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Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry

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Saving the Appearances stands out among Owen Barfield's many books as his most straightforward explication of the evolution of consciousness. Barfield preps the reader with the philosophical puzzles of perception, but then goes way beyond perceptual psychology. He puts those puzzles side by side with what in the West is taken to be common sense regarding the nature of reality, common sense as informed by science.

The implications of this juxtaposition of perceptual facts and scientific method are profound and demanding: a) human consciousness and the appearances of the everyday world are correlates of one another, and have been so throughout human history; and b) there is no other reality "behind" those appearances of the everyday world. Barfield pays close attention to the history of human languages, specifically the phenomena of change of meaning in words through time. These changes reflect the changes in human perception and thinking, and thus are clues and markers to the evolution of human consciousness.

Barfield then traces out the implications for us today, for our thinking about art, about science, and about religion and spirituality. Other and more extended implications have been drawn from Saving the Appearances by Theodore Roszak (Where the Wasteland Ends), Morris Berman (The Reenchantment of the World), Stephen Talbott (The Future Does Not Compute), Neil Evernden (The Social Creation of Nature), and others. There are many, many books out now concerned with consciousness: what it is; what it isn't; its relation to the body; how can we study it. And there are almost as many books about the evolution of consciousness. These are written by philosophers, scientists, psychologists, historians, and metaphysicians of all sorts.

Unique to Saving the Appearances is the combination of Barfield's keen logic and congenial style, and his wide-ranging and powerfully synthesizing mind. What is unique for the reader is the possibility of the opening up of the field of the senses, whereby one sees more than one did before. Reading, and wrestling with, the line of thinking in Saving the Appearances offers the possibility of the redemption of the senses. Saving the Appearances is not the work of an amateur, though it is congenial enough for an amateur to read, and careful and thoughtful enough for a scholar to refute. It will bear close scrutiny and deep meditation.

I finish this book thinking that it might have changed my life; if it has, I might not know it, since I don't understand lots of it, but I find my mind going back to play with the concepts, like an emerging tooth, probing just where my ignorance hurts, trying to tug the sure worthwhile thing out of the sting.

Barfield writes a history of consciousness from undifferentiation to differentiation. At first, humanity perceived themselves at one with all things (he names it, eventually, pantheism). Then, humans began to separate items out of that indiscriminate morass and think about them. Next, humans began to compile these various meditations into patterns. This necessarily separates the humans themselves from the things they analyze. We feel alienated from the world, individual. This is about where we are presently on the history of consciousness.

Barfield proposes, as best I understand it (and I write this review for myself as well, to nail these things to my memory), that only by the imaginative capacity, the creation of meaning (from within the human by the Spirit of God), can we achieve full participation in and unity with what we perceive around us, a mature participation of true knowledge, not the blind instinctive participation of the older time. We are evolving toward this final, spiritual participation--the sanctified imagination. At the same time, we fight off the tendency to create dead perceptions of reality and call them idols.

Those who object to this prescription as an element foreign to Barfield's more religiously innocuous historical commentary would do well to consider why Barfield believes humans originally participated with the world--we and nature are both perceptions of the Divine, and therefore related.

The terms are rather hazy in the book; this isn't my discipline, and I was still trying to decipher some bedrock vocabulary by page 127 (which is a very good page and clarified some things for me, although I spent a disproportionate amount of time on it). It's a mercilessly difficult read. Barfield does crack a joke in the second chapter; see if you can find it. Otherwise, matters are a bit murky, chiefly because of his terminology, which for definition relies on an equally opaque context.

Questions which remain for me: what exactly are idols? I'll have to read the book again sometime to find out. I understand (better) how the human race has evolved in consciousness as we relate to the world around us---how does this theory apply to our social relationships with other humans (and God)?

At any rate, this metanarrative carves a tremendous amount of sense from ancient, medieval, church, Romantic, scientific, and modern worldviews, and in some ways anticipates the postmodern, although I do not think Barfield would have predicted it or considered it an evolutionary advance. Consciousness is perhaps the fundamental issue of human existence. This book, despite its difficulty, explains consciousness better than anything else I've seen (which, I admit, may not say much for my outside reading).

A good work of philosophy doesn't make the reader want to argue with the author, it makes the reader want to ask more questions. If so, then this is a great book of philosophy. Even though I don't agree with all of Barfield's arguments or his conclusions, my world view is changed - on how see the nature of the scietific process; on how I read litterature, both ancient and modern; about the underlying assumptions of how I see the world and how these assumptions came to be. There are so many weak and shallow books on conciousness being being published now, read this for its depth.

