Barfield and the Contraction of Consciousness

Discussion

Matthew David Segall:

"Owen Barfield, a philosopher, philologist, and member of the Inklings, develops, under the influence of Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy, a history of consciousness that resonates deeply with Whitehead’s diagnosis. Barfield argues that modern self-consciousness has come at the cost of losing a felt participation in a meaningful whole.

He distinguishes between “original participation” and “final participation.” In original participation, primal human beings experienced the world as charged with meaning and spiritual presence. The boundary between inner and outer was permeable. Nature was not a neutral stage or collection of objects but a field of living, interpenetrating agencies. The evolution of consciousness is, on Barfield’s account, not a matter of the “expansion” of an originally simple or naïve consciousness. Rather, evolution proceeds as a contraction—“self-consciousness by exclusion”—where reflective autonomy is gained only by cutting ourselves off from a primal sense of belonging to a universal, nondual plenum of meaning.

Drawing on Steiner, Barfield suggests that each day we still recapitulate this history in miniature. In waking life, we experience a world of discrete objects in space, perceived through our senses and grasped in reflective thought. In sleep, we are, according to Steiner, re-submerged in the original unity, though unconsciously. When we wake, we forget that unity, carrying forward only an afterglow of it in what we experience as conscience.

Steiner’s account dovetails with Kant’s insistence that, while theoretical cognition is limited to the phenomenal realm constructed by our own forms of intuition and categories, moral experience—conscience or our sense of duty to the Good—gives us a direct line to the noumenal world. Steiner takes this further: he wants to show that this contact with the spiritual is not limited to moral conscience but can also be cultivated in our encounters with living nature.

In Barfield’s terms, the modern ego arises by cutting itself free from unconscious participation, gaining freedom and critical reflection but finding itself alone in a world that appears mute and indifferent. Modern alienation is thus not simply a mistake. It has been, to some extent, an educational process. The question is how to move beyond this contracted state without abandoning the gains of individuation.

Barfield’s account is echoed in the Whitehead passage quoted above. Consciousness obscures the totality from which it arises. Philosophy is tasked with recovering that obscured totality. For Barfield, this recovery takes the form of “final participation”: a freely willed, self-conscious re-attunement to a spiritually alive cosmos that preserves rather than dissolves individual freedom.

* Goethe, Steiner, and Imagination as Organ of Perception

To understand how such a recovery might be possible, it is helpful to consider Goethe’s science and Steiner’s development of it, because Barfield explicitly sees himself as standing in this Goethe–Steiner lineage.

Goethe was not merely a poet and statesman. He saw his scientific work (including an alternative theory of color, and studies in plant and animal morphology, among other subjects) as more important than his literary production. Against Newton’s conception of color as what happens when white light is split by a prism, Goethe’s careful observations led him to see color as emerging at the boundary of light and dark. He also studied the growth of plants and the form of animal skeletons, arriving at the idea of underlying archetypal formative processes: the Urpflanze or primal plant, the vertebra as primal bone.

The key point here is methodological, though, rather than about particular discoveries. Goethe’s way of knowing nature is participatory. Rather than treating nature as a set of finished products to be measured, he relates to nature as a verb, a process. Through a disciplined use of imagination, he enters sympathetically into the metamorphic movements of growth and transformation. “All is leaf,” he says of the plant; “all is vertebra,” he says of the animal skeleton. These are not mystical aphorisms but attempts to name the formative forces at work beneath the visible finished surfaces of things.

Steiner edits Goethe’s scientific writings and seeks to make explicit the method Goethe was using. For Steiner, imagination becomes a mode of perception, a way of feeling the formative spiritual forces at work in the natural world. Imagination is thus the same creative power at work in nature, but in human form. When we cultivate imagination as a way of knowing, we are not merely fantasizing. We are learning to feel the deeper dynamics that shape plants, animals, and even our own embryological development.

Steiner extends this Goethean method beyond the physical-sensory to the spiritual world. He suggests meditative exercises so others can cultivate this imaginative perception. Whatever one makes of Steiner’s more esoteric claims, the Goethean core is clear: there is a way of seeing in which imagination is not opposed to reality, but is instead the organ through which the deeper reality of nature becomes perceptible."

(https://footnotes2plato.substack.com/p/romantic-imagination-and-the-recovery)