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.