Philosophy and Different Worlds

In contemporary philosophy, what Owen Barfield calls "figuration" is known under the name “alternative conceptual frameworks.”   Richard Rorty says, "the notion of alternative conceptual frameworks has been a commonplace of our culture since Hegel." Rorty also regards Kant to have contributed to this cultural heritage:

Hegel's' historicism gave us a sense of how there might be genuine novelty in the development of thought and of society. Such a historicist conception of thought and morals was, we may see by hindsight, rendered possible by Kant...

But Richard Rorty finds such a notion unintelligible, a world well lost.  The world which is well lost is characterized by Rorty as "neutral material," or "Kantian unsynthesized intuition," a characterization he attributes to Kant.  Rorty points out that if Kantian neutral material really is neutral, then it cannot, in any explicable way, determine how it will be synthesized.  It - the intuition - is ineffable, and "is incapable of having an explanatory function."   But once we speak of it, then it has been synthesized - how else could we put it into words?  By itself, though, an intuition cannot be represented to us.

            In order to make sense of a phrase like "alternative conceptual schemes,” Rorty argues, we must be able to distinguish and identify what is being shaped, and the shaping power or function itself, for how else can we make sense of the statement that `the world can be shaped in different ways'?  Rorty enlists another philosopher, Donald Davidson to argue this point, that the distinction between content and scheme - what is ordered or organized, and the system according to which it is ordered - cannot be made in a coherent way.

            Rorty and Davidson take up with proponents of the notion of alternative conceptual schemes who suggest that such schemes are recognizable in differences of language.  Barfield certainly falls into this category: the nature of human consciousness is evident in texts, and those texts show a marked change from their first beginnings to the texts of today.  Davidson and Rorty state that what is necessary for this argument is some way of distinguishing between differences in language due to different schemes - and therefore different worlds - on the one hand, and differing points of view of one and the same world on the other.  The question becomes, "How do we distinguish between qualitative and quantitative differences?" An example of an extreme quantitative difference ought to provide a nice practice problem, says Davidson.

            Consider a language spoken by aliens, a language to which humans are wholly unsuccessful in correlating an environment, a world.  This might be due to their profoundly different conceptual scheme, such that the way they take up with the world does not at all coincide with the way we take up with the world.  But really, say Davidson and Rorty, do we have any reason then to call the vocal behavior of those aliens a language at all?  They might as well be regarded as not having any language whatsoever, as is assumed of stones and rivers, butterflies and trees.

            Alternatively, if a translation is more or less successful, that is, if a correlation of vocal behavior with environment is more or less successful, is there any reason to conclude anything more spectacular than a slight difference in perspective, as opposed to a different conceptual scheme?  In this example, an `alternative conceptual scheme' is indistinguishable from what is already and uncontroversially called a different point of view of one world.

            The world, says Rorty, is either vacuous, as seen in the discussion of the Kantian unsynthesized intuition, or it is what was always thought – the world is the collection of those things that all agree exist, that are not questioned, that are taken for granted, with only slight differences which are called differences in opinion, or something else equally uninteresting.  Humans are in touch with the world most of the time, for facts in dispute are few, relative to the other ones that are not.  Rorty goes on to say that insofar as the nature of the world is taken to be the arbiter between the "noncompeting trivialities" of idealism and realism, then any attempt to define the world, beyond it being "those planks in the boat which are at the moment not being moved about," is a mad, pathological chase.  He suggests that philosophers can "stop doing philosophy," if such is philosophy, and can instead attempt to "solve problems - to modify our beliefs and desires and activities in ways that will bring us greater happiness than we have now."  Let us consider Rorty’s alternative in more detail.

            In his essays "The Contingency of Language" and "The Contingency of Selfhood" Rorty attempts, as the only intelligible task for philosophy, what he set out in the last paragraph of "The World Well Lost":

[N]ow that these criticisms [of Kantian epistemology] have taken hold, the time may have come to try to recapture Dewey's "naturalized" version of Hegelian historicism. In this historicist vision, the arts, the sciences, the sense of right and wrong, and the institutions of society are not attempts to embody or formulate truth or goodness or beauty. They are attempts to solve problems - to modify our beliefs and desires and activities in ways that will bring us greater happiness than we have now.

Rorty tells new stories, stories in which the world of Kantian things-in-themselves is "de-divinise[d]."  Contingency, and not neutral material or The World, is the stuff of life. Language and self are not divine, but contingent, because science, poetry, and politics alike are metaphorical, are linguistic structures.  Human nature is nothing neither more nor less than the language of our politics, poetry, and science.  Rorty’s reasoning is straightforward: human activity is to speak; to speak is to be; to speak differently is to be different.  Further, truth is only where sentences are; and sentences are only where human language is, and "human languages are human creations."  Truth is a human creation, and does not refer to the status of the relationship between language and The World, which affirms or negates that language.  Nor does this truth jive with idealism, if that idealism clings to "the very idea of anything - mind or matter, self or world - having an intrinsic nature to be expressed or represented."  Truth, for Rorty, is a linguistic construct, and he urges us to see language "as we now see evolution - as new forms of life constantly killing off old forms."

