The Phenomena Are Representations: A Reversal of the Modern Picture

Barfield opens Saving the Appearances with the philosophical-historical reversal on which the rest of the book depends. The standard modern picture — inherited from Galileo, Descartes, and the long Cartesian-Newtonian tradition — treats the phenomena of the natural world as a collection of mind-independent objects given to a perceiving consciousness whose role is the recording or representing of what is already there. Barfield’s argument, drawn from Coleridge, Steiner, and a careful reading of medieval and Renaissance philosophy, is that the phenomena are constitutively representations — the joint product of an unrepresented reality (the underlying particles, fields, energies that physics describes mathematically) and the participating mind that produces, in conjunction with that unrepresented base, the experienced world of colours, sounds, shapes, and meanings the everyday perceiver encounters. The argument is not idealist in the simple sense; Barfield is not claiming that the unrepresented base does not exist or that consciousness produces it from nothing. The argument is that what we ordinarily call “the world” is the joint product of a reality that exceeds representation and a consciousness that participates in producing the representational structure within which the reality becomes available. The clinical-philosophical implication is exact. The modern condition is not, as the standard picture would have it, the achievement of an objective view of a mind-independent world; the modern condition is a particular configuration of participation that has been carrying itself forward for several centuries and that has come, in Barfield’s diagnosis, to mistake its own representations for mind-independent ultimates.

Idolatry: The Modern Condition Diagnosed

The book’s central category is idolatry, and Barfield uses the term in a precise philosophical-historical sense rather than in any narrow theological sense. An idol, in Barfield’s definition, is a representation that is collectively mistaken for an ultimate — a joint product of consciousness and reality that has been treated, by the consciousness that produces it, as if it were the unrepresented reality itself. Barfield’s formulation is exact:

“A representation, which is collectively mistaken for an ultimate, ought not to be called a representation. It is an idol.” — Barfield, Saving the Appearances The diagnosis carries weight. Barfield’s claim is that the scientific-rationalist literalness that has organised modern Western consciousness — the picture of the world as a collection of mind-independent objects governed by mathematical law — is not the achievement of objectivity but the dominance of a particular kind of idolatry. The world the modern subject perceives is a representation; treating that representation as if it were the unrepresented ultimate is the operative move that Barfield names idolatry. The book’s middle chapters develop this diagnosis by tracing the historical conditions under which the literalness took hold — the seventeenth-century scientific revolution, the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, the nineteenth-century evolutionary materialism — and by demonstrating that the literalness, far from being the natural condition of consciousness, is a particular and historically recent configuration whose costs the contemporary subject is beginning to register.

Original Participation, Idolatry, Final Participation

Barfield’s most influential category is the developmental-historical sequence: original participation, the period of literalness (idolatry), and final participation. Original participation names the pre-modern condition in which the perceiver was felt to be embedded in and continuous with the cosmos perceived — the condition that anthropologists and philologists have documented in archaic Greek, medieval European, and traditional indigenous cultures, and that Padel’s philological reconstruction of the porous self in In and Out of the Mind describes for the Greek case. The period of literalness — Barfield’s technical name for the modern idolatrous condition — represents the long detour by which Western consciousness developed the capacity for analytic distinction at the cost of participation; the achievement of analytic distinction is real, but the literalness that mistakes the analytic representations for ultimates is the cost. Final participation names the contemplative condition in which the modern subject, having traversed the period of literalness, can recover a participating relation to the world without losing the analytic-distinguishing capacity the modern period developed. The sequence is not a return to original participation but a moving-forward through literalness into a new configuration that integrates participation and analytic discrimination. Barfield is clear that final participation is not automatic; it is a contemplative and imaginal achievement that requires disciplined practice and that the contemporary culture is only beginning to support.

The Implications for Imagination, Religion, and Depth Psychology

The book’s closing chapters draw out the implications of the original-and-final-participation framework for the contemporary engagement with imagination, religion, and the work of meaning-making. Imagination, in Barfield’s reading, is not the production of unreal images by a mind that should be perceiving real ones; imagination is the active participation by which any phenomenon, including the phenomena of physical perception, becomes a representation in the first place. The contemporary depth-psychological recovery of imagination — Jung’s active imagination, Corbin’s mundus imaginalis, Hillman’s archetypal personifications, Avens’s philosophical defence of the imaginal — is, in Barfield’s framing, the recovery of a participating relation to the world that the period of literalness had foreclosed. The religious implications are equally consequential. The Incarnation, in Barfield’s anthroposophically-influenced reading, is the historical pivot at which the long evolution of consciousness from original participation begins to make final participation possible — though Barfield’s theological commitments are particular and the contemporary reader is not required to share them to receive the philosophical-historical apparatus the book supplies. The depth-psychological reader who has worked through Barfield arrives at a metaphysical framework within which the recovery of imagination can be situated as a serious cultural project rather than as eccentric assertion.

For any practitioner whose work draws on the depth-psychological recovery of imagination, Saving the Appearances is the indispensable philosophical-historical context. After Barfield, the contemporary engagement with imaginal work — clinical, contemplative, artistic — is not improvising; it carries forward a tradition (Coleridge, Steiner, Cassirer, the late Romantic philosophical-historical thinkers) whose articulation supplies the conceptual apparatus the engagement requires. The book is also the natural pair to Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age and to Padel’s In and Out of the Mind: Taylor’s porous-self / buffered-self distinction maps onto Barfield’s original-participation / period-of-literalness sequence, and Padel’s philological reconstruction of the archaic Greek porous self supplies the historical-philological substrate against which Barfield’s philosophical-historical argument can be tested and extended.