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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Michael Ward
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January 7 - February 2, 2023
“You can’t study men, you can only get to know them which is quite a different thing”34 (emphasis added). There is always more to discover; we never arrive at complete, definitive knowledge, or not in this life, at any rate. In
In coming to understand things and in getting to know people, we require others’ perspectives to supplement, relieve, and correct our own.
Lewis will not concur with the notion that the language of science is uniquely objective. Furthermore, he rejects categorically the view that there is only one literal language that reproduces the structures of the world. There is no norm in one kind of language that is particularly factual and “about” the world, whereas all other ways of speaking are more or less subjective. This must be said with great care. . . . Lewis is not one to deny the advantage of technical language for its given purposes; but he denies the philosophical notion . . . called “positivism,” which suggests a singular
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The world has no single character and it must be understood in a variety of ways. To read it with everything moral and esthetic abstracted out is to make it a caricature of itself; to read it with these factors admitted is to see the very logic and sense of the world. (Paul L. Holmer, C.S. Lewis: The Shape of His Faith and Thought, 59–61)
Thus the “local associations” of poetry become for the authors of The Green Book – as well as those educated by its method – a mere isolated expression of one person’s view. The fact that this one person is an expressive subject residing within a human community who in his poetry aims to express something objective is ignored entirely. (James Driscoll, “‘You Have Nowhere to Go’: Alienated Communication and Social Control in THX 1138,” 88f)
This reminds me of the communitarian view of interpretation in *Is There A Meaning In This Text?*
“You cannot get the that into the what as an element: it was the mistake of Descartes to suppose that you could. (I take it this may be what Plato means when he says that good is ἐπέκεινα τῆς οὐσίας on the far side of being.)”
What we know is objective: the manner in which we know is subjective.
“just sentiments”
The heart never takes the place of the head: but it can, and should, obey it
Moral education which interests Lewis does not look much like teaching. One cannot have classes in it. It involves the inculcation of proper emotional responses and is as much a “knowing how” as a “knowing that.” It cannot be taught by listening to a lecture or filling out a worksheet. The picture we get when we think of “knowing how” is the apprentice working with the master. And inculcation of right emotional responses will take place only if the youth has around him examples of men and women for whom such responses have become natural – persons whose vision of human nature is shaped in
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Lewis, like Aristotle, believes that moral principles are learned indirectly from others around us, who serve as exemplars. And he, again like Aristotle, suggests it will be extremely difficult to develop virtuous individuals apart from a virtuous society.
There is a constant task of confession and discernment for those who, nevertheless, wish to point to some surviving and unassailable objectivity in moral truth. It is no longer enough simply to repeat the words “dulce et decorum est” and expect to have them taken at face value.
the old [education] was a kind of propagation – men transmitting manhood to men; the new is merely propaganda
Lewis might have pleased the intelligentsia more if only he had taken the trouble to obfuscate his style.
It is not clear whether Abolition holds that the Tao can (and will) actually be eradicated from human beings or only that it can (and will) be so thoroughly suppressed as to make it appear to have been eradicated.
Followers of the French deconstructionist Michel Foucault, who coined the phrase “regimes of truth,” will want to argue that power undergirds not only our notions of right and wrong but even truth itself.
True and effective rule consists of a relationship, a relationship that might be pictured as a two-way street, connecting ruler to ruled and ruled to ruler. Tyranny is only one abuse of this relationship. There are three other abuses, namely servility, rebellion, and remissness.
Lewis writes, “There will always be those who, on discovering that history cannot really be turned to much practical account, will pronounce history to be Bunk. Aristotle would have called this servile or banausic; we, more civilly, may christen it Fordism.” In other words, Ford’s description of history as bunk betrays a utilitarian mindset that is unworthy of a person of liberal education; Ford does not know from the inside the thing he is disparaging.
The fact that death for a good cause usually involves pain explains why it is the experimentum crucis of an ethical system. For as long as moral choices are painless, it is hard to tell whether they are truly altruistic or not.
We can observe in this comment yet another instance of Lewis defining ethics by reference to anthropology; it is of the essence of human moral behaviour that, at the limit, good actions should be done even if the cost is self-sacrifice.
What the poet of Beowulf saw clearly was simply this: “the wages of heroism is death.” . .
Until modern times no thinker of the first rank ever doubted that our judgments of value were rational judgements or that what they discovered was objective. It was taken for granted that in temptation passion was opposed, not to some sentiment, but to reason.”60
Intellectus was what enabled the perception of a self-evident truth; ratio enabled the taking of a series of logical steps in order to arrive at a truth which was not self-evident.
