What Barfield Thought (Max Leyf and Landon Loftin)

[AshvinP]

I want to call attention to new book on Owen Barfield which was published by Max Leyf and Landon Loftin, called 'What Barfield Thought'. (which is a play on the title of Barfield's book, 'What Coleridge Thought'). We have discussed Barfield here on a few occassions. I had a chance to preview some portions of the book before it was published and I can say that what I read was really interesting and helpful. Although the main focus is not Anthroposophy/Steiner or esoteric science, there is a section on the connection between Barfield and Anthroposophy. Personally, Barfield was my main introduction to the evolution of consciousness, which is of course central to esoteric science, and I think his works build the most helpful bridge between our normal philosophical-scientific thinking and the imaginative thinking we seek to cultivate through Anthroposophy.

As interest in Owen Barfield grows, we aim to meet the need for a scholarly introduction to his thought. Our primary purpose is to present an overview, analysis, and synthesis of Barfield's most salient ideas in a manner that will be of interest to neophytes and initiates alike. Barfield's work can, at times, be difficult to understand; C. S. Lewis put it well when he described Barfield's style of argument as "dark, labyrinthine," and "pertinacious." But Lewis ardently promoted Barfield's work because he knew that people who willingly walk in those dim and winding corridors are, in time, richly rewarded by the bright light at their end. We offer the present work in service to those who wish to undertake this adventure. While the present book will help those readers who wish to engage Barfield for the sake of achieving a greater understanding of and appreciation for other writers who have been associated with or influenced by him, we aim first and foremost to present Barfield as a profound and original thinker in his own right

[Federica]

Thanks for letting us know, Ashvin. I got it, I will surely start reading it as soon as it arrives. If we are a few people reading it at the same time, it would be nice to share our comments in this thread.

[LukeJTM]

Very cool! I saw a link about that online somewhere actually.

However, I will give it a miss for now. I have too many books I have not read yet, I don't want to add another to the "unread pile"

On the other hand, if there is some interest about Barfield's life, I found a really good short documentary about that, which is available on YouTube. It is 40 minutes in length. It also touches on his connection with Steiner/Anthroposophy, as well as "Saving The Appearances" (and some of his other books). It also contains interviews with Barfield. It was probably made in the last years of his life because of his old age in the interviews.

[Federica]

Thanks for sharing, Luke, I have watched the first minutes, to get a sense of the documentary. It looks good, I will surely keep on watching. Regarding the pile of unread or unfinished books, I know what you are talking about! For my part, I still prefer to have those books around, maybe in plain sight, so I can think about them, prefigure the moment I will pick them up and read them. It sounds frivolous, but I like the intention it creates around the book and topic. It's almost as if it catalyzes the moment when I start the book at an appropriate time, and amplifies the book's scope and potential effect.

[AshvinP]

Here is an interesting interview by Mark Vernon of the authors, Max and Landon. We can sense Max trying to sneak in some hints to a deeper spiritual scientific understanding of the evolution of consciousness : )

[Cleric K]

Here is an interesting interview by Mark Vernon of the authors, Max and Landon. We can sense Max trying to sneak in some hints to a deeper spiritual scientific understanding of the evolution of consciousness : )

Thanks Ashvin! Thanks also to MV for bringing attention to the work of M and L.

Hopefully we'll see in the future more interviews of this sort, which actually move in a living direction and not simply reiterate the same old stuff.

[Federica]

I’ll keep it brief here, as I don't have much to add to what’s been developed and highlighted by Cleric in various places here, for example the Cell intelligence thread you have linked. Yes, I surely agree (or should I say, I understand) that modern material science is significant and it is evolving in a way that reflects the evolution of consciousness. Consciousness is evolving towards spiritualization, as the peak of materialistic polarity has now passed behind us. This process has been very insightfully described by Barfield. In particular, he speaks of “final participation” that awaits our consciousness as a coming evolutionary phase, in which we will participate in the spiritual world without dualistic reserve, this time in full awareness, not instinctively as humanity did in past epochs. Barfield’s ideas provide a great way onto the path of Anthroposophy, and Leyf and Loftin, in their recent book “What Barfield thought”, make it efficient and fully approachable to discover that access point.

Steiner said that material science is still to ascend, and will ascend, to the spiritual. It’s on its way, so to say, currently still working through its instinctive phase, where the counterparts of the spiritual world on the material plane are still seen as abstract, mathematical, laws of nature. Maybe it can be said that Einstein’s thought showed preliminary signs of the descent of the Christ impulse in the sphere of material science. Maybe his theories, and even more so the more recent developments in a variety of scientific disciplines, show some signs of spiritualization.

Interesting. That certainly makes sense. Barfield's "final participation" I recall but I can't remember the specifics, so perhaps I should revisit him again. Barfield feels more accessible than Steiner (at first). I think it's because Steiner's work had a lot more information and detail.

So yeah, let's recall the idea of Final Participation. Everything I’m writing here is based on the book “What Barfield thought” by Landon Loftin and Max Leyf. I did start reading Barfield's "Saving the Appearances” last year, but I haven’t finished the book yet, I must admit.


