LEWISIANA.NL

 

What Lewis really did to Miracles

A philosophical layman’s attempt to understand the Anscombe affair

 

by Arend Smilde

 

* Notes  and a long section of  Appendices  are in separate files.

* In section 3, two paragraphs in smaller type may be skipped without loss to the argument.

 

 

 

“Although he reaches his conclusions – with which he is in love – by sophistical methods, his considerations constantly open up very deep and important problems. It is often the case that in the act of exhibiting the sophistry one finds oneself noticing matters which deserve a lot of exploring: the obvious stands in need of investigation as a result of the points that [he] pretends to have made.”

–– Elizabeth Anscombe on David Hume;

W. D. Hudson (ed.), The Is-Ought Question (Macmillan, London 1969), p. 177.

 

 

1

 

Such philosophical fame or blame as C. S. Lewis has acquired is largely due to his attack on what he called Natural­ism. One famous episode in the story of his life is, therefore, the meeting of the Oxford Socratic Club on 2 February 1948, when this attack was itself attacked by the 28-year-young philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe. Much has been written about that meeting and its aftermath; and much, perhaps, is either too popular or too aca­demic to provide a precise idea of what happened here.

           The popular sort of account is usually made up of speculations, friendly or un­friendly, about Lewis’s dismay at hav­ing emerged less than successfully from the debate. Readers of such accounts usually learn little about the philo­sophical mat­ter at hand, and are thus left won­dering whether nothing important has been left out. After all, if Lewis was actually so dismayed, it might, just possibly, have to do with something really important in his ideas about Naturalism. The aca­demic kind of expositor has a tendency to develop rather than strictly describe the exchange of ideas between Lewis and Ans­combe, and to develop it in currently required aca­demic directions. In this way many readers will, again, fail to get what they want – a concise, clear, and yet per­fectly ade­quate idea, epigram-like if possible, of what Lewis and Ans­combe were talking about.

           An attempt will be made here to provide just that, and to draw it from the two really relevant sources only: the written remains of the two con­tenders. The chief sources are repro­duced in a long Appendix.

 

 

2

 

In her “Reply to Mr. C. S. Lewis’s Argument that ‘Naturalism’ is Self-Refuting”,1 Eliza­beth Anscombe specifically criti­cized chapter III of Lewis’s then recent book Miracles. Published in May 1947 by Geoffrey Bles, this book was, among other things, the culmi­na­tion of much anti-Naturalist thought as developed and variously expressed by Lewis in the course of at least a decade. In chapter III, “The Self-Contradiction of the Naturalist”, he discussed the validity of rational thought in a universe where – as the Naturalist asserts or implies – all events without exception are in the last resort deter­mined by “irrational causes”. He concluded that in such a uni­verse rational thought cannot be valid since it, too, must be a product of irra­tio­nal causes; or if any rational thought is valid, then we must recognize that there is, after all, something more to the universe than irrational causes, i.e. more than just Nature.

           Basically, Anscombe agreed with Lewis that Naturalism is untenable. But she considered his “argument from reason”2 a faulty way to attack it. For one thing, she criticized the way Lewis had been using the word “irrational”. He had sug­gested that all natural causes are “irra­tion­al”; but he ought to have distinguished the large and highly rele­vant category of non-rational causes, which is the kind of causes really at work in Nature. Let rational thought be pro­duced by natural, non-rational causes: there is, said Anscombe, no need at all on that account to doubt its “validity”, except when we know that there has been some par­tic­ular cause at work which is a notorious producer of un­reasonable beliefs. Lewis’s use of the words “valid” and “validity” was in fact another thing she criticized; “Isn’t this question about the validity of rea­son­ing a ques­tion about the validity of valid reasoning?”3

           These two criticisms are worth mentioning if only because Lewis explicitly allowed their justness. He did so (without further allowances) in a brief note added to Anscombe’s paper when it was published in the Socratic Digest for 1948. There was also added an excerpt from the Socratic Club’s minute-book about the dis­cussion that took place after the paper had been read. Many years later, in 1981, Anscombe included her critique of Lewis – again followed by these minutes and by Lewis’s note – in the second volume of her Collected Philo­sophical Papers. It is the last item of the book’s third section, “Causality and Time”, and the last piece of the book, which contains twenty-one pieces in all. Remarkably, more than a third of Ans­combe’s 3½-page general introduction to the volume is about the “Reply to Lewis”, which, as she points out, was her “ear­liest purely philo­soph­ical writing which was pub­lished”.4

           Lewis’s appended note is useful as an approach to the affair since Ans­combe’s critique is, as Walter Hooper in his admirable short account has called it, “complex”.5 Less charitably but more to the point it might be called a rather weak per­formance in exposition. To be sure, Lewis had himself not been at his best in chapter III of Miracles, as we shall see. Yet perhaps few readers coming straight from the engaging general clarity of his writing will make it to the end when trying to read Anscombe’s “Reply”, or will make it and at once have a clear sense of main and side issues, and an idea of what exactly is good and what is no good. It is therefore fortunate that we have Lewis’s note telling us at least what he made of it – followed by the important testi­­mony of what he did to Miracles many years later.

