This philosophical chest joins those two parts of us that, while good in themselves, have a tendency to fly apart from each other and so become bad. Our reasonings are all too apt to evaporate into abstraction, floating upward into false spirituality, as if we weren’t also embodied, feeling creatures. Our feelings are all too apt to drag us downward into the overindulgence of some specially addictive sensual pleasure, as if we didn’t also enjoy the light of reason. The chest should check these two centrifugal forces, rooting them in an integrated heart.
The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis’s classic work of philosophy, packs a punch. Although his shortest book, it has had a huge impact since it first appeared in 1943, attracting the attention of everybody from conservative Catholic cardinals such as Joseph Ratzinger (the future Pope Benedict XVI) to liberal atheist philosophers such as John Gray. A powerful defense of the objectivity of value, it lays into many fashionable errors, knocking down intellectual targets, left, right, and center.
Or perhaps I should say “left and right,” for the center is what Lewis seeks to defend. And by the “center” I don’t just mean some bland neutrality between extremes. The center that Lewis defends is not arrived at by merely splitting the difference between opposites. It is not a Laodicean lukewarmness, that we might feel inclined to spit out, but something much more positive and nourishing. Let me explain.
Lewis pictures the human person—philosophically considered—as being made up of three parts: the head, the belly, and the chest. In the head we have rational thoughts. In the belly we have passionate appetites. In the chest we have the liaison officer between reason and passion. It is this middle element that is the distinctively human faculty. By our intellect we are mere spirit, and by our appetite we are mere animal, but by our chest we are truly human.
The argument that Lewis propounds could be summarized in the words of the epigraph to E.M. Forster’s novel Howards End: “Only connect.” Only connect the angel and the animal and you will have the anthropological. The human being is a synthesis of the human brain and the human belly in the human breast.
This philosophical chest joins those two parts of us that, while good in themselves, have a tendency to fly apart from each other and so become bad. Our reasonings are all too apt to evaporate into abstraction, floating upward into false spirituality, as if we weren’t also embodied, feeling creatures. Our feelings are all too apt to drag us downward into the overindulgence of some specially addictive sensual pleasure, as if we didn’t also enjoy the light of reason. The chest should check these two centrifugal forces, rooting them in an integrated heart.
Integration is the key word. Our cerebral self and our visceral self should not be chained together as a criminal is handcuffed to a cop. Rather, the head and the belly should bond like friends, even lovers. The boundaries between the two should dissolve so that we get the best of both worlds. We should be intelligently emotional and emotionally intelligent. The chest allows for the mixing and mingling of this treasure.
And what is true of reason and passion in the constitution of the human person is true in the realm of moral values, various examples of which Lewis lists in the appendix to Abolition. These, too, should go hand in hand.
I have a duty to parents and ancestors, yes. But I also have a duty to children and posterity. I need simultaneously to be looking backward and forward.
I have a duty of “special beneficence” toward those to whom I am indebted through ties of family, neighborhood, and shared citizenship. But I also have a duty of “general beneficence” toward all people, regardless of particular ties, because of common humanity. I need to look inward (to my tribe) and outward (to the world) at the same time.
Looking backward, forward, inward, and outward all at once can be dizzying, which is why people often short-circuit the process and make things easier for themselves by fixating on a single attitude, adopting it to the exclusion of that which it mirrors and balances.
For instance, it is good to practice special beneficence, but if you overemphasize it you enter the jungle of racism, nationalism, and ultimately a kind of ethno-theocracy. Likewise, it is good to practice general beneficence, but if you overemphasize it you end up in the deserts of elitism, individualism, and plutocracy (for only the rich can live permanently without local attachments).
Either way, you have erred against what Lewis calls the Tao, a term he borrows from Chinese philosophy, indicating the perennial “Way” of being human—the rich, complex tapestry of interwoven values that comprises ethical well-being. This Tao is our inheritance as morally sentient members of that primate species called homo sapiens to which we all belong. We are “sapient” insofar as we remain within this tradition of immemorial wisdom. If we try to invent a new moral code, we will fail. As Lewis writes:
