Brief Summary of The Abolition of Man
C.S. Lewis wrote The Abolition of Man in 1943. In the book Lewis argues we must accept objective value as a foundational reality. Unlike in his other major works, this book is not explicitly Christian. Instead, he merely sets out to prove that no matter what other beliefs one has, we must fundamentally accept objective values and morals, what he calls the Tao, if we are to make any sense out of us, morality, truth, or the world.
Chapter by Chapter Summary and Quotes
The book consists of three chapters plus an appendix. For each, I will give a chapter summary, trying to formulate his chapter thesis in my own words. Then I will provide some quotes from each chapter.
If you want to get a quick but decently detailed outline of the book, you can just read the chapter summaries. But I would very much encourage you to read any of the Lewis’ quotes.
(I will be citing the copy of The Abolition of Man printed by Harper Collins.)
The Problem of Pain
1. Men Without Chests
Summary
Objective value, what Lewis calls the Tao, is a reality where certain attitudes and emotions are actually true while others false (18). To rationalize away emotions as not having any relation to objectivity is to forsake truth and beauty. If we do this—if we educate this way—then over time we will make “men without chests”—people who have no “emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments” (24-25).
Quotes
- The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts. The right defence against false sentiments is to inculcate just sentiments. (13-14)
- Aristotle says that the aim of education is to make the pupil like and dislike what he ought…Plato before him had said the same. The little human animal will not at first have the right responses. It must be trained to feel pleasure, liking, disgust, and hatred at those things which really are pleasant, likeable, disgusting and hateful. In the Republic, the well-nurtured youth is one ‘who would see most clearly whatever was amiss in ill-made works of man or ill-grown works of nature, and with a just distaste would blame and hate the ugly even from his earliest years and would give delighted praise to beauty, receiving it into his soul and being nourished by it, so that he becomes a man of gentle heart. All this before he is of an age to reason; so that when Reason at length comes to him, then, bred as he has been, he will hold out his hands in welcome and recognize her because of the affinity he bears to her.’ (16-17)
- But what is common to them all is something we cannot neglect. It is the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are. Those who know the Tao can hold that to call children delightful or old men venerable is not simply to record a psychological fact about our own parental or filial emotions at the moment, but to recognize a quality which demands a certain response from us whether we make it or not. (18-19)
- Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism. I had sooner play cards against a man who was quite sceptical about ethics, but bred to believe that ‘a gentleman does not cheat’, than against an irreproachable moral philosopher who had been brought up among sharpers. In battle it is not syllogisms that will keep the reluctant nerves and muscles to their post in the third hour of the bombardment. (24)
- The head rules the belly through the chest—the seat, as Alanus tells us, of Magnanimity, of emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments…It may even be said that it is by this middle element that man is man: for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal. (25)
2. The Way
Summary
We cannot reach moral conclusions merely logically; they must have premisses (40). We can’t get to the ought, to practical advice, from mere propositions. There must be a foundational ought (31-32). For this foundational ought, many moderns go to instinct, but such argumentation does not work for many reasons: for example, what instincts? why obey instinct? Instead, there is moral absolutes (43).
