In 1943, C.S Lewis published a series of four lectures on the subject of moral realism. His point of departure was a school textbook which he accuses of promoting moral relativism. To avoid upsetting its authors unduly, he refers to it as The Green Book.
"The practical result of education in the spirit of The Green Book" he warns “Must be the destruction of the society which accepts it."
[C.S Lewis, The Abolition of Man, page 1]
Readers may not be entirely surprised to learn that Lewis's Green Book and my Australian English Textbook are one and the same. The book is actually called The Control of Language, and the authors, who Lewis cryptically refers to as Gaius and Titus, were named Alec King and Martin Ketley. Both were British by birth and both were Oxford graduates; but both had spent their adult lives in Australia. King was a professor of English at Monash University near Melbourne; and Ketley taught English at a prestigious private school in Adelaide.
Lewis's quarrel with King and Ketley may be fairly simply stated. According to Lewis, The Control of Language takes for granted that if you say that something is "pretty" you are not talking about the thing itself, but stating how you feel about it. If this is correct, then it must apply in all cases. Whenever we call something pretty or ugly or beautiful or good, we are only projecting our own emotions on to the object. "Murder is wicked" means no more than "I personally dislike murder" —no more, indeed, than "When I read about murder I experience feelings which I happen to dislike." So why not raise children to believe that murder is good? What is to stop future educators, if it ever becomes convenient, from training infants in such a way that they had beautiful, happy thoughts when they contemplated Jack the Ripper?
*
The first thing that Lewis takes issue with is Ketley and King's treatment of an anecdote concerning the romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Here is Lewis's opening salvo:
In their second chapter Gaius and Titus quote the well-known story of Coleridge at the waterfall. You remember that there were two tourists present: that one called it “sublime” and the other “pretty”; and that Coleridge mentally endorsed the first judgement and rejected the second with disgust.
[C.S Lewis, Page 1]
Here are King and Ketley themselves:
This is a story told by Coleridge: he was standing with a group of tourists beside a waterfall, and, after a silence, one of the men in the party said, "That is sublime." Coleridge felt that “sublime" was exactly the right word. And then one of the women in the party added "Yes, it is pretty," and Coleridge turned away in disgust, feeling that "pretty" was exactly the wrong word.
[Alex King and Martin Ketley, The Control of Language, page 17]
Ketley and King have just introduced their readers to the distinction between reference and emotive meaning: that is the title of this second chapter. Reference is for them a technical word: they tell their students that it is part of an “official jargon”. They argue that expostulations ("wow!"), swearwords ("damn!") and gesture words ("good morning") have emotive meaning but no reference. Scientific and technical words, on the other hand, have reference but no emotive meaning, although they may acquire the latter with use.
They then turn to a problematic case. There are, they think, two kinds of adjectives. Words like "big" and "green" have a reference: they refer to a quality in the object, and can therefore be judged "correct" or "incorrect". (It would be simply incorrect to say that the sky was green.) Words like "pretty" and "good", on the other hand do not have a reference because they do not refer to a quality. You might think that I was wrong to say that the sky was beautiful today, but you couldn’t say that I was, in the defined sense, incorrect. The claim is that “sublime” and “pretty” are in the second category.
The waterfall story comes originally from Dorothea Wordsworth's diary: and her version differs substantially from King and Ketley's paraphrase.
A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before.
“Yes, sir," says Coleridge, "it is a majestic waterfall."
“Sublime and beautiful," replied his friend.
Poor Coleridge could make no answer, and, not very desirous to continue the conversation, came to us and related the story, laughing heartily.
[Dorothea Wordsworth, Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland, AD 1803, first published 1874. Second Week, Sunday August 21s.]
In this original version, it isn’t Coleridge who thinks the waterfall is sublime, it is the tourist. The lady doesn’t participate in the conversation; no one mentions the word “pretty”; and Coleridge isn’t disgusted with the tourist's opinion—he finds it funny.
Eighteenth and nineteenth century aesthetes spent a great deal of time worrying about the precise distinction between these kinds of words. Edmund Burke wrote an entire book, A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Sublime and Beautiful, explaining the distinction. This is why Coleridge laughs at the tourist's howler. He and William Wordsworth (the poet, Dorothea's brother) have spent all afternoon trying to establish a philosophical distinction between the very words which the tourist has used interchangeably.
The disagreement, then, is about the use of language. Coleridge had been considering "the precise meaning of the words" and felt that the tourist had first of all chosen an "accurate epithet" to describe the waterfall. Ketley and King's "exactly the right word" is a perfectly good paraphrase.
Why do the details of Ketley and King's version of the story differ from Wordsworth's original: and why doesn’t Lewis point this out? In 1909, an Oxford Poetry professor named A.C Bradley, had published an essay which, like Burke, sought to draw fine distinctions between words like “pretty”, “beautiful” and “sublime”. Like Ketley and King, he takes the Coleridge story as his jumping off point:
Coleridge used to tell a story about his visit to the Falls of Clyde; but he told it with such variations that the details are uncertain, and without regard to truth I shall change it to the shape that suits my purpose best.
