Bruce Charlton's Notions

Our summer holidays this year included staying in Greta Hall, Keswick - which was the house inhabited by ST Coleridge in 1800-1803 together with his friend Robert Southey and their families (Southey spent the rest of his life there).

Above I am being pretending to be inspired by the spirit of Coleridge, by working in the room that was his study. Pretence aside, it is an inspiring room; and I spent several hours there, tackling Coleridge's main prose work Biographia Literaria (Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions). 

(This was an old Everyman edition bought cheaply a few days earlier from Bookcase in Carlisle, one of the great secondhand bookshops; an actual exemplar of Terry Pratchett's concept of 'L-Space'.)

But I have rather reluctantly concluded - after several months of intense effort - that Coleridge is 'not for me' in terms of the detail and specificity of his philosophy.

https://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/ingwaz-metaphysics-of-ing-of-polarity.html
https://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/reality-is-constituted-by-polarity-and.html

From Owen Barfield's wonderful book What Coleridge Thought, I recognised that Coleridge provided a philosophical solution to the primary problem of modernity; but I soon found the memory of this answer slipping away from me; and now - after four months, and despite continuing to struggle with Coleridge - it has altogether gone.

The problem is my inner resistance to the abstract, geometric-mathematical nature of the schema. I can grasp this when I am immersed in the work, but only in the way I grasp mathematical concepts - I don't feel it in my heart, I could not base my life on it - nor could I persuade anybody else of it.

Similarly, Coleridge's metaphysics of Christianity (focused on the mystery of the Trinity) is too abstract and paradoxical for me to find it moving, compelling, inspiring or encouraging.

In sum, Coleridge's ideas are ultimately incompatible with my primary metaphysical understanding of the nature of reality - which is why they keep slipping-away from me. 

My conclusion is that Coleridge's solution to the problem of modernity is valid and works for some people such as Owen Barfield - but I will need to find my own philosophical way of understanding and articulating the way forward beyond alienation, nihilism and despair.

This will need to fit with my fundamental metaphysical beliefs; which are pluralist (in William James's sense); and based on the Mormon concept of the destined mortal human condition as a voluntary, incremental exaltation of each man or woman towards ever-fuller deity; including William Arkle's clarity that this process is an ever greater participation in a creation unified and essentially characterised by loving familial relationships.

In other words, as so often, I return to the master metaphor and concrete reality of God being our loving Father; and the human condition as one of (if we choose) developing, growing-up through experience and striving, over a vast timescale - eventually hoping to rise to the same level of being as our heavenly father, and able to know him in an adult (that is fully divine) way.

In the middle 2000s we had three family holidays staying in Greta Hall, Keswick.


This was the house found and initially inhabited by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), and later and for longer by Robert Southey - the poet laureate and the third, least but (personally) nicest of the Lake Poets who moved up to Cumberland from their early base in Bristol and Somerset. Greta Hall was much visited by Wordsworth and other luminaries of the era - and Coleridge's (unfortunate) wife stayed here (she was Southey's sister in law) when her husaband moved back south.

Coleridge was a tormented and difficult personality, an opium addict; and a world class genius in multiple fields including poetry, philosophy and theology. His influence was remarkable - and international - considering the disorder of his life and indeed his work. Coleridge could be said to have lauched the Romantic Movement - which has never yet gone away, nor has its destiny yet been fulfilled.

The book Lyrical Ballads that he co-published with Wordsworth (who was an even greater poet - regarded as a clear third in reputation to Shakespeare and Milton in English Literature), was probably the most significant single volume of verse in the whole Western literary tradition - nothing has been the same since. He was Britain's two-way link with the academic powerhouse of Germany - and the route by which Romanticism reached the United States via RW Emerson's 'Transcendentalist' movement - amplified by the major intellectual of the next generation, Coleridge's main 'disciple' and Emerson's best friend in Britain: Thomas Carlyle.

It really is quite something to stay in Greta Hall, and to work in Coleridge's study (now containing a a vast antique Chinese bed!) 

Indeed, we are returning for another visit this summer - when I am likely to be even more receptive to the place since I am immersed in Coleridge at present - partly through reading his works (in the astonishing and marvellous Delphi collection on my Kindle e-book - a whole library of Coleridge for £1.50! - thanks to Delphi I have much of the vast canon of Eng Lit carried in my bag much of the time), but mostly as refracted through the mind of another genius, Owen Barfield - in his astonishingly-profound and intelligent book What Coleridge Thought (1971).

Some years ago I wrote about the high-Psychoticism Christian: the 'good Christian' who was not nice,  not sociable, conscientious, organised - who was impulsive, easily bored, bad at sustained endeavour; a man who nearly-always failed to follow-through on his resolutions.

And I later wrote about how such high-Psychoticism persons potentially have a vital role to play in Christianity - because for all its disadvantages; high-P is needed for creativity, and that integrity which depends on immunity to social conformity. 

I now realise that Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) is a great example of exactly what I meant.

Coleridge was a deep and devoted Christian, and had a wide and deep influence through his life and beyond - affecting Anglican practice and theology (via disciples) all through the nineteenth century. 

Coleridge was also a long term opium addict, a frequent drunkard; he all-but abandoned his wife (luckily she and the children were well looked after in the house of her brother in law, Coleridge's friend Robert Southey); and he passionately loved another woman (but entirely chastely).

His life was chaotic in the extreme, he was moody in the extreme, short-tempered, impulsive, inconsistent; he missed appointments and broke arrangements; he failed to finish (or even begin) nearly all of his large projects.

