Last night I was watching one of the commentary disks in the Lord of the Rings DVD set, and this particular segment was discussing the meanings of J. R. R. Tolkien’s story. After dismissing the view of the story as allegory — Tolkien hated allegory, as he himself said several times — the narrative fixed on the importance of relevance, or applicability, to interpretation of the story. It was applicability of the characters, events, and ideas in the story to the problems of our own time and our own world that explains the story’s lasting and widespread popularity. The narrator turned to a discussion of the problem of Evil, which Tolkien confronts directly throughout the story as a constant theme, and in this regard, he mentioned the Ringwraiths. “Let us look at this word,” he said, “since Tolkien is first and foremost a linquist.” He went on to note that the word “wraith” is related to “wroth,” which means angry in archaic English. It is also related to “wreath,” which means twisted, and to “writhe,” which means distorted, as by pain. Thus, he concludes the concept of wraith is a shape applied to the substance which is Man — a contortion of the natural man into something bent and misshapen which no longer knows the difference between good and evil.

This dissertation echoed with my previous ruminations on the duality of matter with its division into the two categories of shape, or form, and substance, or matter. The two kinds are distinct but become joined in any instance of an object. Substance is inherently shapeless. It is a raw material which must have form imposed onto it to become a distinct thing in itself, as raw ores in the earth are without shape, existing in a diffuse vein or deposit. Extracted and worked, some portion of the ore becomes a sword, another portion a candleholder, etc. These forms — sword, candleholder, etc. — are independent of the substance which instantiates them, as we can make many swords, some of bronze, some of iron, some of steel, or even plastic or wood. The form may also be taken as a pattern, such as music, or as a process, such as the four-cycle operation of an internal combustion engine. The form of the music can be represented equally well by pressure waves in the air, or by grooves in a vinyl record, or by magnetic field strengths in the iron oxide of a hard dixk drive’s surface. The substance is irrelevant as long as it allies representation of the pattern of the music, because music is essentially a pattern.

A more interesting version of dualism is to be found in the modern analytic concept of functionalism. Functionalism is the concept in philosophy of mind that mental phenomena are independent of the substrate, so that minds can be constructed equally of brains or of computer circuits. According to this view, the only thing that matters is what they do, not what they’re made of. A functionalist, therefore, is concerned with identifying the function of minds in the most exact terms, so as to facilitate the reproduction of those functions in a manufacturable substance. Without the dualistic relationship of form and function to matter and substance, the functionalist would be unable to support the hypothesis that mental processes can exist in anything but brains. This puts the functionalist philosopher in the unfortunate (and usually unnoted) position of a dualist who begins his entire approach to the question of the nature of minds by sorting out what they do as distinct from their material composition.

Maybe these people would be more forthcoming with their explanations if it weren’t that dualism is also associated, historically, with spirit-matter dualism, and no materialist philosopher wants to be seen as supporting the spiritual component that defines religions, or the “soul.” The functionalist position is not a claim about God, either for or against, but it is an admission that there are important aspects of the world that transcend matter, and honesty requires that we be open about this.

Returning to the discussion about good and evil, it would seem that it would be a mistake to define human beings as either good or evil. Their materiality evinces the possibility of either form, of either functionality, and the choice we have to make is whether to stand straight and true, or to allow ourselves to be bent into the twisted and corrupted form of ringwraiths.