I recently completed reading a work by author George MacDonald called Phantastes. MacDonald was an author with whose works C.S. Lewis was well acquainted, as evidenced by his composing of an anthology of MacDonald's works, as well as including him as a central character in his short fiction The Great Divorce. Phantastes is a fairy-story, and it concerns the travels of a young man named Anodos, who wakes to find himself in Fairy Land. At the end of the story he awakens back home in his own world, and muses over his time spent in Fairy Land. He wonders, "Could I translate the experience of my travels there, into common life? This was the question" (MacDonald 231). Through the character of Anodos I think that MacDonald proposes an interesting question to consider: why are fairy-stories valuable?
Although we ourselves are unable to actually step into Fairy Land, we nevertheless enter it figuratively when we read fairy-stories. By doing so we can learn and experience a reality very similar to our own world and, once we step away from the story, we may very well be able to "translate" our experiences in this secondary world into experience and action in the primary world. I think that MacDonald implies through this work that it is indeed possible to benefit from fairy-stories in this way. In the thoughts following the aforementioned quote, MacDonald notes that mankind's "experience yet runs parallel to that of Fairy Land" (MacDonald 231), which implicitly conveys that MacDonald believed that fairy-stories were directly relatable to the readers' lives.
This theme is evident in Lewis' works, especially in his essay "Myth Became Fact" in which he discusses how we can derive reality from stories; it is also evident in G.K. Chesterton's "Ethics of Elfland" in which he discusses the moral lessons he himself learned from fairy-stories. Each of these authors believed that there were experiences that could be communicated through the secondary world of story, especially in fairy-tales, which appealed especially to the imagination and, therefore, the creative part of humanity. MacDonald's Phantastes serves both to share experiences with readers and to remind them why and how fairy-stories are valuable to read.
Work Cited:
MacDonald, George. Phantastes. Peabody: Hendrickson Publishers. 2011.
Sunday, February 19, 2012
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
Frank Baxter: C.S. Lewis. Narnia and Tolkien
Frank Baxter: C.S. Lewis. Narnia and Tolkien
2nd Entry
In Tolkien’s essay On Fairy-Stories Tolkien makes a distinction between faerie and fairy, with the latter a being (creature). Through-out on Fairy-stories, Tolkien refutes many tales that use to be called fairy-tales as not. For example Peter Rabbit Cotton Tail, is considered by Tolkien as a beast-fable not a true fairy-tale. The question is if the Chronicles of Narnia fit within his definition of what he would call a “fairy-tale”
Narnia certainly fits within his definition of a secondary world, but that is not nearly enough to be considered a faerie tale. In his work, On Fairy Stories Tolkien, states “...fairy stories as a whole have three faces: the Mystical towards the Supernatural; the Magical towards the Nature, and the Mirror of scorn and pity towards Man.” (Tolkien, 53)
For the first subject matter, supernatural, it is clear throughout each book that there are supernatural powers. Examples are the White Witch turning individuals into stone, a silver chair that can enchant a Knight, a pool that will turn anything that enters it gold. Now for the second subject of nature, there are more subtle references to the importance throughout the book. For example the dryad are clearly symbols for the forest, as they move the trees to fight men (natures wrath). The destruction of nature (and the sadness) can be seen in the last book where trees are chopped down and C.S, Lewis describes the horrible scene of the dryad dying. The forest can talk and are held sacred.
For the last criteria of Mirror of scorn and pity of man, is not seen as clearly towards the main characters (as they are respected.) Though C.S. Lewis enables them to have grave flaws, Edmund being a traitor, Eustace being an ass and Jill so prideful almost killing Eustace. But especially within the minor human charters can their pity and scorn be seen. The people of Calormen all worship the wrong entity, Digory’s uncle is a conniving old man that risks others at his expense.
Cleary Narnia meets the criteria that Tolkien laid out and should be considered a fairy-tale. But Tolkien also states that “Most good 'fairy-stories' are bout the adventures of men in the perilous realm or upon its shadowy marches.” (Tolkien, 42) and the question remain is Narnia a good story?
I think that yes it is.
Works cited:
Tolkien, J.R.R. On Fairy-Stories. Web.
