Julian Jaynes and Owen Barfield on the Origins, Nature, and Trajectory of Consciousness

John Schedel, paper presented at The Julian Jaynes Society Conference on Consciousness and Bicameral Studies, Charleston, WV, June 2013.

Abstract: Owen Barfield wrote a review of The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind in the February, 1979, issue of Teachers College Record (80.3: 59-61). In this review, Barfield made several trenchant observations about Jaynes’s contentions. It will be my purpose to describe and analyze Barfield’s critique of Jaynes’s work and to propose possible implications of that critique.

Owen Barfield (November 9, 1898-December 14, 1997) was a British philosopher, author, poet, and critic. He has been known as “the first and last Inkling”, who had a profound effect on the writings of fellow Inklings, C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, as well as T.S. Elliot, Saul Bellow, Howard Nemerov, and James Hillman. Barfield was an anthrosophist who has been characterized as being both a Christian writer and as a learned anti-reductionist writer.

Barfield’s Saving the Appearances: A Study of Idolatry (1988), along with his earlier Poetic Diction (1973) pertain most directly to his views about consciousness. These books, therefore, will be used as the primary bases for the analysis that will be pursued in this paper. …

… My purpose in this paper will be to make a preliminary attempt to compare and contrast Barfield’s and Jaynes’s views as “psychoarchaeology” and “psychohistory”. Possible distinctions between “hallucinations” and “shared representations” will be described. Barfield’s concepts of “collective representations”, “figuration and thinking”, and “participation” will be described and analyzed. Barfield’s views concerning “original participation” will be compared and contrasted with Jaynes’s descriptions of the bicameral mind and its breakdown. Barfield’s and Jaynes’s views about the “trajectory” of consciousness will also be compared and analyzed. Possible implications and suggestions for further research will be offered.