But Coleridge acknowledged and repented his sins; he regretted the way he was, he tried to reform but couldn't. He was what he was - he was made that way.

While what he did was nearly all flawed (requiring tremendous and sustained concentration - or else scattered notes, hints, scraps), and was far less in amount then he was capable of doing; nonetheless Coleridge was perhaps the most significant philosophical thinker of his time. As a conversationalist (or rather monologist) he was apparently supreme; and sometimes he was a lecturer of astonishing power - and thus sufficient of his great potential was somehow made available.     

Christianity has this great strength - and we must never forget it - that repentance is more important than behaviour; and by Jesus Christ repentance is available to everybody at ever time and in an inexhaustible supply.

Much of Coleridge's life needed repenting every hour of every day for decades - but that was not a problem - that well can never run dry. 

And thus Coleridge was a truly great Christian, although in many ways a bad man.

In this age, these end times, when institutions are corrupt and obedience and hard work are turned to evil ends; it is possible that only someone of the Coleridge type has the creativity, independence and courage to provide what is needed.

Not as a Christian leader, of course! That would be a disaster. But as an educator, clarifier, explainer, encourager, and as an inspirer.

I am currently re-reading various Owen Barfield works, including What Coleridge Thought (1971); which had a massive impact when I last read it in 2016. This reading led eventually to my still current metaphysical system (based on the eternal existence of Beings). 

Both in 2016 and now, I gave the fullest and most active attention to my reading; which for me entails reading, in a cafe, at the 'best time of day' for me - which is before 11.00 am. I sit wit the book on one side and a notebook on the other; and read a bit but keep breaking-off to  write comments in the notebook about as much as I read. And I take as long as it takes to work through the book in this way. 

When I first read this book, I was mainly trying to understand 'what Coleridge thought'; but this time I am comparing this with the ways in which I have extended or modified my own philosophy - in which I was triggered by the ways in which I regarded Coleridge as 'dead right' and the ways in which I felt he was still captive to the philosophy he had learned as a younger man. 

In particular, Coleridge (and indeed Barfield) seem to me to suffer - to a relatively worse degree than I do myself - from what Barfield termed Residual Unresolved Positivism. Coleridge was a great genius pioneer, and was making a trail for the first time; such that things were made easier for those who followed.

(Including that Coleridge had, by his work, permanently affected and added-to the world of divine creation - which we can now discover intuitively for ourselves - if we are able to ask the right questions.)

Thus, Coleridge's extremely abstract and difficult exposition of 'polarity' or 'polar logic' and of his schemata for describing human mental activity, can be simplified greatly (I believe) by the simple assumption of having the metaphysical assumption that the 'basic unit' of reality are Beings, which have properties such as life, consciousness and purpose - and who are 'defined' as existing through-time - which means that we should eschew discussing them without reference to time and transformation. 

I have found this to be (so far) extremely powerful and satisfying - partly because it is an explicit elaboration of how I recall seeing the world as a young child; and it chimes with my understanding of the 'animism' of hunter-gatherer tribal people. 

So, this time of reading, I am fitting Barfield's understanding of Coleridge into my own understanding - which is, in a sense, the opposite of what I did first-time-through.

The transcendental philosopher says; grant me a nature having two contrary forces, the one of which tends to expand infinitely, while the other strives to apprehend or find itself in this infinity, and I will cause the world of intelligences with the whole system of their representations to rise up before you. Every other science presupposes intelligence as already existing and complete: the philosopher contemplates it in its growth, and as it were represents its history to the mind from its birth to its maturity....

It is equally clear that two equal forces acting in opposite directions, both being finite and each distinguished from the other by its direction only, must neutralize or reduce each other to inaction. Now the transcendental philosophy demands; first, that two forces should be conceived which counteract each other by their essential nature; not only not in consequence of the accidental direction of each, but as prior to all direction, nay, as the primary forces from which the conditions of all possible directions are derivative and deducible: secondly, that these forces should be assumed to be both alike infinite, both alike indestructible. The problem will then be to discover the result or product of two such forces, as distinguished from the result of those forces which are finite, and derive their difference solely from the circumstance of their direction. 

I currently continue my years-long attempt (thus far, only partially successful) to 'get' Samuel Taylor Coleridge; this time by reading the second volume ("Darker Reflection") of Richard Holmes's very chunky two-volume biography, from about 25 years ago. 

It is an immersive experience; since the impression given is one of an almost day-by-day account of Coleridge's moods and doings: and these were extremely various, wide-ranging and unpredictable.

STC was an extraordinary character - even in that age of extraordinary characters. I am currently focused on the period around 1810; when Coleridge was in his middle and late thirties. Under the impulses of his nature, and opium addiction; he mostly behaved in an utterly unreasonable and demanding manner - and yet was mostly not just tolerated but cherished. 

What amazes me is that Coleridge's genius was not only acknowledged, but very widely supported. 

At this point, STC was publishing a (more-or-less) weekly subscription magazine called The Friend, which consisted of long, intricate, rambling essays on all sorts of fundamental questions. These issues are unreadably dense for my taste, and most people nowadays. 

Yet there were some hundreds of subscribers, including a couple of dozen members of parliament, bishops, professors - and some of the most eminent of the age such as Humphrey Davey and Walter Scott. 

What is striking to me, is that these people were prepared to work very hard in their reading, in order to grapple with fundamental matters, when they regarded the author as a man of worthwhile insight and knowledge. 

