[lit-ideas] Re: Owen Barfield -- Meaning
- From: "Adriano Palma" <palma@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx>,<lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 03 Jul 2011 00:50:58 +0200
** Reply Requested by 7/3/2011 (Sunday) **
not only this Barfield but even idolatry..
did you recall rabbi akiva?
... is.... who refuses idols?
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
ξε ν’, γγέλλειν Λακεδαιμονίοις ἀ ὅτι τ δε
κείμεθα, το ς κείνων ῥήμασι πειθόμενοι.
/begin/read__>sig.file: postal address
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>>> 06/19/11 10:25 PM >>>
My last post today. I referred to this author below in my "Geary's
poetics".
Excerpted from wiki:
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.
In 1920 received a 1st class degree in English language and literature.
After finishing his B. Litt., which became the book "Poetic Diction: a
study in meaning (1928)", 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.
Barfield's 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.
Barfield has been known as "the first and last Inkling".
He was one of the initial members of the Inklings literary discussion
group
based in Oxford -- more specifically, at the "Bird and Baby" pub across
Grice's college, St. John's.
Barfield had a strong influence on C. S. Lewis, and, through his book
(originally Oxon thesis), "Poetic Diction: a study in meaning" (1928),
an
appreciable effect on J. R. R. Tolkien.
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."
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?"
Barfield became an anthroposophist after attending a lecture by Rudolf
Steiner in 1924.
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, 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."
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.
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: a
study in
meaning" (1928) 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.
During 1996 Lachman conducted perhaps the last interview with Barfield,
versions of which appeared in Gnosis magazine and the magazine Lapis.
In a foreword to "Poetic Diction: a study in meaning" (1928), Howard
Nemerov, US Poet Laureate, stated:
"Among the poets and teachers of my acquaintance who know "Poetic
diction:
a study in meaning" (1928), 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'."
James Hillman noted culture critic and psychologist called Barfield
---- "one of the most neglected important thinkers of the 20th Century."
"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: A Study in Idolatry
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 notifor 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; this change over time in human thought is exactly Barfield's
point.
*************************
"Poetic Diction: a study in meaning" (1928, originally Oxon
dissertation).
Barfield's dissertation, "Poetic Diction: a study in meaning" (1928)
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" -- like Grice's,
later.
Using poetic examples, Barfield attempts to demonstrate how the
imagination works with words and metaphors to create what Barfield calls
"utterer's
meaning".
Barfield 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.
Barfield's is a 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".
Barfield's theory of meaning 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".
The Silver Trumpet novel. (1925)
History in English Words (1926)
****************************************
Poetic DictionGreek Thought in English Words (1950)
essay in: G. Rostrevor Hamilton, ed. (1950), Essays and Studies 1950, 3,
London: John Murray, pp. 69–81
This Ever Diverse Pair (1950)
Saving the Appearances: a Study in Idolatry (1957) Evolution – Der Weg
des
Bewusstseins: Zur Geschichte des Europaischen Denkens. (1957) in German,
Markus Wulfing (trans.) Salvare le apparenze: Uno studio sull’idolatrie
(2010) in Italian, Giovanni Maddalena, Stephania Scardicchio (editors)
Worlds
Apart: A Dialogue of the 1960s (1963)
Unancestral Voice (1965)
*****************************
Speaker's Meaning (1967)
*****************************
What Coleridge Thought (1971)
**********************************
The Rediscovery of Meaning
**********************************
and Other Essays (1977)
History, Guilt, and Habit (1979)
Review of Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown
of
Bicameral Mind (1979) essay in: Teachers College Record, 80, 1979-02,
pp.
602–604
Language, Evolution of Consciousness, and
**************************************
the Recovery of Human Meaning (1981)
**************************************
essay reprinted in "Toward the Recovery of Wholeness: Knowledge,
Education,
and Human Values", ISBN 978-0807727584, p 55-61.
The Evolution Complex (1982) essay in Towards 2.2, 6, Spring 1982, pp.
14–
16
Introducing Rudolf Steiner (1983)essay in Towards 2.4, 42, Fall-Winter
1983
Orpheus verse drama. (1983) ISBN 978-0940262010
Listening to Steiner (1984) review in Parabola 9.4, 1985, pp. 94–100
Reflections on C.S. Lewis, S.T. Coleridge and R. Steiner: An Interview
with
Barfield (1985) in: Towards 2.6, Spring-Summer 1985, pp. 6–13
Owen Barfield on C. S. Lewis (1989) G. B. Tennyson (ed.)
The Child and the Giant (1988) short story in: Child and Man: Education
as
an Art, 22, July 1988, pp. 5–7
Das Kind und der Riese — Eine orphische Erzählung (1990) in German,
Susanne Lin (trans.)
A Barfield Reader:
Selections from the Writings of Owen Barfield (1990) G. B. Tennyson
(ed.)
A Barfield Sampler: Poetry and Fiction by Owen Barfield (1993)
edited by Jeanne Clayton Hunter and Thomas Kranidas
References: Lavery, "How Barfield Thought", p. 5 -- The Independent,
"Obituary: Owen Barfield" -- Hooper, "C.S. Lewis Companion and Guide",
p. 622 --
Flieger, "Splintered Light". -- C.S. Lewis, "Surprised by Joy", p. 225.
