Belief in Thinking:

Owen Barfield and Michael Polanyi

Patrick Grant

University of Victoria

I

Owen Barfield is a literary critic in the Romantic tradition, who looks to the history of science, especially to the crucial period of the seventeenth century, for clarification of the relationship between poetry and religious belief in his own time. Michael Polanyi is a scientist who looks to the language of religious faith to help illuminate the function of science in an open society, which he sees beginning in the seventeenth century and which he wishes to defend in the twentieth. The theories of both men meet and overlap on the questions of imagination and the place of art in society. Polanyi contends that appreciating the structure of a work of art can help us to acknowledge the importance of similar principles in procedures of scientific investigation. Barfield sees the poem as a structure wherein forgotten original meanings are made conscious by the yoking of incompatibles as metaphor, and argues that the nature of metaphor in modern literature is deeply influenced by the scientific revolution. From divergent starting points in fields in which they are distinguished, both men find themselves concerned with science in relation to religious belief, and both find h1 the activity of imagination the paradox of faith within which man as scientist and artist is constrained to operate.

l

1. Owen Barfield)

A recent critical assessment ~ of Barfield claims that when the literary history of our time is written, he will be mentioned as a matter of course. The main reason offered is that Barfield brings up to date a romantic tradition which had lost respectability in the early years of this century, and establishes it on a sound epistemological footing

From his first book, Poetic Diction (1928)Barfield’s preoccupation has been the generally Romantic, more specifically Coleridgean, Lotion that the human mind does not merely look upon the world,, but constructs it in perceiving it.xxx interpret this idea, Barfield looks also to the anthroposophical writings of R Rudolf Steiner, 3 whose early interest in Goethe had helped Barfield to find at, alternative to the positivistic bias of modern science, and encouraged him to pursue this problem m context of Romanticism.4[Steiner’s 'occult' side, however, has left Barfield open to a charge of uncritical enthusiast- for arcane speculation, to which Barfield replies that Romanticism without the development Steiner brings to it is puerile. s With Steiner, Romanticism comes of age and his key contribution is to appreciate the favorite Romantic idea that mind participates in what it knows, and then to show this discovery as a key step in the evolution of consciousness.

Assuming the main anthroposophical teaching about a historical development of the human mind, and developing this by way of Coleridge, Barfield holds that it is necessary for our moral and spiritual welfare to understand that there is an interior aspect to evolution. Such understanding has been obscured in the twentieth century by a materialist view of the world, and especially by the widespread acceptance of a Darwinian model of mind emergent from inanimate natured develop this argument, Barfield draws heavily on etymology, 6 maintaining, for instance, that primitive people were not simply mistaken in attributing animistic power to objects which they could name but only explain naively or superstitiously. The study of language reveals rather that the holophrase7 precedes she single name for a single object, just as mythology shows us a universe of multiple meanings interpenetrating. Early men experienced this 'original participation'8 (the sense, that is, of spirit moving in the world and in the heavens as well as inside individuals) to a degree more pronounced than is the case today. Men, it appears, were once conscious in a different way than we are now,9 and Barfield sees two periods before the Romantics as being especially significant hi charting the evolution of the modern mindful

First, Christianity introduced an original insight by way of incarnation, and, as a result, human consciousness was made so decisively aware of itself as to be able to pursue the return to at-one ment wherein man had, at first, dwelt unself-consciously. ~ ~ With X Christ, a new value is placed on the human personality as a particular,

i-aware, responsible being.

The second period occurred with the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.xx The new science is, in a way, itself a consequence of Christianity, because the world of inanimate, quantifiable objects depends on man's self-awareness set over against extended substance. ~ 1 But the Cartesian and Empiricist split between subject and object proposed also a modern isolation of the ego, ~ s now driven in upon itself by the widespread notion that the outside world, to be known truly, muse be known impersonally and in an explicit manned Barfield argues, to the contrary, that things in our experience are shaped by our minds, ~ 6 and sees the Romantics' contribution mainly in their repudiation xxx positivist idolatry of objects. The imagination, they were able to show, is active in perception itself. Yet the great Romantics were without a sense of where such a demonstration should lead them; that is, towards a situation where man could, self-consciously and systematically, use his imagination to re-invest with meaning the world which a skeptical self-consciousness and scientific positivism had drained of significance other than the measurable Barfield points out that modern physics, in dealing with micro-particles, reveals more and more clearly that the roots of matter are unrepresentable, and so the most recent development of science itself challenges the arbitrariness of the Cartesian co-ordinates upon which the history of physics since Descartes depended. Radically new ways of conceiving the structure of matter seem inevitable,~9 and Barfield anticipates a reunion of science and religion xxxx about Ey a progress towards convergence through separation. Such a reunion will be founded, moreover, on a mutual appreciation among scientists and men of religion of the transformative power of xxx thought and perception.

As is the case with any worthwhile idealism, it is diminished by summary. For Barfield this is especially so because the transformative power of imagination would be demonstrated best by the author actually using it. At this point, therefore, we can turn towards some assessment of Barfield's own gifts as a writer, and also to his sensitivity to poetry, which plays an important part in his work.

Barfield thinks, first of all, that although imagination has always been at work in literature, it is a comparatively recent development to understand how it has been at work, and the special achievement of Romanticism was to pioneer such an understanding. Coleridge's main insight on this question is expressed in a metaphor itself deriving from science, whereby he represents the mind as a polar structure able to fuse together in a new meaning things which arc divided, as was the itself, according to Descartes, into extended and thinking substances. Taking up this idea, Barfield goes on to point out that polarity is not a logical concept, and must itself be grasped by imagination:

Where logical opposites are contradictory, polar opposites arm generative of each other—and together generative of a new product.... We can and must distinguish, but there is no possibility of dividing them.... The point is, has the imagination k grasped it? For nothing else can do so. At this point the reader must k be called on, not to think about imagination, but to use it. Indeed )` we shall see that the apprehension of polarity is itself the basic act of imagination. 20

The circle is neatly closed. Polarity is basic to the act of imagination by which polarity is to be grasped, and by this device the entire gamut of human experience can be soon wonderfully collapsed. 'The ontological status of imagination turns on the relation between the mind of man and his environment; particularly on the relation between mind on the one hand and nature on the other. ~ 21 Imagination therefore is the activity which transmutes the dichotomy Itself between subject and object: only by knowing 'that' imaginatively can I know myself, and it is absurd to claim that mind emerged (as Darwin says) from a world of inanimate objects, because objects are but one element in a bi-polar structure involving subjects. Imagination, which unites them, bespeaks rather an anterior spiritual reality, out of which our awareness of the autonomy of extramental things has developed to a degree equivalent to our self-consciousness. Only by an idolatrous mistaking of the material for the 'real' have we lost sight of this rootedness of things in the originally given meaning in which eve, and the world before us, subsist.

