Enjoyment and Contemplation

Enjoyment and Contemplation is the distinction Lewis drew from Alexander’s philosophy between being engaged in an experience and making that experience itself the object of reflection. Its decisive importance in his account is that it clarified why his attempts to identify Joy by observing his own feelings could never grasp it: reflection finds the traces of an experience, not the experience in progress.

The Distinction

In Alexander’s technical vocabulary, “Enjoyment” does not mean pleasure, and “Contemplation” does not mean a contemplative way of life. Seeing a table is to enjoy the act of seeing and contemplate the table. If attention then turns to the act of seeing itself, that act becomes the object of contemplation, while the thought directed toward it is enjoyed. The terms name different directions of attention, not a contrast between pleasant and solemn states.

Lewis uses bereavement to show that the distinction applies to difficult as well as ordinary experience. A bereaved person contemplates the beloved and the beloved’s death, while, in Alexander’s sense, enjoying the loneliness and grief. A psychologist studying the grief reverses the orientation: the grief becomes the object of contemplation, and the psychological inquiry is enjoyed. The same experience can therefore occupy different positions according to what attention is directed toward.

Attention and Its Object

Lewis found the distinction compelling because love, hate, fear, hope, and desire are directed toward objects. Attention to the loved person or feared thing sustains the activity; turning attention toward one’s own love or fear changes its direction. One cannot, in the same moment, look toward hope’s object and inspect the state of hoping without interrupting the first attention. The activities can alternate, but they are not identical or simultaneous in this sense.

This account makes introspection consequential rather than neutral. Turning inward to examine a feeling can interrupt the outward-directed relation that constitutes loving, fearing, or hoping. The distinction does not deny awareness of these activities; it differentiates participating in them from taking them as objects of thought.

Traces, Images, and Joy

Lewis extends the distinction to what remains when an activity is interrupted. Images and sensations may be the residue or track of thought and appreciation, rather than those activities themselves. He compares such residue to a swell continuing after the wind has dropped: what can be inspected afterward is an effect left by the activity, not the activity in motion. He argues for a threefold account—“the Unconscious, the Enjoyed, and the Contemplated”—instead of dividing experience only into conscious and unconscious states.

The distinction retrospectively reorganized Lewis’s pursuit of Joy. He understood his waiting for Joy and his attempts to locate a mental content he could identify as Joy as efforts to contemplate what could only be enjoyed. Such scrutiny could produce an image, such as Asgard or the Western Garden, or a bodily sensation, but neither was Joy itself. They were reminders left by its passage. When treated as the desired thing, images and sensations disclosed their inadequacy; their value was to direct attention beyond themselves.

A Framework for Reading Experience

The idea gives Lewis a way to distinguish an experience from the representation or feeling that follows it. What introspection brings into view may seem like the substance of an emotion, yet the act of inspecting it has already changed the relation of attention. The distinction thus explains both the limits of self-observation and the persistence of desire: its objects cannot be replaced by the inner signs that accompany the search for them.

In Lewis’s account, this was not merely a philosophical vocabulary. He accepted the distinction immediately and retained it as an indispensable tool of thought; more personally, its consequences altered how he interpreted his long history of waiting for Joy. It allowed him to stop treating images and sensations as candidates for Joy itself and to understand them instead as signs pointing beyond themselves.