           It was indeed more than a decade later, when Miracles was sche­duled to be re-issued as a Fontana Books paperback, that Lewis seized the oppor­tunity to re-write and expand chapter III. “I was by no means in the vein”, he wrote as he submitted the result to his publisher on 8 August 1959, “and the job was itself very ticklish and the weather very hot – so you’re lucky it took no longer.” The change was considerable. The original chapter as a whole had six­teen paragraphs; in the revised version the first six para­graphs were kept unchanged, but the remaining ten paragraphs (1,769 words) were re­placed by a wholly new section of twenty-five paragraphs (3,743 words). The chapter title was changed to “The Cardinal Diffi­culty of Natural­ism”. A few dozen small improvements were made elsewhere in the book,6 and the new edition of Miracles came out in May 1960.

 

 

3

 

About his use of “valid” Lewis had said, in his note of 1948, “I admit that [this] was a bad word for what I meant; veridical (or verific or veriferous) would have been better.”7 However, when revis­ing the chapter in 1959 he made no changes to the way he used “valid” (or “validity”) – when he still used it at all. But he did so a good deal less now. The word had occurred eighteen times in the original chapter, but in the revised version it makes only six appearances, with just two of them in the new sec­tion of twenty-five paragraphs; which is to say that there had been fourteen instances in the discarded section of ten para­­graphs. None of the alternative words proposed in 1948 (“veridical” etc.) were actually used.

           The word “irrational”, however, was banished from chapter III. The word never ap­peared in the six-paragraph sec­tion that was retained in the new edition; but it had made twelve highly emphatic appearances in the rest of the original chapter.8 In the re­vised chapter – that is, in the long new section – “non-rational” has clearly taken the place of “irrational” but at the same time, in line with the fate of “valid”, takes an altogether humbler place than its predecessor did in the old edi­tion. “Non-rational” in the revised chapter makes only four appearances, to which may perhaps be added two instances of “not rational”.9

           While it is not strictly true to say that “non-rational” took the place of “irra­tion­al” in chapter III, this replacement is quite precisely the change that was made to chap­ter IV. The im­pression usually given in discussions of the Anscombe affair is that Lewis revised chapter III and left it at that. But in fact there is this further change – among a few others – in chapter IV: all instances of “irrational” were consistently changed to “non-ratio­nal”.10

              After chapter IV, the original book had nine more instances of “irrational”. None of these were altered in the revised edition.11 The reason why Lewis made no further changes from “irra­tional” to “non-rational” after chapter IV may well have been simply inadver­tency. The need for it is indeed debatable or even absent in some cases; but in chapter XIV, where he is referring back to chapter III, and also in chapter XIII, Lewis clearly ought to have made the same change as in chap­ter IV.12 As we saw, the job was “ticklish” while the weather, the summer of 1959, was very hot: let’s call it an example of rational powers competing with non-rational ones.

              Meanwhile the first edition had its own three instances of “non-rational”. They all appeared in chapter V. And all of them appeared in conjunction with “non-moral”, since the Argument from Reason in this chapter receives its usual support and parallel in what may be called the Argument from Ethics.13 Of course none of these were changed in the new edition since, as we remember, Anscombe did approve of “non-rational” to describe natural causes. Two instances are in the re­peated phrase “non-moral and non-rational cause(s)” in a single para­graph on page 44; the third is on page 48 in the phrase “non-moral, non-rational Nature”. But the repeated juxta­position with “non-moral” on page 44 was in a way re­peated once more on that same page. There are two slight differences, however: “non-moral” now takes not first but second place; and instead of “non-rational” Lewis now writes “irra­tional”. Or to spell it out, instead of calling natural causes “non-moral and non-rational” he now calls them “irrational and non-moral”. This shading of “non-rational” into “irrational” is surely interesting. It is as if Lewis, in shifting his focus ever so slightly from the non-moral to the non-rational character of Nature, was led into the temptation of discrediting this non-rationality and called it irrationality. “Irrational” here re­mained un­changed – along with all the other in­stances of “irrational” in the book from chapter V on­ward.

           While the revision on this crucial point of vocabulary was not carried out quite meticu­lously throughout the book, yet the chapters III and IV, where the intervention was most in order, were effectively purged of their stress on the “irrationality” of Nature-according-to-Natural­ism.

