Need help remembering CS Lewis Quote about Joy and Chemical Reactions

score:7

There's this passage on page 76 of Present Concerns:

You can't, except in the lowest animal sense, be in love with a girl if you know (and keep on remembering) that all the beauties both of her person and of her character are a momentary and accidental pattern produced by the collision of atoms, and that your own response to them is only a sort of psychic phosphorescence arising from the behaviour of your genes. You can’t go on getting any very serious pleasure from music if you know and remember that its air of significance is pure illusion, that you like it only because your nervous system is irrationally conditioned to like it. You may still, in the lowest sense, have a ‘good time’; but just in so far as it becomes very good, just in so far as it ever threatens to push you on from cold sensuality into real warmth and enthusiasm and joy, so afar you will be forced to feel the hopeless disharmony between your own emotions and the universe in which you really live.

This is quoted by Tim Keller on page 141 of The Reason for God.

Ben Lima 86

Upvote:1

I've done another search of all of C. S. Lewis's works that are available on Google Books, and this particular phrasing does not appear. However, perhaps this quote from the materialist antagonist of That Hideous Strength approaches what you recall:

"Before going on," said Frost, "I must ask you to be strictly objective. Resentment and fear are both chemical phenomena. Our reactions to one another are chemical phenomena. Social relations are chemical relations. [...] A circle bound together by subjective feelings of mutual confidence and liking would be useless. Those, as I have said, are chemical phenomena. [...] Friendship is a chemical phenomenon; so is hatred. [...] much of what you mistook for your thought was merely a by-product of your blood and nervous tissues."

Lewis's point here, of course, is to debunk this way of thinking; he clearly rejects it.

Nathaniel is protesting 42237

Upvote:3

A search on quite a few of Lewis' works did not yield anything with the phrase "chemical reaction" in it. Additionally, searches for "love" and "chemical" revealed nothing as well.

However, Lewis is quoted this, which is along the same vein:

We can be certain that, in this life at any rate, thought is intimately connected to the brain. The theory that thought therefore is merely a movement of the brain is, in my opinion, nonsense, for if so, the theory itself would merely be a movement, an event among atoms, which may have speed and direction, but of which it would be meaningless to use the words "true" and "false."

It is reprinted in many places.^{1 2 3} It is very likely legitimately Lewis' words and was first said, not written, in a sermon in 1944, which was later transposed and published in a work titled Transposition and other addresses.⁴ According to one source, The Weight of Glory was the American version of that work.⁵ An actual copy of this sermon does not seem to exist online. But the consistency among quoters and the volume of those quoting leads to a reasonable conclusion that Lewis did indeed say these words.

The quote above seems to contain the essence of what you remember, which is that thoughts and emotions are more than chemical reactions, or 'movements in the brain'.

In general, there are many persons, past and present, that have posited and challenged the notion that "love is a chemical reaction". As you should expect, the idea was first forwarded by naturalists and has since been resoundingly rejected by many Christian theologians because of the implications on Christian theology.⁶

fгedsbend 12936

Source: stackoverflow.com

Travel Tips

Need help remembering CS Lewis Quote about Joy and Chemical Reactions

More post

Search Posts

Related post