The Abolition of Man

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Summary: Years Ahead of the Trends
Review: In The Abolition of Man C.S. Lewis was well ahead of his times. He foresaw the development of postmodernism and deconstructionism.

His answer was not restricted to the wisdom of Western Culture. Rather he drew on cultures across the spectrum of time to demonstrate the existence of a Tao--a unifying body of moral knowledge.

Personally, I am going to require this for reading in a doctoral seminar.

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Summary: Have Other Reviewers Forgotten the Title?
Review: I just finished reading this book for the fifth time; it is quickly becoming my favorite. Lewis traces how mankind will by means of poor education, faulty logic, and scientific/technological advances ultimately destroy itself, though certainly not in an apocalyptic fashion.
Lewis details how an improper education denies mankind that which makes us human, our virtue, our "Chests." By our heads we are mere intellect and spirit, and by our bodies we are mere animal and appetite; but where these two meet, the chest, is where we find our humanity.
"The Tao," which Lewis attributes an entire chapter to, is the undeniable universal laws govern and have always governed the lives of all humans (he offers evidence of the Tao from nearly every ancient religion/moral code at the end of the book). The Tao offers us the transparent window or lens with which we are able to experience this world. Those who try to step outside the Tao to criticize it, like those who accuse morality as being the construct of a power-hungry priestly ascetic caste (sound like Nietzsche?)and insist that the burden of proof lie with the accused (morality), speak utter nonsense. Thinkers like Marx and Nietzsche (whose philosophy was so paradoxical it drove him insane, he renounced all philosophy before him, including the ancient Greeks, and used logic to disprove logic), who reject the Tao, reject humanity. (I do no justice to Lewis's arguments; read the book.)
From this point we examine how mankind's conquest of Nature is really only the conquest of some men by other men. We are like the magician who surrenders more and more to Nature in return for power until he surrenders himself. We believe we are progressing, becoming more powerful, but we are not. We fail to factor in time to our equations, and fail to forsee its consequences. For example we are able to control posterity by means of contraceptives and abortion, something man has been unable to do in all of history, until now. We do not understand our own limits. We build too high on too shallow of a foundation, and our own building comes crashing down upon us.
Like Marx's notion that elements within bourgeoisie society are responsible for its destruction, Freud's notion that we all have a "death drive," Nietzsche's idea of a "will to nothingness," Derrida's wish to "transcend man and mankind," and Binswanger's observation that the artists who transcend their own captivity are eventually going to experience a lethal fall, Lewis understands that, from his beginnings, Man has sought his own destruction. But before now we had not the means, the leaders, or the ignorance to go through with it.

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Summary: The Best and the Worst of C.S. Lewis
Review: This book shows Lewis at his best and at his worst. At his best, he is a sharp social critic, a lucid expositor, and a man with an uncanny ability to get right down to the heart of the spiritual perplexities and self-deceptions that vex us in our daily lives, and open them up to the light of reason. I'm one of many people who owe a deep debt to this man, and I revere him as much as any one of the 5-star reviewers here.

But Lewis, as a writer, had serious faults as well. Though he was a generous reader, he was not a generous arguer: his idea of a good argument was to seize upon some poor schmo who epitomized some (then) current silliness and beat him senseless (with wonderfully powerful, clear, simple prose.) The spectacle is always fun, but it sometimes feels like watching Muhammed Ali boxing Peewee Herman -- you've always wanted to see it, but you have an uneasy feeling that what you're watching is not real boxing.

So to read this book properly, you need to understand two things. First, it is not a work of academic philosophy, and it won't stand up as such. That is to say, Lewis did not go out and look for the primary exponents of moral relativism of his time and wrestle them to the ground. He doesn't "survey the literature." He doesn't take on the important relativist philosophers. Instead he seizes this poor anonymous English textbook-writer by the collar and thrashes him soundly, and then goes on to pile up a sort of "everyone says so, so it must be true" defense of traditional moralities. Academic philosophers will no doubt recoil from this book in horror. It is not their sort of book, and it doesn't play by their rules.

Lewis is speaking to a different audience, and he has a different goal in mind. He's not speaking to people who have read lots of difficult philosophy: he's speaking to people who have picked up little bits of fashionable modernist dicta and have fashioned a pseudo-philosophy out of them. He wants to demolish -- not serious, reasoned relativism, but popular, stupid relativism. The person who says that "Einstein proved all things are relative, so there can't be any such thing as absolute right or wrong" -- that's the person Lewis wanted to drop on the mat. And he succeeds in that brilliantly.

