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Participation is for Barfield a "predominately
perceptual relation between observer and observed, between man and nature
. . . nearer to unity than dichotomy" (HGH 26). It is an "extra-sensory
relation between man and the phenomena" (SA 40) in which mind is
not yet detached from its representations. ("This older, embryonic relation
[between macrocosm and microcosm] . . . still
largely subsists--to strengthen and uphold him--in the instinctive life
of man, in sleep and after death, until he is reborn in a physical body"
[RCA 237].) "To be intensely aware of participation," Barfield explains
in Saving the Appearances, "is, for man, to feel the centre of energy
in himself identified with the energy of which external nature is the image"
(SA 109).
"Participation died," Barfield shows, "not
suddenly but by inches. It survived, for example, in chemistry longer than
in the other sciences and, after it vanished altogether, not only from
the sciences but from the Collective
Representations of the educated, or at least the urbanized part of
mankind, its echo continued to survive in their habitual use of language
for the purposes of thought. It is indeed only in our own time that we
are witnessing its eviction from that final stronghold" (SA 98).1
If "anyone . . . finds it difficult to form
any conception of participation, that is, of self and not-self identified
in the same moment of experience," it is not because there are no examples
ready-to-hand. To understand the reality of participation, Barfield observes,
we need only
reflect on that whole peculiar realm of semi-subjectivity
which still leads a precarious existence under the name "instinct"--or
on those "irresistible impulses, on which psychiatrists are inclined to
dwell. Many of us know what panic feels like, and ordinary men are proud
of their sexual vigor or ashamed of the lack of it, although the act is
readily acknowledged in retrospect to be at least as much something that
is done to, or with, them by an invisible force of nature, as something
they themselves veritably do. (SA 32)
See in particular
Saving
the Appearances, Chaps. IV, V, VI. |
1Some enduring
reminders of participation which endured even into our own millennium include:
medieval art and thought, the four elements theory, the four humours, astrology
(RM 18). |
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