            Rorty continues his story, lest we hold onto some pathological dream of essence. He goes on to tell of an idiosyncratic I, itself contingent, precluding personality as a last hideout for idealistic notions.  Rorty enlists Harold Bloom, Friedrich Nietszche, and Sigmund Freud for the work of de-divinisation of the subject, the poet/politician/metaphysician, now that poetry and politics and metaphysics themselves are mortal and idiosyncratic and contingent.  Rorty is forestalling the response that says, 'Even if there is no such thing as objectivity, there may yet be something called subjectivity, and it could have all the qualities of objectivity that the idealist holds sacred.'  But this is not to be; the subject is doomed to the same fate as the object.

            Each person is distinct, and not merely a copy or a replica.   Distinction can be traced back, not to some universal and blind "impress," but to chance, to "the contingencies of our upbringings."   I am no instance of a species, but am "contingent relations, a web that stretches backward and forward through past and future time," a web which bears thus the impress of each individual's "project of self-creation through imposition of one's own idiosyncratic metaphoric."  The web grows each day.  The project continues. New metaphors keep getting made, and old ones continue to die and add to the fabric of the web with their dead bodies.  The free play of language that we see today, in contrast to the orthodox, doctrinal, and magical attitudes of the past, Rorty says is due to the contingency of language - it is not fixed, neither in the world, nor in self as some expression of essence.  Exactly like traditional evolution, the progress of language usage is due to nothing but chance.

C

In Rorty's latter two essays we have seen him deny the representational nature of anything, contra Barfield, and then he suggests the alternative of evolution, which is Barfield's alternative as well. How do we see Barfield's evolution of consciousness being any different than Rorty's? Barfield too speaks of free play in language today, and points to the poetry of the Romantics as especially enlightening examples; and both Rorty and Barfield acknowledge the self-conscious character of the Romantic movement, as a movement to use language in a deliberately and seriously creative manner. Barfield sees the Romantics to have attempted to re-establish a representational nature of nature, but a nature representational not of what was on the other side of nature from themselves, but of what was on the other side of themselves from nature. That is, the Romantics were deliberately reinterpreting - experiencing - nature as representational of the human being. The spirit behind nature was gone with the scientific revolution, but there is more to it than that, says Barfield.

           

Pan, it seems, has not only not retired from business;

he has not only gone indoors; he has hardly shut the door, before we hear him moving about inside.

What this meant for the Romantics, says Barfield, is that

[i]t is no longer simply that the arts `reascend to those principles from which nature herself is derived.' The `principles' themselves have changed their venue. For we are told by the Romantic theory that we must no longer look for the nature-spirits - for the Goddess Natura - on the farther side of the appearances; we must look for them within ourselves.

            It is clear that though Barfield and Rorty deem romanticism as important to the discussion of the history of philosophy, they differ in their treatment of the Romantics: Rorty is critical, insofar as he treats their talk of representation as mistaken. Rorty admits of no human interior, nor exterior for that matter, as they go hand in hand, and depend on what he argues is a vacuous Kantian thing-in-itself - something not wholly present. Though Rorty does admit that we are not always present to or aware of the world, he accepts that "absence" as not interesting. For Rorty, though the Romantics did much to effect their own idiosyncratic metaphoric, they did so thinking that such language was expressive of something deeper. But they were wrong.

            At this point a discussion of the notion of metaphor will be helpful, for two reasons. First, metaphor is the poetic tool par excellence. Aristotle spoke of the making of metaphor as the preeminent poetic art, and as something not able to be taught, though it could be described in terms of series of associations. As the poetic construct, it is understood as the representational construct as well. So a look at such a construct will show us in fine what Barfield and Rorty take to be the nature of representation.

            Second, metaphor will be helpfully discussed because on this score we find the most direct connection between Barfield's work and Rorty. Donald Davidson's work on metaphor will be helpful, because Rorty acknowledges often his debt to Davidson in this vein, and because Davidson refers directly to Barfield. In his essay "What Metaphors Mean,"  Davidson argues that a metaphor - which we may consider as central to the Romantic poetry, in practice and theory - is not a vehicle of some hidden meaning, some `interior truth,' but that they mean what the words literally denote. The significance of metaphoric utterance is instead due to their effect: they draw our attention to something. Lest we think there be some formal and regular - causal - relation between the metaphor and that to which it draws our attention, Davidson likens the effect to being hit on the head with a hammer, and one may then see any number of things. Davidson quotes an essay by Barfield, "Poetic Diction and Legal Fiction," in which Barfield states that a metaphor "says one thing and means another."  Davidson says, in short, `No, Barfield has confused the effect of a metaphor with a supposed "hidden meaning" of a metaphor.'

            There is no fundamental disagreement between Barfield and Davidson, if Barfield's "a metaphor says one thing and means another" is understood as "a metaphor literally says one thing, and points us to another thing."  This is entirely consistent with his understanding of "meaning."  Barfield sees the evolution of consciousness, from one perspective, as a progression from an immediate awareness of the meaning of phenomena, to a preoccupation with the phenomena themselves.  Final participation is the practice of a new link with that meaning.  To have one's attention directed, by literal denotation, to some other thing, only precludes Barfield's understanding of metaphor if things do not mean.  For Barfield they do.