A cognitive life of pure ratio was impossible for any kind of being, human or angelic, for if nothing is self-evident, nothing can be proved.
the intellective part of reason must be in place before the ratiocinative part can get to work.
Before the eighteenth century, almost all moralists viewed reason more in terms of intelligence than ratiocination; reason was therefore understood as “the organ of morality.” Lewis continues: “The moral conflict was depicted as one between Passion and Reason, not between Passion and ‘conscience,’ or ‘duty,’ or ‘goodness.’ Prospero, in forgiving his enemies, declares that he is siding, not with his charity or mercy, but with ‘his nobler reason’ (Tempest, V, i, 26). The explanation is that nearly all of them believed the fundamental moral maxims were intellectually grasped.
This is the rhetorical device known as prolepsis: interrupting the line of discourse to answer potential objections.
Abolition is much more polemic or philippic than it is a discussion paper designed to sway opponents.
Followers of the Tao need to be “looking before and after” (as Hamlet has it), obediently receiving from the past and responsibly handing on to the future.
“A man does not prove his greatness by standing at an extremity, but by touching both extremities at once and filling all that lies between them.”74
Cicero (106–43 BC) in De Republica wrote, “There is in fact a true law – namely, right reason – which is in accordance with nature, applies to all men and is unchangeable and eternal” (11:33). St. Thomas Aquinas defined the natural law as “nothing other than the light of understanding placed in us by God; through it we know what we must do and what we must avoid. God has given this light or law at the creation.”75
The human mind has no more power of inventing a new value than of imagining a new primary colour
it is Christ’s “Person and Office” that are unique, not his teachings.
He mentions that he has been reading the Old Testament and has been surprised by a verse from the book of Proverbs (25:21): “If thine enemy be hungry, give him bread to eat, and if he be thirsty give him water to drink.” He confesses to being taken aback: “One rubs one’s eyes. So they were saying that already. They knew that so long before Christ came.”81 Such a concern for one’s enemy has no counterpart in Greek teaching or in Confucian morality, he says. There is a striking continuity between Old and New Testaments in terms of teaching: the wholly new thing about Christ is not the ethic he
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“Progress” in this sense means not real, objective progress, but that kind of progress which the speaker happens to favour. It is a classic example of verbicide, and from a subjectivist direction. Lewis is alive to the ruse.
The moment you say that one set of moral ideas can be better than another, you are, in fact, measuring them both by a standard, saying that one of them conforms to that standard more nearly than the other.
His unwillingness to get into the specifics of casuistry comports with the basic thrust of Abolition, which is that character formation is the most important factor in moral decision-making; ethics is more about actors than actions.
Moral behavior or character formation is, therefore, always a creative, even heroic work. It is a process by which a person is strengthened to act freely and responsibly at the same time.
If you want strength, you must exercise; if you want to understand morality, you must try to be moral. It is this conviction that lies behind a curious little phrase in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. When Aslan is de-petrifying the stone statues in the witch’s castle, he breathes on the feet of a giant and declares, “Once the feet are put right, all the rest of him will follow.”88 Likewise, in The Pilgrim’s Regress, we read that the Shepherd people (i.e., the Jews) had “their feet set on a road: and . . . if the feet have been put right the hands and the head will come right sooner or
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Lewis maintained that “Christian moral principles” are not different from “moral principles,” and that the real problem is how to obey them:
In his essay “Equality,” Lewis described himself as “a democrat” (a believer in democracy), but he was also keenly aware of the ways in which the term “democratic” could acquire an incantatory value and be used to bamboozle people into accepting all sorts of unwise (and essentially undemocratic) public policies.
nominalism, the belief that universals do not exist, but only particulars.
Lewis considers acceptance of the Tao as a necessary condition of anthropological identity, both for each particular person singly and for humanity overall.
Neither Man en masse nor the singular man on the street can retain his humanity if the Tao is abandoned.
was found to be perfectly explicable
Ph, but it is not, to this day.
manipulable.
As early as 1952 he remarked that the trouble with satirising the modern world was that “what you put into your story as fantastically horrid possibilities becomes fact before your story is printed. The reality outstrips the satire!”117
Juvenal writes “Hoc volo, sic jubeo; sit pro ratione voluntas,” This I will, so I command; let my will take the place of reason
“Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes?”, Who will control the controllers?
Life within the Tao is not an assertion of power but an exercise of wisdom, a wisdom that, as the repeated discussion of dulce et decorum est makes evident, is fundamentally self-sacrificial. Might and right are not synonymous; sometimes powerlessness is the morally correct stance.
