Week 7_2/26/16_Life

“They are closely bound up with the communal life of the group.”

“In discussion with wholly uneducated audiences I have sometimes found matter which real scientists would regard as highly speculative more firmly believed than many things within our real knowledge; the popular imago of the Cave Man ranked as hard fact, and the life of Caesar or Napoleon as doubtful rumor.”

“Quasi-religious responses to the hypostatised abstraction Life are to be sought in Shaw or Wells or in a highly poetical philosopher such as Bergson, not in the papers and lectures of biologists.”

The word life has many meanings depending on how it is defined. To a person life might mean the precious state of being alive, breathing in the air and dong whatever other organisms do when they are fully conscious. But compared to a scientist or a sociologist life might be determined by how one chooses or does with their life or how a group lives their life. But in the grimmest sense the word “life” can be used a verb to “give life to something”. The oxford dictionary definition of the word life is: “The condition or attribute of living or being alive; animate existence. Opposed to death or inanimate existence”, while its connotation of the word life is: “The condition, quality, or fact of being a living person or animal; human or animal existence”, and as well as I said before, the connotation of the word life also includes, “Animate existence regarded in terms of its continuance or prolongation. Opposed to death”. Regardless of the either definitions for the word “Life”, C.S. Lewis, author of “The Discarded Image”, uses the word life very scarcely in his writings, because in his book he uses the word life for its connotative meaning rather than using it for its denotative meaning, to help illustrate points and explanations in his book.

The first instance of the word life used in C.S Lewis’s book he first uses it to explain life in a group, “They exemplify what some writers call pre-logical thinking. They are closely bound up with the communal life of the group. What we should describe as political, military, and agricultural operations are not easily distinguished from rituals; ritual and belief beget and support one another.”  The first instance of the word life is used to further expand his point on the aspects of medieval communal life and culture. While it can be argued the community or a civilization or a culture can have a “life” of its own since a culture or a community can react and act life living things, and that the denotation could be used and inferred in Lewis’s writing, since in the following line, Lewis talks about how these aspect of the community life, father and brings in different beliefs within the community. However, for the purpose of the line, life makes more sense because of how he talks about how the medieval community thinks as a whole.

Furthermore Lewis then uses the word life to distinguish the difference of living in the modern ages and living in the medieval ages. In this case Lewis uses well known individuals from history to illustrate his though of a medieval model and how we take fact and beliefs in things we have heard or read, “In discussion with wholly uneducated audiences I have sometimes found matter which real scientists would regard as highly speculative more firmly believed than many things within our real knowledge; the popular imago of the Cave Man ranked as hard fact, and the life of Caesar or Napoleon as doubtful rumor.” In this case Lewis writes how people dismiss the idea of Caesar or Napoleon’s personal aspects of life but we accept the ideals of cave paintings. He even goes further and even writes about how model ignores how concepts or things that are based on philosophy “Quasi-religious responses to the hypostatised abstraction Life are to be sought in Shaw or Wells or in a highly poetical philosopher such as Bergson, not in the papers and lectures of biologists.” Here he writes how the meaning of life cannot be found in books that define life as simply reproducing and being alive, but here he writes that life is an existence.

            In the end, Lewis uses the word life interchangeably, switching between the connotation and the denotation uses of the word, in order to help provide a better and a clear explanation for arguments and ideals.