Owen Barfield Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description
Owen Barfield (1898-1997) was a British philosopher, author, poet, and critic. After finishing a B. Litt. that became the book Poetic Diction, he worked as a solicitor. He was strongly influenced by anthroposophy. He was born in London, and died in Forest Row in Sussex.Most of his works are still in print and include Unancestral Voice; History, Guilt, and Habit; and Worlds Apart. His work History in English Words seeks to retell the history of western civilization by exploring the change in meanings of various words, and his work Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry is listed in 100 Best Spiritual Books of the Century.
Barfield could perhaps be correctly characterized as the greatest of the "New Age" thinkers, and the most erudite, original, creative and profound of the anti-reductionist writers. He was known for a remarkable capacity to compress the largest possible amount of insight into the smallest quantity of text. For example, his book Saving the Appearances, though a rather slender volume, explores some three thousand years of history and, by taking modern physics and philosophy seriously, transforms the mainstream understanding of the relation of human minds to nature and to evolution. He finds that the evolution of life and of nature is inseparable from an evolution of consciousness. The idea of matter as completely devoid of anything akin to mind, emerges as a mistaken idea, one in conflict with both physics and philosophy. Of course, similar conclusions have been reached by others, but rarely in as revelatory a fashion as Barfield manages. The book has been an influence on a number of scientists (for example, the physicist Stephen Edelglass, who wrote The Marriage of Sense and Thought) and philosophers (for example the Christian existentialist Gabriel Marcel, who wanted the book to be translated into French).
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". Worlds Apart again shows Barfield's peculiar capacity to compress comprehensiveness into the smallest textual space, and without cost to clarity. The book, about two hundred pages in length, 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. Over a period of three days, the characters get down to first principles. Barfield not only had acquired sufficient expertise in all of these fields to be able to speak plausibly for each character in the debate; he also did so with style and made of the argument a dramatic entertainment with spiritual and demonic undertones leading to paradigm-busting revelations, at least for some of the characters.
Another way of characterizing Barfield, is to say that he brings to philosophy something like the magical power to be found in the fiction of C. S. Lewis. Lewis was a close friend of Barfield, and called Barfield "the best and wisest of my unofficial teachers".
Barfield did not do philosophy as a merely intellectual pursuit. Rather it was a way to liberation, and that was part of the reason for Barfield's efforts to combine maximum compression with maximum comprehensiveness. That Barfield did not do 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 "that subject". Barfield seems to have been subtly indignant in replying that "to Plato philosophy was not a 'subject'. It was a Way." Lewis apparently took Barfield's strongly felt point to heart.
Saul Bellow: We are well supplied with interesting writers, but Owen Barfield is not content to be merely interesting. His ambition is to set us free … from the prison we have made for ourselves by our ways of knowing, our limited and false habits of thought, our ‘common sense'.
Barfield has been known as "The first and last Inkling". He was in effect a founder member of the Inklings group. He had a strong influence on C. S. Lewis, and an appreciable effect through Poetic Diction on J. R. R. Tolkien.
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