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Ctionist Reductionist: C.S.Lewis, Science, and Gender Relations

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Ctionist Reductionist: C.S.Lewis, Science, and Gender Relations The Anti-Reductionist Reductionist: C.S.Lewis, Science, and Gender Relations The C. S. Lewis Lecture at the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga March 29, 2004 Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen Professor of Psychology and Philosophy, Eastern University, St. Davids Pennsylvania “The physical sciences, good and innocent in themselves, had already, even in Ransom’s own time, begun to be warped … Despair of objective truth had been increasingly insinuated into the scientists; indifference to it, and a concentration upon mere power had been the result.” C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength (1945)1 “No Model is a catalogue of ultimate realities, and none is a mere fantasy. Each is a serious attempt to get in all the phenomena known at a given period, and each succeeds in getting in a great many. But also, no less surely, each reflects the prevalent psychology of an age almost as much as it reflects the state of that age’s knowledge. Hardly any battery of facts could have persuaded a Greek that the universe had an attribute so repugnant to him as infinity; hardly any such battery could persuade a modern that it is hierarchical.” C.S. Lewis, The Discarded Image (1964)2 “ ‘Your trouble [said Ransom, the Director to Jane] has been what the old poets called Daungier. We call it pride. You are offended by the masculine itself: the loud, irruptive, possessive thing. The male you could have escaped, for it exists only on the biological level. But the masculine none of us can escape. What is above and beyond all things is so masculine that we are all feminine in relation to it.’ ‘You mean I shall have to become a Christian?’ said Jane ‘It looks like it,’ said the Director.” C.S. Lewis That Hideous Strength (1945)3 “It is arrogance in us [men] to call frankness, fairness, and chivalry ‘masculine’ when we see them in a woman; it is arrogance in them [women] to describe a man’s sensitiveness or tact or tenderness as ‘feminine.’ But also what poor, warped fragments of humanity most mere men and mere women must be to make the implications of that arrogance plausible. Marriage heals this. Jointly the two become fully human. ‘In the image of God created He them.’ Thus, by a paradox, this carnival of sexuality leads us out beyond our sexes.” C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (1961)4 Between 1945 and 1948 two middle-aged scholars on opposite sides of the Atlantic each published a visionary novel intended to be a commentary on the place of science in a society coping with the aftermath of World War Two. One was a British Medieval and Renaissance 1 That Hideous strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-Ups (London: John Lane the Bodley Head, 1945), p. 203 2 The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge University Press, 1964), p.222. 3 That Hideous Strength, pp. 315-16. 4 C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (London: Faber and Faber, 1961), pp. 40-41 (Lewis’ emphasis). 2 literature scholar who had little detailed knowledge of the natural or social sciences. But as a historian of ideas he had a keen sense of the dangers of scientism – that is, the assumption that the methods of science can in principle yield exhaustive and ultimate knowledge about all of reality. In one of several challenges to this reductionistic epistemology he produced a dystopian novel about what might happen in a small university setting where science becomes the ultimate source of authority, and the language of value, meaning and purpose is replaced by the supposedly- neutral language of empirical reference and efficient causality. While criticizing this overblown positivism he also defended an essentialist and hierarchical view of gender relations, the demise of which he saw as correlated with the loss of scientific humility and integrity. In this novel, stereotypical masculinity and femininity are presented as timeless archetypes, deeper even than biological sex and apparently more significant for the ideal organization of society than any ‘mere humanity’ shared by women and men. That scholar was C.S. Lewis (1898-1963), who spent most of his academic career at Oxford, but finished it at Cambridge. His dystopia – the third in a trilogy of popular space-travel novels – was called That Hideous Strength, its title drawn from a sixteenth century poetic reference to the biblical Tower of Babel.5 The other scholar, an American, spent his undergraduate years as an English literature major but turned to behavioral science as a doctoral student after a brief but unsuccessful attempt to become a professional writer. He returned briefly to his literary roots towards the middle of his academic