Saving the Appearances by Owen Barfield

First published: 1957

Type of work: Philosophy

Form and Content

Owen Barfield’s thought in general is difficult to place within the usual categorical limits of history, philosophy, psychology, or aesthetic theory. At its center is Barfield’s concept of the role of imagination in the evolution of human consciousness, and the consequences of that evolution on human understanding of physical nature, philosophically conceived reality, time, and history. Implicit in this notion is his understanding of how consciousness itself works, how it formulates representations (ideas or images) of the outside world, how its participation in the outside world generates and completes that world’s felt reality, while realizing its own, and how awareness of the changing meaning of words reveals not merely semantic growth or decay but also the evolving mind of the past and of the world it possessed and partially created.

These linked ideas—developed from primarily literary or linguistic models in his earlier works, such as Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning (1928) and History in English Words (1926)—are focused primarily in Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry on two issues: the failure of post-Renaissance Western scientific thought to establish a consistent epistemology and the consequences of that failure for Western man’s understanding of the relation “between human consciousness on the one hand and, on the other, the familiar world of which that consciousness is aware.” Saving the Appearances begins from the premise that two things currently obscure that relationship, one an omission and the other an assumption. What is omitted is an effective awareness of the participation of the human mind in the creation and the evocation of the phenomena of consciousness—a participation which philosophy has been emphasizing at least since the work of Immanuel Kant, and to which science itself has been calling attention as it continues to detail the enormous difference between the actual structure of physical reality and its appearance. What is misleadingly assumed is that whatever the truth may be about the relation between man and nature, that relation is fixed and unchanging, “the same now as it was when men first appeared on earth.” The twenty-five tightly reasoned chapters of Saving the Appearances sketch provocatively what happens when that assumption is challenged and that omission remedied.

The first stage of the argument—occupying the first three chapters of the book—fixes the reader’s awareness on the evolutionary nature of this process of participation: That is, at various roughly definable historical periods, the dynamics of the process are seen to change, resulting in significantly different human perceptions of nature and man’s relation to it. In the course of the development of this idea, Barfield insists on two others: that the illusory assumption of a static relation between man and nature may be traced to historical causes; and that a dramatically different vision of man and nature results if one keeps steadily in mind and takes seriously the combined insight of science and philosophy regarding the gulf that yawns between physical nature and its appearance, and regarding the mind’s evolving role in bridging that gulf. The final three chapters examine the historical and theological consequences of this altered vision.

Critical Context

As Barfield is keen to acknowledge, the most fundamental intellectual theme in Saving the Appearances has its roots in the literary and philosophical traditions of nineteenth century Romanticism. The idea that the human mind does not merely observe the outside world but, in perceiving, partly creates it as well echoes Coleridge and the thrust of the German Idealistic school that Coleridge had appropriated. In Poetic Diction, Barfield noted that his own theory of knowledge had been born of his experience with English Romantic poets, an encounter that led eventually to his What Coleridge Thought (1971). Earlier, his discovery of the work of the turn-of-the-century mystic and philosopher Steiner allowed him to test his own inferentially developed ideas on the role of the imagination in the historical evolution of consciousness against those of a thinker who claimed direct knowledge of sustained experience with a world that transcended the ordinarily perceived one. Steiner had elaborated his reflections on that experience into voluminous teachings on spiritual science or anthroposophy, which Barfield has described elsewhere as “nothing less than Romanticism grown up.”

Saving the Appearances seeks to examine within a historical context the notion of an evolving human consciousness, to show, as one commentator has put it, “that there is an interior aspect to evolution,” an appreciation of which is vital to intellectual and moral well-being. The clear implication of the book is that to study the historical development of Western thought up to the present is to study the various idols that have resulted, and continue to result, when phenomena—instead of being grasped as representations—are held to have an independent and objective existence. Barfield observes that “a representation, which is collectively mistaken for an ultimate—ought not be called a representation. It is an idol.” Iconoclasm, required of people individually and collectively, is the first step, he believes, on the way to final participation in nature. Breaking free of intellectual idolatry is rendered especially difficult, however, because of the currently prevailing materialist view of the world. That view is abetted by modern science, Barfield argues, through its failure to grasp its own epistemological opportunities and limits.

Saving the Appearances takes its title from a phrase invoked frequently by medieval philosophers as they sought to explain the nature of hypothetical thinking. It meant that a hypothesis was valuable insofar, and only insofar, as it explained or “saved” appearances—but was not on that basis to be regarded as true. By the seventeenth century, however, owing largely to the debate over the Copernican cosmic hypothesis, the phrase had acquired a new implication: that if a hypothesis saves all the appearances (that is, explains the phenomena), it is identical with truth. A new theory about the nature of theory had arisen; because of its historical context, it coincidentally diminished Western man’s appreciation of the representational element in phenomena. Barfield’s book sketches a hypothesis aimed at explaining all realities—including the representational ones—underlying phenomena. It aims at saving all the appearances.

Bibliography

Grant, Patrick. “Belief in Thinking: Owen Barfield and Michael Polanyi,” in Six Modern Authors and Problems of Belief, 1979.

Grant, Patrick. “The Quality of Thinking: Owen Barfield as Literary Man and Anthroposophist,” in Seven: An Anglo-American Literary Review. III (1982), pp. 113-125.

Mood, John J. “Poetic Language and Primal Thinking: A Study of Barfield, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger,” in Encounter. XXVI (August, 1965), pp. 417-433.

Reilly, R.J. Romantic Religion: A Study of Barfield, Lewis, Williams, and Tolkien, 1971.

Sugerman, Shirley, ed. Evolution of Consciousness: Studies in Polarity, 1976.

Tennyson, G.B. “Owen Barfield and the Rebirth of Meaning,” in The Southern Review. V (January, 1969), pp. 42-57.