Near the end of a recent Youtube video interview exploring identity in the digital age on Jonathan Pageau’s Symbolic World channel, Mary Harrington suggests that we are now witnessing the 17th century in reverse.
How strange. I watched the YouTube clip you referenced this morning. Then I happened to read the section of McGillchrist's 'The Trouble With Things' that discusses formal and efficient causes. Now I'm reading your piece on the same topic. It looks like the Universe wants me to get this topic down pat.
I wonder about the Hegelian roots (maybe even Neoplatonist?) of Barfield's conception of "necessary evolutionary stage" (as you say) of disenchantment to scour away the sticky bits of paganism and clean us up for autonomy. Anyway, I found Harrington's linkage of technologies of communication to notions (imaginaries of the person) of soul, self, and identity very interesting.
Note the differences of self-corrective capacities linked to these technologies of communication. Oral cultures subsist within what Hans Jonas dubs "ontologies of life" where everything is alive with the same intentionality of its percipients. The self-correcting capacities of oral cultures reach only to the family and at best to the tribe, where like knows like. So, oral cultures are very pagan (as you mention) in the specific sense of recognizing life and spirit in the full stretch of commonly experienced things within the tribe.
Literate cultures have fully detached communication from the person and preserved it via decontextualizable artifacts, words on parchment, paper, etc. This makes communication portable too--capable of being corrected by a multiplicity of cultures and worldviews. Literate cultures are all about objectivity, about ideas whose truth is in no way dependent upon contingencies of person, place, or time. Here the self becomes an objective subjectivity, a meat-enclosed capsule of subjectivity.
Finally, digital cultures are liquid, saturated with non-stop communications travelling at almost the speed of light from everywhere. Do we find any self-correcting mechanism within such maelstroms of digital data? We make our identities by trying on virtually every option that attracts our attention and catalyzes our mimetic desire.
Just a few undisciplined reactions to your very interesting blog post. Thanks.
Thanks. I find the tripartite of cultures--oral, literate and digital--suggestive of Barfield's schema. It certainly works for the first two. The digital appears to be an outlier, however. I believe that Barfield treats the current digital age as a dangerous extension of our materialist ideology (the literate stage) rather than a departure from it, though I may be mistaken. You are also right about the link between dominant communication technologies within a culture and the identities formed therein. I like your "meat-enclosed capsule of subjectivity." I found Harrington's comments towards the end of the interview about how growing up with digital media gives people--at least some people--the capacity to detect patterns--memes, for example--in the "firehose" of information coming at them interesting. It suggests, or assumes, that there is an integral self capable of standing in such a stream and not being washed away or dissolved. I'm not sure about self-correcting mechanisms, however. How would you interpret this ability she speaks of? And then, finally, to get to Hegel. If what you're saying is true, it would be ironic, since Barfield went out of his way to disinguish his "polarity" from the Hegelian dialectic. But it is hard to imagine anyone--especially a German, like Barfield's master Rudolf Steiner--not being deeply affected by Hegel's program. I wonder about my use of "necessary evolutionary stage" now, since the stage is "necessary" only in the sense of necessary for the eradication of paganism. The eradication itself is not necessary, however. Barfield's third stage of final participation will not necessarily arrive (in the Hegelian sense). I think this is why he was quite depressed towards the end of his life. But perhaps I have misunderstood you?
Very interesting. I’m working up an essay now on the 17th C using Cromwell as a starting point. something “happened” in that century overall, a sort of break in …. something. Great deal of strangeness
I find some of these intellectual games highly entertaining and if I could afford it I would probably subscribe to someone like Mary Harrington in a minute. I could probably ignore the irrationalist "woo" that underpins her flights of intellectual fancy in order to appreciate the almost non-stop "cleverness" of the work at hand.
But ultimately, as I did when I was balls-deep in deconstruction as a grad student in the mid-80s, I have to say: "Well now, as fun as all this really is, we do have an actual world out there that could benefit from the attention of well-intentioned clever folk, no?"
These endless discussions of "identity" and "soul" and "must we really go back to Thomist Christianity to really LIVE?" remind me of the Simon and Garfunkel song The Dangling Conversation wherein we are confronted with the abyss implicit in the questions "Can analysis be worthwhile? Is the theater really dead?"
I'm fully aware that when addressing the kind of people who find these issues "deep" and "meaningful" I am addressing people whose capacities for shrugging off any "real world issues" are beyond substantial.
But the fact remains that a tiny sliver of what? 15% of the global population has the luxury to consider whether it is important that formal and final causes return to their former glory in our approach to understanding life itself.
Substackers unite! You have nothing to lose but your paid subscribers!
For the rest of the world, particularly for the 5 billion or so utterly and completely human persons who live on less than $10 a day? I suspect most of them are hardly in a turmoil over the status of their identity/self/soul and more concerned with feeding themselves and their children for one more day.
I don't espouse this theory, however, some have thought that the elites really control society, and many of them never believed in any of these religions, but picked and chose winners to achieve their ends. It sounds like something out of Pareto or Mosca, but I don't know the origin. You see some hints of this worldview in Livy and a boatload of it in Machiavelli and there is a theory that ancient Chinese society was organized around three different religions that were each useful to a different class of people. Just throwing this out there because I am temperamentally oppositional, and I do not want to distract from the points that A) Christianity is true and B) the new intellectual movements are metaphysically bankrupt. One of the worst outcomes of this is a recent trend in celebrating western cultures tendency to let women dress in thongs and attributing this great achievement to the Holy Powers of Christianity allowing women to sexily display their bodies. I am suppressing an even cruder critique of this worldview, which might ultimately be motivated by men trying to sanctify their porn addled brains.