career, most of which was spent at Harvard, in order to write a utopian novel in which the opposite theme was central – namely, a scientific triumphalism with regard to both the physical and social world. That scholar was B.F. Skinner (1904-1990), and his behaviorist utopia was called Walden Two, after Thoreau’s nineteenth-century Walden (an account of the latter’s two-year experiment in pastoral self-sufficiency) but anchored in a more collectivist and decidedly less Transcendentalist philosophy.6 Skinner’s philosophy of science was Baconian and positivist. Not only did he doubt the scientific relevance anything that could not be directly observed (such as the mind); he also believed in the possibility of bias-free observation, and in the power of inductive reasoning and experimentation to produce a cumulative edifice of scientific knowledge. In Walden Two the reform of gender relations was also a recurring theme, but in a way that anticipated the second wave of feminism and its campaign for gender equity that was to begin almost two decades later. The women and men of Walden Two share both domestic and non-domestic tasks while their children are cared for communally, and neither kind of work counts for more in terms of monetary or social status in the group.7 My first thesis is that Lewis was the more astute of these two scholars in his anti-reductionist analysis of the nature and limits of science. This is so not just because he drew on the resources of earlier traditions in his critique of scientism, but because in his later writings he anticipated the post-positivist philosophy of science that began with the work of Karl Popper and Michael Polanyi, but took flight with a book published the year of Lewis’ death – namely, Thomas Kuhn’s 5 For Lewis’ views on science as related to the history of ideas in general (and to medieval versus modern cosmologies in particular) see The Discarded Image, especially the Epilogue, pp. 216-23. 6 B.F. Skinner, Walden Two (New York: MacMillan, 1948). Given their very different views of the authority of science, the fact that the American edition of Lewis’ Hideous Strength was also published by MacMillan (although not until 1965) might be seen as a nice historical irony. Both books have been steadily reprinted since their original editions appeared. 7 It is unclear whether Lewis and Skinner knew about – let alone read – each other’s novels. But Lewis makes critical references to behaviorism in That Hideous Strength and The Abolition of Man (Oxford, 1943), and passing references to it in The Discarded Image (pp. 166 and 215). 2 3 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.8 In this respect at least Lewis was not the reflex romanticizer of the past that he is often made out to be.9 My second thesis is that Lewis’ theories of gender essentialism and gender hierarchy were misguided, but understandable given his historical location and intellectual heritage. That this theme is notably muted in his final writings (e.g., The Discarded Image, A Grief Observed, and Till We Have Faces10) suggests that if he had married Joy Davidman a couple of decades earlier than he did he might not have ascribed to his theories of fixed, hierarchical gender archetypes the almost-confessional status he gave them in the 1940s and 1950s.11 In saying that Lewis’ views are understandable partly in terms of his historical and personal circumstances, I am aware that I am committing what Lewis, earlier in his career, called ‘the personal heresy.’12 However, I take such a position not as a social scientist trying to do cheap psychohistory but as a neo-Calvinist with a high view of the incarnate nature of all human thought, and a recognition that good and evil, truth and error, are complexly intertwined throughout all of human history. If this is so, then it is irresponsible to romanticize any period of history, or to lionize any thinker – Christian or otherwise – as having some kind of ahistoric, disembodied, ‘immaculate perception.’13 In his less-polemical moments, Lewis himself was profoundly aware of this, as the second quotation heading this essay indicates. Thus, as I affirm his emergent philosophy of science and question his reductionistic – though later more relaxed -- view of gender, I trust that I am working in the tradition of Lewis himself. A Tale of Two Communities There are other intriguing contrasts between Skinner and Lewis and their forays into science fiction. Lewis, an Anglo-Irishman born in Belfast, entered adulthood as a classically-trained 8 Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (University of Chicago Press, 1963) 9 For example by John Wain in “A Great Clerke,” in James T. Como, ed., “C.S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table” and Other Reminiscences (New York: MacMillan, 1979), pp. 68-76; A. N. Wilson, C.S. Lewis: A Biography (New York: Norton, 1990); and Lionel Ady, C.S.
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