After Humanity: A Guide to C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man

by Michael Ward

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 are necessarily coloured by our own presuppositions and intellectual context. In short, objectivity is real and accessible, but subjectivity is also real and not entirely escapable. Nor should we want to escape it entirely, for we have value as subjects.