Buy the audiobook: www.amazon.com/C-S-Lewis-Coll... Schizo-posters will be tolerated Aggressive ath*ists will be kept on a short leash Blessed posters are welcomed
OMG! When I think that Lewis is getting boring, I hit this. What a gem! That's exactly what people like Johnatan Pageu are talking about. Aristrocracy was an image of something. Aristocrats were bad, and so the idea was lost, but it had its merrits. And nie the democracy seems to be failing us. 😒 Similar to how Christians can be bad people but the Church is an image of something greater.
When I read the titles of this video I thought this was going to be kind of boring like who cares about bikes but old man how I was wrong this is beautiful
This is such an interesting framing for how thoughts/opinions tend to evolve. For some of Lewis’ examples there are typical patterns with time : youth vs young adulthood vs mid-life vs old age. But one also can see this in society/media in how intellectual trends or conventional wisdom evolve around certain topics. I wonder what stage we are in regarding concepts that have become popularized and held up by many as the solution: UBI, cryptocurrency, anti-racism, MMT, populism, traditionalism, psychedelics, socialism, etc. Many of their advocates are clearly enchanted.
The crux of the idea is that there are two levels of reality, or you might say two worlds. There is this world in which we live, the practical temporal world, or practical temporal reality. This one is full of flaws and sins. As a result it is never perfect, and it never perfectly satisfies. But there is a world behind this world. There is a deeper or ultimate reality which is perfect, and which alone can satisfy fully. In the enchanted age we catch glimpses of that ultimate reality, but our glimpses are unreal because they don't recognize the limitations of the practical, flawed reality that we live in, in the here and now. When those flaws come crashing down upon us, we become unenchanted. We lose sight of the ultimate reality and see only this practical reality. If you can reach the reenchanted stage, you get to the point where you can see both realities. In the unenchanted age we are in a sense more practical. However it is a short-sighted, limited practicality because the ultimate reality is actually real and it is the more eternal. Thus solutions that we design in the unenchanted stage work well to address the immediate flaws and problems of this world, but they inevitably fail in the long term because they take no account of ultimate reality. In the case of democracy it works temporarily as a solution to the real problems of tyranny and oppression that arise from human flaws. However, because democracy does not reflect the truth of ultimate reality, in the long run it fails because it is psychologically and philosophically unsuited to the full reality of what human beings are and what we truly desire. The highest virtue of democracy is equality. That serves as a cure for unjust inequalities, but in the deepest sense equality is not our highest good. There are a good many virtues that are not compatible with the spirit of democracy. Thus once democracy becomes the spirit and character of a nation, those other virtues are inevitably lost. Thus we may adopt democracy as a practical measure, but if we ever allow that practicality to swallow up the spirit of aristocracy, we will lose really important aspects of what it means to be fully human. To fully understand this you need to have some sense of what the spirit of aristocracy really was for pre-modern people, not just the negative caricature that modernity has placed upon it. Aristocracy was about allowing the best and noblest to rule. This means not only in a political sense, but also in a psychological sense. Recognize that in yourself not all things are equal. Not all ideas, nor all desires are equal. Some are high, good, and noble, while others are mean, selfish, and low. You must seek to be ruled by the higher, the better, and the nobler. Once we become truly democratic in spirit we accept the notion that no idea, no desire, nothing is better than anything else. All is equal.
@@joshuacooley1417 Excellently said. I would only say, to avoid any confusion, that I think you meant "disenchanted"( i.e. 3rd stage,) where you put "unenchanted" (1st stage.) But all in all, a great summary.
I would like to reverse engineer your four stages Lewis and start with the loss of memory from there we could see that war is hell and heros, from another world