However, because the polarity at the heart of perception is reproduced in the relation between images and structure in poetry, the experience of imagination in literature can become a guide to misdirected theories of perception. The poem, typically, shows us a passionate utterance quenched in an adapted form or frame, while the reader, a transcendent third, contains this polarity while participating in it.22 This is explained in Poetic Diction, Barfield's first book, which, as he says himself, determined the future direction of his studies, leading him through Coleridge and Steiner to a fuller exploration of how man becomes aware of himself in history.

II. THE QUALITY OF IDEALISM

Barfield's interest in poetry is convenient because it justifies in advance an approach which sympathetic critics of idealistic philosophy are often forced to adopt, and which involves defending an author in the name of imaginative coherence, despite logical deficiencies or empirical thinness. Certainly, Barfield's writing is strongest when he attends, imaginatively, to metaphoric effects of compound verbal structures, and Poetic Diction relies heavily on its author's literary sensitivity. The extended discussion of “ruin', for example, evokes older meanings of the word, and is itself an attractive, graceful exposition, with a certain literary resonance: 'Like sleeping beauties, they lie there prone and rigid in the walls of Castle Logic, waiting only for the kiss of Metaphor to awaken them to fresh life.’23 The discussion characteristically combines scholarly acuteness with romantic plangency, while staying close to the wellsprings of literature, and citing examples throughout from major poets.

Effective in the same way is the discussion of mediaeval expedience and language ('A farm cart would do for Elijah's fiery chariot on its way up to heaven'),24 or of the pidgin English for steamboat ('thleepiecee bamboo, two-piecee puff-puff, walk-along-inside, no-can

start here

see').25 Statements of fact are constantly enlivened by surprising OF challenging insight, whether on the significance of the Photian heresy in Unancestral Voice,26 or the confusion of 'equality' with 'uniformity',27 or in the image of an angel in a lounge suit as a way of distinguishing medieval conventions Mom our own.28 Here is a passage on the soul in modern times:

For the soul is the Cinderella of twentieth-century civilization. She lives on sentiment: of which we are mortally afraid, preferring to rush out of it either to the physical extreme of violence or of appetite on the one side, or on the other to a rarefied and contentless spirituality; or perhaps to try both in turn, like Aldous Huxley.29

The diagnosis is provocatively tacked down at both ends: first by the fairy story, which sets our minds in pursuit of analogies, and then by the reference to Huxley, hardly a Cinderella, whose cerebral urbanity offsets the suggestion of the merely fanciful with which the passage opened. Everywhere we c',<~'untcr aphorism acid provocative phrasing: ('interior is anterior'; 'r; residue of unresolved positivism'; 'I am all those wherein I am contained'; 'Nature unperceived is the unconscious'). 30

The literary quality of Barfield's writing, in short, is the life-blood of his theory. If the skeleton of his thought consists of abstractions, he presents some attractive flesh, if only to ask: What do you think supports such a wonderful body? Plato had discovered this technique for all his tribe: the validity of his intuitions depends on him proving them on the pulses, by the clash and interaction of dialogue, the dramatic display of personality, and the play of living imperfections upon the underlying ideology. The speculative mind in full flight, it seems, has to discover itself trammeled by the xxx and blinkers of ordinary experience. And this is as should be. Man is not a rational animal: his glory as well as his imperfection is to be rationis capax.

One consequence is that an approach to human thinking such as Barfield's is not to be taken as mainly logical. Indeed, on its own terms you cannot prove such a speculative system wrong. If you find fault say, with the notion of etheric bodies, you will be told that the term 'etheric body' is just a metaphor, or representation, and you don’t yet see what it really means. If you take any point of the argument too literally, that proves the idealist's case that you are spiritually obtuse. If you do not, you can understand it in terms of . . . What? By degrees you may be taken, as Barfield intends that you should, through an imagined past when human consciousness was different from the present, to an even mistier condition when there was consciousness but no material objects as we know them today, until you arrive at the unimaginable condition, xxx meaningful ground, as it were, of all subsequent meanings. 3 xxx are faced with a version of the ontological argument: the human mind is aware of its limitations in having to struggle after the meaning of things, but it can conceive a condition, at least in negative terms, free of this limitation, and prior to our fall into individual personalities.32 This condition, because it suggests a universe immersed in whole xxx, must exist, because meaning and existence are assumed identical.

Barfield, moreover, tries to root this kind of argument in history and appeals to etymology to show that human consciousness was indeed different in past times. This, of course, has the immediate effect of making the material world itself different in past times, threatening even to dissolve it. And so we are back with the mind itself, and its proof of the Absolute deduced from the processes of its own operation. Against this, Kant long ago leveled his guns, and :{though!' Barfield's study of etymology can be fascinating, it ultimately involves metaphysical assumptions unnecessary to his examination of the materials he discusses.33 These assumption`, besides, soon involve us in imponderables; clearly we would need to be rid of the human-mind-as-it-is-today in order to appreciate the human-mind-as-it-was. Yet neither Barfield nor we can be rid of the human mind as it is today, and to replace it with an account of the imagined object appearing to the human-mind-as-it-was would leave us still explicating a doubly determinate structure without justifying the conclusion that one meaningful cosmos is anterior to our struggle

for meaning and significance.

The problem lies not only in Barfield's conception of the past, but the future too: his idea of final participation is stirring. but imprecise. We are told that it will involve us using our imaginations systematically, 34 but not what this means in terms of day to day living. In a recent interview Barfield has this to say:

You can only envisage that [final participation] in terms of rather crude imagery. I tend to think of it as something like this: if you take a circle or a sphere you can have that sphere colored in all shades of color and all degrees of shading of a particular color. In the physical world as we know it, you can't have them all together, because one color washes out another one. But it isn't so very difficult to imagine that all the colorings of the whole sphere could coexist at the same time, in which case each one would in a sense be the whole, but would also be itself. Something in that way. Of course it's a crude picture, but it's the only way I can envisage final participation in a form that is expressible in words.35

It is not just a matter of the image being 'crude': it embodies no f particular sense, and is a failure of imagination to appear convincingly.