2nd Entry
In Tolkien’s essay On Fairy-Stories Tolkien makes a distinction between faerie and fairy, with the latter a being (creature). Through-out on Fairy-stories, Tolkien refutes many tales that use to be called fairy-tales as not. For example Peter Rabbit Cotton Tail, is considered by Tolkien as a beast-fable not a true fairy-tale. The question is if the Chronicles of Narnia fit within his definition of what he would call a “fairy-tale”
Narnia certainly fits within his definition of a secondary world, but that is not nearly enough to be considered a faerie tale. In his work, On Fairy Stories Tolkien, states “...fairy stories as a whole have three faces: the Mystical towards the Supernatural; the Magical towards the Nature, and the Mirror of scorn and pity towards Man.” (Tolkien, 53)
For the first subject matter, supernatural, it is clear throughout each book that there are supernatural powers. Examples are the White Witch turning individuals into stone, a silver chair that can enchant a Knight, a pool that will turn anything that enters it gold. Now for the second subject of nature, there are more subtle references to the importance throughout the book. For example the dryad are clearly symbols for the forest, as they move the trees to fight men (natures wrath). The destruction of nature (and the sadness) can be seen in the last book where trees are chopped down and C.S, Lewis describes the horrible scene of the dryad dying. The forest can talk and are held sacred.
For the last criteria of Mirror of scorn and pity of man, is not seen as clearly towards the main characters (as they are respected.) Though C.S. Lewis enables them to have grave flaws, Edmund being a traitor, Eustace being an ass and Jill so prideful almost killing Eustace. But especially within the minor human charters can their pity and scorn be seen. The people of Calormen all worship the wrong entity, Digory’s uncle is a conniving old man that risks others at his expense.
Cleary Narnia meets the criteria that Tolkien laid out and should be considered a fairy-tale. But Tolkien also states that “Most good 'fairy-stories' are bout the adventures of men in the perilous realm or upon its shadowy marches.” (Tolkien, 42) and the question remain is Narnia a good story?
I think that yes it is.
Works cited:
Tolkien, J.R.R. On Fairy-Stories. Web.
Frank Baxter: Fisher, C.S. Lewis and Narnia
Frank Baxter
Fisher, C.S. Lewis and Narnia
1st Entry
In Fisher’s work he called human beings as Homo narras, that is to mean that we communicate what it men’s to be human by telling stories. In the first story of Chronicles of Narnia, “The Magicians Nephew”, he tells of the story of creation. While this creation is that of a fictional world, I believe that C.S. Lewis is trying to convey the same sort creation that many of the world religion’s hold today.
C.S. was likely trying to get us to feel and experience (as close as possible creation). This is likely true especially if one evaluates C.S Lewis concepts of myths. Where one can only feel the experience but not think, or think or not feel, the myth for him is an attempt at bridging the gapped between these two ideas. In his work you can almost feel creation, as you read you can feel the power of Aslan's song overpower you and I could almost visualize the world being born.
A question is whether C.S. Lewis was just trying to convey the biblical story to believers, or is this a story that every human can relate too. While many may claim using terms of son of Adam and daughter of Eve, this excludes non believers, but many non-believers are familiar with this story and could perhaps imagine the lion symbolism of song as the comics forces that shaped our world and human experience.
Fisher, C.S. Lewis and Narnia
1st Entry
In Fisher’s work he called human beings as Homo narras, that is to mean that we communicate what it men’s to be human by telling stories. In the first story of Chronicles of Narnia, “The Magicians Nephew”, he tells of the story of creation. While this creation is that of a fictional world, I believe that C.S. Lewis is trying to convey the same sort creation that many of the world religion’s hold today.
C.S. was likely trying to get us to feel and experience (as close as possible creation). This is likely true especially if one evaluates C.S Lewis concepts of myths. Where one can only feel the experience but not think, or think or not feel, the myth for him is an attempt at bridging the gapped between these two ideas. In his work you can almost feel creation, as you read you can feel the power of Aslan's song overpower you and I could almost visualize the world being born.
A question is whether C.S. Lewis was just trying to convey the biblical story to believers, or is this a story that every human can relate too. While many may claim using terms of son of Adam and daughter of Eve, this excludes non believers, but many non-believers are familiar with this story and could perhaps imagine the lion symbolism of song as the comics forces that shaped our world and human experience.
Saturday, February 11, 2012
Daniel Williams: Nietszche's Critique of Pure Fiction; 2/11/12
In yet another of the readings from my Existentialist philosophy class, I took notice of an interesting comment by philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, which expressed an idea fundamentally opposed to the ideas of Lewis we have been discussing in class.
Nietzsche writes, "In Christianity neither morality nor religion has even a single point of contact with reality . . . This world of pure fiction is vastly inferior to the world of dreams insofar as the latter mirrors reality, whereas the former falsifies, devalues, and negates reality," (Nietzsche, 132). Here Nietzsche is arguing that religion (and therefore myth, too) creates a world that is wholly disconnected from reality. He even argues that it "is rooted in hatred of the natural (of reality!)" (Nietzsche, 132). For Nietzsche, the Secondary World of myth and story takes one further away from what is real, a sentiment that reminds me of our brief discussion of Plato's belief that the poetic takes one further away from the true reality, which he called the Forms. Whereas Lewis believes that myth actually connects reality and truth, here the opposing view is represented: the more one invests oneself in religious mythology, the less one is rooted in reality, and in fact the more one comes to hate what is real.