The second thing you need to understand, to read this book properly, is that it is attempting to recreate some of Lewis's own journey out of relativism. And here we get to another of Lewis's faults: he wrote too fast. His pile of examples of universal morality could be mistaken for an attempt to prove that there are universal moral principles and all thoughtful moral people have always known it and stuck to them. As such, it would stand as one of the shoddiest jobs of argument ever presented. But that's not really what he's up to, though he really ought to have explained what he was doing more carefully. What he is doing is presenting, in a few pages, the experience he himself had of years of voracious reading in various traditions -- the experience of discovering that the surprising thing about the moral principles of various civilizations is not how various they are, but how similar they are. It's not an argument, really: it's just a distillation of experience.

Which is why to point out glaring omissions (where is Buddhism? What about Wittgenstein? What about the 19th-Century and the Modern theologians?) is to miss the point of this book. If you want to go find the real arguments, go read the philosophers -- you'll find that many of the serious philosophical questions about the nature of morality were not addressed, let alone settled, in this book. This book is, in fact -- though Lewis would have hated the idea -- an extremely personal one. In it you can see Lewis recreating his own progress out of nihilism and relativism. And for those whose early paths resemble his, this book can be -- as I can testify -- wonderfully illuminating, even liberating.

So don't take this book for what it is not -- a philosophical treatise, or a definitive answer to relativism. Instead, take it what it is -- a popular answer to popular "philosophy," and a report on how one man worked his way out of some of his own foolishness by clear thinking and wide reading. Lewis chose in this book to engage people where they actually live, rather than where they wish they lived: he knew that the philosophies we actually live by are much cruder than those carefully thought out and argued by professional philosophers.

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Summary: As long as the limitations of the book are kept in view.
Review: This book has been recently described as not being about general education, but ('rather') about broad politics, religion and philosophy.

It is quite true that politics and philosophy (not religion, though) are central topics of the book. However, Lewis' point in these three lectures (delivered to educators and collected for this book) is that general education often _does_ involve tacit and very powerful philosophical presuppositions that have a direct and practical bearing on politics--and religion, for what it's worth. The 'religious' angle can be easily inferred from TAoM, but Lewis specifically avers from hanging any such weight on his argument. A close read of what he does, will show that Lewis doesn't even argue in favor of the existence of an objective moral standard. He does argue (and powerfully, I think) that the belief in such a standard is a necessity for a healthy society (with healthier individuals)--but that is not the same as arguing for the existence of such a standard. (Lewis restricts any argument in that direction to the simple inclusion of an appendix that illustrates some commonality of ethical principles across society. Even here, he doesn't try to hang much philosophical or religious weight on such commonalities, though. Personally, I am sorry that Lewis never devoted full attention to a rigorous examination of the theistic Argument from Morality. Possibly, this was because he believed it wouldn't serve properly as a primary argument (his use of the AfM in _Miracles: A Preliminary Study_ seems to indicate this). However, it would be misleading to market TAoM as the AfM we might wish Lewis to have written. At best, it can only serve as a tantalizing glimpse, perhaps an opening set of chapters, for such a work.)

As for what this all has to do with public education: Lewis clearly demonstrates in his first lecture, that _other_ people, who _had been_ writing schoolbooks on literature, had already been advancing the philosophy of ethical relativism (perhaps without quite realizing it, as Lewis allows); indeed, in some cases (as he ironically notes) the ostensible 'lesson' in critical appreciation of English literature consisted really of nothing else than training in philosophical relativism. This was already the situation within the British educational system; Lewis (as a respected professor of English literature) is calling attention to the fact, and (as a philosopher) is calling attention to the logical implications. At many different levels, they are implications still worth considering, today.

This, btw, is why Lewis does not report the names of the three authors and two books which he chooses for his examples: he isn't sure whether they consciously intended to make the points he is deriving from them, and doesn't want to vilify them publicly (he says as much on the first pages). Originally he was speaking to other assembled educators who would presumably be familiar with the books in question; thus keeping it 'in the family'. Lewis quite obviously has no problem whatsoever naming names and quoting specific sources, when he believes the scholars he is quoting consciously meant the notions he is attacking. Dr. I. A. Richards (whom he has a healthy respect for in other regards) and Dr. C. H. Waddington are both quoted, and their positions criticized, in this fashion. 'Gaius', 'Titius' and 'Orbilius' are presented as examples of a principle, not as scholars writing with authority (like Richards and Waddington) on the subject in question.

It is true that Lewis speculates, on several levels, about what the intentions of the pseudo-3 might be. But this is legitimate insofar as he is presenting examples of a type, not presenting individuals. This, again, is why he chose to present them pseudonymously; he does not speculate similarly about Richards or Waddington (nor does he present them pseudonymously--this shows he is, as he claims, trying to protect the pseudo-3, while still making use of the examples.)

