Synopsis of Barfieldian Epistemology, Evolution of Conscience, and the Modern Loss of Meaning

Owen Barfield was a philologist in England and was a great friend of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, and influenced them profoundly in their literary works. He is not as well known for his literature or poetry, although he did write, but is best known for his theories on meaning and the evolution of consciousness. Through his exploration of poetic diction he developed a philosophy of the evolution of human consciousness, the exploration and explanation of which became his life’s work. I would like to attempt to give a synopsis of Barfield's theory of the evolution of conscience and the modern loss of meaning.

Let me begin by attempting to describe Barfield’s epistemology. Epistemology is the branch of philosophy which deals with the acquisition of knowledge. It asks the question, How do we come to know something? And how do we know that we know it?

Rene Magritte, an early twentieth century surrealist painter painted this famous pipe. And

underneath it he painted these words “This is not a pipe.” He was trying to draw attention to the

idea that all art, no matter how realistically rendered, is still only representation, or metaphor for the actual subject. This, of course, is NOT a pipe, but the painting of a pipe; the representation of a pipe.

Barfield goes one step further than this and points out that it is not just art that is a metaphor of an actual subject, but all of our perceptions of the external world are a mental representation, or metaphors, of reality. Barfield accepts the assumption that there does indeed exist an exterior reality, but simply points out the fact that the only way in which we are aware of it is through our sensory organs: eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and touch. When our sensory organs come into contact with the particles of the external world they cause sensations which are then interpreted by the mind as a representation of that sensory data. It is the representation of that data that we experience when we hear a bird, or see a rainbow, or even touch a table. Barfield says it like this, “On the assumption that the world whose existence is independent of our sensation and perception consists solely of particles, two operations are necessary…in order to produce the familiar world we know. First, the sense organs must be related to the particles in such a way as to give rise to sensations; and secondly, those mere sensations must be combined and constructed by the percipient mind into the recognizable and nameable objects we call things, it is this work of construction which will here be called figuration.” (Pg. 92 Reader) So this then is Barfield’s epistemology; that the exterior is really interior, because everything we know about the exterior is really a metaphoric representation in our minds of the sensory data that is gathered by our five senses. “The familiar world which we see and know around us- the blue sky with white clouds in it, the noise of a waterfall or a motor-bus, the shapes of flowers and their scent, the gesture and utterance of animals and the faces of our friends- the world too, which experts of all kinds methodically investigate- is a system of collective representations. The time comes when one must either accept this as the truth about the world or reject the theories of physics as an elaborate delusion. We cannot have it both ways.” (Pg. 89 Reader)

This type of perception, it should be noted, requires a certain amount of participation by the perceiver. The world, as such, does not exist without the participation of percipient. We are not generally aware of this participation in creating the world we know, but in fact this creative act of representation, or figuration as Barfield calls it, is at least as important to what we call conscious perception as the perceived matter itself. Now Barfield was not the only or first person to recognize this fundamental idea, the English Romantic poets wrote extensively on this idea, as did the American Transcendentalists. It is what Wordsworth means when he writes in “Tinturn Abbey”

Therefore am I still

A lover of the meadows and the woods,

And mountains; and of all that we behold

From this green earth; of all the mighty world

Of eye, and ear,--both what they half create,

And what perceive; (italics added)

The unique thing about Barfield is that he was way ahead of his time in realizing that the way in which people figurate, or represent, or participate with, the world around them has not always been the same. He realized that people in the past actually participated in the creation of their world in a very different way in which we do today. This change over time in the way in which people form such mental metaphors of the external world in their mind is what Barfield means by the “evolution of consciousness.” Allow me to repeat this: The change from the way in which Ancient man, or “primitive man” understood, or mentally created his world, to the way in which we do today, is what Barfield means by the “evolution of consciousness.” Barfield comes to recognize that this change has occurred through his study of words, poetics to be more precise.

The way in which we perceive the world, determines our semantics. Because words are the verbal and written symbols that we use to indicate the representations that we have in our minds. Each conceptual entity that is separately identified through this process of figuration is represented by a word. In fact the word indicating an idea, or thing, replaces in the mind, the image of that thing and allows us to think about it. When we think analytically it is by mentally manipulating these symbols, or words, in our mind. The words we use, and the meanings we ascribe to them, or our semantics are a direct reflection of the internal thought processes of the mind. Barfield sees the evolution of consciousness as being implied by the evolution of language. By studying how words developed over time, one can also deduce the way in which man’s consciousness has likewise evolved over time. So let’s talk about how words developed and what they mean, both in the past and today.

In Poetic Diction, Barfield states, “One of the first things that a student of etymology- even quite an amateur student- discovers for himself is that every modern language, with its thousands of abstract terms and its nuances of meaning and association, is apparently nothing, from beginning to end, but an unconscionable tissue of dead, or petrified, metaphors. If we trace the meanings of a great many words- or those of the elements of which they are composed- about as far back as etymology can take us, we are at once made to realize that an overwhelming proportion, if not all of them, referred in earlier days to one of these two things- a solid, sensible object, or some animal (probably human) activity.”

