Ayn Rand’s
marginalia on C. S. Lewis, The
Abolition of Man From Ayn Rand’s Marginalia:
Her critical comments on the writings of over 20 authors, edited by Robert Mayhew (Second Renaissance Books,
New Milford, Conn. 1995), pp. 90-94 |
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Quotations from Lewis are reproduced with underlinings,
bold type, and Professor Mayhew’s
editorial insertions [in square brackets] exactly as presented in Ayn Rand’s Marginalia. Underlinings of two editorial paraphrases and one
ellipsis remain unexplained. »
Serial numbers 1 through 21 have been added. The quotation from Lewis at #4
has been slightly expanded. Also added are three end notes commenting on
Mayhew’s paraphrases. » Following each quotation from
Lewis, page numbers in square brackets refer to three editions of The Abolition of Man
respectively: 1. Ayn Rand’s copy, presumably the
first US edition (Macmillan, New York 1947) 2. British first edition (Oxford
University Press, London 1943) 3.
Fount Paperbacks edition (Collins, London 1978) |
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C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man |
Ayn Rand’s
marginalia |
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1. The Innovator
attacks traditional values (the Tao) in defence
of what he at first supposes to be (in some special sense) ‘rational’ or
‘biological’ values. But as we have seen, all the values which he uses in
attacking the Tao, and even claims to be substituting for it, are
themselves derived from the Tao. If he had really started from
scratch, from right outside the human tradition of value, no jugglery could
have advanced him an inch towards the conception that a man should die for
the community or work for posterity. [pp. 27/21/28] |
You bet he couldn’t! |
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2. I am
considering what the thing called ‘Man’s power over Nature’ must always and
essentially be. No doubt, the picture could be modified by public
ownership of raw materials and factories and public control of scientific
research. But unless we have a world state this will still mean the power
of one nation over others. And even within the world state or the nation it
will mean (in principle) the power of majorities over minorities, and (in the
concrete) of a government over the people. And all long-term exercises of
power, especially in breeding, must mean the power of earlier generations
over later ones. [pp. 35-36/28/35] |
So in the pre-science age, there was no power of majorities over
minorities – and the Middle Ages were a period of love and equality, and the
oppression began only in the U.S.A. (!!!) The abysmal bastard! !! |
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3. [pp. T]he later
a generation comes – the nearer it lives to that date at which the species
becomes extinct – the less power it will have in the forward direction, because
its subjects will be so few. There is therefore no question of a power
vested in the race as a whole steadily growing as long as the race survives.
The last men, far from being the heirs of power, will be of all men most
subject to the dead hand of the great planners and conditioners and will
themselves exercise least power upon the future. [pp. 36-37/29/36] |
It is unbelievable, but this monster literally thinks that to give men
new knowledge is to gain power(!) over them. The cheap, awful,
miserable, touchy, social-metaphysical mediocrity! |
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4. There neither is nor can be any simple
increase of power on Man’s side. Each new power won by man is a power over
man as well. Each advance leaves him weaker as well as stronger. In every victory, besides being
the general who triumphs, he is also the prisoner who follows the triumphal
car. [pp. 37/29/36] |
So when you cure men of TB, syphilis, scurvy, small pox and rabies –
you make them weaker!!! |
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5. In the older
systems both the kind of man the teachers wished to produce and their motives
for producing him were prescribed by the Tao – a norm to which the
teachers themselves were subject and from which they claimed no liberty to
depart. [pp. 38/30/37] |
And which brought such great joy, peace, happiness and moral stature to
men!! (The bastard!) |
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6. [Those who will
replace traditional values]* are ... not men (in the old sense) at
all. They are, if you like, men who have sacrificed their own share in
traditional humanity in order to devote themselves to the task of deciding
what ‘Humanity’ shall henceforth mean. [pp. 40/31/39] |
So the state of being “men” is equated with tradition!(?) |
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7. [Those who
reject tradition]** are not men at all: they are artefacts. Man’s final
conquest has proved to be the abolition of Man. [pp. 41/32/40] |
Meaning if you choose your own values and drop blind faith, you are an
“artifact”! |
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8. I am very
doubtful whether history shows us one example of a man who, having stepped outside
traditional morality and attained power, has used that power benevolently. I
am inclined to think that the Conditioners will hate the conditioned. Though
regarding as an illusion the artificial conscience which they produce in us
their subjects, they will yet perceive that it creates in us an illusion of
meaning for our lives which compares favourably
with the futility of their own: and they will envy us as eunuchs envy men. [pp. 42/33/40-41] |
What a confession of his own social-metaphysical soul this all is! He
knows he “can be had” by anyone, and he’s scared of his non-traditional
masters! |
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9. Their extreme
