I always feel somewhat silly discussing C. S. Lewis because I know I will never be able to express anything better than he already has. Discussing though, is not quite the right word, maybe analyzing would be better. It is not that discussing – or analyzing – his writing is unenjoyable, in fact it is quite the opposite. It is rather that I seem to degrade his thoughts when I express or prove them, because I do it so much more poorly than Lewis does.
In his essay Meditations in a Toolshed, he describes the experience of seeing a sunbeam shining through a crack in the wall, at first he saw only the beam, since the rest of the shed was dark. Then he stepped into the beam and saw out to the trees, sky, and sun. He compares the each experience with two types of knowledge. The first is a detached and scientific way of observing and analyzing, while the second is actually experiencing a thing, without scrutinizing it.
When Lewis is explaining the sunbeam, I feel much the way he does looking through the it. But if one begins to pull his writing apart and dissect it, the beauty of his meaning seems to slip out through the cracks, much like how one cannot glimpse the greater world that one see when one looks along the sunbeam. His point is simple; you can agree or disagree, look at the consequences of either position, explore how what he says affects our views of reality, but to logically deconstruct his argument for the value of experiencing to gain understanding seems pointless since he is convincing because he makes you see through the world, rather than see it.
I am not saying that his arguments are not logically valid; they are. I think that much of the force of his arguments come from their beauty, not only their logical validity, and you lose that force when you treat his writing the same way you would treat that of Kant, or Descartes. That is what I see mainly as the difference between looking at or looking along as Lewis uses them in this essay. While there is great beauty in looking at a sunbeam, I do not think that Lewis wanted us to think of looking at and along as the same in that sense.
Any model, stretched too far, loses meaning. Lewis never claimed that this model explained everything perfectly. Besides, this is philosophy: of course it's meaningless (if all you do is take it at face value).
ReplyDeleteLewis addresses this even in the article: "...a great deal of contemporary thought is, strictly speaking, thought about nothing- all the apparatus of thought busily working in a vacuum."
It's all meaningless without application. Lewis' model would be nothing more than words on paper to all of us if we did not also have experience to confirm what he says.
However, I commend you for so boldly looking at this article, rather than strictly along it. I appreciate the irony.