Dietrich von Hildebrand and C. S. Lewis on the Rationality of Affective Value-Response

Frequently, our responses to the objective world have been understood through the faculties of the intellect or will; hence our responses to that objective world have been understood exclusively in terms of belief and volition. When affectivity enters the account, it is understood as a side effect or as a positive hindrance. This position, however, fails to properly account for our experience of value as something that not only calls us to proper belief and volition but also calls us to feel. For instance, we would find something lacking in the man who is unable to rejoice at the birth of his child or mourn the death of his friend. In this paper, I will argue that C. S. Lewis and Dietrich von Hildebrand offer us complementary accounts of value-response, which when taken together paint a more wholistic portrait of human life. Both understand affectivity not as merely irrational responses but as properly grounded rational responses to objective values.

On February 24, 1943, at King's College, Newcastle, C. S. Lewis presented the first of three lectures that became his book The Abolition of Man. Lewis critiques the work of two men, whom he refers to only as Gaius and Titius, the authors of an English textbook for upper forms students, which Lewis calls The Green Book. Lewis admits that he "shall have nothing good to say of them"¹ and critiques The Green Book for creating "men without chests."² For Lewis, the chest represents the faculty capable of rationally grounded feelings, or what he calls "sentiment." Lewis argues that The Green Book, regardless of Gaius's or Titius's intentions, strips students of the capacity to experience feelings as proper responses to the real value of the world.

Gaius and Titius cut the chest out of their students by reducing all predicates of value to mere emotional states. They tell the story of Coleridge at the waterfall, where Coleridge approves of one tourist describing the cataract as "sublime" and disapproves of another tourist who describes the same cataract as "pretty." Gaius and Titius contend that while the man who says, "This is sublime," appears to be commenting about the waterfall itself, he, in fact, is not. Rather, the man is merely making a statement about his own feelings. The man is actually saying that he has feelings associated with the word sublime. In other terms, he has sublime feelings. They contend that we are commonly victims of linguist confusion—we think we are ascribing some value to an object, when in fact we are merely commenting about our own feelings toward an object.

Lewis aptly points out that Gaius and Titius cannot actually hold the position they claim to hold, or at least they cannot hold it with any consistency. Gaius and Titius have mistranslated the emotional states of the person speaking. The man who says, "This is sublime," cannot actually mean, "I have sublime feelings." If it was granted that all predicates of value are merely projections of a person's feelings, those predicates are still an attempt to describe the object. It is the waterfall that he perceives to be sublime. What he feels within himself, even if mistaken, are feelings of response to this sublimity. Lewis notes, "The feelings which make a man call an object sublime are not sublime feelings but feelings of veneration."³ If Gaius and Titius were taken literally, it would lead to obvious absurdities.

Lewis sets the consensus of ancient wisdom against Gaius and Titius: "Until quite modern times all teachers and even all men believed the universe to be such that certain emotional reactions on our part could be either congruous or incongruous to it—believed, in fact, that objects did not merely receive, but could merit, our approval or disapproval, our reverence, our contempt."⁴ He calls this the "doctrine of objective value."⁵ According to this doctrine, values are real features of the world; they exist independent of human perception and human value-laden language.

The Green Book, despite only being an English textbook, exemplifies a whole...