In Lewis’s essay “Meditation in
a Toolshed Lewis distinguishes between
looking ay and looking along. Looking at
is the third person scientific perspective, looking along is looking from the
first person perspective. This is the issue that is the subject of Thomas
Nagel’s famous “What it is Like to Be a Bat.” Many, from J. B. Watson to
Patricia Churchland, have argued the uselessness of introspection as
sub-scientific. Lewis, like Nagel, argues that this kind of dismissiveness
cannot be sustained, and he does sao on the grounds that to do so would undermine
the very reasoning process that grounds the scientific argument on which the
dismissal is based. He writes:
Having been
so often deceived by looking along, are we not well advised to trust only to
looking at? in fact to discount all these inside experiences? Well, no. There
are two fatal objections to discounting them all. And the first is this. You
discount them in order to think more accurately. But you can't think at all -
and therefore, of course, can't think accurately - if you have nothing to think
about. A physiologist, for example, can study pain and find out that it “is”
(whatever is means) such and such neural events. But the word pain would have
no meaning for him unless he had “been inside” by actually suffering. If he had
never looked along pain he simply wouldn't know what he was looking at. The
very subject for his inquiries from outside exists for him only because he has,
at least once, been inside. This case is not likely to occur, because every man
has felt pain. But it is perfectly easy to go on all your life giving
explanations of religion, love, morality, honour, and the like, without having
been inside any of them. And if you do that, you are simply playing with
counters. You go on explaining a thing without knowing what it is. That is why
a great deal of contemporary thought is, strictly speaking, thought about
nothing - all the apparatus of thought busily working in a vacuum. The other
objection is this: let us go back to the toolshed. I might have discounted what
I saw when looking along the beam (i.e., the leaves moving and the sun) on the
ground that it was “really only a strip of dusty light in a dark shed”. That
is, I might have set up as “true” my “side vision” of the beam. But then that
side vision is itself an instance of the activity we call seeing. And this new
instance could also be looked at from outside. I could allow a scientist to
tell me that what seemed to be a beam of light in a shed was “really only an
agitation of my own optic nerves”. And that would be just as good (or as bad) a
bit of debunking as the previous one. The picture of the beam in the toolshed
would now have to be discounted just as the previous picture of the trees and
the sun had been discounted. And then, where are you? In other words, you can
step outside one experience only by stepping inside another. Therefore, if all
inside experiences are misleading, we are always misled. The cerebral
physiologist may say, if he chooses, that the mathematician's thought is “only”
tiny physical movements of the grey matter. But then what about the cerebral
physiologist's own thought at that very moment? A second physiologist, looking
at it, could pronounce it also to be only tiny physical movements in the first
physiologist's skull. Where is the rot to end? The answer is that we must never
allow the rot to begin. We must, on pain of idiocy, deny from the very outset
the idea that looking at is, by its own nature, intrinsically truer or better
than looking along. One must look both along and at everything. In particular
cases we shall find reason for regarding the one or the other vision as
inferior. Thus the inside vision of rational thinking must be truer than the
outside vision which sees only movements of the grey matter; for if the outside
vision were the correct one all thought (including this thought itself) would
be valueless, and this is self-contradictory. You cannot have a proof that no
proofs matter. On the other hand, the inside vision of the savage's dance to
Nyonga may be found deceptive because we find reason to believe that crops and
babies are not really affected by it. In fact, we must take each case on its
merits. But we must start with no prejudice for or against either kind of
looking. We do not know in advance 3 whether the lover or the psychologist is
giving the more correct account of love, or whether both accounts are equally
correct in different ways, or whether both are equally wrong. We just have to
find out. But the period of brow-beating has got to end.t
.;
