Owen Barfield, whom C. S. Lewis described archetypally as his “Second Friend” – “the man who disagrees with you about everything […] not so much the alter ego as the antiself” – on a number of occasions expressed his agreement with the argument of The Abolition of Man, and his admiration of the book. For example, describing various means by which one can become aware of the presuppositions of one’s thoughts, Barfield once wrote:

One, of which the best example I know is C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man, is to take some typical utterance by a contemporary writer, whether scientific or literary, to expose by analysing them the fundamental presuppositions and basic assumptions that underlie it, and then (if it be the case) to show how illogical they are in their reasoning and how pernicious in their effects.

Barfield’s essay, “The Riddle of the Sphinx,” which first appeared in Arena, a journal of the P.E.N. Centre for Writers in Exile in London, and from which a collection of recently published essays by Barfield takes its title, is a product of close engagement with The Abolition of Man. At the time of its publication, April 1964, Lewis’s death in November 1963 was quite recent. It is one of a number of essays and lectures Barfield wrote during this period praising Lewis’s intellectual legacy, even as he continued to argue generously about much of his friend’s thinking.

One of the points of disagreement between Lewis and Barfield, of relevance to Barfield’s response to The Abolition of Man in the essay, was about whether it is possible, in Lewis’s phrase, to “discover an inner meaning in the historical process.” Lewis, most notably in the essay “Historicism,” denied that it was possible, whereas Barfield affirmed it.

Lewis writes in The Abolition of Man, “Until quite modern times all teachers and even all men believed the universe to be such that certain emotional reactions on our part could be either congruous or incongruous to it” [emphasis added]. By the same token the substitutes for the doctrine of objective values (or “Tao”), against which Lewis argues, such as “utility to the community,” or “Instinct,” are recognized by him as typically modern answers to the question of what are the grounds by which behaviour can be called moral. But the historical process by which the “Tao” had come to be questioned, and by which humankind, or large parts of it, had come to abandon it – these do not arise as subject matter in The Abolition of Man.

Characteristically, throughout “The Riddle of the Sphinx,” Barfield places “the disappearance of ‘the doctrine of objective values’” in the historical context of modern thought about what it is to know the world. For example, regarding the tendency to understand literary works as describing only an author’s feelings, rather than also their intended referent, “its emergence coincided roughly with an attempt being made elsewhere to exclude what is called ‘metaphysics’ from the realm of scientific theory.” Barfield’s own conviction, arrived at through his scholarship in the history of words and other fields – that there had been an evolution of consciousness in the course of history, through which man has both become independent from nature in his thinking, and acquired a thorough inwardness and individuation which has been concurrent with an experience of apparently impassable separation from nature – is not made explicit here. But there are hints of the lesson he took from that belief, that this evolution has had a meaning which we can know, and that modern consciousness has not been simply a disastrous flight from the “Tao.” This is perhaps most evident in the following short passage:

In science, it was the disinterested pursuit of truth that led, in the first place, to the abolition of objective quality in nature. Today, I have suggested, the same pursuit can only lead humanity back to the perennial question. Yet how many there are who would rather abandon the pursuit than follow its lead!

The evolution of consciousness, then, in Barfield’s view, had given humans the freedom to answer out of themselves what he calls the perennial question, and also the Sphinx’s question: “what is the meaning of anthropos?” The possibility of disaster is indeed implicit in that freedom. But so is the possibility of what might be called the rediscovery of the “Tao” harmoniously at work in the universal macrocosm and the human microcosm.

Barfield does not refer in this essay to the conclusion of The Abolition of Man, in which Lewis, seeking a path beyond the science that treats Man as a natural object only, and so risks his destruction, suggests the possibility of a science of qualities:

Is it, then, possible to imagine a new Natural Philosophy, continually conscious that the ‘natural object’ produced by analysis and abstraction is not reality but only a view, and always correcting the abstraction? I hardly know what I am asking for. I hear rumours that Goethe’s approach to nature deserves fuller consideration – that even Dr Steiner may have seen something that orthodox researchers have missed.  The regenerate science which I have in mind would not do even to minerals and vegetables what modern science threatens to do to man himself. When it explained it would not explain away. When it spoke of the parts it would remember the whole. While studying the It it would not lose sight of what Martin Buber calls the Thou-situation.

In fact, in another essay, “Lewis, Truth and Imagination,” Barfield calls Lewis’s conclusion “a rather halfhearted suggestion in the final two paragraphs of The Abolition of Man that imaginal, as opposed to analytical, thinking may prove in the end to have some relation even to scientific truth,” and says more broadly of Lewis’s work, “as far as I know, that is the only occasion when such a possibility is touched on.” But Lewis’s conclusion is worth mentioning in the context of Barfield’s considerations regarding The Abolition of Man, since such a science of qualities was, along with imaginative artistic creation, at the forefront of Barfield’s thinking about what could bring about, an aim that Lewis and Barfield fully shared, the restoration of “the doctrine of objective values.”

The article above was written as an introduction to an essay by Barfield, titled “The Riddle of the Sphinx”, which appeared in the 2024 edition of the annual publication Sehnsucht: The C. S. Lewis Journal, whose “academic home” is George Fox University in Oregon. The theme of the 2024 volume was The Abolition of Man. The introduction, with notes which I felt were not called for in a blog post, and Barfield’s essay are available as a PDF.