But we should not ignore Barfield for such reasons any more than we ignore Plato because of our doubts about the ideas or the Demiurge. Plato's most famous pupil had the right attitude. The master's idea of Absolute Justice is good, elevating and noble, but what use is it in the market place? Indeed, Plato himself had fought hard with problems of reconciling the high ideal with the just man's persecution and suffering, and it was not for Aristotle alone to ask the question of how to bring abstractions down to the complex, unlovely facts. Precisely because Barfield appreciates such claims of contingency upon his idealism, he is more readable fair most people than his mentor, Rudolf Steiner. This is partly a matter of style, two books36 even take the form of Socratic debates, and the discretion of indirection is, in literary terms, the better part of Barfield's success in plying his theories upon us. Certainly, the continuing struggle to engage the viewpoints of a remember of opposing persuasions and to keep up to date with the philosophy of science, historiography, theology and particle physics, lend an energy to his writings, for which the Platonic dialogue is a natural xxx

Still, the attempt to establish individual characters among the speakers in Worlds Apart (Ranger's youthful impetuosity, Brodie's methodical thoughtfulness) does not really affect the outcome of the argument. Whereas in Dostoevski, for example, we are continually aware of the recalcitrant, living complexity of human personalities trying to mold themselves in the form of ideas they find appealing, in Barfield it is the ideas which are recalcitrant and complex, and the characters (for the most part appealing) are easily manipulated to fit the turns of argument. People conform to their semi-allegorical names: Ranger is a rocket researcher, Burrows a depth-psychologist, and, thriving at the centre, is Burgeon, while Dunn, a logical positivist, has a 'large car' with a 'shabby body and perfectly tuned engine'.37 Whimsy notwithstanding, the idealist's rarefied atmosphere diminishes the vigor of the various human types gasping to breathe it, and the results show stylistically.

Yet there is density in Barfield's thought, and a passion for ideas, which make his dialogues good reading. Take the passage on the feeling of heaviness in the limbs with which we awaken after deep sleep:

. . . he slowly came to realize, as he had never quite succeeded in doing before, the identity between precisely this heaviness and the recreation which was sleep. The hugeness of the one was the hugeness of the other caught, as it were, in the act; so that during the day that was coming the intolerable might of its oppressive mass would be the effortless ease with which his will would again inform those inert limbs, or with which (as long as they were passive) his mind would exploit their passivity for its own vigilance. There was, after all, no more mysterious transformation than this nightly one of the fagged and jaded into the active and energetic. How could one ever hope to understand the transformation of matter into energy, of the heaviness of matter into the weightlessness of energy, without seeking also to penetrate this? For this was the transformation of matter into energy; only it was the inside of it. 38

The firmness with which the common physiological experience, rooted deeply in instinct, combines with Burgeon's abstract preoccupation with matter and energy, gives the passage complexity and novelty, and on this sort of subject Barfield is at his best.

III. THE CROSS AS POLARITY

I have drawn attention to literary effects in Unancestral Voice and Worlds Apart not just to complain about weaknesses, but to point out problems inherent in bringing Barfield's kind of idealism down to earth. This leads now to the figure of the cross, because Barfield's concern for incarnation and polarity suggests that such a symbol would be especially useful to him.

Throughout his career, Barfield has been preoccupied with unity achieved from the strife of opposites. Tension, he says, is 'an essential feature of polarity',39 and at the 'highest level', this principle leads to trinitarianism: 'The Father, from his unity, projects the Son, the Logos, and then ultimately there's a unity on another plane, another level, the Holy Spirit'.40 The concept is examined exhaustively in What Coleridge Thought, where we find that The polarity, God-Man is the basis of all polarity, in nature and elsewhere'. 4 ~ Life, we are told in Romanticism Comes of Age, 'consists in the strife of opposites', and there is a cross-shaped figure to illustrate this.42 The 'very heart' of Steiner's teaching about the self-conscious re-ascent of man to God is that it 'was made possible by the Incarnation and Death of the Divine Man (whom he also called "The Representative of Humanity") in Palestine Many years Christ, we learn in Unancestral Voice, is the 'archetype of all transformations', in which the 'death of the old' is born 'into the life of the new form', and the process of 'self-transformation through death and rebirth' is basic to our becoming individual men. 44 In a letter, Barfield makes clear how he regards the cross as an archetypal symbol of these kinds of tension, and how they symbolize man in the world:

As I see it, it is impossible to separate the idea of the true stature of human being from the symbol of the cross. This was so long before Christianity, that is the crucifixion, xxx' `! the symbol as history. Plato in the Timaeus speaks of the soul of the world being stretched upon the body of the world in the form of a cross. Again, as the essential sign of space, it symbolizes the whole of phenomenal I existence.

I think it has long been felt, in the East as well as in the West, that within the plane of spatial manifestation (on which imagery depends for its existence) vertical direction symbolizes the Man-God relation and horizontal direction the Man- Man relation, and clearly the two meet in the intersection of the arms of the cross. Both relations are, to my feeling, best understood as polarities, and the two polarities intersect at their point of maximum 'tension', that is, midway between their extremities. Psychologically and theologically one would say- all too glibly: Maximum love of one another is reached at the same point or in the same 'moment) as maximum love of God. 45

In view of this, it is of some interest that in his main books Barfield avoids analysis of the crucifixion as an historical event involving physical suffering. Although he insists on the singular importance of history for a proper understanding of man's evolution and place in the world, he looks to the Incarnation rather than the cross to develop this theme. The cross, important as it is, is mainly a symbol of transformation occurring 'at the turning-point of time, by that central death and rebirth which was the transformation of transformations'. 46 As Coleridge has it, the crucifixion and resurrection were 'the epiphanies, the sacramental acts and xxx of the Deus Patient, the visible words of the invisible Word'.47 The symbolic function, not the xxx of the just mall, attracts Barfield's attention, and his enthusiasm for Rene Guenon's Symbolism' of tile Cross, which is concerned totally with metaphysics, makes this emphasis clear.48

In Saving the Appearances, however, there is a passage which seems to break the rule. Barfield analyses the crucifixion in terms of a human failure among the lows to realize that God was immanent as well as transcendent, and among the Graeco-Romans to hold together their 'representational consciousness' with the Jewish teaching on idolatry. By a rejection of idolatry that at the same time permitted the images to enliven the heart, a smooth absorption of the significance of Christ's incarnation could have been effected. Because it failed, the crucifixion instead cook place.49

Here xxx we begin to see the problem of the cross in terms of the xxx just man. But this aspect of the event remains undeveloped, and the cross instead comes to represent the kind of problem consequent on a misunderstanding. There is, after all, no spilt blood to think about. In an essay entitled 'The Light of the World', where we do find blood, this is how Barfield describes it:

What sort of experience shall we have? We shall have read Rudolf Steiner's description, in the Cassel lectures on the Gospel of St. John, of how, when the blood flowed from the crises on Golgotha, it was much more than a merely physical xxx xxx there was r then a change in the aura of the Earth itself, so that, from being a mere planets, mere receiver of light from the sun, it began itself to emit light.50

