From ‘Paleface’ to ‘Cosmic Man’

Abstract

This chapter examines the trajectory of Lewis’ thought as expressed in his polemical works from Paleface (1929) until the Second World War. During this period, the metaphysical view of the self as separate from and different to the world, which began life as a version of Bergson during the Blast period and became the touchstone of philosophical validity in Time and Western Man, is transferred to the realm of race and nation in an attempt to define the identity of a people and preserve them against the ultimately alien forces of massification now expressed by liberalism and communism. The self, threatened by those forces described in Time and Western Man and The Art of Being Ruled, is to be recuperated at the level of the nation. The nation will stand for the individual, and internationalism will be seen as the agent of anti-individualism in Lewis’ schema. This involves a complete reversal of Lewis’ internationalism, which had seen nation as yet another arbitrary, metaphysically invalid, collective refuge for the weak self. However, Lewis returned to internationalism when continued support for German nationalism became untenable, and relaxed his defence of the self under the stress of personal and transpersonal crisis, as global war erupted.

With the shattering of the personality and the race, the essential object is removed to the domination of the inferior being — and this is the Jew.

Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, (trans. Manheim, p. 290).