Enframing in Tolkien

In the early 1950's, Martin Heidegger described a concept that he referred to as "enframing." In short, the idea is that a person (or a people), intentionally or otherwise, shrinks the boundaries that are the essence of something or someone else. The object of one's enframing is defined in terms of the use that it has for the enframer only. Its reality has changed for the enframer from something that is other and independent of all purpose (or at the least, in which that view remains a possibility), to a tool for the enframer's use, a means to their own private end. It is now defined according to the purposes of one who can dominate it for an end already in the mind of the enframer, independent of the thing itself.

In The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien presents the idea of enframing as a reality that is part of the fallen nature of humanity, common to us all. While the ring itself is the book's most dramatic incarnation of this idea, Tolkien takes care throughout the story to demonstrate the temptation to define people and things in terms of one's own desired ends. It is evident in the fall of Saruman as he gradually sets aside his original purpose in being sent to Middle-Earth for purposes that he deems to be his own. All creatures and thngs in the world about Saruman become either a means or an obstacle to his desired ends. Treebeard most clearly articulates this process as he experiences Saruman's rejection of Treebeard himself and all that is important to him.

"I used to talk to him. There was a time when he was always walking about my woods. He was polite in those days, always asking my leave (at least when he met me); and always eager to listen. I told him many things that he would never have found out by himself; but he never repaid me in like kind. I cannot remember that he ever told me anything. And he got more and more like that; his face, as I remember it - I have not seen it for many a day - became like windows in a stone wall; windows with shudders inside. I think that I now understand what he is up to. He is plotting to become a Power; he has a mind of metal and wheels, and he does not care for growing things, except as far as they serve him for the moment" (The Two Towers).

The power of this observation becomes palpable when Treebeard and Saruman are understood in a broad sense to describe the historical relationship between nature and humanity.

We'll keep this thread alive for a while, so check back in a few days. In the mean time, what do think? It seems like enframing must have begun when the first hominid looked at a rock, and saw it merely as a tool with which to down his next meal. Sam surely used things, planted things in his garden, for example, for some purpose of his own. But how is that related to the vision he had while wearing the Ring that "at his command the vale of Gorgoroth became a garden of flowers and trees and brought forth fruit...," a garden "swollen to a realm" (The Return of the King)?