Thinking Through Myths
What is the relation between myths and the real world? Are myths simply fiction or do they have a necessary role to play in the search for truth? Confined to an antique, superstitious past, or still active beneath “rational” twenty-first-century thought? What is their place after modernity, and within feminism, green politics and popular science? How should we think about myths, and how can we think with them? Myths, it is often said, are more than false stories: they disclose alternative worlds. Yet from the perspective of most modern philosophy, the belief in mythic worlds is still seen as superstitious. When most approaches to the study of myths leave questions about their possible validity in the shadows, in what sense can we then claim that our myths might be true? If even “rational” thought is informed by myth, are scientists, politicians and philosophers mythic thinkers? And if there are truths that are best expressed in stories, should philosophers themselves become myth-makers? In opposition to the popular misunderstanding of myths, Thinking Through Myths explores the relationships between rationality, imagination and story-telling to trace the influence of myth in our own beliefs, origins, and potential futures. Ten outstanding essays, from Robert A. Segal, J. Baird Callicott and William Doty among others, analyze the place of philosophy in myth, of myth in philosophy, and call for the acknowledgement of myths in everyday experience, the marriage of narrative and truth, and the restoration of wonder to thought. ‘‘Explores a dimension of myth that has been unjustly neglected in the modern age. … Schilbrack is restoring metaphysics to myth, without denying the marvellous aspect of the latter. I know of no other book that covers this ground adequately.’’ (Laurence Coupe, author of Myth) ‘‘A welcome addition to serious scholarship on the theory of myth, Thinking Through Myths reinvigorates the field… A breath of fresh air not only for philosophers, but for many fellow travelers as well.’’ (Laurie L. Patton, Associate Professor of Early Indian Religions and Chair, Department of Religion, Emory University, Atlanta, GA) Kevin Schilbrack is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Wesleyan College, Georgia. A graduate of the University of Chicago Divinity School, he writes on the philosophical and methodological questions involved in the cross-cultural study of religions.
Thinking Through Myths Philosophical perspectives
Edited by Kevin Schilbrack
London and New York
First published 2002 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004. © 2002 Kevin Schilbrack for selection and editorial material; individual contributors their contributions. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN 0-203-39844-0 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-39955-2 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0–415–25460–4 (hbk) ISBN 0–415–25461–2 (pbk)
To my father, a reader and a questioner
Contents
Notes on contributors Acknowledgements
ix xi
Introduction: on the use of philosophy in the study of myths
1
KEVIN SCHILBRACK
1 Myth as primitive philosophy: the case of E.B. Tylor
18
ROBERT A. SEGAL
2 Myth and phenomenology
46
M I LT O N S C A R B O R O U G H
3 Myth and pragmatic semiotics
65
WILLIAM L. POWER
4 Myth and metaphysics
85
KEVIN SCHILBRACK
5 Myth and feminist philosophy
101
PA M E L A S U E A N D E R S O N
6 Myth and moral philosophy
123
JAMES WETZEL
7 Myth and postmodernist philosophy WILLIAM G. DOTY
142
viii
Contents
8 Myth and environmental philosophy
158
J. BAIRD CALLICOTT
9 Myth and ideology
174
CHRISTOPHER FLOOD
10 Myth and public science
191
M A RY G E R H A R T A N D A L L A N M E LV I N R U S S E L L
Index
207
Contributors
Pamela Sue Anderson is Fellow in Philosophy and Christian Ethics, Regent’s Park College, Oxford University. Dr Anderson is the author of A Feminist Philosophy of Religion (Blackwell). J. Baird Callicott is Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Texas. He is the author of, among other books, Earth’s Insights: A Survey of Ecological Ethics from the Mediterranean Basin to the Australian Outback (University of California Press), co-editor of Nature in Asian Traditions of Thought: Essays in Environmental Philosophy (State University of New York Press), and co-author (with Thomas Overholt) of Clothed-in-Fur: An Introduction to an Ojibwa World View (University Press of America). William G. Doty is Professor and Chair of Religious Studies, Emeritus, at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. He is the author of several books including Mythography: The Study of Myth and Rituals, editor of Picturing Cultural Values in Postmodern America, and co-editor of Mythical Trickster Figures: Contours, Contexts, and Criticisms (all from University of Alabama Press). He is also the editor of Mythosphere: A Journal for Image, Myth, and Symbol. Christopher Flood is Professor and Head of European Studies at the University of Surrey, UK. He is the author of Political Myth: A Theoretical Introduction and the co-editor of Political Ideologies in Contemporary France and Currents in Contemporary French Intellectual Life. He is also co-editor of the European Horizons series with the University of Nebraska Press. Mary Gerhart and Allan Melvin Russell are, respectively, Professor of Religious Studies and Professor of Physics at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. Together they are the authors of Metaphoric Process: The Creation of Scientific and Religious Understanding (Texas Christian University Press) and New Maps for Old: Explorations in Science and Religion (Continuum).
x Contributors William L. Power is Professor of Religion at the University of Georgia. He has published in the fields of historical theology, philosophical and systematic theology and philosophy of religion and has served on the boards of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion and the International Journal for Philosophy of Religion. He is also past president of the American Academy of Religion (southeast region) and the Society for Philosophy of Religion. Milton Scarborough is Professor of Philosophy and Religion at Centre College. He is the author of Myth and Modernity (State University of New York Press). Kevin Schilbrack is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Wesleyan College. He wrote his dissertation in comparative philosophy of religions at the University of Chicago Divinity School, arguing for the relevance of metaphysics to understanding religions across cultures. Robert A. Segal is Professor of Theories of Religion, University of Lancaster, UK. One of the foremost scholars of mythology in the world, Professor Segal is the author of The Poimandres as Myth (Mouton de Gruyter), Joseph Campbell: An Introduction (Penguin/Meridian), and Theorizing about Myth (University of Massachusetts Press), among other books, and the editor of In Quest of the Hero (Princeton), The Gnostic Jung (Princeton/Routledge), Jung on Mythology (Princeton/Routledge), The Myth and Ritual Theory (Blackwell), and Hero Myths (Blackwell). He is also editor of the Theorists of Myth Series (Routledge). James Wetzel is an Associate Professor of Philosophy and Religion at Colgate University. His writings fall within the areas of philosophy of religion, philosophical psychology, and ethics, and he is the author of Augustine and the Limits of Virtue (Cambridge University Press). He is presently working on a new book, on transgression.
Acknowledgements
The work that led to this volume began in a conference on Myth and Philosophy made possible through the generosity of the American Academy of Religion and the Georgia Humanities Council. I would like to take this opportunity to thank those two organizations for their financial support. I would also like to thank Kris Mayrhofer, Alice Mendoza, and especially the unflappable and omnicompetent Rejeana Cassady for their invaluable help in preparing the manuscript. And above all, I need to thank Teri Cole, Sasha and Elijah, the centers of my life, for resisting my bookishness and for wrestling with me. Though all of the papers in this volume were originally written for inclusion here, some have appeared elsewhere. The figures in the introduction originally appeared in Discourse and the Construction of Society: Comparative Studies of Myth, Ritual, and Classification by Bruce Lincoln, © 1992 by Bruce Lincoln. Used by permission of Oxford University Press, Inc.. I would like to thank Bruce Lincoln and Oxford University Press for permission to reproduce them here. The paper, “Myth and metaphysics” by Kevin Schilbrack, originally appeared in Kluwer Academic Publishers’ International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 48, 2 (October 2000): 65–80. I would like to express my thanks to Kluwer Publishers for allowing me to reprint it here. The paper by Christopher Flood is a revised version of parts of his book, Political Myth: A Theoretical Introduction (New York: Garland, 1996, repr. Routledge, 2001). I would like to express my thanks to Routledge for allowing me to reproduce material. The paper by Robert Segal is an expanded version of Chapter 1 of his book, Theorizing Myth (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999). I would like to express my appreciation to the University of Massachusetts Press for permission to reproduce material. The paper by Mary Gerhart and Allan M. Russell is reprinted with their permission from their book, New Maps for Old: Explorations in Science and Religion (Continuum, 2001).
Introduction On the use of philosophy in the study of myths Kevin Schilbrack
Human beings originally began philosophy, as they do now, because of wonder. … This is why the myth-lover is also a philosopher in his way, since myth is composed of wonders. (Aristotle 1995 [Metaphysics 982b])
I. An overview Since antiquity, philosophers have reflected on the meaning and the truth of myths, those extraordinary accounts of primordial heroes, animals, and gods. These philosophers worked under the assumption, as did Aristotle, that human wonder and speculation about the nature of things can express themselves in a variety of ways, including myths. The central goal of this philosophical inquiry was to see whether or not there were truths about the human condition encapsulated in stories of the origin of the cosmos and humanity, of animals and culture, of sex and death. When one considers the present state of the study of myths, however, it seems that this inquiry is now over. The philosophical study of myths is today nearly nonexistent. Myths disclose alternative worlds. From the perspective of most modern thinkers, however, the belief in mythic worlds was seen as an aspect of culture that was soon to be superseded. Predictably, then, contemporary philosophy shows little interest in the study of myths. If an exception can be made to this generally negative assessment, it will be in terms of philosophical traditions that see human reason in connection to narrative and the imagination. The German idealist tradition, for example, stresses the constitutive or productive role of the imagination, and consequently it has given attention to the ways that the imagination is culturally shaped, not least through myths. As Dieter Sturma notes, “Because of productive imagination, human experience is not merely the representation of the world with which it is confronted, but a process of expression and Bildung” (Sturma 2000: 221). Consequently, in Schelling, Hölderlin, Hegel, Herder, Novalis, Schlegel, and others, there is an appreciation of the social role of myths and even of the need for philosophers to engage in mythmaking.
2 Kevin Schilbrack This idealist tradition continued in the twentieth century, for example, in Cassirer’s work on myth as a form of symbolic thought (Cassirer 1946, 1955; for a critical summary account, see Baeten 1996: chap. 2). Having made the linguistic turn, it continues as well in some branches of the hermeneutic tradition, as in the work of Paul Ricoeur on the interpretation of religious texts (see Ricoeur 1969, 1995) and in the work of Hans Blumenberg on the role of myths in the evolution of consciousness (1988). Though the study of myths is not a central feature of contemporary philosophy, there are resources here for future philosophical contributions to the study of myths. In Anglophone philosophy, however, prospects are dimmer. It is the widespread commitment to a rigorous empiricism, perhaps, that has led philosophers to turn their attention from tales full of the supernatural. A natural place to look for reflection on myths might be the discipline of Philosophy of Religion. But English-speaking philosophers of religion have largely abandoned the study of myths in order to focus on religious beliefs, one might say, in the abstract. The meaning of beliefs, presumably, is easier to pin down than the meaning of stories and therefore myths, along with other narrative and ritual aspects of religion, receive almost no attention. I return to this issue of the role of Philosophy of Religion in the next section. Finally, in the field of Religious Studies, where one might hope that philosophy would be in conversation with the anthropologists, historians of religion, and others for whom the category of myth is central, philosophical perspectives are equally rare. For example, in those anthologies that survey the variety of different approaches to myth – from Robert Georges’ Studies in Mythology (1968) to John Middleton’s Myth and Cosmos: Readings in Mythology and Symbolism (1976) to Alan Dundes’ Sacred Narrative: Readings in the Theory of Myth (1984) to Laurie Patton and Wendy Doniger’s Myth and Method (1996) – no philosophical approaches can be found. Similarly, of the six volumes in Robert Segal’s recent survey of contemporary theories of myth (Segal 1996), only one volume includes any philosophy, and of the twenty articles in that volume, only four could be called philosophical.1 The paucity of philosophical work on myths can be attributed to the fact, as noted above, that so few philosophers today take myths seriously. But it is also fair to say that most contemporary theorists of myths distrust and avoid philosophical questions and are suspicious of philosophers who claim to find universal truths in stories from particular cultures. Instead, these theorists typically focus on the psychological or sociological functions of myth and often leave the cognitive aspects unexamined. Whatever the reasons for the absence of philosophy in the study of myths, I believe that this lack is unfortunate. When social scientists reject the relevance of philosophy, they have a difficult time avoiding reductionistic accounts that treat myths as nothing but fiction. And when
Introduction 3 Philosophy of Religion focuses on religious beliefs, deracinated from their mythical sources, it may gain clarity but risks losing touch with the religious practices of reading, remembering, and story-telling in which the beliefs typically find their life (on the nature, types, and importance of reading to religion, see Griffiths 1999). In short, the lack of philosophical contributions to the study of myths reflects a general lack of connection between normative and the interpretive and explanatory approaches in Religious Studies. From the perspective of this book, this breakdown is as disappointing as it is unnecessary. In our postmodern, postcolonial context, skeptical as we are of universal claims, what contribution can philosophy make to the study of myths? The rest of this introductory essay seeks to give a programmatic answer to this question, both in order to give a sense of the field that can place the essays that follow in a larger context, and also with the hope that it is possible to reignite an interest in philosophical approaches to the study of myths.
