About Rudolph Steiner.

Glossary of Terms at the bottom of the page.
These terms are underlined.

Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) was born in what is now Croatia. The man who would later become an occult thinker and founder (in 1912) of the philosophical and educational movement known as Anthroposophy studied natural science as an undergraduate and then embarked on an intensive study (1889-1897) of Goethe's writings on science (in preparation for the definitive Weimar edition of his work).

After a short stint as a literary editor and as general secretary of the German division of the Theosophical Society, he broke with Madame Blavatsky and Theosophy to found his own rival group, establishing its headquarters in Dornach, Switzerland, building (in 1913) the Goetheaneum, an art noveau architectural monument to the ideas of Anthroposophy and launching the Waldorf School method which would incorporate his educational theory.

A prolific lecturer and author (a projected collected works would contain over three hundred volumes!), he was the author of such books as A Theory of Knowledge: Implicit in Goethe's World Conception (1886), Occult Science (1914) and The Philosophy of Freedom (1916).

Barfield's growing interest in and indebtedness to Steiner, whose ideas C. S. Lewis greatly mistrusted, led to Lewis and Barfield's "great war" in the 1930s.

Overt discussion of Steiner's huge influence is surprisingly rare in Barfield's work (though he never fails to acknowledge his debt). The following represents a sampling of Barfield's comments on Steiner's consequence and significance.

· Steiner's lifework reveals--even to those who reject his findings--mental capacities and qualities of heart and will which may reassure us, by exemplifying, that the stature of microcosm is not, or may at least not be in the future, out of reach of man as we know him. In him we can observe, actually beginning to occur, the transition from homo sapiens to homo imaginans et amans. (LS 100)

· It was a year or two before my first book was published [History in English Words (1926)] that I first came into contact with the writings of Rudolf Steiner. I began, after some hesitation, to study his spiritual science, or Anthroposophy, seriously and steadily; and this went on side by side, in close interaction with [my] other studies. As time went on, three things in particular struck me most about Anthroposophy. The first was, that many of the statements and ideas which I found there produced an effect very similar to the combination of words to which I have already alluded [see felt change of consciousness]. As in the one case, so in the other, this effect was independent of belief. Something happened: one felt wiser. . . . The second was that, so far as concerned the particular subject in which I was immersed at the time, that is the histories of verbal meanings and their bearing on the evolution of human consciousness, Steiner had obviously forgotten volumes more than I had ever dreamed. . . . some of my most daring and (as I thought) original conclusions were his premises. . . . The third was, that Anthroposophy included and transcended not only my own poor stammering theory of poetry as knowledge, but the whole Romantic philosophy. It was nothing less than Romanticism grown up. (RCA 12-13)

· From Steiner . . . I learned for the first time that a serious attempt to obtain exact results with the help of a perceptive faculty developed through controlled [systematic] imagination had been made more than a hundred years earlier, and by no means without success, by that uncrowned king of Romantics, Goethe. (RCA 16)

· I have been shocked and puzzled to have it borne in on me over and over again that even those who are prepared to lend a very sympathetic ear indeed to my own observations, whether on language and poetry or on the wider issue of the whole evolution of human consciousness, are not in the least interested in the news about Steiner which it has been one of my main objects in life to set before the educated public with all the earnestness and sobriety at my disposal. (RCA 16-17)

· That future historians of Western thought will interpret the appearances of Romantic philosophy towards the close of the eighteenth century as foreshadowing the advent of Rudolf Steiner towards the close of the nineteenth I have no sort of doubt. (RCA 19)

· To say that [Steiner] advocated, and practiced, "the systematic use of imagination" is to place so much emphasis on the mere beginning of what he taught and did, that it is rather like saying that Dante wrote a poem about a greyhound. Steiner showed that imagination, and the final participation it leads to, involve, unlike hypothetical thinking, the whole man--thought, feeling, will, and character--and his own revelations were clearly drawn from those further stages of participation-
-Inspiration and Intuition--to which the systematic use of imagination may lead. (SA 141)

See as well the Rudolf Steiner page elsewhere on this website.
See in particular "Listening to Steiner," "Introduction" (RCA 7-24), Saving the Appearances, Chap. XX.

Glossary of Terms

Russian spiritualist, founder of Theosophy.

Occult philosophical movement, founded by Madame Blavatsky, which counted among its members Rudolf Steiner until he broke with Theosophy to found Anthroposophy.

