[MD] Boromir's Journey

[Matt Kundert]

Hey Steve, Marsha,

Steve, you asked what the place for faith is in the kind of 
redescriptions of stuff we get from Pirsig, or the 
pragmatists generally, the place of faith in secular 
philosophies, roughly, and Marsha asked, "Faith in what?"  
And you scratched your head and said, "Yeah--the object 
half is what I want to get rid of."

Read this paragraph again, but this time with "faith" 
excised and a different word stuck in--

Steve said:
I don't think he had any different assessment of the 
probability of success for the Fellowship's task as any 
other members of the Fellowship, yet he was in great 
despair, and the others were not--at least not to the 
degree that Boromir was. I think the others had [hope] 
and that Boromir's lack of [hope] destroyed him and 
that his lack of [hope] was not a lack of belief. The 
difference was not the presence of absence of an 
intellectual structure but an attitude toward the world or 
trust in the process of life.

Matt:
It seems to me you're talking about hope, Mr. 
My-Blog-Is-Called-Atheistic-Hope.blogspot.com.

Hope is just that--it's an outlook, not a belief-structure.  
Rorty liked to summarize the difference between James 
and Nietzsche that way--the upshot of their philosophies 
was more or less the same, but their outlooks were 
completely different and shaped everything they did.

Whereas you'd likely say "faith _in_ X," thus creating a 
static object to believe in the eternality of, the hope 
locution is more like "hope _for_ X," which implies a 
future situation one wants to more towards.  Neither 
Frodo nor Gandalf had faith that Frodo _would_ succeed, 
but they both hoped that he _could_.  There is no future 
perfect verb here, but the power verb--I _can_, I am 
_able_, within my _ability_, my power.  Frodo and 
Gandalf _hoped_ that Frodo was able, but all they could 
do was try.  

Hope is a call to action.  Faith seems something more 
passive.  Faith seems to conceive an ideal, but hope 
resonates with the recognition of the disparity between 
the real and ideal, and the desire to reconcile the two.

Matt
 		 	   		  
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