...P>Much of the bulk of the book ... is devoted to a response to 'serious emotivism'. Nor is Lewis utterly negative about the subject: he specially emphasizes the necessary value of trained emotions, even over against a merely intellectual grasp of ethics (better, he says, to play cards against an ethical sceptic raised to believe 'a gentleman doesn't cheat',than to play against an irreproachable moral philosopher raised among cardsharps! |g|) What he does stress, however, is that emotions are not ethical justifications, nor a substitute for them. Put more shortly, he argues that a person's emotions should be based upon his ethics, and not his ethics upon his emotions. (And he distinguishes this from arguing that ethics are _not_ only a representation of our emotions.)

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Summary: Good point, but a bit awkward
Review: I am not a Christian, but I find C.S. Lewis to be one of the most rational Christians I have ever read. This is the second book I've read by him, not counting the Narnia books, and I have a sort of conditional love for his work. Here Prof Lewis takes a little story about false values accidentally impressed upon students in public schools, and takes it to a far-spanning level. He goes on to explain that values only work if they are expansions of past values, because human values are all traced back to the primordial Tao. Not every example he makes works. For example, he mentions Nietzsche's morality as an innovation without grounds, when, first of all, Nietzsche DID NOT ADVOCATE MASTER MORALITY, but rather encouraged personal morality; and Nietzsche's ideas all have solid ground in ancient Greek philosophy. Nevertheless, Prof Lewis advocates a fair system, where new ideas are acceptable, but we never forget our roots. After all, without this book, we might end up like in Brave New World. That would be bad!

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Summary: Lewis Bravely Knocks Down a Five-Pound Argument
Review: This book is a diatribe in reaction to five sentences that Lewis read in a children's grammar book. The authors (whom he refuses to name, thus making it impossible for anyone to check whether he fairly represents their position and successfully refutes it) stated that when we call a waterfall "sublime," we really mean "'I have feelings associated in my mind with the word sublime'...we are only saying something about our own feelings." Lewis inferred that the authors believed that there is no such thing as human virtue or intrinsic value and that a mostly hedonist biological instinct is the closest thing to a moral code that we can have--all because they said that your estimation of a waterfall's beauty says more about you than about the waterfall!

As far as I can tell, those authors were discussing aesthetics, not moral philosophy. This does not prevent Lewis from fantasizing about what their moral philosophy must be, nor from tearing it down.

Lewis opposes noncognitivism--the philosophical claim that moral statements do not represent propositions about the world--and, more specifically, emotivism--the claim that moral statements represent the speaker's emotions. His only reason is that emotivism leads to contradiction. If, when I say, "Your feelings are contemptible," emotivism would translate it to mean "My feelings are contemptible," then the theory is ridiculous and useless. But no serious emotivist would hold such a view. It is more common to translate it as "Your feelings are contemptible to me" or "I have contempt for your feelings." So Lewis is attacking a straw man and is left without any response to serious emotivism.

Lewis believes that each object merits a certain emotional reaction from us. To say that the waterfall is sublime means that it deserves our admiration, and to fail to sufficiently admire it would be a deficiency on our part. He has one rare moment of insight: "To say that a shoe fits is to speak not only of shoes but of feet," which is immediately vitiated when he uses it to illustrate the claim that our feelings must conform to reality. He does not consider that there might be other ways of evaluating the appropriateness of our emotions: their consistency with other feelings, their appropriateness according to one's principles, their conformity to etiquette, etc. The worth of a shoe can be determined in a variety of different ways, depending on whether it is meant to conform to a baby's foot, a club foot, pavement, sand, or a desire for an extra three inches of height. A shoe is not, as Lewis's theory requires, evaluated by its intrinsic nature; rather, it has, as the wise aphorism suggests, value that is relative to the people who assign it.

Nor does he adequately explain what this theory of the intrinsic worth of objects has to do with moral action. In conflating aesthetic theory with moral theory, he seems to accept the very emotivism he rails against.

He does not successfully refute moral relativism. He insists that morality must rest on certain foundational claims, such as "preserve humanity," which must be accepted as true; but he gets himself into trouble when, halfway through the book, he says these basic moral claims should be accepted as "axioms" necessary for the entire moral system. Accepting "preserve humanity" as an axiom is perfectly compatible with relativism. A relativist will have no problem acknowledging that a certain moral claim is integral to a certain moral system. What relativism denies is that the claim is objectively true outside of the system. By permitting, here, the acceptance of moral claims as merely axiomatic, Lewis undercuts support for his own insistence throughout the rest of the book that these axioms are actually true. He would have done better if he had actually read a book by any mature emotivist or relativist philosopher before trying to argue against the theory.

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Summary: Even more timely than when it was written.
Review: C.S. Lewis wrote this book in 1944, but he could have written it yesterday. In this little gem, C.S. Lewis sees through the modern world view right to the core of where it goes wrong. Most writers would need several hundred pages to explain how modernity differs from the pre-modern world view; and another several hundred pages to explain the dangers of modernity. C.S. Lewis manages it in under one hundred pages. And he even makes it fun.

