Worlds Apart: A Dialogue of the 1960's

by Owen Barfield

"In the great English tradition of the lay specialist, Barfield, a lawyer, modernizes the Platonic dialogue format to focus on the philosophic problems of reality and ways of knowing.. This is the solvent mind at its best-distinguished exchanges giving provocative, open-ended results at every point. Highly recommended. of permanent value." -Choice: Books for College Libraries Owen Barfield, who died in 1997 shortly after entering his hundredth year, was one of the seminal minds of the twentieth century, of whom C. S. Lewis wrote "he towers above us all." His books have won respect from many writers other than Lewis, among them T. S. Eliot, J. R. R. Tolkein, and Saul Bellows, and John Lukacs. He was born in North London in 1898 and received his B.A. with first-class honors from Wadham College, Oxford, in 1921. He also earned B.C.L., M.A., and B.Litt. degrees from Oxford and was a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He served as a solicitor for twenty-eight years until his retirement from legal practice in 1959. Barfield was a visiting professor at Brandeis and Drew Universities, Hamilton College, the University of Missouri at Columbia, UCLA, SUNY-Stony Brook, and the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. His books include seven others published by The Barfield Press: Romanticism Comes of Age, Worlds Apart: A Dialogue of the 1960s, Unancestral Voice, Speaker's Meaning, What Coleridge Thought, The Rediscovery of Meaning, and History, Guilt and Habit.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Literature

212 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1963

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

[Dan Toft · Rating 4 out of 5]

I just finished this one and I'm still digesting it. The reviews that I read before I myself read the book stated that this fictional account is the best way to absorb the sometimes nebulous and abstract thought system of Barfield. Having read it, I agree that it is easier to understand on the first read than, say, "Saving the Appearances" was, but the fictional give-and-take aspects of the book do not dumb down nor simplify Anthroposophy. There were still moments of frustration and self-doubt on my part as I read, but at least Barfield inserts himself as a character into the dialogue and asks the questions and shows the same concerns that I, as an outside reader, had. The humble and questioning attitude of the book certainly gave me some comfort. It made me I realize that I don't have to "get" Anthroposophy, as one memorizes a method and then applies it thereafter, but rather, that it's a series of transformational mysteries to be understood and assimilated.

[Phillip · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my second time to read the book. The first time was a rushed skim to see what it was about. It warrants a careful rereading.

Barfield was a solid writer and thought deeply. Most of us are going to be struck with how that man--with those analytic and imaginative skills, education, atheistic upbringing (a free-thinking household that ridiculed religion), social influences (meaning C.S. Lewis and other University students and faculty), and nearly 70 years to think about it-- believed a set of, what we would now call, New Age believes. It certainly exacerbated his friend C.S. Lewis who said Something to the effect that Barfield was the kind of friend who had the same education and studied all of the same books as himself but reached all of the wrong conclusions. But the beliefs where not a phase in the life of a young man in his 20s. They lasted. Late in life he said his thoughts never changed. He believed the Same in his 90s that he did in his 20s. He said there was never anything new in his books, that they were just restatements of the same things, over and over.

The following is a quick summary of Barfield's understanding of evolution. His work is a continuous critique of rationalism, and the scientific method as a representation of all worthwhile knowledge. And, his anti-Darwinian understanding of evolution is contrary to the way it has been understood for over 100 years. My purpose is not to hold Barfield up to ridicule nor as his champion. He is a mysterious figure to many readers interested in the Inklings. And this review is to give only a taste of what Barfield is about. Since Goodreads is a place for volunteer and amateur reviews I am stopping with physical evolution, and not particularly polishing this. There is more about the evolution of consciousness that is more important to his work but dependent upon the ideas below.

Barfield was devoted to the work of the mystic Rudolf Steiner and was a member of the Anthroposophy society. From Steiner, he believed souls exist eternally (meaning, among other things, they predate the formation of the earth) for all creatures. With the help of spiritual beings, the souls of living things became tied to the physical universe (I'm not saying there is an influence. But it is the same sort of thing described in Tolkien's Silmarillion when the Valar volunteer to be permanently tied to the elements during the creation of the planet in order to participate in its ordering, and destiny. I mention this for illustrative purposes of the sort of thing Barfield describes.).

