| View Larger Image | Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry. | Paperbackby Owen Barfield (Author)
| List Price: | $16.95 | | Price: | $9.20 | | You Save: | $7.75 (46%) | | | Available: | Usually ships in 24 hours |
| | Binding: | Paperback | | Publisher: | Wesleyan | | Edition: | 2ndnd Edition | | Page Count: | 191 Pages | | Publication Date: | August 15, 1988 | | Sales Rank: | 345,571th |
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FEATURES | - ISBN13: 9780819562050
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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EDITORIAL REVIEWS |
Product Description
Barfield draws on sources from mythology, philosophy, history, literature, theology, and science to chronicle the evolution of human thought from Moses and Aristotle to Galileo and Keats. |
CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.5 based on 10 reviews)
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thinking it through by H. Edelglass  5 Stars
March 05, 2009
This very fine and challenging book begins to open pathways long overdue for working with all of our realities. Historically grounded, the author leads to understandings that have been ignored in our general education.
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A door to perception by A. J. M. Groot (Amssterdam, Netherlands) 5 Stars
October 21, 2008
My interest in Owen Barfield was first sparked by the writings of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis but it has proved more lasting than either of those. When I first discovered 'Saving the Appearances' it blew wide open a door to a whole new different way of seeing the world. Especially the opening chapters, with the classic analogy of the rainbow and enlightnening passages on concepts such as 'collective representations', 'figuration' and 'participation', struck me out of the blue. There is such a world of experience that opens up once we recognize that our way of seeing, our sensual perception itself, is determined by cultural and linguistic factors as much as by anything else, and that our current, scientific way of seeing is only a relatively recent phenomenon, that may disappear as quickly as it appeared. Most of all, it encourages us to be fully conscious and fully responsible of the choices we make, most of all of the choice between an insistence on scientific 'fact' or even back towards original participation, and a move towards final participation.
As others have commented, Barfield's writing is always thoroughly though through and at the same time immediately comprehensible. I would also like to add that though his thought leads eventually towards a renewed faith in Christianity, it is possible to appreciate most of this book without a Christian (or anthroposophist, for that matter) background.
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excellent book by Richard Johnson (Maine, USA) 5 Stars
August 25, 2008
Saving the Appearances is a book I have meant to read for about thirty years. It is a very useful discussion of "modern" thinking, though some of the issues addressed have been "solved", at least partially by "post-modern" approaches. Nevertheless, the book is an excellent marker of the road western thought has traveled in the last fifty years.
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In brief by William J. Turgeon (Eastcoast USA) 5 Stars
May 24, 2006
One of the most unduly under-appreciated books of the second half of the 20th century.
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A Brave Plunge into Deep Waters by Mennonite Medievalist (Bellefonte, PA USA)  4 Stars
June 22, 2003
I finish this book thinking that it might have changed my life; if it has, I might not know it, since I don't understand lots of it, but I find my mind going back to play with the concepts, like an emerging tooth, probing just where my ignorance hurts, trying to tug the sure worthwhile thing out of the sting.Barfield writes a history of consciousness from undifferentiation to differentiation. At first, humanity perceived themselves at one with all things (he names it, eventually, pantheism). Then, humans began to separate items out of that indiscriminate morass and think about them. Next, humans began to compile these various meditations into patterns. This necessarily separates the humans themselves from the things they analyze. We feel alienated from the world, individual. This is about where we are presently on the history of consciousness.Barfield proposes, as best I understand it (and I write this review for myself as well, to nail these things to my memory), that only by the imaginative capacity, the creation of meaning (from within the human by the Spirit of God), can we achieve full participation in and unity with what we perceive around us, a mature participation of true knowledge, not the blind instinctive participation of the older time. We are evolving toward this final, spiritual participation--the sanctified imagination. At the same time, we fight off the tendency to create dead perceptions of reality and call them idols.Those who object to this prescription as an element foreign to Barfield's more religiously innocuous historical commentary would do well to consider why Barfield believes humans originally participated with the world--we and nature are both perceptions of the Divine, and therefore related.The terms are rather hazy in the book; this isn't my discipline, and I was still trying to decipher some bedrock vocabulary by page 127 (which is a very good page and clarified some things for me, although I spent a disproportionate amount of time on it). It's a mercilessly difficult read. Barfield does crack a joke in the second chapter; see if you can find it. Otherwise, matters are a bit murky, chiefly because of his terminology, which for definition relies on an equally opaque context.Questions which remain for me: what exactly are idols? I'll have to read the book again sometime to find out. I understand (better) how the human race has evolved in consciousness as we relate to the world around us---how does this theory apply to our social relationships with other humans (and God)?At any rate, this metanarrative carves a tremendous amount of sense from ancient, medieval, church, Romantic, scientific, and modern worldviews, and in some ways anticipates the postmodern, although I do not think Barfield would have predicted it or considered it an evolutionary advance. Consciousness is perhaps the fundamental issue of human existence. This book, despite its difficulty, explains consciousness better than anything else I've seen (which, I admit, may not say much for my outside reading).
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Owen Barfield is unique in havin combined the work of a solicitor wit the profession of literature. In the latter his speciality has been the province of speech and words, and the history and philosophy of meaning. His works on these subjects have long won enthusiastic recognition in university circles, but are now reaching a wider public. He has been described by C. S. Lewis as 'the wisest of my unofficial advisers' and T. S. Eliot wrote of his Saving the Appearances that it was 'one of the...
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