Consciousness obscures the totality from which it arises. Philosophy is tasked with recovering that obscured totality. For Barfield, this recovery takes the form of “final participation”: a freely willed, self-conscious re-attunement to a spiritually alive cosmos that preserves rather than dissolves individual freedom.

We need a renewed metaphysical imagination. This does not mean denying science. It means refusing to handicap science with a mutilated picture of perception. It means recognizing that imagination is not an optional aesthetic supplement to real knowledge, but a cognitive power that allows us to come into conscious relation with the more-than-human... See more

Steiner’s Waldorf pedagogy is explicitly designed to recapitulate this evolution in the development of the child. He insists that early education remain rooted in oral story, myth, and craft, delaying formal literacy so that a sense of meaningful participation can take root before abstracting into letters and numbers. The aim is not to keep... See more

What Coleridge, Barfield, Steiner, Goethe, and Whitehead are all saying is that imagination is not mere fancy. It is not just a brain mechanism limited to recombining sensory impressions. Rather, imagination is the way the deeper creative ground of the cosmos becomes conscious of itself in and through us. What we experience consciously as... See more