Blog #15 - Lewis and Plato (and Derrida, for good measure) - Vickie GG

To what extent does Lewis like or agree with Plato's philosophies? 

One could argue that Lewis reveres Plato and particularly supports his Theory of the Forms, especially in his earlier works. A few examples that quickly come to mind: he puts an obvious Plato quote in Digory's mouth at the end of The Last Battle (with Digory being a "good character"); he reinforces Plato's concept of true Forms by having the "real" Narnia be a true world within two layers of what the characters took to be the "real" world (that were not); and he reinforces true Forms / the Good with the alternate Garden of Eden outcome at the end of Perelandra.

Yet, in Till We Have Faces, Lewis obviously critiques Plato's focus on the logical vs. the poetic / spiritual through the character of The Fox. Furthermore, in this text, Lewis complicates many normally-accepted binaries, such as male vs. female, real vs. unreal, divine vs. mortal, etc. This put me in mind of deconstructionism (Derrida). Though of course Derrida's work couldn't be an influence on this work (since Derrida's texts on this topic were published at least a decade after Till We Have Faces),  But his constant disruption of binaries throughout Till We Have Faces (and even in his other works) position Lewis's as an intellectual precursor to Derrida's later works. And, since Derrida's concept of deconstruction is widely believed to be in direct opposition to and critique of Plato's Forms, this is a contradiction from Lewis's earlier support of Plato's Forms theory (because deconstruction takes what is supposed to be the ideal Form or the hierarchically superior in general and inverts, disrupts, or reverses it). 

Then again, one could read some of Lewis's specific complications of binaries in Till We Have Faces as a reinforcement of the transcendent or opaque nature of the Forms. For instance, the confused gender of Orual throughout the book - the fact that she is not accepted fully as female (because she is "ugly") nor fully as male (because - despite her many "masculine" traits and behaviors - she still technically has a vagina) - could be seen as a way of disrupting the "male as better" beliefs of the time (both of the story and of the time in which Lewis is writing) in order to show that there's no such thing as a perfect gender Form because both genders are equally good (or bad, or inadequate). But one could also read this un-gendering as a sign trying to point to the fact that the perfect Form for humans goes so far beyond the male or female that we as humans cannot actually fully understand it. (Psyche suggests this idea several times when she keeps saying that things are not a question of He or She, when talking to Orual about her servants in her new home, as well as about her husband.) 

So, perhaps Lewis supports Plato's Forms the whole time but is just more sophisticated and nuanced about it in Till We Have Faces, which would fit with the ambivalence he sought to imbue the story with in terms of Orual (and perhaps more broadly). But clearly Lewis has beef with Plato's obsession with logic over emotions, which I think Lewis also critiques through multiple members of N.I.C.E. in That Hideous Strength. 

So, in sum: 
Plato's Forms - (probably / mostly) Lewis approved
Plato's preference for logic over emotion - Lewis condemned