II. Philosophy of religion as a cross-cultural discipline One of the primary obstacles to the philosophical study of myths comes from the discipline of Philosophy of Religion itself. Though in principle Philosophy of Religion can be understood as critical reflection on religion – an understanding which would typically include the philosophical study of myths – in practice it proceeds with a different understanding. In practice, Philosophy of Religion has focused exclusively on a set of questions concerning the rationality of Christian theism, questions like those concerning the problem of evil, the possibility of miracles and life after death, arguments for the existence of God, and the like. In fact, as Robert Neville has pointed out, since roughly 1970 – in a period of antiimperialism, increased international contact, and above all an explosion of information about non-Christian religions – the discipline of Philosophy of Religion has largely retreated from the investigation of religions in the plural. “[For philosophers of religion, the] suggestion that religion is something more than theism has dropped away” (Neville 1995: 168). In short, Philosophy of Religion has primarily restricted itself to philosophizing about (Christian) theism, and has thereby left the study of myths to those who study other religions. One major obstacle to the development of philosophical approaches to the study of myths, then, comes from the understanding of the proper scope of Philosophy of Religion. Even when a philosopher of religion broadens the understanding of the object of the discipline, one can see the influence of this restricted understanding. For example, in a recent Philosophy of Religion anthology, Eleanor Stump notes that “there has been a reviving interest in religion of all sorts in this country [the United States]” and in response, there has been an outpouring of work in Philosophy of Religion. Stump’s views seem to agree with mine when she says that recent work in Philosophy of Religion has
4 Kevin Schilbrack been characterized by “a broad extension of subjects seen as appropriate for philosophical scrutiny” and “a willingness to bridge boundaries with related disciplines” (Stump 1993: 1). But the relative narrowness of her understanding of the proper scope of Philosophy of Religion becomes clear when she describes the extension of the discipline that she welcomes: Not so long ago work in philosophy of religion was largely confined to discussions of the meaningfulness of religious language and examinations of arguments for the existence of God. In the work currently being done, however, philosophers have gotten their courage up and ventured into such areas as providence, creation, conservation, and God’s responsibility for sin, areas where analytic precision is more difficult to attain but where the scope of the investigation is less constrained. (Stump 1993: 1) One can see that this description of the field remains within the limited sense of what the discipline can study. Similarly, when Stump refers to philosophers of religion building bridges with “related disciplines,” she means “most notably with [Christian] theology but also biblical studies” (1993: 1), and does not mention the disciplines that study the nonChristian religions of the world. On this allegedly broader understanding, then, Philosophy of Religion is still restricted and the study of myths does not yet appear as important. A simple way to avoid this problem would be to accept a definition of Philosophy of Religion that is broader. For example, if one understands by Philosophy of Religion “critical reflection on religious language and practices,” then one has a definition that is inclusive enough to permit the philosophical study of myths. This definition is broader than what I take to be the presently dominant one, in two senses. First, it broadens the understanding of what kinds of objects are appropriate for philosophical inquiry. In place of the study of religious beliefs, it has “language and practices.” The category of religious language can then be understood to include not only religious beliefs, but all religious uses of language, such as prayers, confessions, injunctions, and informative utterances. It is also worth repeating that this variety of religious uses of language is sometimes found as a creed, a straightforward list of “beliefs,” but it is usually found in religious scriptures, songs, myths, doctrinal texts, commentaries, and so on.2 Philosophers of religion should explicitly recognize all of these as legitimate objects of philosophical study. By calling Philosophy of Religion the critical reflection on religious language and practices, however, one includes as an explicit part of Philosophy of Religion’s task, study not only of religious language, but also of rituals, spiritual disciplines, initiations, pilgrimages, and other forms of religious behavior. These too should be recognized as legitimate but largely ignored objects of philosophical study. In fact, since holding a belief is itself
Introduction 5 a practice (or more exactly, the activities of repeating, professing, memorizing, and commenting on beliefs is typically in the service of faithful practice rather than an intellectual exercise as an end in itself), practice is the inclusive category. So we can say that Philosophy of Religion is critical reflection on religious practices, including intellectual practices. This definition of Philosophy of Religion is broader than the dominant form in a second way, for in this definition, the term “religion” stands for religions in the plural; there is no religion whose language and practices do not provide legitimate objects of study in Philosophy of Religion. For many philosophers of religion this may go without saying, and philosophical reflection on all religions may be what Philosophy of Religion has always meant to many. But it is worth being explicit that Philosophy of Religion includes more than what is sometimes called “classical general theism,” which is to say those theistic beliefs that Christianity shares with other monotheistic faiths. It is true of course that in Philosophy of Religion texts and classes one finds the occasional Ibn Sina or Buber, but I think it is fair to say that these are presented as examples of “classical general theism”: the beliefs of Jews and Muslims are typically studied only in those respects in which they do not differ from those of Christianity. This definition makes the global nature of the field explicit. When Philosophy of Religion is seen as properly a cross-cultural discipline, the religious objects of philosophical study should reflect this fact. For example, the philosophical study of religious experience should include Buddhist satori and Vodun possession; reflection on the concept of God should include Advaita pantheism and African polytheism; philosophers who work on the problem of evil should consider reincarnation and witchcraft. To the extent that Philosophy of Religion continues to circumscribe its task in a way that excludes all options other than classical general theism, it remains a servant of Christian theology, even when (in the case of a Kai Nielson, J.L. Mackie, or Antony Flew) it is critical and atheistic. On this definition, of course, everything that has traditionally been treated under the rubric of Philosophy of Religion still belongs there – specifically, it belongs under the critical reflection on Christian or theistic religious beliefs. There is nothing wrong with what Philosophy of Religion has traditionally studied. But it is only a part of the discipline. Moreover, this definition is neutral to most contemporary disagreements about how Philosophy of Religion proceeds. That is, I make no assumptions about what methods or criteria are to be employed in this critical reflection: Philosophy of Religion may be pragmatic, phenomenological, empiricist, metaphysical or otherwise. This definition leaves the methodological issues open.
III. Philosophy’s contribution: two models If, then, one agrees that philosophy should include the study of myths, what can philosophy contribute? I would like to propose two models.
6 Kevin Schilbrack Faced with the variety of sociological, psychological, and comparativist approaches that abound in the study of myths, one can answer this question either irenically, saying that philosophy complements the social scientific approaches, and that the student of myths can therefore choose to use either philosophy or a social scientific approach. Or one can answer more creatively, saying that philosophy requires and is required by the social scientific approaches so that neither philosophy nor the social sciences can stand by itself. To illustrate these two answers, I will make use of two diagrams created by the historian of religions Bruce Lincoln. Lincoln counts myth as a form of discourse, a discourse that shapes and legitimates social boundaries and classifications.3 This it does both by persuading people to classify the objects and people of their lived world in one way rather than another and by evoking what Lincoln calls sentiments, those feelings or forces of either belonging or alienation. As a historian of religions, Lincoln focuses on the ability of myths to evoke social sentiments rather than their ability to persuade: whether – and the extent to which – a discourse succeeds in calling forth a following … ultimately depends on whether a discourse elicits those sentiments out of which new social formations can be constructed. For discourse is not only an instrument of persuasion, operating along rational (or pseudorational) and moral (or pseudomoral) lines, but it is also an instrument of sentiment evocation. (Lincoln 1989: 8)4 He illustrates this relationship between the tasks of mythic discourse in the following diagram.
Figure 1 Aspects of the instruments through which social formations are modified and maintained Source: Bruce Lincoln, Discourse and Construction of Society: Comparative Studies of Myth, Ritual, and Classification, © 1992. Used by permission of Oxford University Press, Inc.
Introduction 7 Lincoln not only distinguishes between myth’s ability to persuade and its ability to evoke sentiments; he also argues that the two are separable (Lincoln 1989: 9–10). That is, an act of discourse can evoke sentiments of likeness, attachment, and solidarity, or sentiments of distance, separation, and otherness – regardless of the content of the discourse. Lincoln gives a good example of this. In a multi-linguistic group where one’s language is not the language of choice, sentiments of affinity and estrangement can be evoked simply by using one’s language. By using the minority tongue, one conveys the implicit message “I speak language X” and one can thereby generate sentiments of solidarity or alienation, even though the explicit content of the person’s discourse may have nothing to do with social boundaries. For this reason the student of mythic discourse can attend to myths’ ability to evoke sentiment without raising the issues involved in its ability to persuade – or vice versa. On this account, the possible contribution of philosophy to the study of myths is straightforward: philosophy investigates the persuasive power of myths. That is, philosophers ask the normative question as to the truth or morality of the myth’s content. They inquire into what it is that the myths try to persuade people of, how they do so, and – significantly – they do not bracket but retain the evaluative categories of whether the content of the myth is ultimately rational (or pseudorational) and moral (or pseudomoral). In so doing, they attend to the content of the myths in a way that those who focus on sentiments do not. On this understanding, the philosophical and the social scientific approaches to myths complement and in no way contradict each other. On this view of philosophy’s contribution, whether one chooses to pursue a philosophical or a social scientific approach to study myth is basically a matter of preference or interest. Both are legitimate and one does not have a “complete” analysis of myths unless both are done, but any individual can pursue either. Many Religious Studies programs are built on this kind of division of labor, or as it is sometimes called, methodological pluralism. To agree that this model for the contribution of philosophy to the study of myth is legitimate is therefore to reject those views that argue that Religious Studies should be strictly scientific and not methodologically plural.5 Although this first model is correct as far as it goes, the actual relationship between philosophical and social scientific approaches to myths, I believe, is more complex. On a second model, the two disciplines mutually require each other. This is so because, although myth’s ability to evoke sentiments can be analytically distinguished from its ability to persuade, these two functions are internally related to each other and cannot be completely separated. Lincoln appreciates this interdependence, as one can see in his proposal for a way to classify narratives. [S]ome narratives make no truth-claims at all, but rather present themselves and are accepted as fictions pure and simple: These I propose to
8 Kevin Schilbrack call Fable. Others, in differing styles and degrees, purport to offer accurate accounts of past events. But of the stories that make such truth-claims, only some have sufficient persuasive power to gain acceptance, and the others – those that, in the opinion of their primary audience, lack credibility – I shall classify as Legend, calling those that do have credibility History. And although these two categories are mutually exclusive (i.e., one cannot simultaneously accept and reject the truth-claims of a given story), reclassification of any individual narrative from one class to the other is always possible should the story either gain or lose credibility. Beyond this, there is one further category, and that is a crucial one: Myth – by which I designate that small class of stories that possess both credibility and authority. (Lincoln 1989: 25) By “authority,” Lincoln refers to a feature of a myth’s status as a paradigm. Certain stories come to exercise such a compulsion and moving quality that people have the sense that the meaning of their lives depends on the significance of the story, its re-enactment, or its remembrance. Lincoln links what he calls a myth’s authority with what Malinowski recognizes as myth’s function as a social charter and Geertz’s analysis of myth as simultaneously a “model of” and a “model for” reality; he could also identify authority with Eliade’s treatment of myths as providing archetypes. But the key is that the myth’s authority for a given audience presupposes its credibility to them. Lincoln introduces another diagram that illustrates the relationship of dependence among these three features of myths – that they make truth claims, that they are held as credible, and that they possess authority. (See Figure 2.) The value of this diagram is that it highlights the facts that myths make claims to truth, that these claims are found credible, and that these perceived truths give the myths their authority to provide models or charters for social life. The difference for my purposes between this diagram and the first is that, whereas in the first the ability to persuade was set aside as a feature of mythic discourse that one could either investigate or not, this second diagram shows that any investigation of myth’s authority to provide a model of the proper way to live assumes the credibility of the myth to the actors involved. Whatever authority myths have to serve as a paradigm or a charter depends upon their persuasiveness. If a myth loses its credibility or is no longer seen as making truth claims, then it also loses its authority and is “down-graded” to the status of a legend or a fable. One might say that the credibility of the truth claims made by the myths is an ingredient in their social function. Of course, it does not follow that from this point of view all social scientists are “really” philosophers. On this account, there remains a division of labor and therefore Religious Studies should still include methodological pluralism. But it does mean that any study of mythic
Introduction 9
Figure 2
Classification of narratives
Source: Bruce Lincoln, Discourse and Construction of Society: Comparative Studies of Myth, Ritual, and Classification, © 1992. Used by permission of Oxford University Press, Inc
discourse cannot deny the cognitive dimension of the myths. They cannot treat this form of discourse as nonsense, repeated by people because of their own simplicity or because of priestcraft. For this reason, Alasdair MacIntyre is wrong to say that “a myth is living or dead, not true or false” (MacIntyre 1967: 435). On this model, since the life or death of myth is tied to its credibility, he should rather have said that a myth is living or dead to the extent that it is seen as true or false. Hence it is more correct to describe myth as “true story,” as Eliade and Pettazzoni do, in the sense that myths are always already categorized as true by those who hold them as myths (Eliade 1963: 1–20; Pettazzoni 1954: 11–23). Those who do not want to pursue the question whether the myth is not only believed as true but is also true in actuality can bracket that question, but they cannot deny that the myths are understood to make truth claims. They cannot deny this, since if one defines myths in terms of their authority or their function as paradigms, then one has already assumed that the myths are held as credible. Philosophy’s contribution to the study of myths on this second, somewhat more complex account, as on the first model, involves the investigation of the cognitive dimension of myths. The difference is that
10 Kevin Schilbrack here philosophy is both a legitimate and important inquiry in its own right, and an inquiry that is both dependent on and supportive of descriptive and explanatory approaches to myth. Philosophy depends upon these approaches in that it is only in conversation with these approaches that the meaning of the myths can be elucidated. And philosophy supports these approaches by clarifying what it is that the myth claims to be true, and how this truth claim can be understood.
