Barfield and the inherence of consciousness

what Barfield thought

“Look at a rainbow,” Barfield enjoins his reader in the first sentence of Saving the Appearances. He goes on to make the apparently trivial observation that the rainbow is a phenomenon. But, like so many of Barfield’s insights, its profundity is liable to escape the distracted reader. To be a phenomenon means to be perceived. One may be reminded of Berkeley’s axiom esse est percipi, or “to be is to be perceived, which is ordinarily discounted as an extreme enunciation of the subjective idealist stance. But phenomena, by definition, must be conceived in precisely the way that Berkeley’s axiom indicates since phenomenon literally means “appearance” or “representation.”¹ Hence it makes as little sense to speak of an unperceived or unrepresented phenomenon as to speak of a shapeless hexagon. Barfield observes that, whatever else we may wish to claim about the phenomena, we must acknowledge that they do not preëxist our minds’ participation in their appearance. Hence, far from the image of the Cartesian theater in which objects utterly heterogeneous to the mind succeed, by a sort of conjuring trick, in becoming perceptions for it, Barfield offers a view in which the mind is already latent in every object of perception. He called this function “figuration.” Figuration refers, more or less, to the process that Coleridge denoted with the term “Primary Imagination.” In Barfield’s description from Saving the Appearances:

as the organs of sense are required to convert the unrepresented (‘particles’) into sensations for us, so something is required in us to convert sensations into ‘things’. It is this something that I mean. And it will avoid confusion if I purposely choose an unfamiliar and little-used word and call it, at the risk of infelicity, figuration.²

Far from the Empiricist notion of the mind as a more or less passive onlooker to the external world, therefore, Barfield, following Coleridge and in parallel with various schools of phenomenology, means to draw the reader’s attention to the mind’s ubiquitous and continual virtuality in all perception. Barfield has sometimes been accused of advancing a kind of “closet Kantianism.” Are not “the unrepresented” or “the particles” just another term for the unknowable noumenon or “thing-in-itself” that Kant had posited as existing forever beyond our ability to reach it? No, because Barfield is referring to what is not represented and not what is not representable. An unread letter is not the same thing as an unreadable letter, even if it is written in what, to me, may be a foreign tongue. Similarly, Barfield is not attempting to establish limits to knowledge but to describe features of cognition and perception that are self-evident upon reflection.

Going further, Barfield invites us to consider an alternative to the typical analogy of the mind as an empty box into which impressions and ideas can be put, or a blank slate upon which external objects impress themselves. Instead, Barfield suggests that the mind relates to its objects of perception not as a container to its contents but as virtuality to actuality. In this case, the more fitting model for the mind’s relation to nature would be that which holds between the conscious mind and the unconscious one. As Barfield suggests in his monograph on Coleridge:

It is because reason is present in nature, and not merely because of the repressed physical appetites, or of physically “inherited” memories, that we can speak fruitfully of a “consciousness, which lies beneath or (as it were) behind the spontaneous consciousness natural to all reflecting beings” and that it nevertheless makes sense to call this consciousness-beneath-consciousness “philosophic.” Indeed, the best way of approaching the relation between reason’s “presence in” nature and its “presence to” the understanding, may well be to think in terms of the unconscious” and consciousness.”...What was present but asleep as life in nature becomes, when present to the understanding, the awakener.³ 

Elsewhere, Barfield elaborates on this theme by observing that the phenomenal world cannot coherently be thought of as “external” in a spatial sense. The external world, he writes, “is not outside of man in the sense of being independent of him, but is his outside in the sense that every inside has a correlative outside; that it is the obverse of his self-consciousness: his self-consciousness displayed before him, so to speak, as his perception.”⁴ Conventional wisdom holds that consciousness emerged at some point in evolution as a sort of epiphenomenon of brain processes, resulting from the conjectured survival and reproductive utility that it, ex hypothesi, must have conferred on our ancestors. Barfield emphatically rejects this simplistic view: a hexagon cannot be freed from its shape without being freed from existence altogether and in attempting to grasp the relation between mind and world, we are asked to conceive of a relation no less essential. The mind is not an afterthought to nature.

We will, very shortly, find occasion to enter more deeply into this theme where we hope that any eventual objections to this proposition may receive an adequate response. First, however, let it be noted that, in spite of the hidden homogeneity of mind and world, it is nevertheless possible to treat the objects of perception as if they existed independently. Moreover, it may even be advisable to do this in many instances. Indeed, it is not at all difficult to make a case for the utility of assuming this specific intentionality toward objects of the material world on purely Darwinian grounds. In other words, objects of perception may be regarded as though they subsisted independently of the subjects of those perceptions. “Alpha thinking” is the term that Barfield coins to designate this mode of thought.  Alpha thinking is predicated on the belief in the supremacy of a sort of “view-from-nowhere” in which, as noted, the subject is extracted from its field of perceptual relations but the objects of these relations are retained. Indeed, alpha thinking characterizes the majority of what passes for science and philosophy since the Enlightenment and the so-called “modern period” in science and philosophy. Of course, the assumptions of postmodernism present a stark challenge to this familiar view but the former have, from the looks of things, failed to adequately distinguish between suspicion of metanarratives and suspicion of truth and reality simplicter. Thus, despite that the star of postmodernism may have been on the rise since the publication of Saving the Appearances, it remains far from midheaven and the Empirico-rationalist conceit—that atomic material entities constitute the essential elements of reality—remains the tacit consensus among the vast majority of thinkers, irrespective of how much they may affirm one or another of various fashionable alternatives. If this were not the case and the objects of perception were seen to be bound in an essential relation with their percipients, science and philosophy would display an immediate, necessary, and unremitting interest in the moral and intellectual transformation of their practitioners.⁵ If anything, today there is less interest in such cultivation than at any other time in history and hence the objection that the Modernist conceit is obsolete can be provisionally put to rest. 

