1.1 How big is reality?
There are only three logically possible answers to this question.
The first is that "there are more things in heaven and earth (i.e. in reality) than are dreamed of in your philosophies (i.e. in thought)." That was Shakespeare's philosophy, as expressed by Hamlet to Horatio, who found it hard to believe in ghosts. This is the philosophy of the poet and of the happy man, for whom nature is a fullness, a moreness, and therefore wonderful. It is the philosophy of all pre-modern cultures.
The second possible answer is that there are fewer things in reality than in thought; that most of our thought is mere myth, error, convention, projection, fantasy, fallacy, folly, dream, etc. This is the philosophy of the unhappy man, the cynic, the pessimist: "Trust nobody and nothing." This philosophy is hardly ever found in any pre-modern culture, except in a small minority.
The third possibility is that there are exactly the same number of things in reality and in thought, that is, that we "know it all".
What difference does it make to your life which philosophy you believe?
It makes a total difference, a difference to absolutely every single thing in your life. It colors everything. For if you believe the first philosophy, as Shakespeare did, as Tolkien did, and as most pre-modern peoples did, then your fundamental attitude toward all reality is wonder and humility. You are like a small child in a large house. AS Tolkien said in one of his letters, "You are inside a very great story." You expect mysteries, you expect moreness: terrors to stop your heart and joys to break it. Reality is big. I think of the simple, haunting line in Ingmar bergman's movie The Seventh Seal: "It is the Angel of Death that's passing over us, Mia, it's the Angel of Death, the Angel of Death. And he's very big." In this big world there may be not only things like dragons, but even heroes.
The larger-than-life world is the one our ancestors lived in. Our culture's greatest sadness is that we no longer live in this world. Tolkien's greatest achievement is that he invites us to inhabit this world again. He shows us that this world is our home. He even shows us heroism: he not only shows us heroes but he also shows us that we ourselves believe in heroes. For after we have read Tolkien's unashamedly heroic epic, we do not say, "Well, that was a pleasant little escape from realit", but, "Hey! That was real!"
If you believe the second philosophy, that there are fewer things in Heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophies, then you are cynical, skeptical, suspicious, bored, jaded, detached, ironic, and definitely non-heroic. You are a reductionist: you reduce mystery to puzzle, love to lust, thought to cybernetics, reasoning to rationalizing, ideals to desires, man to ape, God to myth. In other words, you are a typically modern or post-modern man. (Is there much of a difference?) You buy into the first step of the scientific method: "Doubt everything that is not proved; treat every thought as guilty until proved innocent, false until proved true." The older philosophy treated thoughts as we treat people in court: innocent until proved guilty. (Compare Socrates's method with Descartes's on this score.)
The third philosophy is rationalism, in fact, arrogant rationalism: Everything in my thought is real, and everything real is in my thought. In ancient Greece Parmenides said, "What is thought and what is real is the same", and in modern Germany Hegel said, "The real is the rational and the rational is the real"; but I think only those with a divinity complex can actually believe that. And even pantheists, who believe that the whole cosmos in only a thought or dream, believe it is not our dream but God's, and therefore still "more", or transcendent to our thought--unless there is some confusion between us (or me) and God, in which case a shrink or a smack will serve the soul better than a syllogism.
Thomas Howard calls good fantasy a "flight to reality" because, though its details are fictional, the nature of its world, its universal principles and values, are true. Tolkien shows us the nature of the real world by his fantasy. He is making a statement about reality, about being, about metaphysics when he says:
The realm of fairy-story is wide and deep and high and filled with many things: all manner of beasts and birds are found there; shoreless seas and stars uncounted; beauty that is an enchantment, and an ever-present peril; both joy and sorrow as sharp as swords. In that realm a man may, perhaps, count himself fortunate to have wandered.
The fundamental reason for the popularity of The Lord of the Rings is that people sense it is real. No mere escape from reality can be voted "the greatest book of the century".
And that is why Tolkien does not tell us half of what he knows about his world. You can tell everything about fantasies, your dreams, or your thoughts, but not about anything real.
That is also why The Lord of The Rings bears endless rereading: it is heavy enough to bear the mind's journeys into it, like our world. In fact, it is perhaps the most "heavy", full, detailed, complex, real invented world in all of human literature.
Tolkien himself tells us that he felt, in creating it, as we feel in reading it: that it was discovered, not invented, that it had always been there, and it was as much a surprise to Tolkien to discover it as it is to us: "I had the sense of recording what was already 'there', somewhere; not of 'inventing'." Great authors often say that about the experience of writing their masterpieces.
C.S. Lewis wrote from the same point of view:
We must not listen to [Alexander] Pope's maxim about the proper study of mankind. "Know then thyself, presume not God to scan,/ The proper study of mankind is man."The proper study of mankind is everything.
We should never ask of anything "Is it real?" For everything is real. The proper question is, "A real what?"
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