The physical is acknowledged but immediately deflected so that Will contemplate the earth's aura. The emphasis is repeated in an essay on 'The Fall in Man and xxx where the fall has to do with the emergence of human self-consciousness, and the feeling that the ego is separated from the world of nature. But Barfield avoids entirely the problem of pain, traditionally a consequence also of the fall, and the omission is equivalent to the lack of attention to suffering, contingency, and fully-rendered character in the Socratic dialogues. _1 Barfield’s cross, therefore, is no real suffering or abandonment. He admits these occurred, certainly. but does not realize them when he writes] The argument that the crucifixion should not, if properly understood historically, be conceived as two things (a spiritual symbol and a factual execution) but as one symbolic event, is compelling, but insufficient to conjure away the hanging up of a man with nails, any more than the theory of evolution of consciousness conjures away the existence of hard rocks and bright flowers because mind-as-it-is-today was not observing them yesterday may be indeed that the sense of enormity in the crucifixion was mitigated for some observers who appreciated, in faith, the fuller symbolic dimension, though the record tells us that even the disciple who had been given enough hints about what to expect, fled xxx to go a step further and suggest that the Man hanged felt xxx less because he did not separate history and symbol would be to coddle us, and not to enliven our imaginations with a truer sense of the world Idealism, it seems, must validate itself in the thick intensities of the merely contingent, where we cannot readily assume the precedence of act over potency, essence over existence]Barfield remains best when he stays close to poetry, his first love, formic has an acute sense of how imagination works in complex verbal structures expressing particular experiences. Similarly, his wide learning, abundant insight and capacity to evoke the poetic qualities of past civilizations are continually exciting, and his theory takes on an imaginative quality of its xxx;[ At one point, Burgeon's alter ego, Burden, protests: 'What is all the excitement about? You know perfectly well it is simply the old Neo-platonism turning up again. It's always turning up in one place or another. In different disguises.'52 This is both the strength and the weakness of the kind of thought Burgeon pursues. Human beings experience intuitions of value and enduring beauty, and these form part of the meaning of life. Barfield first found such ideals imaginatively expressed in poetry, and he then set out to try to identify the structure of poetry with the structure of life itself.

IV. MICHAEL POLANYI

Michael Polanyi (1891-1976) is a challenging thinker, who demonstrates also the kind of sophistication a trained scientist can bring to the aesthetic questions this book raises. I do not suggest that somehow Polanyi is a spokesman for modern philosophy of science, though he does represent the kind of interest in history and methodology through which science increasingly promotes rapprochement with the humanities.

By contrast with Barfield, who began with poetry and developed towards an interest in science, Polanyi began with science, and ended writing about the artistic imagination. If Barfield's problem has been to render his intuitions concrete, Polanyi's is to render his scientific experience into theory, and his main solution is to say that before the complexity of knowing things in themselves, no theory is adequate. Polanyi's thought is, in a way, a theory about the limitations of theory for knowing how to deal with facts, and his reason for inventing it is to correct all the other theories which have caused trouble through people believing they could produce impossible results. Here Polanyi especially points to the skeptical and empirical approach to knowledge by Descartes and his followers, and to ideologies which developed from it, for instance the French Revolution and Marxism. 53

Polanyi's thought has the advantage of being rooted in rich practical experience. He began his career as a physician, and after the First World War worked as a chemist in Berlin, where he associated with such as Erwin Schroedinger, Max Planck and Albert Einstein. When the Nazis came to power, he left Germany to take a chair in Chemistry at the University of Manchester, later changing the focus of his academic interest, and becoming professor of social studies. This new interest was prompted by the fact that after the Second World War Polanyi had become concerned about the future of science in a society increasingly given over to ideology and planned economies.xxx The central malaise of the twentieth century, particularly made manifest in the violence of two recent wars and a revolution in Russia, he came to attribute to a combination of unrealistic hopes in ideological modes of thought, and an intense critical skepticism engendered by the founders of empiricism.55 An immediate effect of the critical philosophy of Locke and his Enlightenment disciples, Polanyi thought, was to separate the concerns of religious faith from those of secular society, and in so doing to weaken the prestige of traditional ecclesiastical authority. At the same time, the Enlightenment placed a high value on toleration,

Michael Polanyi (1891—1976) is a challenging thinker, who de andontheidealofahumane,secularculture.Socialreformonawide

monstrates also the kind of sophistication a trained scientist can bring scale during the following two hundred years was therefore largely

to the aesthetic questions this book raises. I do not suggest that an outcome of the combined advantages of technical progress and

somehow Polanyi is a spokesman for modern philosophy of science, anti-authoritarian philosophies.

though he does represent the kind of interest in history and Yet the reforms also required ideals to motivate them, even though

methodology through which science increasingly promotes rap- the secular impulse encouraged a disregard for the traditional

aspirations of a millenium and a half of Christian practice. Men of die

Middle Ages had been inspired with high ideals (for example the City

of God), but were assured also of failing to realize them on earth

because of Original Sin. The new movement contrived to keep, in

secular form, the old desire for moral perfection in a heavenly city,

~~1 Al it with ~ `ecl~lar pursuit of rnateri I progress and

prochement with the humanities.

(ana coml~l1lc-u 1~ Wall ~ ~~-~~a~ ~~~~ widespread skepticism about man's fallen nature.

Such an unstable mixture of moral passion and skepticism in European history led eventually to disastrous vicious circles which Polanyi calls 'moral inversion'. A man, for instance, who desires physical well-being for his fellows soon encounters the recalcitrance of society, and then confirms the purity of his moral passion by denouncing complacency Ad and hypocrisy in those who wet> have c compromised with the imperfections of society by accepting its traditional values. One way to preserve . integrity is therefore to react` arc.. violently against morality in its traditional forms. Nihilism is one result, and with it comes a kind of ruthless immorality, .I pitiless machinery of violence which paradoxically becomes the validation of moral honesty and of an ideal material progress.

Polanyi applies his idea of “moral inversion' to the main events of recent European history, and, With various degrees of elaboration and subtlety, to many of its principal thinkers and writers. Out the argument Is not me rely academic; Polanyi believes that moral passions need to be guided by the kinds of skilled knowledge slowly and painstakingly developed by civilization, and this goes for science as well as government. Modern science is tile fruit of an enormously complex development beginning at the Renaissance and, in those countries where it manages to thrive, its traditions have been handed on by the skills of teachers and through the processes of accreditation which in turn afford opportunities for research whereby science sustains itself. 56 However, by introducing the concept of methodical doubt, science also has done much to undercut the respect accorded both to tradition and authority, and this is especially the case in a period of political turmoil such as the twentieth century, when zeal for reform, itself nurtured in the climate of skeptical secularism, is likely to dictate the ends to which science should be directed. But to attempt detailed scientific planning is to ignore all that history- shows about the development of scientific method: that it is a skilled kind of knowledge learned by apprenticeship within an immensely rich and complex tradition, making progress by tentative gropings forward, whereby new discoveries arc assimilated by the scrutiny and skilled assessment of experts. The process is open-ended, and its future results are unpredictable. 57 For that very reason, it seems to offer an opportunity to morally concerned politicians who see loose rather than open ends, and who then plan to tie these up, harnessing science for social reform.