[AC Bradley, Oxford Lectures on Poetry, “The Sublime”]
The "used to tell" part is a little puzzling. Coleridge died some twenty years before Bradley was born, so he can't be relying on oral testimony; but I can't track down any written source outside Dorothea Wordsworth's journals.
After gazing at the Falls for some time, he began to consider what adjective would answer most precisely to the impression he had received; and he came to the conclusion that the proper word was “sublime”. Two other tourists arrived, and, standing by him, looked in silence at the spectacle. Then, to Coleridge's high satisfaction, the gentleman exclaimed, "It is sublime”. To which the lady responded, "Yes, it is the prettiest thing I ever saw”.
So Bradley also thinks that the story is about vocabulary. Coleridge is looking for the "precise" adjective; and the "proper" word. “Exactly the right word” would be another way of putting it. And the problem, again, is that the lady thinks she is agreeing with Coleridge. She thinks that “pretty” and “sublime” are synonyms; just as the man in the original story thought that “sublime” meant the same thing as “majestic”.
It is worth summarising how the story mutates:
What was Coleridge looking for?
Wordsworth: "The accuracy of the epithet" "the precise meaning of the word"
Bradley: "Which adjective would answer most precisely the impression which he had received" "the proper word"
Ketley/King: "Exactly the right word"
What was the difference of opinion?
Wordsworth: "Yes, it is a Majestic waterfall" / “Sublime and beautiful."
Bradley: "It is Sublime" / "Yes, it is the prettiest thing I ever saw."
Ketley & King: "That is sublime" / "Yes it is pretty"
Lewis: "One called it sublime"/"The other called it pretty"
How did Coleridge react?
Wordsworth: “He related the story, laughing heartily"
Bradley: “Her incapacity was ludicrous"
Ketley and King: “He turned away in disgust"
Lewis: “He rejected the judgment with disgust"
When Lewis says that the story of the waterfall is well-known, I think he means that Bradley's essay is well known. Very few general readers in 1943 would have been familiar with Dorothea Wordsworth’s journals; but Bradley's lectures would have been widely read. (His Shakespearean Tragedy is a standard work even today.) It seems clear that The Control of Language relies on Bradley’s lecture, not on Wordsworth’s diaries. (There are two tourists, the words at issue are pretty and sublime.) And it seems equally clear that Lewis is following King and Ketley without going back to Bradley. (Lewis says that Coleridge felt disgust, a word that Ketley and King have introduced.)
But Lewis makes one substantive change to the story. The three other versions are agreed that the dispute is about vocabulary; about choosing “exactly the right word.” In Lewis’s version, what Coleridge disputes is the lady’s judgment. He thought, in King and Ketley’s sense, that she had said something incorrect.
Here is the first part of Ketley and King's commentary on the story.
Why did Coleridge think the one word was exactly right, and the other exactly wrong? Obviously not because the one adjective described correctly, as we say, a quality of the water or the rocks or the landscape, and the other adjective described this quality incorrectly. It is not as if the man had said "That is brown" (referring, say, to the water) and the woman (also referring to the water) had added, "Yes, it is green”. No, Coleridge thought “sublime" exactly the right word, because it was associated in his mind with the emotion he was himself feeling as he looked at the waterfall in its setting of rock and landscape; and he thought "pretty" exactly the wrong word, because it was associated with feelings quite different from those he was actually feeling at the time, and with feelings that, to his way of thinking, no sensitive person would ever have while looking at such a sight.
[Page 17]
So: objects have qualities, such as size and colour; and statements about those qualities can be correct or incorrect. This is a perfectly coherent claim. If I said "the elephant is small" you might say that I was incorrect. But if I said "the elephant is funny" you could only say that you disagreed with me; that the elephant was not funny to you.
And here, I think, is the whole of Lewis's quarrel with the Green Book.
King and Ketley do not think that "prettiness" or "funniness" or "wonderfulness" or “sublimity" are (in their technical sense) qualities. Lewis thinks they are. King and Ketley think that "Elephants are big" and "Elephants are funny" are different kinds of statement. Lewis thinks they are statements of the same kind.
Ketley and King equivocate on this point. When they first tell the story, they say that Coleridge “felt that pretty was exactly the wrong word”. When they repeat it, they said that he “thought that pretty was exactly the wrong word” and add that the lady’s feelings are “feelings which to his way of thinking no sensitive person would ever feel.” If you are going to draw a philosophical distinction between thoughts and feelings, it would be better not to use “feel” as a synonym for “think”.
