Speaker's Meaning

Owen Barfield's book Speaker's Meaning is comprised of four lectures delivered in 1965 at Brandeis University. These are high-level literary analyses; he doesn't dwell, as he did in Romanticism Comes of Age, on a single Shakespearean play, as in "The Form of Hamlet," or on a single Romantic writer, as in "Goethe and the Twentieth Century" and "The Philosophy of Samuel Taylor Coleridge." Instead, he looks at general trends in the history of language, evidenced in literature. Regarding the meaning of individual words, he finds two general trends at work: contraction and expansion. He describes contraction of meaning this way: "The meaning of the word, or the extension of the term, shrinks so that it comes to denote ... only one particular part of some larger area or category, the whole of which it formerly included." (40) The force behind contraction is lethargy -- custom, habit. "The actual meaning of a word must be regarded as a kind of habit, the normal habit of contemporary people when they speak or write; and a good dictionary will contain the best way possible of recording or describing that habit." (29) Barfield refers to this as the lexical meaning of any word. On the other hand, expansion of meaning occurs when the denotation of a word comes to include some aspect that it didn't previously include. This usually -- perhaps always and only -- happens when the lexical comes in sharp tension with an individual speaker's meaning. The individual speaker denotes, in a radical way, a wider expanse of phenomena than the lexical meaning does. This is all very dry and analytical, though certainly astute and worth pointing out. Barfield's real brilliance consists in drawing out the implications of such analyses. One of the implications of this analysis of the changing meaning of words due to contraction and expansion is that logical positivism -- still a force, invisible though it may be -- cannot maintain its claim that metaphysics is a mistaken use of language and that the word's meaning is the way it is normally used to mean, since of course there were times and are places still where the normal use of many words is metaphysical. The second implication is that, on the same grounds, the conclusion is obvious that human consciousness has changed through the millennia. "The most fundamental assumptions of any age are those that are implicit in the meanings of its common words. In our time these happen to be largely the assumptions of nineteenth-century positivism." (44) There was a time, and are still places, when and where "to think of mind, or mental activity, or intelligence of any sort outside of some particular physical brain ... was something that caused them no difficulty at all." (45) The Imagination of the Romantics arose, therefore, partly -- but most significantly -- because the human relationship to nature, to reality, had changed. This change occupies Barfield in Chapter 3 of Speaker's Meaning, "The Psychology of Inspir