That hideous Rorty.

From George Scialabba's essay “C. S. Lewis: Beloved Tormentor”:

“Lewis’s phenomenology of evil attained its apotheosis in Wither, archfiend of That Hideous Strength, the conclusion of his theological science-fiction trilogy. Wither was a philosopher-bureaucrat, whose mode of operation – almost a mode of being – was to blur distinctions. Now, a short definition of modern intellectual history might be: the progressive undermining of all firm distinctions, metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical. In recent years, no one has carried on this dissolution more subtly or rigorously than Richard Rorty, perhaps the most respected living Anglo-American philosopher. I revere Rorty, but thanks to Lewis, I have never been able to leave off mentally comparing him to Wither. And when I heard Rorty lecture for the first time, the physical resemblance I saw – or fancied – between him and Wither made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. That’s how it feels when mentor and tormentor meet inside one’s head.”

On the strength of this paragraph, I may re-read the Space Trilogy soon.