Owen Barfield: The Evolution of Consciousness and the Saving of the World of Appearances
Who Was Owen Barfield
Owen Barfield (1898–1997) belonged to the Oxford Inklings alongside C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. C. S. Lewis considered him one of the most important unofficial teachers he ever had. Barfield lived through almost the entire twentieth century as a lawyer, philologist and philosopher. His main work Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry, published in 1957, offers one of the most penetrating critiques of the modern scientific paradigm and a positive vision of moving beyond it.
Barfield drew primarily from Goethe’s natural science, the anthroposophy of Rudolf Steiner, and classical philology. From these sources he built a view of evolution that differs fundamentally from the Darwinian one. For him, evolution is not merely an evolution of bodies and species. It is above all an evolution of consciousness and an evolution of the world that consciousness co-creates.
The Rainbow as a Philosophical Test
Barfield opens the book with the image of a rainbow. Look at one. Is it there? Not entirely. The sun, the raindrops and your eyes produce it together. Without any of these components the rainbow disappears. No one would call it a hallucination, since you and the person beside you both see it. It is a collective representation.
Now look at a tree. The tree appears solid and independent. Yet if you accept what physics tells us about atoms, nuclei and electrons, you arrive at the same conclusion. The tree you see is again a collective representation. The relation particles : representation is fully parallel to the relation raindrops : rainbow.
This elementary experiment is the key to the entire book. Once you accept it honestly, a different world opens up. And not only philosophically.
Collective Representations and the Role of the Perceiver
A collective representation is not a hallucination. It is what we see together. A tree, an altar in a church, factory smoke, the moon. All of them are representations. They arise in the encounter of two components: something unrepresented (Barfield calls it “particles”) and a conscious organism with senses and a mind.
Perceiving does not mean passive recording. Perception is an activity. For this movement of mind that turns raw sensory data into “things” Barfield uses the term figuration. Figuration is whatever in the representation does not come from the senses. It is the construction that turns sound waves into the song of a thrush, atoms into a table, photons into a friend’s face.
Beyond figuration, Barfield distinguishes two kinds of thinking. Alpha-thinking treats representations as if they were independent of us. Most of science belongs here: botany, chemistry, physics in practice. Beta-thinking addresses the very process of perceiving and thinking. Philosophy, phenomenology, parts of psychology. Barfield shows that figuration, alpha-thinking and beta-thinking interpenetrate and influence each other to a degree we usually do not see.
Original Participation: How Ancient Humans Saw the World
Here comes the concept that gives the whole book its direction. Barfield builds on the anthropologists Lévy-Bruhl and Durkheim. They showed that primitive cultures do not see the world the way we do, merely adding superstitious interpretations to otherwise identical phenomena. Their perception itself is different.
For primitive man a tree, mountain, star or animal is not an object set against consciousness, separated from it. It is psychically bound to him. The being of the totem and the being of the tribe merge in a single experience. To speak of “belief in spirits” is a misunderstanding, since it presupposes the modern detachment that primitive man does not have. Spiritual qualities belong to the percept itself from the start.
Barfield calls this mode of existence original participation. Man participates in the world and the world participates in him. Behind appearances stands the “represented”, which is of the same nature as the perceiver: psychic, voluntary, alive. Mana, gods, spirits, the Father. For primitive man this is not a hypothesis. It is immediate experience.
The etymology of language confirms this. The further back in time we go, the more mythical the representations become. Greek words such as nous or logos cannot be translated as “mind” or “reason” in the modern sense without losing their original content. These words presuppose that mind is something in which the world also takes part, not only the individual.
Evolution as the Gradual Fading of Participation
Astronomy was the first systematic application of alpha-thinking. The Greeks observed planetary motions and looked for geometrical patterns to describe them. Plato taught that the task of astronomy was to save the appearances (sózein ta fainomena). The hypothetical model was meant to rescue what the senses see. At that stage participation still held. True knowledge remained a sharing in the divine Mind. Geometry served as an intermediate step.
The scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries changed all this. The hypothesis, which had served as an auxiliary tool for saving the appearances, became a claim about reality itself. Copernicus and his successors did not say merely “let us imagine that the Earth revolves around the Sun”. They said “the Earth really revolves around the Sun, your everyday perception is an illusion”. This shift had consequences far beyond astronomy.
The mechanical model of the world gradually moved from being a hypothesis into the representations themselves. The table became “in reality” a cloud of particles. Colour became a secondary quality, a projection of the observer onto a mute and colourless universe. The animal became an automaton. Man became a brain inside a skull. Nature lost its inner side.
This is the evolutionary arc Barfield maps out. Original participation retreats, alpha-thinking advances. By the nineteenth century the process was complete. Nature was given the status of a heap of objects that had been there for millions of years before man, in exactly the form we see today. Pre-Darwinian botanists and Darwin himself worked within this presuppositional frame. The evolution they described was an evolution of bodies in an already finished world of appearances, not an evolution of the appearances themselves.
Idols and Idolatry
A representation collectively taken as final reality independent of mind ceases to be a representation. It becomes an idol. An idol is an image mistakenly held to be a thing in itself. This is the precise meaning Barfield gives the word idolatry. He is not speaking of pagan statues. He is speaking of our everyday way of perceiving nature and the body as objects.
Modern man lives in a forest of idols. Galaxy, atom, gene, neuron, hormone, information. We accept all of them as things in themselves. We forget that they are constructions of our own consciousness in encounter with something unrepresented, of which in truth we know nothing certain.
