Jung
Whitehead
Teilhard de Chardin
Levy-Bruhl
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R.U.P. (Residue of Unresolved
Positivism) |
R.U.P. occurs when
positivism--"the
position that there is an unbridgeable gulf between mental experience .
. . and the objective world, the outside world of nature"--"remains in
fact in a man's mind even though he may have in philosophical theory rejected
or resolved it" (SP 13). Those who exhibit R.U.P. "do not really
believe that man's consciousness ever was a part of nature's any more than
it is now" (RCA 190).
Those Barfield accuses of succumbing to R.U.P.
include the archetypal psychologist C. G. Jung,
the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, and
geologist / theologian/ evolutionary thinker Teilhard
de Chardin.1
"I can philosophize myself free from philosophical
materialism quite easily; and so, I dare say, can you. . . ," Barfield
remarks in History, Guilt, and Habit, but that
does not mean we are free of its influence:
after we have done the philosophizing
and gone back to ordinary life, the materialism is still there in our very
instruments of thoughts, and indeed of perception: it signifies that it
is there in the meanings of the words we speak and think with, and notably
so in the commonest words of all--words like "thing," "life," "man," "fact,"
"think," "perceive," and so on. It is not merely a habit but an ingrained
habit. It is even what we call "common sense."
(HGH 73)
Our "Beta-Thinking
. . . can convince itself that we participate the phenomena with the unconscious
part of ourselves. But that has no epistemological significance. It can
only have that to the extent that final
participation is consciously experienced" (SA 137).
See in particular "The Force of Habit" (HGH
65-93), "The Time-Philosophy of Rudolf Steiner" (RCA 184-204). |
1In
Romanticism
Comes of Age, Barfield laments that
Nowhere have I found any real grasp of this central fact: that self-consciousness,
that subjectivity itself, is an historical process. There are hints of
it perhaps in Jung; and sometimes some of the anthropologists--Durkheim,
for example, or Levy-Bruhl, with his 'participation
mystique'--seem to imply it. But sooner or later they drop some remark
which shows that at the bottom of their imaginations they still believe
that man has always, in fact, been what the Phenomenologists would call
'an embodied self in Nature'--neither more nor less of a self than he is
today. They show that they do not really believe that man's consciousness
ever was a part of nature's any more than it is now. But only that he made
a mistake and thought it was-a very different thing. (RCA 190)
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