This is analogous to the attitude of those who knew and supported Coleridge. They were able to discern the depth of his genius through a very unappealing but much more obvious surface of gross unreliability; a characterological inability to complete what he began - or even to begin what he had promised. 

I find myself impressed at their discernment of STC's genius through such clouds of obscurity and chaos - and also their capacity to suffer all manner of inconveniences, rudeness and inconsideration, and let-downs - without giving-up on him. 

By contrast with now; I am struck both by the presence of geniuses of a scale and intensity now absent; and also of a society which valued genius - and was prepared to make allowances for it. 

Both are needed if genius is to have a society-wide and beneficial effect. 

He, who begins by loving Christianity better than Truth, will proceed by loving his own Sect or Church better than Christianity, and end in loving himself better than all.

In his masterful book What Coleridge Thought (1971), Owen Barfield identified Polarity - or Polar Logic - as ST Coleridge's core philosophical concept; and the key to understanding his completion of Romanticism.

I read this book twice, with deep attention, and was convinced by it; however, when I came to try and use the concept of polarity in my everyday life, with the aim of transforming my life for the better - I couldn't. Polarity was just too abstract.

This is probably unsurprising - after all a system of logic is not really the kind of thing which is fundamental; it is more of a tool than a basis for existence. The cognitive domain 'logic' is, indeed of interest to only a tiny minority of very specialised people who have had systematic training.

Furthermore, my experience has been that Christianity ought not to be based upon abstractions, but upon the core analogy of Loving Family Relationships - this is both the reality and the master metaphor (or symbolism) of the Christian religion.

Therefore I need to re-express, re-explain, Polarity in anthropomorphic terms - to make it a matter of human and divine relationships.

Polarity is a way of conceptualising necessary and inseparable opposites: the core physical example (cited by Coleridge) is of a force that coheres and a force that disperses; centripetal (centre-seeking) and centrifugal (centre-fleeing) - the varied combinations of such polar forces then accounts of the dynamic nature of the world, and life.

I then saw that Love - which is the heart of Christianity - is of precisely this nature; because love is a cohesion, a holding together, as with marriage and family relationships; and love is an open-ended creative force, as with children being born, developing, and forging new relationships.

Love is dynamic: it cannot be just cohesion or it will die, it cannot be just expansion or it will die - it must be the polarity of both, which is infinite in its capacity for self-renewal and strength.

Love comes from the dyadic relationship of man and woman, husband and wife, in cohesive relation for eternity and also open-endedly reproducing, having children who have children. The relationships cohere forever, but in a state of continual change and interaction forever.

Love depends on distinction: one person from another, man from woman, parent from child, each sibling from another, each friend unique; and Love also depends on the constancy of the fact of relationship. Many loving relationships changing by an organic, unfolding development. But each relationship sustained in its core nature - husband and wife, father and son, mother and son, brother and brother and so forth.

There are all, in Coleridge's or Barfield's abstract sense, polarities: the insight is true and it is deep. Yet when expressed in terms of relationships it is simple common sense and everyday observation... all we need to do is recognise the ideal for which our earthly family relationships are striving; and then we can know the actuality which will (if we choose it) be the reality in Heaven.

When I recently read - line-by-line and with great concentration - Owen Barfield's What Coleridge Thought; I found myself completely convinced, in complete agreement, until the final two chapters concerning God and Society, when I blocked. I was no longer convinced, I lost the thread, I lost my interest...

It did not take long before I understood what had happened: Coleridge/ Barfield were mystical/ paradoxical Trinitarians in the sense of Classical Metaphysics and mainstream Christian theology - whereas I adhere to pluralistic Mormon metaphysics. For them, ultimately all is one and identified by God - for me, ultimately all is more-than-one; and indeed God is irreducibly multiple - God the Father and Mother in Heaven forming an irreducible dyad; The Father and the Son distinct personages, and the Holy Ghost another.

For Coleridge/ Barfield, everything fundamental is polar: everything irreducible is has distinguishable polarities that cannot be divided; and the ultimate polarity of God and Man. But for me God and each Man are divided - they are another dyad. Dyads are divided, and cannot be united: dyads are divided but related - and the ultimate relation is love.

For Coleridge/ Barfield the Trinity is polar, and love is the dynamism within that indivisible polarity; for me, the Godhead is divided but indissolubly related, and love is that dynamism which relates it: Love is, in fact, ultimately that which holds the universe together.

For me, the creation includes things that are dynamism within unity (i.e. polarity) - which are (I think...) Goethe's Archetypal Phenomena; but above that there are things that are dynamism-between unity (i.e. divinities). Ultimately, reality is multiple: a multiplicity consisting of dyads. 

In the preface to Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, the 'romantic' was given a definition in terms of Wordsworth focusing on the numinous qualities of Nature, and Coleridge upon the Supernatural. So the Fantasy aspect of Romanticism - such as we see in The Inklings - was present from the start.

Shakespeare had a role in Romanticism, in that his renewed popularity came from a German reappraisal (probably originating with Herder, who worked from translated excerpts of Shakespeare - and greatly amplified in England by the Shakespeare lectures of Coleridge) that saw Shakespeare in such terms; as a 'wild', spontaneous, natural genius.

Shakespeare was often linked with the then extremely high valuation of the strange, semi-faked 'poems' of 'Ossian' - which were a 'translation', plus very extensive reworking and expansion, of Gaelic songs and stories collected in the highlands and islands of Scotland by James Macpherson and published in the middle 1700s. So that Homer, Ossian and Shakespeare were found linked in a 'bardic' lineage - for instance, this is later referenced by Emerson and Thoreau.