During the Second World War the British Association for the Advancement of Science Salt founded a division tic to recommend planned research, and Polanyi opposed it.58 His concern continued after the war, and, by way of the Lysenko affair, came to involve his critique of Marxism, which he saw as a major manifestation of moral inversion. To bring off his defense of science in such circumstances Polanyi was forced increasingly to argue his case in epistemological terms: only if we can describe the structure of the human mind in the act of knowing, can we prescribe how it best operates in making ''CiCllti6C disc xxx. '

Polanyi's epistemology and his social theory therefore develop together, and in epistemology his major insight has to do with the dynamics of what he calls the 'tacit dimension'. This corresponds to his analysis of the non-explicit aspirations which influence social progress, and constitute the sense of tradition in a culture. Basically, it implies that we always 'know more than we can tell'. For example, in ordinary experience 'We know a person's face, and can recognize it among a thousand, indeed among a million. Yet we usually cannot tell how we recognize a Ace we know’.59 This is because we 'attend, from a large number of clubs most of which we cannot identify, to the physiognomy which they indicate'. 60 The focus of our attention (the physiognomy) is thus the meaning of the clues which make up the coherent shape, but we are only subsidiarily aware of the clues as we attend to the lace we know. If we focused on the clues themselves we would lose sight of the f ace, just as we can lose the meaning of a word by attending focally to the syllables as mere sounds, or as a piano player will freeze if he focuses on his fingers instead of the music.

After analyzing numerous such examples, Polanyi concludes that because of the bodily rootedness of human reason, and the dependency of language on powers of sensitivity and attention present in animals, we cannot make articulate the ultimate framework of what we know. Rather, we are committed to it 'passionately and tar beyond our comprehension', for we 'live in it as in the garment of our: own skin',62 and cannot divest ourselves of this responsibility by setting up objective criteria of verifiability. Consequently, even at the heart of science the art of knowing (or skill, connoisseurship) remains a; unspecifiable.

The principles of tacit knowledge apply also to art, and on this . subject Polanyi resorts to a further distinction between ‘self-xxxx integrations' and 'xxx integrations' to explain some relative differences within the same general structure between scientific and . artistic endeavors.

The crucial point point about xxx integrations is that the focus of attentions is more important than the subsidiary clues, and this is the case Title most 'scientific' knowing, and with our knowledge of 'objects'. But in self-giving integrations the subsidiary clues are more important, so that we are forced to participate us the integration more fully. In short, the 'participation of the knower in his object deepens religion, and so it is of inter ~ interest to notice the kind of weakness Barfield perceives in Polanyi's thought. This has to do with a Cartesianism' so deeply assumed that it deceives even the liberal philosopher who wishes to denounce dualistic in all its forms. Polanyi continually assumes that we 'dwell in' our bodies, 73 and this, says Barfield implies an independence of thought and object persistently reasserting itself in Polanyi's language despite his theory. Certainly Polanyi does indulge what Barfield considers the cardinal error of thinking about the universe as 'inanimate matter' from which human lite has evolved, without considering what function the evolution of consciousness may have for our understanding of what 'inanimate matter' is. Barfield's thought on this question itself confounds us in problems beyond logic, and, consequently, I have no qualms in following Polanyi when he talks about the practical skills of riding a bicycle or reading x-ray photographs, claiming that we extend our physical bodies out to contain these objects as tools, reaming to use them as extensions of ourselves. But Barfield will not be so easily shaken off, for we do not need to swallow his whole metaphysical theory to acknowledge that Polanyi's language often assumes, as Barfield says, a suppressed dualism.

For instance, Polanyi says of his paper 'On Body and Mired', that it offers 'a unified view of consciousness' which 'includes the bodymind relation in its entirety'. Yet he talks about using things outside of ourselves 'in the way we use our body',72 and the problem is reproduced also in Polanyi's attitude to the personal, which, he claims, transcends both subjective and objective, and is the hallmark of human nature.73 Personal choices, we learn, result in a set xxx]f-xxx standards by means of which we explore the world. But these personal choices are not, it appears, subjective, for Polanyi allows criteria independent of other beliefs, against which we can test ourselves. In the tension between subjective and objective, that hazardous realm between body and mind where these are described as distinct yet known to be one, Polanyi locates what he asks us to recognize as the person, but without speculating on what- kind! of agency enables us to transcend the dichotomy.

Barfield, in a way, had begun at this point by calling upon imagination, and asking us to acknowledge the actin of the mysterious third force which reconciles the polar opposites from which understanding is wrought. But Polanyi’s descriptions of human learning are both more existential and more doggedly practical than Barfield’s The problem of imagination is not central to Polanyi's main work at all, and when he does begin to show an interest in it, he describes it as functionally as he can: 'I call all thoughts of things that are not present, or not xxx present - or perhaps never to be present -- acts of the imagination. When I intend to lift my arm, this intention is an act of my imagination. In this ease imagination is not visual but muscular....'74 Persona! Knowledge is in many respects a brilliant and thorough-going boot:, but it has remarkably little to say on this subject, and only late in Polanyi's career does the question begin to become urgent. It is as if the unlived life of his own theory had begun to catch up with it, and in a series of papers and lectures written towards the end of his life he explores the creative imagination in myth, ritual, poetry and modern art.75 Here we first find the distinction between self-giving and self-centered integrations.

Polanyi's attempt to extend the theory of tacit knowing into the sphere of aesthetics has the effect of immediately bringing to the surface those assumptions hidden by his earlier pragmatic agnosticism. For instance, he now repeatedly describes imagination as a 'power', and within five lines we hear ofof wider powers of meaningful integration', a 'whole range of dynamic powers in art', a 'mental power which can establish a meaning'.76 We can understand, it seems, the structure of the integrations Polanyi describes if we first of all grant that there is a power which enables them. The occult qualities which empiricism fought hard to banish as underminers of sound method, we now find resuming through a back door. Unless, that is, the seat of these powers is itself explained. And occasionally Polanyi does venture upon the fringes of territory Barfield has marked for his own. Indeed, the only place Polanyi ever quotes Barfield is in these late essays,77 where he flirt' also with the problem of polarity ('Opposites may conflict, but on a deeper level they are one'), 7 8 and where we find an occasional sense of Barfieldian mystery about the nature of matteer r ('A belief in the gradual emergence of man from an inanimate universe reveals to us that the cleat matter of our origins was fraught with meaning far beyond all that we are presently able to see in it'). 79 But Polanyi stops short of Barfield's conclusions: the xxx either! is tentative, and Polanyi distrusts the other man's Barfield, in a way, had begun at this point by calling upon metaphysics. Speculation on the spiritual, it seems, even to the end, is imagination, and asking us to acknowledge the action of the no bushiness t-or the scientifically practiced mind.

