C.S. Lewis's Magic, The Force, and The Philosophy of Technology

I had another fantastic conversation with Jess from the YouTube channel Jess of the Shire on my podcast, Parker’s Pensées. We talked about the distinction between hard and soft magic in fantasy fiction, the Inklings’ view of magic, and the wizards of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Legendarium. Jess is a wealth of knowledge and I suggest you all check out the episode here:

Then check out this one on Dune vs. The Lord of the Rings:

Then go binge her channel!

A key theme that came out in our conversation was a distinction between two kinds of magic which The Inklings called goeteia and magia. Jess pulled this distinction from a great essay by Tom Shippey called “New Learning and New Ignorance: Magia, Goeteia, and the Inklings” in Myth and Magic: Art According to the Inkglings edited by Eduardo Segura and Thomas Honegger. I found a copy of the paper linked on this blog post by Daniel Stride: Phuulish Fellow blog —Both of which are worth the read!

A few years back I took a deep dive into C.S. Lewis’s works and read almost everything he’d written, including obscure works and his essay collection and lots of secondary literature, but excluding most of his letters and the OHEL book (English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama). It was an amazing and formative two and a half years of research. But, as is the case with most deep dives, much of what I’ve learned has either been lost completely or has moved down deeper into my psyche and has become something like latent or tacit knowledge. I always lament this phenomenon, but it’s just the nature of the human mind-brain interface, we just cannot remember everything we learn—or at least that’s the nature of my mind-brain interface (I hear there are some lucky (or maybe unlucky?) folks with ‘total recall’ who might have remembered everything from their C.S. Lewis deep dive.)

In preparing for my podcast conversation with Jess on the Inkling’s view of magic and Tolkien’s wizards, I was reminded once again of when I first found this goeteia/magia magic distinction. I was reading Lewis’s dystopian/eucatastrophean SF novel, That Hideous Strength, back in 2017 and stumbled over these Latin words which I had zero frame of reference for. I asked my mentor at the time, Jerry Root, who happens to be one of the world’s leading C.S. Lewis scholars, and he was able to help me conceptualize the difference in these two modes of magic. But then I put it out of my mind and hadn’t thought of it again until talking with Jess.

I went back to find the full quote, so let me share that and then I’ll explain why this is so important to me. Here’s Dr. Dimble explaining the distinction using Merlin and the N.I.C.E. of Belbury as examples:

No. I had thought of that. Merlin is the reverse of Belbury. He’s at the opposite extreme. He is the last vestige of an old order in which matter and spirit were, from our modern point of view, confused. For him every operation on Nature is a kind of personal contact, like coaxing a child or stroking one’s horse. After him came the modern man to whom Nature is something dead—a machine to be worked, and taken to bits if it won’t work the way he pleases. Finally, come the Belbury people, who take over that view from the modern man unaltered and simply want to increase their power by tacking onto it the aid of spirits—extra-natural, anti-natural spirits. Of course they hoped to have it both ways. They thought the old magia of Merlin which worked in with the spiritual qualities of Nature, loving and reverencing them and knowing them from within, could be combined with the new goeteia—the brutal surgery from without. No. in a sense Merlin represents what we’ve got to get back in some different way. Do you know that he is forbidden by the rules of his order to use any edged tool on any growing thing?[1]

Okay so there’s the distinction and it’s a beautiful one. Magic is bifurcated into two categories:

Magia: an older, more natural form of magic which the magician may work in accordance with, but which has its own nature and which may act of its own accord.

Goeteia: a newer, more scientific and systematic form of magic whereby the magician forces magic to their own whim, to bend and even break the magical forces in order to accomplish one’s own ends.

Now my Star Wars nerds should be perking up right now too. This Lewisian magic distinction also tracks with the ways that the Jedi and the Sith use the magic of the Star Wars universe, the Force. The Jedi seek to live in balance with the force, to mind it and work within its natural flow. The Sith, on the other hand, seek to dominate and bind the force to their own desires, to break it if necessary. Why is it that the Jedi can’t summon force lightning against their opponents? Well, because

Force lighting requires strength of a sort only a Sith can command because [they] accept consequence and reject compassion. To do so requires a thirst for power that is not easily satisfied. The Force tries to resist the callings of ravenous spirits; therefore it must be broken and made a beast of burden. It must be made to answer to one’s will.[2]

So according to the Lewisian analysis, the Sith handle the Force in a goeteian manner, systematically breaking it and impelling it to their whims, whereas the Jedi use the Force in a magian manner, living in accord with it, finding balance and harmony and letting it guide them. I find this all fascinating.

