Greetings
all. It’s been a while since I posted to the thread, but I have been watching the debate unfold with great interest. The discussion of Truth/truths is fascinating and I think central to what Tolkien was working through in his subcreation. To belabour a point I first may a while ago on this thread, I think that it is entirely appropriate to see the confrontation between the Nazgűl and the Fellowship as a confrontation between those who wish to defend the right of the Free Peoples to maintain their own sense of truth(s) against the false imposition of a totalitarian Truth by the forces of Mordor.
If that paragraph makes it look as though I am equating capital-T Truth with the project of Sauron – well, yes, I am. But please bear with me
davem, Mark 12_30, Lyta, Child and
H-I as I am not calling you Nazgűl (although I bet you’d all look totally cool in black)
Sauron’s project, as far as I can figure it, is to force a situation upon the world in which his own personal vision of truth (through his ego I/Eye) becomes
the vision of Truth. And that’s some really dangerous territory that I think this thread is beginning to slip into. In this ‘enchanting’ or ‘joyous’ or ‘through a glass darkly’ kind of truth-apprehension that we are celebrating here (and that many of us find in Tolkien’s works) there is a real danger that we will mistake a mirror for a window, and project onto others our own personal views.
In this intuitive moment of apprehension of Truth, there are two possibilities of what’s happening. First, we are engaging with Truth (whatever that might be) but we will only ever be able to do so from our own limited and individual perspective. So while we may ‘see’ Truth we can only ever bring it into our own lives – yoke it to the horizons of our own historical experience – as an individually-understood version or truth of that Truth. The other, rather more simple and disturbing possibility that we’ve explored, is that there is no Truth, and all we see is ourselves, and we then pretend that truth of our own making is the Truth (and this is the Sauron approach).
I believe that most of us here are proceeding in the first mode – that is, we gain some apprehension of Truth through and in the very act of imaginatively engaging with Middle-Earth (which is itself the record of Tolkien’s imaginative engagement with Truth), but where we need to be very careful is in saying that “we’ve glimpse the Truth” and either leaving it there or, worse, begin to work out what that Truth might be for other people. To do this is to slip back into a more Sauron-like mode, as we take our own limited and individual perspective and try to extrapolate from that to what other people might think of it.
As I said in my last post (way back in box 201), I believe that there is a way past or through these individual experiences of truth – and I believe that Tolkien, in the Fellowship, gives us a nice model of that. Actually, where I think we see a way past the fragmentary nature of the endless plurality of truths (or, the endless plurality of individual perspectives on Truth that we experience in our historical time as our own truths) is in chapters like “The Council of Elrond” where reasoned dialogue and stories, conversation, equality of relationships, debate and argument are used to navigate and negotiate through the complicated nature of the history that they are confronting, without ever really pretending to understand the nature of that history. The task of the Council, remember, is not to decide What Does The Ring Mean? But What Must We
Do With The Ring?
It’s this process of debate, confrontation, negotiation, conversation that allows us to integrate our own truths (as perspectives onto Truth) into and with one another. The goal, then, is not to achieve Truth-as-Object (to look through some window and ‘just know’ that we are beholding Truth) but to find a way in which we can proceed in our explorations in a truth-full manner. And again, Tolkien has anticipated us: the point of the Quest is not, as Auden pointed out, to achieve the Precious Object but to
destroy it. The whole purpose of the Fellowship is to rid the world of the dangerous and totalitarian idea of a single overbearing Truth with which to unite and bind all ‘lesser’ truths (“One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them / One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them”).
There is a unity of Truth, but it is
not the unity that comes from singularity (“we all see the same Truth, even though we have different perspectives or versions of that Truth”); instead it is the kind of unity that we find in the Council of Elrond or amongst the Fellowship (“we are on the same journey with different paths, we have the same purpose but different ends”). Capital-T Truth cannot exist as a stationary object in the historical time of human experience, it can only be captured in and through the process of truth-full speaking that we enact as we engage with each others in reasoned and equal dialogue about our own truths (be those truths self-constructed or individual versions of the Truth).