Thursday 11 June 2015

Owen Barfield and the Truth of Imagination - Philosopher of the Inklings

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Owen Barfield deserves his description as 'the fourth Inkling' - along with CS Lewis, JRR Tolkien and Charles Williams - because, although he attended few meetings, his influence is undeniable (especially on Lewis, but also on Tolkien) and his core philosophical concern was exactly that shared by the other three Inklings.

Indeed, Barfield stated this primary concern more explicitly and over a longer period than any other Inkling (because he started publishing so young and lived an active life up to the age of ninety-nine).

This theme is the Truth of Imagination. Barfield's life-long concern was to understand how the Imagination is a source of Truth, a source of knowledge, a way of accessing reality.

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This was also Tolkien's concern, most evident in the concept of Subcreation described in his essay On Fairy Stories - and in his many reflections on myth and history.

It was Lewis's concern in his Platonism - where the Imagination was seen as a mortal and earth-bound way of understanding the primary eternal forms of Heaven - this crops up all through Lewis's ouvre - for instance at the end of The Last Battle and his book on the Medieval world view - The Discarded Image.

And Charles Williams many considerations of Romantic or Positive Theology (via  positiva)  - his multi-form efforts to show that the poetic imagination could be a path towards salvation and theosis; and his best and most explicitly Platonic novel The Place Of The Lion - in which the imagination opens-up a (dangerous, indeed deadly) channel for the eternal forms to invade this world. Furthermore, in his actual life, and to a high degree, Williams lived by the truth and reality of imagination.

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Of course, this concern with the Truth of Imagination was mostly a matter of the confluence of spontaneous personal interests rather than of direct personal 'influence' of one Inking upon another - especially in the case of Charles Williams whose ideas were fully expressed before he even heard of the Inklings (in 1936), and before he actually attended meetings regularly (from 1939-45).

By contrast with Williams, Barfield had done most of his thinking and formulating back in the 1920s, before The Inklings, around the time of his Great War with Lewis (a sustained epistolatory debate from 1925 to Lewis's conversion circa 1930); and when the friendship was forming between Lewis and Tolkien. Barfield's early BLitt thesis, and his first two books (Poetic Diction and History In English Words) also (by his own account) influenced and changed Tolkien at this time - both as a professional philologist and in his imaginative writing.

Once we are sufficiently clear about the nature of The Inklings primary concern, the importance of Owen Barfield becomes obvious.

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7 comments:

Anonymous said...

I just finished The "Great War" of Owen Barfield and C.S. Lewis: Philosophical Writings 1927-1930 (Inklings Studies Supplement No 1 [2015], a littl over a week after getting a copy. Wow! It is pretty compelling reading, with lucid, entertaining styles, but not exactly easy for all that: whew! It has a fine, very helpful introduction by Norbert Feinendegen (who happily "is presently working on a translation of his doctoral thesis into English". It has a very useful "Revised and Integrated Chronology" of all previously published "Great War"-related correspondence by Arend Smilde. It also has a useful list of further '"Great War"-related Materials in Other Published Writings' of Barfield and Lewis.

One general effect is very thoroughly to underscore what you have written in this post! Barfield and Lewis as (so to put it) the 'proto-Inklings'! Including, a discussion between them (or at least stimulated by Barfield) of Christ's "whole life" as both "history and myth" some time before the famous Lewis, Tolkien, Dyson discussion. Barfield apparently having started to think things out himself before encountering Rudolf Steiner and his Anthroposophy, which he seems to have initially embraced as confirming his own thought! (This was news to me: perhaps not to those really acquainted with Barfield.)

A fascinating background in place, as you say, "when the friendship was forming between Lewis and Tolkien", and before either of them (and, I suppose, any of the three) knew anything of "Williams whose ideas were fully expressed before he even heard of the Inklings (in 1936)". And so also (if I grasp it correctly) a thorough-going debate between two different monists before the later, converted nw;y non-monist Lewis would be in a position to evaluate any possible monism on Williams's part.

David Llewellyn Dodds

Anonymous said...

Ach, those last-minute tinkerings! nw;y>newly !

David Llewellyn Dodds

Bruce Charlton said...

@DLD- Thanks for this confirmation. I hope to read this material you mention some day - at present I am working through Barfield's main publications. I find some of it very difficult, and there are things I don't at present understand - for example, I don't understand what he means by polarity - I don't know what he is getting-at, nor why he is making the distinction; and I cannot imagine it.

Anonymous said...

Polarity comes up in the new "Great War" stuff - maybe for the first time? (I haven't read his earliest book, yet, or, indeed, much at all) - I'll see if I can find a useful quotation!

I'd encountered a use of 'polarity' imagery before, in Eric Voegelin, but don't know if the uses are related or analogous (it will take some rereading to try to get a sense if it - maybe post-Neo-Kantians somehow end up with 'polarity'!).

David Llewellyn Dodds

Bruce Charlton said...

@DLD - I have read a lot of sentences Barfield wrote about polarity, but I don't understand them!

HofJude said...

Bruce and @DLD: O draw your attention to Coleridge's concept of polarity, which I don't understand, but which formed Barfield's sense of the concept.
You needn't thank me - glad to set you crooked.

Bruce Charlton said...

@HoJ - Well, the problem is that I have read the relevant passages of Coleridge - I have looked at the words, *studied* the words - but am none the wiser. I would need to come at it from a background in Coleridge's concerns.