[MD] The Barfield - Pirsig connection

[skutvik at online.no]

John, Ian and Multitude

23 Aug.:

> Ok, found the Barfield.  Interesting guy.  I'd like to read an
> influence to Tolkien.  Wiki had a neat quote: <goog_1251010424075>
> Saul Bellow, the Nobel-Prize winning novelist, wrote: *We are well
> supplied with interesting writers, but Owen Barfield is not content
> to be merely interesting. His ambition is to set us free. Free from
> what? From the prison we have made for ourselves by our ways of
> knowing, our limited and false habits of thought, our `common
> sense'.* * *
> 

Ian will remember Scott Roberts who was with the discussion for many 
years and endlessly spoke about Barfield's "participation" system.  
This is a bit like Pirsig's in seeing a upheaval of enormous proportions 
with the Greeks. In Barfield's view existence shifted from 
"participation" - i.e. man was one with his world to "loss of 
participation" (the subject parted company with the world) I believe he 
foresees some "return to participation". This is uncannily like the Aretê 
- SOM shift in ZAMM, but the MOQ is unique in making this pre - post 
Greek shift into the social - intellectual level transition and then the 
MOQ itself as a "return to participation" at a higher turn of the screw. 
Or freeing existence from intellect's prison. Scott was much like Ham 
Priday by refusing to see the MOQ as saying the same only more 
consistent and convincing. 

Bodvar