Shakespeare came from a 'recusant' Catholic, and therefore pre-Reformation, sensibility on his mother's side. She was Mary Arden, and members of the Arden family were part of a concentration of families trying to practice the Old religion; Ardens even involved in, and some executed for, spying, rebellion, and assassination plots.

So, Shakespeare had an interest in magic, fairies, ghosts, witches and the like; that can be seen from A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest (the only plays whose plots were essentially original) and others of his greatest work such as Macbeth and Hamlet. And, in general, many of the plays have a strong 'premodern' element of fate or providence governing the affairs of Men. However, as Tolkien noted with disappointment, such elements are seldom given full value or treated with full seriousness - it is mostly a matter of hints and epiphanies.

With the dawning of the Romantic consciousness, Shakespeare was therefore ripe for revival and reinterpretation in this light - despite that in other respects, his work was often very 'artificial', ironic, fashionable, or simply derivative (in terms of basic plots and subject matter).

Shakespeare can therefore be seen as spanning from the Medieval consciousness, which simply took magic and the supernatural for granted as a real and objective part of the external environment; the early modern consciousness, which treated such matters ironically and satirically - as being unreal and delusional - purely a part of subjective consciousness; and the Romantic consciousness which (in its highest development; e.g. Coleridge, Novalis, Blake) returns to the pre-modern in conscious thought, with a realism that includes as necessary, both the subjective and the objective.

In other words, the Romantic concept of the magical-supernatural is that these things are real; and/but - like all real things - their reality is neither wholly in the external environment nor the internal consciousness, but in the necessary apprehension of the environment by consciousness. They (both the supernatural and all real phenomena) are indeed out-there, and/but they require the subjective consciousness to be known; and only the known is real. (Only the known is part of Creation - all else is unknowable chaos.)

The magical is real, but reality has a new location, in the realm of thinking. Neither purely out-there nor in-here, but in a new conception of the potential of the world of thinking to know directly and perhaps participate in divine creation. This is the thinking of the 'creative genius', who is seen by Romantics as (potentially) the proper mode of all Men.

So the ghost in Hamlet is 'really there' but requires someone to see and hear it; if there was no consciousness present, there would be no ghost.

Probably the main intellectual event of 2016 was my engagement with Owen Barfield's book on the philosophy of Coleridge. This is one of those books which requires (from me, at least) a very intense engagement - because it is working at a metaphysical level; challenging fundamental assumptions regarding the 'structure; of reality.

At any rate, it took me many days of reading and note-taking - and I wasn't able to keep up the necessary level of intensity the whole way through; so I shall need to return and re-read again before too long.

I have written a number of blog posts concerning what I got from the book:

https://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=coleridge+barfield 

But the main thing was the idea of polarity as a way of understanding-by-imagining the basis of reality; and the necessity of imagination as the indispensable way of understanding. In turn, this enables me to explain to myself how it is that Life changes, unfolds and (in that sense) evolves according to a divine destiny that includes the free-will or agency of Men.

This isn't something I can encapsulate here and briefly; but as always with metaphysics, there is a great liberation and excitement from knowing what are one's own (previous) assumptions and that they are not entailed but assumed. 

It was also valuable to understand that the failure of all British (and Western, generally) spiritual awakenings over the past two centuries since Coleridge is explicable in terms of the failure to fix our constraining metaphysical assumptions; this failure foredooms all attempts to escape our culture's trajectory towards ever-more complete alienation, despair and self-chosen damnation.

If you are convinced that it is well for a man, or it may be a nation, to make something, there are two possible ways of imparting the conviction to him.

You may convince him by argument that such a thing, if made, would be a good and useful thing. That is one way.

On the other hand you may say: “This thing already exists, potentially, and is merely waiting to be brought into visible being. Moreover it is your true nature to make it, because its archetype already exists in you. If you fail to make it you will be acting in a way that is fundamentally false: you will be a sort of hypocrite.”

Now I believe that this second method is the only one which has any chance of success to-day. I also believe that it is inherently a better method, because for one thing it is in harmony with religious faith. Ethics are concerned with what ought to be, where religion is concerned solely with what is.

It is, for instance, not a religious appeal to say “You ought not to be acquisitive,” whether or no we add “because in that way peace will be secured.” It is a religious appeal to say: “It is the will of God that you should not be acquisitive,” whether or no we add “and you will find that it is really your own will also, the will of that true self of yours for whose salvation Christ died.”

The question is, therefore, is there any chance of producing by this second method a widespread conviction in the minds of English people that it is their urgent business to create a new society? In attempting to answer this question one naturally asks first, whether attempt has ever been made before.

A century ago a great man was writing in this country on social change and political questions... Coleridge saw that a new society was needed in Europe and that it could only be brought about by a change in people’s ways of thought and feeling. He virtually foresaw, as the inevitable result of habits of thought which were then comparatively new but were rapidly becoming prevalent, the very disintegration which we are now experiencing. He chose the second method of appeal.

Coleridge tried to familiarise English people with the notion that there is what he called the “idea” of a nation, a constitution, a church – that is, not a theory of these things worked out empirically, but something which they are in fact and in the nature of things striving to be; and that the first problem is to recognise this “idea” in each case.

He failed to “get it across” -- it was beyond his, probably beyond any man’s, powers and he never won more than a small audience. The failure was disastrous because for anyone who will first take the trouble to master Coleridge’s system of thought these writings of his contains a depth of Christian political wisdom which I believe to be unsurpassed by any other English, possibly by any other, thinker.

