At Any Rate There’s No Humbug Here: Truth and Perspective
We haven’t let anyone take us in.
—THE RENEGADE DWARFS
The great fear of philosophers over the past four centuries has been that they might be taken in, deceived, duped, caught without any clothes of sufficient evidence. Their motto was to avoid the uncertain and the subjective. Better to lose a world of truth than once to be mistaken. But a rising counter-chorus is being heard. The American philosopher and psychologist William James notes, “For my own part, I have also a horror of being duped; but I can believe that worse things than being duped may happen to a man in this world.”1 C.S. Lewis had a similar perspective, as suggested by this telling description of the Dwarfs in the final volume of the Chronicles: “Their prison is only in their own minds, yet they are in that prison; and so afraid of being taken in that they cannot be taken out” (LB, Chapter 13, p. 748).
The Holy Grail of Certainty
From the early seventeenth century to the middle of the twentieth century, the pursuit of certitude dominated Western thought. Philosophers looked back at past philosophy, science, and religion and wondered why so little progress had been made. The father of modern philosophy, René Descartes (1596–1650), looked at his past education, the achievements of science, and the state of philosophy and morals, and was profoundly disappointed. “There is nothing about which there is not some dispute—and thus nothing that is not doubtful.”2 Relying on reason to produce the clarity and distinctness characteristic of certainty, Descartes began his quest for certainty by turning to the one thing we know directly: our own thoughts. The problem for Descartes was that while some things like my own and God’s existence seem certain, knowledge of the world around us, provided by sense experience, is often uncertain.
At the end of the seventeenth century the Englishman John Locke assumed the task of trying to put our sensory beliefs on a firmer footing. The senses reveal qualities such as color, shape, taste, hardness, and sound. But how can we be sure these qualities are real? Locke’s response is that our understanding is mostly passive. Objects stimulate our senses, which in turn convey to us simple ideas of various qualities. We cannot refuse to receive or alter these simple ideas, though we can combine simple ideas to form more complex ideas. Objectivity is guaranteed, because we add nothing to this incoming simple data. Whenever we have clear and distinct perceptions of simple ideas, we can claim objective knowledge.
But alas, things are not that simple, because as Locke recognized, simple ideas do not simply mirror perceived things. While some of our perceptions represent the real properties of objects, others do not. We can be certain that the objects around us are solid, are extended in space, have shape and are in motion when we sense them. But we cannot have the same certainty about colors, tastes, sounds, and odors, for various persons often have different perceptions when experiencing the same thing. Even in our sensory experience objectivity remains elusive.
At the end of the eighteenth century Immanuel Kant sought to prove the objectivity of sense experience by grounding all knowledge in structures of the human mind. Like a computer, the mind receives data. But the preservation of that data requires that they be saved in files that, for Kant, are preset (a priori). By great fortune all humans have the same model of mental computer and preset files, which guarantees that knowledge can be objective and certain. The price of this turn to subjectivity to guarantee certainty is great, however, for Kant restricts our knowledge to the way things appear to us; about the world as it really exists we can at best speculate.
When we come to the twentieth century we find that the elusive animal of objectivity is still being stalked, this time by the Positivists. Taking their cue from Francis Bacon (1561–1626), the Positivists found objectivity in the empirical sciences. If sense experience can’t verify an empirical claim, the claim is not merely false but meaningless. Objectivity, they claimed, is found in public confirmation and repeatability. But again, Positivism paid a heavy price. Because many ordinary beliefs such as those found in history or in our memories are unverifiable, they are meaningless according to Positivism.
C.S. Lewis was no stranger to Positivism; indeed, his noted tutor, “The Great Knock” (William Kirkpatrick), had Positivist leanings. Lewis writes, “If ever a man came near to being a purely logical entity, that man was Kirk. Born a little later, he would have been a Logical Positivist.”3 Yet Lewis’s grounding in Plato, Northernness (the Germanic and Scandinavian myths), and the Classics made him immune to long-term Positivist influence, so that even before the likes of Thomas Kuhn and Jacques Derrida made such ideas fashionable, we find in Lewis a clear rejection of this search for certitude and objectivity. Three themes supporting this claim run through his Narnian stories. First, knowledge is perspectival; second, knowledge is value-laden; and finally, knowledge is personal. We will consider each in turn.
