This is an interesting point about a speaker’s feelings.

You often project (want) the opposite of what you are feeling.

To say “that is peaceful” you show that you are not at peace.

It’s a statement of internal feeling that you put on something external.

But is that true? 🤔

Lewis has doubts. Why?

Because all value statements are not subjective and trivial!

Even if it were granted that such qualities as sublimity were simply and solely projected into things from our own emotions, yet the emotions which prompt the projection are the correlatives, and therefore almost the opposities, of the qualities projected. The feelings which make a man call an object sublime are not sublime feelings but feelings of veneration. If This is sublime is to be reduced at all to a statement about the speaker’s feelings, the proper translation would be I have humble feelings. If the view held by Gaius and Titius were consistently applied it would lead to obvious absurdities. It would force them to maintain that You are contemptible means I have contemptible feelings: in fact that Your feelings are contemptible means My feelings are contemptible.

-C.S. Lewis, The Abolition Of Man (Amazon)

Do you struggle with sloppy language about your own feelings like this?

See, this passage seems obscure, but it’s not.

Think of how many things today fall into this category of feeling.

We rewrite reality with emotion and expect everyone else in the world to accept it too.

Good grief I am trying to stop typing and not get political here. 🤣

Let’s just not settle deep questions in this same manner, ok?

In their second chapter Gaius and Titius quote the well-known story of Coleridge at the waterfall. You remember that there were two tourists present: that one called it ‘sublime’ and the other ‘pretty’; and that Coleridge mentally endorsed the first judgement and rejected the second with disgust. Gaius and Titius comment as follows: ‘When the man said This is sublime, he appeared to be making a remark about the waterfall… Actually… he was not making a remark about the waterfall, but a remark about his own feelings. What he was saying was really I have feelings associated in my mind with the word “Sublime”, or shortly, I have sublime feelings.’ Here are a good many deep questions settled in a pretty summary fashion. But the authors are not yet finished. They add: ‘This confusion is continually present in language as we use it. We appear to be saying something very important about something: and actually we are only saying something about our own feelings.’

-C.S. Lewis, The Abolition Of Man (Amazon)