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Prehistory is of course the study of all that
took place before the advent of written records. For Barfield, convinced
that 1) our understanding of even the historical past is distorted by the
tendency toward logomorphism; 2) the study
of evolution and the
evolution
of consciousness are inseparable; and 3) etymology is the best method
of approach to earlier forms of consciousness, prehistory remains very
problematic. With impeccable, patient logic, Barfield's works offer numerous
cautions concerning its contemplation.
"It was during the prehistoric period," Barfield
explains in Speaker's Meaning, "that both language and myth
developed. Clearly, therefore, the prehistoric period emerged immediately
from something we are only justified in calling nature, just as later the
historical period emerged immediately from the prehistoric." But here the
clarity ceases, for
here too [Barfield goes on to explain],
the kind of theory I have been engaged in criticizing in the realm of language
and aesthetics [that primitive man "projected" his inner world onto material
nature] involves, in the case of history, a sort of leapfrogging movement
backwards and forwards at the same time. We are kept on the rails to some
extent with the origin of history, because there we have the written records
to guide us, however much we may misinterpret them. When we come to the
origin of prehistory, then, as far as the psychology of it is concerned,
we have mainly speculation. Yet one would have thought that at least we
should go on assuming its emergence from nature, and not from the history
which only came after it.
Barfield seeks to straighten out the incongruity:
Nature, as such, involves the absence,
just as history as such involves the presence, of individual human activity,
as distinct from "instinctive" behavior. But if we maintain (or, if we
imagine or suppose, which is perhaps the commoner failing) that such [phenomena
as language and myth] are themselves the product of individual human activity,
individual human intention, then we are premising, psychologically, that
prehistory emerged, not from nature, but a still earlier "historical" period--a
suppositious period when existentially individualized human beings, not
altogether unlike Julius Caesar, thought and imagined and invented and
repressed and suffered from neuroses, and did a whole lot of other things
which are in fact only possible in--and really only conceivable of--the
historical period. (90-91)
Under modern idolatry,
we have forgotten that our collective
representations (a perceived rainbow for example) is dependent in part
upon our participation. Not surprisingly,
when we contemplate the past, especially prehistory, we are no less idolatrous,
even when we pretend to be scientific. Barfield cautions us to think more
logically about our understanding of events that may have taken place independent
of human (and perhaps all) perceivers:
When particles of rain, rays of light
and our watching eyes are appropriately disposed, we see a rainbow. In
the same way, given the existence, of the particles and the presence of
human beings on the earth, there arise collective representations, or in
other words the phenomena which we call "nature." When dealing with times
in which these conditions were present, therefore, it is quite reasonable
to describe and investigate nature scientifically, not only in the manner
of physics, but also in the manner of the sciences whose field of study
is the past as well as the present, such as geology, ecology, zoology,
and to do this as if the phenomena were wholly independent of man's sensory
and psychological participation. It is not necessarily misleading to do
so, and it has proved to be of great practical use. It is however not sufficiently
realized that different considerations apply to any descriptions, in familiar
terms, of natural events and processes, deemed to have taken place before
the appearance of human life on earth.
It may of course be contended (though I should
not like the task) that some animals enjoy representations sufficiently
coherent to set up a phenomenal whole, which could be called "a world"
or "nature." But this does not really assist much. For, although animals
appeared on earth before man, it is certainly not their world or nature
which geology, for instance, describes; and even so there remains the whole
vast panorama of prehistory which is assumed to have preceded the emergence
on this planet of sentient life of any description. (SA 37)
Barfield then becomes even more specific:
When attention is expressly directed
to the history of the unrepresented (as
in calculations of the age of the earth based on radioactivity), it is
invariably assumed that the behavior of the unrepresented has remained
fundamentally unchanged. Moreover (and this is, to my mind, more important),
for those hypothetical "human beings with collective
representations characteristic of the last few centuries of western
civilization" we might choose to substitute other human beings--those,
for instance, who lived one or two or three thousand years ago. We should
then have to write a different prehistory altogether. (SA 37)1
In
Saving the Appearances, Barfield concludes
that "We shall know what we are doing with prehistory, when we have firmly
grasped the fact that the phenomenal world arises from the relation between
a conscious and an unconscious and that evolution is the story of the changes
that relation has undergone and is undergoing" (SA 136).2
See in particular
Worlds
Apart; passim, Saving the Appearances,
passim. |
1A few pages
later Barfield resumes this reductio ad absurdum dismantling of
our usual thinking on pre-history: "We can adopt a Berkeleyan view of phenomena.
For Berkeley held that, not merely the unrepresented, but the representations
as such, are sustained by God in the absence of human beings. This wide
variety of collective representations which are found even today over the
face of the earth, and the still wider variety which history unrolls before
us, God has chosen for His delight the particular set shared by Western
man in the last few centuries" (SA 38). |
2"All that
is qualitative in nature," Barfield explains in Worlds Apart, "does
depend for its manifestation on our perceiving and thinking. . . . familiar
nature depends on something we do to inferred nature--though we do it for
the most part unconsciously. However it may have been in the past, it does
so depend today. The question whether we can investigate qualities scientifically
comes down therefore to the question whether we can investigate this 'doing'
scientifically" (140). |
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