"Your life a construction, one day you will see, through the illusion, and into the dream." - Damh the Bard, The Cauldron Born
It is a trite common place in PostMo society that "we create our own reality". You can see it in phrases like "re-inventing yourself" or "attracting wealth". Very complex, nuanced ideas from thinkers like Immanuel Kant filter down into pop culture and end up being used by charlatans and politicians to make themselves more popular and/or richer, or more successful with the opposite sex. Entire university study programs are dominated by a moral and cultural relativism which insists vehemently that people are simply too magical and complex to be pigeon-holed with stereotypes or laws or rules of any kind (unless you happen to be a white Christian male, in which case, you are cast in the role of villain-oppressor-enforcer; having this done to you gives you an evolutionary advantage, in that your instincts for self preservation are enlisted and directed toward thinking more critically about the new system of thought).
Luckily, we don't have to spend aeons re-inventing wheels to get us out of this hell, given that it is obvious that the Leftist compulsion to purge the West of its spiritual foundations will, like cancer, eventually "kill the village in order to save it". If Plato's Timaeus is a rip off of Black Athena, or Jane Austen is actually (didn't you get it?) the foremost critic of Victorian spiritual culture, or if (hey, hey!) Alexander Hamilton is one cool multicultural dude, and if these realizations are supposed to regenerate a "New America", I guess it is just the natural consequences of generations (now) of indoctrination by the likes of John Dewey in "theories of truth". This is what happens when deep spiritual truths or philosophical reflections become "popularized" among the masses - something, perhaps anything worth knowing in those reflections, becomes "lost in translation" and ends up furthering processes which can only be described as diametrically opposite and opposed to their supposed spiritual progenitors. Can any thinking person possibly imagine that, insane as they were, our Founding Fathers would have endorsed (say) open immigration?
Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion. Which leads me to add one Remark: That the Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth. I could wish their Numbers were increased. And while we are, as I may call it, Scouring our Planet, by clearing America of Woods, and so making this Side of our Globe reflect a brighter Light to the Eyes of Inhabitants in Mars or Venus, why should we in the Sight of Superior Beings, darken its People? why increase the Sons of Africa, by Planting them in America, where we have so fair an Opportunity, by excluding all Blacks and Tawneys, of increasing the lovely White and Red? But perhaps I am partial to the Complexion of my Country, for such Kind of Partiality is natural to Mankind.
Or that Socrates was a card-carrying Democrat, as Scott Buchanan (that old arch liberal) seemed to think?
"Democracy, which is a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder, and dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequaled alike."
NOTE: I like Scott Buchanan, and may be being unfair to him, but he was (as all "persons of importance" generally then were, of the highly liberal persuasion). He did, however, liken Science to the "black arts": science is "the greatest body of uncriticized dogma we have today". So he is forgiven simply for having written this sentence, a very brave and bold move indeed for a liberal, intellectually, and one almost unimaginable for a "liberal" today.
It should be noted that the deleterious effect on American from immigration, both of the Irish (big city corruption machines), the Italians (the mob), and the Germans (left wing intelligentsia), has never been thoroughly probed or examined by our universities, for obvious reasons. Socrates was likely put to death, not for "corrupting the youth", but for inspiring young, elite men to critically evaluate the "democratic revolution" that threw the Greek world into such turmoil. And if Plato really got all his wisdom from Africa via Egypt, it is strange indeed that no one digs up any statues in Africa of ancient wise men, saints, sages, and heroes, at least none that resembled anything other than totems or idols. Phidias, they knew nothing of. It goes without saying that Jane Austen was a woman, presumably with considerably more wit and intelligence than the average or even superior man, and while she may have seen better than almost anyone the standard limitations of your average Queen Anne-era male protagonist, and may even have had a critical and cranky and materialistic streak in her character and makeup, her morality tales are practically sweeping indictments of almost everything the modern Left stands for, including "moral relativism" and superficiality most of all.
If this is the cure for cancer, more cancer, then perhaps we may safely render ourselves of a second opinion. If the cure for the West involves ripping out the only healthy organs it has left, and maximizing the unhealthy "progressive growths", then it's time to consult a shaman. In this case, if you have read your Immanuel Kant and your Nietzsche, your David Hume and your Wittgenstein, and are thoroughly convinced that Western Man "cannot go back" to that shameful time in which men built cathedrals to honor to the Creator (as if we could actually have adequate knowledge of something supposedly so recondite as the absent Sky-Father-God, who is really, since you've read your Freud, just a projection of infantile or juvenile wish-fulfillment), it is time to dust off a copy of Owen Barfield's Saving_the_Appearances:_A_Study_in_Idolatry.
