Homer, Socrates, Gandalf and Bilbo

 A strange combination, but it all makes sense if you read the post. This is a letter that was published in Philosophy Now (Issue 172, Feb / Mar 2026) in response to an article in the previous issue (171). I’m proud to say it was published with only a couple of minor edits in the first paragraph, which I’ve adopted. Otherwise, it’s unchanged, even down to paragraphs, commas and colons.

 
I was interested in Eric Comerford’s imagined conversation between Bilbo and Gandalf on happiness and wellbeing (Philosophy Now, Issue 171). To misquote Socrates, life without challenges is not worth living. There are a couple of issues here, one of them being the role of fiction in humanity’s evolution. Fiction is not unlike dreaming in that we confront scenarios that we might not encounter in real life, yet we can learn from them. In fact, I contend that the language of stories is the language of dreams, and that, if we didn’t dream, stories wouldn’t work.
 
The overcoming of adversity is a universal theme in fiction, going back to Homer’s Odyssey, if not earlier. And of course, J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings exemplifies this in multiple storylines with multiple characters.
 
All of us, when we reach a certain age, can look back at all the events in our life that ultimately formed our current selves as if we are a piece of clay moulded by life’s experiences. And the thing is that the negative events in our life are just as significant in this process as the positive ones, if not more so. It’s very important to find a purpose, but it invariably involves challenges and also failures. So to revisit Socrates: arguably, a life without failure is not worth living.