IV. The papers included here Though all of the papers included in this volume were written expressly to be part of this project, there were no stipulations about what conclusions the authors should reach, and therefore these papers represent a spectrum of opinions on the question of philosophy’s potential contribution to the study of myths. Nevertheless, the essays are not discordant and, I would like to suggest, as they think through myths from their different perspectives, three themes recur. First, these papers would generally agree that myths are more than simply false stories. But what are the philosophical implications of the idea of “true myths”? In what sense can one say that myths might be true? This first and most pervasive theme, then, involves an examination of what it might mean to say that stories of the gods are rational. Second, several essays in this volume note how difficult it is to think without using narrative structures. But if thinking and myths are intimately connected, if thinking is often done or always done through myths, then the study of myths reflects back upon the investigator. The second theme concerns answers to the question: in what ways is rational thinking (as one finds, for example, in scientific, political, or philosophical thinking) itself informed by myths? The third theme follows from the previous two. If the mythic character of thinking can be rational – or in other words, if there are truths that are best expressed in stories – then the question naturally arises: should philosophers themselves become mythmakers? Robert Segal’s paper “Myth as Primitive Philosophy: The Case of E.B. Tylor” is an especially appropriate starting point for this volume in that Segal locates the project as a whole in the historical context of accounts that have sought to connect myth and philosophy. Segal focuses on the case of the seminal work of the Victorian anthropologist, Edward Burnett Tylor (1832–1917). For Tylor, an arch-modernist, rationality is strictly empiricist and philosophy has no mythical element. In the wake of Tylor’s project, however, a variety of theories arose on the question of the relation between myth and philosophy. Segal sketches the answers of James Frazer, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, Paul Radin, Ernst Cassirer, Bronislaw Malinowski, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Robin Horton, Karl Popper, Rudolf Bultmann, and Hans Jonas. It is common practice at the end of the twentieth century for scholars who study myths to distance themselves from the view, more popular than
Introduction 11 ever in common parlance, that myths are “false stories.” As Segal has put it elsewhere, the recent history of theories of myth can be read as a defense of mythology (Segal 1980). Tylor remains therefore an important benchmark for philosophers not only because he sees myth and what he calls philosophy of nature as sharing a common purpose of explaining events in the physical world, which myth does poorly and philosophy or science does well, but also because he is willing to pursue the thesis that myths can be mistaken, confused, and in general incompatible with and displaced by philosophical or scientific reflection. But why, exactly, does the mythical mode of explanation get displaced by the scientific? Where does the incompatibility lie between the two modes of thought? In answering this question, Segal provides us with a careful reading of Tylor’s account of the relations between reason, sense experience, and imagination in myth. With this in hand, we have a useful standard against which to measure more contemporary theories. As Segal says, “The continuing importance of Tylor lies in his insistence on the intellectual content of myth.” With the paper by Milton Scarborough on “Myth and Phenomenology,” this volume enters into constructive philosophy proper. Scarborough’s thesis is that although contemporary philosophy inherits an anti-mythic stance, the phenomenological method is particularly well suited to mediating the tensions between philosophy and myth. The term “phenomenology” is often used very loosely, perhaps nowhere more than in the study of myths. Consequently, Scarborough begins by carefully adumbrating the steps in this method and then the existentialist turn. With the method of existentialist phenomenology clarified, he illustrates this approach to myth by giving an existential phenomenological reading of the creation stories of Genesis 1:1–2:4 and the Timaeus. As Scarborough explains, existential phenomenology involves the study of human subjectivity or intentionality as it finds itself engaged and in the world. In his hands, therefore, the interpretation of mythic texts focuses on the kind of being-in-the-world that they disclose. For the phenomenological philosopher, the issue is not the truth of the mythic texts but the understanding of human existence – as ultimately real or illusory, embodied or disembodied, planned or accidental – that the texts narrate. On the question of myth’s rationality, therefore, Scarborough argues that myths are rational when one pays attention to the level of operative intentionality. He correspondingly argues that it is not possible to think in a fashion that is free of myth. He traces the strategies with which scholars have sought to isolate a non-mythological thinking. In “Myth and Pragmatic Semiotics,” William L. Power uses Charles S. Peirce’s work on the nature and function of signs to develop an especially rich and systematic understanding of religious myths. Against those who see myth as solely emotive or expressive, Power insists that myths include signs that are typically understood by those who use them to stand for certain realities. As he puts it, myths have not only existential significance
12 Kevin Schilbrack but also ontological signification. By the same token, the semiotic structure of myths is impoverished if philosophers concern themselves solely with the question of a myth’s reference. In other words, Power’s approach is a pragmatic semiotics in that signs in a cultural or cultic system not only function to refer to an intentional object but also to point to how to lead and have a good life. Myths have conative and affective, as well as cognitive value. As Power says, “To take seriously religious cultural systems is to take seriously the semiotic interpretations of their ontological commitments and their understandings of existential faith.” In my paper on “Myth and Metaphysics,” I note that some myths seek to describe the character of reality as such and I try to provide conceptual tools for understanding these metaphysical descriptions. One can read this paper as a development of Scarborough’s existentialist phenomenology or of Power’s pragmatic semiotics in the sense that the metaphysical interpretation of myths that I recommend is not an alternative to a phenomenological focus on experience nor a semiotic focus on culturallinguistic systems. Rather, I mean for my approach to complement them, since the discipline of metaphysics, as I develop it in this paper, does not concern realities that are in principle beyond human experience and language but are, rather, the necessary features found in them. Thus if the phenomenologist or semiotician interprets a myth as providing an orientation to existence, as providing a model of the lived world, then the metaphysician asks whether that model describes features of that world that are peculiar in that they are alleged to exist under all conditions. In this paper, I am especially interested to show the relevance of metaphysics to the projects of those who study myths, including nonphilosophers. Most scholars of religion will agree that the interpreter of myths always works, at least implicitly, from a set of evaluative assumptions. For this reason, I argue that even if an interpreter of myths does not pursue the normative question of whether the myth is true or not, if one interprets the myth as possibly true-or-false, then one needs at least an implicit understanding of how or in what sense the myth is possibly trueor-false. My proposal is that many myths describe aspects of the lived world that purportedly are not contingent, and so an understanding of metaphysical claims based on the work of Charles Hartshorne can give interpreters of myth a rich sense of what myths might intelligibly be about. I illustrate this argument with a metaphysical interpretation of the Buddhist account in the Aggañña Sutta of the emergence of the world of suffering, and my paper ends with a call for cross-cultural metaphysics. Pamela Sue Anderson begins her essay on “Myth and Feminist Philosophy” by explicitly rejecting the idea that myth is something that philosophers have left behind in order to engage in rational discourse. Myths are stories that put the actual worlds of embodied beings into narrative form. Consequently, as she says, whether or not philosophers acknowledge its presence in their texts, “even philosophers are embodied
Introduction 13 beings whose identities involve variables of sexual orientation, race, class, and ethnicity.” By mediating or figuring the concrete worlds of meaning in which people live, myths are the usual means by which a community shapes its imagination, situates its knowledge, and constitutes its identity. These tasks are not only ineliminable but also too important for feminist philosophers not to engage in. Myth thus not only has been woven together with philosophy, but also should be a resource for philosophers, and for feminist philosophers in particular. In short, like Callicott below, Anderson sees the need for mythopoesis, the creation – even by philosophers – of new myths. Feminist philosophy is not a monolithic movement, however, and so Anderson develops a typology of four feminist philosophical approaches to myth (which might be abbreviated as strategies to retrieve, transcend, subvert, and refigure myth). Anderson uses this typology both analytically to sort the variety of feminist approaches to myth, and also constructively to argue for the greater adequacy of her own social epistemological feminist approach. On this approach, feminist philosophers do not give up on mythic imagination. Rather, they engage the mythic imagination in order to uncover and then redescribe the general structures of meaning in the hope of a liberating transformation of the lived world. James Wetzel’s “Myth and Moral Philosophy” provides us with a moral philosopher’s reading of two myths, the biblical story of the Fall and Plato’s story (in the Symposium) of the origin of the sexes. Wetzel’s paper also illustrates a view of demythologizing that is, I believe, implicit in many of the other papers in this volume. The concept of demythologization continues to be misinterpreted as denigrating to myths and as necessarily reflecting a desire to transcend them. But as Wetzel makes clear, one only demythologizes stories that one respects and treasures. As Wetzel puts it, “We debunk the stories we hope to outgrow (like the one about the tooth-fairy); we demythologize the ones we hope to carry with us, in some transformed way, into adulthood.” Moreover, Wetzel approaches the two myths from the classical perspective that human beings are defined by what and how we love. Given this understanding, it is natural to understand our moral lives as pursuits, and consequently the relationship link between moral thinking (philosophy) and stories of quests (myths) is a close one. Thus, when the philosophical demythologization of a story reveals the limits of reason (as in Kant’s reading of the Fall), the result is not the abandonment of myth but instead a remythologization of philosophy in which philosophy itself comes to house a quest for perfection. If previous papers have argued that philosophy cannot take a spectatorial attitude to myth, but that myth and philosophy are always already implicated in each other, this point is embodied in William G. Doty’s paper on “Myth and Postmodernist Philosophy.” Recognizing the particularity of his own position, Doty does not presume to present a clear and distinct
14 Kevin Schilbrack overview of the nature of myth or of mythic thinking, but rather an essay that exemplifies the view that all positions are composite, fragmentary, and partial. He therefore relinquishes the stance of the allegedly neutral critic of myth, and disassembles or deconstructs it. Doty contends that a postmodern approach explodes the disciplinary boundaries of philosophy. As the positivistic distinctions between theory and observation have broken down and blurred, so too has the privileged, objective status of philosophy. As Doty says, quoting Gianni Vattimo, the true moment of transition from the modern to the postmodern is found in the demythologization of demythologization. Consequently, Doty’s philosophy ignores the modernist walls between academic fields and draws freely from James Hillman’s depth psychology, Lawrence Grossberg’s cultural studies, and others in order to create an interdisciplinary approach to myths. For Doty, myths are imagination-rich creations that “forge meaningful interpretations upon the ordinary and the extraordinary.” His essay shows that the same can be true of philosophy. J. Baird Callicott’s “Myth and Environmental Philosophy” opens with the recognition that current environmental crises require an environmental ethic that is expressed in the grammars of particular local cultures but which also reflects cross-cultural agreement. Callicott moves beyond the other papers in this volume by holding not only that Western modes of thought like philosophy and the sciences have involved myth, but in calling for them to cooperate in the shaping of a new mythic worldview. Because the problems we face are global in scope, our response to them needs to be more than just a collection of culture-specific ethics. We need to coordinate or orchestrate the particular myths of world religions. But if, as Callicott insists, each mythic world view is not just incidental clothing for the perception of the same ultimate reality (a romantic, modernist view championed, for example, by John Hick), but rather constructs it, then the conductor of this “orchestra” of diverse religious voices needs to reflect a global culture. Callicott controversially argues that the best candidate for this job is science – not the modernist science of reductionism, mechanism, and materialism that inherits Cartesian dualism, but rather a constructive post-Modern science. The post-Modern myth or “grand narrative” that Callicott recommends must be comprehensive, logically consistent, fallible or revisable, appealing, and practical, or else it will not be credible. Christopher Flood’s paper investigates the place where theories of myth and theories of ideology intersect. In “Myth and Ideology,” he seeks to articulate a model of what he calls “political myths,” narratives that carry a specific political ideology and so invite their audience to assent and potentially to act in accordance with it. His develops his model of political myths so as to provide a tool for identifying and analyzing both the political dimension of mythic discourse and the mythic dimension of political discourse. Flood’s treatment of this issue is original (and fits especially well with the other approaches in this volume) in that he argues against the
Introduction 15 irrationalist tradition in political theory that holds that mythic beliefs are symptoms of an emotionally driven, collective, psychological need to believe that overrides rational knowledge or evaluation of evidence. As Flood says in closing, “There is no need to consider myths as expressions of some special sort of consciousness or to situate beliefs in myths within a psychopathology of the irrational.” Mythmaking “is an entirely normal way of making political events intelligible in the light of ideological beliefs.” Just as Segal’s paper was a fitting beginning for this collection, Mary Gerhart and Allan Russell’s “Myth and Public Science” represents an apposite conclusion. For just as Segal’s Tylor raises the natural sciences as a paradigm of rational thought and of neutral reflection on the world against which the deficiencies of mythical thought become clear, Gerhart and Russell wish to compromise science’s paradigmatic status by showing how public science depends upon the narrative structure of myth. Their method is not to reject the standards of objectivity and rationality in postmodern pique, but rather to show how the persuasiveness of science is not independent of mythic narrative. The “public science” that is found in scientific reports and presentations takes the empirical and analytic investigations of private laboratory work and turns it into a narrative account, adding to the lab work the themes that make it into a story. Science in the form in which it is published also presents itself as transpiring in mythical time rather than historical time. Science thereby involves myth insofar as it requires for its public exposition and persuasiveness the structural and functional aspects of narrative. In this respect, science is parasitic on myth’s richness, its interpretive potential, its durability or persistence, its ability to develop, and its interweaving of fact and fiction. As Gerhart and Russell note in concluding, people seem content with the idea that a work of fiction may include some truth but feel tricked by the suggestion that a truthful account may include some fiction. On their account, however, what unites the mythic and the scientific is not a swindle but the aesthetics of human understanding. Most approaches to the study of myths leave questions about the possible truth of myths in the shadows. It is my hope that as theorists of myths come to reflect on their own presuppositions about what can be true and as philosophers come to appreciate the place of narrative in thinking, both sides will value the philosophical tools these essays supply.
Notes 1 2 3
The four philosophical papers are those by Ernst Cassirer, Philip Wheelwright, Eliseo Vivas, and Paul Ricoeur. Especially good on this issue of the relation of religious doctrines to other religious utterances is Christian 1964. On the relationships within a body of doctrines, see Christian 1972, 1987, and 1995. See Lincoln 1989. It is one of Lincoln’s themes that the use of mythic discourse need not be conservative or reactionary: by constructing new classificatory
16 Kevin Schilbrack
4 5
schemes, myths not only legitimate social structures, but can also serve to destabilize and reshape them. The first diagram is Figure 1.2 in Lincoln (1989: 9); the second is Figure 1.3 (1989: 25). An example of the view that Religious Studies should be strictly scientific is Donald Wiebe (1999), who argues that polymethodism is really Pollyannaism, in the sense that it lets back into the academy those normative approaches that were originally excluded when Religious Studies was created as a field distinct from theology.
Bibliography Aristotle (1995) Selected Writings, trans. T. Irwin and G. Fine, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. Baeten, E. (1996) The Magic Mirror: Myth’s Abiding Power, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Blumenberg, H. (1988) Work on Myth, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Cassirer, E. (1946) Language and Myth, trans. S.K. Langer, New York: Dover. —— (1955) The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Vol. 2: Mythical Thought, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Christian, Sr, W. (1964) Meaning and Truth in Religion, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. —— (1972) Oppositions of Religious Doctrines, New York: Herder and Herder. —— (1987) Doctrines of Religious Communities: A Philosophical Study, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. —— (1995) “The Logic of Oppositions of Religious Doctrines,” in T. Dean (ed.), Religious Pluralism and Truth: Essays on Cross-cultural Philosophy of Religion, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Dundes, A. (ed.) (1984) Sacred Narrative: Readings in the Theory of Myth, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Eliade, M. (1963) Myth and Reality, New York: Harper and Row. Georges, R. (ed.) (1968) Studies in Mythology, Homewood, IL: The Dorsey Press. Griffiths, P.J. (1999) Religious Reading: The Place of Reading in Religion, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lincoln, B. (1989) Discourse and the Construction of Society, Oxford: Oxford University Press. MacIntyre, A. (1967) “Myth,” in P. Edwards (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, New York: Macmillan, 5: 434–7. Middleton, J. (ed.) (1976) Myth and Cosmos: Readings in Mythology and Symbolism, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Neville, R.C. (1995) “Religions, Philosophies, and Philosophies of Religion,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 38: 165–81. Patton, L. and Doniger, W. (eds) (1996) Myth and Method, Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia. Pettazzoni, R. (1954) Essays on the History of Religions, Leiden: Brill. Reynolds, F. and Tracy, D. (eds) (1990) Myth and Philosophy, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Ricoeur, P. (1969) The Symbolism of Evil, Boston, MA: Beacon. —— (1995) Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative and Imagination, Minneapolis, MN: Fortress.
Introduction 17 Scarborough, M. (1994) Myth and Modernity: Postcritical Reflections, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Segal, R.A. (1980) “In Defense of Mythology: The History of Modern Theories of Myth,” The Annals of Scholarship, 1: 3–49. —— (ed.) (1996) Theories of Myth, vols 1–6, New York: Garlard. Stump, E. (1993) “Introduction,” in E. Stump (ed.), Reasoned Faith, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Sturma, D. (2000) “Politics and the New Mythology: the turn to Late Romanticism,” in K. Ameriks (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wiebe, D. (1999) The Politics of Religious Studies: The Continuing Conflict with Theology in the Academy, New York: St Martin’s Press.
1
Myth as primitive philosophy The case of E.B. Tylor Robert A. Segal
I. Myth as the primitive counterpart to science Among the standard issues considered by theorists of myth is that of the relationship of myth to philosophy. There are various positions on the issue. Who holds them will be discussed in the last section of this essay. For now, let me simply list the array of positions held: that myth is a part of philosophy; that myth is philosophy; that philosophy grows out of myth; that myth and philosophy are independent of each other but serve the same function; and that myth and philosophy are independent of each other and serve different functions. Compounding the array of options is the common inclusion of two further categories: religion and science. The relationship between myth and philosophy becomes linked to that between religion and science. On this issue as well there is an array of positions. The pioneering English anthropologist E.B. Tylor (1832–1917) remains the classic exponent of one standard position on the relationship between religion and science and in turn on the relationship between myth and philosophy.1 Tylor subsumes both religion and science under philosophy. He divides philosophy into two categories: “primitive” and “modern.” Primitive philosophy is identical with primitive religion. There is no primitive science. Modern philosophy, by contrast, has two subdivisions: religion and science. Of the two, science is by far the more important, and science, itself wholly modern, is the modern counterpart to primitive religion.2 Modern religion is metaphysics, which has no primitive counterpart. Alternatively, modern religion is ethics, which is by no means absent among “primitives” but which is separate from their religion. Tylor uses the term “animism” for religion per se and not just for primitive religion. Animism is composed of beliefs and rituals. The basic belief is in the existence of one or more gods. Tylor chooses the term “animism” because he derives the belief in gods from the belief in souls (”anima” in Latin means soul) occupying all physical entities, beginning with the bodies of humans. Gods are souls in all things in the physical world beyond humans, who themselves are not gods.
