Aristotle
Goethe
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"Why is it," Barfield
asks in "Speech, Reason and Imagination," "that, today, while everybody
praises the scientific spirit, practically nobody takes the trouble to
acquire it? It is because (let me whisper it very softly), today, the scientific
spirit really is a virtue!" (RCA 75-76). With no desire to be virtuous,
Barfield's books demonstrate an increasing interest in and complex understanding
of the nature and influence of science and scientific thinking, recognized
as a stage in the evolution of consciousness.
Science, we are told
in "The Fall in Man and Nature," is "the study of fallen nature carried
on by fallen man" (RCA 214). His writings offer numerous other semi-detached
observations on the meaning and effects of science and the scientific revolution:
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The philosophy of Everyman
could perhaps best be summed up in the simple proposition: science must
be true because it works. (RM 183)
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A philosophy, or scienti-philosophy--let
us call it a scientism--which has reached the stage of abolishing the "thing,"
will go on to abolish the mind. (PD 31)
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[Science] treats nature
as an invading army treats an occupied country, mixing as little as possible
with the inhabitants. (PD 32)
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Science (the causality-science
which is all we yet have) is clearly the most impenetrable of the prison
walls we call "common sense." (HGH
82)
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When the nature of objectivity
itself becomes (as for instance in modern physics) part of the problem
of method, science is in a measure pitchforked into philosophy. (RM
179)
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For me the use of mathematics
and of the inductive method are not the essential thing in science. It
is the scientific spirit that is essential: the regarding of knowledge
as an end in itself; absolute open-mindedness; elimination of all personal
bias--and the refusal to admit that there is anything which we cannot,
or ought not to, know. (WA 139)
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It seems to [me] that
certain wide consequences flowing from the hastily expanded sciences of
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and in particular their physics,
have not been sufficiently considered in building up the general twentieth-century
picture of the nature of the universe and of the history of the earth and
man. (SA 17)
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Physical science postulates
an unrepresented, as a something which
is independent of our consciousness in a way, or to an extent to which
the phenomena are not. Our consciousness
is, however, not independent of it; for it is in response to its stimulus
that our senses and our figuration and thinking together construct the
phenomenal world. It has however lately been growing apparent that all
attempts to conceive the unrepresented in terms of idol-matter in idol-space
and idol-time break down. Approaching it this way, we learn only that by
taking it up into mathematical equations
we can produce startling technological results. (SA 153)
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If we are seeking to
have to do with spirit, it is worse than useless to try to approach it
by way of scientific investigation--at least as the word 'science" is used
today, for science is avowedly based on mere perception, and in mere perception
it will always be matter we are having to do with and never spirit. Indeed
mere perception is itself the gap between matter
and spirit and, whatever else one can do with a gap, one cannot use
it as a means of crossing itself. (RM 150)
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Science, with the progressive
disappearance of
original participation,
is losing its grip on any principle of unity pervading nature as a whole
and the knowledge of nature. The hypothesis of chance has already crept
from the theory of evolution into the theory of the physical foundation
of the earth itself; but more serious perhaps than that is the rapidly
increasing "fragmentation of science" . . . There is no "science of sciences";
no unity of knowledge. There is only an accelerating increase in that pigeon-holed
knowledge by individuals of more and more about less and less, which, if
persisted in indefinitely, can only lead mankind to a sort of "idiocy"
. . . a state of affairs, in which fewer and fewer representations
will be collective, and more and more will be private, with the result
that there will in the end be no means of communication between one intelligence
and another" (SA 145).
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Why should the scientific
revolution have occurred when it did, and at no other time, although men
had been busy saving the appearances
by abstract hypothesis for century after century? We might be tempted to
answer this question by saying that it came when alpha-thinking
had succeeded in developing more efficient instruments of observation,
so that observations of the phenomena themselves became at last a viable
and more attractive alternative to the traditional medieval practice of
merely glossing Aristotle. (SA
68)
Sanderson speaks for
Barfield when he declares (in Worlds Apart) "My quarrel with modern
science, as it has actually developed, is not for rejecting theory and
contenting itself with phenomena; it is for not doing so. I do not quarrel
with scientists for refusing to try to penetrate to a realm beyond experience;
I quarrel with them for spending most of their time in just that realm"
(166). So, too, does Hunter when he offers the following characterization:
[Modern
scientists] fancy that, if you turn round quickly enough, you will see
the back of your head in the mirror.
