Kant
Moore
Russell
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The underlying basis of reality; an "extra-mental"
realm, the background of our perceptions, on which our collective
representations are based and familiar
nature is built. In Barfield's lexicon, comparable to Kant's
"noumenal world." In a sense, Barfield hints, the unrepresented is
the unconscious about which psychoanalysis
speaks.1
"The atoms, protons, and electrons of modern
physics," he reminds in Saving the Appearances, "are now perhaps
more generally regarded, not as particles, but as notional models or symbols
of any unknown supersensible or subsensible base" (17). And in History,
Guilt, and Habit, he elaborates on this assumption:
The physicists, as you know, have been telling
us for a long time that, in addition to [the world of common sense], or
somehow underlying it, there is the microscopic and submicroscopic world;
moreover that it is only this microscopic and submicroscopic world that
exists independently of ourselves; only that world that has an objective
existence. Some philosophers [G. E. Moore, Bertrand
Russell] have added that it is therefore only knowledge of that world
that can really be called knowledge at all. (15-16)
Barfield sometimes uses "the unrepresented" interchangeably
with inferred nature, "net given," and
"the particles."
See in particular
Saving the Appearances,
passim,
Worlds
Apart, passim. |
1"Certainly,
the 'something quite vague' which can be coaxed into producing an atomic
explosion does not look much like a collective unconscious--but then neither
did the represented, which underlies the ordinary appearances, look like
one--until we started thinking seriously about them" (SA 154). |
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