The following essay is adapted from the transcript of this recording on our Urphänomen research guild Substack. It is a poetic commentary on Owen Barfield’s essay in The Rediscovery of Meaning, “The Meaning of ‘Literal,’” which was also the subject of discussion in this morning’s reading group:
When Whitehead remarked that every science has its instruments—physics its telescopes and microscopes, biology its binoculars and slides—he added that the instrument of metaphysics is language itself. Philosophy, then, is not merely a traffic in abstract ideas. It is an experiment conducted with words upon language itself. Physics works with its lenses, its models. Metaphysics works with sentences to shape the space of meaning out of sound. To think metaphysically is to test how conscious participation in poetic metaphor reshapes the possible.
Owen Barfield performs precisely this kind of experiment in his essay “The Meaning of ‘Literal.’” Barfield does not simply define his terms; he strives to awaken a new mode of consciousness. Or he seeks to invite us to remember the living origins of our capacity for speech. Borrowing from I. A. Richards, he distinguishes between vehicle and tenor to illuminate the difference between literal and metaphorical meaning. The vehicle is the surface image of a phrase—its visible, external sense—while the tenor is the inward quality that the phrase conveys.
When we say she was a rock in the storm, the rock is the vehicle: solid, visible, external. The tenor is the invisible steadfastness the image expresses—courage, devotion. In most metaphors, the vehicle belongs to the external world, while the tenor belongs to the internal. Metaphor joins outer with inner. It bridges sense and soul, the measurable and the felt, the objective datum and the subjective emotion.
Literal language straightens; metaphorical language swirls. The literal draws a line, fixes a relation, and renders the world legible. Metaphor bends that line, turning it back into movement. It keeps meaning alive—circulating, spiraling, metamorphosing.
Barfield observes that modern thought assumes language began literally—that our ancestors pointed, grunted, and named, and that poetry arrived later as decorative flourish. He calls this assumption the myth of born literalness. Against it, he proposes the idea of achieved literalness: that the power to speak literally, to distinguish appearance from essence, is not primitive but late—a product of reflection. In the beginning, material and spiritual meanings, sense and essence, were fused. Human beings did not stand apart from things, they participated in them. Language was once felt as the world thinking itself aloud. Consciousness and cosmos co-emerged through speech, through the Word.
The rise of literal language brought clarity and differentiation but also alienation—a loss of intimacy with the world-process. The literal divides; the metaphorical reconnects. The straightening of the literal gives us the sciences—the rule of measure and the stability of fact. The swirling of metaphor gives us imagination and myth—the pulse of meaning, open-ended and alive.
Barfield wrote that “nature is the reflected image of man’s conscious and unconscious self.” Meaning, then, is not projected onto an inert surface but is the resonance between inner and outer. Even the body, he says, is imaginal—matter expressing mind, form infused with soul. To imagine that language began with simple grunts naming physical things is to imagine a cosmos without consciousness, as though mind were some accidental secretion rather than the luminous field in which all things enter into relations of mutual reflection. Our very ability to describe such a world proves that consciousness has already curved back upon itself. The literal is consciousness tightening its line; the metaphorical is consciousness releasing it again into the circle of participation, fishing not for facts but for futures.
Whitehead’s process metaphysics provides a cosmological stage for Barfield’s dramatization of the evolution of language. Reality, for Whitehead, is not composed of things but of events—actual occasions. Each is a concrescence of feelings. The universe is a creative advance into novelty: feelings arising and perishing, each unification of the universal into the unique contributing itself back to the many. Each occasion of experience is an experimental organ of the world-soul.
A proposition, for Whitehead, is not merely a statement but a propositional feeling—a lure toward new possibility. The vehicle of a statement is its datum, what is given; the tenor is its potential, what it calls forth. A proposition unites the two—what is and what might be—just as a metaphor synthesizes differences into higher harmonies. The literal straightens, consolidating feeling into form and order. The metaphorical swirls, releasing order into novelty and flux. Together they compose the rhythm of process, ingredients in the recipe of relation.
Even physics echoes this rhythm: matter and antimatter, action and reaction, symmetry with a twist. The universe builds straight lines only to bend them again. So with language. Every statement of fact is a momentary settlement in the stream of becoming—a rock in the storm. Every metaphor is a whirlpool in that current, an eddy of distributed agency through which the flow finds its form. Facts give us footholds; metaphors allow us to leap. The literal straightens; the metaphorical swirls. In their interplay we glimpse the dynamic architecture of meaning—the way reality composes, decomposes, and recomposes itself.
Barfield’s philosophy of language is no antiquarian exercise in etymological archaeology. It is a call to adventure. If consciousness evolves with language, then every change in our speech alters our participation in the world. Speech is the altar of consciousness, a prayerful pharmacopoeia inspiring metamorphosis. To think literally is to build; to think metaphorically is to breathe. Without the line—chaos. Without the swirl—death.
Whitehead once wrote that, for most people, words symbolize trees; but for the poet, in the fit of ecstasy, it is the trees that symbolize the words. The poet wanders in the woods searching for the words, and the woods reveal their meaning. Object and symbol, representation and represented, coincide in the poetic act. This reversal captures Barfield’s aim: to make language transparent again to the poetic life that it carries—to awaken us to its figurative power.
Literalism assumes that meaning is imposed upon us by mute matter, that language’s only purpose is to describe physical facts accurately. But if we accept that view, we lose participation in a world beyond ourselves—and with it, we lose ourselves. We need metaphor to link matter and imagination. There is no other way to live.
Barfield quotes Emerson’s idea in his essay “Nature” that every natural fact reveals its intellectual and moral value—and through him reminds us that physics and poetry, reason and reverence, are two expressions of the same cosmological adornment. Metaphysics, engaged in this participatory way, is not a detached description from above, but an act of communion from within. Every word we utter either hardens our hearts or loosens our minds, making us more sensitive to the pluriverse within and around us. To speak with care is to cooperate with the Logos in the co-creation of the cosmos.
The literal straightens. The metaphorical swirls. Between them, the cosmos is made. In their dance we find our balance: rocks in the current, shapes in the flow, an architecture of wonder.
Whitehead reminds us that philosophy not only begins in wonder, but, when it has done its best, also ends in wonder. Barfield might add that wonder is what we feel when we engage language not as a tool of description, but as a mode of communion with the Logos, with the living Word. In such moments, knowledge becomes prayer; meaning becomes sacrament. We remember that Logos in its human form mirrors Logos in its cosmic form. We remember when world and word were one—when meaning was not about reality, but was reality itself: a divine deed.
Footnotes2Plato 
What do you think?