A few weeks ago I received, quite unexpectedly, a copy of C.S. Lewis’s Surprised my Joy from an old college friend. I couldn’t turn down such a direct invitation, so I’ve read it. Here’s a report.
Unimpressed by Joy
I’ve never been much of a Lewis fan; but, since I haven’t read very much of his work, that opinion doesn’t count for much. As I recall, prior to SbJ I had read The Abolition of Man and The Problem of Pain. (In addition, Mere Christianity was recommended to me in the course of this discussion here; I checked it out from the library and tried reading it, but the bad arguments therein induced a repeated urge to throw the book against the wall, and I was unable to finish it. And just skimming through it, I wasn’t able to locate the passage that Mike was referring to.)
But back to the books I have read. This lecture by J. R. Lucas seems to me a fair appraisal of the strengths and weaknesses of Abolition. (One discovers, when one starts poking around in Lewisania, that those who are predisposed towards being sympathetic to his positions are often his sternest critics, perhaps due to their disappointment at seeing potentially good arguments handled sloppily.) As for The Problem of Pain, overall it’s a reasonably good discussion of theodicy, but it’s marred by a ludicrous passage on animal pain, one of the silliest things I’ve ever seen in print.
Reading SbJ did not change my overall reaction to Lewis. I can’t say I wasn’t warned; immediately after his first description of Joy, Lewis issues the following caveat:
The reader who finds these three episodes of no interest need read this book no further.
I count myself among that class of readers. Not that I stopped reading the book; but I have to recognize that I am not a part of the audience that Lewis is addressing, and that it will take an effort on my part to read him with sympathy. To raise just one criticism: Others (including Lucas in the essay linked to above) have noted Lewis’s ignorance of, and antipathy to, science; what I found amazing, in an apologetic meant to be convincing to contemporary materialists, is that Lewis’s materialism (when he held it) came entirely from reading Lucretius, plus his conviction that it was the “current view”; he never engages in the slightest with the way in which contemporary scientific developments make some form of naturalism vastly more plausible (but do not, of course, “prove” it.)
Nonetheless, there are a couple of passages in Lewis’s account of his path to faith that are of considerable philosophical interest. I turn now to them.
The Argument from Reason
One of the crucial steps in Lewis’s conversion, as well as one of the most explicit discussion of philosophical issuesin SbJ, comes in the following passage:
(He) convinced me that the positions we had hitherto held left no room for any satisfactory theory of knowledge. We had been, in the technical sense of the term, "realists"; that is, we accepted as rock-bottom reality the universe revealed to the senses. But at the same time, we continued to make for certain phenomena claims that went with a theistic or idealistic view. We maintained that abstract thought (if obedient to logical rules) gave indisputable truth, that our moral judgment was "valid" and our aesthetic experience was not just pleasing but "valuable." The view was, I think, common at the time; it runs though Bridges’ Testament of Beauty and Lord Russell’s "Worship of a Free Man." Barfield convinced me that it was inconsistent. If thought were merely a subjective event, these claims for it would have to be abandoned. If we kept (as rock-bottom reality) the universe of the sense, aided by instruments co-ordinated to form "science" then one would have to go further and accept a Behaviorist view of logic, ethics and aesthetics. But such a view was, and is, unbelievable to me.
BTW, I didn’t have to type that whole passage in. I was able to cut-and-paste it from this post at Victor Reppert’s website, Dangerous Idea. Reppert is the author of Lewis’s Dangerous Idea: In Defense of the Argument from Reason, and a sometime internetulocutor of mine. As an introduction to the issues surrounding the argument, one can hardly do better than the first chapter of Reppert’s book, which is online here (pdf). Among other things, one will learn that the most complete formulation of the argument is given in Miracles: A Preliminary Study, and that this argument was the subject of a famous debate between Lewis and Elizabeth Anscombe, which has taken on a life of its own in philosophical folklore.
So what exactly is the Argument from Reason? In the simplest possible form, it is the assertion that there is no acceptable naturalistic account of Reason. What exactly does Reason mean here? That question can be answered in a number of ways, giving rise to a number of different versions of the argument. Reppert has admirably distinguished a number of these versions in Chapter 4 of Lewis’s Dangerous Idea, so, rather than make an already meandering post even longer, I’m simply going to reproduce his list. (Sketching in the details of how each argument works is left as an exercise for the reader.)
