Our Friend Bulvy

 C. S. Lewis – Bulverism

In his essay, appropriately titled Bulverism, C. S. Lewis tells the fictional story of Ezekiel Bulver. Bulver discovered, when his mother refuted his father by saying that he was a man, that “there flashed across my opening mind the great truth that refutation is no necessary part of argument. Assume your opponent is wrong, and then explain his error, and the world will be at your feet.” Bulverism is perfectly displayed in the argument that those who support capitalism do so because they benefit from it and have been conditioned to support it. Since they are not disinterested, they must be ignored. Thoughts that are ideologically tainted are invalid.

Lewis points out though, that all thoughts come from someone, who necessarily must have a background and ideology. So then all thoughts would seem to be tainted. The bulverists “have sawn off the branch they were sitting on. If, on the other hand, they say that the taint need not invalidate their thinking, then neither need it invalidate ours. In which case they have saved their own branch, but also saved ours along with it.”

This is one of the fundamental flaws of bulverism. They must hold that some thoughts are tainted while others are not. This is not that different from the position held by most men through history, but bulverism destroys the basis for determining whether a thought is valid or not. The root of bulverism is a denial of the validity of reason.

If one says that reason is the product of ideologically tainted minds, then it is obvious that one would not argue using reason. Though, if rationality is transcendent, then bulverism is revealed to be obfuscation to avoid scrutiny. Lewis concedes that the mind is influenced by physical factors, as the bulverists claim, but argues that thoughts do not originate from the natural world. He says, “All attempts to treat thought as a natural event involve the fallacy of excluding the thought of the man making the attempt.” If thought is the result of grey matter, then it has no more validity to claim to be true than a rock. Regarding natural phenomenon, he says, “The universe doesn’t claim to be true: it’s just there.”

Lewis correctly notes that “All reasoning assumes the hypothesis that inference is valid.” He also says that “If we couldn’t trust inference we could know nothing but our own existence. Physical reality is an inference from sensations.” Again, he is correct, but here he leaves off. He has established the necessary structure of reason, but not the necessity of reason itself. Maybe the world is unintelligible.

If we take that position though, our thoughts describing the world as unintelligible would mean nothing more than any other thought, which is meaningless. Lewis has gone to the edge of reason and chose sanity, though not for its reasonableness.