The Abolition of Man

by C.S. Lewis

‘When the man said This is sublime, he appeared to be making a remark about the waterfall…Actually…he was not making a remark about the waterfall, but a remark about his own feelings. What he was saying was really I have feelings associated in my mind with the word “Sublime”, or shortly, I have sublime feelings.’

‘This confusion is continually present in language as we use it. We appear to be saying something very important about something: and actually we are only saying something about our own feelings.

If the view held by Gaius and Titius were consistently applied it would lead to obvious absurdities. It would force them to maintain that You are contemptible means I have contemptible feelings: in fact that Your feelings are contemptible means My feelings are contemptible.

all sentences containing a predicate of value are statements about the emotional state of the speaker, and secondly, that all such statements are unimportant.

The very power of Gaius and Titius depends on the fact that they are dealing with a boy: a boy who thinks he is ‘doing’ his ‘English prep’ and has no notion that ethics, theology, and politics are all at stake. It is not a theory they put into his mind, but an assumption, which ten years hence, its origin forgotten and its presence unconscious, will condition him to take one side in a controversy which he has never recognized as a controversy at all.

show its practical results on the educational procedure.

From this passage the schoolboy will learn about literature precisely nothing. What he will learn quickly enough, and perhaps indelibly, is the belief that all emotions aroused by local association are in themselves contrary to reason and contemptible.

I have hitherto been assuming that such teachers as Gaius and Titius do not fully realize what they are doing and do not intend the far-reaching consequences it will actually have.

the ‘trousered ape’ and the ‘urban blockhead’ may be precisely the kind of man they really wish to produce.

myself with pointing out that it is a philosophical and not a literary position.

amateur philosophers where he expected the work of professional grammarians.

They see the world around them swayed by emotional propaganda—they have learned from tradition that youth is sentimental—and they conclude that the best thing they can

do is to fortify the minds of young people against

there are three who need to be awakened from the slumber of cold vulgarity.

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—believed, in fact, that objects did not merely receive, but could merit, our approval or disapproval, our reverence or our contempt.

Rta, is constantly identified with satya or truth, correspondence to reality.

It is also the Way which every man should tread in imitation of that cosmic and supercosmic progression, conforming all activities to that great exemplar.

is the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are.

On this view, the world of facts, without one trace of value, and the world of feelings, without one trace of truth or falsehood, justice or injustice, confront one another, and no rapprochement is possible.

In a word, the old was a kind of propagation—men transmitting manhood to men; the new is merely propaganda.

Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless

against the animal organism.

The head rules the belly through the

It may even be said that it is by this middle element that man is man: for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal.

of fertile and generous emotion that marks them out. Their heads are no bigger than the ordinary: it is the atrophy of the chest beneath that makes them seem so.

In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.

The practical result of education in the spirit of The Green Book must be the destruction of the society which accepts it.

They write in order to produce certain states of mind in the rising generation, if not because they think those states of mind intrinsically just or good, yet certainly because they think them to be the means to some state of society which they regard as desirable. It

traditional or (as they would say) ‘sentimental’ values have in the background values of their own which they believe to be immune from the debunking process. They claim to be cutting away the parasitic growth of emotion, religious sanction, and inherited taboos, in order that ‘real’ or ‘basic’ values may emerge.

At this point the Innovator may ask why, after all, selfishness should be more ‘rational’ or ‘intelligent’ than altruism.

then the answer must be that a refusal to sacrifice oneself is no more rational than a consent to do so. And no less rational. Neither choice is rational—or irrational—at all.

This will preserve society cannot lead to do this except by the mediation of society ought to be preserved.

We must therefore either extend the word Reason to include what our ancestors called Practical Reason and confess that judgements such as society ought to be preserved (though they can support themselves by no reason of the sort that Gaius and Titius demand) are not mere sentiments but are rationality itself; or else we must give up at once, and for ever, the attempt to find a core of ‘rational’ value behind all the sentiments we have debunked.

The preservation of society, and of the species itself, are ends that do not hang on the precarious thread of Reason: they are given by Instinct.

Is the preservation of society really given by Instinct or is it the preservation of the self? And what about the ability to give up one’s live (preservation of self) for another’s life?

It looks, in fact, as if an ethics based on instinct will give the Innovator all he wants and nothing that he does not want.

What does Lewis imply about Gaius and Titius’ new way of grounding morals in instinct alone?

Is it maintained that we must obey Instinct, that we cannot do otherwise?

if we have an instinctive desire for the good of posterity then this desire, by the very nature of the case, can never be satisfied, since its aim is achieved, if at all, when we are dead. It

But why ought we to obey Instinct?

For even the Innovator admits that many impulses (those which conflict with the preservation of the species) have to be controlled. And this admission surely introduces us to a yet more fundamental difficulty.

Telling us to obey Instinct is like telling us to obey ‘people’. People say different things: so do instincts.

If we did not bring to the examination of our instincts a knowledge of their comparative dignity we could never learn it from them. And that knowledge cannot itself be instinctive: the judge cannot be one of the parties judged; or, if he is, the decision is worthless and there is no ground for placing the preservation of the species above self-preservation or sexual appetite.

So important to understand! One cannot gain a knowledge of the hierarchy of instincts unless one brings that knowledge to the instincts. It will not be derived from within the system of instinctual behaviors and desires. The human will comes into play here.

Either the premisses already concealed an imperative or the conclusion remains merely in the indicative.

Only people educated in a particular way have ever had the idea ‘posterity’ before their minds at all. It is difficult to assign to instinct our attitude towards an object which exists only for reflective men. What we have by nature is an impulse to preserve our own children and grandchildren; an impulse which grows progressively feebler as the imagination looks forward and finally dies out in the ‘deserts of vast futurity

The truth finally becomes apparent that neither in any operation with factual propositions nor in any appeal to instinct can the Innovator find the basis for a system of values.

All the practical principles behind the Innovator’s case for posterity, or society, or the species, are there from time immemorial in the Tao. But they are nowhere else.

You cannot reach them as conclusions: they are premisses.

This is back towards Aristotle’s deductive reasoning model. One may begin with universal statements to find the particular conclusion. There are some instances, such as in that of the Moral Law, in which one cannot come to these as a conclusion from some particular premises. Instead, “man should care about posterity” is a premise upon which a particular conclusion, “that man should give up his life for the sake of others,” may be made.

itself—as things so obviously reasonable that they neither demand nor admit proof.

If nothing is self-evident, nothing can be proved. Similarly if nothing is obligatory for its own sake, nothing is obligatory at all.

all the values which he uses in attacking the Tao, and even claims to be substituting for it, are themselves derived from the Tao.

modern sense) reason.

Reason devoid of the idea of practical reason (right ordering of the emotions included).