- The Argument from Intentionality
- The Argument from Truth
- The Argument from Mental Causation
- The Argument from the Psychological Relevance of Logical Laws
- The Argument from the Unity of Consciousness in Rational Inference
- The Argument from the Reliability of Our Rational Faculties
A few comments and observations –
– re the Argument from Truth:
Reppert says, on p. 47, in his discussion of the relationships between naturalism, physicalism and materialism:
Some people have suggested that someone who believes in the existence of, say, propositions, which do not have any spatio-temporal location, would be a naturalist but not a materialist. For our purposes, a worldview counts as naturalistic if it posits a causally closed “basic level of analysis”, and if all other levels have the characteristics they have in virtue of those the basic level has. If the base level is mechanistic but is not composed of matter, then we would have naturalism without materialism. If we have a basic level that is composed of matter (I’m not sure how that’s possible), then we have materialism without physicalism. However, if the argument that I am proposing works against physicalism, it will also work against nonphysicalist forms of naturalism as well.
First, while Reppert isn’t 100% explicit about whether he admits the possibility that “some people have suggested,” namely that a view that includes realism about propositions would still count as naturalism, the most plausible reading of this passage is that he does admit that possibility. It seems pretty clear to me that if you accept propositions into your ontology, you’ll have no problem accounting for truth. (For what it’s worth, a combination of realism about propositions and/or mental states, combined with a scornful rejection of any sort of theism, is a fairly common stance among analytic philosophers. I doubt that very many people outside of philosophy departments have thought enough about the issue to have any opinion on the matter at all.)
Second, I have a suggestion about how a nonphysicalistic materialism would be possible. Such a view would combine direct realism about the “medium-sized dry goods” of everyday experience, combined with a fairly radical instrumentalism about scientific theories. In other words: what’s “really there” are things like tables, trees, cows, ashtrays, etc. The theories that physicists come up with are nothing more than rules or predictions that will tell us how those objects will behave when we manipulate them in very complex ways (i.e., scientific experimentation). The entities posited aren’t “really there.” (Of course, philosophers and physicists would spend untold amounts of ink spelling out what’s meant by “not really there”: theoretical postulates, conceptual fictions, etc.)
I have no idea whether anyone has ever held such a view, or whether it’s at all plausible given the current state of physical theory. I merely want to suggest that it’s conceptually possible. And of course, this digression has nothing whatsoever to do with the Argument from Reason. This is just how philosophers amuse themselves.
– moving on to the Argument from Mental Causation:
This, along with the Argument from Intentionality, is the place where Reppert touches most closely on issues at the center of discussion among contemporary philosophers of mind. The argumentative terrain that Reppert faces is very different in the two cases, though. Most naturalists would admit that intentionality is one of the biggest problems for scientific naturalism, and many of them admit the intractable nature of that problem. (Reppert cites some of them.) Things are different with mental causation, though. The causal closure of the physical, if not quite dogma, is definitely the standard view these days, and philosophers who argue for genuine mental causation have an uphill battle.
– re the Argument from the Unity of Consciousness in Rational Inference:
This is one I hadn’t heard before; it poses the most interesting and serious problems for those of us who are inclined towards accepting Buddhist-influenced doctrines such as momentariness and anatta. I’ll have to devote some more attention to this one.
– re the Argument from the Reliability of Our Rational Faculties:
This argument seems to differ in scope from the others; to speak figuratively, it’s painted in much broader strokes. The other versions of the Argument from Reason depend on a fairly precise analysis of what Reason or Rationality requires: that our thoughts must be “about” something, that they must be capable of being either true or false, and that we can draw conclusions about the truth of some propositions based upon the truth or falsity of others. But this argument speaks in very general terms about our “rational faculties.” Those of us who’ve been trained in fine-grained analysis will suspect that the content of this version of the argument boils down to that of the others. But there may be readers who find this the most persuasive of the arguments.
All of that, it should go without saying, is merely sketching out the arguments. I have yet to respond to them. In addition to doing that, in a subsequent post I’ll also take a look at one of the other main planks of Lewis’s apologetic, the Argument from Desire.
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