Is there any better prospect of success to-day? I believe there may be... People have gradually acquired the habit of referring in the most matter of fact, even glib, way to this particular aspect of the “unmanifest.” To this extent we are all accustomed to “moving about in worlds not realised”.

This fact seems to me to create a totally different situation; so that, if Coleridge were here to-day, he would fine exactly what he formerly lacked, a point of contact with the minds of his contemporaries from which at least to make a start.

Am I making my suggestion at all clear? What I want to get at is that the true form of the society which Britain ought to create already exists potentially in the nation’s unconscious; and that an appeal which proceeds on that basis stands the best chance of success.

Edited from Effective Approach to Social Change - Owen Barfield - 1940
http://www.owenbarfield.org/effective-approach-to-social-change

**

Note: This seems an inspiring and energising insight into the nature of desirable social change; and how we ought to set about inducing it.

(And also - very helpfully - what not to do!)

There is a fascinating passage in Owen Barfield's What Coleridge Thought, which is of great value in clarifying the difference between intuition on the one hand - upon which our primary evaluations ought to be based; and on the other hand what might be termed habits, including spontaneous (including innate) mechanisms of thinking and (perhaps evolved, or socialized) 'habits' - which are often erroneous. 

In Chapter XII of Biographia Literaria; Coleridge describes two 'prejudices' (or 'certainties') that are aspects of the realism of mankind, which we all spontaneously do, and believe to be real; yet which are contradictory: 

The first 'prejudice' is what Coleridge terms the outness of phenomena; that (in some sense) there really exists things outside of us; such as that table - which we spontaneously regard as being as we perceive it to be. 

This is not some conclusion we derive from observation and reasoning - it is a matter of 'how we are made'. We do Not spontaneously believe that we see merely the 'appearance' of a table (the 'real' table being something else); but we do naturally assume that the table 'is' a thing outside us, a phenomenon out-there to which we do not contribute. 

The second 'prejudice' is the awareness that 'I' am 'in here'; perceiving the things I regard as things, the phenomena are outside. 

In sum - the two built-in and spontaneous assumptions are that 'I' an 'in here'; and there is a world 'out there'. 

And the apparent contradiction is that the outside strikes us as absolutely real and separate from the I inside; but all we know of the outer, depends on the I inside who observes it - so the 'outer' cannot be wholly outer - or else the perception of an 'I' within must be mistaken...  

Then Coleridge makes the crucial distinction between 'outer' and 'I inside'; that although both of these 'original and innate prejudices' are natural and spontaneous - if we proceed to analysis, to reflect on these prejudices - the assumption of outness dissolves, but the assumption of a 'me, inside' that is doing the analysis does Not dissolve! 

As Barfield summarizes: that inner I which is doing the analyzing always remains aware that it is doing it. And even if the inner I denies that it is doing the analyzing - we remain aware that act of denial comes-from the I itself, and therefore refutes the denial!

While, on the contrary, the natural assumption that there is an independent, obvious, 'objective' world of phenomena, of things, out there; is easily theoretically disproved - by several valid lines of argument. 

Thus, despite their immoveable habit; it is quite normal and common for people to believe that the appearances of things 'out there' is not the whole truth of them, and that the real things differ from their 'obvious' appearances.

In other words; our natural sense of realism about the outside world is 'merely' a habit, which cannot withstand analysis - but on the other hand, our natural sense of our self inside is robust to honest and coherent analysis. At the end of any analysis, we still are aware of our inner-self doing that analysis. 

This 'honest analysis' is therefore potentially an important test for detecting genuine intuitions, compared with false habits or prejudices, or 'wishful thinking'. 

Real intuitions are robust to honest analysis by our-self, whereas fake-intuitions (that may be evolved structural mechanisms, habits, or passively absorbed from socialization) are Not thus robust.

But of course that analysis must be honest! 

The persistence of the 'observing I' through all analysis can be dishonestly denied, as can any other proposition! And exactly such denials are meat and drink - the Big Lies - that underpin the activities and ideology of the modern, mainstream, Establishment System.  

This is why intuition requires us to test assumptions for our-selves. Only we can know the difference between honest discernment, and the many possible tricks and fakery of another Being's conclusions. 

I have been aware of the 'German Romantic' Novalis (1772-1801 - he died of TB at age 28) for a long time, but also knew I was not ready to tackle him.

And indeed I misjudged the nature and scope of his achievement; since I assumed Novalis was solely a lyrical poet and romantic novelist - yet I know from experience that this kind of achievement is not translatable.

(I have tried and failed to appreciate lyrical poetry and poetic prose in translation so many times that I have ceased trying.)

Yesterday I felt ready - and discovered that Novalis was a philosopher, scientist and professional mining engineer who wrote on these - and all other - subjects for a projected Encyclopedia (lost for c. 150 years and only translated into English 11 years ago).

I then encountered some of his aphoristic/ 'fragment'-ary philosophical writings; and have seen enough to recognise that Novalis was someone who was embarked in the same cultural project as ST Coleridge; and that - like Coleridge - he was himself writing from a state of consciousness that had attained Final Participation (no wonder Barfield was so powerfully drawn to Novalis!).

After just a day, it already looks like Novalis will be joining my very small and select pantheon of those who (like Goethe, Blake, Coleridge, Steiner, Barfield, Arkle) significantly understood the single most-important issue of human developmental-evolution as it presents to Western consciousness.

