barfield was anxious to remind his contemporaries
of both its temporality and its fallaciousness.
Not only
what we think, but also the way we think is not necessarily the divinely
appointed way for human beings to think, but is simply the way in which
we have come to think, partly by persuasion and partly by the force of
habit. We may come to see, instead, how the Cartesian diremption of mind
from matter, though methodologically fruitful, is ontologically factitious.
Mind and matter can be separated notionally, and then separately explored.
But that does not mean they are separate. Separate exploration has brought
unheard of gains in accuracy, but only to one side of the coin, only to
the exploration of the outer world from without. The other side was first
disparaged as so-called "occult qualities," then
ignored, then treated as nonexistent. (EC 14)
Our habit of beginning,
as it were, with space and time, as if they were, with space and time,
as if they were existents, and then planting a number of objects in them,
may be traceable to the Cartesian innovation.1
Whereas it would perhaps be possible to begin with the process itself--in
this case the structural process--and look at the order of events, as it
were, from their own point of view. We should then perhaps find that the
relation between structure and space is reciprocal and that it is not the
inevitable nature of our minds, but the Cartesian abstraction, which makes
us find the notion of space without structure less absurd than the notion
of structure without space. (UV 133)
See
in particular "The Evolution Complex," Unancestral Voice, Chap.
11. |
1"He
had in mind a hint dropped by David
Bohm to the effect that the invention of the Cartesian co-ordinates
had marked a crucial moment in the history of mathematical physics, determining
the whole of its subsequent history. Perhaps the co-ordinates were not
as inevitable as we all assumed. Bohm had suggested that it was not a 'natural'
idea, but that there was, on the contrary, a certain arbitrariness about
it. Our ordinary direct experience both of space and of time was not Cartesian
but topological-inside and outside, above and below, before and after,
etc. But at a certain point in the history of science we had made an abstraction
that was not forced on us by nature, by introducing the precise, but limiting,
Cartesian co-ordinates . . ." (UV 133) |
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