first post as Samwise, M.A. ha

So. It’s been a while.

I thought I’d have all kinds of time to blog every day since I only had one class last semester. BUT of course, in classic Samwise fashion, all kinds of time turned in to all kinds of things. And then, upon burning out from the three languages, work and other projects, all kinds of nothing filled my time from Spring Break on.  [and by "burning out" I meant "spring came so the blue skies and green grass and warm sun tempted me away"]

ANYWAY. Now it is summer.

Aaaannd since its been forflippingever, I’m kinda drawing a blank as to what to write…

With only one class my standby just-post-work-I-did-for-school isn’t really an option, since I only have one terrible paper to show for this  semester.*

Rambling Pseudo-philosophical review of the Hunger Games it is then!

Coming soon.

Until then, here’s yet another cartoon from my favorite cartoonist (of those cartooning today– Bill Waterson and Gary Larson are all time faves, of course)

 

*Oh, that and a full tuition scholarship for 3 years of doctoral work starting this fall. That’s the other thing I have to show, not so much for this semester, since I applied last and all I’ve done recently is call and bother the department about funding, but to show for 5+ years of philosophizing so far.  Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam yo.

FUN with LOGIC! (srsly)

You wouldn’t guess that something called Logical Investigations was capable of getting people– including a bunch of 20somethings– freakin excited about life, but in 1901 it that is what those 1000s of pages of Husserl’s work did.

And actually, I totally see why.

Philosophy, as I’m sure I’ve mentioned before, has largely sucked for the last 300 or 400 years because of a faulty anthropology/metaphysics/lots of stuff stemming from Descartes, Locke, Hume, etc. This book rips silly empiricism apart, (at least in the very limited look I’ve had of it so far) and liberates philosophy from what Sokolowski refers to as the ‘ego-centric predicament’.  Basically, modernity was strutting around like they know everything, being all Enlightened by the Scientific Method an–

[A quick tangent: Does anyone else remember the torture in 5th/6th gradeish that was learning the scientific method? I know it was the kid version but still- I think every 11 year old knows that life cannot comedown to that.  Ugh. Anyway.]

So with modernity and narrowed science walking around like they own the place and taunting the wise like they were children who still believe in Santa Clause, and meanwhile they set up this understanding of the human person as basically a brain in a box.  The world pushes and pokes and affects this box and the brain does what it can to infer from the effects what the world out there must be like– the ego-centric predicament. How can I get from my inner consciousness to the outer world?

One of the manifestations of this way of viewing the world was to see logic as a part of psychology– a description of how a healthy mind reasons.  Logic is just man’s mental structure. So the Principle of Non-Contradiction:

one thing cannot both be and not be at the same time in the same respect

or,

if S is P, S cannot be not-P;

becomes:

a person cannot believe  a thing to be at the same time that we believe it not to be

or,

one cannot believe and disbelieve S is P at the same time

So it all comes down to how we happen to think, and it doesn’t necessarily have jack to do with reality.  So anyone with an ounce of common sense should  here this and think, well if that’s true, what’s the point of believing or doing, for that matter, anything?  If its all in our heads and the truth is in fact ‘out there’, if it is at all, that is, unattainable, what’s the point?

Aristotle says in his Ethics that philosophical conclusions have to “harmonize with the facts” of lived life.  Phenomenology, starting with Husserl, is a recovery of this ancient common sense.  The moderns thought that philosophy and science overruled our experience, phenomenology respects our experience as a legitimate encounter with reality, and sees it as the philosopher’s job to reflect on that experience and get to the deeper truth behind it, without ever rejecting the value of the ‘natural’ or ‘prephilosophical’ attitude.

So, with his investigation of logic, Husserl argued that the modern approach doesn’t harmonize with the facts and must be off.  4 main objections:

1) the laws of logic have an ‘exactness’ not found in empirical methods– science is alwaysalwaysalways open to correction, adaptation of laws, whereas logical laws, we find, are always and everywhere true.

2) we understand the laws of logic a priori, that is, we see ‘if S is P s true, S is not P must be false’ and we just see it as duh, yes. Not the case for scientific laws, which have to be demonstrated and proven.  Logical laws are the basis for any and all rational demonstration and proof.

3) Some of the modern crowd thought logic was like chemistry– just like  2H2+ O2 = 2H2O, logic just kind of reacts and unfolds to the necessary conclusion.  But this doesn’t work because their is a timeless dimension to logical necessity, it doesn’t unfold like chemical reaction.  So there. Wrong.

4) Invalid arguments are just as much a product of the mind as valid ones, so what distinguishes between the two if, as the modern psychologismists like Mill and Locke etc say, logic is just the regularities of a healthy functioning mind?  Here is Husserl’s biggest point: the distinction between real and ideal that everyone had forgotten.   There are two senses of ‘judgment’- 1)conscious activity of judging and 2) the meaning content of that judgment.  To illustrate: the professor writes a true statement on the board, and his class of ten students all judge that statement to be true. There are 10 individual acts of judgment(1) going on, but only one judgment(2), only one meaning.  Logic deals with the latter, psychology with the former.

