LukeJTM wrote: ↑Wed Jun 28, 2023 12:02 pm
Federica wrote: ↑Wed Jun 28, 2023 10:48 am
I’ll keep it brief here, as I don't have much to add to what’s been developed and highlighted by Cleric in various places here, for example the Cell intelligence thread you have linked. Yes, I surely agree (or should I say, I understand) that modern material science is significant and it is evolving in a way that reflects the evolution of consciousness. Consciousness is evolving towards spiritualization, as the peak of materialistic polarity has now passed behind us. This process has been very insightfully described by Barfield. In particular, he speaks of “final participation” that awaits our consciousness as a coming evolutionary phase, in which we will participate in the spiritual world without dualistic reserve, this time in full awareness, not instinctively as humanity did in past epochs. Barfield’s ideas provide a great way onto the path of Anthroposophy, and Leyf and Loftin, in their recent book “What Barfield thought”, make it efficient and fully approachable to discover that access point.
Steiner said that material science is still to ascend, and will ascend, to the spiritual. It’s on its way, so to say, currently still working through its instinctive phase, where the counterparts of the spiritual world on the material plane are still seen as abstract, mathematical, laws of nature. Maybe it can be said that Einstein’s thought showed preliminary signs of the descent of the Christ impulse in the sphere of material science. Maybe his theories, and even more so the more recent developments in a variety of scientific disciplines, show some signs of spiritualization.
Interesting. That certainly makes sense. Barfield's "final participation" I recall but I can't remember the specifics, so perhaps I should revisit him again. Barfield feels more accessible than Steiner (at first). I think it's because Steiner's work had a lot more information and detail.
So yeah, let's recall the idea of Final Participation. Everything I’m writing here is based on the book “What Barfield thought” by Landon Loftin and Max Leyf. I did start reading Barfield's "Saving the Appearances” last year, but I haven’t finished the book yet, I must admit.
First, the context in which the idea of
Final Participation should be approached is that of the
indivisibility of consciousness and the rest of reality. Barfield thought: they are distinguishable from each other, but they can’t be torn apart.
In other words, the common scientific approach that considers reality in terms of objects, fully separable and separated from our consciousness, divided from us who consider them, is
arbitrary. Arbitrary, but so ingrained in the normal present-day approach to reality, that we hardly notice it, as if the assumption went without saying. Indeed, very few say anything about this hidden assumption. Barfield is one of those few. The reason why we should be mindful of this assumption is that the only way we have to apprehend the supposedly separable/separate objects of inquiry, is
through our conscious experience. So how can we be sure that our experience has nothing to interact with those objects? Well, we can't! Yet, there doesn’t seem to be any popular alternative view in present-day scientific approach to knowledge.
To put it in a metaphor, we do as if we weren’t obliged to clear our own path through the forest - the staging post of our personal experience - in order to attain the clearing. So we come to know the clearing through that inevitable path we ourselves clear, and then we have things to say about the layout of the trees in the clearing, and why the clearing stands as it does, et cetera, but we forget that all we can figure out about the nature of the clearing depends entirely on how we got there. Had we cleared the path differently, had we come from a different direction, would the clearing have stood differently? We can never assume it wouldn’t, because the only way we have in order to say anything about it, is by... clearing a path to it! Yet, nearly everyone seamlessly complies with the assumption that our activity of clearing a path through the forest has nothing to do with the clearing. Instead, we call the clearing a 'phenomenon' that we pretend we have just bumped into from nowhere, and
we forget how we participated in shaping 'the phenomenon' into existence. In the authors’ words:
Loftin & Leyf wrote:Despite that people often regard the objective world as something entirely independent of our thinking, a critical examination of the evidence at hand calls for a revolution of our conventional views of this subject. The latter are advanced under the banner of scientific objectivity, but the standard is misleading, as we shall shortly see. After all, what evidence could ever be gathered to support the notion that the really real world is ulterior to our experience of it and is to be sought, rather, amidst speculative hypotheses as mathematical abstractions? Any evidence in favor of such a theory entails already having entered our experience and having refuted the very theory it was intended to corroborate.
So we can see that, even from a merely intellectual perspective, something crucial doesn’t add up in our standard approach to reality. We don’t need to fly to any esoteric heights to see that. At least, to establish this ‘diagnosis’, rational intellect is enough. An impartial, fresh. and sound philosophical inquiry is enough to point out the inherent problem with muzzling “phenomena” on one side, muzzling consciousness and thinking on the other, and pretending that we can go about “knowing” in such fashion. With the authors, one could even make the slightly provocative, but fully justified, claim that this pretension is actually
superstitious.
Allright, so that’s the
context in which Barfield conceived of the idea of Final Participation. We can sum it all up with another quote:
Loftin & Leyf wrote:When it is imagined that consciousness is left behind for the sake of apprehending reality in itself, in fact what has been achieved is that consciousness has been configured - and perhaps disfigured - in such a manner that all of our perceptions are unconsciously refracted through conceptual models that nominally deny the existence of the very thing on which they most essentially depend.
Now, moving forward, an unexpected glimpse of hope can actually be discerned in the current mind habit of considering objects as if separated from consciousness (in Barfield: alpha thinking):
Loftin & Leyf wrote:With modernity, the perceived heterogeneity of mind and reality has reached such a pitch that it is possible for thinking to be perceived as such. This is to say that thinking has become so abstract from concrete reality that it is now possible for thought to become an object of its own activity. Ordinarily, thinking is employed to perceive other things, but thinking itself proceeds unnoticed. However, direct reflection on thinking per se presents a new potentiality in the evolution of consciousness that was not yet present, so long as vestiges of Original Participation were still retained. In the latter condition, thoughts were inseparable from things and phenomena: hence it was impossible to grasp thinking itself…
In other words, in the heavily objectifying tendency of current thinking (alpha thinking) lies the seed of the next step in the evolution of consciousness. Because, when alpha thinking picks up just ‘thinking’ as object of inquiry (a special case of alpha thinking that Barfield calls beta thinking) all of a sudden appears the possibility of regaining a
reflective quality in thinking. In this reflexivity, subject and object can be brought to a match, and thinking can switch from a knowing mode based on
inference, to one based on
creation, as the authors put it. So the entirely
new state of consciousness that appears when thinking is brought to deploy its modern objectifying quality
onto itself, is what Barfield calls Final Participation (as opposed to the instinctive Original Participation of ancient man).
Final Participation is a “latent possibility” that Barfield laid out. Now it's up to us to make it happen. It is our responsibility to actualize it, through individual initiative, through our free decision to walk this path we are walking.