Myth as primitive philosophy 19 Primitive religion is the primitive counterpart to science because both are explanations of the physical world. Hence Tylor characterizes primitive religion as “savage biology” (1958: II, 20). Hence he maintains that “mechanical astronomy gradually superseded the animistic astronomy of the lower races” and that today “biological pathology gradually supersedes animistic pathology” (1958: II, 229). In modern times, science has replaced religion as the explanation of the physical world, so that “animistic astronomy” and “animistic pathology” are to be found in only primitive, not modern, animism. Modern religion has surrendered the physical world to science and has retreated to the immaterial world, especially to the realm of life after death – that is, after the death of the body. Where in primitive religion souls – and gods – are physical, in modern religion souls are deemed immaterial and are limited to human beings: In our own day and country, the notion of souls of beasts is to be seen dying out. Animism, indeed, seems to be drawing in its outposts, and concentrating itself on its first and main position, the doctrine of the human soul. This doctrine has undergone extreme modification in the course of culture. … The soul has given up its ethereal substance, and become an immaterial entity, “the shadow of a shade.” Its theory is becoming separated from the investigations of biology and mental science, which now discuss the phenomena of life and thought, the senses and the intellect, the emotions and the will, on a ground-work of pure experience. There has arisen an intellectual product whose very existence is of the deepest significance, a “psychology” which has no longer anything to do with “soul.” The soul’s place in modern thought is in the metaphysics of religion, and its especial office there is that of furnishing an intellectual doctrine of the future. (1958: II, 85) Even if there is no primitive metaphysics, which for Tylor apparently assumes immateriality, primitive thinking is for Tylor anything but nonphilosophical. For by philosophical he means concerned with intellectual questions, not least with questions about the physical world. He continually calls primitive religion a “philosophy” and its inventors “savage philosophers.” With the demise of religion as an explanation of the physical world has gone myth, which for Tylor is confined to primitive religion. Where primitive religion apart from myth postulates gods with power over the physical world, myth elaborates on this postulation to tell how and why gods exercise their power. Even though myth is an elaboration on the belief in gods, the belief itself can survive the rise of science where myth cannot. In modern religion, gods cease to be agents in the world and, like souls in humans become metaphysical entities. Apparently, myths are too closely tied to gods as agents in the world to permit any comparable transformation.
20 Robert A. Segal Even more important than metaphysical entities, gods in modern religion become models for humans. One now turns to the Bible to learn ethics, not physics. One reads the Bible for the Ten Commandments, not for the creation of the world. Jesus is to be emulated as the ideal human, not as a miracle worker. In primitive culture ethics exists outside religion: One great element of religion, that moral element which among the higher nations forms its most vital part, is indeed little represented in the religion of the lower races. It is not that these races have no moral sense or no moral standard, for both are strongly marked among them, if not in formal precept, at least in that traditional consensus of society which we call public opinion, according to which certain actions are held to be good or bad, right or wrong. It is that the conjunction of ethics and Animistic philosophy, so intimate and powerful in the higher culture, seems scarcely yet to have begun in the lower. (1958: II, 11) Again, as protean as religion as a whole is for Tylor, myth is inflexible. Where, then, there is “modern religion,” there are no modern myths. The phrase “modern myth” is self-contradictory. In pitting myth against science, Tylor epitomizes, if one can generalize, the nineteenth-century view of myth. In the twentieth century the trend has been the opposite: it has been to reconcile myth with science, so that moderns, who by definition have science, can also have myth. While the view that myth and science are incompatible still garners some contemporary adherents, its staunchest exponent remains Tylor. By no coincidence present-day defenders of this view are commonly labeled “neo-Tyloreans.” Tylor himself never actually argues that myth and science are incompatible. Rather, he takes their incompatibility for granted. He does argue that the two are redundant, for both function to explain events in the physical world. But redundancy does not mean incompatibility. Why for him are myth and science incompatible? The answer must be that the explanations they give are. For Tylor, myth attributes events to the wills of personalities, whereas science ascribes events to impersonal forces. Myth and science are incompatible because both offer direct explanations of the same events. Gods operate not behind or through impersonal forces but in place of them. According to myth, the rain god, let us say, collects rain in buckets and then chooses to empty the buckets on some spot below. According to science, meteorological processes cause rain. One cannot stack the mythic account atop the scientific one, for the rain god, rather than utilizing meteorological processes, acts instead of them.3 But even if myth and science are incompatible, why for Tylor is myth unscientific? The answer must be that personal causes are unscientific. But
Myth as primitive philosophy 21 why? Tylor never discloses, and one must reconstruct his view. There are various possibilities. First, perhaps for Tylor personal causes are mental – the decisions of divine agents – whereas impersonal causes are material. But Tylor himself contrasts the primitive religious conception of the soul as material to the modern religious conception of it as immaterial. Souls for “primitives” are “substantial material beings” (1958: II, 37). Even primitives’ gods are material: “the lower races are apt to ascribe to spirits in general that kind of ethereal materiality which we have seen they attribute to souls” (1958: II, 284). Not till later do even more advanced religions come to consider superhuman entities other than material: “The ideas of Tertullian and Origen, as to the thin yet not immaterial substance of angels and demons …” (1958: II, 284). Tylor goes as far as to declare that “the later metaphysical notion of immateriality could scarcely have conveyed any meaning to a savage” (1958: II, 41). In short, primitive religion for Tylor is no less materialist than science.4 Tylor’s own view aside, any equation of science with materialism is debatable. At least some present-day scientists and philosophers of science are dualists. If natural science entailed materialism, the mind-body question would not remain a scientific as well as philosophical question. The philosopher of science Adolf Grünbaum writes of the myth that the explanatory standards of the natural sciences are intrinsically committed to a physicalistic reductionism such that psychic states (e.g., intentions, fears, hopes, beliefs, desires, anticipations, etc.) are held to be, at best, epiphenomena, having no causal relevance of their own. (Grünbaum 1984: 75) Tylor’s reason for judging personal causation unscientific not only, then, cannot be but should not be that gods are immaterial entities. Second, perhaps for Tylor personal causes are neither predictable nor testable, whereas impersonal ones are both predictable and testable. For example, while it is predictable that lightning will cause thunder, it is not predictable that the god of thunder will decide to send thunder. But the events that, according to Tylor, primitives most want explained are regular, hence predictable, ones like the daily course of the sun, not irregular ones like thunder. Moreover, many scientific explanations are merely probabilistic, yet they are not thereby less scientific than deductive explanations. The predictability of events in fields like medicine is often much less than even 50–50. Weather predictions are notoriously fallible, yet meteorology is still a science. While in Tylor’s day the ultimate scientific explanations were assumed to be deterministic, many contemporary physicists believe that
22 Robert A. Segal the ultimate explanations of physics will prove to be merely probabilistic (see Salmon 1971: 321–6). Tylor does contrast the testability of science to the untestability of myth, but he does not specify the nature of the test: We are being trained to the facts of physical science, which we can test and test again, and we feel it a fall from this high level of proof when we turn our minds to the old records which elude such testing, and are even admitted on all hands to contain statements not to be relied on. (1958: I, 280) Perhaps Tylor is referring not merely to “experimental tests,” to which “progressive races have been learning to submit their opinions” (1958: I, 112–13), but, more broadly, to a critical, questioning attitude. Yet Tylor must grant primitives some capacity for criticism, for otherwise how to account for the eventual replacement of myth by science as the reigning explanation of the world? Even if, by definition, moderns have science and primitives have myth as their explanations, who is present to replace myth with science save the last generation of primitives? Third, perhaps for Tylor personal causes are particularistic, whereas impersonal ones are generalizable. For example, myth, like history and literature, describes the actions of specific gods and not of gods per se. But the events that, according to Tylor, primitives most want explained are, again, recurrent, not singular, ones: the daily rising and setting of the sun, not the origin of the sun. Unlike such theorists of myth as Mircea Eliade, Tylor thus considers creation myths secondary. Furthermore, the cause of recurrent events in myth is for Tylor always the same: whenever the sun rises and sets, it does so because the sun god has decided to make it rise and set, and the god’s reason never changes. Insofar as for Tylor the causes of all events in the physical world are the decisions of gods, myths collectively might even be said to provide a uniform explanation of all events. Even in explaining recurrent individual events, myths for Tylor are more like science than like history, so that personal causation cannot for him be unscientific because it explains only one-time events. Fourth, perhaps for Tylor personal causes are final, or teleological, whereas impersonal ones are efficient. Gods act not just in response to something but also for some end. Atoms behave only in response to something. But science was partly teleological until Newton, and biology remained teleological until Darwin. Much human behavior continues to be explained teleologically. The difference between myth and science is that myth explains the whole world teleologically. There is no disjunction between the nature of the explanations of human behavior and the nature of the explanations of the behavior of everything else. Indeed, gods for Tylor are postulated on analogy to human beings. Still, for Tylor, the counterpart to myth is not social science but natural science, so that the
Myth as primitive philosophy 23 retention of teleological explanations in social science is beside the point. Tylor need only observe that the course of natural science from Aristotle to today has been from teleological to mechanistic explanations. Even so, it would be going too far to pronounce teleological explanations inherently unscientific rather than ever less scientific. In sum, it is not easy to see how Tylor either does defend or could defend his conviction that myth is unscientific. Because he never questions this conviction, he takes for granted not merely that primitives have only myth but, even more, that moderns have only science. Not coincidentally, Tylor refers to the “myth-making stage” of culture (see, e.g., 1958: I, 283, 392). Rather than an eternal phenomenon, as for Eliade, C.G. Jung, and Joseph Campbell, myth for Tylor is merely a passing one. Humans have myth only until they discover science. Moderns who still have myth have simply failed either to recognize or to concede its incompatibility with science. While Tylor does not date the beginning of the scientific stage, it is synonymous with the beginning of modernity and is therefore recent. Dying in 1917, Tylor never quite envisioned a stage post the modern one.
II. Myth taken literally One reason Tylor pits myth against science is that he reads myth literally. He opposes those who read myth poetically, metaphorically, or symbolically – for him, interchangeable terms. Tylor assumes that the explanatory function of myth requires a literal reading. To read myth non-literally is automatically to cede any explanatory function, and to cede the explanatory function is automatically to trivialize myth. He thus writes that the basis on which such [mythic] ideas … are built is not to be narrowed down to poetic fancy and transformed metaphor. They rest upon a broad philosophy of nature, early and crude indeed, but thoughtful, consistent, and quite really and seriously meant. (1958: I, 285) Tylor even assumes that modern theorists who take myth non-literally do so because they project their own incredulity onto primitives. Never taking myth seriously themselves, these moderns cannot conceive that anyone else has ever done so. It is not self-evident that myth must be taken literally to be taken seriously. Such theorists as Campbell and Rudolf Bultmann argue the opposite: that myth must be taken non-literally to be taken seriously. Where Tylor argues that myth is credible to primitives only because they take it literally, Campbell argues that myth is credible to primitives only because they take it non-literally. Where Tylor argues that myth is incredible to moderns precisely because they rightly take it literally, Campbell and Bultmann alike argue that myth is credible to moderns only insofar as they rightly take it
24 Robert A. Segal non-literally. Tylor objects not to those theorists who read myth non-literally for themselves but to those who read it non-literally for primitives. He would thus berate Campbell far more for what Campbell says of primitives than for what Campbell and Bultmann say of moderns. According to Tylor, moderns who interpret myth non-literally for primitives are anachronistically interpreting it as poetry: Poetry has so far kept alive in our minds the old animative [i.e., mythic] theory of nature, that it is no great effort to us to fancy the [inanimate] waterspout a huge giant or sea-monster, and to depict in what we call appropriate metaphor its march across the fields of ocean. But where such forms of speech are current among less educated races, they are underlaid by a distinct prosaic [i.e., literal] meaning of [actual] fact. (1958: I, 292) In contrast above all to Friedrich Max Müller, Tylor regards primitives as scientists rather than poets.5 At the same time Tylor observes that modern poets like Wordsworth best grasp the primitive disposition to personify nature because they can best imagine the sea, for example, as literally raging: Just so the civilized European may contrast his own stiff orderly prosaic thought with the wild shifting poetry and legend of the old myth-maker, and may say of him that everything he saw gave birth to [mere] fancy. Wanting the power of transporting himself into this imaginative atmosphere, the [non-poetically inclined] student occupied with the analysis of the mythic world may fail so pitiably in conceiving its depth and intensity of meaning, as to convert it into stupid fiction. Those can see more justly who have the poet’s gift of throwing their minds back into the world’s older life, like the actor who for a moment can forget himself and become what he pretends to be. (1958: I, 305) Nevertheless, Tylor maintains that modern theorists of myth misunderstand the primitive disposition to personify nature either because, as in the quotation, they dismiss the literal personification as silly or, worse, because, like Campbell, they transform literal personification into poetry.6 There is a double respect in which Tylor, in the name of primitives, interprets myth literally: not only is myth, according to him, really about the physical world rather than about either society or human beings, but it is really about the divine causes of events in the physical world rather than about the physical world itself. For Tylor’s non-literalist nemeses, it is about neither. One group of non-literalists singled out by Tylor, the euhemerists,
Myth as primitive philosophy 25 contend that myths are really about human heroes, who subsequently get magnified into gods (see 1958: I, 278–82). Heroes neither are gods nor control the physical world. Euhemerists grant that the apparent subject matter of myth is gods and the world. They simply deny that the real one is. Myth for them does not just originate out of the biography of heroes – a possibility that Tylor allows – but actually remains a merely hyperbolic version of that human biography: “legendary wonders” are “treated [by euhemerists] … as being matter-of-fact disguised in metaphor” (1958: I, 279). For example, the myth of Helius’ driving his chariot daily across the sky proves to be only a colorful way of describing the life of a local or national hero. Ancient euhemerists “were declaring that Atlas was a great astronomer who taught the use of the sphere, and was therefore [merely] represented with the world resting on his shoulders” (1958: I, 279).7 Even Zeus “was held to have been a king of Krete, and the Kretans could show to wondering strangers his sepulchre, with the very name of the great departed inscribed upon it” (1958: I, 279). Similarly, modern euhemerists “inform us that Jove smiting the giants with his thunderbolts was a king repressing a sedition …” (1958: I, 279). The other group of non-literalists named by Tylor, the moral allegorizers, assert that myths are really prescriptions for human behavior (see 1958: I, 277–78, 408–15). The myth of Helius becomes a clever technique for promoting self-discipline: “Helius daily drives his chariot across the sky” means “Work hard.” Likewise the myth of Memnon, who is killed by Achilles at Troy, “depicts the destinies of rash young men of promise.” Perseus “symbolizes war, and when of the three Gorgons he attacks only the mortal one, this means that only practicable wars are to be attempted” (1958: I, 277). A present-day moral allegorizer might take the story of Perseus as “an allegory of trade: Perseus himself is Labour, and he finds Andromeda, who is Profit, chained and ready to be devoured by the monster Capital; he rescues her and carries her off in triumph” (1958: I, 278). For the euhemerists, myth cannot be the primitive counterpart to science because its subject is human beings rather than gods or the world. For the moral allegorizers, myth cannot be the primitive counterpart of science because, in addition, it says how humans ought to behave rather than how they do behave. Tylor assumes that myth, as part of primitive religion, is not only non-normative but also amoral. For two reasons, then, myth cannot be moral allegory.8 Since Tylor denies the reality of the gods, he himself might seem to be taking them as mere personifications of natural phenomena and thereby be taking myth non-literally. But he is not. Unlike both the euhemerists and the moral allegorizers, he assumes that primitives themselves take the gods literally. Also unlike his antagonists, so does he. He breaks with primitives in taking the gods as real only in intent, not also in fact. Gods for Tylor are the purported causes of events in the physical world. Myths not merely describe events but explain them. The precise subject
26 Robert A. Segal matter of myth for Tylor is not, then, events themselves but the causes of events. As mere descriptions of events, myths would be unnecessary. Ever observant, primitives for Tylor notice events on their own. They invent myths to account for their observations, not to record them. For Tylor, gods originate out of the personification of nature, but once conjured up, gods are more than mere personifications. They are the causes – the professed literal causes – of the origin and operation of the world. It is only because myths provide the causes of observed events that they qualify as the primitive counterpart to science.