I first read this book in college, having already read the author's "Poetic Diction" (and having had an experience reading it like the author's experience of awakening from a spell on first reading Romantic poetry). "Saving the Appearances" was stranger and even more thrilling, but I think I wasn't really able or willing to take it in at that time. Later, after reading Norman O. Brown's astonishing "Love's Body," and finding references to it, I went back to "Saving the Appearances" with more peace of heart and sat with it for longer periods.

Nothing could have seemed weirder or more exotic at that time than the suggestion that Catholic Christianity--Anglican, Roman, Eastern Orthodox or otherwise--had something profound and urgent to teach our generation, something quite different from what Buddhism had to teach, something about a dimension of reality about which Buddhism had not chosen to speak. It seemed to me then, as it still does now, many years later, one of the handful of truly important books published in the last century on the topic of "Christology," the heart of Christian existence.

Did he owe these insights to Rudolf Steiner? To the circle of Charles Williams, C. S. Lewis, and J. R. R. Tolkien? To his own spiritual experiences? I never followed up on these questions, though the book still seems to me a great treasure.

It taught me a perspective which I think we've scarcely yet begun to understand, although Norman O. Brown (and UC Santa Cruz) & others before him and after him have tried to bring it before our spaced out attention and to map its landscapes--a perspective through time, through history, a history of "geist" or "consciousness."

Is that mysterious time two millennia past merely a late entry in the unfolding of the axial age? Or was it the earliest sign of another age, a first light too long hid beneath a "sacred" bushel that we still have not entirely lifted and set aside? Did Jesus set in motion the gradual arrival of something like a second axial age? an age of incarnational mysticism? a trinitarian age?

I feel grateful to Owen Barfield for this small book that helped to light a path for me through dark times to some recovery of a hope in love & love's body. And to some recovery of trust in the world-shattering, world-disclosing emancipatory power of words.

I felt that Barfield made some very good, interesting, arguments especially concerning the "views of the world" as they existed prior to our own in history, the structure of language, the meaning of religion, philosophy and the ideas of participation which he expounded throughout the book.

I also had some difficulty in following some of the concepts, Barfield appeared to write in an old style no doubt due to his classical education, the book being written in the earlier half of the 20th century. I felt some elucidation of his concepts such as "the unrepresented", "alpha-thinking" etc could have been deeper and more fully described. His ideas of collective representaion is sound athough it is certainly his deep thinking about the way people thought about the world or what the world meant to them which are the highlights of the book. He very correctly criticises the "normal" approach taken when talking about ancient or older literature/writing. It is pointed out that the "obvious" world view now popular is not necessarily that practised in earlier times, even the way a text must be interpreted/seen is a context dependent activity, where, by context we mean the world view present at the time; such as how a person of the middle ages saw the physical aspects of the world eg a stone faling, a bird flying etc. For these arguments alone the book should be commended. The idea relating to participation is also relevant especially the divisions of original and final participation and the "scientific age" in between. Barfield does not merely accept the popularly held belief the ancients had it all wrong but rather looks at why the ancients thought the way they did, they were human beings like us and ceratinly not unintelligent as the writings of Aristotle, Plato, St Augustine, Giordano Bruno etc etc demonstrate.

There is much that is commendable in Saving the Appearances", far more than is not, but given the comments above one does feel that Barfield leads up to a way of thought he considers correct or more correct than any other through his own subjective beliefs which appear to colour the development of his ideas mainly near the end of the book. In other words although everyone has such a way of looking at the world to some degree, Barfield appears to bring it to the fore as a seeming be all and end all and a view not extendable or changable into something better. In this way one progresses through the book from an enlightened stance in the criticism and then the development of his own ideas to an almost Catholic worldview which superficially appears the culmination of the earlier development but is in fact an addendum to the truly original ideas mentioned earlier.

Very good investigation into the history of world views.

My interest in Owen Barfield was first sparked by the writings of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis but it has proved more lasting than either of those. When I first discovered 'Saving the Appearances' it blew wide open a door to a whole new different way of seeing the world. Especially the opening chapters, with the classic analogy of the rainbow and enlightnening passages on concepts such as 'collective representations', 'figuration' and 'participation', struck me out of the blue. There is such a world of experience that opens up once we recognize that our way of seeing, our sensual perception itself, is determined by cultural and linguistic factors as much as by anything else, and that our current, scientific way of seeing is only a relatively recent phenomenon, that may disappear as quickly as it appeared. Most of all, it encourages us to be fully conscious and fully responsible of the choices we make, most of all of the choice between an insistence on scientific 'fact' or even back towards original participation, and a move towards final participation.

