Soul_of_Shu wrote: ↑Sat Aug 28, 2021 1:07 pm
Adur Alkain wrote: ↑Sat Aug 28, 2021 12:14 pmIn my comment I was thinking mainly of Owen Barfield, who I think was quite ethnocentric.
You realize you're going to be lambasted for misrepresenting Barfield. I would suggest that we are all to some extent or another 'conditioning'-centric, in that we all are interpreting through a conditioned mindset, which predisposes us toward certain views, for example, your own view that Barfield is ethnocentric, or that your guru Almaas is a cut above the rest ... Let anyone who is without conditioning cast the first stone
I really like Barfield. I found
Saving the Appearances a very interesting and inspiring read. Saying that he was ethnocentric was not intended as an insult. But it's a fact.
Barfield was a man of his time and of his country. We all know that he was one of the Inklings, a friend of Tolkien. Tolkien is my personal hero. I decided I wanted to become a writer when I read
The Lord of the Rings as a teenager. I think Tolkien is the most important writer of the 20th century. But it would be ridiculous to deny that he was ethnocentric.
So I'm not criticizing Barfield for being ethnocentric. I'm just saying that his ideas about the "spiritual evolution" of humanity have this ethnocentric bias. In
Saving the Appearances when he talks about "original participation" he consistently refers to non-Western peoples who "still" experience the world in this way as "primitives". In this he was just following the anthropologists of his time like Durkheim and Lévy-Bruhl. (Well, actually, these belong to an era of anthropology prior to Barfield's time; in 1957, when he published
Saving the Appearances, the most influential anthropologist was Claude Lévi-Strauss, who rejected Lévi-Bruhls ideas about the "primitive" mind.) In contemporary anthropology it's considered ethnocentric to use the term "primitive" to refer to those peoples, so it's never done anymore. (I have a degree in Cultural Anthropology, so these details probably seem more important to me than to most people.)
In calling those non-Western peoples "primitives", some obvious assumptions are being made: that those "primitive peoples" somehow belong to the past (although they exist right now on this Earth!), and that inevitably all humans will eventually have to go through the same "evolution" that modern "civilized" Westerners have undergone. (That, or face extermination, I guess.)
I am Basque, and I'm pretty ethnocentric myself. But I don't believe that all of humanity will have to go through the same spiritual development that we Basques have. And yet, I resist the idea that the traditional Basque culture (which I believe is imbued in "original participation") belongs to the past. I resist the idea that we Basques are "still" experiencing the world in this way because we are "primitive", but that we will necessarily have to become "civilized".
I'm currently reading Barfield's
History in English Words, which I find fascinating, but pretty ethnocentric. Here is a quote:
Strengthening their physique through the generations by stricter notions of matrimony, working by exogamy upon their blood, and through that perhaps upon some quality of brightness and sharpness in their thought, the Aryans became—Aryans. And then they began to move. And the result was the Bhagavad Gita, the Parthenon frieze, the Roman Empire, and the Holy Roman Empire—it was Buddha, Michelangelo, the plays of Shakespeare, Bach, Goethe—it was Aristotle and Bacon, and the vast modern industrial civilizations of Europe, Britain and America reaching out to the Antipodes.
Barfield, Owen. History in English Words (p. 17). Lindisfarne Books. Kindle Edition.
Since he includes the Baghavad Gita and Buddha, you can say that he was much less etnocentric than for example somebody like Tolkien... But since I'm not "Aryan", he still seems ethnocentric to me!