…

And that is how/why Husserl’s little 1000 page book liberated the thinking world from crappy philosophy.

 

The end.

 

Adventures in Political Philosophy!

Wherein I try to apply some degree of somewhat rational thought to political things that catch my lately anti-political attention.

TODAY’S ADVENTURE:

RELIGIOUS FREEDOM!

YAY!

So obviously,  religious freedom has been a rather big deal in political thought for a few centuries now, and you would think we in this country at least– being founded largely for the sake of religious freedom and all– would have it down by now.  The guys who invented our  nation wrote this:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

 

And now, one of the people running our nation wrote this:

Opponents of contraception had lobbied hard for a broad exemption that would have allowed any religiously-affiliated employer to opt out of providing such coverage. Fortunately, the Obama administration rejected that push and decided to maintain the narrow religious exemption that it initially proposed. Only houses of worship and other religious nonprofits that primarily employ and serve people of the same faith will be exempt. Religiously-affiliated employers who do not qualify for the exemption and are not currently offering contraceptive coverage may apply for transitional relief for a one-year period to give them time to determine how to comply with the rule.

 

Now please tell me, how is forcing religiously-affiliated employers to directly support something fundamentally and strongly against their religion not a violation of free exercise?  Take, for example, legit Catholic schools, the ones that actually follow the teachings of the Church and stuff– isn’t it rather bothersome to any liberty-loving American to see them being forced to participate in something they’ve been steadfastly and explicitly standing against forever?  Disagree with the Catholic stance all you want, (ignoring for the sake of argument the fact that Pope Paul VI was totally right in predicting the breakdown of marriage and family as a result of legalization of contraception…oh and ignore as well  Anscombe’s likewise justified arguments…) the blatant attack on religious freedom should bother the non-religious too– once the ‘religious’ part goes, the ‘freedom’ part is probably already gone.

BUT WAIT. What about all those poor women previously tyrannized by their religiously affiliated employers who now have access to contraception coverage? What about their freedom?  All I can say to that is that religious freedom is covered in the constitution, freedom to have your bad decisions paid for by others is not.

Once again, I ask that flaws in reasoning, oversights, whatever that I am sure are present, be pointed out.   Object! Refute!  Call me out! please and thanks.

Intro to Phenomenology

Some highlights (which I hope to comment on soon) from the first few pages of Robert Sokolowski’s awesome Introduction to Phenomenology:

“Phenomenology is the study of human experience and of the way thins present themselves to us in and through such experience. It attempts to restore the sense of philosophy one finds in Plato.  It is, moreover, not just an antiquarian revival, but one that confronts the issues raised by modern thought.  It goes beyond ancients and moderns and strives to reactivate the philosophical life in our present circumstances.”

…

“In contrast with [the] postmodern understanding of appearance, phenomenology, in its classical form,  insists that parts are only understood against the background of appropriate wholes, that manifolds of appearance harbor identities, and that absences make no sense except as played off against the presences that can be achieved through them.  Phenomenology insists that identity and intelligibility are available in things, and that we ourselves are defined as the ones to whom such identities and intelligibilities are given. We can evidence the way things are; when we do so, we discover objects, but we also discover ourselves, precisely as datives of disclosure, as those to whom things appear.  Not only can we think the things given to us in experience, we can also understand ourselves thinking them.  Phenomenology is precisely this sort of understanding: phenomenology is resaon’s self-discovery in the presence of intelligible objects.”

 

Coming soon, [maybe even later today!]: Why Phenomenology is cooler than Locke and Descartes and even postmodernness.

Back in the ville

Well.

I’m back at escuela.

On my agenda this last semester before I am the proud owner of a very useful Masters degree:

• Sokolowski and Phenomenology.
• at least one more conference (or, I guess, a last minute 60 page thesis ha)
• Greek
• Latin
• German
• work for money for food

I think I am ready.  And I think I will be doing real posts again regularly; for real this time.

woo to the hoo.

Philosophy of Lord of the Rings: The final post

AND FINALLY, to conclude:

5. HOPE AND SORROW

Perhaps the greatest gift Tolkien gives to modern man is a recovery of our human longing—that inexplicable desire of finite man for the infiinite. (Aristotle struggles to figure this out toward the end of his Ethics).  I always find, after reading the book or watching the movies, an awakened longing for glory, battle, nobility, elf-magic, heroism, etc.  When I stumbled upon the Hobbit when I was 10—that was an awesome life canging world opening experience. But if course the material things that trigger that longing isn’t really the true object—the true object is God, the Divine.  Most of the characters manifest to some degree this deep longing.  After leaving Lothlorien, Legolas says,

“Alas for us all! And for all that walk the world in these after-days.  For such is the way of it: to find and lose, as it seems to those whose boat is on the running streams. But I count you blessed, Gimli, son of Gloin: for your loss you suffer of your own free will, and you might have chosen otherwise.  But you have not forsaken your companions, and the least reward that you shall have is that the memory of Lothlorien shall remain ever clear and sustained in your hear, and shall neith fade nor grow stale. “ and Gimli replies.. ‘I thank you…yet Memory is not what the heart desires. That is only a mirror…”