Quotes
- From propositions about fact alone no practical conclusion can ever be drawn. This will preserve society cannot lead to do this except by the mediation of society ought to be preserved. This will cost you your life cannot lead directly to do not do this: It can lead to it only through a felt desire or an acknowledged duty of self-preservation. The innovator is trying to get a conclusion in the imperative mood out of premisses in the indicative mood: and though he continues trying to all eternity he cannot succeed, for the thing is impossible. We must therefore either extend the word Reason to include what our ancestors called Practical Reason and confess that judgements such as society ought to be preserved (though they can support themselves by no reason of the sort that Gaius and Titius demand) are not mere sentiments but are rationality itself.” (31-32)
- From the statement about psychological fact ‘I have an impulse to do so and so’ we cannot by any ingenuity derive the practical principle ‘I ought to obey this impulse.’ (35)
- The idea that, without appealing to any court higher than the instincts themselves, we can yet find grounds for preferring one instinct above its fellows dies very hard. We grasp at useless words: we call it the ‘basic’, or ‘fundamental’, or ‘primal’, or ‘deepest’ instinct. It is of no avail. either these words conceal a value judgement passed upon the instinct and therefore not derivable from it, or else they merely record its felt intensity, the frequency of its operation and its wide distribution. If the former, the whole attempt to base value upon instinct has been abandoned: if the latter, these observations about the quantitative aspects of a psychological event lead to no practical conclusion. (36-37)
- The truth finally becomes apparent that neither in any operation with factual propositions nor in any appeal to instinct can the innovator find the basis for a system of values. None of the principles he requires are to be found there: but they are all to be found somewhere else…You cannot reach them as conclusions; they are premisses. (39-40)
- I draw the following conclusions. This thing which I have called for convenience the Tao, and which others may call natural law or Traditional Morality or the first Principles of Practical Reason or the first Platitudes, is not one among a series of possible systems of value. it is the sole source of all value judgements. If it is rejected, all value is rejected. If any value is retained, it is retained. The effort to refute it and raise a new system of value in its place is self-contradictory. There has never been, and never will be, a radically new judgement of value in the history of the world. (43)
- You say we shall have no values at all if we step outside the Tao. Very well: we shall probably find that we can get on quite comfortably without them. Let us regard all ideas of what we ought to do simply as an interesting psychological survival: let us step right out of all that and start doing what we like. Let us decide for ourselves what man is to be and make him into that: not on any ground of imagined value, but because we want him to be such. Having mastered our environment, let us now master ourselves and choose our own destiny. This is a very possible position: and those who hold it cannot be accused of self-contradiction like the half-hearted sceptics who still hope to find ‘real’ values when they have debunked the traditional ones. This is the rejection of the concept of value altogether. (51)
3. The Abolition of Man
Summary
In our pursuit of “power over nature,” if we abandon the Tao, we (ironically) let nature have ultimate power over us (64-67). When we explain everything away, there’s nothing left (79). There must be some foundational reality: everything cannot he explained away. Hence, we need the Tao, something foundational to Man which makes Man Man. If we forsake this, we’re accepting the abolition of Man.
Quotes
- Every motive they try to act on becomes at once a petitio. It is not that they are bad men. They are not men at all. Stepping outside the Tao, they have stepped into the void. Nor are their subjects necessarily unhappy men. They are not men at all: they are artifacts. Man’s final conquest has proved to be the abolition of Man. (64)
- When all that says ‘it is good’ has been debunked, what say ‘I want’ remains. (65)
- My point is that those who stand outside all judgements of value cannot have any ground for preferring one of their own impulses to another except the emotional strength of that impulse. (65-66)
- For without the judgement ‘benevolence is good’—that is, without re-entering the Tao—they can have no ground for promoting or stabilizing these impulses rather than any others. By the logic of their position they must just take their impulses as they come, from chance. And Chance here means Nature…Their extreme rationalism, by ‘seeing through’ all ‘rational’ mo-ives, leaves them creatures of wholly irrational behaviour. If you will not obey the Tao, or else commit suicide, obedience to impulse (and therefore, in the long run, to mere ‘nature’) is the only course left open…Man’s conquest of Nature turns out, in the moment of its consummation, to be Nature’s conquest of Man. (67-68)
- The real objection is that if man chooses to treat himself as raw material, raw material he will be: not raw material to be manipulated, as he fondly imagined, by himself, but by mere appetite, that is, mere Nature, in the person of his de-humanized Conditioners. (72-73)
- But you cannot go on ‘explaining away’ for ever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go on ‘seeing through things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it 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. (81)
Appendix: Illustrations of the Tao
Summary
Lewis here collects and lists numerous quotes from various traditions to illustrate the Tao.
Quotes
- The following illustrations of the Natural Law are collected from such sources as come readily to the hand of one who is not a professional historian. (83)
- I am not trying to prove its validity by the argument from common consent. its validity cannot be deduced. for those who do not perceive its rationality, even universal consent could not prove it. (83)