“The inside is bigger than the outside”: Perspectival Knowing
The first assumption of objective knowing is that everyone can have the same perspective if only they put themselves into the proper experiential position. Lewis saw through the enchantment of this assumption:
Tirian looked and saw the queerest and most ridiculous thing you can imagine. Only a few yards away, clear to be seen in the sunlight, there stood up a rough wooden door and, round it, the framework of the doorway: nothing else, no walls, no roof. . . . He walked round to the other side of the door. But it looked just the same from the other side: he was still in the open air, on a summer morning. The door was simply standing up by itself as if it had grown there like a tree. . . .
”It is the door you came through with that Calormene five minutes ago,” said Peter smiling.
“But did I not come in out of the wood into the Stable? Whereas this seems to be a door leading from nowhere to nowhere.”
“It looks like that if you walk round it,” said Peter. “But put your eye to that piece where there is a crack between two of the planks and look through.”
Tirian put his eye to the hole. At first he could see nothing but blackness. Then, as his eyes grew used to it, he saw the dull red glow of a bonfire that was nearly going out. . . . So he knew that he was looking out through the Stable door into the darkness of Lantern Waste. . . .
“It seems, then,” said Tirian, smiling himself, “that the Stable seen from within and the Stable seen from without are two different places.”
“Yes,” said the Lord Digory. “Its inside is bigger than its outside.” (LB, Chapter 13, pp. 743–44)
Lewis suggests that our tools of knowing are like Tirian’s door: perspectival. Things might look one way from one perspective and quite different from another. Most of us are wired in pretty much the same way, though there are enough exceptions to keep neurologists interested and busy. But ask any two persons how they see something in the world and suddenly we are thrust into a world of diversity. Colors are shaded, sounds have timbre, tastes run rampant. A connoisseur of coffee I am not. Gourmet flavors are completely lost on me because I have never developed the taste for coffee. It is not that my taste buds are not working or working properly. It is not that I am not “receiving” the simple ideas of the flavors. Rather, it is that I bring to the drinking experience a different context and set of experiences than the coffee aficionado brings. My coffee experience is not merely a matter of appreciation; it is a matter of the taste itself. The coffee really tastes differently to each of us because of what we bring to the experience.
The Lockean view that we receive the world in atomistic bits has been replaced with a Gestalt view of experience. This means the world comes organized and structured with complex richness. For example, we don’t see the star
composed of isolated points. Neither do we construct the star out of the discrete points. We actually see a star. As philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn has shown, we possess no pure observation-language that yields complete objectivity and certainty about our experience. In moving from one conceptual framework, or “paradigm,” to another, we actually see the world as different.4 This is precisely Lewis’s point. The Stable seen from the outside and the one seen from the inside are really in different places; it is not a matter merely of interpretation. The world depends upon the perspective, just as the perspective depends upon the world. Each accommodates and corrects the other.
This view of knowledge does not wallow in fuzzy subjectivity. Tirian knows that the Door stands in the field surrounded by no walls, just as he once knew that the Door was attached to and opened into the Stable. It is a matter of seeing, however surprising that may be in different contexts. For Lewis, the point about seeing extends beyond perception to a concern about the world itself. The theistic paradigm, affirming the existence of a creator God who intervenes in the world, competes with the atheistic paradigm. For Lewis, the atheistic paradigm only sees the Stable as a small, ramshackle building housing animals. For the theist, the Stable can hold more. As Lucy notes, “In our world too, a Stable once had something inside it that was bigger than our whole world” (LB, Chapter 13, p. 744). Lewis holds that some cannot see or hear God or, in the Narnian stories, Aslan, however hard they try; “what you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing: it also depends on what sort of person you are” (MN, Chapter 10, p. 75).5 Lewis argues that theism provides a superior paradigm, and from this paradigm the world is richer because it once housed God himself. In any case, the question of the nature of the world depends on one’s perspective.