     Further, Barfield himself is convinced that a metaphor does in fact do something.  In Poetic Diction Barfield premises that work on the fact that a metaphor does something, namely, it induces a "felt change of consciousness," which is certainly consistent with Davidson's hammer blow to the head.  What Barfield means in particular by a felt change of consciousness is a change from normal consciousness - normal for oneself - to a different consciousness - consciousness experienced as different. 

It is at this point that the reader of Barfield encounters the difference between his theory of metaphor and that of much of contemporary thought, represented by Davidson: Barfield argues that that different consciousness which is induced by the metaphor is somehow akin to the consciousness that produced or inspired the creation of the metaphor.  This is not to suggest any lexicon of metaphor where metaphors are lined up with their particular and unique and detailed essences.  But Barfield does suggest a regular connection between true metaphor - that which imparts knowledge - and the consciousness that produced it.  Davidson's distinction between the meaning and the effect of a metaphor is a helpful one, if it serves to clarify and enrich, rather than preclude, Barfield's notion: metaphors are like hammers put to heads, in that one experiences a felt change of consciousness when engaged with that metaphor.  Further, the content of that different consciousness, whatever that content may be, is the meaning of the metaphor.

Barfield is convinced of the present free play of language and meaning, but he does not agree that it is due merely to chance, nor does he imply that all of the history of philosophy before Wittgenstein was a sham and a mistake, as Richard Rorty seems to.   Barfield takes issue with the role and nature of chance to begin with.  Chance is not implicit in evolution itself.  This is the essential difference between Darwinian evolution and an evolution of consciousness.  Insofar as Barfield's evolution of consciousness was meant to save the appearances of changes in meanings evident in human texts, it is a hypothesis, as all hypotheses are meant to save the appearance of some kind.  In this sense, though, "the concept of chance is precisely what a hypothesis is devised to save us from.  Chance, in fact, = no hypothesis."   "Chance" cannot be analyzed, and therefore is no help whatever in making human history intelligible.  Whereas the "forces at work beneath the threshold of argument in the evolution...of...consciousness" can be, if not analyzed, at least enumerated, described, and related to.

In the scheme of an evolution of consciousness, individuals are now able to use language – as Rorty too argues, but from different premises.  According to Barfield, such free play is not evident in the mythic language of the oldest texts.  Meaning in this period was "given."  What Rorty says about the "given" being a myth, Barfield turns on its head: Myth, the meaning of myth, was given.  But Barfield also says that meaning is no longer give, not because it was a lie or mistake from the beginning, but because things have changed - consciousness has evolved.

Barfield shows that a Kantian metaphysic is as good a diagnosis of the Western state of mind as any, and the more intelligible.  But Barfield, unlike for Kant, granted that imagination need not be blind.  If the appearances - which is all there is to the reality commonly regarded - are to be saved, it will only be so if imagination can see.  In Kantian terms, the thing-in-itself, as out there, is not accessible, but the phenomenal manifold, which is synthesized by the imagination, is accessible.  In this scheme, Richard Rorty's attack on Kant's thing-in-itself does not apply to a Kantian manifold.  And it is the relation between such a manifold and imagination that is the crux of Barfield's work in Saving the Appearances.

Even the Kantian thing-in-itself may not be so inaccessible as all that.  Though Kant introduced the purely limiting concept of noumenon, as an object of insensible intuition, it was for him purely limiting because he could not "comprehend even the possibility.”  Kant argued the limits of our sensibility, our intuition, as a limit to our knowledge, our conceptualizing.  Rorty argued that Kantianism is pathology, and suggested his pragmatic philosophy as therapeutic, not in the sense of fixing Kantianism, but by avoiding it like the plague.  Chance is worthy of our respect as the shaper of language and selves.  There is no stuff out there somewhere, whether inside or out, that somehow one shapes.  On the other hand, if consciousness has evolved, then Kant, Kantianism, and Rorty's pragmatism are not simply mutually exclusive alternatives.  They have told parts of a powerful story, but parts which, if told apart from a redemptive myth such as Barfield's, simply lose their power as edifying stories because they fail to tell us why such edification is really necessary.

            Rorty - and Davidson and Nietszche and Wittgenstein - have helped further break the attachment to language, extending the de-divinisation process to language.  Insofar as those linguistic representations are idolatrous, then Rorty's arguments imply the possibility of speaking a Kantian language without being attached to the meanings - the phenomena - to which Kant himself was attached when speaking as he did.  But unless one is convinced of the seriousness of the detachment from the world which Kant articulated, then attachment - or edification - is merely idiosyncratic metaphoric.  In light of an evolution of consciousness, on the other hand, the history of philosophy turns out to be an ongoing experience with the manifold itself, and out of that, an evolving dialogue with oneself.  Edification becomes redemption, and the result is that one’s conversation, and one’s life, becomes that much more significant.