Owen Barfield
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Owen Barfield (9 November 1898 – 14 December 1997) was a British philosopher, author, poet, and critic.
Barfield was born in London. He was educated at Highgate School and Wadham College, Oxford and in 1920 received a first class degree in English language and literature. After finishing his B. Litt., which became his third book Poetic Diction, he was a dedicated poet and author for over ten years. After 1934 his profession was as a solicitor in London, from which he retired in 1959 aged 60. Thereafter he had many guest appointments as Visiting Professor in North America. Barfield published numerous essays, books, and articles. His primary focus was on what he called the "evolution of consciousness," which is an idea which occurs frequently in his writings. He is best known as the author of Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry and as a founding father of Anthroposophy in the English speaking world.
In 1923 he married the musician and choreographer Maud Douie. They had two children, Alexander and Lucy; and fostered Geoffrey. Their sole grandchild is Owen A. Barfield, son of Alexander.
Barfield and C. S. Lewis met in 1919 and were close friends for 44 years. Barfield was instrumental in converting Lewis to theism during the early period of their friendship which they affectionately called 'The Great War'. Maud also guided Lewis. As well as being friend and teacher to Lewis, Barfield was his legal adviser and trustee. Lewis dedicated his 1936 book Allegory of Love to Barfield. Lewis wrote his 1949 book The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe for Lucy Barfield and he dedicated The Voyage of the Dawn Treader to Geoffrey in 1952.
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Influence and opinions
Barfield might be characterised as both a Christian writer and a learned anti-reductionist writer. His books have been republished by Barfield UK, with new editions including Unancestral Voice; History, Guilt, and Habit; Romanticism Comes of Age; The Rediscovery of Meaning; Speaker's Meaning; and Worlds Apart. History in English Words seeks to retell the history of Western civilisation by exploring the change in meanings of various words. Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry is on the 1999 100 Best Spiritual Books of the Century list by Philip Zaleski.
Barfield was also an influence on T. S. Eliot who called Barfield's book Worlds Apart "a journey into seas of thought very far from ordinary routes of intellectual shipping."
In her book Splintered Light: Logos and Language in Tolkien's World, Verlyn Flieger analyses the influence of Barfield's Poetic Diction on the writing of J.R.R. Tolkien.
More recent discussions of Barfield's work are published in Stephen Talbott's The Future Does Not Compute: Transcending the Machines in Our Midst, Neil Evernden's The Social Creation of Nature, Daniel Smitherman's Philosophy and the Evolution of Consciousness, Morris Berman's The Reenchantment of the World, and Gary Lachman's A Secret History of Consciousness. In 1996 Lachman conducted perhaps the last interview with Barfield, versions of which appeared in Gnosis magazine and the magazine Lapis.
In his book Why the World Around You isn't as it Appears: A Study of Owen Barfield (SteinerBooks, 2012), Albert Linderman presents Barfield's work in light of recent societal examples and scholarship while writing for an audience less familiar with philosophical categories and history.
In a foreword to Poetic Diction, Howard Nemerov, US Poet Laureate, stated: Among the poets and teachers of my acquaintance who know POETIC DICTION it has been valued not only as a secret book, but nearly as a sacred one.
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'."
The culture critic and psychologist James Hillman called Barfield "one of the most neglected important thinkers of the 20th Century".
Harold Bloom, describing Poetic Diction, referred to it as "a wonderful book, from which I keep learning a great deal".
The film Owen Barfield: Man and Meaning (1994), co-produced and written by G. B. Tennyson and David Lavery, directed and edited by Ben Levin, is a documentary portrait of Barfield.
Barfield has been held in high esteem by many contemporary poets, including Robert Kelly, Charles Stein, George Quasha, Tom Cheetham, and others.
Poetic Diction
Barfield's book Poetic Diction begins with examples of "felt changes" arising in reading poetry, and discusses how these relate to general principles of poetic composition. But his greater agenda is "the study of meaning". Using poetic examples, he sets out to demonstrate how the imagination works with words and metaphors to create meaning. He shows how the imagination of the poet creates new meaning, and how this same process has been active, throughout human experience, to create and continuously expand language. For Barfield this is not just literary criticism: it is evidence bearing on the evolution of human consciousness. This, for many readers, is his real accomplishment: his unique presentation of "not merely a theory of poetic diction, but a theory of poetry, and not merely a theory of poetry, but a theory of knowledge". This theory was developed directly from a close study of the evolution of words and meaning, starting with the relation between the primitive mind's myth making capacity, and the formation of words. Barfield uses numerous examples to demonstrate that words originally had a unified "concrete and undivided" meaning, which we now distinguish as several distinct concepts. For example, he points out that the single Greek word pneuma (which can be variously translated as "breath", "spirit", or "wind") reflects the original unity of these concepts of air, spirit, wind, and breath, all included in one "holophrase". This Barfield considers to be not the application of a poetic analogy to natural phenomena, but the discernment of an actual phenomenal unity. Not only concepts, but the phenomena themselves, form a unity, the perception of which was possible to primitive consciousness and therefore reflected in language. This is the perspective Barfield believes to have been primordial in the evolution of consciousness, the perspective which was "fighting for its life", as he phrases it, in the philosophy of Plato, and which, in a regenerate and more sophisticated form, benefiting from the development of rational thought, needs to be recovered if consciousness is to continue to evolve.Template:Citation needed
Worlds Apart
Worlds Apart is one of Barfield's most brilliant performances. It is a fictional dialogue between a physicist, a biologist, a psychiatrist, a lawyer-philologist (who might be taken for Barfield himself), a linguistic analyst (more or less the villain), a theologian (who has reminded some readers of C. S. Lewis), a retired Waldorf School teacher, and a young man employed at a rocket research station. During a period of three days, the characters discuss and debate first principles, occasioned at first by the observation that the various branches of modern thought seem to be taking for granted an incompatibility with one another. The discussion culminates in a crescendo of some length from the retired teacher, who expounds the anthroposophical point of view.
Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry
Saving the Appearances explores the development of human consciousness across some three thousand years of history. Barfield argues that the evolution of nature is inseparable from the evolution of consciousness. What we call matter interacts with mind and wouldn't exist without it. In Barfield's lexicon, there is an "unrepresented" underlying base of reality that is extra-mental. This is comparable to Kant's notion of the "noumenal world". However, unlike Kant, Barfield entertained the idea that the "unrepresented" could be directly experienced, under some conditions.
Similar conclusions have been made by others, and the book has influenced, for example, the physicist Stephen Edelglass (who wrote The Marriage of Sense and Thought), and the Christian existentialist philosopher Gabriel Marcel, who wanted the book to be translated into French.
Barfield points out that the "real" world of physics and particles is completely different from the world we see and live in of things with properties.
- In our critical thinking as physicists or philosophers, we imagine ourselves set over against an objective world consisting of particles, in which we do not participate at all. In contrast, the phenomenal, or familiar, world is said to be riddled with our subjectivity. In our daily, uncritical thinking, on the other hand, we take for granted the solid, objective reality of the familiar world, assume an objective, lawful manifestation of its qualities such as color, sound, and solidity, and even write natural scientific treatises about the history of its phenomena—all while ignoring the human consciousness that (by our own, critical account) determines these phenomena from the inside in a continually changing way.
The particle world of physics is independent of human thought, and only indirectly accessible to humans. The world we see and perceive directly is dependent on and alterable by human thought (this is not to say there aren't or are limits.) Both are 'real' or 'unreal' depending on the meaning of real; that this changes over time in human thought is exactly Barfield's point.