“The smelly little hole of a stable”: Value-Laden Knowing
The second thesis of objective knowing is that knowledge must be value-free. The model of knowing assumed by Enlightenment thinkers and their heirs was science. Scientists allegedly rejected any intrusion of values into the knowing process. A good experiment can be repeated by anyone in similar circumstances following the same procedures. Repeatability guarantees that what one person discovers to be the case will be discovered by all others, whatever the values of the investigators.
In his influential book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn rejects the widely-held thesis that scientific knowledge grows through the steady, linear accumulation of new data. Rather, science develops through the struggle of competing general theories, or paradigms. Often paradigms accepted by the scientific community encounter anomalies, data that will not fit into the current explanatory structure. The geological theory of fixed landmasses could not explain the way continents like South America and Africa fit into each other or the identical geological formations on the respective coasts. The normal approach is to alter some features of the paradigm to account for the anomalies, and usually this successfully resolves the anomaly. But at times mere adjustment of the current paradigm is insufficient to deal with the anomaly, and new paradigms—like continental drift—are suggested. For awhile the paradigms compete until one emerges the winner. The struggle is not painless; old paradigms are not easily abandoned, nor are new ones readily accepted. No obvious method for deciding between them is available. Facts themselves cannot determine a clear winner, and criteria for making a decision are already embedded in paradigms. Since each paradigm faces its own anomalies, one has to decide which has the fewest important anomalies. The decision between paradigms, then, requires not only factual but value judgments. The acceptance of a paradigm is not an objective research project but a value-laden intellectual activity.
Lewis, in his treatment of competing worldviews, agrees. Jill and Eustace chose their fundamental paradigm not by logic but out of their very personal encounter with Aslan. Their adoption of their worldview was grounded on the virtue of faith, not evidence or argument. For Eustace, it was the faith that Aslan could strip him of his dragonish skin and ways (VDT, Chapter 7, pp. 474–75). For Jill, it was faith to accept Aslan’s invitation to drink from the stream despite her fear of being eaten (SC, Chapter 2, p. 558). Faith, in the Narnian stories, is responding without assurance, often in the midst of despair, to the invitation of God. Accepting this invitation brings the beginning of a new paradigm. “It would be nice, and fairly nearly true, to say that ‘from that time forth Eustace was a different boy’. To be strictly accurate, he began to be a different boy. He had relapses. . . . But most of those I shall not notice. The cure had begun” (VDT, Chapter 7, p. 476).
Not only do the acceptance and rejection of paradigms invoke values, the very paradigms themselves introduce values into knowledge claims about the world. Lewis explores the values found in competing paradigms in Lucy’s encounter with the Dwarfs in The Last Battle.
[The Dwarfs] had a very odd look. They weren’t strolling about or enjoying themselves nor were they lying down and having a rest. They were sitting very close together in a little circle facing one another. . . .
“Look out!” said one of them in a surly voice. “Mind where you’re going. . . .”
“All right!” said Eustace indignantly. “We’re not blind. We’ve got eyes in our heads.”
“They must be darn good ones if you can see in here,” said the same Dwarf whose name was Diggle.
“In where?” asked Edmund.
“Why you bone-head, in here of course,” said Diggle. “In this pitch-black, poky, smelly little hole of a stable.”
“Are you blind?” said Tirian.
“Ain’t we all blind in the dark?” said Diggle.
“But it isn’t dark, you stupid Dwarfs,” said Lucy. “Can’t you see? Look up! Look round! Can’t you see the sky and the trees and the flowers? Can’t you see me?”
