I do still think you're on to something ... not certain yet that 'sentience' is the way I'll end up thinking about it, but ... well, more about that in a moment.
I'm not sure this would be true for all the abysmal real world choices people are called upon to make.Sass wrote:If you could truly feel my pain, not just acknowledge the fact that I have pain, then ... you could no more inflict pain upon me than you could methodically take a knife and carve upon yourself. So, I'm sorry, but I still have to reject your concept that empathy is possible for evil.
When I first read Faramond's and Griffy's objections to imagination as the source of evil, I had trouble orienting myself to the argument they were making. But as I thought about it, I realized they were thinking about 'evil' as 'wrongdoing' ... and I guess I was thinking about imagination (openness) and fear (closed-ness) more as properties of the human spirit, rather than as choices to behave a certain way.
One can do wrong without being evil, in other words, and vice versa. I think that's where the possibility enters that a person might have both imagination and empathy ... and even too much imagination, as Griffy says ... and yet choose to do wrong and to cause harm.
I was watching a movie last night that took place in France during the 1930s ... it was sort of a 'snapshot' of several people's lives and the choices they made to survive those times ... not committing terrible crimes, you know, but just ... endless compromises of the soul, sucking up to people they hated, dropping a dime on friends to make themselves appear loyal, hoping to get through the Vichy regime with their own meager fortunes intact. So it was close to the front of my mind that we all temporize, find justification for acts which, on reflection, are not upright. (It was Sméagol's birthday, after all.) And it doesn't have to be such a dire situation as the eve of war. It doesn't have to be outrageous greed, like the greed of Goldman Sachs. Ordinary greed, ordinary selfishness, ordinary fear are sufficient provocation for most of us to make bad choices.
Yeah, Tolkien is very much not post-modern in this respect. He allows the primary evil in his story to be an evil that is 'theological' rather than behavioral.Sass wrote:I re-iterate that, in Morgoth, or Sauron, we are not dealing with ordinary evil.
That's why Saruman is more interesting than Sauron, imo, because he is wicked, you know? He makes abominable choices to further his own ends, and we are shown (to some extent) the evolution of those choices in the text, ending with his final wages. Whereas Sauron (having been presented to us before Morgoth was presented to us) has to be accepted by the reader as inherently evil, evil without cause and evil beyond curing, with only a hint at the underlying cosmogeny that accounts for the appearance of such a being in the world.
Thus, countering the evil represented by Sauron is not presented to us as ... a career recommendation, you know? It is rather the ambient and other-wordly condition of the tale, the theological terms under which the story takes place and against which the virtues of the heroes are played out. No one takes on Sauron directly ... not just because he's too strong but because he's too other. Instead they wage the inner war against the resonance of what he represents within themselves.
But now that we have the Sil, we have a more behavioral treatment of Sauron.
I am intrigued by this idea that Sauron secretly longs to assert himself, even while still under the dominion of Morgoth, and that the Ring secretly longs to be its own master.Sass wrote:I shall need to seriously consider cowardice. What a thoroughly despicable character Sauron is! At least Morgoth has the grandeur of a fallen angel ....Voronwë wrote:... his unwillingness to meet strength with strength ... definitely suggests that he was absolutely capable of imagining -- and fearing -- defeat, long before he was brought down by Gil-Galad, Elendil, and Isildur.
I don't know whether I can agree that the Ring prompted Gollum to commit suicide ... I'm not sure that self-destruction is ever a thing willed by the sort of will to power we are contemplating here. But I don't find it entirely unthinkable either.
If Morgoth were permitted to return to within Arda, and came again to Middle Earth, what would Sauron's relationship be to him?
It is not difficult for me to imagine the inner conflict, the inner chaos, provoked in one who was long subservient, then free, and now faced with subservience again. It's quite an intriguing question, in my opinion, whether seeing all the works of one's self and one's former master destroyed would not be preferable to becoming subservient again. It is precisely the sort of quandry that would break the mind of the sort of character Tolkien has created in Sauron.
If the Ring is to Sauron as Sauron was to Morgoth (or has become so by now over the millennia of separation) is it too far-fetched to imagine a final act of wanton self-destruction, committed knowing that Sauron too and all of Barad-dûr are brought down by that act?
Admittedly Tolkien himself did not explore these avenues. I am not willing to say, though, that the story precludes their exploration.