Obviously Lewis would have disagreed here with Nietzsche, but not merely on the subject of myth. Lewis expressed a love of nature, a fact which is evident in his Narnia series, among other writings. Nietzsche's criticism that pure fiction is characterized by and results in a hatred of the natural seems wholly inapplicable to Lewis, as well as some of his contemporaries, like Tolkien. On the contrary, it seems that Lewis' love of myth and his religious belief directly influenced his love of nature, i.e. of the physical world. It is true, however, that Lewis would have valued the Supernatural more than the Natural, and perhaps it is this at which Nietzsche's criticism is directed. Considering that for Nietzsche there was only the Natural world, anything that directed attention away from that world was false and even nonsensical. No truths could lie outside the Natural world. Or, since Nietzsche was nihilistic in his philosophy, truth itself was a meaningless concept. There existed only reality, only the concrete, Natural world, and any musings beyond that were exercises in ignorance.
I would not consider it surprising to learn that some of Lewis' arguments are directed against ideas that Nietzsche himself propounded. The views each of these men expressed are diametrically opposed: for Lewis, myth contains a great deal of reality in it; for Nietzsche, myth and all religion contain nothing of the sort, only delusion. I think that it is highly probable that Lewis engaged in discussion with philosophers who would have represented Nietzsche's ideas, just as he was writing "Myth Became Fact" in response to a philosopher who discounted the value of mythology. Myth and story were fundamental to Lewis' thought, and therefore the ideas expressed by Nietzsche represented the type of thought against which Lewis was reacting.
Work Cited: Nietzsche, Friedrich: "Human, All Too Human" in L. Nathan Oaklander's Existentialist Philosophy: An Introduction. 2nd Edition. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall. 1996. pp. 128-135.
Nietzsche writes, "In Christianity neither morality nor religion has even a single point of contact with reality . . . This world of pure fiction is vastly inferior to the world of dreams insofar as the latter mirrors reality, whereas the former falsifies, devalues, and negates reality," (Nietzsche, 132). Here Nietzsche is arguing that religion (and therefore myth, too) creates a world that is wholly disconnected from reality. He even argues that it "is rooted in hatred of the natural (of reality!)" (Nietzsche, 132). For Nietzsche, the Secondary World of myth and story takes one further away from what is real, a sentiment that reminds me of our brief discussion of Plato's belief that the poetic takes one further away from the true reality, which he called the Forms. Whereas Lewis believes that myth actually connects reality and truth, here the opposing view is represented: the more one invests oneself in religious mythology, the less one is rooted in reality, and in fact the more one comes to hate what is real.
Obviously Lewis would have disagreed here with Nietzsche, but not merely on the subject of myth. Lewis expressed a love of nature, a fact which is evident in his Narnia series, among other writings. Nietzsche's criticism that pure fiction is characterized by and results in a hatred of the natural seems wholly inapplicable to Lewis, as well as some of his contemporaries, like Tolkien. On the contrary, it seems that Lewis' love of myth and his religious belief directly influenced his love of nature, i.e. of the physical world. It is true, however, that Lewis would have valued the Supernatural more than the Natural, and perhaps it is this at which Nietzsche's criticism is directed. Considering that for Nietzsche there was only the Natural world, anything that directed attention away from that world was false and even nonsensical. No truths could lie outside the Natural world. Or, since Nietzsche was nihilistic in his philosophy, truth itself was a meaningless concept. There existed only reality, only the concrete, Natural world, and any musings beyond that were exercises in ignorance.
I would not consider it surprising to learn that some of Lewis' arguments are directed against ideas that Nietzsche himself propounded. The views each of these men expressed are diametrically opposed: for Lewis, myth contains a great deal of reality in it; for Nietzsche, myth and all religion contain nothing of the sort, only delusion. I think that it is highly probable that Lewis engaged in discussion with philosophers who would have represented Nietzsche's ideas, just as he was writing "Myth Became Fact" in response to a philosopher who discounted the value of mythology. Myth and story were fundamental to Lewis' thought, and therefore the ideas expressed by Nietzsche represented the type of thought against which Lewis was reacting.
