PWJ: S4E55 – AH – “After Hours” with Dr. Robert Koons
Dr. Robert Koons takes us on a tour of Middle Earth with J.R.R. Tolkien, Owen Barfield and Plato!
S4E55: “After Hours” with Dr. Robert Koons (Download)
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Timestamps
00:00 – Entering “The Eagle & Child”…
00:09 – Welcome
00:40 – Dr. Robert Koons
02:31 – Quote-of-the-week
03:12 – Drink-of-the-week
03:46 – Discussion: Finding the Inklings and Barfield
05:08 – Discussion: Platonism
07:00 – Discussion: Neoplatonism
09:58 – Discussion: Cambridge Center Talk
10:36 – Discussion: Five Theological Theses
12:47 – Discussion: Tolkien’s Philosophy
20:05 – Discussion: Owen Barfield
23:06 – Discussion: Ancient Semantic Unities
41:56 – Discussion: So what?
45:46 – Discussion: Growth in Tolkien scholarship
46:24 – Discussion: More information
46:41 – Closing Thoughts
YouTube Version
After Show Skype Session
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Show Notes
Biography
Robert C. (“Rob”) Koons is a professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin, where he has taught for 33 years. He is the author or co-author of four books, including: Realism Regained and The Atlas of Reality: A Comprehensive Guide to Metaphysics. He is the co-editor of The Waning of Materialism, and co-editor of Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives on Contemporary Science. He has been working recently on an Aristotelian interpretation of quantum theory, on defending and articulating Thomism in contemporary terms, and on arguments for classical theism.
Biographical information for Dr. Robert Koons
Chit Chat
- I first came Dr. Koons through a video where he was presenting a talk entitled, Tolkien, Barfield, and Neoplatonism: How Metaphysics Moulded Middle Earth:
- In this episode of Barfield Month we’re going to talk about some of the ideas in the talk.
Quote-of-the-week
- The quote-of-the-week is Lewis’ spiritual autobiography:
“There is a sense in which Arthur [Greeves] and [Owen] Barfield are the types of every man’s First Friend and Second Friend. The First is the alter ego… but the Second Friend is the man who disagrees with you about everything. He is not so much the alter ego as the anti-self. Of course he shares your interests; otherwise he would not become your friend at all. But he has approached them all at a different angle. He has read all the right books but has got the wrong thing out of every one.”
C.S. Lewis, Surprised By Joy
Drink-of-the-week
- For the drink-of-the-week…
Discussion
Background
- Before we jump into the contents of your talk, would you mind telling us a little bit about your history with the Inklings in general, and Barfield in particular?
- What is Platonism?
- What’s the difference between Platonism and Neoplatonism?
- What was the genesis of the ideas of your talk Tolkien, Barfield, and Neoplatonism?
- How did you come to lecture the Cambridge Center for the Study of Platonism?
Setup
- You kick off your talk with five theses about Christian philosophy and Tolkien. What are these?
- So if Tolkien’s philosophy is so important, what was it?
- So let’s move from there to talk about the Inklings in general and Owen Barfield in particular. Most listeners to this podcast will know who the Inklings were, but for the newcomers, could you give us a quick introduction?
- In your talk you connect Tolkien and Barfield’s idea of “ancient semantic unities”. What are “ancient semantic unities” when they’re at home?
Ancient Semantic Unities
- How did Tolkien apply this idea of “ancient semantic unities” to his legendarium?
- How does this connect to philosophy and platonism?
- What’s the impact of all of this? Tolkien used some of Barfield’s ideas… so what?
- Is there anything else you’d like to share before we send people to go and watch your full lecture?
Thank you David and Robert for a serious discussion of connections between Tolkien and Barfield. Great questions and background, David, helping us put Robert’s comments in context, with Tolkien, the Inklings, and Barfield.
I hope you don’t mind a kind of bullet list of remarks. These ideas and topics you two discuss have been on my mind for decades, and in fact just in the last year I’ve dived deep into everything I have the time and wits to understand regarding the *methods* that Barfield and Tolkien employed to access ancient human consciousness. I think this line of inquiry complements well what you two discussed in this episode.
First, I totally agree that one of the most important ‘connections’ between Barfield and Tolkien is the notion of ancient semantic unity. I really appreciated what you both contributed to that discussion. Personally, I think Lewis is not a helpful participant in this particular discussion, especially if we’re discussing theology. Tolkien and Lewis were both theists, but that’s about all I’d venture to say they have in common, in any substantive way. I won’t go into details about why, but there are many. A key difference is that, especially with regard to understanding mythology, Tolkien relied on philological methods, and his imaginative understanding of what philology revealed, whereas Lewis was almost enslaved to logical analysis, and too easily used adventitious metaphor rather than true metaphor. Lewis was fundamentally not a fellow initiate with Tolkien and Barfield in that way.
Your conversation wasn’t about Rudolf Steiner, but a few remarks are needed:
– Steiner was Austrian, not Swiss
– Steiner wasn’t a pantheist, and in fact taught a radical Christianity
The most important reason to bring up Steiner here is because Barfield was in fact a ‘strict Steinerian’, which Robert denied in passing. Of course Barfield did his own thinking, but his thinking was deeply, profoundly, consistently and til the very end influenced by his reading and study of Steiner’s work and life. In fact, I’ve personally found that, just as Barfield claimed in print many times, his own work led me to a deep study of Steiner. In this regard, I don’t understand Robert’s remark that Barfield ‘had a break’ and joined the Anglican Church. Read Simon Blaxland-de Lange’s biography of Barfield for more about that.
