The Hobbit and
Philosophy belongs to a series of ‘and philosophy’ edited
books. The idea is to entice the reader into reading about
philosophy using elements of popular culture such as Tolkien’s The
Hobbit which is edited by
Gregory Bassham and Eric Bronson .
Adventure
This
post comments on the first contribution by Gregory Bassham
exploring the link between adventure and personal growth. Despite
hankerings to be James Bond stemming from childhood ambitions, my
suspicion is that adventure is not fun at all in real life, so I
would tend to agree with the early Bilbo (the hobbit) that adventures
are ‘nasty disturbing uncomfortable things’ only to be
experienced second-hand in books or on film. Perhaps I am too
nervous to venture outside of my comfort zone at the expense of my
personal growth. This reminds me of a poster I saw. It advised:
Don't join the army. Don't become a better you. I'm inclined to
take its literal advice. Too old to join the army, anyway.
One is meant to grow in
wisdom and virtue as a result of adventure. Wisdom is deep insight
about living or something like that. As Bassham says, “a wise
person understands what's important in life, keeps lesser things in
proper perspective, and understands what's needed in order to live
well and to cope with the problems of life.” Adventure (or other
forms of challenging experiences) “can deepen our
self-understanding and they can
broaden our experiences.”
Thus we become wiser. Socrates apparently advised that we need to
know ourselves. We tend to have inflated views of ourselves . This
presumably makes us happy but is it the sort of happiness that is
worth having? What happens when our inflated views are
systematically dismantled and we are, so to speak, destroyed? Then
what? Anyway, apparently if you think you have it all already,
wisdom and goodness, then you won't pursue wisdom and goodness. So
you need to examine yourself ruthlessly, Socrates says.
Pain
and suffering apparently can deepen self-understanding. C. S. Lewis
(Tolkien's friend who wrote the Narnia books) apparently said pain can
“curb our pride, teach us patience, steel us against adversity”
and so on. One wonders if C.S. Lewis was tempted to argue that this
is the reason why God allows evil. This seemed at any rate to be the
Roman philosopher Seneca's view. However, this would not explain why
God allows extreme evil such as torture or volcanoes obliterating
Pompeii or the Lisbon earthquake or 9/11 etc which would seem to go
overboard in curbing our pride and teaching us patience. Even if
torture made a man of someone, it hardly seems justified to allow it
to happen in order to improve someone's character. C.S. Lewis also
adds that pain teaches us we were “made for another world”. I
suppose the logic of this is that since we are so fragile and
vulnerable in this world, we must be designed to live in a different
world. Except that I think we were designed by a mechanical process
called natural selection (we were bred by nature) which is
constrained by the laws of nature in how well it can design us to
flourish in this world.
One
way to broaden one's experience is to explore philosophy. That seems
to me a safer way to gain wisdom and virtue, even if philosophy
bites. Travel is another way to broaden one's experience though I'm
even too nervous to do that. Go to Africa and you get tropical
diseases like ebola and malaria. Go to the Middle East and you get
terrorists taking you hostage. And so on, at least according to the
media.
Bilbo
Baggins grows in virtue as a result of his adventures. A shock or
trauma can apparently have a huge moral impact on a person.
Sometimes the experience can have religious overtones. Bassham
declares that such moral transformations are rare and do not last
long. A more sustainable path to moral growth is apparently through
habit and training. This would explain why a quick moral
transformation would not last long because there is not the time for
good moral habits to become ingrained. Adventures presumably would
allow one to develop some good moral habits such as behaving in a
courageous way. Note this would make it impossible for a human to
behave perfectly all one's life since a human would need to work at
good moral habits. A human can't get everything right all at once.
This seems to me to make it unfair that according to Christianity we
deserve to be tortured eternally in hell for the most minor of
transgressions (and thus can only be saved by the grace of Jesus
Christ which has various strings attached).
The
next post comments on the Hobbit and Chinese philosophy.
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