Work Cited: Nietzsche, Friedrich: "Human, All Too Human" in L. Nathan Oaklander's Existentialist Philosophy: An Introduction. 2nd Edition. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall. 1996. pp. 128-135.
Daniel Williams: Kierkegaard's Existentialism, Lewis, and the Subjective; 2/11/12
In the existentialist class that I am taking, I recently read several selections from the work of philosopher Soren Kierkegaard. As I was proceeding through and studying the readings, I remarked upon some similarities they had to the discussion in our Lewis class. Most notable to me was Kierkegaard's insistence upon subjectivity as truth: he fundamentally argued that the abstract, the purely rational, was irrelevant or at least unrelated to concrete human experience. This reminds me of Lewis' arguments in the "Myth Became Fact" essay, in which he notes that human thought has a tendency towards the abstract, whereas human experience is necessarily concrete. Lewis contended that myth is one way of bridging the gap between the concrete and the abstract. In other words, myth is the means of expressing certain truths in a manner in which they can be understood experientially, even if it is experience of a Secondary (create) world, rather than the primary world.
I believe that Kierkegaard, although he wrote before Lewis, would have agreed at least in part with the thoughts Lewis expressed in that essay. While Kierkegaard was writing mainly as a reaction against several of the enlightenment philosophers, such as Immanuel Kant, rather than commenting on the value of myth as did Lewis, I think that Kierkegaard would appreciate Lewis' position, namely because it implies that the abstract is separate from, and therefore disparate with, the concrete, subjective experience. Kierkegaard believed that pure rationality (the defining characteristic of Kant's works) took one far away from experience, and therefore was a mode of philosophy ultimately useless to the philosopher. Though Lewis seems to value rationality more than Kierkegaard, there nevertheless appears to be agreement about the difficulty of relating the abstract and concrete realities.
Although their writings and philosophies have more differences than similarities, it was interesting to note that both Kierkegaard and Lewis placed value on experience as a means to attaining truth. Kierkegaard wrote mainly about faith as the subjective means to truth, and while Lewis certainly shared that value of faith, he also emphasized myth and story as a means to grasping the more abstract truths about reality.
I find there is much to be admired about their emphasis on the subjective. I certainly believe in reason as a means to knowledge, yet I also agree with both Kierkegaard and Lewis that the abstract world may not be relatable to the experiential world in several instances, at least not without something like myth, story, or human narration in general acting as a medium through which the abstract may be understood. Mathematical truths, for example, are purely abstract truths, but they become meaningful to the world of experience because humanity has found a means to bridge the gap between the abstract and the experiential. In the same way, I think that Lewis' idea of myth as another bridge is a valuable idea. Kierkegaard, however, may have entirely rejected the idea that there was an abstract, rational world to which the experiential may be connected; nevertheless I cannot help note a similar line of thinking behind both Kierkegaard's and Lewis' philosophy about the objective and subjective.
I believe that Kierkegaard, although he wrote before Lewis, would have agreed at least in part with the thoughts Lewis expressed in that essay. While Kierkegaard was writing mainly as a reaction against several of the enlightenment philosophers, such as Immanuel Kant, rather than commenting on the value of myth as did Lewis, I think that Kierkegaard would appreciate Lewis' position, namely because it implies that the abstract is separate from, and therefore disparate with, the concrete, subjective experience. Kierkegaard believed that pure rationality (the defining characteristic of Kant's works) took one far away from experience, and therefore was a mode of philosophy ultimately useless to the philosopher. Though Lewis seems to value rationality more than Kierkegaard, there nevertheless appears to be agreement about the difficulty of relating the abstract and concrete realities.
Although their writings and philosophies have more differences than similarities, it was interesting to note that both Kierkegaard and Lewis placed value on experience as a means to attaining truth. Kierkegaard wrote mainly about faith as the subjective means to truth, and while Lewis certainly shared that value of faith, he also emphasized myth and story as a means to grasping the more abstract truths about reality.
I find there is much to be admired about their emphasis on the subjective. I certainly believe in reason as a means to knowledge, yet I also agree with both Kierkegaard and Lewis that the abstract world may not be relatable to the experiential world in several instances, at least not without something like myth, story, or human narration in general acting as a medium through which the abstract may be understood. Mathematical truths, for example, are purely abstract truths, but they become meaningful to the world of experience because humanity has found a means to bridge the gap between the abstract and the experiential. In the same way, I think that Lewis' idea of myth as another bridge is a valuable idea. Kierkegaard, however, may have entirely rejected the idea that there was an abstract, rational world to which the experiential may be connected; nevertheless I cannot help note a similar line of thinking behind both Kierkegaard's and Lewis' philosophy about the objective and subjective.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)