Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry

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.

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.

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.

A good work of philosophy doesn't make the reader want to argue with the author, it makes the reader want to ask more questions. If so, then this is a great book of philosophy. Even though I don't agree with all of Barfield's arguments or his conclusions, my world view is changed - on how see the nature of the scietific process; on how I read litterature, both ancient and modern; about the underlying assumptions of how I see the world and how these assumptions came to be. There are so many weak and shallow books on conciousness being being published now, read this for its depth.