PARTICIPATION COMES OF AGE:
OWEN BARFIELD AND THE BHAGAVAD GITA Participation Comes of Age:
Owen Barfield and the Bhagavad Gita[1]
October 15, 2006
15,071 words
By Robert McDermott
There may be times when what is most needed is not so much a new discovery or a new idea as a different ‘slant’; I mean a comparatively slight readjustment in our way of looking at the things and ideas on which attention is already fixed.
Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances
[Indigenous people] see with the same eyes as ours, but they do not perceive with the same minds.
Lucien Levy-Bruhl, quoted in Saving the Appearances
The world is “a system of collective representations.” The time comes when one must either accept this as the truth about the world or reject the theories of physics as an elaborate delusion. We cannot have it both ways.”
Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances
The substance of [Saving the Appearances] is a sort of outline sketch, with one or two parts completed in greater detail, for a history of human consciousness; particularly the consciousness of western humanity during the last three hundred years or so.
Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances
What will chiefly be remembered about the scientific revolution will be the way in which it scoured the appearances clean of all the last traces of spirit, freeing us from original, and for final, participation.
Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances
The true, one might say the tremendous impulse underlying the Romantic movement has never grown to maturity; and, after adolescence, the alternative to maturity is puerility.
Own Barfield, Saving the Appearances
My life has been full of external tragedies. And if they have left no visible, no indelible scar on me, I owe it all to the teachings of the Bhagavad Gita.
M. K. Gandhi, Young India, 1925
But what we can do with profit is to seek in the Gita for the actual living truths it contains…suitable to the mentality and helpful to the spiritual needs of our present-day humanity.
Sri Aurobindo, Essays on the Gita, 1921
In any case it is certain that such teachings, expressed poetically, are for each person to work through for oneself. One must experience them in order to lift the soul to the point of finally experiencing a meeting with Krishna, the Lord of Yoga.
Rudolf Steiner, The Bhagavadgita and the Epistles of Paul, 1912
PART ONE: OWEN BARFIELD AND THE PARTICIPATORY TURN[2]
This essay makes use of Owen Barfield’s understanding of the history of participationory consciousness in order to illuminate the way that three early twentieth-century spiritual teachers variously engaged the Bhagavad Gita. Mohandas K. Gandhi, Sri Aurobindo, and Rudolf Steiner all considered the Gita a supremely important text but none of these three teachers read the Gita asone of Arjuna’s contemporaries might have. Instead, standing at the far end of what Barfield describes as as a sort of participatory evolution, these teachers had to approach the Gita as a self-implicating text that unveils itself diversely to various sorts of participatory sensibilities. Building on Barfield’s work, this essay looks at the diachronic participatory distance between these three thinkers and the Gita’s historical (JAKE: Perhaps better to use English term for sitz in leben? Not such a widely know term [I for one don’t know it!]; it may sound slightly grand in the first paragraph of the essay setting), as well as attending to the important synchronic differences in the ways that Gandhi, Sri Aurobindo, and Steiner each participatively engage the Gita.
The first half of this essay summarizes the account of the gradual loss of participation and its possible recovery as described by Owen Barfield (1899-1998), the literary figure, lay philosopher, Coleridge scholar, and aAnthroposophist. English Romanticist[3] in the tradition of Coleridge[4], and particularly in the direct lineage of Rudolf Steiner. As Goethe and Emerson are to an imaginative relation to nature, Hegel and Marx to the patterns of history, Jung to the symbols of the unconscious, Barfield is to participation in evolutionary consciousness. Barfield’s major work, Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry(1957) argues for the reality and significance of the evolution of consciousness, and particularly the chronologicalfor a diachronic shift from original (primal, indigenous) participation to the gradual loss of participation (culminating in certain forms of Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment ways of relating to the world) and, very significantly during the past several centuries of western thought and culture, to the contemporary possibility of “final” —i.e., Romantic—participation (the contours of which are can be discerned, albeit imperfectly, in Romanticism and its related movements). As a mode of participation Barfield means “final” in the Aristotelian sense of an entity’s final goal. [5][6] The second half of this essay discusses the ways that three twentieth-century interpreters of the Gita—Gandhi, Sri Aurobindo, and Steiner—struggle with, explain, and engage the revelation that Arjuna received from Krishna. I I first consider them one by one and then conclude the essay with some comparative reflections in light of Barfield’s participatory theory of the evolution of consciousness.
… ROBERT: FILL IN DESCRIPTION HERE
Owen Barfield’s Theory of Participation on the Loss and Recovery of ParticipationMost of his writings focus on the gradual participation that was lost over many millennia, and in recent centuries in the West calamitously lost, largely forgotten, and not infrequently considered never to have existed.
