An analysis of the abolition of man by cs lewis

Lewis A summary Chapter 1:

We redefine God as our future selves. But what about the views of ordinary, garden variety Americans on these matters of morality and truth? Are there any true things whatsoever? Apparently not, since most people, according to Wolfe, endorse what he calls the Eleventh Commandment: Lewis cites in his great work The Abolition of Man as a source of the breakdown of the Western moral vision grounded in objective truth?

Are they disciples of their own versions of Gaius and Titius and their Green Book? Did they read or were they taught by a contemporary equivalent of Orbilius? In any case, they are presently promoting the kind of agenda that Lewis, in his own day, believed would lead not only to the destruction of society and the abolition of man, but also to the damnation of the human soul.

Hence, we would be wise to listen most carefully to what this distinguished Oxford fellow and Cambridge professor has to say about these paramount issues of morality, truth,and the philosophy of education in what amounts to one of his most insightfuland prophetic works — The Abolition of Man.

Background 4 Because C.

'The Abolition of Man,' by C.S. Lewis

Lewis believed that the Western world was in the process of rejecting the natural law tradition of objective right and wrong, and because he saw this rejection of real truth being taught in the school systems of his day, and because he believed that these two things added up would eventually amount to the collapse of society as he and others knew it, for these reasons he penned this defense of the natural law tradition in The Abolition of Man.

His goal was nothing short of an attempt to salvage Western civilization. Until modern times no thinker of the first rank ever doubted that our judgments of value were rational judgments or that what they discovered was objective. It does not believe that value judgements are really judgements at all.

They are sentiments, or complexes, or attitudes produced in a community by the pressure of its environment and its traditions, and differing from one community to another.

To say that a thing is good is merely to express our feeling about it; and our feeling about it is the feeling we have been socially conditioned to have. But if this is so, then we might have been conditioned to feel otherwise.

Let us improve our morality. These lectures were presented on the evenings of these three successive dates, and were published later that same year by Oxford University Press as The Abolition of Man. Though Lewis does not argue explicitly from Scripture or as a Christian theist p.

Thus he stands in the tradition of the giants of the West such as Plato, Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas who defended the same. Indeed, Lewis shows that this concept of objective truth and morality is not just a Western ideal, but is in fact a global phenomenon.

Chapter 1: Men Without Chests

Not only does he draw on Western thinkers in support of this notion, but he also documents its broad recognition in an appendix to the book that provides clear, substantial illustrations of the Tao in eight fundamental moral categories derived from diverse thinkers and civilizations worldwide.

Indeed, the question of Truth — of True Truth — is the question of our time.The Abolition of Man By C.S. Lewis Introduction The Abolition of Man was first given as a series of lectures in The lectures dealt largely with the dangers of moral relativism – a subject that increasingly was to occupy Lewis’ mind as he noted the destructive trends emerging in the modern world-view.

Lewis later debated the issue. The Abolition of Man is listed as #7 on the top greatest works of the 20th Century. In Abolition Lewis writes of two opposing views: The World off the Green Book vs. the World of the Tao. “Abolition of Man” is a short philosophical work about moral education.

C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, or Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools, in The Complete C.

Chapter 2: The Way

S. Lewis Signature Classics (San Francisco/New York: HarperSanFrancisco, A division of HarperCollinsPublishers, ), p. C.S.

Lewis THE ABOLITION OF MAN or Reflections on education with special Men Without Chests The Way The Abolition of Man Appendix-Illustrations of the Tao Lewis's notes are placed at the bottom of each chapter document.

Transcriber's notes (and explanations) follow Lewis's. are a good many deep questions settled in a pretty summary. Both astonishing and prophetic, The Abolition of Man is one of the most debated of Lewis’s extraordinary works. National Review cho In the classic The Abolition of Man, C.S.

Lewis, the most important Christian writer of the 20th century, sets out to persuade his audience of the importance and relevance of universal values such as courage and honor in contemporary society/5.

Chapter 3: The Abolition of Man. Lewis begins by saying that many today are devoted to man's conquest over nature. While the advance of technology has certainly benefited mankind (e.g. the development of modern medicine), Lewis says that this is not really man controlling nature.