In Surprised by Joy, C. S. Lewis (1898-1963), the British literary scholar, novelist, popular theologian, and Oxford and Cambridge don (1925-1954, 1954-1963, respectively), admitted that his "Second Friend"1 Owen Barfield "changed me a good deal more than I him. Much of the thought which he afterward put into Poetic Diction had already become mine before that important little book appeared. It would be strange if it had not. He was of course not so learned then as he has since become; but the genius was already there."2 But it was, of course, Lewis who would go on to become the household word, the internationally known figure.3

Barfield has had much to say throughout his career on the life and mind of his more famous friend. (G. B. Tennyson's Owen Barfield on C. S. Lewis [1989] collected these in a single volume.) A sampling follows:

· On Lewis' "subjective idealism" in contrast to Barfield's objective idealism:

What differentiated Lewis from other subjective idealists was that he was not content with studying all this as an academic exercise and accepting it as a theory which could have no possible influence on a man's actual behavior. He tried to live by it. He told us something of all this in Surprised by Joy (1955). And I suppose it was here in a sense that I came in. I had had no philosophical training, and I absorbed my subjective idealism from him. But I always had an obstinate feeling that there must be some way of bridging the gulf between the empirical self and the higher self or the Absolute. The argument between us went into all sorts of philosophical and psychological detail, and I remember getting into very hot water on one occasion after trying to maintain that a proposition might be true from one point of view and untrue from another. In these arguments, Lewis could always knock me down without much difficulty, and I learned more than I can say from those falls. (OBCSL 8-9)
On Lewis' argumentative style:

· When one met him and had the intention of putting forward something, arguing with him, it was rather like going in to bat in a game of cricket against a very swift bowler. You were so terrified as you walked toward the wicket that every idea in your head completely vanished except that at all costs you must keep a very straight bat. Well, it sometimes happens that the ball from the swift bowler accidentally hits the bat you have simply held straight, but without trying to wield it, and then it is as likely to go to the boundary as anywhere else, simply because it was such a fast ball. In that sense, one could say that Lewis had the sort of mind that overreached itself. But if it did, he took the consequences quite willingly and humbly. (OBCSL 9-10)

· On the nature of Lewis' intellect:

The rapidity with which his mind responded to whatever was presented to it, not only forming the necessary ideas but also converting them simultaneously into well-ordered sentences, exceeded that of anyone I have ever conversed with. In later years, especially, when I was living a different sort of life from his, I sometimes felt that he must be feeling I was dull, though there is, fortunately, some evidence that this was not the case. There are people in whose company I feel myself to be too quick-witted, so that I have to take some pains to avoid appearing aggressive; there are many others with whom I never think about it; Lewis was, I believe, the only person in whose company I frequently felt myself to be painfully slow-witted. (OBCSL 39)

· On Lewis' understanding of the imagination:

If someone were to ask me at the point of a pistol, and with ten seconds to answer in: What was Lewis' relation to imagination? I should reply (supposing I had my wits enough about me to meet the challenge): He was in love with it. And being in love (which is not quite coterminous with "having sex") has been observed to entail a strong impulse to protect the beloved object from contamination, a kind of horror at the contrast between her perfections and the harsh world of reality. (OBCSL 98)
Lewis had within him this loving impulse to protect and insulate imagination, so that it could continue to live its own pure and chaste life; to insulate it, therefore, from having anything whatever to do with fact. "May it not be that there is something in belief which is hostile to perfect imaginative enjoyment?" he asks in the essay "Is Theology Poetry?" and elsewhere he suggests that, if there had been no myths, the poets would have had to invent them. My memory tells me that, once you are alert to it, you find indications of that protective impulse in many places in his writings. (OBCSL 98-99)
[Lewis] was imagination's own true knight, wearing her favor as he performed his prodigious deeds, and looking up always in the hope of her gracious approbation. But partly for that very reason, he could not contemplate with any enthusiasm the possibility of giving her the vote or of arranging for her active participation in the practical business of life. (OBCSL 101)
Lewis had the very strong feeling that you couldn't relate [imagination] in any way to truth with destroying its essence as imagination; he was in love with it. . . . Yes, he was in Romantic love with it. . . . But I wanted to marry it." (OBCSL 137)
On their respective development as thinkers:

· He developed to a considerable extent after his conversion; whereas I have never changed at all. . . . I have the feeling, when I write a book, that I always write the same book over and over again, though perhaps in a different context or from a different approach. But Lewis did change. . . . It is often the case that thinking people change substantially. There is an earlier Wittgenstein and a later Wittgenstein; there is an earlier Heidegger and a later Heidegger, an earlier D. H. Lawrence and a later D. H. Lawrence; but there's no earlier Barfield and later Barfield. He always says the same thing. And that meant that Lewis had a certain advantage of me. (OBCSL 107)

See in particular Owen Barfield on C. S. Lewis, passim.
1"But the Second Friend," Lewis writes in Surprised by Joy,

is the man who disagrees with you about everything. He is not so much the alter ego as the antiself. Of course he shares your interests; otherwise he would not be your friend at all. But he has approached them all at a different angle. He has read all the right books but has got all the wrong things out of every one. It is as if he spoke your language but mispronounced it. How can he be so nearly right and yet, invariably, just not right? . . . . When you set out to correct his heresies, you find that he forsooth has decided to correct yours! And then you go at it, hammer and tongs, far into the night, night after night, or walking through fine country that neither give a glace to, each learning the weight of the other's punches, and often more like mutually respectful enemies than friends. Actually (though it never seems so at the time) you modify one another's thought; out of this perpetual dogfight a community of mind and a deep affection emerge. But I think he changed me a good deal more than I him.