Idolatry has two serious consequences. Epistemically: nature has lost meaning and inner unity. Science fragments into hundreds of specialisations that do not communicate with each other. The hypothesis of chance has spread from evolution into physics and on into cosmology. Whatever once held flowers, stars and conscience together has been lost. Ethically: nature emptied of spirit becomes manipulable matter. There is no difference between man and machine apart from complexity.
Language and the Logos
Barfield was above all a philologist. His most original contribution comes from the observation of language. Words have a history. Meaning did not develop from the concrete to the abstract, as Victorian anthropology claimed. Rather the opposite. The original language was mythic-concrete: the single word pneuma meant breath, wind and spirit without involving metaphor. Later this polysemic core split into apparently metaphorical extensions, because the participation that held it together was fading.
The Logos of the ancient Greeks and the Word of John’s Gospel point to that original unity in which word, thing and thought were not yet separated. To speak of an evolution of consciousness without an evolution of language is impossible. Language is the living archive of where we have come from.
Final Participation
Here Barfield’s book turns to its second half. Until now it has been a study of decline. Now it becomes a call. Original participation is irrevocably behind us. A return to it would be a regression to childlike unawareness. Barfield repeatedly emphasises this and warns against attempts to revive it through pantheism and occultism.
The way leads forward through what he calls final participation. Its principle is simple and demanding at the same time. Final participation begins when figuration, until now unconscious, becomes conscious. Once man discovers that the appearances are his own co-creation, he ceases to be a passive spectator of nature and becomes its co-author.
This shift cannot be reached by theoretical reflection alone. It requires the systematic cultivation of imagination. Goethe is for Barfield the first modern man to take this path consciously. Goethe’s method in the Metamorphosis of Plants is not speculation. It is a disciplined participation of mind in the very process of growth, where the Urpflanze is not an idea but a potential phenomenon directly perceived.
Rudolf Steiner continued what Goethe had begun and brought it into philosophical form in The Philosophy of Freedom. Steiner added what Goethe avoided: rigorous beta-reflection. Through it final participation became an epistemologically defensible position rather than only a poetic intuition. Anthroposophical medicine, biodynamic agriculture and Goethean science in the wider sense are concrete attempts to apply this view.
The Incarnation of the Word as the Turning Point of History
The final chapters of the book move into theology. Barfield was a Christian thinker and his reading of Christianity is unusual by ordinary church standards.
For him the Incarnation of the Word is not an isolated miracle in otherwise neutral history. It is the culmination of the evolution of consciousness. At the moment when original participation had nearly faded and alpha-thinking was not yet able to replace the lost unity, in the bosom of a nation that had systematically fought against idols, a man was born who identified himself with the Creator and at the same time distinguished himself from the Father. The Logos, until then speaking from outside through nature, became a Logos speaking from within man.
This is for Barfield the historical turning-point of time. Not metaphorically. Actually. Before, original participation was the collective background of humanity. From then on there is the possibility that meaning, which once came from above, may be born from within man. The Eucharist is the institutional seed of this possibility.
Barfield states openly that this possibility was missed. Christianity did not become a conscious assumption of creative participation. It became another layer of idolatry, in which Christ himself was turned into an external authority. The scientific revolution then completed the work of pre-Christian iconoclasm without opening the door to final participation on the other side. We are trapped in an in-between space.
Why Barfield Matters Today
Barfield’s diagnosis fits the circle of authors appearing today on the Quintessence Forum. Bernardo Kastrup speaks of the universe as a mental process and of materialism as a collective psychosis. Federico Faggin approaches consciousness from the side of quantum information and has discovered that his own understanding of the world does not match the materialist frame that produced the microprocessor. Iain McGilchrist maps the breakdown of participation through the asymmetry of brain hemispheres. All of these authors touch by different paths on what Barfield described half a century ago.
For homeopaths Barfield carries particular weight. Classical homeopathy rests on a presupposition that the modern scientific paradigm rules out: a plant, mineral or animal has an inner side, a nature, a signature that can imprint itself on a human being and act there as a remedy. In Barfield’s vocabulary this presupposition is a form of participation. Hahnemann, Scholten and Sankaran work in a terrain that alpha-thinking has been systematically erasing.
It does not follow that homeopathy is only a residue of original participation. The best homeopathic practice is already today a form of final participation. It demands the conscious use of imagination, sensitivity to phenomena, the capacity to perceive growth, transformation and disease as a meaningful whole. Scholten’s thematic prescription is not a magical ritual. It is a disciplined movement of mind that allows one to perceive the period, stage and phase of a plant as part of the living structure of the world. Barfield would recognise here a kindred impulse to Goethe’s science.
Saving the Appearances Today
The original title of Barfield’s book points back to Plato. Sózein ta fainomena. Saving the appearances. In ancient astronomy this meant finding a hypothesis that gave sense to the motions of the stars. For Barfield it means something more radical. The appearances must be saved from their complete collapse into a meaningless cloud of objects. They must be taken up again as the co-creations of a creative imagination in a responsible human being.
If we continue in idolatry, the world will keep fragmenting. Science will move into ever greater specialisation with no possibility of synthesis. Ecology will lose its meaning, since there will be no “oikos”, no home, only a neutral background of matter. Man will become a neurochemical castaway trying to invent meaning out of his own emptiness.
If we step onto the path of final participation, something different may come. Science will turn into a participatory science. Healing will turn into participatory healing. Art will take on cosmic responsibility. Language will stop being reduced to the exchange of information and become the Word again. All of this is Barfield’s project.
Barfield does not give a recipe. He gives an orientation. The concrete work each of us has to do alone. For the Quintessence Forum his message is a reminder that paradigm does not change politically or through propaganda. It changes through the quality of consciousness of individual people who dare to perceive differently. That is the task we have before us.