Barfield’s case for the evolution of consciousness, particularly by tracking it historically in or through English words, is deep and detailed—though not as deep and detailed as the many volumes of lectures dedicated to the evolution of consciousness by Barfield’s spiritual and philosophic mentor, Rudolf Steiner (1961-1925), a central European initiate and esoteric teacher of anthroposophy.[7] The first half of this essay, which summarizes Barfield’s account of the evolution of consciousness, could have been drawn entirely from the thought of Rudolf Steiner. It draws instead from Barfield because his thinking and writings, while consistently and almost entirely derivative of Steiner, are unfailingly elegant, clear, and written for a wide literate public.
Steiner’s books on the evolution of consciousness assume readers and audiences well familiar with the foundation of his esoteric disclosures. Steiner, like Swedenborg[8] in the 18th century and H. B. Blavatsky[9] in the 19th century, was a clairvoyant esoteric original. Barfield, who did not claim to be clairvoyant, was a scholar, thinker, and author, as well as a devoted student of Steiner—albeit an original in this regard, as fully evidenced by his brilliant Saving the Appearances and by his many other widely admired books. While Barfield was deeply influenced by Rudolf Steiner, his style of thinking and presentation are distinctively his own, in faithful accordance with Steiner’s emphasis on the desperate need for original research and thinking in the present age of dependency.
WhileBarfield’s argument in Saving the Appearancesis Barfield’s most widely known work, it is not his only work of vastbuilds upon his previooius works of sustained scholarship, sustained and original thinking, and continuing importance. From age 23 his life and thought were defined by his commitment to anthroposophy which he pursued in its own right and equally as a bridge to the wider world of scholarship, intellectual inquiry, and the arts. In 1926, at age 28, he publishedHis his first book, History in English Words(1926),is a masterful analysis of the way that words at one time held a fullness of meanings, both literal and metaphorical, and whichthatwas at a later time gradually lost. This process, which Barfield traces philologically, involved the differentiation,of or separated out, some of thoseexterior and interior meanings, which were subsequently identified as subjective and objective or literal and metaphorical meanings. particularly the inner (metaphorical) ones, leaving behind only the literal and surface meanings. This account essentially consists in showing how the world lost itssof interiors, as it were, howthe loss of concept’s lost their multi-valence, and the maintenance of only one or more words once part of that rich conceptway that the original poetic depth of words collapses into a merely referential semiosis.
Barfield offers the example of the words way we use the word heart and blood: originallyoriginally, the “heart” included both the physical organ and what we now consider its metaphorical associations. In contemporary usage, it is necessary, but difficult, to bridge the literal and metaphorical of a concept such as heart. At present, we say that the “real” meaning is the organ, the pump in the chest; the metaphorical meaning has become separated from the organ and from the concept that meant both organ and affect. It is as though these have become two separate words such that it takes metaphoric and other forms of imaginative thinking to put these meanings together again. To reunite the physical and metaphoric meanings of heart takes an act act of Romantic intentionally creative thinking, an imaginative (but not fanciful) act that Barfield calls final participation and which he finds anticipatively present in the RRomantic poets (especially Johan Wolfgang Goethe, William Wordsworth, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge). or of final participation. Similarly, whereas the medieval person distinguished two kinds of blood, venous and arterial, and participated in both, contemporary English language differently distinguishes two kinds of blood, shed (as in ‘bad blood’ and ‘hot blood’ and unshed, the only one in which medicine is interested— “in the literal one, that is, in the idol.”[10]
In Poetic Diction (1928) Barfield offers a hypothesis on the distinctive character of the poeticwhat amounts to a philosophy of poetry, namely, thatarguing that the essential element in poetic experienceit is characterized bythe inducing of a “felt change of consciousness.,”[11]This felt change is characterized by a distinct wakefulness that serves as a preparation for the kind of extraordinary perception that is that is essentially final participation. Barfield thus connects our interpretive, poetic and imaginative capacities to a larger narrative of our participation in the world’s own becoming. as well as the essential intent of anthroposophy. What Barfield offers throughout his works is an evolutionary vision of transforming participatory sensibilities, an account of the way that the human co--creation of the world has changed over time. Neither subjective nor objective, this change involves both the way that we comport ourselves to the world and also the way the world offers itself to us.
Original Participation In order to understand Barfield’s vision more fully, it will be helpful to consider more fully his account of participation.
