| Owen Barfield | |
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| Born | 9 November 1898 London |
| Died | 14 December 1997 (aged 99) Brookline, Massachusetts, United States |
| Occupation | Solicitor, Philosopher |
| Nationality | United Kingdom |
| Alma mater | Wadham College, Oxford |
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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 1st class degree in English language and literature. After finishing his B. Litt., which became the book Poetic Diction, he worked as a solicitor. Because of his career as a solicitor, Barfield contributed to philosophy as a non-academic, publishing 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 most famous today as a friend of C. S. Lewis and as the author of Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry.
Barfield met Lewis in 1919. In 1923 he married the stage designer Maud Douie. They adopted three children: Alexander, Lucy, and Geoffrey. 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 her brother Geoffrey in 1952. Barfield died in Forest Row in Sussex.[2]
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Barfield has been known as "the first and last Inkling". He was one of the founding members of the Inklings literary discussion group based in Oxford. He had a strong influence on C. S. Lewis,[3] and, through his book Poetic Diction, an appreciable effect on J. R. R. Tolkien.[4] Lewis was a good friend of Barfield since 1919, and termed Barfield "the best and wisest of my unofficial teachers". That Barfield did not consider philosophy merely intellectually is illustrated by a well-known interchange that took place between Lewis and Barfield. Lewis one day made the mistake of referring to philosophy as "a subject." "It wasn't a subject to Plato," said Barfield, "It was a way."[5] Lewis refers to Barfield as the "Second Friend" in Surprised by Joy:
But the Second Friend is the man who disagrees with you about everything. He is not so much the alter ego as the antiself. Of course he shares your interests; otherwise he would not become your friend at all. But he has approached them all at a different angle. He has read all the right books but has got the wrong thing out of every one. It is as if he spoke your language but mispronounced it. How can he be so nearly right and yet, invariably, just not right?[6]
Barfield became an anthroposophist after attending a lecture by Rudolf Steiner in 1924.[7] He studied the work and philosophy of Rudolf Steiner throughout his life and translated some of his works, and had some early essays published in anthroposophical publications. A study of Steiner's basic texts provides information on some of the ideas that influenced Barfield's work,[8] but Barfield's work ought not be considered derivative of Steiner's. Barfield expert G. B. Tennyson suggests the relation: "Barfield is to Steiner as Steiner was to Goethe".[9]
Barfield might be characterised as both a Christian writer, and a learned anti-reductionist writer. By 2007 all of his books are in print again and include 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 civilization 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.[10]
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." It is a fictional dialogue between a physicist, a biologist, a psychiatrist, a lawyer-philologist, a linguistic analyst, a theologian, a retired Waldorf School teacher, and a young man employed at a rocket research station. During a period of three days, the characters discuss first principles.
In her book Splintered Light: Logos and Language in Tolkien's World, Verlyn Flieger analyzes the influence of Barfield's Poetic Diction on the writing of J.R.R. Tolkien.[11]
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[12] magazine and the magazine Lapis.[13]
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.[14]
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'.[15]
The culture critic and psychologist James Hillman called Barfield "one of the most neglected important thinkers of the 20th Century".[16]
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.
Saving the Appearances explores some three thousand years of history—particularly the history of human consciousness. 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 the 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".[17]
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.[18]
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.[19]
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; this change over time in human thought is exactly Barfield's point.
Barfield's Poetic Diction opens with examples of "felt changes" arising in reading poetry, and discusses how these relate to general principles of poetic composition. But Barfield's greater agenda is "a study of meaning". Using poetic examples, he attempts 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 for 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, the single Greek word pneuma (which can be variously translated as "breath", "spirit", or "wind") reflects, Barfield argues, the primordial unity of these concepts of air, spirit, wind, and breath, all included in one "holophrase". This Barfield considers not the application of analogy to natural phenomena, but the discernment of its pre-existence. This is the perspective Barfield believes is original in the evolution of consciousness, 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.
For a full bibliography including all essays, see Hipolito, "Bibliography of the published Writings of Owen Barfield" in sources section below.