Barfield Scholarship
Essays, Book Chapters, and Monographs
on Owen Barfield and His Work

Curtis Gruenler
Owen Barfield: Prophet of Postmodernism?

Reading Owen Barfield's Saving the Appearances just before I entered graduate school greatly influenced the direction my study of medieval literature has taken, and rereading it in preparation for this conference has reminded me of the potential fruitfulness of his thought for shaping research in my field. But rather than speak from a special area of research, I would like to address the broader issue of Barfield's continuing relevance, indeed increasing relevance, to contemporary thought and culture.

I'm not aware that Barfield ever used, much less commented on, the term Postmodernism, and I rather suspect he might have avoided it as fashionable jargon. Yet despite the fact that Postmodernism means many things to many people, I think it may be a useful term for framing the topic of Barfield's relevance, and may gain new meaning in the process. The answer to the question of my title, whether Barfield is a prophet of Postmodernism, depends, of course, on what we mean by the terms. I will start by indicating some features of Postmodernism in its loosest, most common sense that Barfield clearly anticipated. In itself this would not be much, but what is prophetic in a deeper sense is his interpretation of what these cultural trends mean. In large part these trends are Postmodern in the sense that they are symptoms of what he might call the trauma of modernism, taking modern to refer both broadly to the post-Cartesian age of objective science and narrowly to the late stage of the literary movement that began with Romanticism. Anyone familiar with Barfield's thought will recognize these aspects of modern culture as central to his depiction of the evolution of consciousness in our time. Beyond the trauma of modernism, in this view, lies the possibility of a new kind of consciousness that could be born from it, and I want finally to explore some hints of such a Barfieldian Postmodernism in the strongest sense. In that regard, I will suggest some mutually illuminating connections between the thought of Barfield and that of physicist David Bohm and of philosopher Paul Ricoeur.

In a review of a 1972 book by Theodore Roszak, Barfield points to signs of what he calls "The Coming Trauma of Materialism." By materialism, of course, he does not mean placing excessive value on material possessions but rather the deeper idolatry of taking material objects of perception as what is really real rather than as products of the act of perception. Such idolatry originates in the very use of language to designate objects, but only reaches its height in the attempt at rigorous objectivity, aided by mathematics and scientific instruments, that enabled the triumph of modern Western science and technology. He divides the signs of trauma into cracks on the surface and greater seismic changes bubbling up from within. On the surface are opposition to technology because of its effects and awareness of phenomena unexplained by science. Both of these trends have, I think, moved closer to the center of Western cultural awareness in the last 25 years.

More fundamental, however, and more commonly considered Postmodern, is what Barfield terms objectivity about objectivity. The past quarter century has seen an explosion in what has come to be called science studies after attempts to take natural science as the model for the human sciences rebounded in a wide range of investigations into the social and linguistic conditions of the practice of objective science as well as the epistemological status of its results. Alternative approaches to science, such as those coming from feminism and deep ecology, have posed a different sort of challenge. Of course such challenges to objective science have met with ever more vigorous defenses, perhaps none more eloquent than biologist Edward O. Wilson's new book Consilience, excerpted in the March and April issues of The Atlantic Monthly under the opening title "Back from Chaos." The chaos, for Wilson, is both fragmentation into specialties and the confusions of Postmodernism, which he sees, rightly I think, as both the heir of Romanticism and the "ultimate antithesis of the Enlightenment" that he is championing. At the core of Postmodernism Wilson locates the proposition that "Reality…is a state constructed by the mind. In the exaggerated version of this constructivism," he writes, "one can discern no ‘real’ reality, no objective truths external to mental activity, only prevailing versions disseminated by ruling social groups." Put this way, perhaps, Postmodern constructivism does not sound very persuasive, but it is close to the mode of consciousness Barfield opposes to objectivity and calls participation. For those at all persuaded by Barfield, the question is how close. Perhaps the simplest answer is that constructivism still assumes the primacy of matter, and thus is still caught in the same idolatry as Wilson's scientism but, by denying access to any objective truth, has gone a step further toward evacuating meaning from the world. Barfield, on the other hand, takes meaning, and ultimately spirit, as primary in the co-evolution of consciousness and the external world. The chaos of constructivism would call, then, not for a retreat to Enlightenment science, but for passing through it to what he termed postmaterialism or final participation.

Barfield predicted that a view like constructivism or participation would be the necessary result of facing squarely the findings of modern physics, which depict a reality much different from what we perceive. Instead of something that could fit the common but misleading description "basic building blocks of matter," subatomic physics has found a world of paradox. More recently cosmology has been all the rage, as witnessed by a cover story in this week's U.S. News. Though science journalism has yet to register the degree to which all cosmological speculation is a product of the human imagination, even if buttressed by mathematics, it is beginning to play up the fancifulness of competing, mind-bending theories about the origin of the universe, or an infinity of universes.