But Shippey notes that Lewis is a little inconsistent with this distinction, as he gives three categories of magic in his OHEL book, including Medieval magic derived from faerie, instead of the two he uses in That Hideous Strength. Shippey suggests that this magia/goetia distinction probably originated with Charles Williams, but Daniel Stride notes, again in this fantastic blog post, that each Inkling seemed to have their own take on what these concepts picked out. Here’s how he describes Tolkien’s view:

Tolkien seems to treat Magia as a supernatural effect on the physical world (‘Harry Potter’ magic, essentially), with Goeteia being a supernatural effect on psychology. Gone is Lewis’ view of the genial versus the mechanical, and gone is the moral distinction between the two types of magic. Instead, Tolkien focuses on the ends of magic (‘free will’ considerations), rather than its means – as his letter notes, this is in better accordance with the themes of The Lord of the Rings.[3]

So I wanted to mention these discrepancies to hedge a little bit. Yes, I understand Lewis may have a more nuanced view of magic than he portrayed in his novel. Yes, I understand that Tolkien had a different view of goeteia and magia. But I’m partial to the way Lewis characterizes them in That Hideous Strength, not because I particularly care about magic, I don’t, but because we can use this distinction in magic as a metaphor for our real-life magic, which we call ‘technology’.

In his essay “The Question Concerning Technology” Martin Heidegger analyzes two types of approaches to technology, bringing-forth and challenging-forth. I think these are roughly synonymous with the Lewisian concepts of magia and goeteia in That Hideous Strength.

Bringing-forth is a mode of technological development whereby an artifact is “already there”, hidden in the raw material provided by nature, but is ‘brought forth’ and revealed with the help of the artificer. This is a way of creating along the grain of reality, so to speak. Heidegger uses an old saw mill built on a river in the Black Forest as an example. The river is flowing in a certain direction, it has a particular speed and shape, and those who build the saw mill do so in a way that is in alignment with the nature of that exact river. The river then powers their mill, sawing their lumber. This corresponds to magia and the Jedi. Magic, the Force, the natural world with its furniture and laws, have their own nature and the bringing-forth approach to technology would have its proponents seek to live in harmony with the natures of the things presented to them.

This is in stark contrast to the challenging-forth mode of technological development whereby nature is dominated, broken, destroyed, disintegrated, and then formed into an artifact regardless of its original state or potential. Heidegger uses a hydro-electric dam as an example. Instead of working with the nature of the river, as the old saw mill does, the hydro-electric dam artificers might even canalize the river to make it flow more quickly, they then dam up the river completely and let the water flow when it suits them to maximize the amount of power they can produce from the river. This mode corresponds to goeteic magic and to the mentality of the Sith. Exert your will on the things that present themselves to you, force, bind, bend, break—chop down to the bare essentials and process whatever you will from the raw materials. Force your will on the natural world without regard for the nature of the things used.

In case you couldn’t tell, Heidegger didn’t like the challenging-forth mode of technology. I don’t like it either. Sure, I like lots of products that have been developed through a challenging-forth approach but I’d love to see more humane production method instead, production that sought to live in harmony with nature instead of chewing it up and spitting it out. Production that not only minimizes its effects on the natural world but which makes artifacts more in line with a solar-punk aesthetic than a steam-punk or dystopian cyber-punk aesthetic.

But aesthetics aside, I’m especially concerned about how technology is shaping us humans. I’d really love to see a renaissance of Humane technology that brings us forth according to our rational, volitional, emotional human nature. As it stands, we have a big push in generative artificial intelligence to outsource or minds to chatbots, diminishing our reason; we have massive social media apps zapping our volition and by utilizing cutting-edge psychological research to keep us hooked on their endless-scroll slot machines, and other massive social media algorithms are optimized for engagement which end up exasperating and inflaming our emotions and habituating our worse prejudices. It seems to me like the goeteic-Sith Lord-magicians are intentionally or unintentionally challenging-us forth in a way that is not leading to human flourishing.

But I don’t have any solutions, so I don’t know. This started as a post to promote my conversation with Jess but then turned into a concept association game and ended up as a pessimistic clarion call for humane tech. I kind of bummed myself out to be honest, but I hope you learned something interesting and if you’re in a position to choose dehumanizing or humanizing approaches to tech at your company, please choose the humanizing bringing-forth modes.

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[1] C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength (Scribner trade paperback ed. 2003) 282-83.

[2] James Luceno, Darth Plagueis, 180.

[3] https://phuulishfellow.wordpress.com/2021/02/02/magia-and-goeteia-shippey-lewis-and-tolkien/