--
C.S. Lewis, "Surprised by Joy", pp. 199-200. -- Blaxland-De Lange,
p.27. --
Grant, pp. 113-125
Tennyson, "Owen Barfield: Man and Meaning". -- Philip Zaleski, '100
Best
Spiritual Books of the Century, Harper-Collins,
http://www.gradresources.org/worldview_articles/book.shtml -- Flieger
-- Lachman, "One Man's Century",
p. 8. -- Lachman, "Owen Barfield" -- "Poetic Diction", p. 1. -- Bellow,
"History, Guilt and Habit: Editorial review". -- Lavery, "Interview
with
James Hillman". -- "Encyclopedia Barfieldiana: The Unrepresented"
(entry). --
Remark of Barfield. In Sugerman, Evolution of Consciousness", p. 20.
Barfield, "Worlds Apart" as quoted here
Sources: David Lavery, "How Barfield Thought:The Creative Life of Owen
Barfield" (pdf), The Collected Works of David Lavery,
_http://davidlavery.net/Collected_Works/Essays/How_Barfield_Thought.pdf_
(http://davidlavery.net/Collected_Works/Essays/How_Barfield_Thought.pdf)
,
Hooper, Walter (19 December 1997). "Obituary: Owen Barfield". The
Independent (London).
_http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/obituary-owen-barfield-1289580.html_
(http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/obituary-owen-barfield-1289580.html)
.
Walter Hooper (1998), C.S. Lewis: A Companion and Guide, HarperCollins,
ISBN 9780060638801
Verlyn Flieger (2002), Splintered Light: Logos and Language in
Tolkien's
World, Kent: Kent State University Press, ISBN 0-87338-744-9
Barfield's
influence is the main thesis of this book.
C.S. Lewis (1998), Surprised by Joy, Houghton Mifflin HarcouBiography, London:
Temple Lodge
Patrick Grant (1982), "The Quality of Thinking: Owen Barfield as
Literary
Man and Anthroposophist", Seven 3
Gary Lachman, "One Man's Century: Visiting Owen Barfield", Gnosis 40: 8
Gary Lachman, "Owen Barfield and the Evolution of Consciousness", Lapis
3
Owen Barfield (1928), Poetic Diction: A Study In Meaning
Saul Bellow, History, Guilt and Habit: Editorial Review, Amazon,
_http://www.amazon.com/History-Guilt-Habit-Owen-Barfield/dp/1597311081_
(http://www.amazon.com/History-Guilt-Habit-Owen-Barfield/dp/1597311081)
David Lavery, Interview with James Hillman,
_http://davidlavery.net/barfield/friends_of_barfield/Hillman.html_
(http://davidlavery.net/barfield/friends_of_barfield/Hillman.html)
David Lavery, Encyclopedia Barfieldiana,
_http://www.davidlavery.net/Barfield/Encyclopedia_Barfieldiana/Encyclopedia_Barfieldiana.html_
(http://www.davidlavery.net/Barfield/Encyclopedia_Barfieldiana/Encyclopedia_Barfieldiana.htm
l)
G.B. Tennyson; David Lavery (1996), Ben Levin, ed., Owen Barfield: Man
and
Meaning documentary (VHS), Encino, California: OwenArts Productions, pp.
40
min.
Shirley Sugerman (2008), "A Conversation with Owen Barfield", Evolution
of
Consciousness: Studies in Polarity, San Rafael, Calif.: Barfield Press,
pp.
3–28, ISBN 978-1597311168 . The work is a festschrift honoring Barfield
at
age 75.
Owen Barfield (2010), Worlds Apart (A Dialogue of the 1960's),
Middletown,
Conn: Barfield Press UK, ISBN 978-0955958267
Tuck, Donald H. (1974). The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy.
Chicago: Advent. ISBN 0-911682-20-1.
Hipolito, Jane W. (2008), "Bibliography of the published Writings of
Owen
Barfield", in Shirley Sugerman, Evolution of Consciousness: Studies in
Polarity, San Rafael, Calif.: Barfield Society, pp. 227–261, ISBN
978-1597311168, http://barfieldsociety.org/BarfieldBibliog.pdf,
retrieved 2011-03-27
Lionel Adey. C.S. Lewis's 'Great War' with Owen Barfield Victoria, BC:
University of Victoria (English Literary Studies No. 14) 1978.
Humphrey Carpenter. The Inklings: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles
Williams, and Their Friends. London: Unwin Paperbacks. 1981.
Diana Pavlac Glyer. The Company They Keep: C. S. Lewis and J. R. R.
Tolkien
as Writers in Community. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press. 2007.
ISBN 978-0-87338-890-0
Roger Lancelyn Green & Walter Hooper, C. S. Lewis: A Biography. Fully
revised & expanded edition. HarperCollins, 2002. ISBN 0-00-628164-8
Karlson, Henry (2010). Thinking with the Inklings. ISBN 1450541305.
[edit] External links
Owen Barfield Literary Estate - permissions, publications, academic
research on Owen Barfield
Journal of Inklings Studies peer-reviewed journal on Barfield and his
literary circle, based in Oxford
The Owen Barfield Society
Owen Barfield website
-----
Cheers,
J. L. Speranza
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