rationalism, by ‘seeing through’ all ‘rational’ motives, 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. At the moment, then, of Man’s victory
over Nature, we find the whole human race subjected to some individual men,
and those individuals subjected to that in themselves which is purely ‘natural’
– to their irrational impulses. [pp. 42/33/41] |
The “rational” to him is blind faith! !! So man, by nature, is irrational – but faith makes him
rational!!! |
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10. If the fully
planned and conditioned world (with its Tao a mere product of the
planning) comes into existence, Nature will be troubled no more by the
restive species that rose in revolt against her so many millions of years
ago, will be vexed no longer by its chatter of truth and mercy and beauty
and happiness. [pp. 43/34/41-42] |
– all of which are unnatural!?! |
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11. We do not look at
trees either as Dryads or as beautiful objects while we cut them into beams:
the first man who did so may have felt the price keenly, and the bleeding
trees in Virgil and Spenser may be far-off echoes of that primeval sense
of impiety. The stars lost their divinity as astronomy developed, and the
Dying God has no place in chemical agriculture. To many, no doubt, this
process is simply the gradual discovery that the real world is different from
what we expected, and the old opposition to Galileo or to ‘body-snatchers’ is
simply obscurantism. But that is not the whole story. It is not the greatest
of modern scientists who feel most sure that the object, stripped of its
qualitative properties and reduced to mere quantity, is wholly real. Little
scientists, and little unscientific followers of science, may think so. The great
minds know very well that the object, so treated, is an artificial
abstraction, that something of its reality has been lost. [pp. 44/35/42-43] |
This is really an old fool – and nothing more! Ad hominem! And what does he think an abstraction is, that great “advocate of
reason”? Here’s
where the Korzybski
comes out in him. |
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12. We are always
conquering Nature, because ‘Nature’ is the name for what we have, to
some extent, conquered. The price of conquest is to treat a thing as mere
Nature. Every conquest over Nature increases her domain. The stars do not
become Nature till we can weigh and measure them: the soul does not
become Nature till we can psychoanalyse her. [pp. 45/35/43] |
This incredible, medieval monstrosity believes that “mere Nature” is
the rationally intelligible!!!! |
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13. Either we are
rational spirit obliged for ever to obey the absolute values of the Tao,
or else we are mere nature to be kneaded and cut into new shapes for the
pleasures of masters who must, by hypothesis, have no motive but their own
‘natural’ impulses. Only the Tao provides a common human
law of action which can over-arch rulers and ruled alike. A dogmatic belief
in objective value is necessary to the very idea of a rule which is not
tyranny or an obedience which is not slavery. [pp. 46/36/44] |
The lousy bastard who is a pickpocket of concepts, not a thief, which is
too big a word for him. Either we are mystics of spirit or mystics of muscle – reason? who
ever heard of it? – such as in the Middle Ages? |
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14. In the Tao
itself, as long as we remain within it, we find the concrete reality in which
to participate is to be truly human: the real common will and common
reason of humanity, alive, and growing like a tree, and branching out, as the
situation varies, into ever new beauties and dignities of application. [pp. 46-47/37/45] |
Such as starvation and babies dying at birth. “Unenslaved”
by science! |
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15. Nothing I can
say will prevent some people from describing this lecture as an attack on
science. I deny the charge, of course: and real Natural Philosophers
(there are some now alive) will perceive that in defending value I defend inter
alia the value of knowledge, which must die like every other when
its roots in the Tao are cut. [pp. 47/37/45] |
And how! What’s that, brother? |
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16. The serious
magical endeavour and the serious scientific endeavour are twins: one was sickly and died, the other
strong and throve. But they were twins. They were born of the same impulse. [pp. 47-48/38/46] |
The cheap, drivelling non-entity! |
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17. There is something
which unites magic and applied science while separating both from the wisdom
of earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem
had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been
knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike
the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men: the
solution is a technique; and both, in the practice of this technique, are
ready to do things hitherto regarded as disgusting and impious – such as
digging up and mutilating the dead. If we compare the chief trumpeter of the
new era (Bacon) with Marlowe’s Faustus, the similarity is striking. You will
read in some critics that Faustus has a thirst for knowledge. In reality,
he hardly mentions it. It is not truth he wants from the devils, but gold and
guns and girls. ‘All things that move between the quiet poles shall be at
his command’ and ‘a sound magician is a mighty god’ In the same spirit Bacon
condemns those who value knowledge as an end in itself: this, for him, is to
use as a mistress for pleasure what ought to be a spouse for fruit. The true
object is to extend Man’s power to the performance of all things possible. He
rejects magic because it does not work; but his goal is that of the magician.
