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A key Barfield concept,
introduced in Saving the Appearances, alpha-thinking designates
thinking about our representations in
such a way as to remain "unconscious of the intimate relations which they
in fact have, as representations, with our organism and minds" (SA
24-25). Alpha-thinking is thus "a system of thought which only interests
itself in phenomena to the extent that they can be grasped as independent
of consciousness" (SA 43).
Alpha-thinking, considered
historically, is the increasing exclusion of participation
in order to make phenomena more predictable and calculable. ("Is it not
apparent to reflection," he observes in Saving the Appearances,"that
the validity of alpha-thinking, in so far as it is based on logic,
rests on that very participation which it tends, by its operation, to destroy?"
[SA 98].) Systematic alpha-thinking, Barfield notes, probably began
with astronomy (SA 43), and science is alpha-thinking in its most
advanced stage. The philosophical tenet known as "naive realism" takes
alpha-thinking to be all-in-all; it is alpha-thinking taken to be common
sense.
Though alpha-thinking,
left to its own ends, produces idolatry, it
is important to point out (see below) that Barfield never questions its
long-term benefits for the evolution
of consciousness.
With [the]
ability to experience phenomena as objects independent of human consciousness,
there has grown up our enormously improved power of grasping them in exact
and quantitative detail. (Indeed, it was by shifting our attention to this
detail that we gained that ability.) With this has come the progressive
elimination of those errors and confusions in which alpha-thinking is inevitably
entangled while, in its initial stages, it is still overshadowed by participation;
that is, the vague but immediate awareness of "meaning". . . . And with
this again, has come the power of effective manipulation on which our civilization,
with its many works of mercy, is based. Surgery, for example, presupposes
acquaintance with the human anatomy exact in the same mode that our knowledge
of a machine is exact. (SA 143)
"Whatever sins of omission
alpha-thinking may be guilty of," Barfield is anxious to remind, using
an allusion to Shakespeare's
The Tempest,
"our debt to it is immense":
We owe to
it, up to now, our independence, much of our security, our psychological
integrity and perhaps our very existence as individuals. When Prospero
renounced his last enchantments and set sail for civilization, Ariel, it
is true, remained with Caliban--but so did Setebos" (SA 57).
See in particular
Saving
the Appearances, Chap. III. |
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