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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #233740 in Books
• Published on: 1988-08-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 191 pages

Review
"We are well supplied with interesting writers, but Owen Barfield is not content to be merely interesting. His ambition is to set us free ... from the prison we have made for ourselves by our ways of knowing, our limited and false habits of thought, our 'common sense'" (Saul Bellow )

From the Publisher
5 1/2 x 8 1/2 trim. LC 88-5563

Customer Reviews

A door to perception
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.

excellent book
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.

In brief
One of the most unduly under-appreciated books of the second half of the 20th century.