meditations in a Toolshed- Reflection

In our current world, we find that by and large most conclusions made and discoveries considered to be accurate and significant are resultant of ‘conclusive’ evidence and scientific analysis. This way of looking at things has become the exclusively ‘right’ way to look at them, anything that cannot be explained quantitively is somehow flawed. It has become a one-sided affair of looking at things as they are when they are stripped of internal connotation and left bare in a jumble of scientific jargon. CS Lewis explores this, and challenges us to examine how we see things in not one, but two ways; not just looking at them, but also looking along them.

Looking at things, the specifically “modern type of thought Lewis shows us that all too often we have accepted the erroneous conviction that the “external account of a thing somehow refutes or ‘debunks’ the account given from inside”, that looking at something is much more correct or “valid”

He makes a very interesting point when discussing the contemporary “thought about nothing.” There is a certain tendency to explain things that we have no true experience in, because we feel that the external analyses of these things are more accurate than those of the people who have been “inside” any of them, or have been looking along them. He says that this is “explaining a thing without knowing what it is” which is precisely what tends to occur, therefore perpetuating empty knowledge. This so often happens especially in discussions about religion, with one person claiming the others experience counts for nothing because it is “flawed” because there are aspects of it that cannot be quantified, analyzed or measured with external knowledge.

It is imperative that in order to discontinue the “rot” that Lewis speaks of, we need to cease to believe that looking at things is the more right way to consider them. His illustration of the 2 physiologists is a very poignant one because it shows how circular this logic is; we will always be misled if like the foolish physiologists we believe that all inside “experiences are misleading.” To get a clear understanding of things we must look both at and along things and see which is the more true in each instance of thought. He puts it well in saying that if the outside vision were the correct one, all thought would be valueless, and this is self contradictory. You cannot have a proof that no proofs matter.”