In these late essays, however, Polanyi also develops an insight to modernism that Barfield does not have. Here we should look again at the notion of “transnatural integrations,” describing the interaction between a poem and its structure, a painting and its frame, a drama and stage conventions, and assuring us that we are not watching either an illusion or real life:

The mechanisms that serve to arouse us from our private concerns and to open our minds to follow a work of art are artificial products: their power to arouse and isolate our minds lies in their artificiality, which sharply clashes with our day-to-day experience.80

Polanyi, in this vein, insists everywhere that the artist's interpretation of experience must differ sharply from our usual perceptions',' and his point is that art is different from life. Admittedly, art, like science and morality, has a bearing on everyday things, without u which there would be none of these sciences at ail. A symbol, for instance has a, be 'akin to the matter that it embodies',82 and, conversely, our appreciation of art can help us to give form to the muddled xxx of our personal lives. We 'make it our own and clarify our lives by it. Art moves us, therefore, through influencing the lived quality of our very existence. In other words, without art our existence would mean much less to us,'83 and, like myth and ritual, it invites our submission to the order it presents. Also, like science, it seeks to discover the hidden pattern which becomes part of the universe of self-set standards by which we attempt to deal with the worlds

Still, we must acknowledge that art has a 'comprehensive context', whereas life does not, and from this point of view Polanyi approaches the question of modernism, joining the ranks of the neologisers on this subject by coining the term 'Visionary Art'86 to describe the artistic revolution which took place at the beginning of this century. He looks to Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallard, Eliot, Pound and the surrealists for examples, and claims they are inheritors of the problems of moral inversion with which European civilization has been burdened since the scientific revolution. But instead of ignoring the chaos into which the universe of traditional xxx has when, the painters and poets looked to imagination to short.- up tile ruins against decay:

Because painters and posts xxx the world as absurd, they represented it as a heap of fragments. But because they were artists, their vision brought this supposedly dead pile to life in their works of art! These artists thus preserved the floor of their nihilistic protest by cutting the world to pieces; but they inadvertently triumphed over this destruction of meaning in our social life by evoking in this xxx meaningful xxx never witnessed before. This triumph at once ~ crowned the artists as creators of meaningful visions and succeeded in allowing them, in their own minds, to leave the 'pile' there as an expression of protest against the chaotic conditions of the age.xx

In a way, by contributing to the destruction of coherence, modernism itself may be accused of nurturing nihilism, but Polanyi claims the artistic achievement justifies the risk: 'On balance, therefore, it would seem to have achieved more meaning, in spite of itself, than it has destroyed, HE

Polanyi's view of modernism is plainly at one with the sense, shared by critics and aestheticians alike since the late nineteenth century, that art is not essentially representative. 'Since a purely visionary poem says nothing that can be expressed in a prose statement, the problem of mimesis cannot arise', 89 and much modern art, consequently, calls attention to the redeeming fact itself of the imagination's capacity to fuse incompatibles together:

. . . only modern art has made it clear that what art does is to create facts of our imagination. It is these facts of our imagination, presented to us by our artists, that form part of the thought that makes up our culture.90

By thus claiming that art is at one with the whole range of the human sciences, and that these in unison attempt to widen the range of our<self-set standards, Polanyi insists ultimately on the differences between art and the meaning of things in themselves. The contribution of modernism is to call attention to this very difference, and therein lies its genius. Barfield, whose interest in the Romantics encouraged him to stress the continuity between art and life, as he did between consciousness Slid existence, has little sympathy with such view. In Saving the Appearances he complains of the 'riot of private and personal symbolisms'9' that characterizes modern art, and welcomes attacks on it, such as Graham Hough’s xxx xxx xxx v 2

Despite such differences, however, Barfield and Polanyi con-conspicuously agree in their central analyses of metaphor and the complex integrations through which the imagination declares itself demanding the personal participation of the knower in the known Both analyze the importance of Christianity to the history of science and agree upon the importance of the scientific revolution to modern`; consciousness. As with Barfield, the peculiar cast of Polanyi's attitude to these questions is expressed in his treatment of the cross.

Vl. THE CROSS AS COMMITMENT

Polanyi's repeated teaching that we can never make articulate the premises of our knowledge, and that in every act of knowing we are committed beyond our understanding, leads him to affirm repeatedly the Augustinian maxim, nisi credideritis ''on intelligitis; unless you believe you will not understand. 93. Just as we do not know clearly our intellectual roots, so we do not know where our discoveries will lead us, or what fruit they will bear. Instead, we 'dwell in' the articulate framework we inherit from our culture, using it to move our knowledge forward to more adequate conceptions of that reality with which we make contact by way of our theories.94 Indwelling is a prior condition of breaking out, and in our lives as thinking human beings, continual restlessness calls in question whatever satisfactions we achieve.

The main point about 'nisi credideritis', therefore, is that it enables us to acknowledge the tension and uncertainty inherent in our human manner of being in the world, and for Polanyi the key insight of Christianity is that it 'sedulously fosters, and in a sense permanently satisfies, man's craving for mental dissatisfaction by offering him the comfort of a crucified God'. 9s The cross represents the conditions of knowledge itself, for the cross is fraught with anguish and inherent dubiety96 while it calls upon faith and directs us towards an 'unthinkable consummation', 97 assuming at the same time the burden of our past imperfections. The cross, moreover, teaches that it is 'the Christian's duty to believe in this epochal event and to be totally absorbed by its implications. Faith, fait] that mocks reason, faith that scornfully declares itself to be mere foolishness in the face of Greek rationalism—this is what Paul enjoined xxx his audiences'.98 Polanyi concludes, provocatively, that the Pauline scheme of faith, works and grace, based on the cross, is the 'only adequate conception of scientific discovery',99 and he would have us acknowledge the symbol as effective because we can make it stand for such a complex range of modern, sophisticated knowledge.

But on the cross as a Given' symbol, divinely revealed, Polanyi has little to say, as he has on the spiritual nature of the 'powers' of human imagination. His view of art, as of human experience in general, is rather that our statements are concretions out of a world of flux, that man is being-in-a-world,' °° and condemned to doubt, always in process towards truth which he can never make finally explicit. Human culture, like modem visionary art, shores up the fragments, and man's rootedness in potential thought is the central Act of his nature. Unlike Barfield, Polanyi feels the primacy of potency to act. We are left, admittedly, open to acknowledge a higher meaning for religious symbols, but the risks in affirming these are our own, and the cross remains the sign of our suffering incompleteness in all things.

