C. S.
Lewis’s essay “Transposition” is available in his collection The
Weight of Glory, and also online here. It is, both philosophically and theologically,
very deep, illuminating the relationship between the material and the
immaterial, and between the natural and the supernatural. (Note that these are different distinctions,
certainly from a Thomistic point of view.
For there are phenomena that are immaterial but still natural. For example, the human intellect is
immaterial, but still perfectly “natural” insofar as it is in our nature to
have intellects. What is “supernatural” is what goes beyond a
thing’s nature, and it is not beyond a thing’s nature to be immaterial if
immateriality just is part of its nature.)
By “transposition,” Lewis has in mind the way in which a system which is richer or has more elements can be represented in a system that is poorer insofar as it has fewer elements. The notion is best conveyed by means of his examples. Consider, for instance, the way that the world of three dimensional colored objects can be represented in a two dimensional black and white line drawing; or the way that a piece of music scored for an orchestra might be adapted for piano; or the way something said in a language with many words at its disposal might be translated into a language containing far fewer words, if the relevant latter words have several senses.
As these
examples indicate, in a transposition, the elements of the poorer system have
to be susceptible of multiple interpretations if they are to capture what is
contained in the richer system. In a pen
and ink drawing, black will have to represent not only objects that really are
black, but also shadows and contours; white will have to represent not only
objects that really are white, but also areas that are in bright light; a
triangular shape will represent not only two dimensional objects, but also three
dimensional objects like a road receding into the distance; and so on. In an orchestral piece adapted for piano, the
same notes will have to stand for those that would have been played on a flute
and those that would have been played on a violin. In a translation into a less rich language,
words that have one meaning in one context will have to bear a different
meaning in another context. In general,
the relationship between the elements of a richer system and the elements of
the poorer system into which it is transposed is not one-to-one, but
many-to-one.
You cannot properly
understand a transposition unless you understand something of both sides of it,
as Lewis illustrates with a vivid example.
He asks us to consider a child born to a woman locked in a dungeon, who tries
to teach the child about the outside world via black and white line
drawings. Through this medium “she
attempts to show him what fields, rivers, mountains, cities, and waves on a
beach are like” (p. 110). For a time it
seems that she is succeeding, but eventually something the child says indicates
that he supposes that what exists outside the dungeon is a world filled with lines
and other pencil marks. The mother
informs the child that this is not the case:
And instantly his whole notion of the
outer world becomes a blank. For the lines,
by which alone he was imagining it, have now been denied of it. He has no idea of that which will exclude and
dispense with the lines, that of which the lines were merely a transposition… (Ibid.)
(Though
Lewis does not note it, the parallel with Plato’s Allegory of the Cave is
obvious.)
Now, transpositions
in Lewis’s sense do not exist merely where we are trying to represent something (in words, drawings,
music, or whatever). Lewis points out
that a similar relationship holds between emotions and bodily sensations. The very same sensation -- a twinge of
excitement felt in the abdomen around the diaphragm, say -- may in one context
be associated with romantic passion and be taken to be pleasant, and in another
context be associated with a feeling of distress and be taken to be
unpleasant. Very different emotions can
be transposed, as it were, onto one and the same bodily sensation in something
like the way very different meanings might be associated with the same
word. And as with the other sorts of
transposition, you will not understand what is going on if you look to the
lower medium alone. In this case, you
will not know what emotion is being felt, or even what an emotion is, if you
look to the bodily sensation alone.
As Lewis
points out, the notion of transposition is useful for understanding the relationship
between mind and matter and the crudity of the errors made by materialists. Lewis, like Aristotelians and Thomists, is
happy to acknowledge that “thought is intimately connected with the brain,” but,
also like them, he insists that the conclusion “that thought therefore is merely a movement in the
brain is… nonsense” (p. 103, emphasis added).
As I have argued many times (at greatest length and most systematically here),
there is no way in principle that the conceptual content of our thoughts can be
accounted for in materialist terms, because concepts have an exact or
determinate content that no material representation or system of
representations can have, and a universal reference that no material
representation or system of representations can have. The relationship between thought and brain
activity is accordingly somewhat analogous to the relationship between the
meaning of a written sentence and the physical properties of the ink marks that
make up that sentence. If the ink marks
are damaged or destroyed, it will be difficult or impossible for the sentence
to convey its meaning. But of course it doesn’t
follow that the meaning of the sentence is reducible to or knowable from the
physical properties of the ink marks alone.
Similarly, if the brain is damaged, then thought is impaired, but it
doesn’t follow that thought is reducible to brain activity. (I do not say that the analogy is perfect,
only that it is suggestive.)
