Modernity and the Evolution of Consciousness: Part I

Modernity corresponds to an ontologically real phase in the co-evolution of consciousness and the cosmos: such is the claim of philosopher and “Inklings” member Owen Barfield. Rather than construe thinkers in the modern canon purely according to the dialectical history of ideas, Barfield also read them as symptomatic expressions of a new relation to the world that was brought about by more than human agency. In his book History in English Words (1926), Barfield points to Francis Bacon as one of the first to give expression to this new relation by reconceiving the meaning of “modern” in terms of progress. Bacon’s novel usage of the term reflected his distaste for—as it seemed to him—the impractical and bookish doctrines of Aristotle propounded by the Scholastics. Against the old ways, Bacon would measure the success and veracity of science according to the fruits it could produce for ordinary life—its instrumental value. The book of Nature was no longer Word-like, no longer a sacramental image to be scried; science, no longer a contemplative participation in the divine Mind. Rather, as Barfield and other scholars have noted, what seems implicit in Bacon’s reception of Christianized Neoplatonism is an increasingly opaque perception of the world, a new feeling for the density and otherness of matter. As those familiar with criticism of Bacon will recall, he is said to have articulated an extreme version of this new feeling with his declaration that, in the modern practice of experimental science, Nature shall be “put on the rack and tortured for her secrets.” Peter Pesic’s survey of Bacon’s work has since revealed this to be a misattribution, but its prevalence in contemporary ecocriticism suggests that the extreme version of this new experience—which, conceptually speaking, involves a disengaged mode of subjectivity held over and against a totally objectified material world—has become a force to be reckoned with.

Owen Barfield

If Bacon operationalized this new experience of the world with his instrumental approach to science, Galileo gave it theoretical expression in the distinction between primary and secondary properties. Only those features amenable to mathematical measurement were considered substantially real. The ontological status of qualities became virtual; essence, a vestige of our naïve past; meaning, a precious phantom exclusive to the human mind. The philosopher and mathematician René Descartes then further entrenched this division through his articulation of the metaphysical dualism of res cogitans (thinking substance) and res extensa (extended substance or matter). His epistemological dissociation of the observer from the observed would forge a legacy that all subsequent philosophers of modernity would be called upon to accept, negotiate, or reject.  Around the same time, we have Thomas Hobbes articulating his social contract theory on the premise that orderly human society emerges in opposition to the primordial “war of all against all” that is the state of Nature. These four thinkers are typically associated with a version of modernity which presents a hybridized reality: modernity as the imposition of dualized, abstract categories (e.g. nature vs. culture) onto concrete existence from a disembedded, ahistorical “view from nowhere.” What makes Barfield’s alternative, evolutionary understanding of modernity so commendable is that it allows us to account for the distinctions which characterize these hybridities without metaphysically dividing them. He achieves this, in part, by grounding his approach to history not in the dualism of Bacon, Galileo, Descartes, or Hobbes, but in the metaphysics of “polarity” which animates Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “dynamic philosophy” of imagination.

In “Either : Or,” an essay included in the book Imagination and the Spirit, Barfield reminds us that Coleridge proposes his philosophy as an alternative to Descartes’ premise that the extrinsic realities of matter and motion could exhaustively account for the entire universe. Echoing Friedrich Schelling before him, Coleridge calls instead for a conception of reality involving “two contrary forces, the one of which tends to expand infinitely, while the other strives to apprehend or find itself in this infinity.” The dynamism of these two forces is anteceded by their “prior unity” which, Coleridge insists, is not merely a concept but a reality. Any given subject-object relation is thus in truth a “tri-unity,” and the fabric of reality is—following Plato and Augustine—trinitarian. Coleridge names this primordial activity the primary imagination, which, as he writes, “I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.” To perceive tri-unity in the relationship of subject and object, is, for both Coleridge and Barfield, “the basic act of imagination,” a repetition in the finite, human mind of that “one power.” Contrary to the activity of discursive of thought—which abides by the either/or lawfulness of identity and noncontradiction—imagination sees in polarity an underlying wholeness: that the One can become as Two. Chief among the virtues of Coleridge’s dynamic philosophy are its reintegration of mind and nature in wake of Descartes and the way in which it re-contextualizes the constructive activity of human perception thematized by Kant as a finite repetition in “the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM”—in other words, in God.

Rudolf Steiner’s chalkboard

But what does this have to do with modernity? In Barfield’s lecture “The History of Ideas : Evolution of Consciousness,” he distinguishes history from the unconscious process of evolution by describing it as (at least in some degree) “a consciously directed process”: when humans emerge “from identity with the inner workings of nature” (i.e. evolution) and achieve self-consciousness, history has commenced. Thenceforth, evolution and history travel alongside each other. Barfield’s insights are primarily gleaned from his deep study of philology, particularly what he called “semantic history,” or the study of word meanings and their transformations over time. What Barfield found is that most words can be traced back to meanings which include both an outer-material reference (whether an activity or thing) and an inner-psychic one. For example, the ancient Greek word pneuma (πνεῦμα) included breath, wind, and spirit in its own peculiar, unitary meaning as all three without distinction. Barfield refers to such meanings variously as “perceptual,” “figurative,” “concrete,” or “imaginal,” (I will use “imaginal” henceforth) and contrasted them with the more abstract meanings of later ages like our own wherein the unitary meanings of imaginal words (e.g., pneuma) have mostly polarized into what are taken to be either purely subjective (spirit) or purely objective (breath and wind) meanings. What is unique (and controversial) about Barfield’s theory is his conclusion that what we now refer to as subjective meanings were once immediately given in perception—Nature was once Word-like, a speaking image.

One major implication of this conclusion is that the distinction we make today between inner realities (consciousness) and outer realities (the physical universe) is not final, nor is it an accurate basis for reconstructing human evolution or even the pre-human past. Rather, the imaginal meanings of ancient words reveals the inner to be co-primeval with the outer in a unity that precedes their polarization; to represent evolution accurately we must therefore imagine it as a triune process: a co-evolution of consciousness and the cosmos. As far as human history is concerned, the modern era might well be a twilight of the gods, but we must take the enchanted claims of prior epochs at face-value. When Barfield wrote that “The gods are never far below the surface of Homer’s language,” he meant it in all seriousness. In his major work Saving the Appearances, Barfield refers to the primordial form of human consciousness as “original participation”—a prehistorical state of being which mirrors the “prior unity” of polarity. As Barfield says in the lecture cited above, “I myself have occasionally used the word ‘participation’ to try and indicate a predominantly perceptual relation between observer and observed… which is nearer to unity than to dichotomy.” The imaginal character of ancient words testifies to the wholistic experience of “original participation,” a revelation that, for Barfield, can awaken us to the potential to make the world whole again by seeing the tri-unity of subject and object through imagination. In the second part of this article, I will sketch out more fully how Barfield interprets the polarization of original participation as prior unity into self and world. If dualistic articulations of modernity—forgetful of the link between observer and observed—are only one possible response to the evolutionary development of polarization, is it possible to conceive an alternative modernity which fosters their reunion? For Barfield, the answer is a decisive and dire yes.

Ashton K. Arnoldy is a Ph.D. candidate and teaching assistant in the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program at the California Institute of Integral Studies. His dissertation is focused on the recuperation of metanarrative in the work of Owen Barfield.