Barfield believed that everything (even rocks, other minerals, plants--everything in the physical universe) has eternal consciousness. Consciousness in the physical world has guided the physical evolution of Earth from phases of being liquid to solidity to some of the weak souls manifesting into animals (who together share a common soul). While the strong souls have directed their physical evolution to become humans (while still a part of nature develop an ego).

In other words, souls direct their physical evolution (over successive births and deaths) by their will to change a succession of species to eventually become the kind of animal they desire to be, (and place themselves in environments that will assist the survival of that animal they wish to become) and develop physical features such claws or fins that perform as a tool for survival in the natural environment. While mankind has developed general purpose features, such as the hands, that do not do a single thing, thus allowing for varied and changing purpose of the individual, withing a single life. This all quite different from Darwinism.

Obviously, Barfield is an author that a lot of readers are going to lose interest in before getting very far, because his work is demanding. It takes a lot of reading to get to the kernel of the work and isn't going to be worth it for a lot of people. Especially, since he telegraphs a lot of his thoughts and refers to Rudolf Steiner over and over again. And, it helps to read Steiner to get a better understanding of how Barfield makes a lot of his conclusions. This requirement is going to turn a lot of people off and it is another way the work is demanding.

This does not mean Barfield only restates the work of Steiner. He elaborates, restates and contributes to his teacher's work, especially Barfield's discussions of the role of the evolution of language to the evolution of human consciousness.

To end, I will point out that we don't have to agree with an author to enjoy his or her work. Prime examples for me are Thomas Pynchon and William S. Burroughs. Both do things in their work that I really like and keep returning to read, sometimes repeatedly. At the same time there are lots of things I don't enjoy about both authors. Yet, as I say, I reread them again and again. Sometimes there is a thing an author does that makes it worthwhile to read his or her work, even if it is only a sliver of the the whole.

[Poetreehugger · Rating 5 out of 5]

A relatively deep read, which for me took more mental effort, but in a good way.
P. 67, "We are no longer capable of thinking deeply, because we think too quickly."

[Dan'l Danehy-Oakes · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a dense book, in the best sense of dense: it is full of ideas. I have come to expect idea-density from the two previous books of Barfield's I've read, but this one takes the schwarzwälder kirschtorte: if it doesn't average one new brainbender every page or two I would be amazed. T.S. Eliiot, on the front cover of the rather ancient copy I have here, says: "An excursion into seas of thought which are very far away from ordinary routes of intellectual shipping."

A brief opening sets up the situation: Burgeon, the narrator, comes to realize that people in different intellectual specialties simply don't talk to one another very much -- that they are in "watertight compartments." Unhappy with this, he arranges a weekend of unplanned discussion at a country house, with eight (all male, of course...) participants:
- himself, a solicitor with philological interests;
- a professor of historical theology and ethics;
- a young man employed at a rocket research;
- a professor of physical science;
- a retired schoolmaster;
- a biologist engaged on research work;
- a linguistic philosopher; and
- a psychiatrist.

Now, it must be noted that each of these gentlemen is up-to-date in his field as of the early 1960s; so it's no use expecting, for example, the linguistic philosopher to know anything about Barthes or Derrida, or for the biologist to be familiar with the neo-Darwinian synthesis. But their specialties are almost background to what they are actually discussing -- behind a number of topics and side topics, the overarching theme of the dialog (octolog?) is frankly epistemological. Each of them backs a particular theory of whether we know anything, and if so, how.

The background for this is a discussion of intellectual revolutions, with particular emphasese. Galileo and all that crowd explored, and radically changed the way (Western) humans think about, space (in the larger sense, not just _outer_ space). Darwin, along with a number of biologists and geologists, similarly explored time in radical new ways. Freud and his successors discovered and explored the parts of the human mind not easily accessible to introspection. Space, time, mind: the flavors in which the epistomology flows.

Every participant has a great deal to say -- the theologian/ethicist probably the least of the bunch -- but large chunks of the book are devoted to two set-pieces.

