The Relation of Reason and Imagination: C.S. Lewis on Enjoyment and Contemplation

Two. The relation of reason and imagination

If reality consists of nothing but physical objects and abstract concepts, then reality has, in the last resort, nothing to say to us. We are in the wrong universe. Man is a passion inutile; and so, good night. And yet, the supposedly real universe has been quarried out of man's sensuous experiences.

C. S. Lewis found his philosophical position not while he was studying philosophy for Greats, nineteen twenty to nineteen twenty-two, but only much later in a long process of thinking and reflecting on his own experiences. Part of his intellectual development took place when he worked as a philosophy tutor and recognized that he had difficulties making clear his position to his pupils. But no less important was the long philosophical debate with his friend Owen Barfield that is commonly known as the "Great War". It had started in nineteen twenty-three when Barfield and with him Cecil Harwood, another mutual friend, got to know the writings of Rudolf Steiner and showed himself to be impressed by this esoteric Austrian philosopher; it ended in nineteen thirty when Lewis accepted a personal God.

As Lewis refused to follow Barfield on the road to anthroposophy, it became necessary for him to reflect on his epistemological position and to argue for his own metaphysical views. This helped him to appreciate human experience in its actual concreteness and to clarify the relationship between man's reason and imagination. In Part three point two point one and three point two point two, more will be said about the development of Lewis' philosophical thinking with regard to his view of being; the following pages will focus on his epistemological reflections.

Two point one. The distinction between "enjoyment" and "contemplation"

The basis of Lewis' epistemology is a conceptual distinction he adopted from the Australian philosopher Samuel Alexander. Alexander, who in turn mentions G. E. Moore's essay "The Refutation of Idealism" nineteen oh three as his source, distinguishes in Space, Time and Deity nineteen twenty two elements which constitute in their mutual relation every experience. On the one hand, there is an act of mind (or awareness); on the other hand, there is the object the mind is aware of in an experience. Both elements are present in every experience, but our relation to them is not the same, for it is the mind itself as one of those two elements which has the experience: it is the togetherness or "compresence" of those two elements in the experiencing mind which constitutes the experience.

The one element is present in the experience as the experiencing (as the act of having the experience), the other as the experienced (as the object of that experience). The experiencing mind always knows that it is itself having the experience. When I see (for example) a table, I not only do the seeing, but I know that I do the seeing, and I see not only the table, but I know that I see the table. Lewis, who read Space, Time and Deity in March nineteen twenty-four, immediately accepted this distinction and kept on using it for the rest of his life.

Alexander suggests that both elements have found expression in language as well, for here we find the distinction between the cognate accusative and the objective accusative. Cognate accusative means that the thing spoken of is pro- duced by the activity of the subject - e.g. if you fight a battle or devise a logical riddle. Objective accusative means that an act refers to an object that is other than the experiencing subject - e.g. if you fight your enemy with a sword or think about the theorem of Pythagoras.31

Both Alexander and Moore argue that the object of an experience cannot be a part of (or element in) the experiencing mind but must be considered to exist independent from it. For if sensation (or any other experience) did not mean being aware of something other than the experiencing mind - that is, if it were not an aspect distinguishable from the act of experiencing - then no man could be aware even of himself. Lewis also claims that the self can only be aware of itself if it recognizes itself in contrast to something other that is not itself.

Alexander calls the act of being aware of or attending to (equals the experiencing as something that is consciously done by the mind) an "enjoyment" which "contemplates" its object (equals the experienced). Lewis illustrates the application of these concepts using the example of seeing a table:

When you see a table you 'enjoy' the act of seeing and 'contemplate' the table. Later, if you took up Optics and thought about Seeing itself, you would be contemplating the seeing and enjoying the thought.

However, we should be aware that while both Alexander and Lewis draw their examples from sensory experience, the underlying analysis applies to any act of mind we may perform: Acts of thinking or knowing are no less enjoyments than any other experience the mind is living through, and a particular notion as their object is no less contemplated than any material object.

For Alexander, this is an analytical truth: it is what it means to have an experience. Hence, it is no less impossible that there is an enjoyed act of mind without a contemplated object than that there is a child without a mother, or a mother without a child. There is never an experience which does not have those two elements in it: every enjoyment of an experience (as an act of mind) is a contemplation of the experienced object. Because of this, Alexander is willing to call the whole experience an enjoyment and a contemplation:

There are no two separate mental acts, one of enjoyment and one of contemplation. The mind, in enjoying itself, has before it, and therefore contemplates, the object. Contemplation is a name for the same act as enjoyment, only in reference to the object.

In other words, in every experience, it is possible to distinguish between an experiencing subject and an experienced object. With regard to the activity of the experiencing subject, the experience is called an enjoyment, with regard to its object, it is called a contemplation. But if an experience is defined by the togetherness or "compresence" of an act of mind and an experienced object in the experiencing mind, it may suffice to refer to one of these two elements in order to ensure that the whole experience is meant. It is not necessary to mention the other element explicitly because it is self-evident that it is present in the experience as well.

