Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry by Owen Barfield
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

An Aesthetic Epistemology

What a wonderfully insightful, erudite and concise example of reasoning! It almost doesn’t matter weather Barfield is correct or not because the sheer elegant beauty of his thinking is so enticing. That he is correct, however, is a good bet, a bit like discovering Plato is a pseudonym for Helen of Troy and she’s asked you out on a date.

Barfield starts with the apparently innocuous example of a rainbow. Obviously the rainbow doesn’t exist except when it is seen. The particles of water which physically exist in the air-space of a thunderstorm are not the rainbow. The rainbow is constituted by that phenomenon and the human eye and brain in concert. This is ‘Kant for dummies’, and very effective.

Then extend that observation of the rainbow to the entirety of creation. None of it exists unless it is perceived, or as Barfield terms it, becomes a representation in the human senses. That’s right, the tree falling in the forest doesn’t make a sound if there’s no one to hear it. Even more surprising, “there is no solidity if there is nothing to feel it.” This talent to make representations, shared with many other creatures, Barfield calls “figuration.” Think of this as a confirmation of the modern corporate management principle: if it don’t get noticed it don’t exist.

A little clarification might help ease the threat of solipsism. A representation is something I perceive to be there. The same goes for you and everyone else. If my representation is different from that of others, this calls for an explanation. If a satisfactory explanation is found (e.g. differences in distance or persecutive on a phenomenon) then my representation ends by being part of a collective representation. If an explanation cannot be found, we’re stuck with social tension.

But it is also crucial to recognise that all the collective representations taken together with whatever personal representations we each may have don’t reduce what is unrepresented. We can say that the unrepresented is what is independently there and is undiminished in its infinity when anything becomes represented. In that case the world that we all accept as real is in fact a system of collective representations but it cannot be anything approaching the reality of what is there, or the phenomena that take place. This is so partly because of human sensory and technological limitations. But it is also a consequence that we are constantly choosing what to notice (to perceive) depending on what interests us.

What we then do with representations is remarkable and probably unique in the world as far as we know. We use language to name the representations and so develop words, ideas, concepts. This Barfield calls “beta-thinking” which is characterised by an intimate “participation” with the phenomenon we are engaged with.

Participation has a very specific meaning for Barfield beyond mere involvement. It is the “extra-sensory relation of the human being and the phenomenon.” In other words, beta-thinking uses language. The existence of the phenomenon depends fundamentally on this participation, that is, providing words for what we perceive. This provides the necessary condition for the creation of collective representations as well as subsequent cultures. Different words, different phenomena.

Our species has yet another unique skill. We can think about representations as something independent of ourselves and then consider representations in their relations with each other, a kind of analysis or theorising. And we can think about the nature of collective representations as such, and their relation to our own minds. This is a special kind of reflective ability which considers language independent of its figurative uses. Barfield calls this “alpha-thinking.” Alpha-thinking is akin to what can be called rational or scientific reasoning.

The three modes of thought interact more or less continuously, acting as what would be called (much later) cybernetic regulators on each other. But there seems to have been an evolution of this interaction within recorded history. Alpha-thinking has grown much more important. This can be documented in a number of interesting ways.

For example, when we translate the Greek ‘nous‘(νους) as ‘mind’ and ‘logos‘ (λογος) as ‘reason’ or ‘word’, “we are in continuous danger of substituting our phenomena for theirs,” among other reasons because the Greeks had simply not developed alpha-thinking as we have. They participated in phenomena they describe such that the significance of the ancient Greek really can’t be recaptured. Their divine pantheon to us presents many problem of logic that simply never occurred to them. Their ideas of personal virtue were not ethical abstractions but practical demonstrations by epic heroes.

Perhaps the most compelling proof of the shift toward alpha-thinking is the so-called Copernican revolution, which also involved Kepler and Galileo. The ancient Greek notion of ‘hypothesis’ is that it is an explanation which “saves the appearances,” not in the sense of avoiding embarrassment but because such an explanation would account for the facts at hand acquired by beta-thinking. The Greeks weren’t bothered at all if several hypotheses accomplished this objective, even if they were contrary to each other. Respect for the factual data not theory was paramount.

Thus the idea of a heliocentric universe had been mooted and commonly known as early as the sixth century in a commentary on Aristotle’s treatise on astronomy (De Caelo). The real turning point in science occurred when Kepler and Galileo, and Copernicus “began to think not just that the heliocentric hypothesis saved the appearances but was physically true, in fact an ultimate truth.” This constitutes the real Medieval scientific revolution, not merely a change in paradigm but a fundamental shift in the nature of thought itself. Hence the Church could allow Galileo to continue to teach Copernicanism as an hypothesis that saved the appearances, but not as a truth.

What was feared by the Church in its condemnation of Galileo was a new theory of theory, namely that if some theory saved all the appearances, it was identical with truth. In other words, that if such a theory became a collective representation and used in alpha-thinking, it would be taken for more than an “artificial as if” Such an assertion would quite rightly be considered an idolatrous statement (the Church, of course, failed to comprehend that its great doctrinal edifice was exactly that for the same reason; Barfield misses the point as well, so forgive him his last two chapters).

So, concludes Barfield, “A representation which is collectively mistaken for an ultimate ought not to be considered a representation. It is an idol.” Through this insight we are able to detect what is essentially the evolution of idols from around the point of the Copernican revolution - a succession of claims to the ultimate truth of successive collective representations, all ultimately overthrown and forgotten as false idols. But yet each subsequentLy ‘confirmed’ hypothesis claiming to be true.

This continuous quasi-revolution in thought occurs in part because of the nature of language itself which means something slightly different today than it did yesterday; but also because alpha-thinking is inherently dialectical. It inevitably seeks the flaws in itself through the process of turning personal into collective representations. Indeed, that appears what we mean by inquiry tout court. And yet many scientists, religionists, ideologues as well as many other purely obnoxious people continue to insist that they know the truth. This is not only idolatry, it is hubris of the most intense order. And the insistence on ultimate truth is the best criterion of likely falsity I have ever come across in a lifetime of searching.

Postscript: Barfield’s theory is, as far as I can tell, exactly the same as the semiotic theory put forth by C. S. Peirce a half century earlier. Barfield’s ‘representation’ is functionally equivalent to Peirce’s ‘sign’. And the modes of thought, that is, figuration, alpha and beta-thinking, track Peirce’s First, Second, and Third. Barfield doesn’t mention Peirce so I presume that he knew nothing of his work or the work of other American pragmatists.

View all my reviews