2Barfield, of course, has offered a dissenting account of who influenced whom. "He says in Surprised by Joy that he believes I influenced him more than he influenced me. If that is true, which I very much doubt, it is because he made it possible. When he showed me that passage in typescript before the book had gone to the printer, I told him he ought to add that it was he that taught me how to think at all" (OBCSL 9).
3In his introduction to Owen Barfield on C. S. Lewis, G. B. Tennyson offers the following discerning comparison of Lewis' and Barfield's academic and popular acceptance.

Lewis's towering visibility is already pressing heavily on the consciousness of an academic establishment that prefer to ignore him or treat him as the special province of overzealous sectaries. Barfield's subtler visibility will continue to increase, in his case probably from the academy outward, for he already enjoys a dedicated academic cult following. Lewis will gain in academic stature and Barfield in popular appeal. but the two reputations will at points again converge as the two lives did in the twenties, and Barfield and Lewis will come to be seen as one of the most enduring literary constellations of this century. ( xii)

Inspired by Goethe, Barfield speaks of acquiring the "habit of thinking actively; of choosing to think, instead of letting your thoughts just happen" (HGH 76-77). Such conscious thinking is systematic imagination. It is a way of aiding the senses without the "use of precision instruments" (WA 146) which--as a kind of "controlled participation" (RCA 235)--involves "the mind's self-experience in the act of thinking" (HGH 77).

Goethe called such imagination, which he sought to perfect as an instrument of his completely misunderstood morphological investigations, "exact percipient fancy" (RCA 34); and it may be thought of as the transfer of "the esemplastic imagination [Coleridge] from literature and art to science" (RCA 34).

With Coleridge, Barfield would agree that "Only those possess imagination in the deepest sense 'who feel in their own spirits the same instinct, which impels the chrysalis of the horned fly to leave room in its involucrum for antennae yet to come. They know and feel, that the potential works in them, even as the actual works on them'" (quoted in SM 82; from BL, Chap. 12). To see in this way is to possess systematic imagination.

Systematic imagination, as Sanderson explains in Worlds Apart, "involves looking at the phenomena open-mindedly, without at that stage obtruding any theoretical cerebration, conscious or unconscious, and letting them speak to you for themselves" (146). In practicing it, the observer

reaches a certain point ("the prime phenomenon"), stops there and endeavors rather to sink himself in contemplation in that phenomenon than to form further thoughts about it. It implies a certain--if one may use the word--chastity of thought, a willingness not to go beyond a certain point. The blue of the sky, said Goethe, is the theory. To go further and weave a web of abstract ideas remote from anything we can perceive with our senses in order to explain this blue--that is to darken counsel. (RCA 34)

Science, of course, has forbidden itself the possibility of such participatory vision, as Sanderson explains in dialogue with Burgeon in Worlds Apart.

Sanderson: . . . One of the first principles of science is that all feeling must be ruled out, where scientific investigation is concerned. But then it is always assumed that, when one speaks of "feeling," one means subjective feelings--wishes and so forth--by which one's thinking is unconsciously influenced. But that is not what I mean at all. There is such a thing as objective feeling, which can be used as a means to clearer thinking and deeper perception.

Burgeon: Any competent poet or painter knows that.

Sanderson: Yes, but his object is not scientific investigation. What I am trying to put is, that, if a man deliberately strengthens his thinking in the sort of way I am suggesting--by uniting with it the natural energy of his feeling and willing--he begins to penetrate, with consciousness, into those other parts of his organism where the older relation between man and nature still persists. He becomes aware of what is going on at the normally unconscious pole, able to observe it, and in this way he gains direct access to the past, that is, to the primeval period when that relation prevailed. You can say he re-enacts it in conscious experience; or you can say he actually observes the past, instead of having to infer it in his fancy from the present. They are two different ways of putting the same thing. (153)1

"Systematic imagination," Barfield contends in "From East to West," "is, in fact, clairvoyance" (RCA 38).

See in particular Worlds Apart, passim, "The Force of Habit" (HGH 65-93), Romanticism Comes of Age, passim, Saving the Appearances, Chap. XX. 1Consequently, the hypotheses of science remain anything but organic:

Theories like vitalism, or those of organismic biology-are simply thought-models, evolved inside a scientist's head to enable him to account for the phenomena which he observes. Just as mechanism was another and cruder thought-model. They do not amount to a participation of the knower in the unconscious thinking that is going on in nature. That is only achieved by contemplating the phenomena themselves in concentrated mental activity, but without at the same time thinking about them. Then they begin to explain themselves. Then they appear as what they are in time as well as in space. . . . (145-46)

Great Italian poet, author of the epic poem The Divine Comedy.