Now, suppose
someone noted that sentences are always embodied in some physical medium or
other -- ink marks, pixels, sound waves, etc. -- and concluded that the meaning
of a sentence must therefore be reducible to or deducible from the physical and
chemical properties of ink marks, pixels, sound waves, etc. alone. He would be conflating the two sides of a transposition,
and in particular trying to reduce the richer system (the system of meanings)
to the poorer system (the system of physical marks or noises). He would be like the child in the dungeon who
thinks that the outside world must be “nothing but” what can be captured in
black and white line drawings, or like someone who thinks that the richness of
an emotional state can be reduced to a mere bodily sensation, or like someone
who thinks that the most complex orchestral piece must really be “nothing but”
whatever noises can be made on a piano.
Now, anyone
who seriously thinks that thought can be reduced to brain activity, or who suggests
(as an eliminative materialist, as opposed to a reductive materialist, would) that
the notion of thought can be eliminated entirely and replaced by the notion of
brain activity, is like that. Actually, he
is much worse than that. He is not like
the child in the dungeon who has never seen the outside world and thus makes an
innocent, though egregious, error in supposing that it must be reducible to
what can be captured in a line drawing.
The materialist is more like the woman, if we imagine that for some
bizarre reason she somehow talks herself into believing that the outside world
contains nothing more than what is in a black and white pencil drawing -- even
though she has actually seen the outside world and thus knows better. The materialist knows full well that thought
is real, and that the conceptual content of thought is as different from the physical
properties of brain activity -- electrochemical properties, causal relations,
etc. -- as apples are from oranges. It
is only an ideological fixation on one side of the transposition involved here
that leads him to insist otherwise.
Suppose the reason the woman fell into a delusion like the one in
question is because she had spent so long a time in the dungeon that she came
to love it, and could barely remember the outside world. The materialist has so fixated upon and
fallen in love with the less rich side of the transposition (brain activity)
that, at least in his philosophical moments, he can barely keep in mind what
the richer side (thought) is really like.
This error
of conflating the two sides of a transposition is rife within reductionist philosophical
theorizing. Think, for example, of Hume’s
claim that concepts are “nothing but” impressions or mental images, or Berkeley’s
claim that physical objects are “nothing but” collections of the perceptions we
have of them, or subjectivist theories of value that claim that judgments about
what is good or bad are “nothing but” expressions of various sentiments. Whenever we consciously entertain some concept,
we tend to form a mental image of some sort.
For example, when we entertain the concept triangularity, we form a mental image of a triangle or of the written
or spoken word “triangle.” But it doesn’t
follow that the concept is to be identified with such mental images, and indeed
(and contra Hume) it cannot be. The concept,
being completely abstract and universal, is richer than any mental image or set
of mental images, which are always concrete and particular. What the mind does when it makes use of
mental imagery as an aid to thought is to transpose, in Lewis’s sense, the
richer conceptual order into the poorer order of mental imagery. Similarly, in perception, the mind transposes
the richness of physical substances (the full nature of which can be grasped
only by the intellect and not by sensation or imagination) into the poorer
medium of sense images. Berkeley’s
idealism in effect collapses that richer order into the poorer one. And in conscious acts of moral judgment, our
grasp of something as good is associated with a feeling of approval, while our
judgment that something is bad is associated with a feeling of
disapproval. The mind transposes the
former, cognitive order into the latter, and very different, affective
order. The subjectivist theorist of
value makes the mistake of collapsing the former into the latter.
As Lewis
notes, however, it isn’t just materialists and other reductionists who are
guilty of confusion where transpositions are concerned. Religious believers are prone to it as well
to the extent that they collapse the supernatural into the natural. For example, Lewis notes the danger of
confusing one’s emotional state with one’s
spiritual state. Obviously there is a rough and ready correlation
here. Being close to God and morally upright
is often associated with a feeling of well-being. But feelings are fickle things and subject to
distortion. A scrupulous person takes
his feelings of guilt to be a sign that he has sinned, when in fact he has
not. A lax person takes the absence of
any feelings of guilt as evidence that he has not sinned, when in fact he has. Highly emotional styles of worship seem to
some to be evidence of genuine devotion, whereas more sedate forms of worship
might seem spiritually arid. But the
former sort of devotion can also be superficial and fleeting, and the latter deeper
and more enduring. Pop spirituality
tells us “Don’t think, feel!” but the reverse is much closer to the truth.
(Notice that
I say only that it is closer to the truth,
not that it is the truth, full stop. I do not for a moment deny that feelings have
a role in the religious life, and I think Lewis would not deny it either. We are, after all, feeling creatures by
nature, not bloodless Cartesian intellects trapped in bodies. The point is just that feelings are the
lower, poorer side of the transposition, whereas the intellect -- which alone
can ultimately judge one’s true spiritual state -- is the higher, richer side. Here as in every other aspect of life, the
affective tail must not be allowed to wag the cognitive dog.)