“How in the name of all Humbug can I see what ain’t there?” (LB, Chapter 13, p. 746)
The Dwarfs adopt the view that they are in a dark, smelly stable. Their dismal paradigm determines the way they see the world. When Lucy holds aromatic wild violets under their noses they take them to be filthy stable-litter. Aslan’s roar is the machine noise created by the gang at the other end of the Stable. The glorious feast of pies and tongues, trifles and ices, that Aslan prepares for them tastes like hay, old turnips, and dirty water from a donkey’s trough. The paradigm they have chosen will not allow them to see or to value differently. What for Lucy and the others is filled with joyous beauty, for the Dwarfs is only the occasion for a blind brawl. As Aslan remarks, “Their prison is only in their own minds, yet they are in that prison; and so afraid of being taken in that they cannot be taken out” (LB, Chapter 13, p. 748).
As the twentieth-century philosopher John Dewey notes, action calls for decision, and decision calls for knowledge without certainty. Lewis too sees values as part of the underlying paradigm used in decision-making directed toward action. In The Silver Chair, Eustace, Jill, and Puddleglum have to make a quick but momentous decision about whether or not to release Prince Rilian from his chair. Which of his utterances derive from the enchantment and which reflect the sane Prince? To cut his restraining ropes might mean their death. Yet the finding of Rilian and his release was the very mission Aslan gave them.
“Quick! I am sane now. Every night I am sane. If only I could get out of this enchanted chair, it would last. I should be a man again. But every night they bind me, and so every night my chance is gone. But you are not enemies. Quick! Cut these cords.”
“Stand fast! Steady,” said Puddleglum to the two children. . . .
“Oh, if only we knew!” said Jill.
“I think we do know,” said Puddleglum. . . . “You see, Aslan didn’t tell Pole what would happen. He only told her what to do. That fellow will be the death of us once he’s up, I shouldn’t wonder. But that doesn’t let us off following the sign.” (SC, Ch. 11, pp. 625–26)
Although Puddleglum was uncertain, he had the knowledge needed for action. He knew what he needed to do, and this included obedience to the commands of an Aslan he had never met.
Knowing is a relationship between the knower and the known, such that each contributes to the task. Post-moderns like Jacques Derrida contend that neither sense data nor texts have intrinsic meaning; they achieve significance from the meanings we attach to them. The meaning we bring into the context comes from ourselves, and there is no self devoid of values or normative structures. In his denial of intrinsic meaning, Derrida goes too far, but the point stands that knowing is a balancing act between the contributions of the knower and the known. The dichotomy between value-free objectivity and value-laden subjectivity is false.
“I know nothing about Aslan”: Personal Knowing
The third thesis of the Enlightenment model of knowing is that knowing is impersonal. Since knowing is objective, knowledge claims are interchangeable. What one perceives, so should another.
Rejecting the ideal of scientific detachment, philosopher of science Michael Polanyi contends that knowing involves the passionate, personal participation of the knower. Knowing is an act of commitment in which we bring ourselves to the experience in a variety of ways. We bring theories to the knowing experience, because we cannot understand the data apart from theories. We bring our bodies to the knowing experience, because our very thought processes originate from and are shaped by our body. Even the process of discovery is personal, for from beginning to end it is guided by our “personal vision and sustained by a personal conviction.”6
But doesn’t this make knowing a subjective rather than an objective process? Polanyi argues that it doesn’t, for there is an objective world that is given to us in our experience, whereas in complete subjectivity all meaning and understanding is contributed by the knower. Theories, for example, are not merely personal but are expressed for the use and evaluation of the community, guarding us against being misled by our own desires or perceptions. The objective component to knowledge is maintained through our contact with reality. Personal knowledge, then, is the fusion of the personal and the objective.
In Prince Caspian, the four Pevensie children and the dwarf Trumpkin have become lost searching for a way to meet up with Prince Caspian. “Look!” Lucy suddenly cries out.
“Where? What?” asked everyone.
“The Lion,” said Lucy. “Aslan himself. Didn’t you see?” Her face had changed completely and her eyes shone. . . .
“Where do you think you saw him?” asked Susan.
“Don’t talk like a grown-up,” said Lucy, stamping her foot. “I didn’t think I saw him.”