Romantic Christianity made a brilliant start with Novalis, William Blake and ST Coleridge - and then nothing-much for many decades until Rudolf Steiner became (strange sort of) Christian in about 1898; to be followed by Owen Barfield and William Arkle in later generations - and there is William Wildblood and myself among current writers. But there have never been many Romantic Christians...

Why so rare, and what went wrong with the intermediate generations? Of course there were plenty of Romantics - but among them hardly any Christians; indeed most of them were either atheists or spiritual anything-but Christians.

A pre-eminent example was Ralph Waldo Emerson; who was an arch-Romantic and who began as a Unitarian minister - Unitarians being, at that time, like Emerson, Christians on-the-way-out. He ended-up as a kind of deist, flavoured with what he had gathered of Hinduism and Sufism.

Emerson was known for his elevation of the intuitive, epiphanic, 'moment' of insight to the highest possible valuation; like most Romantics, he required that all knowledge be derived from direct personal experience. SO why did Emerson not do the same for Christianity as he did for everything else? Why did he not develop a Romantic Christianity built from the kind of direct intuitive insights that fuelled the rest of his wide-ranging creativity? This will be answered below.

My guess is that Emerson accepted the evaluation of most Churches that Christianity must be derived from external authority - or else it is not Christianity. Catholics demand that the individual conform to the teaching of the Church authorities, or the traditions of the lineally descended ancient Church. Protestants demand conformity to the canonical scriptures of the Bible.

But what unites all churches is the assumption that whatever Christianity is, it is located outside the individual. The insistence is that Christianity does not come from within - not from individual experience, not from personal intuition.

Ultimately the task for the individual is to conform to external authority. The church judges the individual. 

If this is true; then Romanticism and Christianity are incompatible. So, how did Novalis, Blake and Coleridge come to believe that they had developed a Christianity based on their inner knowledge? It is mostly a matter of their basic and ultimate assumptions, of metaphysical assumptions. These authors believed that the individual could have direct knowledge of Christianity without it being derived from any intermediary at all; not rooted in church authority, without canonical scripture, traditional, philosophical theology or anything else.

Or, at least, and in conformity to Romanticism; that this direct form of personal knowing should serve to evaluate all other knowledge claims. So the individual judges the church; and may (like Blake, Steiner and Arkle) dispense with all churches - although Coleridge and Barfield were both, in later life,' communicating' (communion-taking) members of the Church of England.

We can see, then, why Emerson did not remain a Christian - because he apparently accepted the assertion that a real Christian must be under the authority of a church. (The only dispute was about which church/es it was correct to regard as really Christian.) It seems that, for Emerson, anyone who claimed to be a Christian outside of a church, was not really a Christian.

But there may be more to it than this - because Emerson did not believe in the divinity of Jesus; therefore real Christians were in error. Emerson's idea of deity was abstract - 'The Over Soul' - and therefore infinitely different-from a Man. The only union of Man with deity, therefore, was for Man to surrender his self and 'melt-into' the infinitude of deity.

So Emerson was a hopeless case! Ultimately, he did not want what Jesus offered; and preferred what Eastern religions offered. And what applies to Emerson, also applies to many other Romantics since. Some Romantics are materialist; but among those who are spiritual - it has mostly been an Eastern spirituality; which ultimately regards the individual self and our mortal world as temporary illusions.

This is the source of the paradox by which Emerson valued the moment of insight above all; yet ultimately he regarded each epiphany as evanescent, soon to be lost in time - and therefore worthless.

Other Christians have had strong Romantic impulses, but retained the conviction that the individual judgement must be subordinated to church authority - GK Chesterton is an example. Chesterton regarded the 'catholic' church (at first the Anglo Catholic wing of the Church of England; then in his late middle age, the Roman Catholic church) as the source of knowledge, of truth. For Chesterton Romanticism was the proper attitude each individual ought to adopt towards this truth.

For Chesterton, therefore, the individual did not have direct and personal intuitive access to knowledge; except for the knowledge that the church was true. The only primary knowledge was that the church was the only source of knowledge. 

Something similar could be said for CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien. They were Romantics and also Christians - but their Romanticism was secondary to their Christianity - and was at most understood to be a good and proper (perhaps even necessary) attitude towards their Christianity. The Romantic intuition was not, for them, a primary source of knowledge: that was revelation as communicated by  their churches.

This is why Romantic Christians - by a strict definition - have been so rare. Most Romantics were not Christians, but among those that were; Romanticism is regarded as an attitude but not as a source of knowledge.

It was the great contribution of Owen Barfield - posthumous disciple of Steiner, best friend of CS Lewis, and fellow Inkling with Tolkien - to clarify and emphasise this vital distinction.

Owen Barfield, in his introduction to What Coleridge Thought (1971), comments that ST Coleridge's philosophical work was aiming to institute a metaphysic and science of qualities. 

I would modify this to suggest that all metaphysics ought to be concerned, primarily, with qualities. Metaphysical qualities refer to the "building blocks" from-which we construct our world view, our understanding of fundamental reality. 

Such qualities are what underlie all specific and quantitative discourses; such as the various sciences. 

For instance, the metaphysical question of whether the basic units of reality are living-Beings; or instead abstract particles, waves, forces, fields etc? 

Almost-everything hinges on which assumption we make: which fundamental qualities we regard as primary. 

If we assume that fundamental reality is a matter of "physics"; then we cannot discover life, consciousness or purpose in the universe - since these are all excluded by assumptions. All possible apparent instances of life/ consciousness/ purpose must (by assumption) be reducible to physical causes and explanations. 

