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

by Michael Ward

without an appeal to the Tao, what pretends to be moral persuasion is really just coercion:

the opposing worldviews of today, have a common starting point in the rejection of the natural moral law and the reduction of the world to “mere” acts.

If science aims for the most comprehensive knowledge in accord with reality possible, then to make absolute one method is the opposite of science.

You might even say that, for Lewis, the abuse of language is one of the things which would tell you immediately that you couldn’t trust someone, that the person you were listening to didn’t understand what it was to be human

logic only tells us how to relate the terms operative within a given system of thought (or “grammar,” to use a Wittgensteinian term), it does not tell us which system of thought to adopt in the first place.

we see at once that Bacon and the magicians have the closest possible affinity. Both seek knowledge for the sake of power (in Bacon’s words, as ‘a spouse for fruit’ not a ‘curtesan for pleasure’).130

For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men

lines by which Oswald Spengler acclaimed Hitler in 1934: “Man is a beast of prey . . . would-be moralists . . . are only beasts of prey with their teeth broken.” . . . Many seem to think this moral approval of brutality is only a German vice, but Simone de Beauvoir hails the glorification of crime and lust by the Marquis de Sade as great moral pronouncements and then identifies these teachings of crime and lust with the exposure of bourgeois ideologies by historical materialism. So the French Marxist writer transmutes bestiality into moral rebellion even as the Nazi historian does.

Is analytical understanding always a basilisk, he wonders? Must we always murder to dissect?

The Tao grounds all our morality, even our immoral attempts to overturn it, just as the Earth upholds us as we dig our own graves. Stepping back to see where we have been standing will turn into an infinite regress unless we realise that a fundamental truth of this kind (“I am standing on the Earth” – “I have a moral nature”) is different from all subsequent truths, which is why it is rightly called fundamental.

Lewis’s overarching and undergirding purpose is to demonstrate that the Tao grasps us; we are already within the Tao, and always remain within it, often without realising it, whether we like it or not.

W.B. Yeats, said, “We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.”

According to Lewis, imagination was “the organ of meaning,” while reason was “the natural organ of truth,”

One becomes good not by assenting to ideas, but by actualising one’s identity as either courageous or not, either chaste or not, either honest or not. Morality is less an onerous imposition upon one’s nature and more a kindly outfitting of one’s nature or graceful unfolding of one’s nature as it opens to, embraces, and is embraced by, the goodness, truth, and beauty of reality.

Lewis knew early on and deep in his imaginative bones that defeat is no refutation. Defeat, death, loss, poverty, weakness, powerlessness of any kind – these things are not to be simply equated with moral failure. They may be symptoms of moral failure. They may represent the fruits of laziness, cowardice, ineptitude, and so on, but not necessarily. There is such a thing as innocent suffering, honourable defeat; it is possible to die a good death.

To a thoroughgoing adherent of subjectivism, the value of a good death is invisible because power – self-assertive power – lies at the heart of that philosophy. Value is not an external reality that is recognised and then either praised or dispraised according to the lights of practical reason, but rather a conferral from one’s own irrational or nonrational nature (whatever that nature happens to be at any given moment). Truth thus dissolves into power,†† and the notion that self-sacrifice could ever be morally obligatory becomes absurd. Which is not to say that life will always be preferred over death. Self-immolation may be the choice du jour. But the choice to die will be made for no reason other than one’s momentary preference, not because one acknowledges it to be the good and right thing to do. The citation of Juvenal that we noted above (page 163) is worth recurring to here: “Hoc volo, sic jubeo; sit pro ratione voluntas” (“This I will, so I command; let my will take the place of reason”). Self-destruction is fully possible in a subjectivist world, even self-destruction that might accidentally redound to other people’s benefit, but reasoned self-sacrifice – a purposeful, generous, self-abandoned laying down of one’s life for the good of others as others – is impossible. As Robert Bolt puts it memorably in the screenplay of The Mission: “If might is right, then love has no place in the world.”19

abusus non tollit usum (“abuse does not abolish use”). If the Tao had been abused, so much the worse for its abusers.

The immemorial Way, the nexus of practical reason that surrounds and supports all human beings and summons them to ethical maturity, teaches that defeat is no refutation. Might is not right. Early in youth, Lewis had learned that honour was due to wisdom, not to power. Many years later, however, he would learn the wisdom of Juvenal’s statement honouring one particular kind of power: “Nature confesses that she has given to the human race the tenderest hearts, by giving us the power to weep. This is the best part of us.”†††