Preston Grissom

Student’s Choice #3

Owen Barfield: Collective Representations

            Barfield claims that we use our senses and imagination in an active way.  We believe that we see something and therefore, in our minds, it exists.  In class we discussed that we see a rainbow as a bunch of colors in the sky.  It almost seems as we can trace it to the ground to find some gold.  We do not see that is actually made up of millions of water droplets. This is a representation.

If we see something and ask others if they see the same thing we are actively creating a collective representation.  This is like if two people heard the same thing come from someone’s mouth.  Many times this happens when someone says “spit” but both people think they hear another word.  What they both perceived is a collective representation.

What is interesting is when we see that the world itself is merely a mass amount of collective representations.  Everyone thought the world was flat, and so it was.  Everyone thought we were the only solar system, and so it was.  Everyone thought Pluto was a plant, so it was (still should be I don’t care what the geniuses say).  This becomes confusing and humbling at the same time.  What happens when one man or woman gets an insight on the world we have never seen.  What if in a million years humans find out the hydrogen really isn’t hydrogen but it is oxygen in a different form than we ever knew existed?

This leaves us humble in that we can say what we “really believe” of the world but it makes us scared as well because the ground we stand on is always moving.