As others have commented, Barfield's writing is always thoroughly though through and at the same time immediately comprehensible. I would also like to add that though his thought leads eventually towards a renewed faith in Christianity, it is possible to appreciate most of this book without a Christian (or anthroposophist, for that matter) background.

I readily admit that Owen Barfield's "Saving the appearances" is one of the strangest books I've ever read. I somehow understand it, and yet I don't. Is that how C.S. Lewis felt like, when attempting to argue with his "second friend"?

Barfield was an Anthroposophist, and he admits at one point in his work that it's really intended to soften the impact on the reader of Rudolf Steiner's ideas. Steiner was the founder of Anthroposophy, a new religious movement with many of the usual ideas (reincarnation, meditation, Atlantis etc).

The main idea in "Saving the appearances" is that all of reality is actually a "collective representation" created by human consciousness, which in turn is somehow identical to God's ditto. This somehow reminds me of Bishop Berkeley's subjective idealism, but in Barfield's version, human consciousness is evolving. Primeval man had something the author refers to as "original participation", apparently a kind of pantheistic near-fusion with nature. Gradually, this changed to another form of consciousness during Greek antiquity and again during the Middle Ages. During the modern era, humanity have forgotten that the world is really a collective representation of our own making. Instead, we treat our collective representations as if they were really "out there", thereby turning them into idols of the mind. (Hence, the sub-title "A study in idolatry").

Barfield is surprisingly consistent, even to the point of absurdity, as when he writes that our knowledge of prehistory (when no humans existed) is really a "symbolic" knowledge, since no "real" world could have existed before the advent of Homo sapiens. (George Berkeley "solved" the problem by postulating that the world permanently exists in the mind of God.) However, Barfield also suggests that perhaps the world *did* in some sense exist even before consciousness, since consciousness have always existed, but in a dormant and subconscious manner. I admit that I didn't quite got this part!

Barfield believes that the next step in humanity's evolution is something called "final participation", which I suspect is a kind of clairvoyance of the kind Steiner claimed to posses. Jesus came to Earth to speed up this evolution from idolatry to final participation. This is somehow connected to "the mystery of the kingdom", as well.

Please note that Barfield isn't *simply* saying that humans have perceived the world in different ways during different periods. He quite literally believes that the world *was* different when perceived by our medieval or Stone Age ancestors. Presumably, we can therefore change the make up of the universe by changing our collective representations of it. Quite an idea, and a crazy one, too. Especially if "final" participation is really a version of Steiner's "spiritual science", by the help of which the Anthroposophical leader claimed access to information about the spirit-world, the past, the future, etc.

The only reason why I don't attack "Saving the appearances" harder, is that it gives such a quaintly naïve and naively quaint impression on the reader. Quite unlike Steiner's own writings, which have the strange quality of being both boring and quite insane simultaneously - is that "final" participation? Although Barfield was on many issues more sympathetic than C.S. Lewis, I nevertheless feel a breath of fresh air and sanity every time I return to Lewis after reading the musings of his second friend. Somehow, traditional Anglicanism seems more logical!

I believe Owen Barfield once quipped: "Lewis had a need to believe in an outside world". Well, Owen, so do I. So do I. Indeed, I even suspect that might be the only way in which to truly "save the appearances"...

I read in some of the reviews that a more clear and in-depth probe of the initial philosophical ideas Barfield put forth was wanted. This book is basically a meditation on Rudolf Steiner's The Philosophy of Freedom, with Barfield teasing out the psychological, historical, and linguistic implications of such an epistemology and finding corroboration with who-were-then contemporary scholars. So, if one wants a clear philosophical understanding of the terms 'figuration,' 'alpha-thinking,' 'beta-thinking,' the 'unrepresented,' and a philosophical foundation for 'Final Participation,' check out Michael Wilson's translation of The Philosophy of Freedom (which Barfield helped in translating) and Rudolf Steiner's short doctoral dissertation, Truth and Science: a prelude to a philosophy of freedom.

Read this twice through heart racing, underlining, jotting notes and comments in the margins, you can have a real dialogue with this book, following Barfield's difficult but kindly logic, helping you through to his expansive vision. If you have the courage for a new world, wrestle with this book.

Saving the Appearances is a book I have meant to read for about thirty years. It is a very useful discussion of "modern" thinking, though some of the issues addressed have been "solved", at least partially by "post-modern" approaches. Nevertheless, the book is an excellent marker of the road western thought has traveled in the last fifty years.