Through and through "a Western concept," imagination should be understood as "potentially extraordinary consciousness--not just the dream stage, but the whole gamut of it-present with ordinary consciousness" (RM 30). For Barfield, inheritor of the Romantic, Coleridgian conception of organic imagination, the term denotes "an ultimate mental activity that opposes, and transmutes into a kind of aesthetic or mystical contemplation, that absolute dichotomy between perceiving subject and perceived object on which our practical everyday experience . . . is necessarily based" (xxx).1 Or to put it simply and concisely, imagination is for Barfield "the power of creating from within forms which themselves become a part of nature" (HEW 211).

Whereas the word "''imagination' has come to mean, for most people, the faculty of inventing fictions, especially poetic fictions . . . ,"2 for Barfield imagination "in its deepest sense . . . signifies that very faculty of apprehending the outward form as the image or symbol of an inner meaning . . . " (RM 19). With Shakespeare he would agree that

as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name. (quoted in HEW 209)

As successor to the throne once held by "inspiration,"3 imagination is the "needful virtue" of our time because the literalness which supports idolatry is the "besetting sin" of the age (SA 162). In imagination "we find ourselves in finding vision" (RM 30).

Imagination's theatre of action is not, however, some subjective realm but the world itself. (And so we find Barfield quoting with admiration historian of science Thomas Kuhn concerning "transformations of the 'imagination that we shall ultimately need to describe as a transformation of the world'" [HGH 83-84.]) It is "the most precious of all our possessions--the chosen one of all our faculties to be our savior" (RCA 45).4

Barfield's concept of imagination is indebted as much to Rudolf Steiner as to Shakespeare and the great Romantics. For Steiner revealed the role of imagination in the evolution of consciousness. Only Steiner," he observes in the "Introduction" to Romanticism Comes of Age, "clearly apprehended [imagination] as part, and but the first part, of a long, sober process of cognition that may end in man's actually overcoming the dichotomy [between mind and matter, self and world]--sober but involving a plus of self-consciousness amounting to a mutation, since it presupposes no less than a crossing of the stark threshold between knowing and being" (RCA 15-16).

Barfield's philosophy of imagination is inextricably linked to his concept of polarity. In a memorable passage from "Matter, Imagination, and Spirit" he explains the relationship. As human beings, he writes, "we live in [the] abrupt gap between matter and spirit; we exist by virtue of it as autonomous, self-conscious individual spirits, as free beings." This gap cannot be ignored with impunity, however; indeed, "because our freedom and responsibility depend on it, any way that involves disregarding the gap, or pretending it is not there, is a way we take at our own peril." The existence of this gap makes possible--makes necessary--imagination:

Now imagination does not regard the gap; it depends on it. It lives in it as our very self-consciousness does, in this case not as a small helpless creature caught in a trap between the two, but rather as a rainbow spanning the two precipices and linking them harmoniously together. The concern of imagination is neither with mere matter nor with pure spirit. It is thus a psychic, or a psychosomatic, activity. On the other hand, if we are seeking to have to do with spirit, it is worse than useless to try to approach it by way of scientific investigation-at least as the word 'science" is used today, for science is avowedly based on mere perception, and in mere perception it will always be matter we are having do with and never spirit. Indeed mere perception is itself the gap between matter and spirit and, whatever else one can do with a gap, one cannot use it as a means of crossing itself. (RM 150)

Because "the images begotten by [it] are alive and creative, and have a sort of germinating power of their own," the rainbow of imagination thus provides the means to recover, this time self-consciously, with full human awareness, the powers at work in the creative universe: "When true imagination is at work, the same power is operating in man as operated, in the Beginning, in the creation of the world; only now it flows from an individual mind, and in association with what Coleridge called the 'conscious will'" (RM 89).

See in particular "Imagination" (HEW 196-215), "Imagination and Fancy, I & II (WCT 69-91), "Imagination and Inspiration" (RM 111-29), "Matter, Imagination, and Spirit" (RM 143-54), and Poetic Diction, passim.
1In "The Rediscovery of Meaning" Barfield offers a concise summary of Coleridge's position:

Thus it was held by Coleridge that the human imagination, at its highest level, does indeed inherit and continue the divine creative activity of the logos (the 'Word' of the opening verses of St. John's Gospel) which was the common origin of human language and consciousness, as well as the world which contains them. Out of the whole development of the romantic movement in Europe at the turn of the eighteenth century and in the nineteenth a conviction arose in these circles that man's creative imagination can be applied, not only to the creation and contemplation of works of art but also in the contemplation of nature herself. (RM 19)

2"Imagination," Barfield hastens to remind us, "is not the fenced preserve of poetry, or even of the fine arts in general; and no one saw that more clearly than George Eliot, when she remarked, in Daniel Deronda: 'Here undoubtedly lies the chief poetic energy:-in the force of imagination that pierces or exalts the solid fact, instead of floating among cloud-pictures'" (HGH 80).

