yeah i'm just gonna give up on showing you out of context quotes,
words that i don't know, whatever
just take the actual commentary and go
Before I get this started, I probably should make clear that I most certainly know that I am not the target audience for this piece of writing. I'm sure any competent thinker would absolutely destroy my rebuttal, or just any remotely competent humanities major in general, but I write this stuff because I'm bored, not to actually effect social change.
Do any of these philosophical books effect any actual change these days though? Everyone's on Twitter and Reddit these days consuming and engaging with ragebait the CCP or Elon throws at them (me included!), so do writings like these still have any impact?
Hell if I know. Anyways, let's get this crap started! I have no idea where my philistine commentary is going to take me, but who cares?
Lewis starts off by calling out some weird English textbook that shows just how much school curriculums have changed since his era. The book yaps about how a person calling something "sublime" actually just means that the person has "sublime feelings," which certainly is a brainless take if I've heard one. Lewis, of course, disagrees with this in a much more eloquent manner, but if you want to see how he does that just read the book yourself.
Quick tangent- before he transitions into his main point in the book, though, he drops this:
Some pleasure in their own ponies and dogs will they have lost.
I know this seems like a really mediocre quote, but I find it pretty funny how he assumes a goddamned pony is just a normal thing for an English family to have. It probably was back in his day, but in this day and age it just sounds crazy.
But I digress. Where I start to disagree is a quote he drops from Aristotle. Even though Lewis is just quoting the dude, it's pretty clear he agrees with the guy:
[T]he aim of education is to make the pupil like and dislike what he ought.
He also quotes a bunch of other "great" thinkers saying that some things are objectively worth our admiration and others are objectively worth are condemnation, but we all know that by "objective" he just means what the teacher likes. These quotes are brought up to refute the assertions the no-name English textbooks make that most of the emotions in romantic writing are BS, but I feel like he presents a sort of false dichotomy. From what I see, Lewis thinks that it's either
How about a third option?
IDK, I just really feel like Lewis fails to emphasize the importance of independent thought in education. Going to school is 20% knowing things and 80% getting critical thinking and problem-solving skills. I may have, pulled that ratio out of nowhere, but you get the idea. Independent thought is orders of magnitude more important than correctly associating the adjective "sublime" with some stupid waterfall.
Lewis also seems weirdly obsessed about dying for one's country. This book was published only a couple years after the end of WWII, so I guess it is justified, but only his day and age. In 2024, I think it's an absurd thing to want to die for one's country, and I'm pretty sure most of my friends would think the same.
The first chapter is also where Lewis introduces the concept of the 道 or the "Tao," which he believes is the natural order of things that all humans should strive to recognize, emulate, or whatever. Point is, he believes there are "objective" morals. That argument is wrong on plenty of levels, but that's a point for the next section, since he discusses it in a lot more detail there.
OK, so Lewis treats this 道 as something that is 100% infallible, some set of moral axioms that the universe itself has crafted for man. If you're like me, this statement by itself should already seem wrong on so many levels.
Before we start, I'm not saying that all morals are fake! Obviously, killing and stealing are bad, and we should treat others how we want to be treated, yada yada yada. I'm just saying that they're all manmade, and that are inherently fallible. For god's sake it took, what, 300 years just for the United States, a country inherently founted on the principle of freedom, to say that "Actually, two guys should have the freedom to marry."
I even agree with Lewis with one contention he makes. Throughout this chapter, he argues for the necessity of the Tao because he thinks that at some point things have to be good for their own sake. I pick up trash on the sidewalk not because it'll give me any immediate benefit, but because it's generally a good thing to make the community a little bit cleaner. I give a sandwich to the homeless person on the street even though it's not really in my self-interest because, again, it's generally a good thing to do so. Schools should give students a general sense of what's right and what's wrong, but again I have to emphasize the importance of letting kids come to conclusions on their own instead of just drilling them on what they should or shouldn't know.
Setting aside how human-centric this Tao is, as I'm pretty sure that's a whole new set of philosophy I don't have the brains to deal with, I think Lewis goes wrong when he asserts that the set of morals specified in the Tao are unchanging, and that we have to follow them or else we're nothing more than animals or whatever. Sure, he tries to address this;
Those who understand the spirit of the Tao and who have been led by that spirit can modify it in directions which that spirit itself demands.
Who decides what mods are "in the spirit" of the Tao? Lewis most certainly believes that some thinkers, like Aristotle, develop the Tao in ways "that spirit itself demands," while others, perhaps Marx, don't. Who's he to decide what the Tao wants? This supposed Tao he speaks of is supposed to be a part of nature, right? How are we supposed to know what the uncaring, all-powerful force of nature wants?
To quote him more on who gets to develop the Tao:
The outsider knows nothing about the matter.
Who gets to decide who's on the outside and who's on the inside? The "bad" philosophers like Nietzsche probably think themselves that the mods they're making are what nature or god truly wants!
That's the main issue I have with this concept of the Tao. Lewis treats it like it's infallible, but really, it's just another moral code made up by men, for men. No doubt, there is a sense of continuity in it, but in the end it's other people who get to decide what is and isn't added to the general code most people live by. Sometimes the change is gradual, sometimes it's might makes right, but nature itself doesn't particularly have a say in the development of this code.
The first two chapters had bad takes, but they were at least about things that were somewhat hinged. This last one, though, Lewis was probably smoking something while writing it.
He transitions from the Tao to this chapter about man conquering nature by supposing people who think that man can go beyond the "natural" concept of Tao and are able to mold future generations to their every whim. Going from this, he then argues that by supposedly conquering this set of morals, we're actually regressing to a state of nature, perhaps something like Hobbes' depiction of the initial state of a person as savage and brutal.
I'm probably misrepresenting what Lewis thinks this conditioned person will look like, but he barely spends any time on how exactly the new person will think and act. The closest thing I've found is this quote here:
When all that says 'it is good' has been debunked, what says 'I want' remains.
I'm just going to interpret this as meaning that Lewis' conditioned person is no different from a primitive caveman, running on pure desire and instinct. There is some merit in the claim that without a set of morals, humanity is just another species on this godforsaken planet. In a lot of stories I've read (I won't say which ones) where a character gets corrupted and throws away their humanity, a lot of them act no better than animals.
Still, though, all this is based on the claim that the Tao is 100% natural. But let's just give Lewis the benefit of the doubt here and say that they are. Even so, Lewis still manages to go wrong when he says this:
But I am not supposing them to be bad men. They are rather, not men (in the old sense) at all.
...what?
I don't think even the most psychopathic techbro out there would strip the new human of all its morals. Lewis supposes that in conquering nature, we necessarily have to conquer this natural concept of the Tao, but I'm willing to bet at least 99.99% of all humans are inclined to do good. What motive would anyone have, really, to condition the man such that nothing in the Tao is within him?
I'd at least somewhat understand if humans molded the future generations to become nothing more than glorified worker bees who know only of serving their superiors, but to say that the molded man will regress to nature is outlandish as all hell! Who knows, maybe Lewis just got caught up in his formal philosophy and logic so much he never cared to take a step back and think, "Hey, does this crap actually make a shred of common sense?"
final rating: 7/10,
even though his opinions are awful, at least he keeps them short
like the entire "book" is only around 50 pages long