Saving the Appearances focuses primarily on the contemporary loss of participation and the ways inwhich contemporarythis affects modern humanity shows the effects of this loss but it necessarily begins with an account of primal or original consciousnessparticipation, the kind of immediate consciousnesscy that humanity has been steadily losing, and in the modern Wwest precipitously, through the entire sweep of history. Influenced by Steiner’s philosophy of history (which resembles in important respects the philosophy of history of Georg W. F. Hegel and Friedrich W. J. Schelling), Barfield essentially sees history as a loss of participation and the longing to overcome itthis loss.[12]But itIt is truer still to say, with Barifield, that this gradual loss of participation is half of history, the devolutionary half; the other half, evolution, is the gradual overcomingof this loss by a series of breakthroughs and contributions. According to Augustine, Hegel, Steiner, and Barfield, the most significant of these contributions was the birth into flesh of the Logos, the Christ, in Jesus of Nazareth at the baptism in the Jordan. (Of these four thinkers, only Steiner wrote at length about the great and enduring contributions to the evolution of consciousness of Krishna and Buddha.[13]) Sri Aurobindo, also influenced by Hegel, offers a similar meta-narrative: tThe divine empties itself into time and space, and evolves through diverse civilizations and modes of consciousness. This ,a process that leads humanity both further from the divine andbut, simultaneously, through a series of avatars (divine intercessory beings), overcomes this distance by initiating a new sort of intimacy closer in new and significant waysbetween humanity and divinity.
In several of his works, Barfield traces the evolution of consciousness and particularly the loss of original participation.,Bby paying attention to the history of wWestern languages and supplementing this with the accounts.With the help of early twentieth century anthropologists, he Barfield offers a picture of describes of original (i.e., “early,” “primal,” orand “indigenous”) participation; “early,” “primal,” and “indigenous” would also be apt terms for this mode of consciousness. However, aAs Barfield uses very few examples from outside the western tradition, it would seem an important test to apply his account of the evolution of consciousness to the axial age of India, specifically the emergence of the Bhagavad Gita from the great Indian epic, the Mahabharata, in approximately the sixth century. As India has preserved more thoroughly than the West certain original forms of participation, lLooking at the Gita offers us a special opportunity for insight into the participatory transformations in which Barfield is interested. in for the East preserved more thoroughly that the West certain original forms of participatio The West, of course, has evolved its own from an original consciousness with which it is partly continuous, however difficult it may be to see the continuity. Hadbut as a rule the West not has been so violentlysuppressed and in replacingreplaced each of its successive cultural expressions. it could have in its midst valuable original, or more nearly original, cultural forms. Because itsThe West’s commitment to change has been more revolutionary than evolutionary, thus burying much of its memory of original participation, forcing itus to look for original consciousness in cultures far the West must lookfor original consciousness in cultures removed from its own indigenous subculturesits our own. The correct term for the nature of the relationship between the indigenous cultures of North America and their European replacement is holocaust.
The Mahabharata, which includes the events covered in the 18 chapters of the Bhagavad Gita—particularly the episode of the warrior Arjuna in dialogue with Krishna, his charioteer (and not yet revealed as a god) on the firing line of a civil war—can be seen as a mix of primal and historical consciousness, or as a transition from myth to history, rather like Homer, and perhaps like the transition from within Homer to Sophocles, and progressively to Virgil, Dante, and Joyce. from The the more mythical Iliad to The the more historical and reflexive Odyssey. Every civilization has contributed to theThis transition is one from a direct, or easily accessed, relationship to the divine or spirit world, to a consciousness in which the divineboth divinity and spirit seem removed and gradually replaced by the independent reality of the self and the earthly world. Or, we might sayIn other words, Tthis process is characterized by the gradual loss of mythic consciousness and the gradual development of increasingly specific, hardened, and isolated human selfhood personalities. Even within classical Greek culture, Achilles, Odysseus, Agamemnon, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Alexander can be seen to advance represent a rather direct line from mythic to historical consciousness, from an immediate relation to the gods and the spiritual world to a dimmer relationship to a spirit world, and a more confident relationship to their individual identity and their own thinking.
In original participation, a significant relationship to gods and spirits (e.g., in the afterlife of the dead) was neither problematic nor questioned; rather, it was automatic and easily shared. The gods were “here” and “there” in the mind’s eye, in the psyche of individuals and communities. A familiar phrase for original participation, “In the beginning,” signaled a no-time, or no specific time, an arche (an atemporal foundation or,an original principle), a “time” when the gods were luminously present to humanity. Barfield’s point, and of course he is not alone in saying this, is simply that in the course of several millennia, the accessibility of the gods and spirit beings became less obvious, and then not at all obvious, and thenbefore becoming doubtful, and then finally unbelievable. Increasingly in the modern West, God and the world of spirit beings came to bebecame realms of the far away, then and then the unreachable, and then before such realms seemed to die entirelydead. In the West, during the 19th and 20thninetieth and twentieth centuries,of the West there came to be a consensusa consensus emerged regarding the nonexistence (both past and present) of God, gods, and spirits alike had never been. What had been believed to be the case with respect the God and spirits was not so, and never had been so; what had been believed was shown to be an illusion, a projection by humanity in its immaturity (i.e., in its naively conceived original participation).