3As Barfield observes in Speaker's Meaning, "Perhaps all our endeavors to say something fruitful about imagination can best be seen as a struggle to reject the old concept of inspiration--and yet somehow retain it--to reject the old superindividual psychology and at the same time to develop an individual psychology which is viable for the phenomenon of art . . ." (SM 80).

4Though his primary emphasis is on imagination as a power to transform the world of perception, it should be noted that Barfield also detects the existence of a power--a much needed power--he calls "moral imagination." In "Matter, Imagination, Spirit," he distinguishes it from other forms of imagination.

The extent to which we perceive [the] body as mere matter, and the extent to which we perceive it as spirit, will depend on the degree of imagination with which we are perceiving. We may call this 'moral imagination,' to distinguish it from the aesthetic imagination which is concerned with the perception of nature. To the extent that we experience another's spiritual activity in speech, in gesture, in the mobility of his countenance, and so on, the same mode as our own-and thus af it were our own-we are exercizing our moral imagination. (RM 151)

The culminating stage in the evolution of consciousness, the "entelechy of the earth-evolution as a whole" (RCA 44), when man "regains his at-one-ment with the principle of creation, only now in full self-consciousness as a self-contained Ego" (RCA 85), final participation is a difficult (if not impossible) to grasp idea,1 which can perhaps best be understood as "a self conscious rapport with the whole phenomenal world" (IOB 13), or as a "willed consciousness of [original] participation" [EC 27] which "must itself be raised from potentiality to act" (SA 137). Final participation will be possible only when "the macrocosm is . . . focused to an invisible point in the isolated Ego" (RCA 48), for in final participation "man's Creator speaks from within man himself" (BAR 66); we grasp fully our directionally creator relation with the divine.

Final participation is not attainable simply through imitation of original participation. For the Greeks, Barfield reminds us, were inside the world's unity; we are outside of it.2 We live in thought, not in thinking, and thus we must "first . . . realize that it [the original unity] is still there, and then . . . learn how to get back into it, how to rise once more from thought into thinking, taking with us, however, that fuller self-consciousness which the Greeks never knew . . ." (RCA 61). The models upon which Barfield draws in formulating his theory of final participation come not from the Greeks but from Goethe and Rudolf Steiner.3

"One need not be an analyst," R J. Reilly has observed, "to see the progression Barfield intends: from the solitude of private thought, to the strengthened thought that rays out into the thought of the universe, to the absolute dissolution of private thought in the universe, or the Kingdom--or from subjective idealism to Anthroposophy to heaven" (BAR 76). Into his nineties, Barfield has retained a firm faith that "the world of final participation will one day sparkle in the light of the eye as it never yet sparkled early one morning in the original light of the sun" (SA 161). But if we are ever to attain final participation, it will be in the far distant future. It does not loom on the horizon. "Final participation," as Barfield writes in Saving the Appearances' final chapter,

is indeed the mystery of the kingdom--of the kingdom that is to come on earth, as it is in heaven--and we are still only on the verge of its outer threshold. Two thousand years is a trifle of time compared with the ages which preceded the Incarnation. More than a thousand years had to pass before the Western Church reached even that premonitory inkling of final participation which it expressed by adding the Filloque to the Creed, and acknowledged that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Son as well as, originally, from the Father. (182)

The closing lines of Barfield's verse play Orpheus may be taken as a depiction of the mindset of final participation (the "he" of these lines can be taken to be not just Orpheus, the archetypal poet, but mankind as well):

He shall ascend Parnassus awake and find his soul:
Proteus shall work unsleeping for ever, and forms shall flow
As the meaning of words a poet has mastered. It shall be so
That Zeus shall abandon to Chronos the antique starry crown,
And softly out of Olympus the high Gods shall come down
Shedding ambrosial fragrance in clouds that for ever abide,
And earth shall be covered with blushes and make herself sweet as a bride. And her light shall be liquid as honey, her air taste good like bread In the mouths of them that dwell upon earth, and all shall be fed. (O 112)

See in particular Saving the Appearances, Chaps. XX, XXII, XXIV, XXV; Unancestral Voice, passim.
1Against the criticism that his eschatology is too complicated, Barfield explains that "The movements of fingers disentangling a crumpled skein are complicated, but the final result is not complication" (SA 163). Still, in Owen Barfield: Man and Meaning, Barfield admits that any definitive explanation of final participation is "quite beyond me."
2"There is no question of going backwards and trying to be little Greeks. . . . The task which their philosophers instinctively set themselves was . . . to get outside a plane of consciousness in which they normally lived, so as to be able to conceive of it: to turn thinking into thought. Our problem is the converse of this. We are outside it already. Our task is twofold, first to realize that it is still there, and then to learn how to get back into it, how to rise once more from thought into thinking, taking with us, however, that fuller self-consciousness which the Greeks never knew, and which could never have been ours if they had not laboured to turn thinking into thought. Thus, being normally outside, it follows that we shall also be conscious of it as a different world, a world into which we can plunge at will" (RCA 61).

3"Beta-thinking leads to final, by way of the inexorable elimination of all original, participation. Consequently Goethe was able to develop an elementary technique, but unable or unwilling, to erect a metaphysics, of final participation" (SA 139

Participation is for Barfield a "predominately perceptual relation between observer and observed, between man and nature . . . nearer to unity than dichotomy" (HGH 26). It is an "extra-sensory relation between man and the phenomena" (SA 40) in which mind is not yet detached from its representations. ("This older, embryonic relation [between macrocosm and microcosm] . . . still largely subsists--to strengthen and uphold him--in the instinctive life of man, in sleep and after death, until he is reborn in a physical body" [RCA 237].) "To be intensely aware of participation," Barfield explains in Saving the Appearances, "is, for man, to feel the centre of energy in himself identified with the energy of which external nature is the image" (SA 109).

"Participation died," Barfield shows, "not suddenly but by inches. It survived, for example, in chemistry longer than in the other sciences and, after it vanished altogether, not only from the sciences but from the Collective Representations of the educated, or at least the urbanized part of mankind, its echo continued to survive in their habitual use of language for the purposes of thought. It is indeed only in our own time that we are witnessing its eviction from that final stronghold" (SA 98).1

If "anyone . . . finds it difficult to form any conception of participation, that is, of self and not-self identified in the same moment of experience," it is not because there are no examples ready-to-hand. To understand the reality of participation, Barfield observes, we need only

reflect on that whole peculiar realm of semi-subjectivity which still leads a precarious existence under the name "instinct"--or on those "irresistible impulses, on which psychiatrists are inclined to dwell. Many of us know what panic feels like, and ordinary men are proud of their sexual vigor or ashamed of the lack of it, although the act is readily acknowledged in retrospect to be at least as much something that is done to, or with, them by an invisible force of nature, as something they themselves veritably do. (SA 32)

See in particular Saving the Appearances, Chaps. IV, V, VI.
1Some enduring reminders of participation which endured even into our own millennium include: medieval art and thought, the four elements theory, the four humours, astrology (RM 18).

The idea that our inner world contains or represents the outer world in miniature; that each individual human being embodies in small the whole of the universe; that, in the words of Pico della Mirandola (quoted by Barfield in RCA 237), "Whereas God contains in Him all things, because He is their source, Man contains in him all things, because he is their centre"--belief in the existence of the Macrocosm and the Microcosm--is an ancient one, shared by East and West alike.1 Barfield's own version of it is drawn from a number of sources, including the thought of Samuel Taylor Coleridge,2 and the teachings of Rudolf Steiner.3

In "The Time-Philosophy of Rudolf Steiner" we are told that "The human microcosm [is] a centre, into which irradiated centripetally an unbroken influence from the macrocosm" (RCA 187). And we learn from the Meggid in Unancestral Voice that macrocosm/microcosm is a "once and future" idea. "The truth," the Meggid explains, "that the human body is an epitome of nature was once known to the generality of mankind, and though it has long been lost to their view, they will find the truth again. . . ."

"If you would faithfully trace the course taken by the mind of man since it first began to apprehend regularity in nature, then you must distinguish, in the domain of nature herself, between the earth and the universe beyond it. It was in the universe beyond, among the stars and planets, that regularity and irregularity were first distinguished. It was not until men had transferred the habit of that discernment from the heavens to the earth that they beheld, upon earth too, any "laws" of nature. And this they could do, because it is out of that universe that the body of the earth has shrunk together. It has shrunk together and gathered into itself the life of the universe, as the seed shrinks together within the parent plant. All its exterior irregularities point back to that origin. But the earth is not a lifeless relic; it is also the living body of mankind, and, permeating an old machine, there is the new life that looks forward to the future." (154)

See in particular "The Time Philosophy of Rudolf Steiner" (RCA 184-204); Unancestral Voice, passim.
1In the East, for example, Hindu teaching holds that the individual self, Atman, is identical to Brahman, the divine being. In the west, Empedocles, Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics-all proffered some version of the macrocosm/microcosm idea, as have later thinkers like Meister Eckhart, Nicolas of Cusa, Bruno, Leibniz, Emerson, and Whitehead. (See DPR 324.)
2In What Coleridge Thought, Barfield quotes (with obvious admiration) Coleridge from his Theory of Life on macrocosm/mircrocosm:

Man possesses the most perfect osseous structure, the least and most insignificant covering. The whole force of organic power has attained an inward and centripetal direction. He has the whole world in counterpoint to him, but he contains an entire world within himself. Now, for the first time at the apex of the living pyramid, it is Man and Nature, but man himself is a syllepsis, a compendium of Nature--the Microcosm! Naked and helpless cometh man into the world. Such has been the complaint from earliest time; but we complain of our chief privilege, our ornament, and the connate mark of our sovereignty. (68)

3Theodor Schwenk's Sensitive Chaos: The Creation of Flowing Forms in Water and Air presents a fascinating application of Steiner's version of macrocosm/microsm in its demonstration of the way the same natural forces that shape the creation of our inner world-the convolutions of the brain for example-also function geologically-in, for example, the flow of a river or the patterning of cloud movements.

Pico de Mirandola (1463-1494).
Italian humanist philosopher, author of On the Dignity of Man.

A collective representation is simply a shared phenomenon created by and through our thinking. Taken together, collective representations constitute nothing less than "the world we all accept as real" (SA 20). Because of idolatry, however, we seldom understand the real to be either collective or a representation; instead, the real becomes a matter of common sense. We seldom recognize the shaping role we play in creating the 'real" world around us. We hardly seem ready to accept what is, for Barfield at least, the true common sense that

It is only because of the thinking that we do, and have done in the past, from childhood on, that when we look around us, we do not stare uncomprehendingly at a chaos of unrelated impressions, but perceive an ordered--a coherent world of beings, objects and events--a world which, to some extent at least, we can already say we know. (RCA 227)

"I believe it will seem very strange to the historian of the future," Barfield observes in Saving the Appearances, "that a literal-minded generation began to accept the actuality of a 'collective unconscious' before it could even admit the possibility of a 'collective conscious'--in the shape of the phenomenal world" (135).

Barfield's understanding of collective representations own much to the questions raised by modern physics' investigation into the ultimate building blocks of matter. The "really real," the "particles" (as Barfield likes to call them) out of which all things are made, remain, he notes, "unrepresented":

[It is well] to remember, when we leave the world of everyday for the discipline of any strict inquiry, that if the particles, or the unrepresented, are in fact all that is independently there, then the world we all accept as real is in fact a system of collective representations. (SA 20)

But we do not live in the unrepresented.

Whatever may be thought about the "unrepresented" background of our perceptions, the familiar world which we see and know around us--the blue sky with white clouds in it, the noise of a waterfall or a motor bus, the shapes of flowers and their scent, the gesture and utterance of animals and the faces of our friends--the world too, which (apart from the special inquiry of physics) experts of all kinds methodically investigate--is a system of collective representations. The time comes when we must either accept this as the truth about the world or reject the theories of physics as an elaborate delusion. We cannot have it both ways. (SA 18)

Barfield was very interested in the question of how given collective representations come to be accepted as reality, as "collective":

As to what is meant by "collective"--any discrepancy between my representations and those of my fellow men raises a presumption of unreality and calls for explanation. If, however, the explanation is satisfactory; if, for instance, it turns out that the discrepancy was due, not to my hallucinations, but to their myopia or their dullness, it is likely to be accepted; and then my representation may itself end by becoming collective. (SA 19)

Even allowing for the obvious--that "two people can make the same momentary mistake about the identity of an imperfectly seen object"' that "the generally accepted criterion of the difference between 'I thought I saw' and 'I found it was'" is and always will remain; "that the former is a private, the latter a collective representation"--profound questions still remain:

How, then, if "they" are a whole tribe or population? If the "mistake" is not a momentary but a permanent one? If it is passed down for centuries from generation to generation? If, in fact, it is never followed by a "they found it was"? The difficulty is, that then the "mistake" is itself a collective representation. (SA 28)

For Barfield, of course, the modern Western mind has, with its "sins of idolatry," been guilty of just such a mistake.

See in particular Saving the Appearances, Chap. III.

The hypothesis of instinct, as Gregory Bateson has pointed out (in Steps to an Ecology of Mind), is really a "black box" theory--a non-explanation in which modern science deposits all that it does not understand about a given subject and then agrees to call it an explanation.

Barfield, of course, understands instinct in Anthroposophical terms as the product of "superindividual wisdom." "If we really look at nature--if we really observe without the tabu at the back of our minds--," he explains in Speaker's Meaning, "there is nothing whatever to suggest that she has 'no inside.' Indeed, there is everything to suggest the contrary. The concept of 'instinct,' however it is taken, alone implies as much. For instinct cannot be understood, cannot honestly be conceived, otherwise than as a superindividual wisdom at work in nature" (SM 112).

In Owen Barfield: Man and Meaning, he professes his conviction that "animals have more participation than human beings, and what participation they have is obviously original. . . . They have a group soul. . . . When you see all these birds suddenly decide to leave the roof and fly round and round, it can't be that one of them says 'Come on chaps, let's go then.' It's obviously some kind of mental experience common to them all."

See in particular "Subject and Object in the History of Meaning" (SM 92-118).

Gregory Bateson (1904-1980)

American anthropologist and cybernetic theorist, author of Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1973) and Mind and Nature (1978).

The Tabu (The Embargo)

The prohibition--largely unstated but almost always assumed in our scientific age--that the natural world is to be understood without resorting to any hypotheses involving concepts of mind or subjectivity or spirit. "I am not . . . saying," Barfield explains in Speaker's Meaning, "that there is any embargo on a man's arriving at, and even expounding, some kind of idealist philosophy or other, some abstract theory or rational demonstration that mind must be conceived as anterior to matter--Berkeleyism, Kantianism, neo-Kantianism, Bergsonism, Buddhism--there is a wide choice." The tabu is of a different nature.

What the tabu enjoins is that he shall put all that out of his mind as soon as he lays down his pen or leaves the lecture room; above all, that he shall not attempt to apply it in any other realm of inquiry that he may enter, an inquiry, for instance into the origin of language, or of myth, or (if he happens to be a scientist) into the basis of post-Cartesian scientific method. As soon as he goes on to do this, he is bound as a respectable member of educated society to start off from a whole array of presuppositions that are quite incompatible with the conclusions he has arrived at as a philosopher or physicist, or whatever. (109-110)

The tabu or the embargo (Barfield uses the words almost interchangeably) results in a drastic curtailment of modern science's claim on Truth:

The limited scope of all scientific inquiry is today often emphasized rather strongly by those engaged in it. So much so, that when we have heard them on the subject, we are sometimes left with the feeling that we ought to look on all scientific theories as mere "hypotheses" in the sense of the Platonic and medieval astronomers, and that it is wrong to take any of them with the "literalness" that embroiled Galileo with the Church. They are, at best, we are assured, the mathematical formulae which up to the time of writing have been found the simplest and most convenient for--well, for saving the appearances. In physics, in particular, there is a marked tendency to treat almost as an enfant terrible anyone who takes the models literally enough to refer to them in any context outside that of physical inquiry itself. (SA 54)

Under the sway of the tabu "those who [a century ago] insisted that organic forces specifically different from mechanical ones were accused of 'Vitalism,'" and "those who today insist they are different from both mechanical and electromagnetic forces are commonly accused of 'Mentalism.' That "the absolute 'refusal of most biologists to admit the existence of any forces remotely resembling mental operations" necessitates the backdoor adoption of a "picturesque vocabulary" to account for "operations which obviously are quite crudely mental,"1 we seem, under the tabu, not even to notice the contradictions in our thought (xx 129).

Outside the sciences, the tabu produces other, more pernicious effects, explained by the Meggid in Unancestral Voice:

The tabu bars all approach to an awareness of the encompassing spirit that persists and sustains through the transformation that is waking and sleeping and through the transformation that is life and death. It persuades the mind that the borderland between the non-spatial and the spatial manifestations of spirit cannot and should not be broached by the understanding. Its foundation was deliberately laid . . . at a time when the form of Western thought was itself yet young and delicate. And as the twig was bent, the tree has grown. In the course of the centuries, as the forms of Western thought have strengthened and hardened, the barrier has been entrenched and fortified by the two adversaries, till today it has become a tabu. Even to think of crossing it is indecent. It takes courage to disregard a tabu. . . . The scientist bows before it, because the whole of his science is founded on it; the philosopher because he has taken his cue from science and would now rather eliminate the ghost than sacrifice the machine; the religious because, for, him, God must be God the Paterfamilias or nothing; the artist--nowhere perhaps than here has the strength of the tabu shown itself more plainly. (UV 108-109)

See in particular Unancestral Voice, passim, Worlds Apart, passim.

1Barfield provides examples: "I mean, for example, when we hear strictly orthodox geneticists talking of codes and blueprints and assuring us that each growing organism refers to the blueprint for instructions, and then of constraints imposed by nature, or mistakes in following the instructions and so forth" (xx 129).

Bishop Berkeley (1685-1753)

Irish philosopher and clergyman, the founder of the modern school of idealism and author of such books as The Principles of Human Knowledge (1710).

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)

Influential German philosopher, author of Critique of Pure Reason (1781).

Henri Bergson (1859-1941)

Nobel Prize (in literature) winning French philosopher, author of Matter and Memory (1896; trans. 1911), Laughter (1900; trans. 1901), and Creative Evolution (1907; trans. 1911).