In a nutshell, his book is on the dangers of moral relativism, a concern which we hear much about these days. Less often do we hear the critiques which he brings to bear on the technological mindset that wants to subject nature to our own whims. The punch line is that when all is said and done, our whims can only come from nature (if we refuse to acknowledge some external source of value.) If all there is in the world is nature, then nature must inevitably win.

Virtually every page offers a fresh insight into our modern-day foibles. That he wrote this highly relevant book more than a half-century ago is testimony to the clarity of his vision.

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Summary: A Magnificent Work of Ethics and Social Commentary
Review: Though best-known as a Christian apologist, Lewis' Abolition of Man has an appeal to an audience outside of Judeo-Christianity as well as within.

Lewis takes on those who want to rewrite morality, and for that matter, master and change human nature (hence the title). The various movements for this have changed names and some details, but from David Hume to modern-day sociolobiologists and Peter Singer, we can see a continuity of people who want to proclaim a new moral order (but at the cost of of some aspect of our humanity).

Lewis neatly dissects these would-be revolutionaries and show how any attempt to rewrite human nature must occur within the context of Nature and natural law, and that the new morals that these revolutionaries proclaim are in fact distorted, mutilated echoes of what Lewis dubs the Tao, which is a common morality written in human nature and shared by all the great faiths, philosophies and cultures. In the appendix, Lewis has selections from the great sagas, scriptures and philosophers showing how the Taoist, Confucian, Greco-Roman, Old Norse, Hindu, American Indian, and Judeo-Christian cultures all have a common morality, and while Lewis allows that these ways of life are not identical, they do point to some natural set of laws which humans should follow.

The end result is a beautiful critique of moral relativism and the more dehumanizing philosophers and pundits of modern times. In the 1-2 hours it took to go through this book (though I look forward to returning to it and pondering some parts of the book further), this has become one of my favorite Lewis books.

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Summary: Brilliant as always
Review: While reading C.S. Lewis I often get that wistful feeling of "I so wish I had thought of that". This short collection of essays is not an exception. Subtitled "Reflections on education with special reference to the teaching of English in the upper forms of schools", Lewis uses an elementary English text to illustrate the insinuation of moral relativism to all levels of modern society. The first essay contemplates our society filling young minds with knowledge but leaving out all sense of objective truth or value - we produce "Men Without Chests". "You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilization needs is more 'drive', or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or 'creativity'. 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."

His second essay concerns one of his preoccupations - Natural Law or what he calls the "Tao", that sense of fair play that runs through all of us. The appendix contains bits of that Tao - culled from Old Norse, Ancient Chinese, Babylonian, Roman texts that lay down moral laws that appear to be accepted across thousands of years and widely diverse civilizations by common consent.

The final essay "The Abolition of Man" addresses the future of mankind in light of his attempts at "innovation". When the last frontier is man's own nature, the successful conquest will be man's abolition. This is frightening considering the willingness of modern liberals to play fast and loose with life, cloning, and soon, gene manipulation.

This short book is more relevant today than when Lewis wrote it and is essential reading for Christians.

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Summary: Chock-full of thought provoking statements
Review: In this brief but excellent philosophical work, Lewis addresses the issue of moral relativism. He begins by evaluating the ideologies implicit in a few examples of English textbooks used in the schools at his time. He shows how these ideologies do not belong in the textbooks because of their falsity and potential to creep into the thinking of the students who use them. Lewis discusses with convincing logic that there is such a thing as objective truth/values, and that this is universally inherent to humanity. He uses the word "Tao" to collectively refer to these values, and elaborates on his intended meaning on pg. 28 of the Third Printing. He states,

"This thing which I have called for convenience the Tao, and which others may call Natural Law or Traditional Morality or the First Principles of Practical Reason or the First Platitudes, is not one among a series of possible systems of value. it is the sole source of all value judgements. If it is rejected, all value is rejected. If any value is retained, it is retained. The effort to refute it and raise a new system of value in its place is self-contradictory."

The appendix of the book shows a list of possible examples of this natural law, and how it extends across religion and culture. This agrees with the Christian belief that there is a natural order/law established by God and written on the hearts of all humanity (see Jeremiah 31:33, Romans 2:14-15, Hebrews 10:16).

The third chapter of the book offers a startling insight into the progress of science towards "conquering nature." Lewis shows how in the abscence of the natural law or a foundational set of morals, humankind will have found that it's supposed power over nature is really nothing but a certain amount of tyranny over other humans. I think a modern illustration of Lewis' point is the inaccesibility of vaccines and simple medical treatments in third world countries. Altogether "The Abolition of Man" is an excellent work that can be appreciated and enjoyed by Christians and non-Christians alike.