A commentator on LotR,  tells of a 6thgrader who read LotR and then cried for two days; he says, “I think it must have been a cry for life and meaning and joy from the wasteland.” Joy—it requires life with meaning, but unfortunately the wasteland that is modern society,with its emphasis on tolerance and self-esteem, requires the very opposite, that is, no objective meaning.  Because truth entails the possibilty that you are wrong, and that’s just unpleasant.  Much better to assign our own arbitrary values in whatever manner makes us happy-for-now, since it’s not as if any of it matters in the long run anyway.  The pluralism preached in schools and media today, while it may be motivated by  good enough intentions, really eradicates the possibility of meaning.  The only way for everyone to be equally right is if everyone is wrong, and if that’s what’s considered best for society, to promote and ensure everyone peaceably enduring in their wrongness, society won’t last long.  Anything grounded in so weak a foundation is doomed to self-destruction.   And we’re well on our way, now 39 years into the genocide of the unborn, with all the moral decline in other areas that naturally goes with a selfish, subjectivist ethic.

“The world is indeed full of peril and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all the lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater.” (Haldir the elf of Lothlorien)

“there was sorrow then too, and gathering dark, but great valour, and great deeds that were not wholly vain”.

Something that is quite hard to understand, for Americans especially,  is the strange relation between sorrow and hope.  And I say ‘especially for Americans’ because of something Viktor Frankl observes; he says at the end of man’s search for meaning that Europeans are rather confused by American’s weird obsession with being happy all the time. True happiness only comes from doing the right thing, living a good life—in other words, there are about a million more important things one has to figure out and do in order to even be on the way to happiness- focusing on ‘being happy’ is not one of them, but an almost sure guarantee that you’ll never get there.  Aristotle saw this too.

With this misguided focus on happiness as opposed to the substance that leads to it, it is not hard to see why the sorrow-hope connection is  often missed.  True hope is not silly optimism—the Fellowship had little hope that they would actually succeed, yet they marched on, because it was the good and noble and right thing to do.  I’m sure they all would have prefered to spend what was most likely their last days doing anything else, but that wasn’t really an option.  Sure, it was with in their physical capability to drop their weapons and run home to the woods or moutnains or Shire, but their nobility and purity of heart wouldn’t really allow it.  What kept them to their noble task at hand was not chance of success, but faith in a higher ordering, a bigger story, a grand narrative that they had a part to play, however it ended up for them.  This is what hope is: trust in a greater deeper meaning to things; such hope gives rise to indominatble courage, a new strength as shown by the little Hallfling heroes:

At the Black Gate Frodo says, “I am commanded to go to the land of Mordor, and therefore I shall go. If there is only one way, then I must take it. What comes after must come.”

and later, within mordor, Sam thinks to himself, “So that was the job I felt I had to do when I started, help  Mr. Frodo to the last step and then die with him? Well, if that is the job, then I must do it. …But even as hope died in him, or seemed to die, it was turned to a new strength.”

It is only when hope is placed beyond the material results, beyond one’s personal well-being, that the strength and courage necessary to pick up one’s Cross and follow Christ (which is really what the LotR is all about) is possible.  Sorrow and sadness is inescabable in this vale of tears, but it is sorrow accepted rightly that enables true, deep hope and joy as well.  In the Silmarillion, which tells of Creation of middle earth through divine music,  Tolkien describes one of the subcreator angel gods in a passage that to me is particularly enlightening on the subject of sorrow:

Mightier than Este is Nienna… she dwells alone. She is acquainted with grief, and mourns every wound that Arda has suffered in the marring of Melkor.  So great was her sorrow, as the Music unfolded, that her song turned to lamentation long before its end, and the sound of mourning was woven into the themes of the World before it began.  But she does not weep for herself; and those who hearken to her learn pity, and endurance in hope.  Her halls are west of West, upon the borders of the world; and she comes seldom to the city of Valimar where all is glad.  She goes rather to the halls of Mandos, which are near to her own; and all those who wait in Mandos cry to her, for she brings strength to the spirit and turns sorrow to wisdom. The windows of her house look outward from the walls of the world.

 strength, wisdom, hope, pity, are all fruit of grief and mourning.  There is a greatnobility in such suffering thatis overlooked in modern culture.  We tend to want to live always in easy cheerfulness, but it often comes at the loss of wisdom, strength, pity, hope.

There is also a deep joy that comes with sorrow:

“O great glory and splendour! And all my wishes have come true!’ and then he wept.

