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| Owen Barfield (1898-1997) |
My reading has taken a recent turn into
the philosophy of history, an unfortunate phrase in some ways, but suffice it
to say it involves thinking about how we understand history. I turned from a
short book on the history of rhetoric to some writings of Quentin Skinner about
how to understand the history of political thinking. Skinner reports that R. G.
Collingwood influenced him. Collingwood again! Last year, after having known
for some time that I should tackle Collingwood, I bought one of those
magnificently inexpensive South Asian editions of The Idea of History (1946/revised ed. 1994), Collingwood’s
posthumously published masterwork on the topic. I shipped it back to America,
not knowing that in China my reading and thinking would turn in this direction.
Of course, readers of this blog will
expect that I would turn to John Lukacs in this topic as well, although, since
it’s confession time, I’ve never done a complete read-through of Historical Consciousness: The Remembered
Past (1968/1985), Lukac’s masterwork (but far from only work) about history
as a subject. When reading Lukacs now, the name of Owen Barfield (b. 1898) comes
up, a name I know but a body of thought that I’ve never completely gotten a
handle upon. Lukacs mentions Barfield as a source of thinking about
“participatory knowing”. A number of years ago I read two of Barfield’s most prominent works, Saving the Appearances (1957) and History, Guilt, and Habit (1957). (His
Coleridge book sat on my shelf for a long time, and it lies in wait for me like
buried treasure.) How do you pigeonhole Barfield? You don’t. Philosopher,
anthropologist, literary scholar, or a bit of a kook? Like most intriguing
thinkers, he trashes boundaries and goes off seeking answers where he may. I
could not get him on one pass.
Owen Barfield was born in 1898 and lived—remaining
active and lucid—to 1997. He graduated from Oxford just after the War. Collingwood
graduated just before the War and accepted a faculty position at Oxford shortly
after the War, beginning his tenure as a professor of philosophy. (I’ve found
no record that the two of them ever had any direct contact.) Barfield was a
literary man and took his degree in literature.
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| Friend, fellow Inkling, & godfather to Barfield's daughter Lucy, to whom he dedicated a book |
Also, while at Oxford, he met C.S. “Jack”
Lewis, with whom his name is inevitably linked. They developed a friendship and
became intellectual sparring partners: Barfield in the early 1920s found an
intellectual beacon in the writings of Rudolph Steiner, an Austrian mystic (for
lack of a more precise term) and founder of Anthroposophy. Lewis, of course, later
became a Christian. Lewis and Barfield, together with J.R.R. Tolkien and
Charles Williams, formed The Inklings, an informal literary group. But while
Lewis and Tolkien took up academic positions at Oxford, Barfield was called to
his family business in London and began work full time as a solicitor
(transaction lawyer). He remained in this position until 1959 when he retired
and turned his full attention to writing and speaking.
Barfield published his first book, History in English Words (1926) about
how meanings of words change over time reflecting changes in the way people
think about the world. While Barfield’s output was limited during his time
working as a solicitor, he did publish Poetic
Diction: The Recovery of Meaning (1928) (based on his thesis at Oxford),
and he drafted Saving the Appearances,
which is perhaps his most well-known work. He moved from a fascination with
words and Romantic poetry to the study about how consciousness has evolved and
how human self-knowledge has changed over history. Put in the broadest terms,
Barfield argues that human consciousness once enjoyed a participatory knowledge
of nature and the world around it, but that has been lost and now seeks a new
source. Barfield’s project is a wide-scale inquiry into how we know and how
that way of knowing has changed during history. Barfield doesn’t believe we can
go back, but he ponders how we might move forward.
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| R.G. Collingwood (1889-1943), fellow Oxfordian |
It appears that Barfield addresses
Collingwood’s work directly in later works. Barfield, after retiring as a
solicitor in the late 1950s, enjoyed a second career as an academic lecturer
and teacher in the U.S., lecturing and teaching at Brandeis University, Drew
University, and the University of Missouri, among others. In Speaker’s Meaning (1967), Barfield
addresses Collingwood’s work. Collingwood argues that we imaginatively re-enact
history when we consider a historical topic. In fact, all history is the
history of human thought according to Collingwood. While I don’t have access to
these Barfield books, the interplay between Barfield’s work and Collingwood’s intrigues
me.
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| John Lukacs, active Hungarian-American historian |
John Lukacs has cited Barfield in his
books, such as Historical Consciousness
(available via Google Books) and The
Future of History. Lukacs participated in a Barfield Centenary Celebration
put on jointly by Columbia University and Drew University (New Jersey). (Alas.
I have no record of his remarks.) I can’t now detail all of Lukac’s references
to Barfield, nor can I now explore the ties and influences, but as I note
below, I hope to do so later.
T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Howard Nemerov, Saul
Bellow, Walker Percy, Harold Bloom, James Hillman, and William Irwin Thompson
(not to mention Lukacs) are among those who have praised Barfield's work. (See
David Lavery’s “Friends
of Owen Barfield” site for a more detailed list.) Yet, like Lukacs, he
seems relatively unknown and underappreciated. I hope to bring together
something showing how in time, space, and thought Collingwood, Barfield, and Lukacs
connect in their thinking about history and human understanding (or knowing) in
general. I believe that there are some intriguing possibilities to explore.
4 March 2020. I've edited this for some updates and typos, but most happily, since writing this I've done some additional reading that now spars me the embarrassment of some of the failings that I had to admit to when I first wrote this in 2014.
