The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning

The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning Volume 15 Winter 2009-2010 Article 14 2009 Reviews Julie J. Nichols Charles Suhor Edward Sullivan Follow this and additional works at: https://trace.tennessee.edu/jaepl Part of the Creative Writing Commons, Curriculum and Instruction Commons, Curriculum and Social Inquiry Commons, Disability and Equity in Education Commons, Educational Methods Commons, Educational Psychology Commons, English Language and Literature Commons, Instructional Media Design Commons, Liberal Studies Commons, Other Education Commons, Special Education and Teaching Commons, and the Teacher Education and Professional Development Commons Recommended Citation Nichols, Julie J.; Suhor, Charles; and Sullivan, Edward (2009) "Reviews," The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning: Vol. 15 , Article 14. Available at: https://trace.tennessee.edu/jaepl/vol15/iss1/14 This Essay is brought to you for free and open access by Volunteer, Open Access, Library Journals (VOL Journals), published in partnership with The University of Tennessee (UT) University Libraries. This article has been accepted for inclusion in The Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning by an authorized editor. For more information, please visit https://trace.tennessee.edu/jaepl. 90 JAEPL, Vol. 15, Winter 2009–2010 REVIEWS Meaning and The Evolution of Consciousness: A Retrospective on the Writing of Owen Barfield Julie J. Nichols, Utah Valley University Barfield, Owen. History in English Words. London: Methuen and Co., Ltd., 1926; 2e London: Faber and Faber, 1953. Faber Paper- back, 1962. Reprinted 1964, 1969; also Massachusetts: Lindisfarne P, 1967; 8th printing, with a foreword by W. H. Auden, 2007. —. Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning. London: Faber and Gwyer, Ltd., 1928. 3e, with an Afterword by the author. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 1973. Reprinted Norwood, PA: Norwood Editions, 1975. 2nd Wesleyan ed., 1984. Excerpted in Reclaiming the Imagi- nation: Philosophical Perspectives for Writers and Teachers of Writing. Ed. Ann E. Berthoff. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann Boynton/Cook, 1984. 39-40. —. The Rediscovery of Meaning, and Other Essays. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 1977. Wesleyan Paperback, 1985. San Raphael, CA: Sophia Perennis, Barfield P, 2006. —. Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry. London: Faber and Faber, 1957. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1965. 2e, with an Introduction by Owen Barfield. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 1988. —. A Barfield Reader: Selections from the Writings of Owen Barfield. Ed. G. B. Tennyson. Hanover, NH: UP of New England/ Wesleyan UP; Edinburgh: Floris Books, 1999. “ mid all the menacing signs that surround us,” wrote Owen Barfield in 1961, A“perhaps the one which fills thoughtful people with the greatest foreboding is the growing general sense of meaninglessness. It is this which underlies most of the other threats” (Rediscovery of Meaning 11). This sense of meaninglessness—which hasn’t gone away in the intervening years, I would venture to say— has its basis, according to Barfield, in the “habit” of “meticulously observing the 90 JAEPL, Vol. 15, Winter 2009–2010, 90-96 REVIEW: Nichols/Writing of Owen Barfield 91 facts of nature and systematically interpreting them in terms of physical cause and effect” and in no other terms. Though this habit has produced “incalculable and largely beneficial results for the accumulation of practical knowledge, or knowledge enabling the manipulation of nature,” it has also solidified into the assumption that there is no other way to interpret our observations, or even (which is worse) to observe at all (11, original emphasis). The cost of this limitation is equally incalculable: since “there is usually little connection between the [physical] cause of a thing and its meaning,” our modern emphasis on the measurable and tangible seems to have obviated the need to seek for meaning at all (12). And that, declares Barfield, is egregious ignorance. “The Rediscovery of Meaning” is the title both of the essay quoted above and the book into which it was collected with eighteen other essays in 1977. Here—and, progressively more strongly, in all his works—Barfield reminds us that human beings have not always founded their thinking on the materialist assumption. “The study of the transition from medieval to modern thought is the study of the great and painful wrench” from Aristotelianism to positivism, he says; “it is a mistake to suppose that we are more open-minded today; we are merely open-minded about different things” (Rediscovery of Meaning 14-15). In short, Owen Barfield is an iconoclast. He urges us to “unthink” the habits of thought that bind us to materialism so that we may begin to believe, again—to perceive, again—to participate, again, in meaning. The theory that human consciousness is in the process of evolving from what he calls “participatory consciousness” (Saving the Appearances 41) to “final consciousness” (133-37) is, in fact, the core of his contribution to twentieth and twenty-first-century thought. Owen Barfield’s life and work span the entire twentieth century. He was born in 1898 in North London, and his first major works, History in English Words and Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning, were published in 1926 and 1928, re- spectively. Educated at Highgate School (where Coleridge and Hopkins were stu- dents in their time) and at Wadham College, Oxford, he is often remembered first, by those who recognize his name at all, as a friend of C. S. Lewis. Like the other Inklings, he was interested in literature and language. But as G. B. Tennyson, a Barfield editor and scholar, puts it in his introduction to A Barfield Reader, this was no ordinary interest: “He saw in the nature of poetry and in the deepest nature of language itself . elements that no materialist philosophy could explain” (xvii). In a concise online introduction to Barfield, Gary Lachman says Barfield’s “belief in language as an archaeological record of ‘the evolution of consciousness,’ and as a means of translogical insight, was as at odds with the reigning [positivist] Zietgeist as you could get.” For those of us who teach language— whether explicitly or implicitly, modern education foregrounding language and literacy above all else—Barfield’s writings deserve more exposure than they typi- cally receive. In a time when “meaning” is often downplayed as the least important thing about a text, Barfield advocates the primacy of meaning in an unfold- ing set of arguments whose cumulative effect is a profound integrity. History in English Words, to begin at the beginning, is not another Bill Moyers journey through the “history of the language.” The preposition in (rather than of) is key here. Barfield employs this preposition deliberately throughout his oeuvre, reminding readers that it is necessary to think from within the worldview of the writers we read—essential, in fact, to break the habit we have developed of imposing on earlier times and earlier writers our consciousness: 92 JAEPL, Vol. 15, Winter 2009–2010 It has only just begun to dawn on us that in our own language alone . the past history of humanity is spread out in an imperishable map, just as the history of the mineral earth lies embedded in the layers of its outer crust . language has preserved for us the inner, living history of man’s soul. It reveals the evolution of consciousness. (18) This notion—already identified as “evolution of consciousness” and first hinted at in History in English Words (86)—is central to Barfield’s argument. Barfield read and approved of Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind because it was one of the first books to sug- gest from a materialist point of view what Barfield asserted was obvious if you looked at ancient languages and philosophies: [The] larger process . told by the history of the Aryan languages as a whole . is the shifting of the centre of gravity of consciousness from the cosmos around him into the personal human being himself. [This] general process . can be traced working itself out into all kinds of details; not only in that intimate, metaphysical change of outlook which it is so hard for us to realize now that the change has taken place—in the appearance of words betokening a sharper self-consciousness—but also in the moral and personal sphere. (171-72) In its first four chapters, History in English Words provides a co-chronology of the English language and British consciousness. Copious examples in the last five chapters, from such categories as “myth” (specifically the ways mythological consciousness is still present in such English words as panic, day, and sky), “philosophy and religion” and “devotion” (cosmos, initiate, mystery, conscience), and “experi- ment” (attraction, dubious, analyse, distinguish), offer ample evidence that since consciousness and language evolve together, these concepts and perceptions did not exist before the words for them appear. And the order in which words appeared chronologi- cally suggests that consciousness has devolved from a state in which humans saw themselves as undifferentiated from their environment to our current habit and assumption that only our differentiatedness matters. But there is reason to see this in an affirmative light; and the affirmation lies in language itself. If the thesis of History in English Words is that language reveals the evolution of consciousness, Poetic Diction starts with the premise that the aesthetic effect of “poetic” language happens because of a “felt change of consciousness” (48-49). Scientific language (i.e., “the human being needs nitrogen and oxygen in a particular ratio in order to live”) is tautologous. It does not add to the sum of consciousness or knowledge. Its purpose is to engender subjectivity or self-consciousness (i.e., “this is what each thing consists of in external form—the only important kind of form”).

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