Philosophical paradigm shift: CS Lewis on the fall of English Hegelianism.

I have learnt in other fields of study how transitory the ‘assured results of modern scholarship’ can be. When I was a boy one would have been laughed at for supposing there had been a real Homer: the disintegrators seemed to have triumphed for ever. But Homer seems to be creeping back. Even the belief of the ancient Greeks that the Mycenaeans were their ancestors and spoke Greek has been surprisingly supported. We may without disgrace believe in a historical Arthur. Everywhere, except in theology, there has been a vigorous growth of scepticism about scepticism itself. We can’t keep ourselves from muttering multa renascentur quae jam cecidere.

Nor can a man of my age ever forget how suddenly and completely the idealist philosophy of his youth fell. McTaggart, Green, Bosanquet, Bradley seemed enthroned for ever; they went down as suddenly as the Bastille. And the interesting thing is that while I lived under that dynasty I felt various difficulties and objections which I never dared to express. They were so frightfully obvious that I felt sure they must be mere misunderstandings: the great men could not have made such very elementary mistakes as those which my objections implied. But very similar objections – though put, not doubt, far more cogently than I could have put them – were among the criticisms which finally prevailed. They would now be the stock answers to English Hegelianism.

C.S. Lewis (1996) The Essential C. S. Lewis NY:Scribner, p. 357. Available online .

C. S. Lewis gives his testimony on the suddenness of English Hegelianism’s decline. He views it as the end of a philosophical approach rather than the eclipse of certain ideas. It was, to use Kuhn’s term, a paradigm shift.

The Latin phrase “Multa renascentur quae jam cecidere, cadentque quae nuc sunt in honore” is from Horace and means “Many words now in disuse will revive, and many now in vogue will be forgotten”1. (It is inscribed on Robert Clayton’s memorial in Celbridge, probably expressing the hope that his ideas would be judged more kindly in the future than by his contemporaries. In other words, for an 18th century paradigm shift.)

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CS Lewis critiquing Christmas

Lucy meets Tumnus: against a snowy landscape, a little girl and a faun carrying parcels stand under a wrought iron streetlight.

“Always winter and never Christmas!” The dismay expressed at that idea in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe does not mean that C.S. Lewis was an uncritical fan of Christmas. In 1957 he wrote “What Christmas means to me”, critiquing the idea of Christmas1

Lewis outlines the three meanings of Christmas: as a religious festival (“important and obligatory for Christians…of no interest to anyone else”), a popular holiday (“an occasion
for merry-making and hospitality…I much approve of merry-making”) and a commercial racket. This third is what Lewis objects to.

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C.S. Lewis, Irish philosopher?

A photograph of C. S. Lewis hanging in The Eagle and Child pub in Oxford
A photograph of C. S. Lewis hanging in The Eagle and Child pub in Oxford
(c) Freddie Phillips/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

C. S. Lewis was born in Belfast on 29th November 1898, and a festival in that city celebrating him is in its second year.

So for the purposes of this, he’s Irish. But is C. S. Lewis a philosopher? A piece in the University of Oxford Practical Ethics blog argues that he is, in C. S Lewis as a moral philosopher:

All decent people believe essentially the same things, he thought. There is, in other words, not just a Universal Moral Grammar, but a Universal Moral Vocabulary. This is an old idea. It’s inherent in the idea and language of natural law. ‘[T]aking the race as a whole’, wrote Lewis, those who referred to the “Law of Nature’ ‘thought that the human idea of decent behaviour was obvious to every one. And I believe they were right.’ Our moral norms are hardwired. ‘It seems, then, we are forced to believe in a real Right and Wrong. People may be sometimes mistaken about them, just as people sometimes get their sums wrong. But they are not a matter of mere taste and opinion any more than the multiplication table.’

Readers may see a certain similarity to the ethical theory of another Ulster man, Francis Hutcheson.

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