'The Lord of the Rings and Philosophy'

[Lush]

This thread has rocked my world.

Lyta, a number of posts again, you asked: "Can there be happiness if there is desire? Can desire be reconciled with a moral code, or can it be simply resisted and a moral life be adhered to with a secret longing?"

I'd say a big "HELL NO" to both of those inquiries.

The nature of desire is destructive, as we've said before.

Happily (at least for me), it can be argued a person does not need desire in order to achieve anything.

With that notion in mind, I would like to put forth the idea that Bombadil is one of those creatures that can achieve anything without actually desiring the said achievement. This is a concept tied in closely to Eastern philosophy; something Tolkien didn't subscribe to, as far as we can tell, but I nevertheless find it curiously applicable here.

This philosophy holds not only that "no desire equals no suffering" but also the notion that "anything can be achieved without desire." As in: [good?] deeds are to be done for the sake of doing them.

Furthermore, the secret longing that you speak of, I believe, is the most destructive force within the individual and within society; because it manifests itself in a person's deeds, sometimes without a person even knowing it.

The power of longing lies not in its subject and the means of getting to or not getting to said subject, but in its mere existence.

This is why I find people that suppress their [immoral?] urges to be hilarious: because in my view they're not any better off as that cokehead that cannot resist doing another line or whatever one's poison of choice ultimately is.

At the end of the day, I find that in terms of morality or immorality, we are all equal before God. There can be none of that, "Well I'm not Hitler or Sauron or anything, so I must have a better shot at redemption" in my eyes.

Furthermore, I maintain that any theory that tries to encompass the notions of morality will be incomplete, whether it be Kant's or Aiwendil's (btw, my friend, the laws of physics are not as cut and dry as you make them out to be, there is lots of stuff going on in that realm that we may never understand) or Tolkien's, or whatever.

I like to take this whole morality business one day and one deed at a time; like Tolkien's Sam, I believe. I
Which is why I am ultimately satisfied with the "fuzzy" (but are they warm too? [img]smilies/wink.gif[/img] ) notions of immorality that Tolkien puts forth in LotR.

Whether consiously or not, Tolkien makes it pretty clear that he does not have all the answers.

Something about that makes the LotR ring truer for me than Plato's ponderings.

Oh, and Diamond: Don't give up on the notion of a human "heart," because of some cheesy lines in some cheesy movies.

The truth is, each human heart is corrupted somehow. That doesn't mean that the heart's leanings won't surprise you every once in a while.

And furthermore, my priest tells me that the divine cannot be reached through the pure workings of our conscience. It's gotta be a combined effort (remember Frodo at Weathertop? How he knew and did not know what he was doing or what force was speaking through him? Eh? Eh?).