Lewis also
notes how religious people are prone to mistake the earthly images of Heaven
for the real thing, and sometimes feel let down when they are told that this is
a mistake. How could Heaven be eternal
bliss without eating, drinking, and (my example, not Lewis’s) playing
Frisbee with Fido? Deleting such
earthly pleasures from our picture of Heaven seems to leave nothing in its
place. Heaven comes to seem arid, bleak,
and boring. But this is precisely the
wrong lesson to draw, comparable to the error the child in the dungeon makes
when he is told by his mother that the world outside the dungeon lacks pencil
lines. As Lewis writes:
The child
will get the idea that the real world is somehow less visible than his mother’s
pictures. In reality it lacks lines because it is incomparably more visible.
So with
us. “We know not what we shall be”; but we may be sure we shall be more, not
less, than we were on earth. Our natural experiences (sensory, emotional,
imaginative) are only like the drawing, like pencilled lines on flat paper. If
they vanish in the risen life, they will vanish only as pencil lines vanish
from the real landscape, not as a candle flame that is put out but as a candle
flame which becomes invisible because someone has pulled up the blind, thrown
open the shutters, and let in the blaze of the risen sun. (pp.
110-11)
Descriptions
of Heaven that make use of earthly images are transpositions of a higher,
richer order into a lower, poorer one.
The religious believer who cannot understand how Heaven can lack earthly
delights is like the materialist who cannot understand how thought could be
more than brain activity, or the subjectivist ethical theorist who cannot
understand how judgments of moral goodness and badness can be anything more than
the expression of feelings.
I would say
that a similar mistake is made by many of those who resist classical
theism in favor of the more anthropomorphic “theistic personalist” conception
of God. When told by Thomists that we
have to understand language about God in an analogical sense, they think that
this entails thinking of God in a cold, abstract, and impersonal way. (One mistake they sometimes make is to think
that the Thomist is saying that descriptions of God are merely “metaphorical.” That is not
what the Thomist is saying. Not all
analogical use of language is metaphorical.
The Thomist takes talk about God’s power, knowledge, goodness, etc. to
be literal, and thus not metaphorical. The claim is rather that such talk is not to
be understood in a univocal way. For discussion of the Thomist theory of
analogy, see pp. 256-63 of Scholastic
Metaphysics.)
In fact, to
think of the God of classical theism as cold, abstract, and impersonal is as
clueless as the child in the dungeon thinking that the world outside must be
very cold and abstract if it does not contain the pencil lines he sees in his
mother’s drawings. Just as the world
outside the dungeon is in fact far more
warm and concrete than the pencil drawings, so too is the God of classical
theism infinitely more “personal”
than the lame man-writ-large “God” of theistic personalism. The theistic personalist is like the boy who comes
to prefer the drawings to ever leaving the dungeon, or the like the denizen of
Plato’s cave who thinks it insane to believe tales of a world more real than
the shadows on the wall. Or if you
prefer a more earthy biblical analogy, he is like Esau, trading his birthright
for a mess of pottage and thinking he’s gotten the better deal.
One way I've the seen distinction between real beings and beings of reason put, is that real beings are in nature and therefore are independent of the mind, whereas beings of reason are not in nature but in the reason and therefore are dependent on the mind. If this distinction is fairly accurate, then it would seem to follow that beings of reason do exist in some way or sense, though in the same way or sense that, say, an oak tree does.
ReplyDeleteI see. The scholastics qualify being with real to make the distinction. It's a good thing Scott clarified then. It sounds like I mainly just need to get my terminology about it in line with the scholastic use. Thanks.
... which is taking more time than I expected in some areas, in small part because I'm expected to switch into analytic jargon every time I write a paper (though in this case I was unsure even of that).
ReplyDeleteedit: ... I write a [philosophy] paper
ReplyDeleteI did it again. Sorry. Let me correct that now: "John West, [etc.]"
ReplyDeleteOhh, and John is fine, Glenn. Hah. I just don't post under "John" to avoid confusion.
Late to this, sorry. But isn't it inevitable that, to those who inhabit the level into which anything is transposed, will see that thing as being thin and abstract? At least, once it is explained that the transposition is not to be taken at face value?
ReplyDeleteSurely, any such explanation will necessarily say that the transposition involves something outside our experience. And as such, will seem unreal, "real" being taken as that which we normally experience.
(Lewis used this problem in his fiction - e.g., in the Silver Chair.)
Spirit is genderless, hence transposition meets the higher and lower realm of being. God is not her or him, ultimately. God is love.
ReplyDelete