The common belief in Barfield’s day, and today the general notion is still around, is that the words that we use today formed initially as very simple verbal indicators for physical items or basic human activities, devoid of abstract of metaphorical meaning. We see this still today in the depictions of “cave men” pointing at something and uttering UUUUG! (Hurrah for Geico for giving sophistication to the cave man) Anyway this is the way in which we think of primitive man and thought. The problem with this notion is that when we study ancient writing, the language is actually MORE metaphoric than language today. Others before Barfield had noted this as well, and had come up with the explanation that time between the earliest man and our earliest manuscripts there existed a “metaphorical period” in which men took these simple concrete words and applied them in very abstract, metaphorical ways which created the reservoir of ancient metaphors, the dead and petrified form of which make up our language today. Barfield ridicules this notion when he says, “In other words, although, when [the linguist] moves backwards through the history of language, he finds it becoming more and more figurative with every step, yet he has no hesitation in assuming a period- still further back- when it was not figurative at all! To supply, therefore, the missing link in his chain of linguistic evolution, he proceeds to people the infancy of society with an exalted race of amateur poets.”

Barfield realized that this made no sense whatsoever. In fact what Barfield theorizes, and what modern language theory has been increasingly confirming, is that the words which seem to be denoting simple items or ideas, were extremely metaphorical to them. Allow me to site two examples of what I mean by this. If the roots of the word deity or divine is traced back far enough, we would find that it comes from the Latin root Deus, which means God, This word Deus is a cognate of the Greek word Zeus, which as we all know was the great sky god of the Ancient Greeks. Taken further back, these words come from an indo-european word, [deiwos], which meant the day time or bright sky. The old pre-Barfieldian way of explaining this was that primitive man came to at some time indicate the actual sky, or sun in the sky, with some word similar to [deiwos], and that some time after that man began to associate the word with the abstract characteristic of brightness, light, the sun’s life giving power, the residence of God, and a heavenly father. Barfield realized however that when ancient man looked at the bright blue heavens and said deiwos, he was not indicating any one of these single meanings but meant all of these concepts simultaneously. Not in a polysemous way, in other words he did not use the word for sky in some senses, and god in another sense, and brightness in yet another context; rather all of these ideas were wrapped up into one very meaningful and powerful word. That word to ancient man did not have many meanings, it had much meaning.

The Latin root for our word ‘spirit’ as well as the root of our word ‘respiration’ also can be traced back to a word, spiritus in the latin, that meant ‘wind’ ‘breath’ and ‘life force’ or ‘soul’. Again in this word we see that what have an ancient word from which many concepts, both abstract and internal, as well as concrete and external, are formed. Similarly to our example of the Indo-European word for bright sky, the ancient man who used this word ‘spiritus’ meant all of these internal and external meanings at once. Barfield recognized that the use of words in this way by ancient man indicated that his way of understanding the world around him was also much more unified and that he was connected to his exterior. The way in which internal/abstract meanings are connected to the external/concrete objects indicates that there was a very intense awareness of the participation that man had with the creation of his perception of the external world. The often ridiculed ‘myth’ or ‘mythological’ understanding of the physical world makes much more sense when we understand the way in which our ancient ancestors figurated, or represented the world in their minds.

The current model of understanding myth as primitive man’s pitiful attempts of rationally explaining the world around him, makes as little sense as the old ways of thinking about language development. This way of explaining myths is dependant, much like old theories of language development, on a time in which man saw only things and then went through a period of great imaginative reasoning where everything became a god and a spirit. Barfied writes in Poetic Diction, “the more widely accepted naturalistic theory of myths is very little more satisfactory for it is obliged to lean just as heavily on the same wonderful metaphorical period. The only difference is this, that for an extinct race of mighty poets it substitutes an extinct race of mighty philosophers.” Barfield points out the mistake that is made in thinking in this manner, “For the nineteenth-century fantasy of early man first gazing, with his mind tabula raza, at natural phenomena like ours, then seeking to explain them with thoughts like ours, and then by a process of inference ‘peopling’ them with the ‘aery phantoms’ of mythology, there is not any single shred of evidence whatever.” In other words, the problem is that we take our own empirical manner of figuration, of representation, of inductive reasoning and assume that all men over the course of time thought as we do today, and the semi-unconscious process of interpreting the sensory data that comes into our mind was done in the same way, and created the same representations in their minds as it does in ours, the only difference being that they drew inferior conclusions about the phenomenon that they were experiencing and that we, have drawn the correct ones. In actuality, ancient man participated with their reality in a different manner from us today, he did so in a way which made everything much more alive and connected to the human experience than we do today with our observational, empirical manner of seeing the natural phenomena around us. Indeed the way in which ancient man’s mind represented the data passed to his mind from his sensory organs created a world in which he was continually aware of his participation in creating it, and one in which everything around him was connected to him in a tapestry of meaningful relationship between himself and the world around him.

