“The Empty Universe,” by C.S. Lewis
Victor Reppert posted a passage from a preface that C.S. Lewis wrote called “The Empty Universe.” I briefly looked around online to see if a complete text was available and found one here.
I have two thoughts. First, the main argument Lewis makes in his preface (which you’ll just have to read – it’s not too long) reminds me of something he says at the end of The Abolition of Man. Not the exact same issue, but the same method is in question from a different angle.
You cannot go on ’seeing through’ things forever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that a window should be transparent, because the street or the garden beyond is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? It is no use trying to ’see through’ first principles. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To ’see through’ all things is the same as not to see.
Second, I very much like the last passage of Lewis’s preface, where he says how certain books can be quite satisfying even if you disagree with them.
It has also given me that bracing and satifying experience which, in certain books of theory, seems to be partially independent of our final agreement or disagreement. It is an experience most easily disengaged by remembering what has happened to us whenever we turned from the inferior exponents of a system, even a system we reject, to its great doctors. I have had it on turning from common “Existentialists” to M. Sartre himself, from Calvinists to the Institutio, from “Transcendentalists” to Emerson, from books about “Renaissance Platonism” to Ficino. One may still disagree (I disagree heartily with all the authors I have just named) but one now sees for the first time why anyone ever did agree. One has breathed a new air, become free of a new country. It may be a country you cannot live in, but you now know why the natives love it. You will henceforward see all systems a little differently because you have been inside that one. From this point of view philosophies have some of the same qualities as works of art. I am not referring at all to the literary art with which they may or may not be expressed. It is the ipseitas, the peculiar unity of effect produced by a special balancing and patterning of thought and classes of thoughts: a delight very like that which would be given by Hesse’s Glasperlenspiel (in the book of that name) if it could really exist. I owe a new experience of that kind to Mr. Harding.
This is something I look for when I read books of different persuasions than my own. I think the experience is rare.
OK, Josh. Read some Sartre and tell us what we’re all missing.
I don’t know if I’d say “we’re all” missing something about Sartre. You’re the only anti-Sartre commenter around here I’ve seen!
But I’ve explained why I’m anti-Sartre. You haven’t given me any reason to change my mind.
I don’t think you’ve explained. You’ve taken defensive stances beginning with a coy “I don’t understand,” continuing with “Nazis” and flat denials of the point (e.g. that you can have subjective meaning in a world without objective meaning), and ending with “I haven’t read any existentialists” and “existentialists should believe in God instead.” Those are just cute paraphrases. Anyway I tried again back at that post.
Joshua: “I don’t think you’ve explained. You’ve taken defensive stances beginning with a coy “I don’t understand,” continuing with “Nazis” and flat denials of the point (e.g. that you can have subjective meaning in a world without objective meaning), and ending with “I haven’t read any existentialists” and “existentialists should believe in God instead.” Those are just cute paraphrases. Anyway I tried again back at that post.”
No, I wasn’t being coy. I didn’t understand. Since you had yet to make a distinction between objective meaning and subjective meaning, there was nothing for me to deny. I thought I began with “I haven’t read any existentialists.” And given my failure to realize the distinction between objective and subjective meaning, if such a distinction is legitimate, my conclusion that honest exitentialists should be believe in God follows. So no, I wasn’t being “cute.”
Clarification: I was the one being cute, with paraphrases.
Have you read “An Experiment in Criticism”? In addition to lots of other lovely stuff about reading, Lewis also says something similar there: “A true lover of literature should be in one way like an honest examiner, who is prepared to give the highest marks to the telling, felicitous and well-documented exposition of views he dissents from or even abominates. I read Lucretius and Dante at a time when (by and large) I agreed with Lucretius. I have read them since I came (by and large) to agree with Dante. I cannot find that this has much altered my experience, or at all altered my evaluation, of either.”
Also related: in his introduction to a book on St. Athanasius, Lewis wrote: “firsthand knowledge is not only more worth acquiring than secondhand knowledge, but is usually much easier and more delightful to acquire.”
I agree with you that the experience of reading a book that allows you to breath “a new air” is rare, and with Lewis that it is far more likely to come from a primary source, from one of the greats such as Lucretius and Dante as opposed to “inferior exponents of the system.” On the other hand, I also find that non-experts (e.g. Eric Hoffer) or people writing books that aren’t theory but that nonetheless impart an approach to or “philosophy of” life (e.g. Richard Feynman’s autobiographies) have deeply affected me.
I think the idea of philosophies having the qualities of works of art was quite important to Lewis professionally as well as spiritually. For instance he seemed to truly relish the medieval view of the universe as beautiful in itself even though it wasn’t true (like in his book the Discarded Image). That is wonderful for a literary person, but what do you think of it as a philosopher? When it comes to philosohpies, can philosophers care about qualities other than truth?
Sartre advocate violence, even terrorism. This is made most clear in his extended preface to The Wretched of The Earth, by Fanon.
You will have to read it to believe it.
I find I experience what Lewis describes when reading his work.