Owen Barfield

Most of his works are still in print and include Unancestral Voice; History, Guilt, and Habit; Romanticism Comes of Age; Rediscovery of Meaning; Speaker's Meaning; and Worlds Apart. History in English Words seeks to retell the history of western civilization by exploring the change in meanings of various words. Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry is on the 1999 100 Best Spiritual Books of the Century list by Philip Zaleski.

Barfield might be characterised as both a major "New Age" thinker, and a learned anti-reductionist writer. He was known for his concision. For example, his short book Saving the Appearances explores some three thousand years of history and, by taking modern physics and philosophy seriously, explores our understanding of the relation of minds to nature and to evolution. He finds that the evolution of life and of nature is inseparable from an evolution of consciousness. The idea of matter as completely devoid of anything akin to mind, emerges as a mistaken idea, one in conflict with both physics and philosophy. Similar conclusions have been reached by others, but rarely in such a fashion, and the book has influenced for example, the physicist Stephen Edelglass (who wrote The Marriage of Sense and Thought), and the Christian existentialist philosopher Gabriel Marcel, who wanted the book to be translated into French.

Barfield was also an influence on T. S. Eliot, who called Barfield's book Worlds Apart "a journey into seas of thought very far from ordinary routes of intellectual shipping". Worlds Apart again shows Barfield's peculiar capacity to compress comprehensiveness into the smallest textual space, and without cost to clarity. The book, about two hundred pages in length, is a fictional dialogue between a physicist, a biologist, a psychiatrist, a lawyer-philologist, a linguistic analyst, a theologian, a retired Waldorf School teacher, and a young man employed at a rocket research station. Over a period of three days, the characters get down to first principles. Barfield not only had acquired sufficient expertise in all of these fields to be able to speak plausibly for each character in the debate; he also did so with style and made of the argument a dramatic entertainment with spiritual and demonic undertones leading to paradigm-busting revelations, at least for some of the characters.

Another way of characterizing Barfield, is to say that he brings to philosophy something like the magical power to be found in the fiction of C. S. Lewis. Lewis was a close friend of Barfield, and called Barfield "the best and wisest of my unofficial teachers".

Barfield did not do philosophy as a merely intellectual pursuit. Rather it was a way to liberation, and that was part of the reason for Barfield's efforts to combine maximum compression with maximum comprehensiveness. That Barfield did not do 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 "that subject". Barfield seems to have been subtly indignant in replying that "to Plato philosophy was not a 'subject'. It was a Way." Lewis apparently took Barfield's strongly felt point to heart.

Saul Bellow: We are well supplied with interesting writers, but Owen Barfield is not content to be merely interesting. His ambition is to set us free … from the prison we have made for ourselves by our ways of knowing, our limited and false habits of thought, our ‘common sense'.

Barfield has been known as "The first and last Inkling". He was in effect a founding member of the Inklings group. He had a strong influence on C. S. Lewis, and an appreciable effect through Poetic Diction on J. R. R. Tolkien.

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