I am writing because we used introduction chapter to ‘Saving the Apearances’ entitled ‘Rainbow’ in our landscape perception workshop and in the discussion that followed the idea soon arose that our way of viewing the world was our construction, but then it went so far that even our pure sense-impressions were also our- or better said our bodily constitution’s construction.
However some of us felt that this was going too far. The world how we perceive it (colours, smells, resistance etc.) are also there independent of us (and not only atoms, or whatever they are=the unpresentable)
After reading the chapter again and again and then with the help of the excellent article by Stephen Talbott, called Evolution of Consciousness http://netfuture.org/fdnc/appa.html and then the two by you http://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2009/06/owen-barfield-on-the-metaphysics-of-modern-science-1/

and http://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2009/06/owen-barfield-on-inspiration-and-revelation/ and the one by Caryl Johnston http://from-the-catacombs.blogspot.com/search?q=owen+barfield and I came to the following;
Owen Barfield states that the book was not written for discussing metaphysics.
So he does want not point (as I thought too!) for example to the problem of the primary and secondary qualities of sense-perceptions that is touch (matter) and resp. sight (colour) or specialise in what form atoms, energy exists.

He only wants to point out that what we see (and only see and not think) is a vast area of colours (in the case of sight) without any connection or patterns between them.
But in our daily life we automatically think rainbow or chair etc.
However to come to that, we have to think ‘chair’; that is;
1) it is physical ( we, with our body can sit on it)
2) it has a reasonable flat surface, which is not to low neither to high.
3) it has a support for our back or at least for a part of it.

In case of the rainbow; it is an arc , in the form of half a circle, it has rained and the sun shines and it has a variety of colours in a specific order etc. etc.

So a lot of thinking has gone on before we use the concepts chair, rainbow etc.

This is what Owen Barfield calls figuration and we are not often aware of it .
However if we can’t figure(!) it out, then we need to do some alfa thinking.

The intention to use the article for my workshop was to stress or bring over

1) That the sense-perceptible (pure sense-perception) is a reality, (but not the full reality!)

2) And that the way we interpret it (figuration) depends on our way of thinking about it (and mostly how we have thought about it (habit) or worse; what we were told about it )

During the session we also talked about that the way we see the world (as pure -sense-impression) indeed depends on our constitution (our eye for example) and e.a some animals perceive the world only in black and white or some primitive animals only by the lower senses (touch, movement, balance).

But this does not mean that we (or perhaps better said; our constitution) fabricates or creates the colours etc.

Later during the week when we started to realise that the landscape contains the interplay between natural and cultural factors and when we viewed the landscape in all its glory, we realised it is only given to us , as human beings to see the world in its full glory. Even the Gods can not see it like that!

Is this helpful or am I still not understanding it?
I hope you understand what I meant to say, that is get my speaker’s meaning.

Adriaan http://regarding-landcapes.blogspot.com/

I do not know whether we identify a province as separate and apart because we fear and revile it or if we might revere it , feel it sacred as a result of its separateness and purity from personal taint. It reminds me of two Yiddish proverbs:

“Mit ein hintn zitst men nit oif tsvei ferd”…or; You can’t sit on two horses with one behind

and;

“Dorten iz gut vu mir seinen nito”…or; That place seems good where we are not

Then, the spell is broken by :

“Oif drei zachen shtait di velt: oif gelt, oif gelt , un oif gelt”…or; The World Stands on Three Things, on money, on money and on money.

Two outa three aint bad.

“Liberals err when they downgrade standards in favor of participation, and conservatives likewise err when they exalt objectivity in order to deride participation. In such a situation one is apt to echo the biblical saying – the very stones cry out! What can reconcile objectivity and participation? Has anyone tried? If so, who? And how is it to be done? And why is it important?”

If not, I’m sensing a resurrection of Rorty’s invisible demons, dancing above the beds of the physically (and mentally) infirm….