Regarding the function of alpha thinking: it was suggested that the world viewed through this mode of thought is the familiar view-from-nowhere world of natural history and the natural sciences. Many imagine that consciousness is a very late arrival on the scene in this picture and that numberless eons of stars careening in their orbits and nebulae exploding into celestial elements transpired before the first faint flickers of consciousness emerged on the stage of universal history. More significantly, many imagine that mind could be hypothetically extracted from the universe and its history, and the latter would have nevertheless played out exactly as it is believed to have done in fact, notwithstanding the absence of this single apparently trivial detail. Alpha thinking is naturally oblivious to itself and hence prone to dismiss its own existence as an afterthought—an epiphenomenon of more fundamental processes.

But, of course, to adopt something as a methodological postulate is not to be confused with advancing a defensible assertion of that thing as fact. Indeed, serious reflection will at once reveal the impossibility that the existence of consciousness can be adequately grasped from the departure point outside of consciousness on the premise that the phenomenal world bears, to begin with, no relation to the mind that perceives it. It may be objected that the assertion of mind as an elementary feature of Creation smacks of superstition and pseudoscience. But it is only possible to level this objection from the outlook of alpha thinking alone—an arrested alpha thinking at that, for on the basis of what evidence can it be posited that the world could just as well exist entirely bereft of subjectivity? After all, any inquiry into this question at all already presupposes the very thing it is attempting to disprove. But more pressingly, any evidence for this hypothesis, even in the (perhaps impossible) absence of a researcher for whom it could present as evidence, would have to be drawn from an alternative universe to our own, since the present one demonstrably fails to bear this theory out. It must be seen that the roots of deficiency in this view extend far deeper than mere lack of access to ulterior realities. Instead, any observation of reality independent of mind succeeds in falsifying itself in principle before it can even be carried out. After all, where would the observations come from? 

Still, a different objection could be raised by appeal to the multiverse hypotheses that are currently entertained by a number of prominent theoretical physicists. But to postulate something as a hypothesis to “save the paradigm” is a far cry from establishing it through observation and on the basis of evidence. Models are, in some instances, interchangeable with theories or paradigms but they are never interchangeable with evidence. Hence, to the one who is inclined to dismiss the immanence theory of mind in the world as superstition, it must be objected that the boot is on the other leg: ours is the only universe we know of, and consciousness is always already present in all of our knowledge of it. But what about the universes we don’t know of? By now, the objection should be moot and perhaps even tiresome, for on what basis do we suspect the existence of these alternatives? If it is on the basis of evidence, we have seen that consciousness is already inherent in that evidence and hence, the existence of that evidence as such refutes what it is being marshaled in attempts to prove. If it is on the basis of no evidence, then whence does the objection arise in the first place? Because this is a book about Barfield’s thought, we will leave for another occasion speculation over what motives ulterior to evidence may lead a person unflaggingly to maintain such a view in spite of the lack of evidence to substantiate it. Instead, we hope that the possibility of consciousness’ status as a fundamental element of the universe has been set forth convincingly enough that readers who nevertheless harbor objections will not summarily dismiss arguments of Barfield that are established on this premise.

Photo by Tengyart on Unsplash

The above is a slight reworking of a section for a forthcoming book I am co-authoring with Landon Loftin on an introduction to the philosophy of Owen Barfield with specific reference to his theory of the evolution of consciousness, which was substantially informed by Steiner’s anthroposophical teachings. The book is expected for publication in 2023 under the title What Barfield Thought.

1. From Ancient Greek φαινόμενον, phainómenon.

2. Barfield, Saving the Appearances, 24.

3. In Coleridge’s words:

The Imagination then I consider either as primary, or secondary. The primary Imagination I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I Am. The secondary I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.”

S.T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, Ch. 13. See Barfield’s analysis of this passage in chapter 3 of What Coleridge Thought, 130.

4. Barfield, The Rediscovery of Meaning and Other Essays, (1977), 204.

5.  Barfield alludes to the corollary of the integral view in Saving the Appearances when he writes: 

“We should remember this, when appraising the aberrations of the formally representational arts. Of course, in so far as these are due to affectation, they are of no importance. But in so far as they are genuine, they are genuine because the artist has in some way or other experienced the world he represents. And in so far as they are appreciated, they are appreciated by those who are themselves willing to make a move towards seeing the world in that way, and, ultimately therefore, seeing that kind of world. We should remember this, when we see pictures of a dog with six legs emerging from a vegetable marrow or a woman with a motor-bicycle substituted for her left breast.” 

Barfield, Saving the Appearances, 137