Evolution of Consciousness

Evolution of Consciousness

Barfield asks whether consciousness itself changes through history. Starting with Collingwood’s distinction between history and natural process, he challenges the assumption that earlier thinkers perceived the same world we do. Through Coleridge, William James, poetry and the history of language, he explores the interdependence of thought and perception. He considers participation, Julian Jaynes’s account of consciousness, Aristotle’s elements and the scientific revolution, arguing that changes in consciousness involve changes in the experienced world itself.

1. 0:00 — Evolution, history and Collingwood
2. 5:24 — The limits of a history of ideas
3. 10:28 — Perception before thought
4. 13:43 — Coleridge: distinguishing without dividing
5. 17:09 — William James and the inseparability of thought and perception
6. 19:27 — What is the world we perceive?
7. 23:37 — Consciousness as the inside of the world
8. 27:05 — The difficulty of studying consciousness through language
9. 31:00 — Poetry, prose and the evolution of language
10. 36:51 — Participation and the emergence of self-consciousness
11. 38:50 — Julian Jaynes and the bicameral mind
12. 41:08 — Aristotle and the changing meaning of the elements
13. 44:46 — The scientific revolution and changes in perception
14. 48:27 — History and evolution continuing side by side

Owen Barfield — 2 recordings in the archive.

And I I begin by asking the question, is there any real difference between what we mean when we use the word evolution and what we mean when we use the word history? It sometimes looks as if there's not. Whether you talk about the history of the earth or the evolution of the earth or of mankind makes no difference. On the other hand, the terms are not always interchangeable. No biologist would talk about the history of species and no historian would refer to the evolution of the Peloponnesian war. This shows I think that there really are two different concepts involved involved and that we should do well to keep them distinct in our minds whether or no we allow them to overlap in the looseness of casual speech. But what then is the difference? And it seems to me that the historian R. G. Collingwood was laying his finger on it when he argued in his book, The Idea of History, that I quote, "All history is history of thought." Maybe that in putting it in just that way, all history, he was spoiling a good case by overstating it. But whether that is so or not, he was drawing attention and drawing it usefully I think to the fact that when we speak of history, we have in mind or or ought to have in mind something that imports a consciously directed process at least in some degree a conscious process. There may be even in recent history as Marxism for instance maintains much in the process that is going on unconsciously. But in order to be historical it must be in some measure a conscious process and that surely is what distinguishes it from evolution. By contrast with history, evolution is an unconscious process. Another and perhaps a better way of putting it would be to say that evolution is a natural history, a human process since nature in it in its higher development does of course include animal consciousness. I don't however think we can say it includes human consciousness. Not that is unless we're happy to smudge our vocabulary. Nature, someone will say, includes human nature very well. But in so far as we treat man as a part of nature, for instance, in a biological survey of evolution, we are precisely not treating him as an historical being. As an historically…