In the first, the solicitor and the physicist spend a good part of the Saturday morning improvising (they improvise; I'm sure Barfield thought it out carefully in advance) an excellent parody/pastiche of Socratic dialog, explicitly on topics epistemological and, to a lesser extent, ontological. The solicitor asks the typical leading questions, to elicit from the physicist "truth," or at least an idea of what truth and knowledge are, and how to get at them. He (the solicitor) is particularly interested in how we can know anything about times and places where there are, or were, no human witnesses, but the discussion covers a great deal more ground than that, with occasional applause or complaints from the other six.

The second setpiece has the retired schoolmaster taking on all comers in defense of his beliefs, which are explicitly based on the work of Rudolf Steiner, the founder of anthroposophy -- a topic dear to Barfield's heart. He claims that the world was spiritual before it was material, and that we can "remember" things from before there was life; that some kind of reincarnation goes on; and that the human mind can be trained to perform extraordinary tasks: clairvoyance is mentioned (and attributed to Steiner).

This is not a book I would recommend to everyone, or perhaps to _anyone_: it seems to be the sort of book that you have to decide for yourself is worth the trouble of finding (it is in print, but I don't recall seeing a copy in any new-book store) and reading it. I hope I have provided information that will enable you to at least begin making such a decision for yourself.

[Ben McFarland · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Owen Barfield reading tour continues with Worlds Apart, written by Barfield as a "dialogue" between several academics with different philosophies. Two are clearly anthroposophists like Barfield, and the rest represent different disciplines ranging from physics to psychology. I'm trying to decide if this book is a good entry point to Barfield or not. It does focus on science and the back-and-forth of the many objections to Barfield's ideas. The dialogue format of Worlds Apart plays to Barfield's experience as a lawyer, and about 1/3 of the way through there's an extended Socratic dialogue that may be the best entry to his philosophy that I've seen. The problems include a section of extended Steiner-worship at the end and a definite feeling that the other characters are straw men.

What I'd really like to see is an extended dialogue between Barfield and C.S. Lewis, which I know actually happened because Lewis alluded to it in his famous description of Barfield as his "second friend." There's a book of Barfield commenting on Lewis, and that may be the next stop on the tour.

One of my constant questions would be what Barfield would make of the analysis of DNA words that I'm thinking about right now to reconstruct the ancient words. On the one hand, that's exactly what he did with English words, and he argues at the end of Saving the Appearances that evolution and Christianity naturally cohere. On the other hand, English words are a way of looking at the human mind, while DNA words are not, because these words were never formed by the human mind, and there's also that little bit about Barfield saying the past "never happened." But this passage near the end of Worlds Apart finally resolves it for me:


"Brain, heart, liver, spleen have been built into your body by the world, by the whole history of the world, and if you 'study' one of them in that intensive way, you have access to the relevant period of world-history. Access, first of all, to the building that was going on before your birth and, through that, back into their remoter phylogenesis."


"You see -- or at any rate I have argued -- that if evolution has indeed been fundamentally the evolution of self-consciousness, there cannot be that sharp break between ontogenetic and phylogenetic development, which the positivist picture of evolution assumes. The one must merge gradually back into the other." (p. 195-196)

Of course, right after this high point is when the book really goes off the deep end, with too much Steiner and too little anyone else. (Maybe even too little Barfield!) However, that part is written as a collection of unconnected observations, almost like appendices, and so I think even Barfield saw some of that as outside the necessary argument he was making. I'm starting to separate the wheat from the chaff here and I think there's a way to adapt some of the ideas of Barfield in a way that takes the good and leaves the bad. In particular, I think Tolkien ultimately did that and such an adaptation accounts for some of the strength of The Lord of the Rings. Is there a way to do that with the data collected by current biology rather than the ancient Norse sagas? I'm not sure. Stay tuned.

[Dane · Rating 3 out of 5]

T.S. Eliot once called Worlds Apart "a journey into seas of thought very far from ordinary routes of intellectual shipping." Not knowing this quote or much about the book besides its format, I expected an fairly common apologetic account of the relation between science and religion, with the added flair of Socratic dialogue. Needless to say, I was wrong.