And the anecdote is not, in fact, very apt for the point they are making. When philosophers and aesthetes wrote about sublimity, they did, in fact, write about emotion. According to Edmund Burke, humans have two basic needs—for sex and companionship, and for self-preservation. We have one set of feelings when we see an attractive lady (or, presumably, a handsome gentleman) and a different set of feelings when we see a ferocious tiger. Objects which are analogous to pretty ladies—flowers and birds and delicate paintings—make us feel nice feelings; big things like mountains and volcanoes and waterfalls that could potentially hurt us make us feel nasty feelings. But the sensations we experience when we look at a dangerous thing from a safe distance can, in fact, be pleasantly exciting or thrilling. Things which give us one kind of feeling (e.g oil paintings) we call “beautiful”; things which give us the other kind (e.g waterfalls) we call “sublime”
This raises philosophical questions about whether we call objects sublime because we experience pleasantly terrifying sensations when we look at them; or whether we happen to experience pleasantly terrifying sensations when we look at things which have the innate quality of sublimity. The hymn writer Joseph Addison argued that God so created humans that they would take pleasure in looking at things which did in fact have the quality of "beauty"—and would have had that quality even if no humans had ever existed to look at them. He thought that human beings were created to take pleasure in the contemplation of God, who is the biggest and most terrifying thing that it is possible to imagine; and that God kindly put waterfalls and volcanoes onto the earth as a means for them to experience an analogous numinous awe.
Andrew Wilton’s catalogue for a 1981 exhibition called “Turner and the Sublime” is concerned with neither C.S Lewis nor S.T Coleridge, although it does contain several paintings of waterfalls. Quoting a 1805 essay by one Payne-Knight, he writes:
“All sublime feelings are…feelings of exultation and expansion of the mind tending to rapture and enthusiasm.”
[Andrew Wilton, Turner and the Sublime, p10.]*
Now, that is an interesting turn of phrase: “sublime feelings”.
King and Ketley's second example (which Lewis doesn’t quote) makes their point rather more clearly. They ask the reader to compare the phrases "a big, red fire" and "a wonderful, beautiful fire”. Most of us would agree that “red” describes a quality that the fire itself may or may not have; but “wonderful” refers to the speaker's feelings about the fire.
But they also acknowledge a difficulty. If I speak of a "wonderful fire" you will probably think of the kind of fire that you think that I would think is wonderful: say, one that's giving off a lot of heat, is under control and not too smoky. And you, like me, are very probably imagining a camp fire, complete with sausages, boy scouts and guitars. A 1940s Australian student would have been more likely to think of a roaring coal fire in a domestic house. If I were a psychotic arsonist (which, for the avoidance of doubt, I am not) then a "wonderful, beautiful fire" might mean something very different indeed!
So, on King and Ketley’s terms, "wonderful" does have both a reference and an emotive meaning. If I call a horse "beautiful" I am probably saying that the horse has a set of measurable qualities that people who know about horses regard as desirable; and also that I myself am experiencing pleasure from looking at them.
But now we come to a difficulty which has, I think, up to now been overlooked. King and Ketley say that when the lady declared the waterfall to be pretty, Coleridge “turned away in disgust”. And Lewis repeats this. Coleridge “rejected the judgement with disgust”.
But disgust is an emotion.
It is, in fact, a gut feeling. It bypasses the brain altogether. We don't feel disgusted by a pile of dog mess because we think it is unhealthy: if anything, we know that it is unhealthy because we find it physically repellent. It requires some intellectual effort to override the feeling: I feel that rotting food is disgusting, but I think that it is my duty to do the recycling and I believe I will suffer no ill-effect if I wash my hands afterwards. Dog owners and people with babies are particularly good at suppressing feelings of disgust towards human and animal waste. The feeling is distinct from the belief.
Do the authors of the Control of Language envisage Coleridge recoiling from the insensitive lady as he might have recoiled from something a cow had deposited in the adjoining field? Do they say "Coleridge appeared to be saying something about the lady's feelings towards the waterfall: really he was only describing the state of his own gut?" Come to that, does Lewis accuse them of reducing a subtle distinction between beauty and sublimity to the level of a nasty smell? Or did he think that the lady's aesthetic misjudgement had the objective quality of disgustingness in the same way the sky has the objective quality of blueness?
Lewis states that
The reason why Coleridge agreed with the tourist who called the cataract sublime and disagreed with the one who called it pretty was of course that he believed inanimate nature to be such that certain responses could be more “just” or “ordinate” or “appropriate” to it than others. And he believed (correctly) that the tourists thought the same. The man who called the cataract sublime was not intending simply to describe his own emotions about it: he was also claiming that the object was one which merited those emotions.
[page 9]
But King and Ketley have stated:
Pretty was exactly the wrong word, because it was associated with feelings quite different from those he was actually feeling at the time, and with feelings that, to his way of thinking, no sensitive person would ever have while looking at such a sight.
[page 17]
How, exactly, do these claims differ? For King and Ketley, Coleridge felt disgust because he thought that what the lady felt about the waterfall was inappropriate. Lewis says that Coleridge and the tourist both believed that the waterfall was such that it deserved particular feelings more than others; that some feelings were “just” or “appropriate” and some were “unjust” and “inappropriate”.
I suppose “no sensitive person would have those feelings when looking at this thing” is a weaker claim than “this thing is such that those emotions are appropriate to it.” I suppose that “he felt this was the wrong word” and “to his way of thinking the feelings were wrong” are weaker claims than “the word and the feelings were in fact, objectively, wrong.”
But it’s a very fine distinction: not one likely to lead to the end of human civilisation.
But C.S Lewis hasn’t yet deployed his biggest guns.
[*] The quotes from Addison also come from the Turner catalogue.
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment