Owen Barfield's The Rediscovery of Meaning - Session 1

the introduction to first edition (1977)

Owen Barfield’s short introduction to the first edition (1977) of his collection of essays titled The Rediscovery of Meaning has a remarkable potency, even if only in a suggestive manner, because—in his usual way of distilling the vastly complex into an elegant conceptual one-liner—he provides the golden thread of his oeuvres’ abiding concern: “the importance of penetrating to the antecedent unity underlying apparent or actual fragmentation.”^[1] But what does he mean by this “antecedent unity”? And how does one go about discovering it?

Those familiar with Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s will no doubt recognize the phrase above from his Biographia Literaria with reference to the organic form of a work of art—it’s ideal underlying unity—and the isomorphism this aesthetic experience has with our perceptual relationship with the cosmos itself. Echoing Friedrich Schelling, Coleridge envisioned the world as woven from a polar process which, in the Time before time, was primordially One (an antecedent unity)—and so must be construed as in truth a tri-unity. One could claim that this insight goes all the way back to myth and symbol, in the Trimurti found in many traditions around the world, in the familial dynamic of Osiris-Isis-Horus, in the Monad-Dyad-Triad of Pythagoras and Hermeticists ever after him.

Barfield’s familiarity with these thinkers and symbols no doubt informed his capacity to elegantly articulate the key insight and salvific power of his principle theme—the evolution of consciousness—but it was his own discovery of evidence for that antecedent unity in the history of linguistic meaning which enflamed him with a faith in its reality.

Initially, it was his youthful fascination with the psychological impact of genuinely poetic diction—which, he realized, was sometimes catalyzed by the strange meaningfulness of ancient words—that led him into the dreamy annals of semantic history—a transdisciplinary mix of etymology, anthropology, psychology, and philosophy.

The further he looked back, the more ancient words seemed to have what he referred to as a “compact” meaning, partaking of both a literal-material and subjective-symbolic-inner-psychological meaning (the oft cited Greek pneuma, which meant breath, wind, and spirit all at once, is one of countless examples). For Barfield, this implied that the experience correlative to ancient semantics involved a kind of unity between what we today refer to as the subjective or psychological pole of experience and metaphorically deem “inside” and the supposedly material “outside” world. Spirit then was in the wind, in the breath… somehow indissociably one—an antecedent unity.

Though some words we use today still retain that compact meaning (heart for instance, as the physical organ and inner-psychological organ of feeling-perception), we mostly have polarities: we have wind and breath, but not with spirit in them; whereas spirit, unless you are spiritually inclined, is for many just a mere idea. As I suggested with Barfield in my dissertation, this historical process can be described as a polarization of an original unity into the dyad of subject and object.

Barfield then goes on in his introduction to say that the discovery of this antecedent unity bodied forth in the history of language has value for us as we face what many refer to as the “meaning crisis”—an absence of cosmological orientation in the midst of disciplinary fragmentation. Its value is the realization that our conception of knowledge has shifted in accordance with this fragmentation and forgetfulness of that antecedent unity, and that it might shift again through this recollection.

Rather than an accumulation of information about the objectified world through the silos of separate disciplines—a process which breaks meaning apart—knowledge which reflects an awareness of the primordial (and ever-present) unity of subject and object—what Barfield refers to as “participation” in Saving the Appearances—threads meaning back together, brings it back to Life.

For Barfield, returning to meaning required a practice of historical recollection—a practice of allowing the evolution of consciousness depicted in the historical transformation of linguistic meaning and other cultural media to demonstrate through portrayal (Goethe’s method) this movement from unity to fragmentation. “If knowledge formerly connoted a certain awareness of an antecedent immaterial unity,” as he writes in this vein, “then the perception or intuition of such unities is a historical as well as an ontological topic.”^[2] This is Barfield’s way of saying that it is not only an evolution of consciousness suggested by the history of meaning, but also its correlative—the phenomena of the objective world, subject and object co-constituted in the process of their gradual polarization from antecedent unity. As he describes it, this evolution “must be seen as the progressive metamorphosis of a universal or generalized consciousness, which embraced both man and nature, into the individualized and alienated self-consciousness we have today; and further that there are indications that this contraction seeks to be followed by an expansion from the separate new centers thus created.”^[3]

As Barfield envisions it, the rediscovery of meaning and the renewal of genuine knowledge begins to alight through this expanding, expanding beyond our insulated self-consciousness into a new intimacy with the living cosmos, though without annihilating our centers of selfhood. One could call that movement Love. “This, it is argued,” as Barfield continues, “involves realizing that the centers — human beings — are still, in their subconscious depths, transpersonal. It can be understood, as he quotes from Saving the Appearances, “if, but only if, we admit that in the course of the Earth’s history something like the Divine Word has been gradually closing itself with the humanity it first gradually created — so that what was first spoken by God may eventually be respoken by man.”^[4] And therewith we get a taste of the Christology Barfield gradually embraced as a result of his studies in semantic history.

Though “reared an agnostic,” he would eventually have the “startling experience” of recognizing the special relation between the revelations of semantic history (which one might justifiably refer to as the biography of the Word) and the lore of the Gospels. “Here is the antecedent Unity of unities, here is the interior Transforming Agent of evolution, here is the positive meaning of life on Earth, here is the Meaning of meaning itself staring me in the face!”^[5]

For my part, I think Barfield was onto something. For me, insight into that antecedent unity and the depiction of its polarization in the evolution of consciousness depicted by semantic history have been and continue to be like a golden thread—guiding my heart through the maze of today’s chaos with faith in a new unity woven between us through our happy obedience to that transpersonal light within, that ever-present emissary and image of primordial oneness—Love.

May it be so.

---

^[1] 4.

^[2] 4.

^[3] 6.

^[4] 6.

^[5] 7