Product Description

C. S. Lewis sets out to persuade his audience of the importance and relevance of universal values such as courage and honor in contemporary society.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #12109 in Books
• Published on: 2001-03
• Released on: 2001-03-20
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 128 pages

Amazon.com Review
C.S. Lewis's The Abolition of Man purports to be a book specifically about public education, but its central concerns are broadly political, religious, and philosophical. In the best of the book's three essays, "Men Without Chests," Lewis trains his laser-sharp wit on a mid- century English high school text, considering the ramifications of teaching British students to believe in idle relativism, and to reject "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 and the kinds of things we are." Lewis calls this doctrine the "Tao," and he spends much of the book explaining why society needs a sense of objective values. The Abolition of Man speaks with astonishing freshness to contemporary debates about morality; and even if Lewis seems a bit too cranky and privileged for his arguments to be swallowed whole, at least his articulation of values seems less ego-driven, and therefore is more useful, than that of current writers such as Bill Bennett and James Dobson. --Michael Joseph Gross

Review
"A Real Triumph." -- Owen Barfield

From the Back Cover
In this graceful work, C. S. Lewis reflects on society and nature and the challenges of how best to educate our children. He eloquently argues that we need as a society to underpin reading and writing with lessons on morality and in the process both educate and re-educate ourselves. In the words of Walter Hooper, "If someone were to come to me and say that, with the exception of the Bible, everyone on earth was going to be required to read one and the same book, and then ask what it should be, I would with no hesitation say The Abolition of Man. It is the most perfectly reasoned defense of Natural Law (Morality) I have ever seen, or believe to exist. If any book is able to save us from future excesses of folly and evil, it is this book." This beautiful paperback edition is sure to attract new readers to this classic book.

Customer Reviews

A Dense Defense of Natural Law and the Validity of Reason
As far as I can see, there were two main cornerstones in Lewis' thinking:

(1) The ultimate validity of Reason, perhaps best summed up in his essay "De Futilitate": "Unless all that we take to be knowledge is an illusion, we must hold that in thinking we are not reading rationality into an irrational universe but responding to a rationality with which the universe has always been saturated."

(2) The ultimately objective nature of morality, also known as Natural Law and in this book called the "Tao."

The "Abolition of Man" brings both of these aspects together in the most compact manner of all of Lewis' writings. It is so compact that most readers will likely want to read the (very short) book more than once, so as to really get what Lewis is saying.

Readers should be aware that this is not another "Mere Christianity," which was first written as a radio broadcast and addressed to the general public; "The Abolition of Man" is addressed to an academic audience, and without a certain academic level one is likely going to feel pretty lost in the "Abolition."

The POINT of the "Abolition," however, is a similar one as that of the opening chapters of "Mere Christianity": that there is an overarching moral understanding of humanity, and if you abolish this overarching morality - the "Tao" - then you abolish humanity itself, because our human identity is inexorably linked to it.

In the "Abolition," C. S. Lewis does not go as far as to say that Natural Law depends on a Supernatural Lawgiver, but for him, that is clearly the next step in the argument, and is perhaps the direction into which he wants to nudge his academic audience.

I have enjoyed this book more than once, and have been particularly grateful for the appendix, in which Lewis lists a whole row of quotes on morality by various cultures, in order to show that there is such a thing as a Moral Absolute. I have used his selection of quotes more than once in my own lectures.

Jacob Schriftman, Author of The C. S. Lewis Book on the Bible: What the Greatest Christian Writer Thought About the Greatest Book

Gimongously Interesting!
Lewis extracts the meaning of modern western schooling trends, that is, he shows logically and religiously what the modern system implies for the future of human thought and behavior. It's fantastic! Much more interesting than my measly review could possibly indicate!

Biased, religious, and logically flawed.
While this is a great piece if you want to step inside a virtue theorist's mind, as an actual philosophical text it is rather poor.
While it is obviously religiously biased, it is Lewis' own circular paradoxes that lead to a flawed system of logic that can not support itself.