How strange. I watched the YouTube clip you referenced this morning. Then I happened to read the section of McGillchrist's 'The Trouble With Things' that discusses formal and efficient causes. Now I'm reading your piece on the same topic. It looks like the Universe wants me to get this topic down pat.
Yes, one ought to pay attention to such things. :)
I wonder about the Hegelian roots (maybe even Neoplatonist?) of Barfield's conception of "necessary evolutionary stage" (as you say) of disenchantment to scour away the sticky bits of paganism and clean us up for autonomy. Anyway, I found Harrington's linkage of technologies of communication to notions (imaginaries of the person) of soul, self, and identity very interesting.
Note the differences of self-corrective capacities linked to these technologies of communication. Oral cultures subsist within what Hans Jonas dubs "ontologies of life" where everything is alive with the same intentionality of its percipients. The self-correcting capacities of oral cultures reach only to the family and at best to the tribe, where like knows like. So, oral cultures are very pagan (as you mention) in the specific sense of recognizing life and spirit in the full stretch of commonly experienced things within the tribe.
Literate cultures have fully detached communication from the person and preserved it via decontextualizable artifacts, words on parchment, paper, etc. This makes communication portable too--capable of being corrected by a multiplicity of cultures and worldviews. Literate cultures are all about objectivity, about ideas whose truth is in no way dependent upon contingencies of person, place, or time. Here the self becomes an objective subjectivity, a meat-enclosed capsule of subjectivity.
Finally, digital cultures are liquid, saturated with non-stop communications travelling at almost the speed of light from everywhere. Do we find any self-correcting mechanism within such maelstroms of digital data? We make our identities by trying on virtually every option that attracts our attention and catalyzes our mimetic desire.
Just a few undisciplined reactions to your very interesting blog post. Thanks.
Thanks. I find the tripartite of cultures--oral, literate and digital--suggestive of Barfield's schema. It certainly works for the first two. The digital appears to be an outlier, however. I believe that Barfield treats the current digital age as a dangerous extension of our materialist ideology (the literate stage) rather than a departure from it, though I may be mistaken. You are also right about the link between dominant communication technologies within a culture and the identities formed therein. I like your "meat-enclosed capsule of subjectivity." I found Harrington's comments towards the end of the interview about how growing up with digital media gives people--at least some people--the capacity to detect patterns--memes, for example--in the "firehose" of information coming at them interesting. It suggests, or assumes, that there is an integral self capable of standing in such a stream and not being washed away or dissolved. I'm not sure about self-correcting mechanisms, however. How would you interpret this ability she speaks of? And then, finally, to get to Hegel. If what you're saying is true, it would be ironic, since Barfield went out of his way to disinguish his "polarity" from the Hegelian dialectic. But it is hard to imagine anyone--especially a German, like Barfield's master Rudolf Steiner--not being deeply affected by Hegel's program. I wonder about my use of "necessary evolutionary stage" now, since the stage is "necessary" only in the sense of necessary for the eradication of paganism. The eradication itself is not necessary, however. Barfield's third stage of final participation will not necessarily arrive (in the Hegelian sense). I think this is why he was quite depressed towards the end of his life. But perhaps I have misunderstood you?
Very interesting. I’m working up an essay now on the 17th C using Cromwell as a starting point. something “happened” in that century overall, a sort of break in …. something. Great deal of strangeness
It’s here: https://open.substack.com/pub/enoch/p/so-dark-a-heart-as-mine-oliver-cromwell?r=l07s5&utm_medium=ios
I find some of these intellectual games highly entertaining and if I could afford it I would probably subscribe to someone like Mary Harrington in a minute. I could probably ignore the irrationalist "woo" that underpins her flights of intellectual fancy in order to appreciate the almost non-stop "cleverness" of the work at hand.
But ultimately, as I did when I was balls-deep in deconstruction as a grad student in the mid-80s, I have to say: "Well now, as fun as all this really is, we do have an actual world out there that could benefit from the attention of well-intentioned clever folk, no?"
These endless discussions of "identity" and "soul" and "must we really go back to Thomist Christianity to really LIVE?" remind me of the Simon and Garfunkel song The Dangling Conversation wherein we are confronted with the abyss implicit in the questions "Can analysis be worthwhile? Is the theater really dead?"
I'm fully aware that when addressing the kind of people who find these issues "deep" and "meaningful" I am addressing people whose capacities for shrugging off any "real world issues" are beyond substantial.
But the fact remains that a tiny sliver of what? 15% of the global population has the luxury to consider whether it is important that formal and final causes return to their former glory in our approach to understanding life itself.
Substackers unite! You have nothing to lose but your paid subscribers!
For the rest of the world, particularly for the 5 billion or so utterly and completely human persons who live on less than $10 a day? I suspect most of them are hardly in a turmoil over the status of their identity/self/soul and more concerned with feeding themselves and their children for one more day.
But yeah. What about that Elon, eh?
I don't espouse this theory, however, some have thought that the elites really control society, and many of them never believed in any of these religions, but picked and chose winners to achieve their ends. It sounds like something out of Pareto or Mosca, but I don't know the origin. You see some hints of this worldview in Livy and a boatload of it in Machiavelli and there is a theory that ancient Chinese society was organized around three different religions that were each useful to a different class of people. Just throwing this out there because I am temperamentally oppositional, and I do not want to distract from the points that A) Christianity is true and B) the new intellectual movements are metaphysically bankrupt. One of the worst outcomes of this is a recent trend in celebrating western cultures tendency to let women dress in thongs and attributing this great achievement to the Holy Powers of Christianity allowing women to sexily display their bodies. I am suppressing an even cruder critique of this worldview, which might ultimately be motivated by men trying to sanctify their porn addled brains.