From: Scott R (jse885@spinn.net)
Date: Thu Nov 14 2002 - 05:59:52 GMT
Sam,
----- Original Message ----- >
> However, I'm intrigued by your proposed shift, viz: you are"concerned with
> what I consider to be the basic work of philosophy, namely *changing* the
> way we understand key words".
>
> That's a very anti-Wittgensteinian approach (which doesn't make it wrong,
of
> course). He would argue that bringing philosophy into everyday language is
> the source of all our confusions; that the words are working fine just as
> they are (until the philosophers start talking); and that, if we want to
> ease our confusions, what we need is to examine how words are used in
their
> everyday context, and that will ease our troubles. To use his image, it
will
> 'show the fly the way out of the fly bottle', and stop us being worried by
> its buzzing.
This is all to the good, for ordinary language, but not for the
extraordinary language needed to discuss "the way things really are", if one
takes on faith, as I do, that the Buddha, Jesus, Shankara, Eckhart, etc. are
what they claim to be: knowers of the Truth. So I agree with, say, Rorty,
that such notions as that with our science and ordinary thinking, we can
asymptotically approach the way things really are, is bogus. Only a mystical
awakening can do that. So in my mind, what philosophy should be doing is
showing the paradoxicality of the unawakened mind, to bring it to aporia.
> How would you understand the fourth level?
As Barfield would have, had he addressed the question. That, around 500 B.C.
in Greece (and with parallel movements in the East), consciousness started
to change from what he called "original participation", where subject and
object had not split apart, where the spirit in the trees was seen "behind"
the tree, and where totemism made sense (the social level was everything).
With the Greeks, what he calls alpha-thinking commenced, that is, thinking
about things. This requires that the things become objective, and that is
what happened, a process that didn't really become fully accomplished until
about 500 years ago, and which accomplishment made the scientific revolution
possible. So we are now in a state where the participation has gone
underground, so to speak, namely we are not conscious of it, yet it is still
there, since otherwise we couldn't be aware of anything. Or rather, our
being aware of anything is what he calls 'figuration' -- turning the
unrepresented into the represented. The future he calls 'final
participation', where we regain our connection with everything else, but as
opposed to original participation, the connection is "felt" internally, not
externally.
Well, you asked. This short synopsis does violence to Barfield's thought, so
I encourage you to seek it out ("Saving the Appearances: A Study in
Idolatry"). Especially as a Christian theologian, I wonder what you make of
another key part of it. Along with the Greeks' alpha-thinking, he sees the
Hebrews as also working against original participation, but with them it was
by commandment (the second: no idols). He ends the book: "... the other name
for original participation, in all its long-hidden, in all its diluted
forms, in science, in art and in religion, is, after all -- paganism."
- Scott
>
> Sam
> www.elizaphanian.v-2-1.net/home.html
>
>
>
>
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