[MD] Boromir's Journey

[Steven Peterson]

Hi Matt,


On Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 12:24 AM, Matt Kundert
<pirsigaffliction at hotmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

Thanks, Matt. The connection to hope seems important. I think there is
a lot of overlap as you point out that "hope" can be substituted for
"faith" without changing the meaning in the bit you quoted. Hope is
certainly a different dimension from belief, but I still think that
there is something to faith outside of hope. I'm trying for a secular
description of the Sabbath mind or "nirvana is samsara"  rather than
the Christian "assurance of things hoped for." Even when things are
not as they were hoped to be, and even much worse that you hoped, one
can still recognize a perspective like God sitting back in his chair
on the seventh day and pronouncing "it is good." Sometimes everything
really sucks, but "sucking" is just how it is sometimes in this
perfect world. There is the realization that if things *never* sucked,
it wouldn't be a perfect world anymore.

It is not only the desire to reconcile the real and the ideal, though
that may be part of it. It is also to recognize that from a certain
point of view, the real always already is ideal. It isn't that the
pain is gone, but that the pain is exactly as it should be, so pain
doesn't need to become sufferring.

I hope that makes some sense and clarifies a bit. I wish I had more
time, but I'm pretty busy for the next couple of days.

(I'd like to hear Sam Norton weigh in here. Does he ever post anymore?)

Best,
Steve