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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Michael Ward
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January 7 - February 2, 2023
English Professor Tony Nuttall deems the argument “dazzling” and claims it “thoroughly routs whole volumes of Nietzsche and Sartre.”
Modernity was evidently producing barbarism, but did it really matter? And if so, why?
He tackles “education” in the widest possible sense and takes it to mean something like moral inheritance, the legacy of humane wisdom that the older generation imparts to the younger and which the younger have a duty to hand on in due course.
Lewis, of course, never uses such technical terms as these in presenting his case; he was too good a writer for that. Like a poet, he keeps things particular, dramatic, and easily picturable.
Are things beautiful, good, and true just for us as individuals, or can we speak and feel about them in ways that take us beyond our isolated perspectives into a shared discourse of objective value?
Lewis’s message in this first lecture could be summarized in the pithy words of E.M. Forster: “Only connect.”** Only connect the angel and the animal and you will have the anthropological. The human being is a synthesis of the human brain and the human belly in the human breast.
Lewis’s choice of “The Way” as the title for this second lecture refers us back to “the Tao,”†† the term he introduced in his first address, which he uses not because he wants to single out Chinese philosophy as uniquely insightful but in order to de-emphasize Western categories and remind his readers that moral reality is universal.
It is impossible to live in a logically consistent fashion holding to the belief that value is based on instinct.
a diverse chorus of voices, indicating that the human family is a real family, with certain core values in common. It is something of a mêlée at times, like any family, but still it is united at the root.‡‡
The Tao is not something that human beings simply make up; it is something they discover.
In closing the coffin-lid on objective value, humanity has opened Pandora’s box. We no longer find the solution to the problems of life in “knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue,” but increasingly in willpower, technological control, and surgical alteration of nature to suit our own convenience. This is “the world of post-humanity which, some knowingly and some unknowingly, nearly all men in all nations are at present labouring to produce” (75).
Outside that framework, the only basis for ethical decision-making is sheer impulse, dependent on heredity, digestion, the weather, or the random association of ideas, and these impulses are all, by definition, outside the realm of reason.
These subjects of the Conditioners will also be “not men at all,” but rather “artefacts” (64).
God is “the Father of lights,” as St. James’s epistle has it – a verse that Lewis was fond of quoting† – and these “lights” include any moral or philosophical illumination, anything good, true, or beautiful, that a given tradition might possess. Such lights bear witness to “common grace” and therefore to the value of natural theology.‡
The similarity he finds between Christian and non-Christian wisdom does not lead him to conclude, “So much the worse for Christianity,” but “So much the better for these other traditions.”§
Religion comes from a Latin root meaning “to bind,” referring to the bond of obedience that characterizes the life of a member of a religious order. By extension, religion can be thought of as a bond of unity, as a process that “re-ligaments” or “re-ligatures,” tying disparate things back together into one, integrating diverse viewpoints.
It is this recognition of objective value that precedes what we ordinarily call “religion”
Recognition of objective value is a kind of ur-religion underlying them all, and indeed all traditional philosophies and coherently logical systems of thought whatsoever.
As Lewis writes in “On Ethics” (1943?): “It is moral codes that create problems of casuistry [moral adjudication], just as the rules of chess create chess problems.”‡‡
Without such a shared premise as a bedrock, we cannot dispute matters rationally with one another, but only assert our particular subjective preferences and try to shout down those whose preferences conflict with our own. To deny this core principle is to deny what makes us human: it leads to a situation that is so ethically immature it does not even rise to the level of Paganism.
Which is why current debate involves more name-calling than attempts at persuasion through reason. Also the apparent belief in universities that the mere assertion of something determines its truth. No evidence or reasoning is needed in support and those who call for them are deemed simply evil.
He argues that humanity’s knowledge of the moral law has not been depraved “in the same degree as our power to fulfil it.”
“God neither obeys nor creates the moral law”; the moral law is, rather, an expression of God’s nature.
[in the words of Dr. Johnson] ‘men more frequently require to be reminded than informed’” (158f).
But though mere philosophy may be less sufficient than theology, that is no reason not to go as far as possible under purely philosophical steam.
“behind the laws of the state there is a Natural Law. . . . I hold this conception to be basic to all civilisation.”1
He knew, all too well, from personal experience, that the Tao was a real thing, an immovable norm or standard that kept confronting him and challenging him with its obdurate actuality, however much he might have privately preferred to dismiss it as illusory.
See Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment.
It is interesting to note that, even at this early stage of his development, Lewis ties ethical behaviour to anthropology (it is something owed “to our own manhood”).†††† He doubtless already knew that there was good etymological reason for doing so, given that the word “virtue” comes from the Latin root vir, meaning “man.”
