For the half century and more of his life as a writer Owen Barfield has been a man who thinks otherwise, working against the grain of our prepossessions about man and nature and the relations between them. His latest book consists of three lectures delivered at Vancouver in the autumn of 1978, and Barfield took them as an occasion to present to a broad public a distillation of his thought in the many and diverse writings of his literary career. They assay western man's unhappy present, look back to a saner and happier past, and lay out a program for the future that will enable us to recover what we have lost by imaginatively "reexperiencing the past in the present."

Barfield's history of the human past is not, he emphasizes, "a history of ideas" (an account of evolving concepts); it is a "history of consciousness" (consciousness being defined as an inseparable "interpenetration of thinking and perceiving"). The past he undertakes to represent is the prehistoric past, prior to the existence of written records. Dr. Johnson derogated attempts to reconstruct the mind and life of man before recorded history—in the eighteenth-century phrase, "the state of nature"—as the speculations of those who like to talk about what they cannot know.

Barfield, however, in the most innovative aspect of his work, believes that we have valid clues to the unrecorded consciousness of man in recorded language itself; that is, in etymology. For words which currently have purely immaterial, conceptual meanings (like the word "conception" itself) are made up of material roots, while words which currently have material meanings (like "heart" and "sun") once had immaterial references as well. From such observations linguists have traditionally concluded that language began with words possessing purely material references, some of which evolved into a later stage of immaterial references. Barfield, however, concludes that in the very distant past human consciousness made no distinction, and a fortiori no division, between immaterial and material, subject and object, consciousness and things, thoughts and facts and feelings, inner and outer. What we now perceive as outer objects were then perceived as "images," fusing what we now distinguish as material and immaterial; hence the "lived world," the reality which men experienced, was a world constituted by consciousness and things, inner and outer, perceived as a seamless whole.

Our modern consciousness has become divided, in a way that is inscribed in our language, and consequently dominates not only our metaphysical systems but also the implicit metaphysics incorporated in what we call "common sense." And because our thinking consciousness inseparable involves our perceiving consciousness, the reality that we perceive has also been sundered—increasingly since the triumphs of the natural sciences—into an outer material world and an adventitious, internal subjectivity and sense of self. To our "idolatry" of a merely material and external reality Barfield attributes the essential malaise of modern man: his desperate sense that his infinitesimal self is cut off, isolated, estranged, or in the most potent term, alienated from the outer world, as well as from his original community with other human selves. The growing virulence of this disease of self-imprisoned man has as its symptoms an increasing incidence of free-floating anxiety, of objectless guilt, and most disturbingly, of that manifestation of the divided and alienated self we call schizophrenia. Our obsessive dividing of that which we should merely distinguish is driving us mad.

I write about Barfield's views in the mode of a neutral historian of ideas—a mode which, with his usual breadth and balance in treating modern intellection and science, Barfield admits to be valid and useful within its proper bounds, though radically inadequate to deal with the evolution of a full human consciousness. Barfield credits most of his leading ideas to Coleridge, Goethe, and above all Rudolf Steiner. But of course the view that, to heal the ills of the present, we must in the future revert to a more felicitous past, is the earliest recorded, and still the most persistent, western, design of history, whether the lost felicity is called Eden, the golden age, or the state of nature. And within this overall design, the oldest and most pervasive diagnosis of what is wrong with mankind is that what was once an all-embracing totality has become fragmented into isolated, alien, and conflicting parts. This diagnosis is embodied in the ancient and ever-recurrent theosophical myth of the One Primal Man who has fallen into division—a division from his own divine self, between his spiritual aspect and the material universe he had once incorporated, and among his individuated human selves. Writers of the Old Testament early translated the loss of Eden into figurative terms of man's divorce by, and unendurable exile and estrangement from, the one God whose marriage covenant Israel had violated by its idolatry of material gods. So early as the third century Plotinus gave such views of the human condition an enduring metaphysical form in his doctrine of an Absolute One, identical with the Good, from whom emanates everything that exists. In the scale of emanations, evil supervenes upon the material universe by reason of its farthest "remoteness," hence "privation" from the Good; and since the Good is the One, this remoteness is also a dividedness into separateness and multiplicity. Human, or moral evil, consists in the "fall" of each severed soul into an immersion in matter, and in the fuming of the aspirations and desires of the isolated soul from the undivided One to the material many. Plotinianism was quickly assimilated by the Church Fathers into the biblical scheme of history, so that, as Leone Ebreo summarized the widespread theological belief, "sin and division in man are almost one and the same thing, or at least two inseparable things, the one always implying the other." In recent times this conception of man's essential malaise was assimilated by Hegel into his philosophy of the division of Spirit into its self-centered and mutually conflicting others and given the name "alienation"; Hegel's alienation was by Marx reinterpreted into his "material" terms of a primitive communal stage of an integral man and society which, in the capitalist stage of history, has become divided into isolated and warring classes, in which each individual is fragmented within himself and alienated both from the natural world and from the products of his work; while Freudians often explain alienation as the consequence of the primal division from the mother at birth. In Thomas Wolfe's haunting epigraph to Look Homeward Angel:

Naked and alone we came into exile. In her dark womb we did not know our mother's face; from the prison of her flesh have we come into the unspeakable and incommunicable prison of this earth. . . . O waste of loss, in the hot mazes, lost, among bright stars on this most weary unbright cinder, lost!

D. H. Lawrence offers two versions of the alienated self. At the end of Sons and Lovers, it is the death of his mother that leaves Paul Morel isolated in a material universe in which "there was no Time, only Space. . . . Stars and sun, a few bright grains, were spinning around for terror. . . . 'Mother!' he whispered, 'Mother!' " In his book Apocalypse Lawrence explicitly reinterprets the biblical scheme of fall and redemption into a scheme of division and reintegration. "The cosmos is a vast living body, of which we are still the parts. . . . Now this is literally true, as men knew in the great past, and as they will know again." But the Reformation and the new science gave impetus to that process of fragmentation which is radical evil.

What we want is to . . . re-establish the living organic connections, with the cosmos, the sun and earth, with mankind and nation and family. Start with the sun, and the rest will slowly, slowly happen.

Suppose we now abandon the neutral stance of the historian of ideas and ask: "What evidence is there for the truth of this historical view of the essential health and pathology of mankind?" I have always found compelling the old maxim of consensus gentium, that what has in essence been asseverated, though in diverse creeds and vocabularies, everywhere, always, and by all men should be taken to possess a deeply human truth; and certainly, the view that the root of human evil and suffering consists in being divided, cut off, alienated from a former integrity qualifies, by this criterion of truth, as the oldest, most persistent, and currently by far the most prevalent diagnosis of the sorry condition of the human race. A problem arises, however, when we ask the further question: "What then shall we do to be saved?" For all the views of fragmented man that have sketched postulate a lost felicity, and analyze the preset infelicity, mainly in order to justify a program for a future restoration. But the proponent of each view promulgates a drastically different way toward reintegrating what in time has been divided, depending on whether he is a committed Hebrew or Christian, or a Plotinian, Hegelian, Marxian, Freudian. . . .

The way toward a saving reintegration that Owen Barfield proposes is, he says, extraordinarily difficult, but not impossible. It consists in a willed and irremissive undertaking to transform the inherited categories of our thinking—hence of the consciousness and perceptions with which our thinking is interpenetrative, and of the kind of "reality" we experience—against the powerful force of the "collective mental habits" that constitute common sense, and hardest of all, in a fashion that must inescapably be expressed in the very language which incorporates the categories we are trying to transform. Ultimately, however, Barfield's reliance is not on our conceptual thinking, but on the power of what he calls our "imagination" to break out of the imprisonment-in-division effected and enforced by our habits of mind and by the language we speak. That such an imagination of an integral world, in which man and consciousness are "inside" rather than "outside" a lived reality, can in fact triumph is attested by the long, vital, and effectively communicated lived reality of Owen Barfield himself.