You both discuss that Barfield and Tolkien strived to help their readers ‘regain an ancient mode of thought’. Yes, and no, and for different reasons. Barfield – like Steiner – insisted that the point of understanding ancient human consciousness was to come to a perception of the evolution of human consciousness. The point of that is to come to understand and experience human consciousness as it is today, not what it was, and to prepare oneself for what it will be.
For instance, in terms of the ancient semantic unity of ‘light’: Tolkien unfolds a world of light in the Silmarillion, as David points out, and Tolkien achieves this to an extent that few (no?) others have done, as Robert points out. But the difference between Tolkien and Barfield – and the importance therein of Steiner – is that Barfield then asks – and explicitly and repeatedly asks – ‘Where did that light go? What is light, now, today, for human beings of the 21st century? And where will light go in the far distant future and evolution of human consciousness?’
Finally, what I think most directly and strongly binds Tolkien and Barfield in their separate quests to understand ancient human consciousness was *method*. How did they achieve that experience of a past, long past, human consciousness? Constructing metaphor was one element of the method, where ‘metaphor’ is understood in Barfield’s terms of true or adventitious – elemental or analytic. (Not, btw, ‘synthetic’ v. analytic. We today have to use metaphor synthetically, whereas ancient humans had an awareness naturally).
So much good discussion between you two, and you helped clarify many points for me. Thanks so much for offering up your conversation.
Sincerely,
Danny Smitherman
You’re very welcome! Next up I’ll be interviewing Dr. Mark Vernon about his book “The Secret History of Christianity”.
Great stuff, thanks!
While I think Lewis wasn’t without his philological subtleties, but I do get a similar impression.
Ah, I should’ve caught the Swiss-Austrian issue. Regarding Steiner’s religious outlook, I throw up my hands in defeat at any attempt to categorize him. If I were pushed, I’d maybe describe it as a form of Gnosticism?
I definitely see Barfield pointing us forward, but at the same time, didn’t he think we had lost something as a result of Positivism’s influence on language?
Would you say Tolkien just points us to Iluvatar as the origin and destination of it all?
I think I understand Barfield more deeply/fully than Tolkien, but as to the question ‘what’s really important, in the end?’ Tolkien sums that up in his term eucatastrophe, i.e., the good news. The last moments between Frodo and Gollum at the cracks of Mt Doom, and the fall of Sauron’s rule, definitely qualifies as eucatastrophe. But here’s where it gets interesting.
It was a good catastrophe only for those alive at the time. If we accept that middle earth is our world, in a dim distant past, then we have to say that we know how it all turned out after that – we today ARE how it turned out, for good or bad. Certainly that’s why Tolkien’s ‘sequel’ to LOTR peters out, because there is the unavoidable spoiler of the reality of today’s world – we are the realization of middle earth’s future. Hardly a heaven on earth.
If middle earth were entirely a fabrication, then that sequel could go on to tell the story of how everything changed, for the better, and that the Age of Men was also, either itself an abiding Age of Peace, or a precursor to it. But ME wasn’t a complete fabrication – it was an asterisk reality of vast dimensions crystallized around his imaginative practice of philology of real earth human languages. And we know how that’s turned out.
Barfield, too, extrapolates a human pre-history – and on the same exact basis as Tolkien did, namely, philology – but he focuses, not on a specific language or people and their history, but the trends evident in all languages and all people. He finds meaning in these trends, and extrapolates then forward into the future of humankind.
Tolkien gives as an elaborate, imaginative example of a particular people’s pre-history, based on the evidence of existing human texts. But Tolkien doesn’t philosophically justify his dependence on language – as opposed to archeology, anthropology, astronomy, for instance.
Barfield’s work makes sense of the claim that human language is a reliable, and even revelatory guide to human consciousness and the experience of it – including ancient human consciousness.
If we say that Tolkien gives us the steps we need to transport ourselves back in time (and thus is a true and real time machine), Barfield’s work is the roadmap, drawn according to experience, but from a height sufficient to show the larger features – the stages of the evolving human consciousness.
Thanks so much for sharing my thoughts with your readers – I appreciate that. More importantly, I think it gives reason to think that Tolkien and Barfield aren’t meant to be outliers or freaks. Instead, they have shown the efficacy of real, repeatable, reliable methods to evoke the originating consciousness of ancient texts.
One added remark, to be added to the last, long paragraph of my original comment:
Besides metaphor, the other essential element of the methods of both Tolkien and Barfield was etymology, and other tools and discoveries of philology. Neither of these men could have done what they did without etymologies of words. See Barfield’s book Night Operation to see just how literally and profoundly he took this activity and tool as a way to enlightenment.
P.S. My paper “How Did They Do That?! The Time Travel Methods of JRR Tolkien and Owen Barfield” was accepted for presentation at the Pacific chapter of the Ancient and Modern Language Association conference this November in Las Vegas (though my presentation will be virtual). Please check it out if you can!
I’ve been looking here but I don’t see it…
On that page, clear the checkbox “Only show sessions still accepting papers.”
Also, here’s the video intro: http://savethephenomena.blogspot.com/2021/07/real-time-travel-owen-barfield-and-jrr.html