Barfield’s Symposium, and Other Tales

by John Beck

The Owen Barfield Literary Estate continues to republish, and publish for the first time, works of the most influential English-speaking anthroposophist to date. The Estate is energetically directed by grandson Owen Barfield, and there is a steady increase of free offerings at www.owenbarfield.org alongside handsome new editions. Dr. Jane Hipolito is the expert series editor for the books.

Owen Barfield’s accomplishments are many and profound. In "What Coleridge Thought" he did much to restore awareness of the stature of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, among the greatest English-speaking thinkers (not just a great poet and aesthetician) whose complex life and subtlety of mind hid him from view for a century and a half.

Barfield also brought to life etymology—the history and genealogy of words—in several widely appreciated books, beginning with "History in English Words". His word work also provides an ideal foundation for understanding “evolution of consciousness”—a subject which might be much more widely investigated if we began to call it simply “human evolution.”

Barfield also gave a very clear way of thinking about the relation of human consciousness to nature: as a participation in it, originally, then a separation into our modern “onlooker” consciousness, and now in prospect—if we will—a new participation in which we retain our hardearned sense of individual responsibility and “agency,” the ability to act. I can think of no intelligible insight other than this “original and future participation” which has the power to explain not only where our present ecological crisis has come from (the radical detachment of the “onlooker”), but also the participatory role we can and must play if it is to be overcome.

Finally, in "Saving the Appearances" O.B. carefully leads us to the still almost unthinkable realization that humanity’s shared representations of reality have shaped and reshaped reality. The effort to think such a thought encounters a real block, a cultural taboo, as he says. And you perhaps thought that there were no taboos in modern culture! Then again, this taboo may be serving a function. Do we perhaps wish to postpone any confident recognition that consciousness can reshape reality—that “nothing there is but thinking makes it so”—until we have found a new and secure relationship to our individual conscience?

I am writing not only to praise Barfield, however, nor really to review the four books I will mention. All that is needed is to give the hint that in meeting and engaging Owen Barfield one has started on a great and important adventure. And yes, adventure was another of his talents. His early children’s book "The Silver Trumpet" was also known to the Tolkien family (yes, those Tolkiens), and it seems that there was a whole stream of significant tales, which are now readily available. There is "Eager Spring", an ecologically colored tale from the mid-1980s; "Night Operation", a late, dystopian science fiction; and from the late 1920s "The Rose on the Ash-Heap".

It is fair to say that one might not read any of these today if they were not by Barfield. He is disinclined to wind up the tensions to the extremes of the last several decades, so addicts of the sensational will be disappointed. These are simply good stories with deep, culturalmoral undertones. "The Rose on the Ash-Heap" is of the serious fairy-tale genre: one gains most from its symbols (beginning in the Rosicrucian title) if one can open up again like a wondering child. In "Eager Spring" the spiritual striving of women and the forces of commercial indifference do battle for the health and life of the Earth. When the malefactors are finally brought to such justice as there is, we hear very contemporary words from the court: “It is fortunate for the defendants that the penalties exacted by the law bear so little relation to the offense.” And "Night Operation" tells us a tale of fear and social manipulation overcome only by a few young people—who then find themselves taking the Manichean or Bodhisattva path, returning into the evil and working to change it from inside.

The fourth volume here is much better known, at least to Barfieldians. It brings to my mind the Symposium of Plato, that great enduring conversation about love. Rudolf Steiner mentioned the Symposium in connection with the social role of alcohol; his research indicated that it was a force for liberating the individual from the old group souls. Now that we are well liberated to begin with, its effects are not so helpful. Ancient cultures had ways of managing this Dionysian power, and one such was the gathering where the guests were reclining together (“symposium”) and drinking, and working against the effects of the alcohol by making speeches on the most serious topics. In Plato’s Symposium the comedian Aristophanes has the hiccups throughout, and subsequent generations blushed much (or rewrote Plato) due to the different affections of the ancient Greeks.

Reading Barfield’s non-alcoholic conversation should make us blush all the more over the state of modern culture, for "Worlds Apart: A Dialog of the Sixties" is concerned with the truly obscene compartmentalization of knowledge. A “friend of Barfield” arranges a weekend with a nice selection of academics, plus a young rocket scientist, plus an older Waldorf school teacher. All of them think and work in very different worlds, and for the most part they are all accustomed to dismiss or ignore what the others see and work with. Faced with the same situation of relentless specialization and compartmentalization Buckminster Fuller asked us around the same time (in Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth) to think comprehensively, to collaborate like the crew of a great spaceship, and to wake up to the idea of synergy: that a whole is more than the sum of its parts. This holistic thinking is what Rudolf Steiner called for when he said that realities of mind and spirit must be viewed from many sides, even contradictory ones.

Barfield here takes hold of the core of contemporary culture and puts it through such a many-sided looking. It is hard work to engage each of the speakers and his direction of thought. (Yes, it’s the sixties, and all the participants are men. Another blush.) Each field of science and inquiry has evolved a lot in fifty years, so one should not run out with any of the particular arguments of this book and try to make conversation with the nearest materialist. And there are real efforts today at holistic thinking, along with many “inter-disciplinary” projects at universities.

What we have not overcome, however, is a kind of eutrophication or over-nourishment of thought life. A Swedish friend has long been working on that problem with the Baltic Sea. The run-off of nutrients from such enterprises as pig farms has “fed to death” a large part of this great sea. I would say that decades of increase in higher education, post-World War II, have brought much new energy into global culture, but the specialization of it all has made for endless fine extensions of particular thoughts, and little rethinking of the whole. So the Tree of Knowledge, to bring the metaphor on shore, is very root-bound and in need of a bigger pot.

Barfield’s Waldorf teacher comes off the best in "Worlds Apart", reminding us that insights large, healthy, and whole may come more easily to a thoughtful high school or grade school teacher, still free to think her own thoughts. Meanwhile, out on the academic battlefield today most instructors are poorly paid part-timers with no hope of a liberating tenure appointment.

This was my second steep read through Barfield’s great conversation. It went much better than twenty years ago, when I met it in the Barfield Group at the New York Branch of the Anthroposophical Society. The ideas and the well-drawn persons came to life strongly. A lawyer with a spiritual bent, like Abraham Lincoln, Barfield thinks and writes powerfully well. His “big” books may never be easy, but they are sound.

In ten years or so I will read "Worlds Apart" again. It is an exercise in “meta-thinking”—in pushing off from the safe and familiar shore in order to consider all the various harbors of thought. There, under the stars on the open mental sea, one may wonder when a great new civilization may be born, united in enjoyment of rich differences, reaching out to “participate” nature again, and prepared to evolve consciousness as a matter of sober intention.

John Beck (editor@anthroposophy.org) is editor of being human.