So what happened then? Why did this change? Why is it so hard for us to comprehend this unified, meaningful ancient mindset?

I have implied a few times in talking about the past that the difference in thought process between us and them is our unique reliance on the analytical nature of positivist philosophy. Positivist philosophy holds as it’s epistemological foundation that we can only know something through empirical evidence. This type of thought process is what Barfield calls Alpha thinking. He says, “Alpha thinking, as I have defined it, is thinking about collective representations. But when we think ‘about’ anything, we must necessarily be aware of ourselves as sharply and clearly detached from the thing thought about…In fact the very nature and aim of pure alpha-thinking is to exclude participation.” In other words, this way of thinking, which we today call empirical positivism, seeks to be able to think about the phenomena as something separate from the human, on its own, from an observational point of view, rather than a participating point of view. By doing so it must, out of necessity, break up the unified meanings into separate words which indicate the internal or abstract ideas expressed by them, and the external/concrete objects or activities to which they were attached. This manner of observational thinking and figuration did not begin all at once but had many starting points. The Lyceum, Aristotle’s famous school, ancient Alexandria the birth place of modern medicine and where the first geocentric model of the universe was conceived, the scholastic form of inquiry of the Middle Ages, were all steps toward the movement that we today call (somewhat self-aggrandizingly) the Enlightenment. It is during this relatively recent transformation of thought that we see very influential philosophers like Spinoza, who declares that man is but a facet of nature, and not exceptional in the role that he plays. The complete separation of man from his participation in creating the knowable world naturally leads to the conclusion that human life is in the end meaningless, and that existence itself is pointless. Now I don’t want you to think that I am here to condemn the science department, or that I am against thinking in this analytical way, I started back to school as a mechanical engineering major, and have always been fascinated by the physical sciences, and I am very much for the good things, including the improvements in comfort and life span, that they have brought about. The problem arises when we can only see our world through such a Positivist lens. As we just discussed, the metaphoric mental recreation of sensory data is the medium through which we understand our world. Empirical Positivism denies the act, or medium, of creative, participatory, metaphoric representation, while at the same time using the current, given set of collective representations, or semantic set, as the authoritative set by which the world is “empirically” observed. The concern that Barfield had, and I echo, is that we have become unaware that there is, or ever was, another way of mentally representing the world around us, and when we see the world only through empirical eyes, it has the negative consequence of leaving our lives bereft of meaning. We can see the effects of this lack of meaning in our modern use of language, as Barfield puts it, “We no longer call up any mental image of “standing beneath” when we use the word ‘understand’, nor do we feel an physical “pressing out” when we speak of expressing a sentiment or idea.” The only reason these words have any meaning at all is because they still cling tenuously to their old metaphorical past. They do still mean something to us, but they have lost that active living meaning that accompanied them when they were spoken by our ancient ancestors.

If I might, I would like to give one last example to clarify the difference in the two modes of thought, the analytical empirical mode of and what I like to call the participatory mode. I am writing with my pencil on this piece of paper some words, what can science teach me about what I am writing? It could tell me about the way in which lead is formed with minute sheets that are loosely bound so that the friction between it and the paper cause it to leave behind a line of lead chips. Science could tell me about the brightness and weight of the paper that I am writing on. It can explain that proprial receptors in my hand relay to my brain that I am holding the pencil correctly. It could tell me that the nervous impulse propagating from the post central gyros, passes through the cortico-rubral tract and meets with impulses from the cerebellum which then pass into the rubral-spinal tracts of the brachial plexus and then pass a neuro-electric charge due to the reception of sodium into billions of sodium channels along the length of the axion of a nerve cell in the ulnar, radial, or median nerves, which causes a positive charge at the nerve terminal which releases acetocholine into the neuromuscular junction which causes the endoplasmic reticulum of the muscle cell to release its calcium content into the muscle causing it to flex. Science can tell me a good many things about my writing. But what do the words that I wrote mean?

She walks in beauty like the night,

Of cloudless climes and starry skies,

And all that’s good of dark and bright,

Meet in her aspect and her eyes:

Thus mellowed to that tender light

Which heaven to gaudy day denies. -Byron

This poem is meaningful to me, and hopefully it was meaningful to you too. The first time I heard this poem it changed the way I saw the night sky, and my wife; it connected my 'self' to the phenomenon of perceiving the night sky such that it allows me to participate anew in the act of seeing it. This is the final point I would like to make. Barfield believed that through good poetry, and I would add good story telling, the metaphors of language can be refreshed and cause what he called a “felt change of consciousness” so that the same sensory input, for example from looking at the sky at night, will result in a new mental representation in your mind. Good poetry and literature allow us to re-participate in the perception of the green earth around us. It allows us to remake some of the meaning that has been lost.

Brandon Pearce