C. S. Lewis on the Joy of Reading what you Don't Agree With

HT: Joshua Blanchard. From C. S. Lewis's The Empty Universe.


It has also given me that bracing and satifying experience which, in certain books of theory, seems to be partially independent of our final agreement or disagreement. It is an experience most easily disengaged by remembering what has happened to us whenever we turned from the inferior exponents of a system, even a system we reject, to its great doctors. I have had it on turning from common “Existentialists” to M. Sartre himself, from Calvinists to the Institutio, from “Transcendentalists” to Emerson, from books about “Renaissance Platonism” to Ficino. One may still disagree (I disagree heartily with all the authors I have just named) but one now sees for the first time why anyone ever did agree. One has breathed a new air, become free of a new country. It may be a country you cannot live in, but you now know why the natives love it. You will henceforward see all systems a little differently because you have been inside that one. From this point of view philosophies have some of the same qualities as works of art. I am not referring at all to the literary art with which they may or may not be expressed. It is the ipseitas, the peculiar unity of effect produced by a special balancing and patterning of thought and classes of thoughts: a delight very like that which would be given by Hesse’s Glasperlenspiel (in the book of that name) if it could really exist. I owe a new experience of that kind to Mr. Harding.