In his 1936 book Language, Truth and Logic, A.J Ayer argued that all philosophical problems were really grammatical misunderstandings. If I say "Dogs are loyal" and "Unicorns are fictitious", you could be deceived into thinking that "dogs" and "unicorns" are entities of the same kind, and that "loyalty" and "fictitiousness" are qualities that they respectively possess. St Anselm very famously made this kind of mistake when he took the question “Does God exist?” to mean “Does entity A, God, possess quality B, existence?”; and to treat it as if it were the same kind of question as “Does entity C, a frog, possess quality D, greeness.”
It seems likely that King and Ketley had been reading Ayer. They warn readers that the phrases “this is brown” and “this is sublime” are grammatically similar, and that this could give rise to a misunderstanding. It is on this point that C.S Lewis’s case against the Control of Language chiefly rests: if this passage doesn’t precipitate the apocalypse, nothing will:
We must, at this point, clear up a confusion which may already have puzzled you. We construct our sentences, our written or spoken speech, as if this distinction between emotive meaning and reference did not exist. When the man said, "That is sublime," he appeared to be making a remark about the waterfall. The form of the sentence is exactly similar to the form of "That is brown," a sentence which does make a remark about the waterfall, about its colour. Actually, when the man said, "That is sublime," he was not making a remark about the waterfall, but a remark about his own feelings. What he was saying was, really, "I have feelings associated in my mind with the word “sublime," or, shortly, "I have sublime feelings." There is the same confusion, also, in the sentence, "It was a wonderful, beautiful, fire." And you will find that this confusion is continually present in language as we use it. We appear to be saying something very important about something; and, actually, we are only saying something about our own feelings. We continually use emotive words, words with emotive meaning, as if they had a definite reference. [The Control of Language, page 19]
Lewis hyper-focuses on the phrase “sublime feelings". Before we have got to the bottom of page 1, he has told us that "the emotions which prompt the projections are the correlatives and therefore almost the opposites of the qualities projected" but that this is a pons asinorum of the subject.
The feelings which make a man call an object sublime are not sublime feelings but feelings of veneration. If “This is sublime” is to be reduced at all to a statement about the speaker's feelings, the proper translation would be “I have humble feelings”. If the view held by Gaius and Titus were consistently applied it would lead to obvious absurdities. It would force them to maintain that “You are contemptible” means “I have contemptible feelings", in fact that “Your feelings are contemptible” means “My feelings are contemptible." [Abolition of Man, page 1]
It is this kind of thing that makes as intelligent a writer as Alistair McGrath warn that Abolition of Man is a difficult book. It's probably forty years since I first read it, and I think I have come to see what Lewis was getting it. Suppose I was invited to a wedding, and suppose one of the other guests was a wheelchair user. Suppose I caught myself thinking “I hope I won’t be seated next to that disabled man at dinner”. I might very well then say to myself "That is a despicable feeling". But if I wanted to describe the feeling itself, then I would have to say "I have superior feelings" or "I have bigoted feelings" or “I have feelings of irrational revulsion”. “Those are despicable feelings” actually means "It is despicable that I am having those feelings" or "I despise myself for feeling that way" or, if you insist “I have self-contemptuous feelings”.
If you showed me a photograph of your new pet, I might very well say “That kitten is cute”. I would not, on Lewis’s terms, be saying “I have cute feelings". I suppose that what I would be having would be maternal or affectionate or patronising feelings. If, on the other hand, I observed a small child presenting their schoolfellow with a Valentine card expressing life-long devotion, I might possibly say that the feelings the child was having were “cute feelings”—meaning that I felt that it was cute that the child felt that way. My own feelings would be those of motherliness or affection (towards what the child was feeling): the child’s feelings would be passionate or devoted or romantic.
Lewis says that if you translate “This is sublime” into subjective language, it comes out as "I have feelings of veneration" or "I have humble feelings." King and Ketley say that Coleridge was describing "feelings of awe, deeply felt pleasure, and a kind of profound and calm excitement". Bradley goes with "astonishment, rapture, awe, even self-abasement”. The difference between the two viewpoints doesn’t seem insurmountable. But it’s the grammatical point which troubles Lewis.
Ketley and King's language certainly invites several possible misunderstandings.
1: "I have feelings associated in my mind with the word sublime”
This could be taken to imply that Coleridge is being vague and inexact—as if he was waving his hands and gesturing towards some inchoate sublime vibes. But on King and Ketley's view all words derive significance from being "associated in the mind" with objects, concepts or feelings. “Associated in my mind” is a technically precise way of saying “represents”, “refers to” or simply “means”.
2: "We use words with emotive meaning as if they had a definite reference"
“Those words don't have a definite reference" could be taken to mean “those words don’t have a clear meaning” or “those words are meaningless”—which again, would imply vagueness or lack of rigour. But “emotive meaning” and “definite reference” are being used in a defined technical sense. The claim is “the two kinds of meaning, referential and emotive, can sometimes be confused.”
