Berkeley
Kant
Bergson
Descartes
Galileo
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The prohibition--largely unstated but almost always
assumed in our scientific age--that the natural world is to be understood
without resorting to any hypotheses involving concepts of mind or subjectivity
or spirit. "I am not . . . saying," Barfield explains in Speaker's
Meaning, "that there is any embargo on a man's arriving at,
and even expounding, some kind of idealist philosophy or other, some abstract
theory or rational demonstration that mind must be conceived as anterior
to matter--Berkeleyism,
Kantianism,
neo-Kantianism, Bergsonism, Buddhism--there
is a wide choice." The tabu is of a different nature.
What the tabu enjoins is that he shall
put all that out of his mind as soon as he lays down his pen or leaves
the lecture room; above all, that he shall not attempt to apply it in any
other realm of inquiry that he may enter, an inquiry, for instance into
the origin of language, or of myth, or (if he happens to be a scientist)
into the basis of post-Cartesian scientific
method. As soon as he goes on to do this, he is bound as a respectable
member of educated society to start off from a whole array of presuppositions
that are quite incompatible with the conclusions he has arrived at as a
philosopher or physicist, or whatever. (109-110)
The tabu or the embargo (Barfield uses the words
almost interchangeably) results in a drastic curtailment of modern science's
claim on Truth:
The limited scope of all scientific inquiry
is today often emphasized rather strongly by those engaged in it. So much
so, that when we have heard them on the subject, we are sometimes left
with the feeling that we ought to look on all scientific theories as mere
"hypotheses" in the sense of the Platonic and medieval astronomers, and
that it is wrong to take any of them with the "literalness" that embroiled
Galileo
with the Church. They are, at best, we are assured,
the mathematical formulae which up to the time of writing have been found
the simplest and most convenient for--well, for saving
the appearances. In physics, in particular, there is a marked tendency
to treat almost as an
enfant
terrible anyone who takes the models literally enough to refer
to them in any context outside that of physical inquiry itself. (SA
54)
Under the sway of the tabu "those who [a century
ago] insisted that organic forces specifically different from mechanical
ones were accused of 'Vitalism,'"
and "those who today insist they are different from both mechanical and
electromagnetic forces are commonly accused of 'Mentalism.'
That "the absolute 'refusal of most biologists to admit the existence of
any forces remotely resembling mental operations" necessitates the backdoor
adoption of a "picturesque vocabulary" to account for "operations which
obviously are quite crudely mental,"1
we seem, under the tabu, not even to notice the contradictions in our thought
(xx 129).
Outside the sciences, the tabu produces other,
more pernicious effects, explained by the Meggid
in Unancestral Voice:
The tabu bars all approach to an awareness
of the encompassing spirit that persists and sustains through the transformation
that is waking and sleeping and through the transformation that is life
and death. It persuades the mind that the borderland between the non-spatial
and the spatial manifestations of spirit cannot and should not be broached
by the understanding. Its foundation was deliberately laid . . . at a time
when the form of Western thought was itself yet young and delicate. And
as the twig was bent, the tree has grown. In the course of the centuries,
as the forms of Western thought have strengthened and hardened, the barrier
has been entrenched and fortified by the two adversaries, till today it
has become a tabu. Even to think of crossing it is indecent. It takes courage
to disregard a tabu. . . . The scientist bows before it, because the whole
of his science is founded on it; the philosopher because he has taken his
cue from science and would now rather eliminate the ghost than sacrifice
the machine; the religious because, for, him, God must be God the Paterfamilias
or
nothing; the artist--nowhere perhaps than here has the strength of the
tabu shown itself more plainly. (UV 108-109)
See in particular
Unancestral Voice,
passim,
Worlds
Apart, passim. |
1Barfield provides
examples: "I mean, for example, when we hear strictly orthodox geneticists
talking of codes and blueprints and assuring us that each growing organism
refers to the blueprint for instructions, and then of constraints imposed
by nature, or mistakes in following the instructions and so forth" (xx
129). |
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