III. Myth and religion Another reason Tylor pits myth against science is that he subsumes myth under religion. For him, there is no myth outside religion, though, again, modern religion is without myth. Because primitive religion is the counterpart to science, myth must be so as well. Because religion is to be taken literally, so must myth be. On the one hand myth for Tylor arises last within primitive religion and presupposes the rest of it. Hence he writes that the “first and foremost” cause of myth is the “doctrine of Animism,” or the belief in gods, itself (1958: I, 285). On the other hand myth for him supplements the rest of religion. There is no primitive religion without myth. Without myth, primitives would still know who their gods are, what phenomena individual gods control, and what the hierarchy of the gods is. But they would not know the biographies of their gods, the past behavior of the gods, and the relationship between gods and humans. And even if Tylor downplays creation myths, without creation myths, primitives would know the operation but not the origin of the world. They would know the causes of only recurrent, not initial, events in the world. Myth completes the explanation of the world provided by the rest of religion.
IV. Reason in myth For Tylor, myth stems from innate intellectual curiosity, which is as strong in primitives as in moderns: “Man’s craving to know the causes at work in each event he witnesses, the reasons why each state of things he surveys is such as it is and no other, is no product of high civilization, but a characteristic of his race down to its lowest stages” (1958: I, 368–9). More than idle curiosity, the quest for knowledge among even primitives “is already an intellectual appetite whose satisfaction claims many of the moments not engrossed by war or sport, food or sleep” (1958: I, 369). Tylor acknowledges an emotional side to religion, but he deems the intellectual side paramount (see 1958: II, 444–5). For Tylor, the postulation of first souls and then gods is a rational inference from the data: “the primitive animistic doctrine is thoroughly at
Myth as primitive philosophy 27 home among savages, who appear to hold it on the very evidence of their senses, interpreted on the biological principle which seems to them most reasonable” (1958: II, 83–4). Rather than transforming heretofore dead and inert phenomena into living and mobile ones, primitives hypothesize souls and gods to account for the life and activity – the data – that they already experience around them: The sense of an absolute psychical distinction between man and beast, so prevalent in the civilized world, is hardly to be found among the lower races. Men to whom the cries of beasts and birds seem like human language, and their actions guided as it were by human thought, logically enough allow the existence of souls to beasts, birds, and reptiles, as to men. The lower psychology cannot but recognize in beasts the very characteristics which it attributes to the human soul, namely, the phenomena of life and death, will and judgment, and the phantom seen in vision or in dream. (1958: II, 53) We moderns consider even more madcap the postulation of souls and gods in inanimate objects like “stocks and stones, weapons, boats, food, clothes, ornaments, and other objects,” for to us these objects “are not merely soulless but [underlying it] lifeless” (1958: II, 61). But “if we place ourselves by an effort in the intellectual position of an uncultured tribe, and examine the theory of object-souls from their point of view, we shall hardly pronounce it irrational” (1958: II, 61). A stone over which one trips can seem to have placed itself there. Plants as well as animals do seem to be exercising their wills in their varying responses to human effort. Animals, plants, and inanimate objects do appear as agents in dreams and visions. Because moderns no less than primitives see humans in their dreams, hear the human-like cries of beasts and birds, and trip over stones, Tylor is not distinguishing primitive senses from modern ones. He is distinguishing primitive trust in the senses from modern wariness. Less critical than moderns, primitives accept unquestioningly not only their normal, waking impressions but even their dream and hallucinatory ones: Even in healthy waking life, the savage or barbarian has never learnt to make that rigid distinction between subjective and objective, between imagination and reality, to enforce which is one of the main results of scientific education. Still less, when disordered in body and mind he sees around him phantom human forms, can he distrust the evidence of his very senses. (1958: II, 29) Religion partly originates from the primitive attempt to explain the appearance of humans in dreams and visions, which are therefore taken as real.
28 Robert A. Segal Tylor faults primitives for failing to check not only their sense impressions but also their inferences from those impressions. Primitives automatically take as speech the noises made by beasts and birds, in which case animals must for them possess not only life and motion but also intellect, for which additional reason animals must harbor souls and then gods. Because primitives never question the inferences they draw from sense impressions, ordinary or abnormal, they invent myth and religion rather than science. Once primitives hypothesize gods as the causes of natural events, they experience, not just explain, the world as filled with gods: They [primitives] could see the flame licking its yet undevouted prey with tongues of fire, or the serpent gliding along the waving sword from hilt to point; they could feel a live creature gnawing within their bodies in the pangs of hunger; they heard the voices of the hill-dwarfs answering in the echo, and the chariot of the Heaven-god rattling in thunder over the solid firmament. (1958: I, 297) Still, primitives initially experience the world no differently from moderns. They see and hear what we do. They merely trust their eyes and ears and on the basis of them reason out, not assume or project, the existence of souls and then gods. Primitives may be uncritical, but they are not illogical. They proceed scrupulously inductively – from observations (of, say, the regularity of rain) to hypothesis (that, by analogy to human actions, rain results from the decision of an agent) to generalization (that the cause of all natural events is the decision of agents). Tylor thus preserves his fundamental parallel between religion for primitives and science for moderns.
V. Imagination in myth As much as Tylor stresses the role of reason in myth and religion, he accords a place to imagination, at least in myth. Like the rest of religion, myth functions to explain the world, but unlike the rest of religion, myth does so in the form of stories, which are in part the product of imagination. It is imagination which transforms the rational belief in Helius as the sun god into the fantastic story of Helius’ daily driving a chariot across the sky. Undeniably, Tylor vigorously decries the view that myth stems from unrestrained imagination: Among those opinions which are produced by a little knowledge, to be dispelled by a little more, is the belief in an almost boundless creative power of the human imagination. The superficial student, mazed in a crowd of seemingly wild and lawless fancies, which he thinks to have
Myth as primitive philosophy 29 no reason in nature nor pattern in this material world, at first concludes them to be new births from the imagination of the poet, the tale-teller, and the seer. (1958: I, 273) Tylor even maintains that both the euhemerists and the moral allegorizers fail to take myth seriously because they attribute it to unbridled imagination, which he equates with “poetic fancy” (see, e.g., 1958: I, 285, 289–90). For Tylor, to attribute myth to imagination is invariably to make its subject other than the physical world, is thereby to make its function other than explanatory, and is thereby to cease to take myth seriously. Still, Tylor accords a commodious place to restrained imagination – imagination restrained by reason. The comparative approach, which he takes for granted neither the euhemerists nor the moral allegorizers employ (see 1958: I, 280–2), “makes it possible to trace in mythology the operation of imaginative processes recurring with the evident regularity of mental law …” (1958: I, 282; see also 274–5). Tylor assumes that untethered imagination would never yield the patterns he finds in myths, so that regularities constitute ipso facto evidence of the subordination of imagination to reason. The stories may be fantastic, but they are fantastic in uniform ways. Tylor asks rhetorically, “What would be popularly thought more indefinite and uncontrolled than the products of the imagination in myths and fables?” (1958: I, 18). Here he anticipates Claude LéviStrauss. For both, the demonstration of uniformity in myth, the seemingly least orderly of artifacts, proves that not only it but also its primitive creators are rational (see Lévi-Strauss 1965: 83; 1970: 10). For both Tylor and Lévi-Strauss as well, the rational function of myth must be scientific-like.
VI. Assessment Tylor’s subordination of imagination to reason is symptomatic of the central limitation of his overall theory of myth: his overemphasis on myth as akin to science and his underemphasis on it as akin to literature. Myth for him is a scientific-like hypothesis that merely happens to take the form of a narrative.9 Like Lévi-Strauss, he downplays the format in order to uphold the content. He assumes that myth, like the rest of religion, is an explanation of the physical world, is taken seriously only when it is taken as an explanation of the physical world, and is taken as an explanation of the physical world only when the form is taken as merely a colorful way of presenting the content. Form and content are separable, and content alone counts. To treat the form as anything more than this is to reduce a set of would-be truth-claims about the world to fiction. Tylor views myth the way Karl Popper and Carl Hempel, among many others, view history: as a causal explanation of events. For Popper and
30 Robert A. Segal Hempel, a historical account may take the form of a narrative, but the form is irrelevant to the purpose of the account, which is to explain why something happened. Other philosophers maintain that history is more, or even other, than explanation and that the narrative form is central to the purpose of history. Narrative for them is not merely a literary device but a way of thinking. Someone of a Tylorean bent would reply that to regard history as more, let alone other, than a causal explanation is to trivialize it.10 Tylor’s attempt at minimizing both narrative and imagination fails. First, he simply cannot restrict the subject of myth to the physical world or even the human one. He cannot disregard the divine world. Even if gods are postulated in order to explain the physical world, surely they become of interest in their own right, if only for their power over the physical world. Surely the intellectual inquisitiveness that Tylor is so zealous to credit to primitives would not abate with the postulation of gods as the causes of events in the world. Exactly insofar as myths for Tylor are narratives about gods, there must surely be interest in gods in themselves. The Hebrew Bible may present God only in relation to humans and the world, but Homer and Hesiod, for example, also depict the gods among themselves. Certainly in science the microscopic world, even if initially postulated to account for the macroscopic world, becomes of interest in itself. Second, descriptions of the divine world are surely the work of imagination. Gods may be postulated on analogy to human beings, but they are still more than human beings. Whatever qualities make gods gods and make heaven heaven are surely the product of imagination. Far from constricting the exercise of imagination, the belief in gods doubtless spurs it. Third, the content of myth does not evince “the operation of imaginative processes recurring with the evident regularity of mental law” (1958: I, 282). Strikingly, Tylor barely discusses the content of myth – beyond stipulating that myth presents a divine explanation of natural phenomena. What form that explanation takes, he never says. He provides no common pattern for myths. The sole myths for which he provides any regularity are hero myths, in which, according to him, the subjects are exposed at birth, are saved, and grow up to become national heroes (see 1958: I, 281–2). But this pattern is neither universal nor detailed. And hero myths for Tylor are secondary. He offers no comparable pattern for creation myths, flood myths, or myths of recurrent natural processes. It is hardly clear that Tylor could if he tried. While it may be facile to say, as both ancients (Plato, Plotinus) and moderns (Hans Blumenberg) do, that in myth anything can happen, in myth the grandest array of things does happen. Any limits on the narrative are likely set by the scope of imagination, whether imagination is envisioned as something running free or, much closer to Tylor, as something rigidly checked by cognitive processes.11 Literary critics like Richard Chase may go too far in reducing myth to literature (see Chase 1946; 1948: 3–22; 1969: v–vii, 73–4, 80–1,
Myth as primitive philosophy 31 110–31), but Tylor doubtless goes too far in ignoring the literary character of myth. Tylor reduces myth to plot. He ignores other standard literary considerations such as point of view, character, diction, narrative technique, and reader reaction.12 In the light of postmodernism, Tylor’s approach doubtless seems not simply one-sided but also hopelessly out of date. Where postmodernists would view myth as a mere story and not an explanation, Tylor views myth as an explanation and only incidentally a story. What is needed is not the replacement of myth as explanation by myth as story but instead the integration of the two: the working out of how form and content, story and explanation, operate together. The continuing importance of Tylor lies in his insistence on the intellectual content of myth. He refuses to pay the price of reconciling myth with science: giving up the explanatory power of myth by reading myth as, say, an expression of feelings rather than an explanation of external events. For Tylor, myth either is explanation or is nothing.
