The Abolition of Man originated as a series of lectures given during the Second World War. In this enduringly work, Lewis defends the objectivity of value, pointing to the universal moral ecology that all great philosophical and religious traditions have acknowledged as self-evident. Though Lewis writes as an apologist for Christianity in many of his other works, he here constructs his argument on purely philosophical grounds, making an anthropological claim, not advancing a theological case. Objective value, he maintains, is humanity’s ethical inheritance, which we can extend and develop but may not properly escape. Insofar as we try to deny or subvert this way of being moral, we make ourselves (and those whom we raise or teach or otherwise influence) essentially less than human. We produce “men without chests,” or in other words, people who have no stable heart, no reliable capacity to liaise between intellect and appetite, no ability to distinguish between what is good in itself and what is good for them. Right thus dissolves into might and sheer willpower takes the place of reason. The result is the erasure of our own true identity, “the abolition of man.”
Description:
The Abolition of Man originated as a series of lectures given during the Second World War. In this enduringly work, Lewis defends the objectivity of value, pointing to the universal moral ecology that all great philosophical and religious traditions have acknowledged as self-evident. Though Lewis writes as an apologist for Christianity in many of his other works, he here constructs his argument on purely philosophical grounds, making an anthropological claim, not advancing a theological case. Objective value, he maintains, is humanity’s ethical inheritance, which we can extend and develop but may not properly escape. Insofar as we try to deny or subvert this way of being moral, we make ourselves (and those whom we raise or teach or otherwise influence) essentially less than human. We produce “men without chests,” or in other words, people who have no stable heart, no reliable capacity to liaise between intellect and appetite, no ability to distinguish between what is good in itself and what is good for them. Right thus dissolves into might and sheer willpower takes the place of reason. The result is the erasure of our own true identity, “the abolition of man.”