There are eight characters in this dialogue, each representing one of the 'watertight compartments' discussed by the narrator, Burgeon, in his attempt to get down to first principles across numerous fields of knowledge. There is a rocket scientist, a professor of history and theology, a theoretical physicist, a retired schoolmaster, a biologist, a linguistic philosopher, and a Freudian psychoanalyst, and lawyer in love with words. Despite this wide cast of characters, it is often not difficult to determine where Barfield himself stands. The linguistic philosopher, psychoanalyst, rocket scientist, psychoanalyst, and biologist clearly represent views that Barfield strongly disagrees with (with the linguistic philosopher receiving special treatment in his repeated humiliations at the hands of the theologian). The rocket scientist represents a naively scientific optimism that disregards the humanities; the biologist is too materialistic in his view of evolution; the psychoanalyst seems incapable of evaluating ideas themselves; and the haughty; the lingustic philosopher considers himself above dialogue at all in his pretentious logical positivism (an incredibly dirty word to Barfield).

Barfield's views, on the other hand, are especially esoteric. First, he uses Burgeon and the physicist to attack the inconsistency of a mindless universe in a mock socratic dialogue which is incredibly entertaining to read. Working on from this, he uses the retired schoolmaster (a disciple of Rudolph Steiner) to argue for the threefold aspects of man, the ability of every man to experience the past and future as present, and reincarnation. While the philosophical arguments presented are (in my view) insufficiently responded to by the participants in the dialogue, they transform a multi-disciplinary discussion on first principles into an interesting glimpse into the beliefs of anthroposophy.

[Timothy Nichols · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read Plato’s Dialogues when I was 14, and enjoyed them. This was *hard*. Barfield thinks in some very sideways kinds of ways, and I really enjoyed working at keeping up with him. His angle of view on the scientific revolution was well worth the effort, and there’s some other gems besides.

[Christian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Barfield works wonders in this genre-bent philosophical conversation. What he does great is highlight the truth of every position presented and leading the reader to a convergence of them all. Rather, that Truth disseminated is still transcendent Truth which encompasses differences.

Knowing Barfield's exultation of Rudolf Steiner, it was interesting that Steiner was presented by someone other (Sanderson, a retired schoolmaster) than OB's own stand-in (Burgeon, the narrator and solicitor). Are we to follow the narrative and see Sanderson's final exposition as Barfield's message? Or see Sanderson as another stepping stone to be transcended?

A great book to exercise thought and philosophical imagination!

[Nathan Miller · Rating 2 out of 5]

Liked the setup, with his idea of interdisciplinary conversation about presuppositions, but the execution was lacking. Particularly the last third read like a JW pamphlet for anthroposophy, Barfield’s pet heresy.

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Owen Barfield’s philosophical works were highly regarded by such a diverse collection of authors as Saul Bellow, T.S. Eliot, C.S. Lewis and John Lukacs. And, while it is perhaps one of his more accessible books, there is much in Worlds Apart to suggest just why these authors found Barfield worth pondering.

I took the first half of the book very slowly, reading and rereading small chunks over the course of a couple weeks, getting used to the ideas and to Barfield’s style of discourse (in terms of form, the book is modeled on the Socratic dialogue). But then I finished the second half in just a few days. Unfortunately, I’m still not sure just how much went entirely over my head, and how much I’ll benefit from in some residual way. Mostly I appreciated Barfield’s pointed attacks on the idea, assumed by naturalism and scientific materialism, of a mindless universe--that is, of mind as an ultimately insignificant product of natural forces, a mere resonating box inside the human skull. Barfield’s ingenious (and yet, once they’ve been seen, seemingly self-evident) arguments expose the logical inconsistencies and groundless prejudices of “mindless” naturalism. That, however, is only the start of the book. From there, Barfield gets more abstract and, I think, speculative. Much of his commentary on Rudolph Steiner’s anthroposophy ideas, or “spiritual science,” left me confused ‘n bemused but curious to learn more.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book is a tough read. I will have to read it again. I was drawn to it because of the dialogue between a lawyer, a theologian, a philosopher, a biologist, a physicist, a rocket scientist, a psychiatrist and a retired schoolteacher. The discussion centers around evolution of the mind & consciousness. The aim it would seem was to reach an agreement between the different specializations and it highlighted how different these specializations use their methods to understand how our world works. What I did not like is what seemed to me to be an apologetic of anthroposophy in certain parts of the dialogue.

[Robert]

Such a profound book. I could read this 20 times and get something new out of it each time.

[Jesse · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great conversation!

[Phillip · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you like Saving the Appearances you will probably like this book.