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 during 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 A Study in Idolatry.
Owen Barfield met C.S. Lewis in 1919. In 1923 he married the stage designer Maud Douie. They adopted three children: Alexander, Lucy and Geoffrey; C.S. Lewis wrote his 1949 book The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe for Lucy Barfield and to her brother Geoffrey in 1952 he dedicated The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Owen 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. He had a strong influence on C. S. Lewis, and, through his book Poetic Diction, 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 was a devotee of anthroposophy. He began a lifelong study of the work and philosophy of Rudolf Steiner, also during the 1920s, and many of his earlier essays were published in anthroposophical publications. In return, a study of Steiner's basic texts provides information about Barfield's work.
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 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, 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'.
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. Matter interacts with mind and wouldn't exist without it. The idea that matter is completely devoid of anything akin to mind (that, for example, matter can ever have existed without being perceived) is rejected as being in conflict with both physics and philosophy. 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.
Poetic Diction
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.
Lionel Adey. C.S. Lewis's 'Great War' with Owen Barfield Victoria, BC: University of Victoria (English Literary Studies No. 14) 1978.
Simon Blaxland-De Lange. Owen Barfield Romanticism Comes of Age a Biography London: Temple Lodge. 2006
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
Shirley Sugerman, ed. Evolution of Consciousness: Studies in Polarity. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press. 1976. ISBN 0-8195-4094-3