Vll. CONCLUSION

Barfield and Polanyi both approach the problem of a dissociation in sensibility occasioned by the rise of science during the seventeenth century, and each takes one of the two broad routes open to philosophy on such a question: Barfield's bias is rationalist, and Polanyi's empirical. Barfield, so to speak, works down, whereas Polanyi works up, so that the challenge in the first case is to have language concretize the author's intuitions of transcendence, and in the second to open up the technical discussion to mystery broached by the theory. If the rationalist needs to express convincingly a sense of the anomalous contingencies of human existence, the empiricist needs to dream of higher things, and it seems that in the history of Western culture during the last three hundred years a universe of discourse permitting a seamless continuity between these realms of human experience has been increasingly hard to find. Traditionally, their mediation had been by way of what St. Augustine called 'spiritual vision', indicating that effect of language by which we appreciate most clearly the mind's capacity to experience the concretized universe, the particularized general. In short, Augustine propounded a theory of imagination in which images are the dynamic centre of human language, and his insight remains valid, for without it we court either an excess of rationalism (ignoring the recalcitrance of things) or of empiricism xxx to an idolatry of things). Still, the practicing scientist and the Neoplatonism aesthetician start, as we expect, from the bias determined by the universe of discourse with which each is familiar. With Barfield and Polanyi, such starting points are, in a way, polar opposites, but it is a measure of their understanding of human experience in xxx that their xxx should overlap on the question of imagination, and on the so u' tort ill art as a paradigm for the dynamic, xxx xxx <,xxx hut; knowledge.

CHAPTER 6

Romantirism Comes of Age, 5X, 59; Speaker's Meaning, I l; The GaseJor A??tJ?ropojuphy (London: Rudolt Steiner Press, Iy7o), p. 7.

?4. See Una??restral Voire, p. 4o; 'Partieiparion and Isolation'. p. 9; Saying tli?, Appearaures, pp. 9, of.

I 5. See '(jut the Consciousness Soul', Romantirism Come; of Age, pp. 84 fl.

6. See Wl?at Coleridge Thought, passim.

17. 'this is Bafi~eld's 'final~participation'. See Saving the Appearaures, pp. 133 fir.; Romantirism CO???eS of Age, 60, 61; Speal~er's Meaning, p. 114.

18. See una??cestral Voire, pp. 119 95.; Worlds Apart (Conneetieur: Wesleyan University Press, 1963), pp. 76 95., et passim.

19. Jnan?estral Voire, p. 133.

no. What Coleridge 71lought, p. 36.

I. R. J. Reilly, 'A Note on Barfield, Romanticism, and Time', in E?'olVtio?? of Consciousness. Studies in Polarity, ed. Shirley Sugerman (Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1976), p. 183.

7. See What Coleridge Thought (Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 971)

3. See especially Romantirism Comes of Age (collnectict?t: Wesleyan University Press, 1967; first published 1944), for a collection of essays written front an anthroposophical view-point.

4. See especially, Shirley Sugerman, 'A Conversation with Owen Barfield', in

EVolUtio?? of Co??sCio?dsneSS, p, I ?.

5. See Romanticism Comes oJ Age, pp. ? 6 ff; and R. ]?. Reilly, Romantic Religion (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1971), p. 16.

6. See especially, History i?? English Words (London: Faber and Faber, ?953). Also Poetic Diction (London: Faber and Faber, 196z, first published ? 9a8), Saving the Appearanres: A Study in Idolatory (London: Faber and Faber, New York: I-larcourt, Brace and World, Inc., ?S?55), and Speaker's Meaning (Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1970), all make use of the history of words.

7. See Poetic Diction, esp. chs. 111 anti IV, pp. 60- 8~).

8. The phrase is distinguished from 'final participation', and the concept is analysed especially in savings? the Appearaures, esp. pp. ~8 If; 4o 95.; 133 Q

y. See, for example, Ron?a??tirism conies of Age, pp. 70, 184; ur?aUrestral Voire (Conuccticut: Wesleyan University Press, rg6S)' p. ?4.

to. See 'Participation and Isolation, A Frish Light on Present Discontents', in She Rcdisrovery of Meaning and (9tner l.`say, (Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1977), p. cod: 'Another thing which these books of mine have in common is that their standpoint is always historical.'

I 1. See Romantirism Comes Al Age, p. :3 ?; 'Philology and the Incarnation', in Rediscovery, p. z34. Barfield's view ofthe process is summarised by Reilly, l~o???antir Religion, pp. Z1 tT.

I a. See Romantirism Comes oJ Age, p. 43. and 'The "Son of God " and the 'Son of Man",' Rediscovery, pp. :49 of.

13. Barfield insists everywhere on the crucial nature of the scientific revolution. See for instance, Saving the Appearanres, 6, X, ~ o, I I, I 8, zo, ~ I, et passim; l tnanrestral

Voice, 95, log; 'Participation and Isolation', 7; Wl?at (:.~oh ridge 77?0~,g??/, 48;

l

11. Ibid., pp. 71-72.

12. Ibid., p. 70. Barfield says the poem is imagination appearing.

23. Poetir Diction, p. I l5.

24. Saving the Appearances, p. 73.

25. Poetic Diction, p. 49.

26. Pp. 101 If.

27. 'Participation and Isolation', pp. IZ if.

28. Saving the Appearaures, p. 73.

29 Ron?anticistn Comes o|Age, p. 174.

30 Unanrestral Yoire, p. 16; Sugerman, 'A Conversation', p. 13; Unanrestral Voire, p. 163; Romantirism Comes of Age, p. all.

31. Unanrestral Voile, pp. 14, 90; Romantirism Comes of Age, 70; Speaker's Meaning, pp. 93 if.; Saving the Appearaures, pp. 4, 7 - 8.

32. An interesting embodiment of this conception in literature is described by U. Milo Kaufmann, Paradise in the Age al Milton, English Literary Studies, No. I I (1968), as'l:initude mangue'.

33. See John J. Mood, 'Poetic Languaging and Primal Thinking. A Study of Barfield, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger', Encounter, XXVI (1965), p. 426, accusing Bafi?eld of making assu?nptions. There is a brief, energetic

Nuttall, A Cortunot! shy' p. 121.

Saving the Aypearan~es, p. 137.

Sugerman, 'A Conversation', pp. 17-28.

Worlds Apart, and to a lesser degree, Una,??estrdl Voire. Worlds Apart, p. 6z.

arnic?` on Ban`;eld in

34.

35.

36.

37.

38. Unanrestral Voire, p. 104.

39. Sugcrman, 'A Conversation', p. Ig.

40. Ibiza., p. 20.

41~ What Coleridge Tlun/glit, p. I ? 3.

42. Ro'H,?titii isle C Trot S of Ag`, pp. I S4, I 56.

43. Ibid., p. 231.

44. Utiaurestral Voirr. pp. I'`, 1S8.

45 Letter, dated 7June 1977.

46. Unanrestral Voile, p. 163.

47 W)lat Coleridge 71?0?4ght, p. 156.

`8 l" ~ to ~~~;,kl recommends dub bc?olc u ?tssemul tea~bug on the subject.