Conversely; if the fundamental reality is assumed to be constituted by Beings; then every-thing that is and happens will - ultimately - be-derivable-from life/ consciousness/ purpose/ motivation/ meaning... and other attributes of Beings. 

Thus metaphysical assumptions are far more important than any specialized discourse; and this importance is likely to be most lethally - and inescapably - damaging, when actual metaphysical assumptions are unconscious or denied.  

In a post at Albion Awakening, I tackle a subject close to my heart and causal of the deep malaise of the modern condition - namely the rapid corruption of Romanticism from its Christian beginnings to a combination of radical politics, sexual revolution and make-believe.

Since Romanticism was the divinely destined direction for Western Man; this has been catastrophic over the past two centuries - with (on one side) serious mainstream Christianity rejecting imagination, inspiration and intuition - hardening into materialism; and (on the other side) mainstream culture diverging into the instinct-driven sexual revolution and the iron cage of pseudo-rational totalitarian bureaucracy.

As Owen Barfield first understood; one answer is for us to return to the source of true Romanticism - such as Wordsworth and Coleridge, and pick up the threads - and carry forward the Romantic project. And this is no hardship - but a delightsome task!

And it will succeed; because Rudolf Steiner - in his early works, culminating in the Philosophy of Freedom - has done all the heavy lifting for us (with Barfield's later assistance).

The answer is there, waiting; the answer is coherent, beautiful and fruitful; and a world of wonders beckons! - if we want it; and assuming we each make the effort to know it intuitively: for our-selves...

For the past couple of years I have understood the essence of Rudolf Steiner and Owen Barfield in relation to thinking, and during that time I have striven to re-express these more simply in order to make them more widely known. But it has been hard to achieve this goal, and my estimate of my own success has not been great. 

For example the vital idea of 'polarity'. If you follow the previous link you will see some of my attempts at explicating polarity. However, I have come to realise that root problem relates to polarity being a metaphor derived from physics (i.e. from magnetism) - often with mathematical (e.g. geometric) aspects. And this makes it difficult to apply to the situation of human reality.

So Coleridge, for example, argued cogently and (to me) convincingly 200 years ago that we must have a logic based on polarity - but it is terribly difficult to grasp what he meant by this, and how we would go about such a change, and what positive difference it might make... William Blake seemed to express much the same conviction as Coleridge in some of his poems - especially the early aphorisms... but again it's a big jump from appreciating poetic 'paradoxes' to changing the structure of mainstream thinking.

But is, instead, we use biological metaphors and analogies to explain the same essential situation, then it is much more comprehensible. So, if we do our philosophy in terms of life, development, growth etc - then we find that we don't need a special concept of polarity. A living being generates contrasts and differences that can be distinguished (as we validly and usefully distinguish the several organs of a body, such as the heart); yet these distinctions are not separable (as we cannot separate the heart from the rest of the body, without killing both).

In fat, a thoroughgoing animism, or anthropomorphism, seems to be the best solution to many difficulties. And this has the added advantage of fitting with our own childhood experiences as well as the evolutionary-developmental-history of human consciousness. We can see that our task is to return to the simple, childlike animism and anthropomorphism - but this time not unconsciously and because we know no differently, but deliberately and in full awareness of what we are doing.  

In a sense; Coleridge, Steiner and Barfield all knew this and explicitly said this; but they did not follow-through with the task of ejecting physics and mathematics from their explanatory schemata and replacing them with the child-like way of thinking of reality as alive, conscious, purposive - and with the relations between entities understood as relationships between beings.

Or consider the way that Steiner and Barfield describe the evolution of consciousness through various stages - and the possible future of the Imaginative Soul/ Final Participation. We seem to see a mechanical universe going-through various phases towards a predetermined outcome (and Steiner, especially, attaches all kinds of mystical-numbers of years to these phases and the way they play out - with predictions stretching millennia into the future).

How much clearer it is to state that the evolution of consciousness happens because God wants it to happen and influences the world accordingly; but only insofar as each Man chooses (from his agency) to ally himself with God's plan. Man's destiny is therefore what God hopes will happen, it can be achieved only incrementally, but each individual must choose to cooperate; and might well choose to oppose.  

Animism and anthropomorphism are only 'childish' in a bad sense insofar as the child knows nothing different than them (and much the same applies to Men in simple, tribal hunter gatherer societies). Modern Man knows many different ways of thinking - especially the simplified-modelling of reality with mathematics and the sciences; and every model is partial and distorted and of ultimately unknowable generalisability... all of the explanations of mathematics and science are at bottom only simplified models that may, or may not, be useful for some specific purpose and situation.

Yet reality is as it always was. There is nothing childish about recognising that we were correct about the ultimate nature of reality when we were children and before Men had civilisations - after all nothing has ever disproved it!

I have had considerable difficulty in conceptualising Love - but I keep trying because it is at the heart of Christianity, and because false conceptions cause trouble; especially in a society like ours, where The Good is under continual attack; and all Good things are subject to subversion, corruption, inversion.

Obviously (to a serious Christian) Love isn't a feeling-just; and obviously also it isn't a justification for sex - it must be a metaphysical (structural) reality of creation. But if one makes a serious formulation of Love along the lines of its being 'cohesion' (as I have previously done) then Love comes-out as being something like the imposition and preservation of 'order'...

