Life & Wisdom Quote by C. S. Lewis

Lewis is playing a clever reversal game: he takes the bleak modern claim that the universe is meaningless and tries to show it can’t even get off the ground without borrowing tools it pretends not to need. The line hinges on an epistemic trap. To recognize “no meaning” as a truth rather than a mood, you need a standpoint from which meaning is intelligible. Just as “dark” only registers against the prior category of “light,” “meaninglessness” only reads as a deficit if “meaning” is already in the room as a real possibility. Otherwise you’re not diagnosing a void; you’re just making noise.

The subtext is classic Lewis: a defense of moral and metaphysical realism dressed in an accessible analogy. He’s not arguing that life feels meaningful; he’s suggesting our capacity to judge, to negate, to call something “absurd,” smuggles in a standard of sense-making that can’t be generated by pure accident. That’s why the darkness metaphor lands. Darkness isn’t a “thing” you discover in the way you discover a planet; it’s a privation, a concept parasitic on what it lacks. Lewis wants “meaninglessness” to look equally parasitic.

Context matters. Lewis is writing in the mid-century aftermath of world war, when existential despair and mechanistic accounts of humanity were culturally ascendant. As a Christian apologist with a philosopher’s training, he aims less to preach than to expose the hidden costs of fashionable disbelief: even nihilism, he implies, relies on a kind of moral and rational light it can’t explain.