And all the host laughed and wept, and in the midst of their merriment and tears the clear voice of the minstrel rose like silver and gold, and all men were hushed.  And he sang to them, now in elven tongue, now in the speech of the west, until their hearts, wounded with sweet words, overflowed, and their joy was like swords, and they passed in thought out to regions where pain and delight flow together and the tears are the very wine of blessedness” (933)

X.  THE RING and THE CROSS

The LofR is a story of spiritual warfare.  Both the battles on the fields and interior.  A great depiction of this coems toward the end of the Fellowship, when Frodo has put on the Ring to escape Boromir, and is tempted to submit to the Eye of Sauron. “The two powers strove in him… For a moment, perfectly balanced between their pierciing points, he writhed, tormented. Suddenly he was aware of himself again. Frodo, neither the Voice nor the Eye: free to choose, and with one remaining instant to do so.  He took the Ring off his finger. He was kneeling in clear sunlight before the high seat. A black shadow seemed to pass like an arm above him ..then all the sky was clean and blue and birds sang in every tree. ”

Again, the Lord of the Rings is an alarm clock, an awakening to reality.  And it is a much needed wake up call.  John Henry Newman wrote that  “absorbed in the thought of the life to come are they who really and heartily receive the words of Christ and His Apostles. Yet to this state of mind, and therefore to this true knowledge, the multitude of men called Christians are certainly strangers; a thick veil is drawn over their eyes; and in spite of their being able to talk of the doctrine, they are as if they never had heard of it. They go on just as the heathen did of old: they eat, they drink; or they amuse themselves in vanities, and live in the world, without fear and without sorrow, just as if God had not declared that their conduct in this life would decide their destiny in the next; just as if they either had no souls, or had nothing or little to do with the saving of them, which was the creed of the heathen.” Tolkien’s imaginative work does more to remove this ‘thick veil’ from our eyes than a lot of nonfiction ever could.  Fairy tales, as Tolkien, Lewis, Kreeft insist, sneak past the often prideful and overrationalized mind to the soft heart and subtly work conversion before the mind realizes what’s going on, by awakening the longing for something more…

That something more, is of course, again, God.   Kreeft says, “Very subtly, yet very deeply, LotR really points to Christ. That is why its central symbol is the Ring: it is the exact opposite of the Cross”. The Ring, sin, pride, power, is closed in on itself, and empty. The cross is open to all the world, and full of God’s  infinite love.  The ring corrupts and enslaves, the cross sets us free.

Since it is the feast of Elizabeth Ann Seton today, [or was the day I gave this talk] I thought I’d end with a quote from her that is actually rather fitting for what I have tried to bring out of Lord of the Rings in relation to Catholic truth: She says, “We know certainly that our God calls us to a holy life. We know that he gives us every grace, every abundant grace; and [important part:] though we are so weak of ourselves, this grace is able to carry us through every obstacle and difficulty” With God’s grace, even a couple little hobbits—really, only a couple humble hobbits– can make it to Mt. Doom and back.

Philosophy of Tolkien part blue ivy

Almost forgot:

 3. ETHICS/EVIL
Closely related to the topic of anthropology is ethics.   In fact, modern moral philosophy has in large part failed precisely because of its grounding in a faulty understanding of man.  Man is understood to be nothing more than a highly advanced ape—merely a rational animal, as Boethius mistakenly thought.   And like Augustine pointed out, this downgrading of humanity, this attempt to strip away the divinely created dignity from man, is mistaken for some kind of liberation or ennoblement.   In reality, though, if we are nothing but animals, why is Sauron so bad? Why not enslave Middle Earth  if you can? We all die and fade to nothing anyway.  Nietzsche saw this, and is one of the few who recognizes what the death of God really means—it means good and evil no longer have meaning. That is why Nietzsche pushed to move ‘beyond good and evil’, and reduced everything to ‘Will to power”—Sauron’s philosophy, the Philosophy of the Ring of Power. And, even though he’s very wrong overall, Nietzsche is right that such a moral state is the logical consequence of atheism.  God is the ground of Good, without Him, there is nothing to stand on, no standard to judge by, but yourself, and who are you? (Dawkins…)

One of the great evils of modernity is utilitarian ethics, which calculates the right or wrongness of an action based not on any intrinsic or transcndental higher goods, but on results—and those results are judged in terms of pain and pleasure they bring.  Thus, nothing is intrinsically evil, for literally anything could be ethically chosen if it resulted in a significant enough overall increase in pleasure or decrease in pain.  Utilitarianism is clearly rejected thorughout the story, primarily in the refusal of the wise to use the Ring against Sauron.  When all utilitarian reasons for action are gone, the heroes of the story still move onward, to fulfill their duty even if no good comes of it.  They exemplify the ancient wisdom that physical life and comfort and success are not the most important things, but nobility, goodness for goodness sake, bravery, are.

“every choice makes us a more heavenly or hellish creature”  says Lewis.  Thus, ethics ultimately is not solely about external results, like the utilitarians mistakenly think, but internal effects.  Intrinsically evil actions are never justifiable, whatever the good external results because of the dire internal and spiritual results.  And this goes for every choice we make.