 

 

4

 

The change appears to be related to a decision of Lewis not to push further, in chapter III, the point reached at the end of the section that was retained: his claim that Naturalism is “a proof that there are no such things as proofs – which is non­sense”.14

           In the old edition he certainly had tried – but in vain – to push that point further. It was in the course of this project that he had begun using the word “irrational” in this book, and used it more frequently here than in any later chapter. He soon reached what he called “a rule”, printed in italics, “that no thought is valid if it can be fully ex­plained as the result of irrational causes”.15 Four paragraphs further on, how­ever, he had not really made any progress as he stated: “every theory of the universe which makes the human mind a result of irrational causes is inadmissible, for it would be a proof that there are no such things as proofs. Which is non­sense”.16 This repetition sounds lame; there is nothing to make it the effective ostinato of a healthy rhetoric.

           Another sign that Lewis was on a wrong track here, in the old edition, is the way he followed up a promise implied on page 26, only three lines into the section that was to be discarded: “...we can believe in the validity of thought only under certain con­di­tions.” Readers hoping to hear these conditions spelled out had to be quite patiently attentive. Lewis went on and on amplifying the negative insight expressed in italics on page 27, as quoted above. It is not until the end of page 29 that valid thought, rather than invalid thought, comes back into focus. Turning yet another page, we arrive at last where Lewis must have hoped to get us when he proposed to think out the conditions. “The validity of thought is central: all other things have to be fitted in round it as best they can”. The conditions, or in fact the one great condition for validity is that it be central. The idea is thus expressed well enough, even if Lewis expressed it dif­fer­ently elsewhere (“self-existent”, “self-evident” etc.); it is an impor­tant idea; and it is clearly the point Lewis had to make and wished to make in this chapter and which he was to defend to the end of his days. But, brief as the chapter is, he had spent most of it telling us what is wrong, not what is right. He had failed to see that the negative approach pretty soon ceased to be the obvious way toward his goal.

           Now to go yet a little further into this detail, the improvement brought by the re­vision is visible when we compare these long-awaited “con­di­tions” with their counter­part in the revised chapter. That counterpart is in the “terms” mentioned at the bottom of page 21 in the Fontana edition. Here we read that “the act of infer­ence [can be] the real insight that it claims to be ... only on certain terms.” The thing to note is that this comes, now, not three lines but almost three pages after the end of the retained section – Lewis having first taken time to tell us what he positively means by acts of inference, that is, by the essential thing in valid thought. Acts of thought (or acts of knowing, or of inference) are “a very special sort of events” in that “they are ‘about’ something other than themselves and can be true or false.” It is only after this passage, which has no parallel in the first edition, that Lewis submits that there are “terms” attached to this curious faculty of being true or false. And then without delay, as the first underlinable thing on the next page: “the act of knowing[ʼs] ... positive character must be determined by the truth it knows.” Briefly pointing out that this is impossible in a universe as defined by Naturalism, he then goes on to spend several pages examining three ways in which we might nevertheless decide to save a Naturalistic face for rationality. Rational thought might perhaps be a product of natural selection; or of experience; or of daily practice. In other words, we are now almost constantly thinking about terms on which thought can be valid.

           All this is much better than the old insistence on Naturalism as a proof that there are no proofs. Meanwhile its successor, Naturalism as an attempted proof that there are proofs, fares no better. It too is shown to fail; and the failure produces the discovery that “reason is our star­ting point”. This con­clu­sion is essentially the same as the old one, “the validity of thought is central”. The new way to reach it, however, is both more in­viting and more com­pelling. It is a more natural road to Nature’s “frontier” – which is the subject of chapter IV.

           The improvement is, I think, the one recommended by Victor Reppert in his book about the Argument from Reason, C. S. Lewis’s Dangerous Idea. The Argu­ment, if we want to keep it flying, should be framed not as a “skeptical-threat argument”, but as a “best-explanation argu­ment”.17 Don’t bother yourself or anyone with the unreal problem that reason may not work. Do treat reason – best of all perhaps your opponent’s own reason – as a fact in search of an expla­na­tion.

