Sunday, July 03, 2005

Levy-Bruhl, quoted in Owen Barfield's, Saving the Appearances (Wesleyan, 1988, pp 28-35): "... in other words, the connecting links of the representations are given, as a rule, in the representations themselves." (in reference to "primitive" cultures). Also, "The collective representations and interconnections which constitute such a mentality are governed by the law of participation..."

Barfield goes on to summarize "participation", or "original participation" as described by Levy-Bruhl and other anthropologists as an "awareness we no longer have, of an extra-sensory link between the percipient and the representations. This involves, not only that we think differently, but that the phenomena (collective representations) themselves are different."

But Barfield then corrects this idea: "[W]e do, in fact, still participate in the phenomena, though for the most part we do it unconsciously. We can only remind ourselves of that participation by beta-thinking [a sort of "thinking about thinking about representations" - jd] and we forget it as soon as we leave off."

On the other side of the negation of the negation is a "final participation", but more on that later.

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