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Old 02-24-2007, 06:31 AM   #293
Raynor
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I mean that I can accept all kinds of different beliefs as they are presented - I can understand them and see how they work without having to believe them myself.
So, if I may ask, does that basically mean that you understand and "tollerate" this work, but you do not consider it compatible with morality?
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A comment about the 'reasoning' behind his writing is very different to the kind of textual analysis he was carrying out in response to letters from his readers who were responding to the text on the page. I'm talking about where he has a letter from someone saying "Oooh, Gandalf reminds me a bit of...." and Tolkien responds to that in much the same way as we respond to one another in discussion about the printed text. Tolkien's thoughts as he drafts are different - but even then he is not prevented from acting as a reader in response to his won work. That's what writers do - critically examine and edit their work in the draft, and frequently respond to it by noticing other meanings they had not thought about.
This seems to me as a logical fallacy of argument from ignorance. The fact that Tolkien didn't put in the drafts all his thoughts (and we don't even know all his drafts) doesn't mean that we should restrict our judgement of the mechanism of his writting strictly to what appears in the drafts. This interpretation ignores the great importance spirituality had for Tolkien, it enforces a chasm between stated intention and actual work, with no _single_ positive proof, while at the same time unwarrantly denigrates Tolkien, by implying a certain dishonesty on his part.
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Actually, that's an interesting quote as it is Tolkien saying that any kind of moral truth must never ever be explicit and must not be able to be compared to the 'real world'.
That's erroneous reasoning; not explicit does not mean or imply impossibility of comparison.
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Maybe it helps if we have good for humans and Good for gods - to distinguish them?
But is good different only due to our limited knowledge, or are we talking about two incompatible types of good?
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Last edited by Raynor; 02-25-2007 at 12:48 AM.
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