You don't have to spend three decades of your adult life figuring out what the meaning of life is, that's the good news. We already have a way to speed that up considerably, if you have the requisite character and/or intelligence (enough of either one is usually sufficient to jump start the other) and discipline (you have to supply that on your own): you can do what thousands of noble and virtuous young lads and ladies did in bygone eras of unimaginable brutality and barbarism did - you can read the classics. And by the classics, I don't mean titillating French novels or decadent diatribes against the people who make your employment possible (Karl Marx?). I mean serious works of philosophy and religion.
Owen Barfield's little treatise, even considered abstractly, has to rank as one of the top hundred serious philosophical books written in the last four hundred years by anyone. If you are going to "go modern", he is even more important, because he understands the postmodern situation from the inside out, and has passed beyond it. Along with George Parkin Grant's neglected collected works, including his thoroughly brilliant English Speaking Justice and Technology and Empire, I can think of no Anglo thinker who is more useful or necessary to our present situation. I say this because these works are not merely theoretical, but practical and germane to the current existential crisis in the West. Reading Plato's Timaeus is fantastically wonderful (you will suddenly "get" the Middle Ages); so is picking through Evola's Revolt Against the Modern World (where you will be treated to an evisceration or vivisection of almost all modern sentiments on Justice), or perhaps Aurobindo's treatise on the Bhagavad-Gita is more to your taste (want to know how God's revealing act hides, in that very act, the knowledge of the Creator through the "fall" of man?). Wait, you may think. These are religious questions. Worse, they are theological. No exegesis, just Jesus! No Justice, Just Us! I don't have time to involve myself in cultic activities. There are tenure tracks to be gained, promotions at work for virtue-signaling & political correctness, Almighty dollars to be captured in the global marketplace!
But you don't have to be religious or even "pious" to understand Grant or Barfield. You simply are asked to follow a train of argument, and to think for yourself. No questions asked, nothing assumed, whereas many of the other "great works" of the modern and classical or pre-classical canon require a massive amount of preparatory work, like studying Dante, or an avid interest in some branch of esoteric wisdom which relies on personal perception and experience, like Eliphas Levi. I also include Valentine Tomberg's Meditations on the Tarot in this list, but some of the things treated in such works are so holy and profound that there is a great danger of being a child with a sharp sword in their hand. With Barfield (or with EF Shumacher's Guide for the Perplexed), there is no such danger. But you will have to think about it, and the work of thinking is primarily in following the obvious inferences in our own sciences, but simultaneously being able to separate yourself from your ordinary presuppositions about where those investigations should lead.
Owen Barfield, to put it quite simply, dismantles the modern worldview in two hundred pages of easily understandable prose, using the tools which the modern worldview itself provides, combined with a mind that is willing to follow the clues where they lead after asking pertinent questions. And, in my opinion, Barfield does this better than anyone else, saving perhaps his teacher, Rudolf Steiner (who, once again, belongs in a different and more difficult category requiring more intense preparation and inward effort).
Would it interest you to understand and actually know, to literally see, how the modern worldview of Science, Technology, and Progress literally eats itself up? Barfield catches it at the crime scene, in the very act of devouring its murdered victim, which is what he calls the "original participation" of primitive man in the Divine process of creating the mind and the world together. And how, pray tell, would he manage to pull that rabbit out of his hat? How could one possibly "prove" this from the evidence, given that amazingly progressed and evolved homo sapiens like ourselves weren't around to take accurate notes and conduct double-blind placebo controlled studies of the said events?