. . . [They] are
like children thinking they can have it both ways. First they insist on
cutting out awe and reverence and wisdom and substituting sophistication
as the goal of knowledge; and then they talk about this method of theirs
with reverence and awe and expect us to look up to them as wise and venerable
men. (22)
As early as Poetic
Diction, Barfield was convinced that "what is needed is, not only that
larger and larger telescopes and more and more sensitive calipers should
be constructed, but that the human mind should become increasingly aware
of its own creative activity" (PD 28).1
And he remained persuaded of not only the axiomatic truth that "the mind
cannot refer to a natural object without at the same time referring to
its own activity," but of the "equally unforced awareness not only that
scientific discovery is always a discovery about language,
but also that it is always a discovery about the self which uses language"
(RM 139),2
Barfield wants to see a new kind of alternative science and, drawing on
the example already provided by Goethe (and others),
he has gone a long way toward thinking it through.
"No doubt the world
can be thought of as a sequence of causes and effects," he writes in History,
Guilt, and Habit; "but it can also be thought of as"
a sequence
of patterns, of forms changing into other forms. One can go further than
that. Can the life in nature really be adequately thought in any other
way? By treating it exclusively as a sequence of cause and effects, are
we not in effect struggling to grasp the whole of nature with the imprisoned
thinking that is in truth only applicable to the inanimate part of it?
It was a firm conviction to that effect that made Goethe,
at the end of his life, attach more importance to his scientific than to
his literary output. (82)
In the long run, "What
will chiefly be remembered about the scientific revolution will be the
way in which it scoured the appearances clean of the last traces of spirit,
freeing us from original and for final
participation" (SA 185).
See in particular
Saving
the Appearances,
passim,
Worlds Apart, passim,
"Science and Quality" (RM 176-86). |
1"Science,"
Barfield knew in 1928,
deals with the world which it perceives
but, seeking more and more to penetrate the veil of naive perception, progresses
only toward the goal of nothing, because it still does not accept in practice
(whatever it may admit theoretically) that the mind first creates what
it perceives as objects, including the instruments which Science uses for
that very penetration. It insists only dealing with 'data,' but there shall
no data be given, save the bare percept. The rest is imagination. Only
by imagination therefore can the world be known. (PD 28)
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2Earlier
in the century, under the sanction of logical positivism and linguistic
analysis, an attempt had been made to reconsider the role of language in
scientific reasoning, but as Barfield makes clear in the following account
(from Poetic Diction), the result was wholly unsatisfying and completely
reductionistic:
In the nineteenth century the real world
was assumed to consist in the last resort of things. The things got smaller
and smaller-molecules, atoms, electrons-but they were at least there and
if you had a powerful enough microscope you would, it was assumed, see
something like a number of billiard-balls, or little solar systems. So,
in a less sophisticated way, Hume had been content to assume that the 'impressions'
which were the material of knowledge were produced in the senses by 'objects.'
Twentieth-century science has abolished the 'thing' altogether; and twentieth-century
philosophy (that part of it, at least, which takes no account of imagination)
had obediently followed suit. There are no objects, says the voice of Science,
there are only bundles of waves-or possibly something else; adding that,
although it is convenient to hint of them, it would be naive to suppose
that the waves of the something else actually exist. There is no 'referent,'
echoes the philosophy of linguistic analysis deferentially, no substance
or underlying reality which is 'meant' by words. There are only descriptions,
only the words themselves, though it 'happens to be the case' than men
have from the beginning so persistently supposed the contrary that they
positively cannot open their mouths without doing so.
"It happens to be the case"--complains Mr.
A. J. Ayer in his Language, Truth and Logic--that we cannot, in
our language, refer to the sensible properties of a thing, without introducing
a word or phrase which appears to stand for the thing itself as opposed
to anything which may be said about it.
Kant erected the Forms of Perception as
a kind of impenetrable screen between the real world of 'things in themselves'
and the mind of man. The Positivists have substituted syntax for the forms
of perception, and scrapped the things as otiose. (18-19)
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