Education, Emotional Sentiment, and Ethics Theme Analysis

The Abolition of Man originated as a lecture series that C. S. Lewis delivered at the University of Durham in 1943, critiquing current methods of teaching English and their implications for broader society. He bases his argument on an English textbook he was asked to review, which he refers to as The Green Book, and he gives its authors the pseudonyms Gaius and Titius. Lewis staunchly attacks Gaius and Titius’s educational approach, because they reject belief in objective reality. In particular, Gaius and Titius do not believe that things objectively merit particular human sentiments (e.g., to them, a waterfall is not objectively beautiful), and, in fact, they attack the value of sentiment in literature altogether. Lewis, on the other hand, believes that proper sentiments—that is, emotions that are in harmony with objective reality—can and must be taught. By evaluating Gaius and Titius’s approach as contradictory to history and reason, Lewis argues that the cultivation of sentiment is not only a valid part of modern education, but critical for the formation of ethical human beings.

Gaius and Titius, according to Lewis, are fundamentally mistaken about the validity of sentiment, or emotion, in education. While they see sentiment as irrelevant to reality and therefore dispensable, Lewis argues that properly trained sentiments are vital for well-educated people. Lewis posits that Gaius and Titius “have honestly misunderstood the pressing educational need of the moment.” Whereas Gaius and Titius think that the day’s youth are too sentimental, Lewis has observed the opposite in his own teaching: “For every one pupil who needs to be guarded from a weak excess of sensibility there are three who need to be awakened from the slumber of cold vulgarity.” The current problem isn’t too much sentiment, in other words; it’s the wrong kind of sentiment.

Lewis goes on, “The right defence against false sentiments is to inculcate just sentiments. By starving the sensibility of our pupils we only make them easier prey to [propaganda].” Lewis means that eradicating sentiment doesn’t actually defend students against false, manipulative ideas (e.g., in advertising or wartime propaganda). It just makes them less capable of recognizing such false sentiments for what they are. In contrast to Gaius and Titius’s view, then, Lewis believes that students must be trained to hold “just sentiments”—emotions that are trained to be in harmony with objective reality (which Lewis will define more closely later, when he discusses traditional values).

Even if Gaius and Titius were to agree with Lewis that students should be taught “just sentiments,” they would have no basis for teaching such sentiments. This is because they don’t believe that objects inherently merit particular sentiments—an approach that Lewis argues is divorced from history and disastrous for the future. Lewis argues that, “Until quite modern times all teachers […] believed the universe to be such that certain emotional reactions on our part could be either congruous or incongruous to it—believed, in fact, that objects did not merely receive, but could merit, our approval or disapproval, our reverence or our contempt.” In other words, the premodern assumption was that things objectively merited certain emotional reactions. For example, “The man who called the [waterfall] 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.” That is, as opposed to Gaius and Titius’s claim, the man was expressing a just sentiment—the waterfall is sublime—that lines up with what’s objectively true about the waterfall.

By rejecting this older approach, therefore, Gaius and Titius place themselves outside of a perspective that has prevailed throughout history. Lewis names St. Augustine and Aristotle as just two of the venerable predecessors with whom Gaius and Titius find themselves out of accord: “St Augustine defines virtue as […] the ordinate condition of the affections in which every object is accorded that […] degree of love which is appropriate to it. Aristotle says that the aim of education is to make the pupil like and dislike what he ought.” Gaius and Titius’s modern approach robs students of the ability to be virtuous—that is, to love the right things in the appropriate measure.

The result of the inadequate modern approach is that students will be incapable of understanding ethics: whereas “the pupil who has been thus trained in ‘ordinate affections’ or ‘just sentiments’ will easily find the first principles in Ethics,” the one who has not “can make no progress in that science.’’ The ultimate outcome can only be harmful for society. Lewis will develop this idea further in subsequent lectures, but his comments about propaganda effectively preview his point. A student whose sentiments have not been properly trained will be susceptible to propaganda and other forms of manipulation (or even to manipulating and otherwise harming others), because he or she lacks a stable basis for determining what is truthful, good, and just.