 

 

5

 

Lewis began following this new and better course in the revised Miracles with an im­plicit nod to Ans­combe. Shortly after beginning the long new section of the revised chapter he invites the reader “to notice the two senses of the word because”. As we know from her later comments, Ans­combe con­sidered the re­vi­sion a real im­provement on the first version and also an im­prove­ment on her own paper. The gain was in an increased “recognition of the depth of the problem”. But she still saw “much to criticize”.18 And indeed, after the nod to Ans­combe we find Lewis soon get­ting under his own steam again. What is worse for Ans­combe, the con­vic­tion which was probably nearest to her heart in this matter seems to have pro­duced, through her paper, the very opposite conviction in Lewis. The word because, he points out, de­notes either a Cause-and-Effect relation or a Ground-and-Con­se­quent relation. This is pretty exactly the thing Anscombe had urged him to recognize. In her plea for better thinking about causes, she had warned him that because is a treacherous word. Lewis heeds the warning, and he obliges by unmasking the treachery. They are per­fectly agreed now that Nature is basically an affair, not of irrational, but of non-rational causes, and that non-rational causes are totally unconnected with any act of thought de­serving of the name. But their conclusions from this are exactly op­posed. To para­phrase:

 

    There is nothing wrong about being caused, said Ans­combe.

    That’s right, said Lewis, but then there is nothing good about it.

 

This I take to be the brief formula I hoped to find.

    What remains to be found out is exactly why Anscombe thought the revi­sion of Miracles a consider­able improve­ment and still saw much to criticize. A good start for such a follow-up to the present inquiry would perhaps be to keep my formula slightly closer to the original terms of the debate, putting it thus:

    Anscombe:       There is nothing irrational about being caused.

    lewis:              That’s right, but then there is nothing rational about it.

Elizabeth Anscombe’s further, perhaps central, objection may then come into its own, as follows –

    Anscombe:       But rationality has no causes and needs no causes.

Which makes is easy to further imagine

    lewis:              If that is what you mean, let us look into it a little closer.

My own efforts to think this last problem out, either on my own or with the help of others who have written about it, have resulted in a tentative conviction that I lack the brains for it.19 Anscombe’s own last words on the matter, in 1981, were that

he doesn’t explore this idea of “an act of knowing solely determined by what is known”, which is obviously crucial ... I think we haven’t yet an answer to the question I have quoted from him: “What is the con­nec­tion between grounds and the actual occurrence of the belief?”

This may be rhetorical – as if she was pointing out that no answer to the question will ever come from anyone; that the connection is not going to be found. At the same time it is significant that she still seems prepared to think and talk about this “connection” at all. It suggests that she was, perhaps, more willing now than she had previously been to suspect some sort of real com­pe­tition between natural causes and un­natural ones; as if Lewis would have had a point if he had shown exactly how the grounds for a belief result in someone’s adopting that belief, or how the thing known determines the knowledge of it.

           But of course he could never have shown this in a way that would satisfy any real or acting de­fender of Naturalism. This, in fact, had been his whole point, the very reason why he had brought up the mat­ter in the first place – as Anscombe herself had helped him see clearer than he first did. There is a thing which is there and yet is not nature. To explain the connection between the two would presumably be to ‘reduce’ that thing to nature and so to obviate Lewis’s point. His point is that it can’t be explained. If it were, there would have been no point, no argument from reason, and no Anscombe affair.

 

 

6

 

There are two further testimonies from the two contenders about their differences. These are briefer than the briefest formula we could have found. Lewis and Ans­combe have both been reported to say “I won.”20 On the Anscombian view, there might be a way to accept both comments as “full” yet compatible explana­tions of what happened, each being perfectly true in its way – the one having causes, the other having reasons. There would be no end, however, to the debate about who had the reasons and who had the causes, so that, if not for better rea­sons, it might be safer to say that both lost.

           For if Anscombe was candid enough, which she was, to recog­nize a real improve­ment in the revised chapter III of Miracles, she must have seen also that the revision was only an elabora­tion of Lewis’s original rejoinder during their Socratic exchange in February 1948, as summarized in his “Note” and in the minutes. In other words, Lewis appears to have been quick to see his way out of the problem presented by Anscombe’s attack. This is astonishing when we see the “complexity” of the attack; and see how it focussed, if there was a focus, on the “skeptical threat” mode of Lewis’s argu­ment; and further see how easily this might have lured him deeper into the trap of that mode, deeper than he had already gone; and then see how smoothly he avoided this and adopted the better mode instead. To get such a rejoinder to your attack is perhaps not to lose but it can hardly be called to “win”. On the other hand, Anscombe’s criticisms were clearly justi­fied if only because, as she noted with good justice, “Lewis’ rethinking and rewriting showed he thought [they] were accu­rate.”21 A man who follows up an attack on something he has written by an extensive rewriting in partial recognition of the just­ness of that attack cannot be properly said to have “won” the day. Perhaps, if and when it comes to desig­na­ting a winner, the best final evaluation of the affair is not that both parties won, but that both gained. Or is this what we call a win-win game after all?

 

 

 


 

 Notes  (html) and  Appendices  (pdf) are in separate files.