And if order is achieved then love will stop, because everything will be frozen, static. Most Christian metaphysical understandings of Love do exactly this, and therefore end up trying to assert that something which is unchanging and eternal - all knowing, omniscient - is also-somehow dynamic, generative, and the primary motivation.

Yet, to conceptualise Love as expanding, always changing - open-endedly and forever - is to fall into something akin to the sexual revolution (as approximated by a free love commune or 'bath house' culture); a continuously-expanding appetite for variety, intensity and transgression.

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In fact, Love turns-out to be the best example of polarity (or polar logic) as described and proposed by Coleridge as the fundamental metaphysical reality. Once this is grasped, we can see that the usual way of dividing up the world into alternatives - as, for example, the division used above that Love is either static or dynamic - when what we actually get is alternatives neither of which is true.

The idea of polarity asserts that at the very heart of things is a principle (or are principle) that have the character of being indivisible; so Love must be envisaged as containing stasis in terms of its poles of cohesion and expansion - but the things itself is living, dynamic and continually re-creating itself; re-creating its differentiations (into cohesion and expansion) and recreating the tendencies (of cohesion and expansion).

(I picture this polarity, metaphorically, as a swirling, dyadic, bipolar 'star'; in which each different star that constitutes the system orbits the other, and the orbit oscillates in diameter - now larger, now smaller - but growing over time, in which energies are continually generated and continually thrown-off. The stars are complementary - each differs from the other and needs the other. The two-fold and orbiting nature of the system is perpetuated forever, but/ and the other features of the system may change open-endedly by expansion, contraction, combination etc. It's only a metaphor and breaks down it pushed, but it helps me.)

If we can suppose that the heart of reality is a polarity of love-as-cohesion ad love-as-expansion, then we can understand how Love may be perpetual - because creative. Love as a polarity is the kind-of-thing which might make the universe, the kind of thing which might keep it alive even while holding it together.

And creativity itself has to be understood as polar - because it includes preservation as well as novelty. And Life, likewise.

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This is a profoundly different way of understanding reality than we are used to - it requires a fundamental change in assumptions. And one reason that polarity has never become normal (although the idea has been knocking-around since Heraclitus) is that - taken seriously - it destroys the established way of understanding things, including mainstream-established Christian theology.

And like any metaphysical change, polarity doesn't make sense when considered in the light of a different and habitual metaphysical system, such as we deploy in public discourse.

Plus there are distorted and misleading versions of failed-polarity knocking around; such as the idea that the ideal is some kind of balanced-mixture of opposing forces - for example the common modern trope that Order and Chaos ought to be in balance. Yet the Order versus Chaos idea is typically one in which the opposition is between static-states, not between forces or tendencies; and is often poisoned by the dishonest attempt to destroy order and allow something otherwise forbidden (sex, drugs, unconstrained pleasure-seeking etc). Order-Chaos might be conceptualised as a true polarity, but in fact it very seldom is.

(It is always possible to reject metaphysical discussion as too theoretical, but it seems to me that in an age such as this one (an age of questioning) wrong metaphysics will sabotage the Good, even when the attacks on it are incoherent.)

A further problem with polarity and Christianity is that most Christians attempt to be monotheists, and are very concerned to assert the one-ness of God. Whether they are successful (given the full deity of Christ) is moot. Non-Christian monotheists such as Jews and Muslims (and common sense analysts) would say that Christianity is polytheistic - but Christian philosophers have regarded it as metaphysically crucial that God should ultimately be one, However, if God is ultimately one then polarity is not profound - only superficial.

Therefore a metaphysics of polarity implies that deity be polar - and Coleridge argued this using the Holy Trinity as polar components - although I find that I cannot follow his argument. Nonetheless, for a mainstream Christian to believe in polarity as primary, it seems necessary the Holy Trinity somehow be understood as a polarity. 

For those, like myself, who believe that Mormon theology is correct, the answer is obvious - that God is a polarity of masculine and feminine, that the ultimate basis of polarity is God conceptualised as a complementary dyad of Heavenly Father and Mother; and this primary polarity creates all others.

This idea of polarity at the root of everything fits with the Mormon understanding of reality as evolving, because evolution is also a polarity of continuity and newness. Evolution is a transformation, a changing of form in a retained entity, not the substitution of one entity for another different one. Evolution is about eternal lineage as well as here-and-now difference. 

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It is not easy to grasp; but I have found that the idea of polarity as the fundamental metaphysical reality is one of great clarity, strength and power; and I recommend it.


(Further reading on polarity is What Coleridge Thought by Owen Barfield, 1971.)

The Owen Barfield Blog continues to grow swiftly - two posts today; one of which is about a topic I would recommend to almost everyone: polarity.

Because this is an idea about the fundamental nature of reality, polarity is not easy to get-ahold-of. But, equally, because it is an idea about the fundamental nature of reality, once grasped it 'changes everything'. You will realise to what extent, and for thousands of years, unjustified assumptions have led to insoluble pseudo-problems, and confidence-sapping incoherence.

In a sense, in putting forward polarity, ST Coleridge was pre-equipping Western Civilisation with the weapon it needed to resist exactly what has since destroyed it: anti-Christian, secular Leftism. 

But polarity is more than that: it is what is needed to rationalise, and explain to ourselves, the next and destined step in the historical development of human consciousness - of our self-awareness in relation to reality.

So polarity is about as important as anything in philosophy - yet it is terribly hard to communicate; indeed it cannot be communicated. The best that can be done is to point people in the direction that they should be searching, and to encourage them to find-out in the only way possible: for themselves.