VII. Other views of the relationship between myth and philosophy Tylor’s is but one view of the relationship between myth and philosophy or between religion and science. Closest to Tylor stands James Frazer, the Scottish-born classicist and anthropologist. For Frazer, as for Tylor, myth is part of primitive religion, and primitive religion is the counterpart to science, itself entirely modern. Primitive religion and science are, as for Tylor, mutually exclusive and not merely redundant. But where for Tylor primitive religion, including myth, functions as the counterpart to scientific theory, for Frazer it functions even more as the counterpart to applied science, or technology. Where for Tylor primitive religion serves to explain the physical world, for Frazer it serves to effect the world, above all by spurring the crops to grow. Underlying the primitive practice, or ritual, is, as for Tylor, an explanation of the way the world works, and that explanation, the counterpart to scientific theory, is a “savage” or “barbarous” “philosophy” (Frazer 1963: 306). Just as for Tylor, so for Frazer, philosophy is universal, and primitive religion, including myth, is the primitive stage of it. As an explanation of the physical world, religion is, as for Tylor, false but still logical: crude and false as that philosophy may seem to us, it would be unjust to deny it the merit of logical consistency. … The flaw – and it is a fatal one – of the system lies not in its reasoning, but in its premises … (Frazer 1963: 306) Reacting against the views of Tylor and Frazer and other members of what he imprecisely calls “the English school of anthropology,” the
32 Robert A. Segal French philosopher and armchair anthropologist Lucien Lévy-Bruhl insists on a much wider divide between myth and science. Where for Tylor and Frazer primitives think like moderns, just less rigorously, for Lévy-Bruhl primitives think differently from moderns. Moderns alone think logically. Primitives, oblivious to the law of non-contradiction, think “prelogically.” There is a distinctively primitive mentality, in which thinking is enveloped in emotion-laden concepts, or “collective representations.” Where for Tylor and Frazer primitives perceive the same world as moderns but simply conceive of it differently, for Lévy-Bruhl primitives, shaped by their representations, perceive and in turn conceive the world differently from moderns. They perceive and conceive of mystical identity between themselves and the world. For Lévy-Bruhl, as for Tylor and Frazer, myth is part of religion, religion is primitive, and moderns have science rather than religion. But for Lévy-Bruhl, in contrast to Tylor and Frazer, science is logical as well as true, and religion is not only false but also non-logical. Where Tylor and Frazer subsume both religion and science under philosophy, Lévy-Bruhl associates philosophy with thinking freed from at least primitive representations. Primitive thinking is nonphilosophical because identification with the world precludes the detachment that philosophizing presupposes. Primitives use religion, including myth, not to explain the world but to commune with it, or “participate in” it. More precisely, they use religion, and especially myth, to restore the “mystic” identification with all things that has gradually begun to fade: Where the participation of the individual in the social group is still directly felt, where the participation of the group with surrounding groups is actually lived – that is, as long as the period of mystic symbiosis lasts – myths are meagre in number and of poor quality. … Can myths then likewise be the products of primitive mentality which appear when this mentality is endeavouring to realize a participation no longer felt – when it has recourse to intermediaries, and vehicles designed to secure a communion which has ceased to be a living reality? (Lévy-Bruhl 1966: 330) Lévy-Bruhl never claims that moderns are free of primitive-like representations. But he does claim that one modern enterprise is virtually free of primitive-like representations and is therefore most nearly objective. That enterprise is scientific theorizing: Finally, let us consider the most favourable case, that of peoples among whom logical thought still continues its progress, whose concepts remain plastic and capable of modification under the influence of experience. Even in such circumstances logical thought will not
Myth as primitive philosophy 33 entirely supersede prelogical mentality. … It is far from being all the concepts in current use, for instance, which express the objective features and relations of entities and of phenomena solely. Such a characteristic is true of a very small number only, and these are made use of in scientific theorizing. (Lévy-Bruhl 1966: 342–3) The most abrupt reaction to Lévy-Bruhl comes from the Polish-born, American-raised anthropologist Paul Radin. The title of his key book, Primitive Man as Philosopher, says it all. Radin never even mentions Tylor, but he in effect revives Tylor’s view, while at once qualifying it and extending it. Radin grants that most primitives are far from philosophical, but points out that so are most persons in any culture. He distinguishes between the average person, the “man of action,” and the exceptional person, the “thinker”: The former [i.e., the man of action] is satisfied that the world exists and that things happen. Explanations are of secondary consequence. He is ready to accept the first one that comes to hand. At bottom it is a matter of utter indifference. He does, however, show a predilection for one type of explanation as opposed to another. He prefers an explanation in which the purely mechanical relation between a series of events is specifically stressed. His mental rhythm – if I may be permitted to use this term – is characterized by a demand for endless repetition of the same event or, at best, of events all of which are on the same general level. … Now the rhythm of the thinker is quite different. The postulation of a mechanical relation between events does not suffice. He insists on a description couched either in terms of a gradual progress and evolution from one to many and from simple to complex, or on the postulation of a cause and effect relation. (Radin 1957: 232–3) Both “types of temperament” are to be found in all cultures, and in the same proportion. Yet not even primitive “men of action” evince a different mentality from that of their modern counterparts, so that Lévy-Bruhl goes too far in so characterizing even them. And he goes much too far in denying the presence of thinkers among primitives. Tylor, for his part, scarcely assumes all primitives or all humans to be equal in their philosophical proclivities, but he does assume all humans to be intellectually curious and in that sense philosophical. Radin does not. But to those primitives who are, Radin credits them with a philosophical prowess far keener than Tylor assumes. According to Radin, primitive speculations, which are to be found most fully in myths, are abstract and systematic, and are not
34 Robert A. Segal merely geared to accounting for events in the physical world. Furthermore, primitives are capable of rigorous criticism: it is manifestly unfair to contend that primitive people are deficient either in the power of abstract thought or in the power of arranging these thoughts in a systematic order, or, finally, of subjecting them and their whole environment to an objective critique. (Radin 1957: 384) Tylor’s analogy between primitives and children Radin would spurn. A far less dismissive reaction to Lévy-Bruhl comes from the German philosopher Ernst Cassirer. For Cassirer, following Lévy-Bruhl, mythic, or “mythopoeic,” thinking is a distinctively primitive form of knowledge, is laden with emotion, is part of religion, and projects onto the world mystical oneness with it. Cassirer places myth within his four main forms of knowledge – language, art, and science being the others. Yet he claims to be breaking sharply with Lévy-Bruhl by asserting that mythic thinking has its own brand of logic. In actuality, Lévy-Bruhl says the same and invents the term “prelogical” exactly to avoid labeling mythic thinking “illogical” or “non-logical.” Cassirer claims to be breaking with LévyBruhl even more by stressing the autonomy of each form of knowledge: But though a subordination of myth to a general system of symbolic forms seems imperative, it presents a certain danger. For if a comparison of the mythical form with other cultural forms is taken in a purely objective sense, i.e., based on purely factual parallels and connections, it may well lead to a leveling of the intrinsic [i.e., distinctive] form of myth. And indeed there has been no lack of attempts to explain myth by reducing it to another form of cultural life, whether knowledge [i.e., science], art, or language. (Cassirer 1955: 21) Yet Cassirer simultaneously maintains that myth is incompatible with science and that science succeeds it: “Science arrives at its own form only by rejecting all mythical and metaphysical ingredients” (Cassirer 1955: xvii). For all his effort at differentiating his view of myth from LévyBruhl’s, Cassirer duplicates Lévy-Bruhl in making myth wholly primitive and science wholly modern. Still, Cassirer’s characterization of myth as a form of knowledge – as one of humanity’s symbol-making, world-creating activities – puts myth back within the camp of philosophy. Subsequently, Cassirer comes to see myth as not merely primitive but also modern. Now he focuses on modern political myths, notably those of Nazism. Myth here amounts to ideology. Having previously concentrated on ethereal, epistemological issues, Cassirer now turns to brute, social scientific ones: how do political myths grab hold and keep their hold?
Myth as primitive philosophy 35 Having previously scorned Lévy-Bruhl’s stress on the irrational nature of myth, Cassirer now embraces it: “In all critical moments of man’s social life, the rational forces that resist the rise of the old mythical conceptions are no longer sure of themselves. In these moments the time for myth has come again” (Cassirer 1946: 280). Tying myth to magic and magic to a desperate effort to control the world, Cassirer applies to modern myths the explication of primitive myths by, especially, Bronislaw Malinowski: This description [by Malinowski] of the role of magic and mythology in primitive society applies equally well to highly advanced stages of man’s political life. In desperate situations man will always have recourse to desperate means. If reason has failed us, there remains always the ultima ratio, the power of the miraculous and mysterious. (Cassirer 1946: 279) Cassirer departs from Malinowski in making the uncontrollable world the social world rather than the physical one, in conferring on myth itself magic potency, and most of all in seeing myth as modern. But modern myths for Cassirer constitute an atavistic revival of primitivism. Where previously Cassirer analyzed myth as quasi-philosophy, now he cuts off myth from philosophy. The marginalized role left to philosophy is to study political myths in order to help combat them: It is beyond the power of philosophy to destroy the political myths. A myth is in a sense invulnerable. It is impervious to rational arguments; it cannot be refuted by syllogisms. But philosophy can do us another important service. It can make us understand the adversary. In order to fight an enemy you must know him. That is one of the first principles of a sound strategy. … When we first heard of the political myths we found them so absurd and incongruous, so fantastic and ludicrous that we could hardly be prevailed upon to take them seriously. By now it has become clear to all of us that this was a great mistake. We should not commit the error a second time. We should carefully study the origin, the structure, the methods, and the technique of the political myths. We should see the adversary face to face in order to know how to combat him. (Cassirer 1946: 296; see also Cassirer 1979: 219–67) It is hard to see how this proposed study of political myths is really a task for philosophy rather than for social science. Political myths seem severed altogether from philosophy. Cassirer’s appropriation of Malinowski is in any event ironic because the Polish-born anthropologist reacts as vigorously as Lévy-Bruhl to a philosophical approach to myth. Where Lévy-Bruhl asserts that primitives seek to commune with nature rather than to explain it, Malinowski asserts
36 Robert A. Segal that primitives seek to control nature rather than to explain it. Both associate a philosophical approach with an explanatory, or intellectualist, one, and both associate that view with the English – for Malinowski, with Tylor foremost. Both attribute this contrived notion of myth and, in general, of religion to a contrived notion of primitives. Writes Malinowski: In his well-known theory he [Tylor] maintains that the essence of primitive religion is animism, the belief in spiritual beings. … Thus animism, the philosophy and the religion of primitive man, has been built up from observations and by inferences, mistaken but comprehensible in a crude and untutored mind. (Malinowski 1954a: 18) Malinowski refers to Tylor’s religion maker as “the savage philosopher.” Invoking Frazer, for whom myth and religion are the primitive counterpart to applied science, Malinowski argues that primitives are too busy trying to survive in the world to have the luxury of reflecting on it. Where for Frazer primitives use myth in place of science, which, again, is exclusively modern, for Malinowski primitives use myth alongside science. Primitives possess not just the counterpart to science but science itself: If by science be understood a body of rules and conceptions, based on experience and derived from it by logical inference, embodied in material achievements and in a fixed form of tradition and carried on by some sort of social organization – then there is no doubt that even the lowest savage communities have the beginnings of science, however rudimentary. (Malinowski 1954a: 34) Primitives use science to control the physical world. Where science stops, they turn to magic. Where magic stops, primitives turn to myth – not to secure further control over the world but, on the contrary, to reconcile themselves to aspects of the world that cannot be controlled, such as natural catastrophes, illness, aging, and death. Myths, which are not limited to religion, root these woes in the irreversible, primordial actions of either gods or humans. According to a typical myth, humans age because two forebears did something foolish that introduced old age irremediably into the world: The longed-for power of eternal youth and the faculty of rejuvenation which gives immunity from decay and age, have been lost by a small accident which it would have been in the power of a child and a woman to prevent. (Malinowski 1954b: 137)
Myth as primitive philosophy 37 Myth explains how, say, flooding arose – a god or a human brought it about – but primitive science and magic, not myth, say what can be done about it. Myth says that nothing can be done about it. There are myths of magic, just as there are myths of all other practices, but these myths serve to bolster allegiance to practices by vouching for their antiquity. Myths used as a fallback to science and magic are myths about physical, not social, phenomena, and they serve to resign primitives to the uncontrollable. Malinowski never makes clear whether moderns as well as primitives have myths. As modern science provides far more control over the natural world than primitive science does, any modern myths would surely be, as for Cassirer, those of social phenomena and, as for Cassirer, are ideologies. Reacting both against Malinowski’s view of primitives as practical rather than intellectual and against Lévy-Bruhl’s view of primitives as emotional rather than intellectual, the French structural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss boldly seeks to revive an intellectualist view of primitives and of myth. At first glance Lévi-Strauss seems a sheer throwback to Tylor. For myth is for Lévi-Strauss, as for Tylor, an exclusively primitive, yet nevertheless rigorously intellectual, enterprise, and on that ground is philosophical. In declaring that primitives, “moved by a need or a desire to understand the world around them, … proceed by intellectual means, exactly as a philosopher, or even to some extent a scientist, can and would do” (Lévi-Strauss 1978: 16), Lévi-Strauss seems indistinguishable from Tylor. For both, myth is part of primitive religion, serves to explain the physical world, and is thereby philosophical. Yet in fact Lévi-Strauss is severely critical of Tylor, for whom primitives concoct myth rather than science because they think less critically than moderns. For Lévi-Strauss, primitives concoct myth because they think differently from moderns – but, contrary to Lévy-Bruhl, still think and still think rigorously. According to Lévi-Strauss, primitive, or mythic, thinking is concrete. Modern thinking is abstract. Primitive thinking focuses on the observable, sensory, qualitative aspects of natural phenomena rather than, like modern thinking, on the unobservable, non-sensory, quantitative ones. Yet antithetically to Tylor, myth for Lévi-Strauss is no less scientific than modern science. It is simply part of the “science of the concrete” rather than of the science of the abstract: [T]here are two distinct modes of scientific thought. These are certainly not a function of different stages of the human mind but rather of two strategic levels at which nature is accessible to scientific enquiry: one roughly adapted to that of perception and the imagination: the other at a remove from it. (Lévi-Strauss 1966: 15)
38 Robert A. Segal Where for Tylor myth is the primitive counterpart to science per se, for Lévi-Strauss myth is the primitive counterpart to modern science. Myth is primitive science, but it is not inferior science. If myth is an instance of mythic thinking because it deals with concrete, tangible phenomena, it is an instance of thinking per se, modern and primitive alike, because it classifies phenomena. Lévi-Strauss maintains that all humans think in the form of classifications, specifically pairs of oppositions, and project them onto the world. Many cultural phenomena express these oppositions. Myth is distinctive in resolving or, more accurately, tempering the oppositions it expresses. While the oppositions experienced in the world are reducible to the consummately existential tension between nature and culture, the payoff from the diminution of the oppositions is purely intellectual: myth serves less to make life bearable, as it would for Malinowski, than to solve a logical conundrum – the oppositions amounting to contradictions. But then myth for Lévi-Strauss actually operates at a different intellectual level than it does for Tylor. Where for Tylor myth is intellectual because it goes beyond description to explanation, for Lévi-Strauss myth is intellectual because it goes beyond description to resolution. Tylor’s preoccupation with mythic and religious explanations as personalistic and with scientific explanations as impersonal has been challenged by the English-born, African-resident anthropologist Robin Horton. In many ways Horton follows Tylor, so much so that he is called a “neoTylorean” – a label intended to be pejorative but one accepted by him with pride. Just like Tylor, Horton deems both religion and science explanations of the physical world. Just like Tylor, Horton deems the religious explanation primitive, for which he prefers the term “traditional,” and deems the scientific one modern. Just like Tylor, Horton deems the explanations mutually exclusive. While Horton does not focus on myth in particular, doubtless myth for him, as for Tylor, is part of religion. Horton does not contest Tylor’s equation of religion with personalistic explanations and of science with impersonal ones. But he relegates the issue. For him, the difference between personalistic and impersonal explanations “is more than anything else a difference in the idiom of the explanatory quest” (Horton 1967: 69–70). For Horton, the use of personal causes to explain events, while still not scientific, is no less empirical than the use of impersonal ones. Tylor attributes personalistic explanations to the less critical thinking of primitives. They take the first kind of explanation at hand. Like children, they seize on personalistic explanations of the world by analogy to the explanations of human behavior. Horton, by contrast, offers a less condescending account of personalistic explanations. Theories for him typically originate out of similarities drawn between the phenomena to be explained and already familiar phenomena. Familiar phenomena are ones that evince order and regularity. Because in “complex, rapidly changing industrial
Myth as primitive philosophy 39 societies the human scene is in flux,” order and regularity “seem lamentably absent” there. Instead, “it is in the world of inanimate things that such qualities are most readily seen. This is why … the mind in quest of explanatory analogies turns most readily to the inanimate.” In traditional African societies the reverse holds. Here order and regularity “are far less evident” in the inanimate world. “Here, being less at home with people than with things is unimaginable. And here, the mind in quest of explanatory analogies turns naturally to people and their relations” (Horton 1967: 65). It therefore makes solid theoretical sense for African religion to credit events to the decisions of person-like entities.13 Horton departs most fully from Tylor in distinguishing religious from scientific explanations by their context rather than their content. Adopting the terminology of Karl Popper, he asserts that religious explanations operate in a “closed” society, whereas scientific explanations operate in an “open” one. A closed society is an uncritical one, in which “there is no developed awareness of alternatives to the established body of theoretical tenets.” An open society is a self-critical one, in which “such an awareness is highly developed” (Horton 1967: 155). In a closed society the prevailing tenets, because never challenged, assume a sacred status, any challenge to which would constitute blasphemy. In an open society the existing beliefs, because subject to challenge, possess no sacred aura and can therefore legitimately be assessed.14 Popper himself, the Austrian-born, English-resident philosopher, breaks even more radically with Tylor than Horton. For Popper maintains that science emerges out of myth. Tylor never explains how science ever emerges, for religion, including myth, provides a comprehensive and seemingly non-falsifiable explanation of all possible events in the physical world. While science succeeds religion and in that sense emerges out of it, Tylor never attempts to trace the emergence. Popper does. He asserts that science emerges out of religion and, specifically, out of myth. Science emerges not, to be sure, out of the acceptance of myth but out of the criticism of myth: Thus, science must begin with myths, and with the criticism of myths; neither with the collection of observations, nor with the invention of experiments, but with the critical discussion of myths, and of magical techniques and practices. The scientific tradition is distinguished from the pre-scientific tradition in having two layers. Like the latter, it passes on its theories; but it also passes on a critical attitude towards them. The theories are passed on, not as dogmas, but rather with the challenge to discuss them and improve upon them. (Popper 1974: 50) Furthermore, Popper maintains that there are scientific as well as religious myths – this antithetically to Tylor, himself never cited by Popper. Horton never goes this far. For Popper, the difference between scientific
40 Robert A. Segal and religious myths is not in the content but in the attitude toward them. Where religious myths are accepted dogmatically, scientific myths are questioned: My thesis is that what we call “science” is differentiated from the older myths not by being something distinct from a myth, but by being accompanied by a second-order tradition – that of critically discussing the myth. Before, there was only the first-order tradition. A definite story was handed on. Now there was still, of course, a story to be handed on, but with it went something like a silent accompanying text of a second-order character: “I hand it on to you, but tell me what you think of it. Think it over. Perhaps you can give us a different story.” … We shall understand that, in a certain sense, science is myth-making just as religion is. (Popper 1974: 127) While Horton follows Popper in making attitude rather than content the hallmark of science, he does not ignore content altogether. Religious explanations, which include mythic ones, remain personalistic and scientific ones remain impersonal. Popper may in fact assume the same, but the sole criterion he names is that of attitude.15 Even if Popper argues that science grows out of myth, he certainly does not argue that myth is science or is philosophy. The theorists who come closest to equating myth with philosophy, though by no means with science, are the German theologian Rudolf Bultmann and the Germanborn, American-resident philosopher Hans Jonas. Both were followers of early Heidegger and offer existentialist readings of myth. While they limit themselves to their specialities, Christianity and Gnosticism, they apply a theory of myth per se. Bultmann acknowledges that, read literally, myth is about the physical world, is incompatible with science, and should be rejected as uncompromisingly as Tylor rejects it. But Bultmann asserts that myth is intended to be read symbolically. Read symbolically, or “demythologized,” myth is no longer about the physical world. It is about the place of human beings in the world. Myth no longer explains but describes, and describes not the world itself but humans’ experience of it: The real purpose of myth is not to present an objective picture of the world as it is, but to express man’s understanding of himself in the world in which he lives. Myth should be interpreted not cosmologically, but anthropologically, or better still, existentially. (Bultmann 1953: 10) Myth ceases to be merely primitive and becomes universal. It ceases to be false and becomes true. It becomes a statement of the human condition.
