Seven Paths of the Hero in Lord of the Rings: The Path of Love

Sam's is the simplest yet the most touching of all paths: His simple loyalty and love for Frodo make him the single person who never wavers in his task throughout the book. Though all members of the Fellowship are engaged in momentous events, Sam always remembers that the sun coming up in the morning is a glorious sight, and that hobbits have to eat. When Frodo can no longer even walk, and will not let Sam carry the Ring, Sam carries Frodo. Then, when Gollum joins them, Frodo's kindness has to be balanced by Sam's stern limits. Ultimately Sam's outcome is the happiest of all those on the Quest: He has been able to see the Elves who so fascinate him, able to serve as Frodo's companion on the greatest of all Quests, and now able to return to his blessed Shire, to marry his loving Rosie, have many children and live happily ever after.     

Seven Paths of the Hero in Lord of the Rings: The Path of the Wizard

The test for a wizard, already the wisest of the wise, is to resist arrogance and serve those less wise. If he passes this test, a time will come when he must willingly accept his own death in order to be transformed into something still greater. In Tolkien's great story, Lord of the Rings, the wizard Saruman fails his tests, while Gandalf passes with flying colors. Where once Saruman was the stronger of the two, now Gandalf easily surpasses Saruman's powers. Gandalf the Grey becomes Gandalf the White, taking on Saruman's mantle. When the dwarf Gimli comments that Gandalf is dressed all in white now, Gandalf replies “Yes, I am white now. Indeed I am Saruman, one might almost say. Saruman as he should have been.”     

Seven Paths of the Hero in Lord of the Rings: The Path of Tragic Failure

Gollum's path might be seen as the modern equivalent of the Greek tragic hero: Though fated to fail personally, he yet serves greater needs. Driven by greed and avarice, Gollum loses his identity and is reduced to little more than desire for his “Precious” ring. Yet, even in failure, even while committing evil, Gollum plays an indispensable part in the Quest. Subdued, almost won over by Frodo's kindness, he leads Frodo and Sam to Mount Doom. There, in Frodo's moment of weakness, it is necessary for Gollum to bite off Frodo's finger in order for Frodo's destiny to be fulfilled. We each have a Gollum within us: Who has never experienced greed and avarice? We each have to treat the Gollum inside with the same kindness displayed by Frodo, the same firmness displayed by Sam.     

Synergistic Paths to Happiness: Findings from Seven Countries

Four individual profiles of ways toward happiness were found on a Slovene sample: Full, Empty, Pleasurable, and Meaningful life types. The present study aimed to validate these four types in samples from seven different countries (N = 3690) utilising four different languages. Participants completed the Orientation towards Happiness Scale and measures of hedonic and eudaimonic well-being, and ill-being. A two-step cluster analysis was performed with each of the seven country samples. A highly congruent, highly internally replicable four-cluster solution was found in all seven samples. Full and Empty life individuals have high and low scores on all three orientations to happiness, respectively. Pleasurable and Meaningful types reflect two traditional philosophic orientations: Pleasurable life individuals scored high on pleasure, average on engagement and low on meaning orientation, while Meaningful life individuals had high scores on meaning, average on engagement, and low scores on pleasure orientation. The four types differed in subjective happiness and psychological well-being with full life type characterized by the highest scores on subjective happiness and psychological well-being, and Empty life by the lowest scores. On the other hand, depressive symptoms were likely to be the lowest in the Full life type and the highest in the Empty life type. Meaningful and Pleasurable life types were characterized by moderate well- and ill-being, but the two types tended not to differ from each other on the measures used.     

Representing Spatial Structure Through Maps and Language: Lord of the Rings Encodes the Spatial Structure of Middle Earth

Spatial mental representations can be derived from linguistic and non‐linguistic sources of information. This study tested whether these representations could be formed from statistical linguistic frequencies of city names, and to what extent participants differed in their performance when they estimated spatial locations from language or maps. In a computational linguistic study, we demonstrated that co‐occurrences of cities in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy and The Hobbit predicted the authentic longitude and latitude of those cities in Middle Earth. In a human study, we showed that human spatial estimates of the location of cities were very similar regardless of whether participants read Tolkien’s texts or memorized a map of Middle Earth. However, text‐based location estimates obtained from statistical linguistic frequencies better predicted the human text‐based estimates than the human map‐based estimates. These findings suggest that language encodes spatial structure of cities, and that human cognitive map representations can come from implicit statistical linguistic patterns, from explicit non‐linguistic perceptual information, or from both.     

