Lewis on transposition

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.