Education, reason, and the Good

In The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis criticizes the moral philosophy implicit in a volume he calls The Green Book, a textbook that he had been sent to review. He uses this text as a foil to represent subjectivist ideas about language and ethics. The book was actually titled The Control of Language (1939), by Alec King and Martin Ketley. Lewis focuses on some misguided claims in King and Ketley’s textbook to launch his defense of the traditional notion of the objectivity of the Good — of what he terms “objective value.”

In their book C. S. Lewis on Politics and the Natural Law (Cambridge University Press, 2016), Justin Buckley Dyer and Micah J. Watson offer a summary of the argument Lewis makes in The Abolition of Man. Here is an excerpt from their summary:

“Contrary to the theory of value put forward in ‘The Green Book,’ Lewis insisted, ‘all teachers and even all men’ had for many years ‘believed the universe to be such that certain emotional reactions on our part could be either congruous or incongruous to it — believed, in fact, that objects did not merely receive, but could merit, our approval or disapproval, our reverence, or our contempt.’ Yet despite his desire to align himself with ‘all teachers and even all men’ throughout the centuries, Lewis’ own thought was undoubtedly shaped by a very specific tradition rooted in the teachings of Plato and Aristotle and ‘baptized’ by later Christian thinkers such as Augustine and Aquinas. In each of the three main arguments he advances in The Abolition of Man, Lewis draws heavily from and reiterates points developed within this tradition.

“First, Lewis argued that the primary task of early education is to train our emotions to respond correctly to objects in the world. That is to say, we must learn to love what is lovable and to despise what is despicable. Before considering abstract questions of justice and morality, we must be trained and brought up in good habits, learning to love things that are good and beautiful. As Aristotle taught, only those ‘brought up in fine habits’ can ‘be adequate students of fine and just things, and of political questions generally.’ Yet according to Augustine, every created thing is good and each good thing ‘can be loved in the right way or in the wrong way — in the right way, that is, when the proper order is kept, in the wrong way when that order is upset.’ Virtue is thus a matter of loving, and not merely knowing, what is true and good and beautiful. The fictional Eustace Scrubb in the Chronicles of Narnia series represents someone educated in one of the schools where the ideas of ‘The Green Book’ would predominate; he reacts poorly to everything. The son of ‘very up-to-date and advanced people,’ Eustace is not merely ignorant of, but also does not love, what is true and good.

“A rightly ordered human soul is one in which reason submits to the authority of God, on the one hand, and our emotions and appetites submit to the authority of reason, on the other. Following Plato, Lewis divides the soul of man into three parts: appetite, emotion, and reason. Our appetite pertains to bodily urges and base desires; emotions pertain to passions such as anger or fear. Neither appetite nor emotion is, in itself, moral or immoral. Each has a proper function. A well-ordered human soul is one in which reason rules the appetites through an alliance with well-trained emotions. A brave man, for example, is one whose emotions ally with his reason to face danger in an appropriate situation, whereas a coward yields to fear precisely when he ought not to. This tripartite model of the soul provides the foundation for Lewis’ analysis, and the model presumes that (1) there is a real and objective good and that (2) a proper education begins by training the emotions to respond correctly to the objective world, ‘welcoming everything good and abhorring everything not good.’ The fact that people disagree about what is good is no knock against the theory, for it is presumed that a person whose soul is disordered will not correctly perceive the good, since his or her appetite will have usurped the proper place of his or her reason and ruled in its stead.

“Still, many people — including the authors of ‘The Green Book’ — have denied that the proper function of reason is to apprehend an objective good at all. Instead, they agree with Hobbes’ contention that ‘whatsoever is the object of any man’s appetite or desire, that is it which he for his part calleth good,’ since there is nothing ‘simply and absolutely so, nor any rule of good and evil to be taken from the nature of the objects themselves, but from the person of the man.’ The Hobbesian view upends Plato’s vision of a rightly ordered soul and makes appetite the legitimate (or at least unavoidable) ruler of reason, with thoughts serving passions ‘as scouts and spies’ that ‘find the way to the things desired.’ David Hume followed Hobbes on this very point, arguing for an instrumentalist conception of reason, such that ‘reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.’ On the Hobbesian/Humean model, our end goal or ultimate desire is provided by arational and amoral appetite and emotion, and reason is merely the means by which we scheme to satisfy our desires.

“Among other things, this new reductionist psychology upends traditional theories of education, which had presumed that educators were trying to train emotion to aid reason in ruling the appetite. But if the term ‘good’ describes only our own emotions or desires, then the tripartite model of the soul makes no sense. And ‘when all that says “it is good” has been debunked,’ Lewis contended, ‘what says “I want” remains.’ The new man, created by the new education, is a man without properly trained emotions, a man without a chest. This, in Lewis’ view, makes him something less than a man, akin to a beast, motivated only by his own base desires and sense of what will give him pleasure. Of course, the new man might have culturally refined tastes and a mild temperament, but that would be only a by-product of his environment. There is no sense in saying any one man is better than another. As one of the new men in That Hideous Strength explains, all human desires and motives are ‘merely animal, subjective epiphenomena.’ When his environment changes, and he becomes something else, it is useless to talk of values improving or regressing, since values have all been seen through. . . .

“Lewis often treated the man ignorant of the first principles of reason as a hypothetical possibility but an empirical rarity. In the formulation of Richard Hooker, who offered what Lewis considered to be the highest and most beautiful expression of the natural-law tradition, the ‘first principles of the Law of Nature are easy; hard it were to find men ignorant of them.’ In his BBC broadcast talks, Lewis raised the possibility that you might find ‘an odd individual here and there who did not know’ the law of nature, ‘just as you find a few people who are colour-blind or have no ear for a tune.’ Lewis’ comparison of color-blindness to moral ignorance should not be read as a denial that the first principles of reason are both true for all and, at some level, known by all. There was no person simply ignorant of the law of nature. Yet Lewis did consider it a possibility that a person’s moral knowledge could be effaced by inordinate passions or evil habits. In the Chronicles of Narnia series, some of the ‘talking animals’ — animals, that is, that have the ability to reason — become so corrupt on the inside that they turn into irrational beasts. ‘Wouldn’t it be dreadful,’ Lucy asks in Prince Caspian, ‘if some day in our world, at home, men started going wild inside, like the animals here, and still looked like men, so that you’d never know which were which?’ Lewis never suggested that men could be born without chests, as a man might be born color-blind, but he did fear the possibility that propaganda and conditioning actually could create a race of sub-men whose perception of the first principles of reason had been destroyed.”

— from Justin Buckley Dyer and Micah J. Watson, C. S. Lewis on Politics and the Natural Law (Cambridge University Press, 2016). Michael Ward discussed The Abolition on Man on Volume 154 of the Journal. That interview has been re-released as an Archive Feature.