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Perhaps the designation which categorizes Owen
Barfield most precisely (ignoring, despite their partial appropriateness
and strong claim to legitimacy, "philosopher," "literary critic," etc.)
is one that is, to all intents and purposes, extinct: "philologist."1
Whatever the foregrounded subject of Barfield's writing may be, the background
is always language.
For Barfield, language is transpersonal; it
is "not a tool invented by individual minds but an echo reverberating from
the source of all individual minds, of all individual selves" (HGH
63). It is, in fact, "the storehouse of imagination
. . . its function is to mediate transition from the unindividualized dreaming
spirit that carried the infancy of the world to the individualized human
spirit, which has the future in its charge" (PD xx). Language, he
had explained as early as History in English Words, "has preserved
for us the inner, living history of man's soul. It reveals the evolution
of consciousness" (HEW 14).
As the Meggid explains
to Burgeon in Unancestral Voice, serious contemplation of
the evolution of consciousness can lead to only one conclusion about the
role of language in the development of the human mind:
"You had to see the origin of language
as the self-gathering of mind within an already mind-soaked world. It was
the product of 'nature' in the sense that the meaning of words, if you
approached them historically, could all--or as nearly all as made no difference--be
shown to be involved with natural phenomena. Moreover, interfusion of the
sensuous (sound) with the immaterial (meaning) was still, even today, its
whole point. Yet it was certainly not, in its earlier stages, the product
of individual minds; for it was obviously already there at a stage of evolution
when individual minds were not yet. He had no doubt of its pointing back
to a state of affairs when men and nature were one in a way that had long
since ceased. Even now, even in our own time, there was the mysterious
"genius of language" which many philologists had detected as something
that worked independently of any conscious choices." (UV 69)
Despite the Meggid's insistence on the intuitive
correctness of such a philosophy of language, our current common sense
view of language, the legacy of Victorian
positivism, is decidedly counter-intuitive,
as Barfield sarcastically observes in History, Guilt,
and Habit:
[The 19th century] was imbued even
more indelibly than our own age with a mental image of primitive man as
a being with a system of perception exactly like our own and with a mind
very much like our own, except that it was not nearly so well stocked.
Therefore--so they reasoned, or so they instinctively assumed--language
must have begun as a series of cries or grunts or howls that somehow very
gradually turned into signs indicating the material objects by which Darwinian
man perceived himself to be surrounded; and then, still of course very
gradually, that system turned itself into the languages of Homer and Shakespeare
and the Bible. (45)
Our unwillingness in this "logophobic" age (the
term is James Hillman's
2)
to acknowledge the foundational and mysterious nature of language in the
creation of the human leads to logical absurdities. It leads us to contemplate
(always unsuccessfully) the origin of language when "strictly speaking
only idolators [that is, those who refuse to acknowledge the constitutive
role the human imagination plays in shaping the so-called natural world]
can raise the question of the 'origin of language.' For anyone else to
do so is like asking for the origin of origin" (SA 123).
It leads us to talk about language (with language)
as if it were external to and objective for us--as if it were our possession,3
forgetting that
you cannot study anything without
speaking and reading and writing about it. And you cannot speak or read
or write without using language, without using the language of today, as
your medium. But the language of today is itself the product, the manifestation,
of the very thing you are trying to undermine, so to speak, with your historical
depiction of the way in which it came into being. You can dig into the
earth with a spade in order to get beneath the surface. The spade is itself
a product of the earth, but that does not bother you. But if, by some mysterious
dispensation, the spade were part of the very path of earth you were splitting
up, you would be rather nonplused, because you would destroy the instrument
by using it. And that is the sort of difficulty you are up against when
it is not the earth you are digging into, but consciousness; and when it
is not a spade you are digging with, but language. . . . However quickly
you turn around, you can never see the back of your own head. (HGH
21)
See in particular "Language and Discovery"
(RM 143-54) "Language and Poetry" (PD 93-101), History
in English Words, passim, Speaker's Meaning, passim. |
1The Linguistics
Encyclopedia defines philology as "the forerunner of historical linguistics,
. . . the study of literary monuments or inscriptions to ascertain the
cultural features of an ancient civilization" (196). It is helpful to remember
that Friedrich Nietzsche, for example, was by training a philologist and
not a philosopher. |
2In
Re-Visioning
Psychology,
Hillman notes, "We are in a peculiar double bind with words;
they fascinate and at the same time the repel. . . . because of nominalism
words have become both bloated in importance and dried in content" (8-9). |
3"Speech did
not arise," Barfield insists in Saving the Appearances [123] "as
the attempt of man to imitate, to master or to explain 'nature'; for speech
and nature came into being along with one another." |
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