Thursday, November 29, 2007

What Did Lewis Mean?

It's been a while since I read this. C.S. Lewis has not been high on my list of reading material recently, although Stanley Fish references him as a scholar occasionally, Robertson Davies may or may not intentionally allude to him, and I read the first couple of chapters of An Experiment in Criticism not long ago. Somewhere in his writing Lewis states that there is a danger in too much introspection. What was the context of that statement, and what actually did he mean?

2 comments:

Jim said...

I think that idea was expressed in Surprised by Joy, which I recently read for the first time. It's near the end of the book if you want to try to find it. I had trouble understanding what he was saying, but I think he was saying that when introspecting, we are not really observing what we think we are observing. Rather, we are only observing the remnants of the experience, and that can be misleading.

Jamey said...

Didn't read the original context, but in my mind too much introspection is bad because it begins with an "I." In other words, it can make me too self-focused, and there's not a fresh supply of wisdom and encouragement within myself.