All anthropology, especially English branches, approach the study of the evolution of language from the position that primitive people were just like we are, except that they "fell back" from the consequences of their thought and embraced superstition, "peopling the world with gods and goddesses", filling in the gaps of their naturally but nonetheless limited knowledge. By "just like we are", Barfield means that modern men assume one of two things: either than primitive peoples were animals or pre-human (which is difficult to hold as one moves into the dawn of history and the classical historical period) who had not yet evolved a sufficient cortex (but if they had, they would have immediately begun to "progress" like we have - they were "like us" in that they were the seed, and we the flower), or that they had adequate computing cortex power, and could represent the world in front of them and manipulate it abstractly, but that superstition or ignorance, prejudice or bias was too strong for them (or morality too weak), and that they therefore shied away from drawing the logically necessary conclusions which must be adduced from the evidence of perceiving the same world which we see, which obeys logically necessary scientific laws, easily discoverable (given the right conditions or sufficient time/effort) through empirical study of these phenomenon. Sound familiar? About right? This is what you have been taught since you were old enough to make words, through Sesame Street and kindergarten, Sunday School, youth camp and scouting, all the way through to the modern university. It's in every movie, from Jurassic World to Mississipi Burning. Modern people believe that they have evolved, and they equate that evolution with the whole panoply of modern political correctness. Think of PC as representing the watered down popularization of a mulligan-witches brew of an amazingly nasty range of origin, everything from Frantz Fanon and Marcuse and the Weathermen, to Richard Rorty and Karl Popper and Susan Sontag. In some cases the variety of poison is not an absolute indication of its worth, as a lot of partially useful stuff gets thrown in the pot. However, the odd good ingredient, or useful insight, is generally lost in the welter of conflicting and poisonous goo. All in all, the purpose of this melting pot seems to be either as a sedative (something for everyone) or as an acid (no one is immune to every poison in the pot). As a failsafe, the smell alone can kill you (if you can still smell), or one can simply be drowned alive in the pot like a rat, and go into the ingredient list. What survives, or floats on the surface of this scum, is an oozy, unctuous fake religion, an ersatz neo-Puritan modern morality play, in which the entire world can simply be comprehended as a kind of Aesop's fable. The universe, in this brew, is no more mysterious (as Thomas Carlyle once put it) than the "cooking of a dumpling". The sacred spell of the Past is gone, gone with the wind, dying the death of a thousand cuts from critics, who have proven that our hominid ancestors were incurable racists and sexists who undoubtedly would repent if they had a chance to do so, and whose metaphysical views have either nothing to do with their perverse character (if they can be co-opted) or can be dismissed as irrelevant (if they can't be used to augment modern power narratives).
Just live your life, be nice, be politically correct; advance and continue to evolve. There, that's it! Even easier than reading a two hundred page book by some unknown Welsh barrister associated (suspiciously) with the reactionary and probably fascist group at Oxford known as the Inklings.
Barfield doesn't bother with political stuff in his work - I simply use this as a net to point out that political scenes in the modern world are built on the superstructure of something larger, which lies underneath like a giant turtle that holds up their world. This superstructure, Barfield argues, is actually nothing but abstract ideas codified in modern ideas (which is exactly, as it turns out, what modern philosophy claims about all possible philosophy in all possible worlds, so no surprise it is no exception). Barfield has a very clever scholarly and empirical method for demonstrating this. But he manages to go down to the root, which is another very clever trick. He doesn't (for instance) spend his scholarly time attacking the British Labor Party or atheists or the 1968 Paris riots. Nor does he try to undermine science in any way.
Quite the contrary, as to the latter point. Barfield believed that Science was part of the Providential purpose to clear the field of "original participation", and to make room for creative participation. Science provided an acid bath, which scoured the mirror of the soul clean from paganism; however, in a real sense, Science is "the last and greatest Paganism". Because even Science cannot confess God as He is, since it regards God as an object, who is to be filtered through the lens of Science. Nothing transcendent or numinous can come out on the other side, and thus, Science is left (as it were) standing alone on the field, the greatest of all earthly idols, and the only thing remaining. It is an idol, precisely because it takes as the totality of what is unrepresented, its own abstractions concerning that unrepresented, and this (specifically) while even being totally aware that this is precisely what it is doing on its own terms (thanks to quantum science).
Science knows that what "is there" (if the question has any meaning whatsoever) is actually "dust" or "particles", which our eye represents to us a certain way thanks to our abstractions and the feedback loop between the eye, our abstractions, and our representations of "what is" to our selves as "the real world". A tree is not just a tree: it is an energy web which we cannot see, made up of particles which emit even finer energy particles and reflect light, both of which are even more mysterious. It is only by assuming our assumptions, and agreeing to treat things as if all we already thought we knew was true, that we can "go forward" and begin to run experiments on this reality we represent to ourselves, and draw conclusions. We suspend disbelief (a disbelief, moreover, which is demanded by strict Scientific calculation), and then proceed to "know" matter by manipulating as being "dead" and inhabiting empty space (which, also, we know is not empty, through Science).
