The Abolition of Man
C. S. Lewis's three Riddell Memorial Lectures on the natural law and the consequences of its rejection
Tradition: Anglican Christianity / natural law tradition
Without the natural law, "man's power over nature" becomes some men's power over other men — and the conditioners abolish the very humanity they claim to perfect
The Abolition of Man is Lewis's most philosophically rigorous short work. The three Riddell Memorial Lectures develop a sustained argument: progressive education's attempt to teach values as merely subjective feelings (the "Green Book" example) cuts the branch on which human civilisation sits — once the natural moral law (which Lewis calls "the Tao," with extensive appendix of cross-cultural parallels) is rejected, what looks like "Man's conquest of Nature" becomes some humans' manipulation of others, and the conditioners themselves become subhuman. The work has been read as one of the central twentieth-century natural-law philosophical arguments and continues to be central reference for Catholic, Reformed, and Anglican moral philosophy.
Author
Editions cited
- The Abolition of Man (HarperOne, 2001)
- The Abolition of Man (Oxford, 1944; multiple reprints)
School Embodiments
The Abolition of Man is one of the most rigorous twentieth-century defences of moral realism in popular form — there are real values, real virtues, accessible cross-culturally and binding on all humans qua humans.
"Until recently the world's moral instinct was in agreement with itself in a way it has long ceased to be." (Abolition of Man ch. 2)
Lewis's appendix on the Tao is a cross-cultural natural-law argument that has been read by Catholic moral philosophers (Maritain, Finnis) as a major popular statement of their tradition.
"The Tao... is the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is." (Abolition of Man ch. 1)
Modern evangelical engagement with Lewis treats the Abolition of Man as a major resource for apologetic moral realism and cultural critique.
"The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts." (Abolition of Man ch. 1)
A theological neighbourhood: Reformed natural-law theology (Cornelius Van Til critically, David VanDrunen sympathetically) has engaged the Abolition of Man as a major twentieth-century non-Catholic natural-law statement.
"Man's power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument." (Abolition of Man ch. 3)
The argument that humans have a real nature with characteristic goods that natural law tracks is recognisably hylomorphic-Aristotelian, mediated through the Thomistic tradition Lewis engaged.
"You cannot go on 'explaining away' for ever; you will find that you have explained explanation itself away." (Abolition of Man ch. 3)
Lewis's Platonist sympathies (especially in the closing chapter's defence of objective beauty and goodness) place him in continuity with the classical Platonic-Christian synthesis.
"To say that the cataract is sublime means saying that our emotion of humility is appropriate to the cataract." (Abolition of Man ch. 1)
The argument that the "conditioners" abolish their own humanity by treating others as objects is recognisably personalist — the human person cannot be reduced to instrumentally-manipulable matter without losing what makes the person a person.
"What we call Man's power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men." (Abolition of Man ch. 3)
Less an embodiment than a theological neighbourhood: Orthodox engagement with Lewis has been warm (especially the Inklings' circle's sympathy for Orthodox sacramentalism), and the Abolition of Man's defence of the tao parallels Orthodox theological cosmology.
"The Tao, which others may call Natural Law or Traditional Morality or the First Principles." (Abolition of Man ch. 1)
Anglican tradition.
Internal Tensions
Lewis's argument relies on the broad cross-cultural convergence of moral systems (the appendix is the evidence). Critics (especially relativist anthropologists) have argued the convergence is overstated and the divergences understated. Modern natural-law theorists (Finnis, George) develop the argument more rigorously; Lewis's contribution is the compressed popular statement of the philosophical point.
I. Time
Real historical time of human cultural development. The argument is moral-cultural — what we are about to lose if we cut the tao away.
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II. Space
Standard background.
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III. Matter
Real and the locus of human existence; "Nature" is what is to be mastered or, alternatively, what has its own real moral order.
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IV. Observer
The Lewisian observer is the morally embodied human person — embodied, plural, active in moral cultivation, situated in a real cosmic-moral order. Moral authority is tradition (the tao) accessible to all humans cross-culturally.
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V. Energy
Not directly engaged.
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VI. Information
The tao — the natural moral law — is preserved across cultures and traditions. Personal information conserved in the standard Christian framework.
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Personas that cite this work
Personas with the nearest attribute fingerprint
Historical figures whose own classification on the same six-dimensional grid lands closest to this work's. Computed by attribute-agreement on coordinates both address.
Computed school proximity
The work's attribute fingerprint scored against all schools using the same quiz scorer. Useful as a sanity check on the hand-curated embodiments above.
How The Abolition of Man resolves each dilemma
51 resolved positions across 4 dimensions, including 7 distinctive where the majority of schools go the other way · 6 unaligned.
Each dimension is sorted so minority positions come first. Mainstream positions are folded into an expandable list.
Time · 9 dilemmas, all mainstream
Matter · 7 dilemmas, all mainstream
Observer · 37 dilemmas · 5 distinctive
Mind, agency, and the knower's relation to the known.