“Where, Lu?” asked Peter.
“Right up there between those mountain ashes. . . . And he wanted us to go where he was—up there.”
“How do you know that was what he wanted?” asked Edmund.
“He—I—I just know,” said Lucy, “by his face.” . . .
“The only question is whether Aslan was really there,” [said Peter].
“But I know he was,” said Lucy, her eyes filling with tears.
“Yes, Lu, but we don’t, you see,” said Peter.
“There’s nothing for it but a vote,” said Edmund. . . .
“Down,” said the Dwarf. “I know nothing about Aslan.” (PC, Chapter 9, pp. 373–74)
Lewis’s treatment of Lucy’s sighting suggests that he, like Polanyi, sees knowing as personal. Lucy did not merely think or believe she had seen Aslan; she knew that she had. But how to convince the others? It is not clear that she could, for she had no proof, only her own word. But still she knew.
Lucy exemplifies what Polanyi calls tacit knowledge; she could tell by Aslan’s face what he wanted. But what was it about Aslan’s face that conveyed this knowledge? As Polanyi writes, “We can know more than we can tell.” For example, we can recognize someone, distinguishing them from many others. But we usually cannot tell how it is that we recognize that person. Or again, “we recognize the moods of the human face, without being able to tell except quite vaguely, by what signs we know it.”7
Saying that knowledge is personal doesn’t imply that knowledge is merely subjective. Not every knowledge claim has equal merit. There are what Alvin Plantinga calls defeaters—reasons for abandoning one’s belief. Some experiences might suggest that our senses are unreliable. A hallucinogenic weed might have got into Lucy’s rations, causing her to think she had seen a lion. Or perhaps Lucy saw a wild lion, as Trumpkin suggests. The possessor of personal knowledge has no right to ignore countervailing evidence. But neither are believers like Lucy compelled to abandon their personal knowledge simply because others have not had similar experiences. What might be a defeater for one person might not be so for another. Thus, although all knowing is grounded in the knower, it can still be objective because the paradigms in which one works are often public possessions of communities, subject to the challenge of potential defeaters.
Spells
Perhaps in one way or another we are all, like Prince Rilian, bound by the Queen of Underworld, under some sort of spell or other. The spell-makers are the paradigms that govern our ways of knowing. The Enlightenment thinkers were under the spell of objectivity and certainty, lest they be fooled or taken in. The history of philosophy testifies to the problems this view of knowing faced and was unable to solve. Lewis helps us in his Chronicles of Narnia to see a different paradigm, one in which we are all in one way or another “taken in” in the pursuit of truth. Truth and action based on knowledge are no less important for Lewis than for the Enlightenment philosophers. But he realizes that knowledge involves both the world to be experienced and the knowers themselves, rich with context, concepts, values, and indeed, their very being. Either we stay in our dark castle, protecting our paltry and diminishing certitude, or with Rilian we advance, realizing that action requires risk and uncertainty. “He walked resolutely to the door and flung it wide open” (SC, Chapter 11, p. 627).
1 William James, “The Will to Believe” (1896), reprinted in Philosophy of Religion: Selected Readings, second edition, edited by Michael Peterson et. al. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 88. Compare Alfred North Whitehead, Modes of Thought (New York: Macmillan, 1938), p. 22: “Panic of error is the death of progress.”
2 René Descartes, Discourse on Method, Part I.
3 C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1955), p. 125.
4 Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), p. 127.
5 Similar insights are often found in Eastern philosophical and religious traditions. Consider this story told by Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh: “One man who wanted to see the Buddha was in such a hurry that he neglected a woman in dire need whom he met along the way. When he arrived at the Buddha’s monastery, he was incapable of seeing him. Whether you can see the Buddha or not depends on you, on the state of your being.” Thich Nhat Hanh, Living Buddha, Living Christ (New York: Riverhead, 1995), p. 52.
6 Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 301.
7 Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (New York: Doubleday, 1966), pp. 4–5.