Myth as primitive philosophy 41 Even once demythologized, the New Testament still refers in part to the physical world, but now to a world ruled by a single, transcendent God, who does not look like a human being and who does not intercede miraculously in the world. Satan does not even exist and instead symbolizes the evil inclination of humans. There is no longer any physical hell. Hell symbolizes despair over the absence of God. Likewise heaven refers not to a place in the sky but to joy in the presence of God. The Kingdom comes not outwardly, with cosmic upheavals, but inwardly, whenever one embraces God. Alienation from the world is the condition of humans prior to finding God. At-homeness in the world is the condition upon finding God. As desperately as Bultmann wants to make myth acceptable to scientifically minded moderns, he is not prepared to interpret away the existence of God altogether. One must continue to believe in God to accept even the demythologized New Testament. At best, demythologization makes the mythology of the New Testament compatible with science, but acceptance of the mythology requires a commitment that goes far beyond science. Like Bultmann, Jonas seeks to show that ancient myths retain a meaning for moderns. For Jonas, as for Bultmann, myth read symbolically describes the alienation of humans from the world prior to their acceptance of God. Because ancient Gnosticism, unlike mainstream Christianity, sets immateriality against matter, humans remain alienated from the physical world even after they have found the true God. In fact, the true God can be found only by rejecting the false god of the physical world. Gnostics overcome alienation from this world only by transcending it. Unlike Bultmann, who strives to bridge the gap between Christianity and modernity, Jonas acknowledges the divide between Gnosticism and modernity. He translates Gnostic myths into existentialist lingo to demonstrate only the similarity, not the identity, between the ancient Gnostic outlook and the modern existentialist one: the essence of existentialism is a certain dualism, an estrangement between man and the world. … There is only one situation … where that condition has been realized and lived out with all the vehemence of a cataclysmic event. That is the gnostic movement. (Jonas 1963: 325) In Gnosticism, the state of estrangement is temporary, at least for those who eventually find God. In modernity, which Jonas interprets from the standpoint of secular existentialism, alienation is permanent. It is the human condition. Without trying to make Gnosticism palatable to moderns, the way Bultmann tries to do for Christianity, Jonas tries to show how Gnostic mythology can still speak to moderns, and not to modern believers, as for Bultmann, but to modern skeptics. The mythology can do so because, rightly grasped, it describes not the nature of the world but the nature of the experience of the world. Like Bultmann,
42 Robert A. Segal Jonas seeks to reconcile myth with science by recharacterizing the subject matter of myth. Bultmann and Jonas in effect reduce myth to philosophy. First, they take the meaning of myth from philosophy. Myth is simply a symbolic expression of philosophical truths. Second, Bultmann and Jonas concern themselves with only the message of myth. They ignore both the origin and the function of myth. Undeniably, both “demythologize” myth in order to make its message palatable to moderns, but why myth is needed to convey that message, especially when philosophy conveys the same, they never consider.
Notes 1 Tylor discusses only the historicity and diffusion of myth in Tylor 1865: chaps 11–12. His full theory of myth is presented in Tylor 1871: chaps 8–10. He sums up his views in Tylor 1881: chap. 15. Citations to Primitive Culture are to the Harper 1958 reprint of the final, 5th edn (1913). In this reprint, the last chapter of volume I is moved to volume II. Volume I, now given the separate title The Origins of Culture, contains chaps 1–10 of all earlier editions of Primitive Culture; volume II, now titled Religion in Primitive Culture, contains chaps 11–19 of all earlier editions of Primitive Culture. 2 To be sure, Tylor sometimes does call primitive religion “early science” (see, e.g., 1958: II, 31) and does contrast primitive religion to “modern science” (see, e.g., 1958: II, 62). But more often he contrasts primitive religion to science per se (see, e.g., 1958: II, 29). 3 Strictly, causation in myth is never exclusively personalistic. The decision of the rain god to dump buckets of rain on a chosen spot below presupposes various physical laws that account for the accumulation of rain in heaven, the capacity of the buckets to contain the rain, and the direction of the dumped rain. Conversely, agency in the animal kingdom surely exists. Tylor could still maintain that myths themselves ignore physical processes and focus on decisions. 4 Admittedly, Tylor does sharply contrast animism to “Materialism”: “The divisions which have separated the great religions of the world into intolerant and hostile sects are for the most part superficial in comparison with the deepest of all religious schisms, that which divides Animism from Materialism” (1958: II, 86). He even defines animism as “the deep-lying doctrine of Spiritual Beings, which embodies the very essence of Spiritualistic as opposed to Materialistic philosophy” (1958: II, 9). But by materialism he likely means the belief in bodies alone. The “spiritual beings” in animism may themselves be material, but animism does not, like materialism, preclude immaterial beings. Since animism is his term for religion altogether, not merely for primitive religion, and since he himself stresses the continuous preoccupation with the soul from primitive religion to modern (see, e.g., 1958: II, 9–11), by “religious schisms” he must, to be consistent, mean the schism between religion and science. That schism may be wholly modern, but on one side lies modern as well as primitive religion. 5 To be accurate, Tylor, following Müller, does allow for “myths based on realization of fanciful metaphor” (1958: I, 368), but these myths constitute only one, minor category of myth. For Müller, all myths are the realization of fanciful metaphor. 6 Writes Campbell:
Myth as primitive philosophy 43 Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted [literally] as biography, history, or science, it is killed. The living images become only remote facts of a distant time or sky. Furthermore, it is never difficult to demonstrate that as science and history mythology is absurd. When a civilization begins to reinterpret its mythology in this way, the life goes out of it, temples become museums, and the link between the two perspectives is dissolved. (1968: 249) 7 While Tylor dismisses as “euhemerists” those who interpret gods as mere metaphors for human beings, euhemerists themselves conventionally grant that gods, once postulated, are interpreted as gods. Instead, they merely argue that gods arise from the magnification of humans, as Tylor himself allows. Strictly speaking, ancient euhemerists maintained that the first gods were really great kings, who were deified after their deaths. Euhemerus himself maintained that the first gods were living kings, who were deified during their lives. On the term see Fontenrose 1966: 20–3. 8 At his most dismissive, Tylor says against the moral allegorizers what Claude Lévi-Strauss says against Freudians: that they so misconstrue the nature of myth as in effect to invent new versions of old myths rather than to decipher existing versions. Writes Tylor: “For here, where the interpreter believed himself to be reversing [i.e., by interpreting] the process of myth-making, he was in fact only carrying it a stage further in the old direction …” (1958: I, 277). Writes Lévi-Strauss: “Under the pretense of going back to the original myth, all Freud did – all he ever did – was to produce a modern version …” (1988: 189). See also Lévi-Strauss 1965: 92–3. 9 I am using “narrative” straightforwardly, as interchangeable with “story.” For a technical distinction between mere narrative and outright story, see Scholes 1982: 59–60. 10 On history as narrative see Gallie 1964a; 1964b: chaps 2–5; White 1963: 3–31; 1965: chap. 6; Danto 1965: chaps 7, 8, 11; Mink 1987. The four differ on the compatibility of narrative with causal explanation and specifically with causal explanation of a Popperian or Hempelian kind. 11 In a line which anticipates cognitive psychology, Tylor states that “[t]he office of our thought is to develop, to combine, and to derive, rather than to create; and the consistent laws it works by are to be discerned even in the unsubstantial structures of the imagination” (1958: I, 274). 12 On these issues see, classically, Lubbock 1921; Forster 1927. See, more recently, Booth 1961; Iser 1974; Chatman 1978; Sternberg 1978; Genette 1980; Rimmon-Kenan 1983; Bal 1985; Prince 1987. 13 Where Horton downplays Tylor’s preoccupation with personalistic, or anthropomorphic, explanations in religion, American anthropologist Stewart Guthrie revives it. For Guthrie, as for Tylor, anthropomorphism constitutes the heart of the religious explanation. Yet Guthrie is no Tylorean and is in fact very critical of Tylor (see Guthrie 1993: 22–6). Moreover, Guthrie, like Horton, seeks to account for anthropomorphism rather than, like Tylor, almost to take it for granted. But Guthrie breaks with Horton as well as Tylor in finding anthropomorphism in science as well as in religion, even while granting that anthropomorphism is more central to religion than to science (see Guthrie 1993: 35, 163–76). Where for both Horton and Tylor anthropomorphism is an exclusively primitive way of explaining the world, for Guthrie it is a near-universal one. 14 Robin Horton later tempers the difference between traditional and modern thought. He comes to grant that criticism can occur in a traditional society even in the absence of an awareness of alternatives and that intellectual anxiety is to be found in modern as well as traditional society. Now the difference is
44 Robert A. Segal narrower: in a traditional society there are no competing alternatives. See Horton 1982: 201–60. 15 The English classical philosopher F.M. Cornford is like Popper in arguing that Greek science grew out of myth and religion, but he limits himself to the content and considers not at all the attitude. For Cornford, science perpetuates, albeit in secular form, religious and mythical beliefs: see Cornford 1912. Where Cornford here contends that Greek science only subsequently severed its ties to religion to become empirical science, later Cornford argues, much more radically, that Greek science never severed its ties to religion and never became empirical science: see Cornford 1952: chaps 1–11.
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Myth as primitive philosophy 45 —— (1982) “Tradition and Modernity Revisited,” in M. Hollis and S. Lukes (eds), Rationality and Relativism, Oxford: Blackwell. Iser, W. (1974) The Implied Reader, trans. not given, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Jonas, H. (1963 [1952]) “Gnosticism, Existentialism, and Nihilism,” in his The Gnostic Religion, 2nd edn, Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Lévi-Strauss, C. (1965 [1955]) “The Structural Study of Myth,” in T.A. Sebeok (ed.), Myth, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. —— (1966) The Savage Mind, trans. not given, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. —— (1970 [1969]) The Raw and the Cooked, trans. J. Weightman and D. Weightman, New York: Harper Torchbooks. —— (1978) Myth and Meaning, Toronto, Ont.: University of Toronto Press. —— (1988) The Jealous Potter, trans. B. Chorier, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Lévy-Bruhl, L. (1966 [1926]) How Natives Think, trans. L.A. Clare, New York: Washington Square Press. Lubbock, P. (1921) The Craft of Fiction, London: Jonathan Cape; New York: Scribner. Malinowski, B. (1954a [1948]) “Magic, Science and Religion,” in his Magic, Science and Religion and Other Essays, Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books. —— (1954b [1948]) “Myth in Primitive Psychology,” in his Magic, Science and Religion and Other Essays, Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books. Mink, L.O. (1987) Historical Understanding, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Popper, K.R. (1974 [1962]) Conjectures and Refutations, 5th edn, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Prince, G. (1987) A Dictionary of Narratology, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Radin, P. (1957 [1927]) Primitive Man as Philosopher, 2nd edn, New York: Dover. Rimmon-Kenan, S. (1983) Narrative Fiction, London and New York: Routledge. Salmon, W.C. (1971) “Determinism and Indeterminism in Modern Science,” in J. Feinberg (ed.), Reason and Responsibility, 2nd edn, Encino, CA: Dickenson. Scholes, R. (1982) Semiotics and Interpretation, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Sternberg, M. (1978) Expositional Modes and Temporal Ordering in Fiction, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Tylor, E.B. (1865) Researches into the Early History of Mankind, 1st edn, London: Murray. —— (1871) Primitive Culture, 1st edn, London: Murray. —— (1881) Anthropology, 1st edn, London: Macmillan; New York: Appleton. —— (1958 [1913]) Primitive Culture, 5th edn, vols 1–2, New York: Harper Torchbooks. White, M. (1963) “The Logic of Historical Narration,” in S. Hook (ed.), Philosophy and History, New York: New York University Press. —— (1965) Foundations of Historical Knowledge, New York: Harper & Row.