3: "Actually we are only saying something about our own feelings"
We use “only” to indicate that something is not very important: “It is only a minor injury” or “He is only an amateur”. But we also use it to mean “one thing in particular and not anything else”: “Vegetarians only eat plants”; “I only smoke on special occasions”; “Only kings live in palaces”. So “We are only talking about our feelings" does not necessarily mean "We are talking about feelings, as opposed to something important.” It might mean “Some words in some context refer solely to feelings and not to anything else as well.”
4 "We appear to be saying something… about something, we are really only saying something about our own feelings."
The opposite of something is “nothing”. King and Ketley don't mean that when we say the fire is wonderful, we are saying nothing. And they don’t mean that when Coleridge said that he was experiencing deep pleasure and awe, he was saying nothing. I think that when they say “something” they may really mean some thing—some physical object rather than some intangible concept. "We appear to be saying something about some thing but we are really only talking about our feelings" means “Some words appear to refer to an object and also to a feeling, when in fact, they refer to a feeling alone.”
But Lewis isn’t particularly interested in what the text means. He doesn’t care what Ketley and King intended it to mean. What worries him is the way it is likely to be misunderstood. He may, indeed, be deliberately misunderstanding it himself to demonstrate how easy it would be for someone less clever than him to get caught out. (He does that sometimes: addressing theology students on the subject of modernist Biblical criticism, he says directly “Though I may have nothing but misunderstandings to lay before you, you ought to know that such misunderstandings exist.” It is clear from the lecture that he actually understood Bultman very well.)
His allegation is that a student reading the sentence “We appear to be saying something very important about something; and, actually, we are only saying something about our own feelings” will understand it to mean “All value judgements are subjective and therefore insignificant.”
The schoolboy who reads this passage in The Green Book will believe two propositions: firstly, that all sentences containing a predicate of value are statements about the emotional state of the speaker, and secondly, that all such statements are unimportant. It is true that Gaius and Titius have said neither of these things in so many words. They have treated only one particular predicate of value (sublime) as a word descriptive of the speaker's emotions. The pupils are left to do for themselves the work of extending the same treatment to all predicates of value: and no slightest obstacle to such extension is placed in their way. The authors may or may not desire the extension: they may never have given the question five minutes’ serious thought in their lives. I am not concerned with what they desired but with the effect their book will certainly have on the schoolboy's mind. In the same way, they have not said that judgements of value are unimportant. Their words are that we "appear to be saying something very important" when in reality we are "only saying something about our own feelings". No schoolboy will be able to resist the suggestion brought to bear upon him by that word “only”. [page 3]
An English text book might contain buried assumptions. King and Ketley might be trying to plant the seeds of logical positivism and moral relativism into kids’ heads while teaching them essay technique. Evangelicals used to complain that text books which were meant to be teaching the science of evolution said things like “evolution proves that human beings are really only monkeys” or “evolution teaches that humans are insignificant”: they felt that religious and philosophical ideas unrelated to science were being smuggled in under the radar.
A co-religionist once told Lewis that it was a Christian critic's job to “lay bare the false values of contemporary culture”. Lewis said this might mean "to expose the falsity of the values of contemporary culture" or alternatively "to reveal what the values of contemporary culture actually are, and by the way, I personally think those values false”. Lewis agreed that an expert in Lit Crit might be particularly good at revealing what the underlying values of a text actually were; but that he was no more qualified than anyone else to say if they were true values or false values. And it was dishonest to be paid as a professional critic and offer your services as an amateur moralist. On another occasion, he said that what the world needed most was not more books of Christian apologetics, but more good books about science and history and architecture written by people who happened to be Christians: with their Christianity implicit, or, as he put it, latent.
It is perfectly valid to assert that a text book has latent values or buried assumptions or unexamined premises. But Lewis offers no close reading of the Control of Language. He doesn’t summarise the book’s main argument. If you have only read CS Lewis, you would have no way of knowing that Ketley and King are trying to explain the semantic triangle in the language of fifth formers; or that they believe in the associative theory of language, or that the distinction between reference and emotive meaning is at the heart of their argument.
Elsewhere, talking about dirty books and scary stories, Lewis said that it is notoriously difficult to predict what will inflame or terrify a child. But he claims that he can know with certainty the effect that a particular sentence in a text book will have on the readers, in the same way that he knows that educating children according to Ketley and King’s precepts ”must”—not “might” or “could” but “must—lead to the extinction of human civilisation.
It is tempting to say that Lewis was trying to invent deconstruction twenty years early. Take a marginal, secondary, word or phrase. Make that the centre of the text. Interpret the text on the basis of this new centre. Demonstrate that the text now contradicts itself. Rinse and repeat.
"We appear to be saying something very important about something; and, actually, we are only saying something about our own feelings."
Appear/important/only.
Checkmate.
This is the first section of an ongoing critique of C.S Lewis's book The Abolition of Man. (I think that my essays should make sense if you aren't familiar with that tome.) This first section (which runs to six chapters) has already been published in full on my Patreon page, and the second section is being serialised there at present.
Please consider joining the Patreon if you would like to read them, and to support the writer.
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