The Gwydiona Experience
The Pre/Trans Fallacy
In Poul Anderson's The Night Face, a planetary population confuses periodic loss of sanity, and thus also of reason, with transcendence of reason. The above-linked posts refer to CS Lewis' and Ken Wilbur's discussions of this kind of error. Here is another example from Lewis. After plausibly describing a bear's sensations, he adds:
"One of our race, if plunged back for a moment in the warm, trembling, iridescent pool of that pre-Adamite consciousness, would have emerged believing that he had grasped the absolute: for the states below reason and the states above it have, by their common contrast to the life we know, a certain superficial resemblance."
-CS Lewis, That Hideous Strength IN Lewis, The Cosmic Trilogy (London, 1990), pp. 349-753 AT CHAPTER 14, p. 670.
I have been out for most of today, enjoyably employed but of course not blogging. However, I have finished rereading That Hideous Strength so there should be an end of Anderson-Lewis comparisons for a while.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
My recollection of THE NIGHT FACE is that the ill-starred Gwydiona DON'T recall anything they might have thought or experienced during their periodic seasons of madness. Probably because it would be unbearable for them to recall such things during their periods of sanity.
Ad astra! Sean
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