Korah in the Midrash: The Hairless Heretic as Hero

Perhaps the least likely hero in the Bible is Korah, the Levite who challenges Moses’s leadership in Numbers 16 and whom later tradition regarded as an archvillain. This article examines how the rabbinic, Christian, and Islamic traditions appropriated this figure and turned him, if not into a full-fledged hero, then at least into a kind of trickster whose challenge to Moses reinforces the authority of Orthodox tradition. An example of this transmutation is the way rabbinic Midrash turns Korah into a kind of hyperlegalistic rabbi. He poses typical rabbinic questions to Moses that are intended to undermine the law, but by drawing limits around his questions the Midrash constructs the boundaries of rabbinic dissension. Another set of themes puts women at the center of the Korah story and also plays with Korah as bald: in these stories, sexuality and power are linked to hair. In patristic writings, Korah becomes the exemplar of a heretical bishop and is also made fabulously wealthy (a theme common also to Jewish and Muslim traditions). Korah’s wealth symbolizes the Israel of the flesh: this biblical villain now comes to stand for the Jewish people as a whole. In Muslim sources, he is also transmuted into “the enlightened one.”     

诠释泰州学派的英雄

本文对泰州学派的英雄风格的形成 ,以及英雄行为的内在动力 ,进行了探讨 ,认为泰州的精神形成有弟子的精神认同 ,也有王艮思想的影响 ,认为泰州学派何心隐与朝廷官僚的斗争实质是话语权的斗争 ,而斗争的动力主要缘于他的权力欲望。并认为士大夫普遍存在的权力欲望是历代清议的动力和基础。     

从父权制英雄的历史演变看后父权制英雄的兴起

19世纪晚期存在主义反英雄的出现是对传统父权制英雄价值观的颠覆.在理性时代,父权制英雄的价值观念走向极致,随着理性时代的结束,传统的父权制英雄正在走向没落,人类正在进入争取个人存在与宇宙存在和谐统一的后父权制英雄时代.     

The Transcendence and Non-Discursivity of the Lifeworld

This paper points to two little-discussed interrelated features—among sociologists—about the nature of the lifeworld (Lebenswelt): that the experience of transcendence is an essential component of human actions, and that lived experience (Erlebnis) is founded on the non-discursivity of the lifeworld, i.e., the pre-predicative background expectancies from which the discursive arises. I examine the intellectual route of Alfred Schutz who developed his mundane lifeworld theory from appropriating Edmund Husserl’s notions of appresentation and apperception. Harold Garfinkel later extended Schutz’s concept of lifeworld to the empirical investigations of constitutive social orders. By way of conclusion, I warn against a strain of constructionism in sociology, which tends to ignore the two said features of lived experience and inaccurately conceives social realities as essentially the actor’s discursive accomplishments.

The Solicitation of the Trap: On Transcendence and Transcendental Materialism in Advanced Consumer-Capitalism

This article argues that a transcendental materialist conception of subjectivity can move us beyond the orthodox idealist theories that dominate progressive thought in advanced consumer-capitalism. This position can shed new light on current forms of subjectivity that seem to prefer life in consumer culture’s surrogate social world rather than active participation in cultural and political resistance and transformation, which requires far more than simply ‘transcending the norm’. The rebirth of creative political subjectivity is impossible unless the subject is prepared to risk a traumatic encounter with the Real, the fundamental indeterminacy that exists not in the ideal-symbolic but the material realm, and prepared to reject liberal-postmodernist identity politics to participate in the construction of a coherent alternative ideology.     

Transcendence of the Ego (The Non-Existent Knight)

I exist, but I am not a thing among things; X exists if and only if there is something such that it=X. This is consistent, and it is a view that can be supported. Calvino’s novel The Non‐Existent Knight can be read so as to illustrate this view. But what is my relation to the things there are if I am not identical with any of them – things such as my arms, my garden, the city I live in? I name this the Gurduloo problem, after the Knight’s page. This relation must be one that admits of degrees; I suggest that we say that I manifest myself through the things thus associated with me. Several pseudo‐problems, pertaining to volitional action, supervenience, observability, and the emergence of consciousness, dissolve upon inspection.     

先验性之逻辑——对道德倒置的分析

我认为,作为道德价值领域的一个问题,道德倒置并没有得到应有的重视. A.罗伊(Arundhati Roy),一位生活在最有可能爆发核战争的危险地带的女性,在她的作品中强烈地表达了一种绝望与挫败感.