RSS
Home
A consideration of academics between the wars
Print
Email
RSS
Subscribe
C.S. Lewis: one of the last Great Dons
If we are to consider the intellectual environment between the great wars we should first take consideration of the influences, both philosophically and also economically, that paved the way for such thinking. It is true that while the intellectual school of Oxford is steeped in traditional academia, still the influence of more modern ideas had begun to crumble the once academic approach to University life. As Collingwood points out, the general opinion at the time when he attended Oxford was such that if it was not quite taboo, certainly it was weird to be a professional philosopher. The practical nature of philosophy had been replaced by the more analytic rationalists such as Bertrand Russell who saw philosophy more as having mathematical utility than as something worth contemplating in its own right.This and other realists such as J. C. Wilson were responsible for the overlaid pessimism toward intellectual thought as something that could explain the true about the nature of things. The once great tradition of intellection turned itself at once into professionalism.
If we look to the immediate past the reasons for this seem to make themselves known. Philosophy had just endured the certainly anti-academic philosophy of Nietzsche and had begun to form a sort of existential approach to life -- there are a lot of things we can’t explain, the existentialists seem to say, but that doesn’t mean we ought to try to explain them, instead we should embrace the phenomenon as the necessary absurdity of life.
Industrialism had also taken its toll economically on thinking men. Beside whatever argument one may present for or against the industrial expansion, the effects it had economically, and therefore practically, on education cannot be ignored. It is hard to revolt against a system, which at the time, seemed to generate so many positive additions to the quality of life in society. It is all to easy to ignore the darker process of the industrial manufacturing in favor of the more polished product one eases one’s life with. What seems to have happened then, was academics as a whole chose the grandeur approach to what was then the choice not between progression and tradition, but between luxury and tradition. The roaring twenties and the Jazz age are perhaps perfect names for such a sentiment.
The revolt against such a movement by men such as R. G. Collingwood and C. S. Lewis becomes then not so much a revolt on the academic thoughts in the university, but the lifestyle of the university which led to the rather dry intellectual failings. Collingwood always seems to appeal to the more traditional side of philosophy, but instead of crying for the return of the Socratic method, instead he urges individually intellectual contemplation of the great masters and tradition as something worth doing even amid the need new ideas and methods.
C. S. Lewis of course always appealed to the more practical side of things. If we could sum up the nature of his philosophy and apologetics in one phrase it would surely have to be practicality and simplicity. Mr. Lewis always had a knack for reducing a philosophy into its simplest terms so that we could see what really held it up. The age old problems were to him not large masses of traditional theory, but something every man must in some way contemplate and explain.
The appeal for simplicity was in most ways a continuum of nietzschean and Existential reduction of philosophy to every day life, but it was something more primal. It appealed to a time when philosophy was something men would live and die for, and therefore something of the greatest importance when contemplating one’s life goals and ambitions. It was an appeal to thinking in general as opposed to progress where the goal was correct thought not new ideas. The entirety of their intellectual goals, were, perhaps, best summed up in famous words of G. K. Chesterton, “I did try to found a heresy of my own; and when I had put the last touches to it, I discovered that it was orthodoxy. (Chesterton, G. K. Orthodoxy)”
