Saturday 25 May 2019

A basic outline of the evolution of consciousness in the historic period

I have been reading Owen Barfield, Rudolf Steiner and Bruce Chlaton's writings about them and I thought it would help me picture their ideas by putting down in as simple an outline as I could the basic narrative of the evolution of consciousness that is in their work. For those reading this it won't serve as an alternative to reading their works but is meant to show the basic shape of their ideas in a potted form.

Literary tradition provides us with a record of recent changes in human consciousness and in this time period we can see changes. By looking at the way words and meaning develop we can see certain patterns. The word "pneuma" that once had a single meaning which held within it the separate meanings we now have of breath, wind & spirit, represents the way our current inner (spirit) and outer (breath, wind) meanings were previously unified. This represented a kind of consciousness where matter and spirit were also unified. Likewise,the reason that ancient man expressed himself in myth was not because he liked to tell fanciful stories but because that is how he experienced the world, Mythic consciousness where spiritual and physical had not yet separated was what Owen Barfield termed original participation, I remember taking a course on the Australian Aborigines, who from an external perspective with modern eyes would seem to live a life of material deprivation but instead their landscapes were rich with stories and meaning embedded in them and the world's origin was not a theory but an experience they entered into. It was however a tribal life rather than individual life. An interesting snapshot into an earlier time before they crashed into the modern world view.

From the time of the rise of Greek thought about 5 centuries before Christ till about the 15th century, we see the rise of intellectual life but still with a sense of participation. Subsequent to that the sense of individuality develops and original participation dies. Alienation emerges, in Shakespeare for instance we witness characters with individual inner life. Colin Wilson notes that the emergence of the novel marks an opening of our inner private life.

R J Reilly's book Romantic Religion has a chapter on Owen Barfield which gives an excellent overview of his works, he writes on the emerging self and the awareness of historicism:

"The seventeenth century first gives us words that indicate this perspective: progressive, antiquated, century, decade, epoch, out-of-date, primeval. Also, as an aftermath of the Reformation, we begin to find words hyphenated with self appearing in the language: self-conceit, self-confidence, self-contempt, self-pity—the centre of gravity has shifted from phenomena to self.”

We often think of thinking just in terms of what Barfield calls alpha thinking which is thinking about things, but just as important is what Barfield terms figuration. which is joining our sense information or percepts with concepts to make the things of the world, Steiner goes into detail regarding this process in his book "Philosophy of Freedom", the chair we see only exists when we have combined the concept "chair" with the percepts we experience. In thinking our world is created, interior is anterior. 

Another key historical marking point is the Galileo affair, his theory of the heliocentric solar system which is so often given as an example of the suppression of science by faith, yet I think this a facile interpretation, as the Pope was not objecting to Galileo presenting his theory but rather his insistence that it was TRUE. Barfield uses the phrase 'saving the appearances" to describe how up to this time theories regarding the workings of the material world were regarded. They were seen as systems for best describing our experiences, TRUTH was considered the nature of God and the human intellect could strive for it but not contain it. So Galilieo could be seen to be making an idol of thought and this kind of idol is now prevalent in our modern thinking. We have a lot of these eternal laws of the universe that are both scientific orthodoxy and part of modern consciousness and this is so for both religious or secular people, to go beyond these "Truths" is to the orthodox "unthinkable". 

So we have slowly built up in our minds thoughts that we worship as realities, true they have reshaped the external world with automobiles, computers, satellites, cell phones, high rise buildings etc. It's a moot point whether we would have created these things using theories rather than idols. But our ancestors would have thought these creations  magical/diabolic and I think we would be wrong to scoff at them for this interpretation. But this thinking creates from thinking a world with no inside, where the thinking that built it has been banished. Leaving a world without meaning which is not a good place. Although Steiner states that this stage is necessary for the development of the individual and an intentional act of imagination will move humanity to a new synthesis that Barfield calls Final Participation if we so choose to take that step.

Along with these dead idols of thought another striking modern obsession is looking for the smallest basic building block to find the fundamental basis of a world pictured as mechanical. Animals are killed and dissected to see what they are composed of but instead they decompose. Plants are put in blenders and the goo is examined to give an explanation for their life, form and beauty. In contrast to this, Goethe had the sense that plant and animal would yield up their nature to him through sufficient contemplation, that our senses, aided by our thoughts and are good tools for discovery. Truth is all around us, it is within us. Consciousness is the inside of creation. Steiner’s book Occult Science an Outline is an attempt to look back into the past from the inside, the opposite of H G Well's time traveller who took modern materialist thought back into the past to refashion a dead world. 

Our challenge now is to reforge the world in ourselves with abundant life and beauty, through imaginative and spiritual effort.