[pp. 48/38/46] |
This is monstrous! !!! !! So Bacon is a “magician” – but Christ performing miracles is, of
course, a spectacle of pure, rational knowledge!! This monstrosity is not opposed to science – oh no! – not to pure
science, only to applied science, only to anything that improves man’s
life on earth! !!! |
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18. It might be
going too far to say that the modern scientific movement was tainted from
its birth: but I think it would be true to say that it, was born in an
unhealthy neighbourhood and at an inauspicious
hour. [pp. 49/38-39/47] |
!!! You bet your life, you God-damn, beaten mystic at the
Renaissance! |
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19. Is it, then,
possible to imagine a new Natural Philosophy, continually conscious that the
‘natural object’ produced by analysis and abstraction is not reality but only
a view, and always correcting the abstraction? I hardly know what I am
asking for. [pp. 49/39/47] |
This is true – but even here he’s lying. He knows what he wants:
a science subservient to the Pope. |
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20. [Lewis claims
we must stop at tradition if we wish to avoid an infinite regress of rational
explanations.]*** 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. [pp. 50/40/48]w |
The abysmal caricature who postures as a “gentleman and a scholar”
treats subjects like these by means of a corner lout’s equivocation on
“seeing through.”! By “seeing through,” he means “rational understanding”! Oh, BS! – and total BS! |
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21. [Lewis ends his
essay with the previous passage. On the next page, above the beginning of the
Appendix, Ayn Rand made her last statement, apparently a summary of the
essence of the whole essay.] [pp. 51/41/49] |
The bastard actually means that the more man knows, the more he
is bound by reality, the more he has to comply with an “A is A” existence
of absolute identity and causality – and that is what he regards as
“surrender” to nature, or as nature’s “power over man.” (!) What he objects
to is the power of reality. Science shrinks the realm of his whim.
(!!) When he speaks of value judgements, he means values set by whim
– and he knows that there is no place for that in nature, i.e. in
reality. (The abysmal
scum!) |
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Notes * Lewis is
speaking of a hypothetical ‘race of conditioners who really can cut out all
posterity in what shape they please’. **
While the paraphrase suggests that Lewis is still referring to ‘the
Conditioners’, he is now in fact talking about ‘their subjects’ – i.e. what
he envisions as the ‘conditioned’ mass of mankind. *** The
explanation seems superfluous but is actually misleading. Lewis is not advocating
any external stop to rational explanation, but exposing an internal one. He
is denouncing what he calls ‘the fatal serialism of the modern imagination’,
pointing out that ‘there are progressions in which the last step is sui generis – incommensurable with
the others – and in which to go the whole way is to undo all the labour of your previous journey’ [50/40/48]. His general
concern is with ‘what seems to be a hard idea to modern minds, that a certain
degree of a thing might be good and a further degree of the same thing bad’ (Collected Letters Vol. 2, p. 211,
8 March 1937). His particular concern here is with stopping reason from
stopping itself. |
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