Modernity, with its relativism or utilitarianism, really has no room for evil, since they reject the standards by which evil is judged to be so.  But anyone who has experienced life at all knows there is most definitely evil, and it’s not just my perspective or cultural historical circumstances or pain.  It is the privation of good, the corruption of what ought to be well.  Without objective good, there can be no objective evil, but as long as objective good remains (as it always will) so does hope.  Tolkien shows us this beautifully through Samwise:

“There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.”

4. HEROES

“To cast aside regret and fear. To do the deed at hand.” These words of counsel from Gandalf to the renewed King Theoden are counsel to all Christians. The Christian life requires great courage—Christ does not come to bring peace but a sword.  This is war.  And note that it is not courage to ‘be who you want to be’ or ‘follow your dreams’ or contemporary nonsense like that—it is courage to do the deed at hand.  Here again providencea and humility come up.  In modern society, the stress is laid upon individualism.  We are self-made, rulers of our own destiny, with no duty or obilgations to anyone but ourselves and those we choose.  THis is not really how life is, though.  We are placed in a very limited set of circumstances, with inevitable obligations to parents, neighbors, communities—we don’t have a choice. Further, we are given a finite set of talents and abilities, that it is up to us to cultivate and freely use, but the purpose is determined for us—we are to use our gifts well, in such a way to bring us and those around us closer to God, or we can use thempoorly.  We are not as wildly free to be who we want to be as our kindergarten teachers taught us, but is that so bad?

Frodo was ‘meant’ to find the Ring, and utimately he was the only one who could save MiddleEarth by bearing this ring to Moutn doom.  But he didn’t have to.  He could have walked away or curled up and died at any point along the journey, but while it would be understandable, it wouldn’t be right.  It may not be ‘fair’ by modern standards that this poor little hobbit was chosen by fate to give up his peace and comfort in the Shire forever to save the world, but ‘fairness’ is not the highest good.  In fact it ranks pretty low on the scale of good things.  True justice is significantly higher than whiny fairness, and self-sacrifice is way higher still..

True heroism and courage, as LotR vividly shows us, is dependent upon humility. There is no such thing as going ‘above and beyond’ what is required—in life there are choices laid before you, and you either find the courage to get over yourself and do what is asked, or you don’t.

While the movies are overall very faithful to the book, they made one significant and, to my mind, inexcusable, change—they took one of the noblest and most heroic characters and corrupted him—Faramir. In the movie, upon discovering the Ring, he brings it and the Hobbits forcibly to Gondor, to try to win his father’s love.  In the book, there are father issues—Denethor does say that he wishes Faramir had died instead of Boromir—but Faramir does not let his moral integrity be compromised because of this family tension.  He is honest:  he would “not snare even an orc with a falsehood’ And he resists the Ring honorably, saying “I would not take this thing, if it lay by the highway. Not were Minas Tirith falling in ruin and I alone could save her, so, using the weapon of the Dark Lord for her good and my glory. No, I do not wish for such triumphs” and he stands by that even when discovering that this weapon is the Ring, defended only by a little hobbit.  And this is not because he does not love his home, but precisely because he loves his citytoo much to let her become a ‘mistress of slaves’ by the unjust power rather than a noble queen among queens.

The main hero of Lord of the Rings, however, is not any Faramir nor any of the main Christ figures—Frodo Priest, Gandalf Prophet or Aragorn King—but the humble and simple Samwise. Of all the characters, it is he who shows greatest charity in his unwavering love for his master. He is the good and faithful servant, which is exacty what God asks us to be.  Simple, selfless gardener Samwise Gamgee, who in the end is left behind to manage the daily life of the Shire.  This shows the beautiful diversity of the kingdom of heaven—it is not just fo r the great ringbearers and wizards but for the lowly as well.  The Shire, then, is not simply the empty comfort to be awakened from, but also is our home away from home, and is worth saving and keeping well.

(Cath)Phil and Lord o’ the Rings tertia pars

In media res:

…Now, on to the five points. First,

1. SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

Tolkien did not like the rapid industrialization and technologization he saw all around him in the 20^th century.  This is evident not only in the cruel destruction of the Orcs and Saruman shown in the  movie, but also, in the book, the hobbits return to the shire to find it enslaved to ‘industry’ ‘efficiency’ and progress’ at the hands of Sharkey and ruffian men.  THere is also the pilantirs, which reveals information but can also be used to manipulate those who look in it.  This was Tolkien’s commentary on the negative possibilties of radio and TV.

More important, however, is the story’s overall rejection of the idea that scientific knowledge is primary.

“To think that reality contains nothing more than the scientific method can know is like thinking that Shakespeares plays are nothing but exercises in  grammar, that the water that endlessly fascinates the poet and the mystic is actually nothing but oxygen and hydrogen, or that the road we actually travel has nothing more than the map does.”