Yet when physicists themselves take seriously the philosophical implications of their findings, it can lead, as in the work of David Bohm, to a radical reappraisal of the relation between the world we perceive and our consciousness of it. Bohm and Barfield became acquainted in their later years, and were even the joint focus of a 1982 series of discussions at Drew University chronicled by another of the participants, G. B. Tennyson. You might be familiar, from Bohm's contribution to the essays compiled by Shirley Sugarman under the title The Evolution of Consciousness, with his argument that science, even basic physics such as his, proceeds primarily not by mathematics and logical reason but by images and metaphors that express in ordinary language a creative leap of the whole intelligence, one that is experienced as perception or a flash of insight. Seen in this way, scientific discovery can look like a construction conditioned by language, but Bohm presses behind such a view by grounding language, consciousness, and the world discovered by science in what he calls the implicate order. I would not want to attempt a lengthy explanation of this encompassing theory, and I am not qualified to judge its details, though it is worth noting that Bohm's controversial approach to quantum mechanics has begun to receive renewed attention from the scientific community. In this theory, each point in space contains folded up, or implicate, information about the whole universe. Bohm uses the analogy of a hologram, which can show a three-dimensional image because each part of the hologram contains the entire picture. The world we perceive, then, arises from the selective unfolding of this information both as matter and as consciousness. The implicate order thus forms the basis of Bohm's cosmology as spirit does of Barfield's; both are open to objective investigation, but must ultimately surpass knowledge. Moreover, both thinkers also accord language a privileged place. For example, while Barfield shows how metaphor affords a conscious experience of participation, Bohm takes language as another implicate order, in which the meaning of any given word is enfolded into the rest of language and arises from the whole. In his last years Bohm devoted a great deal of attention to facilitating a mode of dialogue that would help a group of people participate together in the making of meaning and a change of collective representations.

Barfield's attention to the centrality of language, such as its ordinary function in forming our collective representations and the extraordinary potential of metaphor to deepen perception, is without doubt his most important anticipation of Postmodernism. Critiques of natural science are as yet only a sidelight of the schools of thought that see human society and selfhood as embedded in and conditioned through and through by language. In philosophy, the late 20th century has been characterized largely by what is often called the "linguistic turn." To take the most provocative example, Jacques Derrida's demonstrations of being trapped in the metaphorical play of language imply that any meaningful construction can be deconstructed. On one hand deconstruction reveals the logical conclusion of positivism (or materialism or pure objectivity) that Barfield and many others have also pointed to, but on the other hand I think a Barfieldian perspective might also hold open the possibility that Derrida's own linguistic practice offers a sort of via negativa toward another stage of thought. More frustrating from a Barfieldian perspective is the work of Michel Foucault, who argues the overriding influence of discourse in shaping social and political practices and even what can be thought in any era about self and society, only to attempt to reground discourse in a "field of forces" in which material interest, sheer power, is again primary. Nonetheless, through Foucault as well as postmodern Marxists and anthropologists, a term like "ideology" has grown to include reference not just to a conscious set of political ideas but to the whole unconscious set of symbols through which individuals participate meaningfully in culture.

For me, the most helpful engagement with postmodern thought, pointing to a path through it much like Barfield's, is that of the French Protestant philosopher Paul Ricoeur. Even more than Barfield, Ricoeur has maintained a strict separation between his philosophical and theological work, which means that he meets the postmodernists on their own ground. Widely respected for putting various schools of thought in fruitful dialogue, Ricoeur's astonishing range is much too great for brief summary. I would merely like to suggest some points of contact between Barfield and Ricoeur from which avenues of development might open. Ricoeur began his career in the philosophical tradition of phenomenology, a term that can be applied to Barfield's concerns though not to his manner of pursuing them. In the '60s, Ricoeur turned his attention to hermeneutics on the principle that the self comes to itself only through the mediation of language, that is, in a work of interpretation that bears fruit in both increased self-understanding and a reference to reality. Ricoeur would agree with Barfield, I think, that "nature is the reflected image of man's conscious and unconscious self." In upholding the meaningful reference of discourse, Ricoeur emphasizes the ability of metaphor to redescribe reality and of narrative to project a new world in which the interpreter comes to a new self-understanding. In Ricoeur's theory of discourse, this polarity between reference to reality and reference to self is built on a series of other Barfieldian polarities (such as those between discourse as event and discourse as meaning, and between immanent sense and extralinguistic reference). Most important, however, is the polarity that structures the answering work of interpretation. Ricoeur most often calls these poles explanation and understanding, and he links them by an aphorism: to explain more is to understand better. Under explanation, Ricoeur gathers all the methodical, objective sciences of interpretation, such as structuralism; but these are completed only by understanding, an essentially nonmethodical, subjective affirmation of belonging. By passing through the detour of explanation, a naive understanding becomes a knowledgeable one.

