Smooth speculative latitude with Owen Barfield

[whitetigerlily]

This account of poetry, most fully spelled out in Barfield’s first book, Poetic Diction, comes from Barfield’s study of the Romantics (Barfield went on to write a seminal work on Coleridge, and one of his collections of essays is called Romanticism Comes of Age, a phrase which specifically connotes Anthroposophy); but its roots are in Plato and the

Comments

[pineneedles]

Hi...Is it a synergy? I am writing also about Barfield, and clearly I will be reading Poetic Diction. :)

But this comment to the speculumcriticum participation about self-so-ness.. Of course the word does not represent the joy of Sahaja, but somehow I feel the birth of Jesus that we remember is in it: "spontaneous, natural"...

"What you say about Barfield and correlationism raises the question about the deep sources of ancient forms of realism and the general shape of the answer to the question: What is the nature of the object such that the mental aspect of our interaction with it does not differ from its reality? As has been said, we see through our ideas and the default assumption is that this 'gauze' is not a distorting medium. We participate directly in the life of the object.

Does Barfield hold that focusing on the representation in the Lockean way is a sterile form of life preventing the reality of the object from manifesting itself? One thinks of the Zen concept of 'tzujan' or selfso-ness."

[whitetigerlily]

Spontaneous, natural, in simple phrasing... when you have no time to perceive the differences between this divine act and the murmur of waves, or bellow of a bull near the crib..