According to Alexander, however, it is not the same - it is actually two different experiences - to enjoy a certain experience or to contemplate it.

When we see a table, we enjoy the act of seeing (which is still a contemplation, namely a contemplation of the table). But we may also contemplate the act of seeing (which is still an enjoyment, namely an enjoyed act of investigating the phenomenon called "human perception"). Hence, the enjoyment of an act of seeing (as an act of mind equals an internal experience) would not be the same experience as a contemplation of this same act of seeing (as an object equals seen from the outside).

And we should be aware that while every experience is enjoyed, not every experience is contemplated. In the vast majority of cases, the object we contemplate is not a human experience but some other object like a sunset, a mathematical problem, a loved person or an argument in a philosophy book. To choose an experience (or experiences in general) as the object of our contemplation means to choose from all possible objects of contemplation a special class of them, namely the act of experiencing itself, in order to enjoy the activity called epistemology (in philosophy), perceptual psychology (in psychology), or neurophysiology, optics etc. (in the natural sciences).

In "Meditation in a Toolshed", Lewis calls the enjoyment of an experience (the experiencing) a "looking along", and the contemplation of an object (the experienced) a "looking at". In "Early Prose Joy", The Personal Heresy and An Experiment in Criticism, he calls the enjoyment of an experience a "looking through", and the contemplation of an object a "looking at".

Lewis illustrates in this essay also what happens when we switch from enjoying "looking along" an experience to contemplating "looking at" it. He steps in his toolshed in and out of a sun beam which illuminates the shed, that is, he steps in and out of a certain experience. While he is looking along enjoying the act of seeing along the beam, he looks at contemplates the leaves and the sun ninety million miles away. When he steps out of the beam, he looks at contemplates the beam (his own previous experience) from the outside but still enjoys an act of seeing, of looking along his visual impulse. In other words, the act of looking at his own former experience is a new and different experience, but still a looking along. Both experiences - the inside vision of looking along the beam and the outside vision of looking at the beam - are an enjoyment as well as a contemplation.

It is the same with Lewis' other examples from "Meditation in a Toolshed". A young man is in love with his girl: he is looking along enjoying his sexual impulse and looking at contemplating the girl. Then a psychologist comes and performs an act of psychological research: he is looking along enjoying his act of psychological research and looking at contemplating the young man's sexual impulse. A mathematician performs an act of mathematical thinking: he is looking along enjoying an act of mathematical thinking and looking at contemplating timeless and spaceless truths. Then a cerebral psychologist comes and performs an act of scientific investigation: he is looking along enjoying that act of scientific investigation and looking at contemplating the mathematician's act of thinking. Each of these experiences is an act of looking along and of looking at, of enjoying a particular act of mind and contemplating a particular object. Put in a table, the equations are thus:

Enjoyed

The fact that Lewis also uses both terms to denote the whole act of experiencing (for example in his "Summa") has produced some confusion among Lewis scholars. It must therefore be emphasized that both, Alexander and Lewis, consider it impossible that there could ever be an enjoyed act of mind without a contemplated object: an experience always consists of the togetherness or "compresence" of an enjoyed act of mind and a contemplated object in the experiencing mind.

Lewis' constant use of Alexander's distinction shows the great importance he attributed to it in epistemological questions. But we should be aware that he did not follow Alexander in his metaphysics. When he accepted Alexander's distinction, he was an Idealist, and he kept on using it after he had accepted the Christian faith. He therefore rejected Alexander's naturalistic interpretation of the knowledge relation.

This is important because a main characteristic of acts of experiencing is that they "are 'about' or 'refer to' something other than themselves": by taking something other than themselves as the object of their awareness, acts of experiencing have the character of being intentional. For Alexander, being a naturalist, the cognitive relation between the mind and its objects was not unique: he believed that man's mind or consciousness is in the last resort identical with brain processes. But Lewis followed Kant, Bradley and Moore in believing that the relation between the mind and its objects is utterly different from any relation that could possibly exist between objects as objects. It is not the relation of a thing to its quality, or of a thing to a part of it, but the relation of knowing a thing or consciously being aware of it. This is essential to Lewis' whole thinking; it is for example a vital element in his "Argument from Reason" (Part one point one point four and two point two point three).

In most cases, Lewis uses the enjoyment/contemplation distinction strictly in Alexander's sense. But in his literary theory, he sometimes uses it in an analogical way. For here he states that the reader ought not to look at the poet but through the eyes of the poet (or through the spectacles the poet is wearing), in order to see what the poet sees. In Alexander's terms: the reader should not contemplate the poet but enjoy the act of mind the poet is enjoying, in order to contemplate the object as the poet contemplates it. This is not a strict application of Alexander's distinction, for the reader's consciousness is not meant to be identical with the poet's consciousness; it is only meant to share it in its quality of experiencing.

Another way of presenting this analogical application of the enjoyment/contemplation distinction is Lewis' use of the French words savoir (to contemplate or have "knowledge about" the poet and the historical situation he was living in) and connaître (to enjoy or have "knowledge-by-acquaintance" of what the poet has experienced or imagined by sharing his point of view as it is expressed in his books).