First, the context in which the idea of Final Participation should be approached is that of the indivisibility of consciousness and the rest of reality. Barfield thought: they are distinguishable from each other, but they can’t be torn apart.
In other words, the common scientific approach that considers reality in terms of objects, fully separable and separated from our consciousness, divided from us who consider them, is arbitrary. Arbitrary, but so ingrained in the normal present-day approach to reality, that we hardly notice it, as if the assumption went without saying. Indeed, very few say anything about this hidden assumption. Barfield is one of those few. The reason why we should be mindful of this assumption is that the only way we have to apprehend the supposedly separable/separate objects of inquiry, is through our conscious experience. So how can we be sure that our experience has nothing to interact with those objects? Well, we can't! Yet, there doesn’t seem to be any popular alternative view in present-day scientific approach to knowledge.

To put it in a metaphor, we do as if we weren’t obliged to clear our own path through the forest - the staging post of our personal experience - in order to attain the clearing. So we come to know the clearing through that inevitable path we ourselves clear, and then we have things to say about the layout of the trees in the clearing, and why the clearing stands as it does, et cetera, but we forget that all we can figure out about the nature of the clearing depends entirely on how we got there. Had we cleared the path differently, had we come from a different direction, would the clearing have stood differently? We can never assume it wouldn’t, because the only way we have in order to say anything about it, is by... clearing a path to it! Yet, nearly everyone seamlessly complies with the assumption that our activity of clearing a path through the forest has nothing to do with the clearing. Instead, we call the clearing a 'phenomenon' that we pretend we have just bumped into from nowhere, and we forget how we participated in shaping 'the phenomenon' into existence. In the authors’ words:

Despite that people often regard the objective world as something entirely independent of our thinking, a critical examination of the evidence at hand calls for a revolution of our conventional views of this subject. The latter are advanced under the banner of scientific objectivity, but the standard is misleading, as we shall shortly see. After all, what evidence could ever be gathered to support the notion that the really real world is ulterior to our experience of it and is to be sought, rather, amidst speculative hypotheses as mathematical abstractions? Any evidence in favor of such a theory entails already having entered our experience and having refuted the very theory it was intended to corroborate.

So we can see that, even from a merely intellectual perspective, something crucial doesn’t add up in our standard approach to reality. We don’t need to fly to any esoteric heights to see that. At least, to establish this ‘diagnosis’, rational intellect is enough. An impartial, fresh. and sound philosophical inquiry is enough to point out the inherent problem with muzzling “phenomena” on one side, muzzling consciousness and thinking on the other, and pretending that we can go about “knowing” in such fashion. With the authors, one could even make the slightly provocative, but fully justified, claim that this pretension is actually superstitious.


Allright, so that’s the context in which Barfield conceived of the idea of Final Participation. We can sum it all up with another quote:

When it is imagined that consciousness is left behind for the sake of apprehending reality in itself, in fact what has been achieved is that consciousness has been configured - and perhaps disfigured - in such a manner that all of our perceptions are unconsciously refracted through conceptual models that nominally deny the existence of the very thing on which they most essentially depend.

Now, moving forward, an unexpected glimpse of hope can actually be discerned in the current mind habit of considering objects as if separated from consciousness (in Barfield: alpha thinking):

With modernity, the perceived heterogeneity of mind and reality has reached such a pitch that it is possible for thinking to be perceived as such. This is to say that thinking has become so abstract from concrete reality that it is now possible for thought to become an object of its own activity. Ordinarily, thinking is employed to perceive other things, but thinking itself proceeds unnoticed. However, direct reflection on thinking per se presents a new potentiality in the evolution of consciousness that was not yet present, so long as vestiges of Original Participation were still retained. In the latter condition, thoughts were inseparable from things and phenomena: hence it was impossible to grasp thinking itself…

In other words, in the heavily objectifying tendency of current thinking (alpha thinking) lies the seed of the next step in the evolution of consciousness. Because, when alpha thinking picks up just ‘thinking’ as object of inquiry (a special case of alpha thinking that Barfield calls beta thinking) all of a sudden appears the possibility of regaining a reflective quality in thinking. In this reflexivity, subject and object can be brought to a match, and thinking can switch from a knowing mode based on inference, to one based on creation, as the authors put it. So the entirely new state of consciousness that appears when thinking is brought to deploy its modern objectifying quality onto itself, is what Barfield calls Final Participation (as opposed to the instinctive Original Participation of ancient man).

Final Participation is a “latent possibility” that Barfield laid out. Now it's up to us to make it happen. It is our responsibility to actualize it, through individual initiative, through our free decision to walk this path we are walking.

[Federica]

Bernardo praises Saving the Appearances by making it a Kastrupian book, "light and easy", with "very little spirit", at 14:30

[LukeJTM]

Oo, very cool to know that Bernardo read Barfield's book! Maybe he will read Steiner's Philosophy of Freedom at some point? He has read Barfield so he probably heard of Steiner's work. Or maybe he will read Jean Gebser's book? But who knows.

P.S. I know I've not posted for a while. I've just been busy for a while. I appreciate the replies given last time I posted, however I don't have much to reply with at the moment.

[LukeJTM]

And I will add lastly, I have been reading Michael Wilson's translation of Steiner's PoF. I shared a link to it in another thread recently, it was the one speaking about differences between German and English philosophical terminologies (in the introduction). I am finding Wilson's translation much easier to read than the version titled The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity (with the blue cover). It just seems to flow better than the other translation I have. I think it is because Wilson has deeper familiarity with both German and English than whoever translated the other version maybe. He uses simpler terminologies as well, e.g. mental picture instead of representation, so it could be that also. And he still remains true to Steiner's original German edition as far as I know.

Does anyone else have an opinion on the different translations to maybe share?