Kreeft often refers to the Enlightenent as the Great Darkness whereby “wisdom is downgrraded to science, understanding to calculation, and rather than explore mysteries, we solve problems” LotR is a strangely ancient light in the modern darkness.  Tolkien invites us, through his awe-inspiring elves and wizards and kings, to seek wisdom (like Solomon) while warning against the  perils of misuse of technology in his depiction of the cruelty of orcs and fallen wizard in the industrialization.  There is also Gollum, who used the ring to find get at roots and beginning of things, but found “All the great ‘secrets’ under the mountains had turned our to be just empty night: there was nothing more to find out, nothing worth doing”.  This is the true end result of knowledge apart from wisdom… boredom and despair, no humanist utopia…

Lord of the Rings, as any great work of art, isglaringly obvious evidence against materialism that the elites of today find so appealing, and that is the required assumption of public education. But this doesn’t make sense.  As Lewis points out in a letter to an (at the time) non-Christian friend, “If you really are the product of a materialist universe, how is it you don’t feel at home?”

But we do feel somewhat at home in the world of LotR, while at the same time we are reminded that we are very much not at home.  And this reminder is much needed.            “We need to return to the classical priority of contemplation over action” says PK. We need to be a little less like Martha and a little more like Mary and choose the‘better part’ at the feet of Jesus.This is, of course, next to impossible in the modern world, the time-saving technology of which has sucked our time and damaged our ability to just be.

2. MAN

Self-knowledge is, of course, a central goal of philosophy and human existence.  JPII says that “God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth—in a word, to know himself—so that, by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves”

In the classic medieval work, The Consolation of Philosophy, (another short and awesome little read)  the author, Boethius, writing from prison, had recently gone from being quite influential politician  to death row under suspicion of treason, and is (understandably) in rather rough shape, despariring, sorrowful, etc. and not handling this turn of fortune well. He is visited in prison by Lady Philosophy, who seeks to heal him of this disease, which she informs him is the result of having forgotten what he is. She says,

“You are confused because you have forgotten what you are, and therefore, you are upset because you are in exile and stripped of all your possessions. Because you are ignorant of the purpose of things, you think stupid and evil men are powerful and happy. And, because you have forgotten how the world is governed, you suppose that these changes of your fortune came about without a purpose.  Such notions are enough to cause not only sickness but death. But be grateful to the Giver of health that nature has not entirely forsaken you. For you have the best medicine for your health in your grasp of the truth about the way the world is governed…But the time has not yet come for stronger remedies. It is the nature of men’s minds that when they throw away the truth they embrace false ideas, and from these comes the cloud of anxiety which obscures their vision of truth. I shall try to dispel this cloud by gentle treatment, so that when the darkness of deceptive feeling is removed you may recognize the splendor of true light.”

 

Boethius had forgotten that he is not merely a rational animal, but a creature made in the image and likenes sof God.  Forgetting this dignity is what plummeted him into despair, and shifted his focus from first things—God—to lesser things like wealth and physical freedom.

Augustine makes a similar observation, saying that when the soul turns away from God it forgets itself “and slithers and slides into less and less which is imagined to be more and more.”.   This is the power of the Ring that changes kings of men to wraiths, and hobbit-like Smeagol to creeping and broken Gollum.   Saruman the White and wise a twisted and pathetic corrupter of men’s hearts. The connection Lady Philosophy makes between  knowledge of self and knowledge of providence is very interesting—andvery much present thoughout LotR.  The acknowledgment of a higher power puts you solidly in your finite place, but it is your proper place, the only one where you can be fully yourself.  Providence is not restrictive or belittling—aimless and enless possibility of the nihilisitc existentialist is.  Providence requires menaing, a purpose to all suffering and joy.  Without God’s guiding hand, all man has is himself, and as we know from the horrors of 20^th century, man is not a suitable Godsubsititute.

Those who are fully themselves, Aragorn, Gandalf, etc. trust in the deeper power governing all things, whereas those who forget themselves seek to usurp that governing power.  Boromir, who is pretty much just a regular guy—he’s no wizard or king or anything, just a man—falls to this temptation, and reveals to us our very real human weakness.  Yet he also shows the possibiilty of redemption, as he atones for his sin and dies a good death which is our ultimate earthly goal.

A central theme in LotR is death, and this is another point where it and modernity clash.  We don’t like to think about death, and that refusal to do so is precisely why we so easily forget ourselves.   Kind of like philosophy, in that the only choice you have is having a good or bad one, death also is inevitable, and all of us will have a good one, like Boromir’s, Theoden’s or a bad one like Saruman’s.  And the key to which one we attain lies in whether or not we daily ‘die to self’’,– self-sacrifice, in LotR just as in our Christian lives, is key.

“Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. He who loves his life loses it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life.”

The Shire had to be left for it to be saved, and that only at Frodo’s losing it forever.

(C)P&LotR vers. 1.1

As promised, part deux of my Lord of the Rings and Philosophy talk.  [Part uno here]

II. LORD OF THE RINGS background

Before I get into the specifics, it might be helpful to briefly defend the philosophication of this great piece of literature, and tell briefly some of the background regarding its origin. “Philosophy,” explains Kreeft, “says the truth, literature shows it”; or, as I have heard elsewhere, ‘literature is philosophy clothed in beauty” .  Since literature is ultimately about life and truth, despite what contemporary junk might lead one to think, it makes sense that philosophy and lit would g together so well.