The importance of Barfield in my view is that the deep understanding of participation restores a sense of dynamic purpose and meaning to human history. In my essay I discuss Owen Barfield as an “Overshadowed Man” – overshadowed first by his great friend, C.S. Lewis, far better known; overshadowed by Thomas Kuhn, author of “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” which argues some of the things that Barfield argues but in a much less nuanced and subtle way; and finally – and this I did not mention in my essay – by the work of Rudolf Steiner, the founder of Anthroposophy or Spiritual Science. Barfield had the modesty to say that “Rudolf Steiner has forgotten more than I ever could possibly have learned” about evolution, language, participation, consciousness, science, etc. etc. And yet for the English-speaking world Barfield is more accessible than Steiner.

Still – speaking as one who began with Barfield, graduated to Steiner, and now straddle the two different, sometimes incompatible, other times mutually supportive worlds of Anthroposophy and Catholicism – I have to say: when will the spark catch? Anthroposophy has its faults (I know them well) – but in view of the social, political, spiritual and moral decadence of our Western society today it’s going to take something like Anthroposophy – huge, vast, outrageous, poetic, challenging, deepening and essentially (if somewhat heretically) Christian – it’s going to take nothing less for us to climb out of the abyss.

So, bravo for publishing these articles about Barfield – I hope they lead your readers to embark on a sober and demanding journey!

It is useful to recall that, having acknowledged Kant’s placing the forms between us and the things in themselves, Barfield said: Science “insists on dealing with ‘data,’ but there shall no date be given, save the bare percept. The rest is imagination. Only by imagination therefore can the world be known. And what is needed is, not only that larger and larger telescopes and more and more sensitive calipers should be constructed, but that the human mind should become increasingly aware of its own creative activity.”

Both Coleridge and Barfield (Coleridge in a typically less systematic way—that is, in his marginalia) were at some pains to register their dissent from—if also to acknowledge their indebtedness to–Kant. (Coleridge moved to Germany—and remained there notwithstanding the death during his absence of his son—to learn German so that he could read Kant.) In the main, Barfield followed Coleridge in suspecting Kant of regarding as merely regulative what is actually constitutive.

A whole appendix to Poetic Diction is devoted to Kant, as is a large portion of the apparatus in What Coleridge Thought. There’s no substitute for reading these books, and I won’t attempt a substitute. The latter especially is a piece of astonishing erudition. The former is too, though Barfield was only in his twenties when it was published.

A propos of what sort of mischief might devolve from Kant, Barfield wrote: “How many children, I wonder, are nowadays informed at an early age by some elder brother or some guide, philosopher, and friend, that what they see and hear and smell is not ‘nature’ but the activity of their own nerves? And though this is not Kant’s doctrine, it is a crude physiological reflection of it. Thus, it does not require a very active fancy to see the Koenigsberg ghost hovering above, and intertwining itself with the ideas of minds that never knew Kant’s name.”

Which is to say that Barfield wants neither Kant nor especially Coleridge associated with the usual horseshit coming out of the humanities and the cuddly “sciences.” That is, he shares your suspicion.

One suspects that the people who argue for creationism or intelligent design on the one hand, and for the standard-issue naturalistic narrative on the other, are both standing on very unsound foundations, since neither takes such things into account.

For Jason’s article focuses, and it’s plenty to think about, on immediate perception. But not only space but time are, it appears, not “idol” qualities independent of consciousness. As Jason’s piece argues, this is not to say that nature (space and time) is unreal, but that nature is not something going on all by itself without our consciousness.

One aspect of this that I personally find interesting relates to the age of the universe. I accept that the universe is about 14 billion years old and the earth about 4.5 by. But clearly, on a Barfieldian reading, we cannot think of stars, planets, the “emergence of life,” and so on as we HABITUALLY imagine them, going on about their business till the advent of human consciousness, but behaving and looking just as we suppose they would if we’d happened to be there to see them.

The Altamira cave paintings are, I suppose, among the best evidence we have for prehistoric human consciousness. I gather that at the oldest they are about 16,000 years old. What we are to infer from chipped flints and so on is harder to say, but these works of art surely denote human consciousness. But they are very recent indeed compared to a 4.5 billion-years earth. How old is Nature? Rather younger than the universe or the earth, it would seem…

How is this different from Kant?