What Coleridge Thought

by Owen Barfield

Please put price both in barcode and separately on back cover.

Genres: Philosophy, Poetry, Literary Criticism, Literature

300 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1971

About the author

Arthur Owen Barfield was a British philosopher, author, poet, and critic.

Barfield was born in London. He was educated at Highgate School and Wadham College, Oxford and in 1920 received a first class degree in English language and literature. After finishing his B. Litt., which became his third book Poetic Diction, he was a dedicated poet and author for over ten years. After 1934 his profession was as a solicitor in London, from which he retired in 1959 aged 60. Thereafter he had many guest appointments as Visiting Professor in North America. Barfield published numerous essays, books, and articles. His primary focus was on what he called the "evolution of consciousness," which is an idea which occurs frequently in his writings. He is best known as a founding father of Anthroposophy in the English speaking world.

Barfield has been known as "the first and last Inkling". He had a profound influence on C. S. Lewis, and through his books The Silver Trumpet and Poetic Diction (dedicated to C.S. Lewis), an appreciable effect on J. R. R. Tolkien. Lewis was a good friend of Barfield since 1919, and termed Barfield "the best and wisest of my unofficial teachers". That Barfield did not consider philosophy merely intellectually is illustrated by a well-known interchange that took place between Lewis and Barfield. Lewis one day made the mistake of referring to philosophy as "a subject." "It wasn't a subject to Plato," said Barfield, "It was a way." Lewis refers to Barfield as the "Second Friend" in Surprised by Joy:

But the Second Friend 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 become your friend at all. But he has approached them all at a different angle. He has read all the right books but has got the wrong thing 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?

Barfield and C. S. Lewis met in 1919 and were close friends for 44 years. Barfield was instrumental in converting Lewis to theism during the early period of their friendship which they affectionately called 'The Great War'. Maud also guided Lewis. As well as being friend and teacher to Lewis, Barfield was his legal adviser and trustee. Lewis dedicated his 1936 book Allegory of Love to Barfield. Lewis wrote his 1949 book The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe for Lucy Barfield and he dedicated The Voyage of the Dawn Treader to Geoffrey in 1952.

Reviews

[Ben McFarland · Rating 4 out of 5]

This may be the best of Barfield's books, or at least the most grounded and therefore far-reaching, but I really think that unless you're a Coleridge scholar, you're better off reading up to it with Barfield's previous works. In particular, Saving the Appearances seems to be a pre-requisite, and I've always thought it was hard to jump into that book without reading Poetic Diction first. The other works by Barfield are OK but I'd say these three are the most worthwhile, in this order.


The other examples of "late Barfield" I've read were too much influenced by Steiner and anthroposophy, but this one manages to avoid those topics (except for a few mentions). Also, Barfield is not focusing on Barfield's ideas so much as Coleridge's, filtered through Barfield, to be sure. I got the sense that the two are enough on the same wavelength that Barfield's filter is more a good teacher teaching than it is a partisan lobbying. I feel like I "get" Coleridge more after this book and that strengthens my estimation of both Coleridge and Barfield. This also fits with the picture of Coleridge from the wonderful history Age of Wonder.


To be sure, Barfield can't get through a whole book without making some annoying absolute and contrarian statements about modern science. I do think that my reading of Barfield can accommodate most of his intellectual puckishness by interpreting Barfield's "matter before mind didn't exist" to become "matter before mind didn't MATTER" (not in the same way as it matters now). It all comes down to what you mean by "exist," see?


But in this book that move of "translation" doesn't have to be made that often. It makes sense that Coleridge and Barfield are sympatico given the influence of German philosophy on Coleridge, which goes right along with Barfield's love for Goethe (which I'm OK with) and Steiner (which I'm not).


In the end, I think Coleridge's "polar logic" as described by Barfield may offer a way to interpret Barfield's philosophy in a way that throws light on modern experience without throwing out all of modern natural history. In fact, polar logic may be incorporated into a narrative interpretation of natural history. Barfield's own statements about the natural fit between evolution and Christianity imply that this should be possible, even when his sweeping dismissal of science of the past seems to get in the way.


Overall, a fascinating and helpful book that I'm working on integrating, but not for the faint of heart. I'm not sure how that interprets into a star rating, but Barfield's against quantitation anyway, so I'm sure he won't mind my avoiding the five stars on this one, even though I think it may be stronger on the whole than previous works I've given five stars to. This is definitely worth working your way up to.

[Tom Schulte · Rating 4 out of 5]

Apparently, this was written while the philosophical works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge were coming out in new volumes. Who knew the author of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner/the Hunting of the Snark was a philosopher, too! Apparently, a noted and productive one. So, we get the philosopher's subtlety and the poets metaphor: "“It is a dull and obtuse mind, that must divide in order to distinguish; but it is a still worse that distinguishes in order to divide.” (Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Aids to Reflection)

Coleridge sallies forth to distinguish from the directly perceptible world of natura naturata to explore the "supersensuous" realm of the natura naturans. From these musings he developed a polar logic, apparently refined from the writings of Giordano Bruno and Nicholas of Cusa from the idea of coincidence of opposites. Ultimately, we find Coleridge has affirmed a Christian mysticism that is his worldview. Regardless, of how we take the culmination, the journey sparkles with such observations as, "The want of adverbs in the Iliad is very characteristic. With more adverbs there would have been some subjectivity, or subjectivity would have made them." (Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: And the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Christabel)

[Duncan Barford · Rating 4 out of 5]

For all I know this book could be What Owen Barfield Thought rather than Coleridge, because its portrait of Coleridge's philosophy seems rather close to what I understand of Barfield's. Yet this book certainly shakes off the Coleridge I knew at university: Wordsworth's nature-boy sidekick; the drug-addled screw-up who never realised his potential. Barfield fills the gap between this image and the profound spirituality I sense (now that I'm older and uglier) in 'The Ancient Mariner' and 'The Pains of Sleep', for instance.

Barfield's Coleridge is a non-dualist, a philosophical warrior passionately at odds with Enlightenment materialism and Cartesian epistemological arrogance. Those famous paragraphs in Biographia Literaria on Fancy and Imagination, Understanding and Reason, which I thought I'd nailed in school at 'A'-level, are only the tip of a philosophical iceberg. Barfield diligently exposes its profound depths, revealing Coleridge as a coherent, systematic thinker, firmly in the Platonic tradition. In his scientific musings Coleridge stands close to Goethe, which makes him a precursor also to Barfield's hero, Rudolf Steiner.

It's no easy read. It's a book I'll need to return to. I don't have the scholarship to judge whether Barfield's Coleridge is 'accurate', but the way he has placed Coleridge in the tradition of great western mythical thinkers I found irresistible.

[J.A.A. Purves · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a book that will amaze and challenge you. Samuel Taylor Coleridge applied his theology to life in ways that have fallen out of favor in our mass-consumer culture and he did so in ways that we can still learn from. Following Barfield's reasoning is a discipline, in and of itself. But, if you do the active work of following the chains of reasoning that he builds from Coleridge's romantic insights into theology, then you will reach some peaks you have never climbed before.

The discussions in this book of the distinctions between the passivity of "attending" and the activity of "thinking," between the primary and secondary imaginations, between "fantasy" and "imagination", and of how much thinking will be unconscious if we allow it to be (instead of paying attention to from where our assumptions derive) ... all these are distinctions that could make a great difference in the way that you look at the world around you.

Note: While this is an excellent book, it is probably best read alongside of Barfield's Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry, which reasons a little more slowly in order to make some of the same ideas more intelligible for beginning thinkers.

[Jeff Falzone · Rating 5 out of 5]

Owen Barfield is a fucking god of creative and ridiculously precise thinking.

[Rhys · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting exegesis of Coleridge's philosophy that focuses on 'polarity' and the field of relation that is created. Most interesting was how Barfield relates Reason to Understanding and Understanding to the Senses ... natura naturans & natura naturata. How Coleridge relates the imagination to ideas, reason and the creation of the subject is also interesting.

"It follows from the whole nature of the relation between reason and understanding that “an idea, in the highest sense of that word, cannot be conveyed but by a symbol”; that is to say, so far as slanguage is concerned, in figurative language" (p.160).

[Phillip · Rating 5 out of 5]

This has grown on me. It was really tough to get in to for the first 70 pages. I put it down, read other things, including some other Barfield and then I was able to return to it.

Barfield appears to have idolized literary figures. He worked out his own ideas by responding to the work of others. But Steiner this...Steiner that... is a bit thick to read over and over again throughout his work.

This book was a relief. He explored ideas by discussing the philosophy of Samuel Coleridge. I think that most of us are going to be much more sympathetic to reading about the venerable Romantic poet than the mystic Steiner.

The change in frame of literary figure allows the reader to see discussions of polarity, the nature of God, psychology, and creativity. So the ideas are given primacy quite different from the usual themes embedded in his proselytizing about Anthroposophy.

[James Prothero · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very dense and Barfield can be hard to follow with undefined terms. However, I learned a lot about Coleridge.