PBS has produced recently a 4 hours long virtual meeting between two very influent intellectuals of last century: Sigmund
Freud and C.S. Lewis. The twos are imagined into a virtual debate about very popular topics: God, faith, sex, ethics, religion. If we know that Freud was the worldwide famous scientist and founder of psychoanalysis, we know barely few things about his counterpart, the irish novelist, essayst and theologian C.S. Lewis. The second one dues his posthumous fame to the cinematographic adaptation of his fantasy saga,
The Chronicles of Narnia.
PBS reconstructs a dialogue between the materialist conception proposed and deeply justified by Freud and the more romantic conception of religious belief substained by Lewis.
The mind who planned this very stimulating operation is Dr. Armand Nicholi, who was invited some years before to teach a course on Freud's
philosophy at Harvard University. The parallel traced by Nicholi was so successful, that PBS decided to produce a sort of documentary, which is based on the comparison of these two big thinkers.
Freud and Lewis propose worldviews which conflict deeply with each other. The basic topic, deeper than the one's or the other's main ideas, is just the concept of a
worldview.
Worldview are crucials, because no man can live without any worldview. Since the day of our birth, we rise up and ideas take form in our mind. These ideas also shapen the way we define ourselves, the way we interact with our friends and with the rest of the worls. So, finally a lot of things like opinions, feelings and impressions contribute to form our worldview, and this worldview is the matrix that informs our walk in the whole life. It determines all the choices that we are going to consider; and even all the available choices are seen and selected through the lens provided by the worldview. Being ortodox christian, atheist, muslim or liberal jewish - these are all choices that a peculiar worldview offers to us, and which submit our ways to conceive our own freedoms.
Freedom of thought is very important fact, but mainly it's verbal thing, a mere abstract subject of discussion. That's because our thinking cannot take the distance from the worldview that informed our way of thinking; we cannot take the distance from ourselves.
This is the main binding, which is the originary base of every kind of freedom.
For more information about Freud and Lewis religious conceptions and worldviews, please refer to the relevant links here below.
Marzio Valdambrini