To accept traditional morality is not to be convinced of the existence of a particular code of ethics, but to wake up to the implications of the code within which one already lives. It is a kind of homecoming, a relaxation into one’s earlier or original self.‡‡‡‡
Lewis realised that he would have to admit “that mind was no late-come epiphenomenon; that the whole universe was, in the last resort, mental; that our logic was participation in a cosmic Logos.”15
“It wasn’t a subject to Plato, it was a way.”
Once he began teaching philosophy, Lewis discovered that his “watered Hegelianism” wouldn’t serve him as a sufficient basis from which to conduct tutorials. In a footnote, he adds: “Not, of course, that I thought it a tutor’s business to make converts to his own philosophy. But I found I needed a position of my own as a basis from which to criticise my pupils’ essays”
‘I refute it thus’”
An individual is neither locked permanently inside solitary confinement nor dispersed irretrievably like a handful of dust across the universe at large. Rather, like Shelley’s image of a humanized aeolian lyre (see page 65), we both receive impressions from external stimuli and can properly use our reason to judge their nature and value. There is an interplay of passivity and activity, of mutuality and reciprocity. We observe and receive the data presented to our senses by the outside world as disinterestedly as possible, but our selection and interpretation of those data are processes that
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The pervasive, almost ubiquitous acceptance of various kinds of emotivism and subjectivism in modern Western culture means there can be no persuasion – that is to say, rational argument leading to a freely adopted change of mind.
In this rational desert, the only way people can effect social or political or legislative change is to mobilise a sufficiently large contingent of like-minded protestors and out-protest their opponents. The question of truth, as such, is relegated to a second- or third-order issue: the real question is one of power. And thus we arrive at our post-truth world.
Therefore, they see the prime task of a teacher to be disenchantment: unweaving the spell of value-laden language so that children control it, rather than being controlled by it.
the unity of the human body does not consist in “retaining the same particles. My form remains one, though the matter in it changes continually. I am, in that respect, like a curve in a waterfall.”15
The Abolition of Man is at heart a reductio ad absurdum
pons asinorum: Latin for “bridge of donkeys,” a term from geometry denoting a basic test of intelligence which must be passed in order to proceed to harder subsequent propositions.
Lewis had a high view of Dr. Johnson and listed James Boswell’s Life of Johnson (1791), widely regarded as the foundational work of modern biography, among the ten books that he considered to have most shaped his vocational attitude and philosophy of life
The Prelude exists in three versions, dated 1799, 1805, and 1850. Lewis named it in the list of ten books that he considered to have most influenced his vocational attitude and philosophy of life
Of course, there are sometimes occasions when there is real “bunk” that genuinely needs to be brought to light, but more often than not debunking is a process of question-begging derisiveness, the sort of sardonic bubble-pricking found in works such as Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians17 or in car-manufacturer Henry Ford’s famous dismissal of history as “more or less bunk.”†† It would be fair to characterise Lewis’s view of logical positivists in this way: he thought they were short-circuiting philosophy with pre-emptive scorn, failing to rise to the level of mature debate about substantive
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Publius Virgilius Maro (70–19 BC), Roman poet, best known for his epic poem, the Aeneid, which Lewis included in the list of ten works that most shaped his vocational attitude and philosophy of life
properly understood, the particular may illuminate the general and even the universal.
Lewis learnt this love of the local from his friends Arthur Greeves, who called it “homeliness,” and A.K. Hamilton Jenkin, who called it “quiddity.”
This is why Lewis can say “no animal has moral virtue”25 – that is to say, no nonhuman animal has moral virtue, because only that which is properly human partakes of moral sapience (i.e., wisdom, reason), which is why man is rightly categorised as “homo sapiens.” But man can freely surrender these uniquely human traits and step back down into the category of mere hominid. Thus he becomes a “trousered ape.”‡‡
when we attempt to describe a work’s badness, we usually do so by resorting to terms that might equally well be applied to good work.
One of Lewis’s favourite Latin tags was abusus non tollit usum (“abuse does not abolish use”). The fact that emotions can be corrupted into emotionalism, thereby diminishing rationality, is no justification for regarding emotion as altogether and necessarily irrational.
‘Never let us live with amousia,’ was one of his favourite maxims: amousia, the absence of the Muses.”32
In Lewis’s view, students are more likely to live lives from which the Muses are absent than to live lives in which the Muses are too dominant. The average pupil, he thinks, tends towards sterility of sentiment, not excessive fertility of sentiment.