Clearly these two poles are very much like what Barfield calls in Poetic Diction the rational and poetic principles or, in Saving the Appearances, objectivity and participation. Thus to Ricoeur's theory of interpretation Barfield adds the idea of an evolution of human consciousness in which Ricoeur describes a late stage. Conversely, Ricoeur presents to the evolution of consciousness the importance of textuality, in which the polarity of interpretation becomes greatest and most fruitful. By distancing the reader from the oral situation of dialogue, textuality makes possible, and is answered by, an interpretive act of appropriation that engages most completely the polarity of explanation and understanding. The suggestion here is that the path through objectivity to final participation might be historically linked to the phenomenon of textuality. Of course the modern period is also the age of printing, which had a great influence on the rise of objective science as well as other cultural phenomena Barfield accords an important place in the evolution of consciousness. Although he would no doubt have resisted any sort of technological determinism, the crucial interaction between human consciousness and the tools of literacy, as studied both philosophically by Ricoeur and more historically by scholars such as Walter Ong and Eric Havelock, greatly enriches the picture of this evolution. If writing, and even more strongly printing, stimulates objective consciousness, when does reading also engage the other pole of final participation? Barfield of course points to poetry, and Ricoeur extends his attention to narrative, especially as it relates to consciousness of time. In both cases there is an implication that certain kinds of poetry and narrative, often those most esteemed as literary, have a special power to open up new worlds and new self-understandings. One place to look might be texts that draw attention to their own textuality, a sort of self-reflexivity most characteristic of Postmodernism.

In connecting the evolution of consciousness to the technology of human communication, surely it is worth noting also that the postmodern age, the age in which the coming trauma of materialism becomes visible, is also the age of electronic communications. This is yet another large and complex field of speculation, but without even broaching the topic of virtual reality we can ask what sort of consciousness or interpretation is appealed to by movies. Film provides an exemplary experience of our ability to perceive a world in what is only flashing colors on a screen. Of course movies generally succeed in entertaining by staying close to the world we already live in. Yet even leaving aside experimental film and looking only at current movies in wide release there are hints of a real Barfieldian Postmodernism coming into view. Robert Redford's film "The Horse Whisperer," for instance, appeals both to objective appreciation of nature in its luminous Montana landscapes and to a more subjective sympathy with nature as, if not a projection of the human self, at least a place of facing oneself and a profound source of healing. The horse whisperer himself seems less a primitive throwback than way forward beyond treating animals as objects to identifying consciously with their inner lives. The X-Files movie, on the other hand, revealingly subtitled "Fight the Future," is perhaps a paranoid anticipation of strong Postmodernism. In Mulder and Scully, of course, we have the polarity, played out as a never consummated romance, between a believer in the hidden significance of things and a thoroughly objective rationalist--never mind that Mulder's hidden significances often have to do with extraterrestrials, no doubt owing to the still strong preference for material explanations of mysteries. I came out of this film with a half-conscious tendency to see the world as animated by a sinister presence, an experience that is not unique to this film nor, I think, to me, and a future I do indeed want to fight. Finally, "The Truman Show" gives a strong clue when the creator of the immense set from which Truman's entire life has been televised explains, "We accept the reality presented to us." We watch Truman struggle to see through the collective representations that have been created for him and to interpret the anomalies that crop up. As Captain Ahab says, "All visible objects…are but as pasteboard masks," and those in the movie who are hooked on Truman's TV show, just like those of us watching the movie, all cheer for Truman to "strike, strike through the mask." But the question becomes, What about the viewers? What would it mean for them, and for us, to "strike through the mask"? Perhaps a similar act of courage and imagination to see behind the reality presented to us. Through its postmodern self-reflexivity, "The Truman Show" becomes a sort of allegory of the evolution of consciousness.

I would like to conclude merely by underlining the shared value placed by all three of the thinkers I have discussed on dialogue, especially between different disciplines and schools of thought. The great bane of the triumph of objectivity is fragmentation and alienation, and whatever role textuality and electronic media might play in overcoming it, real change will also require the kind of face-to-face dialogue we are having here.