Saving Appearances
The surface may be where truth begins.
We are told we live in a post-truth society—perhaps only a “post-fact” one. Matters of fact become matters of opinion. Everything can be true in its own way.
Once, seeing was believing. Now it’s the surest sign you’re being fooled.
A politician appears moderate and reasonable. What’s behind the smile? A corporation speaks of justice or responsibility. That’s branding. A public figure professes repentance or reform. Just wait. Even facts aren’t “true” anymore—depending on which channel you’re on.
Suspicion has become a reflex.
The surface lies; truth must be buried deeper. Our politics makes sure we don’t forget.
A few years ago, I began reading the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek. I don’t remember exactly why. I suspect it was a reaction to the constant talk about mindfulness and “finding your true self” from people like Deepak Chopra.
The language was everywhere. Žižek’s quarrel is not with meditation itself but with what he calls spiritual capitalism—the conversion of transcendence into lifestyle management, spirituality absorbed into consumer ideology, meditation turned into red-light therapy and “5D Quantum Sound” sessions.
Michael Satva, a co-producer of the Conscious Life Expo, puts the mood bluntly: “With AI, nobody knows what’s real anymore. So if you don’t know what’s real, you might as well enjoy and believe in something much more fun and exciting.”
Žižek counters in his own style: “Don’t look for your inner self. You’ll only find deep shit.”
The search for a pure inner self, he thinks, begins in the wrong place. Look deep enough and you won’t find purity but chaos. Growth does not come from digging inward but from taking on a role and committing to it. “The only way to overcome yourself,” he says, “is to identify with your mask.”
Žižek illustrates the point with a scene from Roberto Rossellini’s General Della Rovere (1959), a celebrated World War II film starring Vittorio De Sica. In the story, a small-time Italian swindler is forced by the Nazis to impersonate a murdered resistance hero. At first, he plays the part to survive. Gradually, he grows into it. He refuses to betray others and dies publicly as General Della Rovere. Žižek calls this “good alienation.” The man’s supposed “true self” matters less than the role he accepts. Freedom, then, does not come from searching your inner life. It comes from committing to something outside yourself and living up to it.
Max Beerbohm’s story, The Happy Hypocrite, tells a similar tale. George Hell, a shameless hedonist, falls in love with a virtuous woman who says she could only love a man with the face of a saint. So he buys a mask. Wearing it, he wins her. What begins as deception becomes discipline. When the mask is finally torn off, the face beneath matches it. Hell has become Heaven. Sometimes we become better not by discovering our “true selves,” but by acting against them—by practicing what we are not yet.
We repeat sayings like “beauty is only skin deep,” “you can’t judge a book by its cover,” or “if you only knew the real man.” These are everyday versions of an old philosophical suspicion: appearance deceives. The visible misleads. Truth lies somewhere underneath.
We may have it backwards.
What if appearance is not the lie at all?
One of the most original—and most neglected—philosophers, Owen Barfield, spoke of “saving appearances.” Unlike thinkers who treat knowledge as a social construct laid across a mute world, Barfield did not reduce reality to projection. His point was subtler. He called it participation: consciousness and world belong together, meeting where awareness and reality intertwine. Appearance is not the opposite of reality; it is one way reality becomes actual. Every fact wears a face.
Seen this way, familiar warnings lose some of their force. The public face is not a cover for the real self. Habits are not cosmetic. The roles we assume are not empty forms.
Žižek emphasizes alienation. The self is split, decentered, never fully at home. The mask works because there is no inner core to betray. Barfield emphasizes participation. What appears is not merely performance; it is formation.
Taken together, their point is simple and unsettling.
Speak moderation long enough and you may have to practice it. Invoke responsibility often enough and you may be held to it. Perform repentance seriously enough and you may have to change. Not fake it till you make it—but practice it until it shapes you.
Think of Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White. Charlotte spins words into her web—“Some Pig,” “Radiant,” “Humble.” At first, they are strategy, even an exaggeration. Wilbur is not yet what the web declares. But he grows into the words. They do not hide reality; they call it into being.
The surface is where promises are made, habits take root, and character is tested. The face is not just a mask we learn to distrust; it is the place where a life takes shape.
Appearance is not the enemy of truth. It is where truth takes form.
Once, seeing was believing. Now our task is to live so that what others see is worth believing.
Note and reading
Slavoj Žižek—The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (2003). Ideas that allow people to participate in capitalism while easing the unease it otherwise provokes—what Žižek criticizes as the “ideological supplement” that keeps the system running smoothly. See also Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates (2002).
