Sound thinking
The peril of positivism
by Ken Myers
One of the guests on Volume 161 of the Journal is Landon Loftin, the co-author (with Max Leyf) of What Barfield Thought: An Introduction to the Work of Owen Barfield (Cascade Books, 2023). During the interview he cited a 1961 article by Barfield titled “The Rediscovery of Meaning.” That essay — originally published in the Saturday Evening Post — is currently available in the anthology The Rediscovery of Meaning and Other Essays (Barfield Press), which Loftin says is the best book to obtain if one is beginning to read Barfield’s work. Here are a few paragraphs from the article.
“Up to now even those who reject materialism as an ultimate philosophy have been content to accept the limitations which positivism seeks to impose on the sphere of knowledge. True, they say, the spiritual values which constitute the true meaning of life can be dimly felt and are, in fact, what lie behind the symbols of religion and the mysterious phenomena of art. But we can never hope to know anything about them. There are — and this is often suggested with a certain unction — two kinds of truth: the scientific kind which can be demonstrated experimentally and which is limited to the physical world and, on the other side, the ‘truths’ of mystical intuition and revelation, which can be felt and suggested but never known or scientifically stated. And if these seem to be incompatible with the truths of science — well, perhaps that is all the better. ‘The heart has its reasons whereof reason knoweth not.’
“In this way for a number of years a precarious equilibrium may be said to have been established between a meaningless and mechanical world of physical events described by science and some kind of ulterior spiritual significance which that world might be supposed to conceal and with which it had little if anything to do. The idealist philosophies of the nineteenth century made it their business to maintain this equilibrium by rationalizing it as best they could.
“It was a state of affairs that could not last, and its latent instability has been exposed by a certain further step which the doctrine of positivism has taken in our time. The older positivism proclaimed that man could never know anything except the physical world-mechanism accessible to his senses. The twentieth-century variety — variously known as ‘logical positivism,’ ‘linguistic analysis,’ ‘the philosophy of science,’ and so on — goes further and avers that nothing can even be said about anything else. Language is meaningful only insofar as it communicates, or at least purports to communicate, information about physical events, which observation and experiment can then confirm or disprove. The ground is cut away from beneath the feet of any idealist interpretation of the universe by a new dogma, not that such an interpretation is untrue but that it cannot even be advanced. The language in which it is couched is not really language at all (although it may obey the rules of grammar) because it has no meaning. Not only that, the ground is cut away from any sort of inner life at all. Moral judgments, for instance, have no factual reference. If we say, ‘Cruelty is wicked,’ all we really mean is that we don’t like it. Words which purport to refer to anything beyond the reach of the senses do not in fact refer to anything at all. Our conviction that they do is merely a mistake we make about the possible ways of using language. When we combine such words into sentences, we imagine we are saying something, but in fact we are merely making noises, which express our feelings, as laughter and tears and grunts express our feelings. This, it is claimed, has always been the case, and all mythology and religion, together with practically all philosophy before the rise of positivism, are simply examples of these linguistic errors.
“The upshot of all this was once well put by C. S. Lewis, when he pointed out that by and large, if the new positivism is right, the history of the human mind since the beginning of time has consisted in ‘almost nobody making linguistic mistakes about almost nothing.’ Even so, modern ‘analytical’ philosophy is interesting and significant just because it forces the issue to its logical conclusion and brings into the open the mental predicament which acceptance of positivism has always really implied. Like a sort of scalpel, linguistic analysis lays bare that connection which we began by affirming between the rise of positivism and the general sense of meaninglessness in the West. At last the choice is plain. Either we must concede that 99 per cent of all we say and think (or imagine we think) is meaningless verbiage, or we must — however great the wrench — abandon positivism.”
