Alasdair MacIntyre:
Our kinship to the dolphin and the chimpanzee cannot be discarded and this is a kinship not only with respect to the animality of the body, but also with respect to forms of life. The greatest students of animal behavior have exercised skills and sensibilities that resemble closely those of the gifted social or cultural anthropologist. […]
… And when a species, such as our own, is able through the use of language to become reflective about its reasons, it is not only the having of reasons that is now on occasion causally effective in guiding behavior, but the having of reasons for taking this set of considerations rather than that to be in this particular situation genuinely reason-affording that is causally effective.
J. R. R Tolkien:
Philology has been dethroned from the high place it once had in this court of inquiry. Max Müller’s view of mythology as a “disease of language” can be abandoned without regret. Mythology is not a disease at all, though it may like all human things become diseased. You might as well say that thinking is a disease of the mind. It would be more near the truth to say that languages, especially modern European languages, are a disease of mythology. But Language cannot, all the same, be dismissed. The incarnate mind, the tongue, and the tale are in our world coeval. The human mind, endowed with the powers of generalization and abstraction, sees not only green-grass, discriminating it from other things (and finding it fair to look upon), but sees that it is green as well as being grass. But how powerful, how stimulating to the very faculty that produced it, was the invention of the adjective: no spell or incantation in Faerie is more potent. And that is not surprising: such incantations might indeed be said to be only another view of adjectives, a part of speech in a mythical grammar. The mind that thought of light, heavy, grey, yellow, still, swift, also conceived of magic that would make heavy things light and able to fly, turn grey lead into yellow gold, and the still rock into a swift water. If it could do the one, it could do the other; it inevitably did both. When we can take green from grass, blue from heaven, and red from blood, we have already an enchanter’s power—upon one plane; and the desire to wield that power in the world external to our minds awakes. It does not follow that we shall use that power well upon any plane. We may put a deadly green upon a man’s face and produce a horror; we may make the rare and terrible blue moon to shine; or we may cause woods to spring with silver leaves and rams to wear fleeces of gold, and put hot fire into the belly of the cold worm. But in such “fantasy,” as it is called, new form is made; Faerie begins; Man becomes a sub-creator.
I’m rereading Tolkien’s lecture-essay On Fairy Stories, or trying to anyway since my printer is not hooked up and that means reading on a… device. I wrote a flurry of notes on Meador’s essay on AI yesterday. While there were things to genuinely praise, I found his use of Tolkien and Wendell Berry to be — well, I’m trying decide if it’s just wrong or if it is as grotesque as my initial reaction found it to be. Or maybe I’m just wrong. Gotsta think a bit.