Generale Della Rovere—film cited by Žižek, Roberto Rossellini (1959). About desire as aspiration and figuring out the kind of person you want to become—a theme in Russ Roberts’s book Wild Problems (2024), to which I’m indebted.
“Inside New Age spirituality’s new age”—An example of how some now imagine “a future full of potential and creativity in contact with our galactic brothers and sisters.” Language is intuitive and soulful. (RNS, March 2, 2026)
The Happy Hypocrite: A Fairy Tale for Tired Men—Sir Max Beerbohm. A short story first published in 1896—a lighter, more humorous response to Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.
Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry—Owen Barfield (Wesleyan Edition, 1988). C. S. Lewis called Barfield “the wisest and best of my unofficial teachers.” His work has also been praised by T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, and Saul Bellow.
For readers well versed in René Girard, Barfield likewise sees desire as mimetic rather than private, but roots it in participation—our co‑creation of a shared world of meaning—rather than in rivalry and the scapegoat.
Saving the Appearances can be slow‑going, dense, and occasionally technical. For readers wanting a starting point, the Introduction and pages 122–147 are especially helpful.
Additional:
Imagination and fancy—Increasingly, fancy pulls us away from appearances grounded in reality toward hollow facsimiles, and away from the imagining that stays in living contact with what is actually there, as Duncan Reyburn argues. This now shows up in superhero mash‑ups, polished avatars, and AI art. Anime, now increasingly popular, is a partial exception, since the way it is drawn can still serve depth of character and world, a point developed by David Armstrong.
Your essay causes me to ruminate on a favorite subject—the centrality of appearance—but now with thinkers I’ve never heard of— Slavoj Žižek and Owen Barfield.
“Be only your face,” Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben advises. “Go to the threshold. Do not remain the subjects of your properties or faculties, do not stay beneath them: rather go with them, in them, beyond them.”
Agamben might as well have been drawing conclusions from remarkable novel The Happy Hypocrite that you gloss here, in which the protagonist goes "to the threshold." Our professed disdain for hypocrisy may be based in large part on a misapprehension of Jesus’ criticism. The public masks of the scribes and Pharisees in question weren’t at odds with their inner essences—or at least that doesn’t seem to be Jesus’ point. His point, I think, is that their public actions were inconsistent and deceitful. Eating up the property of widows, for instance, is a public action—a systemic one, not a private one.
Arendt believed that the French Revolution collapsed because its leaders, unlike the American founders, mistrusted public appearance and, not coincidentally, found hypocrisy everywhere:
“However deeply heartfelt a motive may be, once it is brought out and exposed for public inspection it becomes an object of suspicion rather than insight; when the light of the public falls upon it, it appears and even shines, but, unlike deeds and words which are meant to appear, whose very existence hinges on appearance, the motives behind such deeds and words are destroyed in their essence through appearance; when they appear they become ‘mere appearances’ behind which again other, ulterior motives may lurk, such as hypocrisy and deceit. The same sad logic of the human heart, which has almost automatically caused modern ‘motivational research’ to develop into an eerie sort of filing cabinet for human vices, into a veritable science of misanthropy, made Robespierre and his followers, once they had equated virtue with the qualities of the heart, see intrigue and calumny, treachery and hypocrisy everywhere.”
Redeeming masks, as this novel may be said to do, may be the first step toward a greater practice of redemption. Fielding in one of his Tom Jones essays enjoins us to be merciful by comparing us to players:
“A single bad Act no more constitutes a Villain in Life, than a single bad Part on the Stage. The Passions, like the managers of a Playhouse, often force Men upon Parts, without consulting their Judgement, and sometimes without any regard to their Talents. Thus the Man, as well as the Player, may condemn what he himself acts . . .”
Fielding writes such trenchant comedy, I think, because he discovers redemption so easily. Comedy is so deeply on the surface, much as it is in the Gospels.
What a great observation about Charlotte! Charlotte spinning her web is akin to God at creation: as you say, “They [the words] do not hide reality; they call it into being.” Creation is redemption. The great temple theologians, both Jewish and Christian, were right: God creates not in a void but in the midst of chaos. We can’t fix our own chaos. We can speak the truth; we can, as you credit Barfield with pointing out, participate.
If a book is a machine to think with, as I.A. Richards claims, then this post does the job of something burdened with a lot more words. Thank you.