Conclusion

Abstract

To recapitulate before concluding: Lewis acquired early a model of reality founded on the separation of the mind from the world. At the centre of this model is the philosophical problem that he found articulated in Bergson, of separating the real self from its spatial manifestations. The self, which for Bergson is ‘refracted and thereby broken to pieces’, becomes the false object of a consciousness which then ‘loses sight of the fundamental self’.¹ Lewis’ early texts frequently meditate on this problem, doing so at greatest length in Enemy of the Stars, which laments that the whole process of life is one of the ‘grotesque degradation and “souillure” of the original solitude of the soul’.² The problem is that while the mind seems to itself dynamic and alive, perceived from the inside, all human activity perceived from the outside seems mechanical. This dual view was at the root of Lewis’ polemics from The Art of Being Ruled and Time and Western Man onwards. There, he insisted that the physical world, including most human activity, was mechanical and meaningless, but that in exceptional cases ‘personality’ might evolve, separate from and above the automatism of the rest of life. In spite of this insistence on the value of personality, Lewis concedes that personality is little more than a certain kind of dynamism, the product of contending intellectual forces, perhaps, having no absolute existence. Ezra Pound, remarking that Lewis ‘was wrong about everything except the superiority of live mind to dead mind’, identified accurately Lewis’ central tenet.³ These views on the question of personality are radically politicised, particularly by the First World War, which was central to the birth of Lewis’ perception that the individual was at the mercy of mass forces, and that these forces might be manipulated by the unscrupulous or power mad. The confrontation between self and society now becomes one in which every social force, from industry itself through to literature and philosophy, is seen as an enemy of the self. Yet while Lewis conducts his polemical campaigns in defence of the self, racially organised around the concept of ‘Western Man’, he continues, particularly in his fiction, to demonstrate his view that political polemic is in itself essentially arbitrary as it has no metaphysical reference, and is therefore no more than part of the campaign to limit and destroy the self. Despite this pronounced scepticism, Lewis continues to move to the right in his rejection of what he perceives as the anti-individualism of liberalism and communism, and proposes, in his fiction at least, the existence of a Jewish conspiracy or tendency to undermine the self — now identified, grandiosely, with Western Man.

… it is well-nigh impossible to open your mouth without being called a fascist

The Jews: Are They Human?, p. 29.