THE FIELDThe Field

English · field

field

Open ground, and then a hundred borrowed sciences.

Etymology

Old English feld: open, unenclosed land. Related to fold, and to words for spreading out. The agricultural sense is older than the physical, the psychological, the social, and the metaphorical.1

Semantic range

A farmer’s field. A magnetic field. Lewin’s life-space. A social field. A quantum field. A morphogenetic speculation. A scene of Eros. The ‘field’ of this house.

What the gloss loses

English field flattens distinctions that other languages keep. Shared vocabulary is not shared mechanism. A psychological field is not a physical field.

Misuse

Do not collapse Gestalt, Lewin, phenomenology, electromagnetism, and the psychoid into one energy. The rhyme is editorial.

Which field are we standing in, and who taught us to call it that?

Notes

  1. Joseph Bosworth and T. Northcote Toller, An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1898), s.v. feld.