49. 50.

Saving the Appearanres, p. 172,

Supplement to Ant)?roposophi~ Mf?t'?t?tt1Kt~? (Feb., 1974). p. 3.

Art.

51. Romantiris~n ('Ames of Age, pp. 205 If.

52. Unancessral Voice, p. 23.

53. See Personal Knowledge. Inwards a Post-C.ritiral l~hilosop/iy (New York: Harper Torchbooks, ~964; first published 19S8), pp. 269 95.; and 'Beyond Nihilism' (~960), ed. Marjorie Grenc, Knocking and Being (C'h~cago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), pp. 3--23. These themes recur throughout Polanyi's writings.

54. Science, Faith and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ~y64), 'Background and Prospect', pp. 7- I9. This new introduction gives an account of how the book came to be written in 1946.

55. The following account of scientific method and moral inversion summarises a theory which recurs throughout Polanyi's writings, for example: Personal Knowirdge, 203-45; 'Beyond Nihilism', ed. Grene, pp. 3--~&; The Tacit Dimension (New York: Anchor Books, Go), pp. 5S if; 'Flee Logic of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, Igsl), pp. 8 If., 93 ff. Good critical summaries can be found in Harry Prosch, 'Cooling the Modern Mind', Skidmore College Bulletin (1971), pp. 5 95., and 'Polanyi's Ethics', Ethics, 82 (Jan. '97~), gin ~ t3; 'Polanyi's Tacit Knowing in the "Classic" Philosophers', Journal v/ the British Society for Phenorurnology, Vol. 4, No.3 (Oct., ~ 973), pp. no ~ - ~ 6. For a full scale application of Polanyi to the history of philosophy, see Marjorie Grcne, 77re Knower and the Known (Berkeley: The University of California Press, ~974).

56. See, for example, The Logic of Liberty, pp. 8 -- 14; s3 fit:; Science, l aith and Society, pp. z4, z6, 74 95.; Meaning (with Harry Prosch), (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 197s), p. I 4s

57. The open-endedness of scientific enquiry, and the unpredictability of the results of research are favourite themes. See for instance Personal Knowledge p. 5, et passim; TO 'rarit Dimension, pp. 53 ff.

58. The story is su mmariscd in Polanyi's new pref ace to Science, Faith and Society (1964), and the grounds of his opposition are stated in the book.

5y. The Tacit Dimension, p. 4.

60. 'On Body and Mind', The New Scholasticism, 43 (~969), p. 199.

61. Ibid., p. 200

62. Personal Knowledge, p. 64.

63. 'Meaning'. Unpublished lecture given at the University of Chicago, April,

, pp. 18, 4.

64. 'The Meaning of Paintings'. Unpublished lecn~rc (1967), pp. 7- 8. 1 acknowledge with thanks the generosity of Professor Harry Prosch in providing typescripts of Polanyi's Icctures. These, in collaboration with Michael Polanyi, Professor Prosch has since edited in Meaning. I refer to the lecture drafts when the emphasis seems different from the edited version.

65. 'Meaning', p. 5.

66. 'The Meaning of Paintings', p. 14.

67. 'What is a Painting?', Else American Scholar, 39 (Autumn, ~970), p. 656.

68. Ibid., p. 664. Polanyi does not mean that all painting must be representative, and he examines also the structure of non-representative paintings (e.g., p. 663).

6y. Ibid., p. 664.

70. Ibid., p, 665.

7 I, See What Coleridge Thought, p. 247, n. 29. 8arfield also has brief remarks on Polanyi in The Caselor Anthroposophy, pp. I w - 12, and Rediscovery, p. 181.

72. 'On Body and Mind', p. 199.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 6

~ (it)

73. Personal Knowledge, pp. 300 of.

74. 'The Creative In~agination', Tri-Quarterly (1966), p ~ 18.

75. Some of these were gathered and edited by Polanyi and Harry Prosch in

Meaning.

76. 'The Meaning of Paintings', pp. 4- 5.

77. Meaning cites only one reference in the index, but the lectures mention

Barfield more frequently—see for instance, 'Meaning: A Project', p. 20; 'The

Meaning of Paintings', pp. 6, 15; 'Meaning', p. 8.

78. Meaning, p. 12y.

79. ~id., p. 147.

80. Ibid., pp. 117 - 18.

81. Ibid., p. 109.

82. 'Meaning: A Project', unpublished lecture, p. 23.

83.

84.

85.

86.

87.

88.

Meaning, p. 109.

See 'The Meaning of Paintings', p. 26.

Personal Knowledge, p. 65.

See Meaning, ch. 7, 'Visionary Art', pp. I o8 - 19, esp. p. I 12.

Ibid., pp. 115-16.

.. Ibid., pp. 116-17. The original lecture is less grudging: 'its power to transcend this decomposition by new ranges of visionary experience has revealed us worlds of the imagination, and I accept the balance.' 'Visionary Art', p. 12.

89. Ibid., p. 112.

90. Ibid., p. ~ ~ s

g l. Saving the Appearances, p. 131.

92. Romanticism Comes of Age, p. 20. Yet it is not so simple. Hugh Kenner in The Pound Era (London: Faber and Faber, 1972), PP.105 - 6,163, et passim, describes the preoccupation of modernism with etymology and the tensions of polarised energy. Some of his descriptions of Fenollosa apply well to Barfield. Also, Polanyi's indebtedness to the phenomenological movement, acknowledged especially in The Study of Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), P. 102, bears close resemblance to Barfield's appeal to the same body of thought in Speaker's Jileanin,t, PP. 106 ff. The modernism of both men reflects in their study of history. An interesting, more oblique connection is by way of Marjorie Grenc's appeal to the physicist David 13ohm to develop Polanyi's ideas. See The Knower and the Known, P. 246. Professor Bohm is a favourite authority of Barfield's.

93. Polanyi uses this phrase throughout his writings. An example is, Personal Knowledge, p. 266. For further analysis, see my article, 'Michael Polanyi: The Augustinian Component', The New Srholas~irlsm, XLV111, 4 (Autumn, 1974), PP 438-- 63,

94. See Personal Knowledge, 'Dwelling In and Breaking Out', pp. 195-204.

95. Ibid., p. 199.

96. Ibid., pp. 279 of.

97. Ibid., p. 405.

98. 'Faith and Reason', ed. Fred Schwartz, Psyrholog~ral Issues, Vol. V111, No. 4, mOn0BraPh 32, 'Scientific Thought and Social Reality, ES5JYS by Michael Polanyi' (New Yorlc: International Universities Press, 1974), P. 117.

fig. Ibid., p. 130.

too. This is Marjorie Grenr's conclusion: see The Knower and the Known, pp. 56, 61.