As far as the Catholicity of this work, Tolkien himself said, “The LR is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work…the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism.” This is what made the preparation of this talk rather difficult, espcecially for an organizationally challenged person like me—the Lord of the Rings is not an allegory; there isn’t a clearcut Aslan-Jesus translation, but rather the whole of the story reflects truth—it’s, again, a mini (or really not so mini) reflection of our world, and where do you begin to explain the world??!

But anyway, it may be surprising at first that LR is so deeply Catholic, since there is no church-going or worship or much in the way of prayer or even meniton of gods in LotR, BUT there is humility, self-sacrifice, providence, the acknowledgment of deeper, higher meaning, good and evil.  The Lord of the Rings is, as I will argue throughout, the truth.  and as such it directly contradicts much of mainstream post-Christian thought.  One of the greatest tragedies of modernity is that it has forgotten the reality revealed in fairy stories.  Fairy tales, says Chesterton, are not true because they tell us dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be defeated. LR is true, not because elves and dwarves and hobbits had concrete existence on earth once upon time (though I wouldn’t be surprised) but because through their trials we learn about our own.

To really highligh the value of Tolkien’s work, take as a counterexample that terrible cultural phenomenon/sign of our impending doom that is Twilight—it is obviously and predictably thrown together with no depth at all.  The characters, events, dialogue are entirely superficial and meaningless—they hardly make sense. (Ed you sparkle in the sun? really?And you’ve spent your immortal life thus far repeating high school over and over again? really?)  In Tolkien, on the other hand, all is fitting, it all makes sense in the larger whole, which is not just a story of 9  companions but an entire world with millenia long past, bigger and deeper than any other literary world; LotR was part of Tolkien’s larger mission to fill what he perceived as a serious lack in English culture–there aren’t any ancient legends. The closest the English get is Arthur, but Tolkien wasn’t the biggest fan of Arthurian legends because they took place during the time of Christianity, yet still involved a lot of messing around with  Paganism.  So what does a guy whose idea of a good time is reading a Finnish grammar cover to cover do? He makes up a millenia long history-of-a-world, based on an entire language, which he first invented.  Not even Harry Potter, which is pretty good,  comes close to that.

(Catholic) Philosophy and Lord of the Rings vers. 1.0

So once upon a time I had a blog.  And I shall return to regularly posting, someday soon, but until then I’m going to cheat and put up, in 1000 or so word chunks, a talk I gave for my parish’s faith formation speaker series.  I should at least edit it for internet publication, but you know what? I am still in lazy Christmastime mode and will put up the rough draft. So there.

NOTE:  This is hardly original stuff. I’m am a lowly channel of Tolkien and Lewis and Peter Kreeft’s  thoughts.  My intention with this is to convey the importance of what they have to say, with minimal contribution from me– what can I add to those guys?

NOTE ALSO: This was thought out and written largely during the aforementioned lazy Christmastime, sooo… yeah.

Anyway,  here’s the rather drawn out and overly long introduction: (part II, on LotR background, coming tomorrow, and real posts– I promise– coming soonish)

I. (personal) INTRODUCTION

When I tell people that I’m studying philosophy, or that I’m still studying philosophy, or that I’m planning on continuing to study philosophy—for basically forever—I am frequently met with understandably skeptical reactions. Uhhh, seriously? Why? What am I going to do with that? Well, I hope to teach at a university. Maybe write a book or two. Oookay, that’s at least a job, but again, why?  What good is teaching or writing or talking about philosophy doing? You’re not making,  buying or processing anything. SO what’s the point? Well, an interesting practical sidenote is that employers are finding that those who study ‘practical’ things like business tend to come out of school less prepared for life and work than those who study in areas like philosophy, where their ability to problem solve and think creatively is developed.  (So there.)   But that’s beside the point.  Philosophy is not important because it teaches you to think ‘outside the box’ – which in itself is not necessarily valuable—but because it is that by which we answer the most important ‘why’ questions of life.   It is an inevitable dimension of  the human experience—you can’t not have a philosophy of life, an overarching worldview of some kind, unless you really live moment to moment, experience to experience, with no values, no judgments, no reflection; in short, like an animal. Pretending philosophy is irrelevant or useless is simply a poor philosophy, not its absence.  So, modern society’s dismissive attidtude toward philosophy (setting aside for the moment that much of modern philoosphy is actually not that great) is indicative of the terrible worldview driving it. (Hence, many of our worst cultural problems).

That is not tosay that everyone has to actively study the history of philosophy to be a saint, obviously, nor that every good Catholic philosopher is necessarily a good Catholic.  Love of wisdom, like any other human love, is limited and corruptible.  Still, its importance, when rightly ordered, is immeasurable, for again, the questions it wrestles with are those that are most essential to human existence.   God gave us reason for a reason; As JPII put it in his encyclical Fides et Ratio: “Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth”.  This truth is, of course, ultimately God.  As a philosopher, one of my favorite quotations in the Catholic tradition is from 2^nd century saint Justin Martyr, who said:  “Philosophy is, in fact, the greatest possession, and most honourable before God, to whom it leads us and alone commends us; and these are truly holy men who have bestowed attention on philosophy.”