Science is an idol that "knows" itself to be such (on its own terms), but is helpless to stop pretending that it is such anyway, being unconscious of this in a deeper sense, as it does not "participate" in the numinosity of Creation. Its only function (besides providing us with acres of corn and anesthetics, very useful functions on its own level) metaphysically is to give man an opportunity to exercise independent and creative participation, which is the Recreation of the world in Christ, a return to the primordial state of original participation, and surpassing it.
As hard as this is for modern minds to accept, Barfield demonstrates lucidly from textual evidence (direct quotes) and anthropology itself that primitive or ancient man did not see the same world visually, nor experience it inwardly, in the way which we do. When he perceived the "particles" or "dust", his soul had inner motions which revealed things directly to him as representations of what was unrepresentable: this made him create "idols" to represent what could not completely be represented, the One Being behind all Creation and all of perception of creation. Additionally, because of the inner motions of the soul, and because of the lack of genetic training caused by experience in the gymnasium of Creation, he did not even see the same thing visually which we see. Thus, he did not "people" the world with divine beings out of superstition, refusing to follow abstract concepts which we have bravely pursued, but rather, described what he knew was there, and what he saw. He did not have the option to abstract from the sense world, mediate the world through that abstraction, and then manipulate it logically: he knew it, numinously, and the experience was credulous and undoubting in the same sense that we credulously and undoubting and with good reason "know" the law of gravity is there. When Homer writes of the "wine dark sea" and the "tumbling sky", these are not superstitious metaphors or allegories, but what he actually saw and additionally, "knew" inwardly. Julian Jaynes makes this last and similar points, and with similar scholarly acumen as Barfield (who approaches things from anthropology and etymology), from a slightly different angle in his magisterial The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.
What we call "consciousness" is just the absence of original participation, and the power to perceive the world this way germinated and grew very slowly in man - it was still alive in the Middle Ages, although this was a turning point. It was necessary to achieve full independence from original participation, because it was not voluntary, in order that man might grow from a slave into a son. Still, the possibility remains that man may become "stuck" in the teenage years. Liberated from original participation, and confident that this is unreal and never existed to begin with, he is ignorant that the world is a gift or symbolon or eidola of God, and so constructs his own Idol, the last Idol, which is false consciousness of a world of empty space and dead matter, with only man's appetites and desire for more power over a helpless Nature to guard and guide him from destroying himself.
What the ancients knew was "consciousness" was in fact the remains of the primordial state, dwindling slowly under the steady tutelage of genetic and cultural growth in the arena of the Fall, of dense matter, helped (perhaps) by the very tutelary powers which would be denied and cast out by the tutored new man:
Even so we, when we were children, were in bondage under the elements of the world
(Galatians 4:2)
Man cannot go back to original participation, but has to move forward into creative participation, in which Grace will perfect Nature, for nothing is lost, nothing is ever forgotten. The modern PostMo movement to paganism is still born, assuming it would even work, because the very "elementary spirits" themselves have changed under the Creation drama. Instead, man must clear away, with Reason, every Idol, and then destroy the last as he creatively learns to use even Reason to re-experience participation in and through the Christ, thus not only reclaiming all of his original birth right, but transcending it into that which is more.
Owen Barfield assumes, along with Rudolf Steiner, that man will learn to judge the angels, and "see through" Science. How is all of what Barfield doing different from what the modern PostMo culture is doing when it "re-interprets" fairy tales? That is the subject of a second post, but to get it started, and to end this one, I will say that Barfield 1) believes something is there (the "particles" and behind them, God) 2) believes it is knowable by man, and 3) points the way towards doing so, not through rewriting "narrative" of abstract concepts, but through handling evidence at a meta-narrative level (what he calls beta-thinking, beyond abstract alpha thinking). Post Modernism is essentially either alpha thinking that thinks it is beta (but can't move beyond concepts or abstractions, albeit anti-concept and anti-abstractions), or else it is immature beta-thinking which prefers to wallow in florid inventions (Gnosticism) as opposed to handling in a mature way the subject matter of Creation. Barfield would say that magic is real, and that the world is a mystery, even though (temporarily) we have to learn to experience the world as exactly the opposite, in order to prepare, in the darkness, for the final participation. In this way, man uses Reason as a tool, rather than letting rational abstractions compel him to think and perceive in ways inimical to his true nature. This is not Post Modernism, but a restoration, regeneration, and transcending of Pre Modernism.
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