My primary motivation for this talk was the need to defend and explain philosophy both in itself and in  relation to Catholicism.  That is, philosophy opens up a world of truth, goodness and beauty that the (very closely connected) influences of Protestantism and secularism in contemporary society tend to obscure.  On the one hand, Protestant theology tends to see faith as opposed to reason; faith is, necessarily, absurd or irrational, and one must overcome rational objections and take a blind leap to be counted among the faithful. Then there are the obvious limitations of secular materialism, which, accepting the Protestant dichotomy, takes the side of human reason and  rejects that blind leap of faith as unlikely to pay off; it then proclaims with Nietzsche that God is dead, or, the more boring ones, proclaim with Singer, Dawkins et al that God is not even to be taken seriously enough to warrant  an obit, but rahter should just be ignored until education and scientific evidence finally win out over silly religious people.  With secular materialism and the equal but opposite reaction of new agey misticism dominating philosophy publicily, it is not surprising that it is dismissed by those with common sense.  But not all philosophy is like that—Catholic philososophy, especially, is different.  It is also extremely important, for without it,we cede that particular battlefield to the crazies on the materialist side and the crazies on the New Agey side.

What Catholics trying to live in modern world face is the tendency to split like a Protestant—reilgion/faith on one hand, ‘reason’ and science and stuff on the other, and just try not to mix them up too much, because the ‘truth’ of human reasoning and the ‘truth’ of revelation are contrary.  As we know, a house divided against itself cannot stand. That’s why Catholicism is so great—it sees reason and faith as complementary, truth as unified.

As Chesterton says,  “It is idle to talk always of the alternative of reason and faith. Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.”

Catholicism, with its appreciation of the complimentarity of faith and reason (Anselm’s fides quaearens intellectum—faith seeking understanding)not only provides a much more realistic and solid foundation than the other alternaitves, but also, through this,  makes way for a grand and rich tradition of artisitc awesomeness.[LR, dante, shakespeare etc]  Life as the Catholic knows it is much much too big for this world, so that often the only way to convey the truth of it is through imagination.  This is what Tolkien’s work does.  It gives us the turht of our Catholic faith in a new light, a new light that is especially powerful in countering the darkness of the modern world.  This talk, then, also affords me an opportunity I couldn’t pass up: an excuse to share, with anyone willing to listen, two of my favorite things, phlosophy and Lord of the Rings, all in the service of my absolute favorite, the source and summit of all Truth, and all in the name of what this speaker series and our lives are about: Growth in holiness.

With that in mind, I will focus (or try to focus—I am a philosophy student) on 5 points where the Catholic philosophy underlying LotR shines through and reveals to us, through the entertaining and beautiful meidum of literature and cinema  important truths that are hard to find in the cynical mainstream modern world.  For this endeavor I rely heavily upon Peter Kreeft’s elucidation in The Philosophy of Tolkien: The Worldview Behind The Lord of the Rings. Full of quotes from Tolkien as well as Tolkien’s good friend C. S. Lewis, this is an awesome and definitely manageable read; (Kreeft says that a possible use of the book is for an intro to philosophy class.) [ So I guess, this talk is my interpretation of Kreeft’s interpretation of Lewis’s interpretation of Tolkien’s story…] Drawing from Kreeft, Lewis, Tolkien, and the Catholic philosophical tradition in general, I will try to highlight important lessons in the areas of one: 1. Science  and Technology 2. Man (ie, humanity) [PK’s note on sexist language: he says, Those who insist on changing the cenutries old convention by which’he’ is shorthand for ‘he or she’ are invited to pay their dues to the newly neutered grammar god and add a ‘she’ to each ‘he’ in the following “If he (or she) does not have a tin ear for language, he (or she) will change his (or her) mind about his (or her) linguistic “improvement”, I (or we) think.”] 3. Ethics  4.Heroism 5. Hope and Sorrow  .  These points overlap and interpenetrate one another quite a bit, and it was quite difficult to narrow it down to five points and keep them neat and orderly. I get too excited about this stuff.

Throughout I will constantly rip on ‘the modern world’ ‘modernitiy’, ‘;moderns’ in a perhaps rather overly simplistic way, but I don’t mean to promote a nostalgic recovery of a lost time nor do I really think modernity is 100% bad. Modern technology and other advances are potentially great, but they can be misused or easily distract us from the truly important and real, creating an atmosphere like that W. H. Auden depicts in his poem Sept. 1 1939:

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good

LotR is, in Kreeft’s words, “a long and beautiful alarm clock”—it reminds us of where we are, and it’s not home, despite our attempts to pretend we’re right where we’re supposed to be.  We are in a war.  A spiritual and very real epic struggle to get to our eternal home or lose it forever.