2
Myth and phenomenology Milton Scarborough
Myth and philosophy are mother and child. Originally there was myth alone. Philosophy came later, emerging from its mythic matrix.1 Literacy and visualism served as midwives for the delivery. Since that time, the two have exhibited all the tensions endemic to troubled families. Not long after its birth, philosophy, like a child anxious to grow up too soon, explored the possibility of independence. Plato rejected poetry, the stuff of myth, but sought refuge in myth when reason, the stuff of philosophy, ran into difficulties. The Christian Middle Ages rejected pagan myths while embracing biblical ones, although without acknowledging the latter as myths. Like a child who lives far away from home but keeps a flattering portrait of mother on the wall, the Middle Ages did not totally deny the connection to myth but dressed it in respectability. In the modern era, having become thoroughly ashamed of anyone associated with the irrationality of magic and monsters, philosophy not only denied its mythic parentage but also sought by matricide to rid the world of myth altogether. Under the influence of Darwin nineteenth-century anthropologists judged it to be acceptable to acknowledge having been nursed in infancy by a mother so long as one had outgrown her. In the twentieth century, however, philosophy has occasionally softened and sought a reconnection to its ancient lineage, especially since anthropological fieldwork and sociology have discovered much about the practical ways in which myth functions. Philosophy, along with the social sciences, has articulated a variety of non-cognitive uses of myth but almost always has regarded science and its own critical enterprise as myth-free. For the most part, however, philosophy has simply ignored myth. More recently, this has begun to change. The appearance of several books which argue for both an original and a continuing relation between philosophy and myth hint at some renewed interest in myth by philosophy and may signal the beginning of a rapprochement (Hatab 1990; Daniel 1990; Scarborough 1994). Philosophy is not a simple, monolithic discipline but is practiced according to a variety of methods. In this essay myth will be examined with the help of the phenomenological method, which seems particularly well suited to mediating the tensions between myth and philosophy. First, I
Myth and phenomenology 47 will describe the method, then bring it to bear in the partial interpretation of two myths influential in the West, the P-account of creation in Genesis and Plato’s Timaeus. Finally, I will comment briefly on the ambiguous relation between philosophy and myth.
I. The phenomenological method Phenomenology has been called a “movement,” “school,” “circle,” “system,” and “common conviction,” although each of these terms is problematic. Most often it has been called “method” consisting of several techniques or steps. Its instigator was twentieth-century Moravian philosopher Edmund Husserl.2 In a time of relativism, positivism, historicism, and reductionism Husserl wished to set European civilization on a more certain intellectual foundation by making philosophy scientific. The way to do this, he believed, was to sweep away all preconceptions (such as Occam’s Razor) and elaborate theoretical constructs and return “zu den Sachen,” to the things themselves, where by “things” he meant “phenomena,” the data of immediate experience. Perhaps the best summary of the steps associated with the method was given by Herbert Spiegelberg in his The Phenomenological Movement: A Historical Introduction (Spiegelberg 1971). 1
2
The first step is phenomenological description. It begins with a lingering, careful, attentive, respectful intuiting or noticing of what appears to consciousness. It explores those phenomena, noting their intact elements and their intact relationships to surrounding phenomena.3 One might notice, for example, that a rose in a vase is not a perfectly constant object but changes shape as one walks around it and changes color as it appears in light or shadow, that it changes significance when seen against a white wall or in front of an open window or while the music of violins is heard. It becomes temporal rather than merely spatial. Finally, the phenomenologist seeks unhurriedly to articulate linguistically the content of the aforementioned intuiting and exploring, not to obviate the necessity for others to intuit and explore it but to point the way for them to do so. Such descriptions are understood always to be selective rather than exhaustive. They can, however, be adequate. The second step is called variously “eidetic intuiting,” “eidetic reduction,” “investigating general essences,” or “Wesenschau.” Just as the ultimate interest of scientists is not in individual bits of data but the general laws found therein, so Husserl, who wished to make philosophy scientific, was less interested in particular phenomena than the general essences or types manifested in and through them, for example, the essence of space, material objects, or selfhood in general. This move from particular examples to universal type does not forsake
48 Milton Scarborough
3
4
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intuition for inference but involves an “ejective intuiting”; the essence arrived at is apprehended in a “categorial intuition.” While the second step focuses on establishing individual essences, the third aims to determine essential relationships among elements within an essence or among several essences. It makes use of “free imaginative variation,” which in imagination omits and replaces various elements and relationships to discover which are essential and which are not. Four sides are essential to a square, for example, but the specific length of the sides is not. Step four is paying attention to the way or manner in which phenomena appear. An object shows itself to us, for example, from a particular side or angle and in full sunlight, shadow, or artificial light. The artificial light may be incandescent, fluorescent, white or colored, constant or stroboscopic. The object may appear clearly, blurred, or surrounded by a fringe or halo. Such modes of appearing are themselves genuine phenomena and worthy of description. Step five is the highly controversial one of constitution. For Husserl, phenomenology investigates not only objects or the what of intentional consciousness (“noematics”) but also the subject of intentional consciousness – i.e., the acts of intending (“noetics”). Early in Husserl’s career he meant by “constitution” the manner or stages by which phenomena come to be established in and for consciousness over time, for example, the transition we make from the initial and superficial impressions of people to a deeper understanding of them. Later, however, as he adopted an increasingly idealistic philosophy, he understood the term to mean the way in which phenomena are constituted by the transcendental subject or ego. Also controversial is the sixth step, variously known as “bracketing,” “epoche,” “phenomenological reduction,” or “transcendental reduction.” In the naïve or natural attitude, which we have absorbed since childhood by a kind of cultural osmosis, we often attribute or deny to phenomena an existence transcendent to consciousness. We take for granted that the world we understand ourselves to live in is real, along with the objects within it. We may also regard some particular items in that world as unreal. This step is not to be understood as denying or doubting the real existence of world or objects; phenomenologists are required to be neither epistemological atheists nor epistemological agnostics. Bracketing or phenomenological reductions consists simply in ignoring without prejudice the issue of existence, putting belief in existence out of play, assuming a mode of disinterested contemplation of the content of experience (which remains, hence the use of “bracket”) minus the questions of existence (which does not remain, hence the use of “reduction”). The purpose of such bracketing is merely to ensure that the philosopher gives undivided attention to the phenomena and is not distracted by biases related to questions of
Myth and phenomenology 49
7
existence. For example, we commonly take the bizarre stories of a paranoid schizophrenic to be false. Such a belief can prevent us from undertaking a serious examination of those stories or mislead us in our efforts to characterize them. If we “know” that real space is Euclidean, we are not likely to undertake, as did phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a description of schizophrenic space. Such an investigation led him to understand schizophrenia as a complete and alternative modality of being-in-the-world. Such a view of schizophrenia has implications for therapy. He also investigated night space and mythic space. Finally, there is hermeneutics, a step Husserl did not encourage. It has to do with the intuiting, exploring, and describing “meanings not immediately manifest” in what appears; rather, the immediately given data are taken as clues to “hidden meanings,” which is the task of hermeneutics to “unveil.” Whereas normal phenomenology, for example, would concern itself with describing the surface content of a dream (monsters chasing us), hermeneutics would see that content as a clue to a deeper, perhaps unconscious, meaning (neurotic tendencies). It, too, is controversial. Indeed, only the first step is endorsed by all phenomenologists, and each step afterward has fewer supporters than the previous one. The result is that there is considerable methodological diversity among those who are called or who call themselves phenomenologists.
II. The existentialist turn From the outset Husserl’s phenomenology was essentialist in nature; it was essences, general types, that he sought. Moreover, his interest in transcendental subjectivity grew over time. While much German phenomenology remained essentialist, first Martin Heidegger, then Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and, in a limited way, even Husserl himself, transformed phenomenology in an existentialist direction. Perhaps the most significant summary of this transformation was given by Merleau-Ponty in the “Preface” to his Phenomenology of Perception (Merleau-Ponty 1962). While stressing continuity with the earlier tradition, he also pointed to significant differences contained in his own views.4 For Merleau-Ponty, the step of description is no longer to be understood in a scientific sense. Science is a second-order expression. Perception, by contrast, is not of the order of judgments or predications but is antepredicative, non-positional, non-thetic. The perceived world precedes understanding and is more primitive, fluid, ambiguous, even mysterious. Descriptions appropriate to this world must be first order and less than scientific; they are existential significations. Existential phenomenology is transcendental5 in the sense of bracketing the natural world, but because the world is always already there before the
50 Milton Scarborough onset of any philosophical activity, the epoche reveals the final impossibility of the phenomenological reduction. If existence, including especially human existence, cannot be put into complete abeyance, then an existentialist philosophy becomes possible. The full implication of this shift is that humans are not to be conceived as transcendental egos that create the world or before whom the world is transparently arrayed but, as creatures belonging to and partly constituted by the world, as beings-in-the-world. As Merleau-Ponty declares, “There is no inner man, man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself” (Merleau-Ponty 1962: xi). In this regard, perhaps his most significant achievement is overcoming the Cartesian anthropological dualism of an objective body, on the one hand, and a subjective mind or consciousness, on the other; both are reified abstractions produced by a modernist, non-radical kind of reflection. Perception, however, gives access to the self as an ambiguous, temporal, pre-objective unity. Merleau-Ponty does not, however, reject entirely the study of essences but sees them as means rather than ends. Moreover, essences are partially achieved and partially found, neither simply discovered nor wholly constituted by a transcendental subject. He compares essences to a fisherman’s net, which is intended to draw up the “quivering fish and seaweed” of spontaneous and pristine existence. Indeed, it is by contrast with essences that existence comes more fully into focus. Intentionality is an alternative to the characterization of consciousness as consisting of ideas or representations. It says that consciousness is not a thing but the act of directedness toward an object. In the case of selfconsciousness, the self itself is the object of consciousness. Merleau-Ponty takes full advantage of the distinction drawn by the later Husserl between active and operative intentionality. Whereas the former is narrowly conceived as an intermittent, reflective, intellectual act directed toward a limited object, the latter is an ongoing, pre-reflective and more comprehensive intention directed toward and providing understanding of an entire world. It is primarily the latter which gives access to this spontaneous, naïve, ante-predicative world and to human existence in coition with it. For Merleau-Ponty in particular, perceiving, feeling, motility, and speaking are partially differentiated modes of the body’s operative intentionality, which underlies and makes possible active intentionality. These modes also indicate the subject-like character of the phenomenologically perceived body. Finally, Merleau-Ponty takes up and elaborates Husserl’s concept of the life-world (Lebenswelt). It is an oriented, lived world, which precedes and underlies reflection. It is the world toward which operative intentionality is directed and in which human beings exist as beings-in-the world. It is the ultimate horizon, frame of reference, or context in which all acts are performed; in which they make what sense they do; and in which we live, move, and have our being prior to all philosophizing.
Myth and phenomenology 51 It should be clear to the reader by now that the essentialist phenomenology of Husserl has been substantially transformed and that phenomenology and existentialism have merged. The boundaries of transcendental subjectivity have been exploded, and the self has spilled out into a body and, beyond that, dispersed itself into a world. Things are messier. Lack of universal agreement about the steps of the phenomenological method and the greater subjectivity introduced by existentialism resulted in an abandonment of all pretense that philosophy could be scientific. Now phenomenology is a matter of expressing and interpreting intuited existential significances. According to existentialism, insofar as we are biological beings, we belong to a common genus; as distinctly human, however, each individual constitutes a unique class containing one member. It is not surprising, then, that phenomenologists who are also existentialists cannot be easily described by the characteristics of a common class. Heidegger makes the point by saying: “Potentiality stands higher than actuality. To understand phenomenology consists in seizing it as a potentiality” (Heidegger 1962: 63). For his part, Merleau-Ponty declares: “We shall find in ourselves, and nowhere else, the unity and true meaning of phenomenology” (Merleau-Ponty 1962: viii). These statements amount to declarations of independence from the stepwise method of essentialist phenomenology and reflect a more idiosyncratic selection and adaptation of phenomenological concepts and techniques in the expressing and interpreting of existential meanings. It is with such an attitude about phenomenology that I will now turn to myth.
III. Phenomenology and myth How does the phenomenological method, in whole or part, facilitate our understanding of myths? In order to answer this question I will attempt to apply it to the P-account of creation in Genesis and, in a secondary fashion, to Plato’s Timaeus. In doing so I will rely on the expanded, less precise, existentialist version of the method. It will be applied variously to the world of the myth, the world of the culture producing the myth, and to the world of the scholar seeking a general theory of myth. Although some scholars regard fairy tales, folk tales, legends, and much else as myths, I prefer to reserve the term for traditional stories about the origin of the whole of things. Such a preference appreciates function while refusing to ignore form. The two myths selected have been and remain crucial for Western culture. Phenomenology seeks to sweep away, to the extent possible, preconceptions that inhibit direct intuiting of phenomena. The epoche, step 6, is intended as a prophylaxis against one particular preconception, the natural attitude, which presupposes the real existence of some things and the non-existence of others. Its utilization is especially important in the examination of myth. The term “myth” has become a virtual synonym for what
52 Milton Scarborough is false. Academic treatments of myth often begin with a distinction between this popular usage and the scholarly view of myth as fulfilling serious and vital functions in a society. Yet even scholars, who are at pains to rescue myth from its detractors, often ultimately judge it to be associated with the past, the primitive, the subjective, and the false. They will admit the presence of myth in their own culture as well as that of others, in the present as well as the past, and increasingly in science as well as religion, but yet regard their own theoretical analyses as independent of myth. I have argued elsewhere that no theory of myth that does not take into account its own myth-dependency can be fully adequate. If we cannot carry out the bracketing completely, we can, as Merleau-Ponty says, “slacken the intentional threads” that connect us to the world in order to facilitate the appearance of that life-world and of our dependence upon the myth which provides a first articulation of it. The elimination of a second preconception is of special importance in the interpretation of the creation stories of Genesis. I refer to the view that in creating the world Elohim or Yahweh must have made use of Platonic Forms. Such an interpretation has been common since the first century of this era, when Philo of Alexandria transported Plato’s Forms into the biblical account as ideas in the mind of Elohim, an eisegesis of enormous consequences.
IV. In the world of the work Having removed some preconceptions and applied the epoche, it is time for phenomenological intuiting, exploring, and description. As a result of the existentialist transformation this means, when confronted with an interpretive task, evoking an upsurge of linguistic meaning prompted by “wonder in the face of the text,” to parody Eugen Fink’s famous quote. A lifetime of sedimented acts is put at the disposal of the task of understanding a text so that in the coition between them an interpretive meaning arises which is intuited as fitting the text. This way of putting the matter eschews a purely subjective or a purely objective understanding of the interpretive act but allows for a contribution from both text and interpreter. It is important, first of all, to notice the mode of Elohim’s creative acts. Whereas neither the Craftsman in the Timaeus nor Yahweh in the Jaccount speaks, the “Let there be” uttered by the Yahweh of the P-account (Genesis 1:1–2:4a) calls or commands the world into being by words. In the language of J.L. Austin, it is a performative speech-act. That creation takes place by speech has a number of implications. Scholars commonly regard speech (including vocabulary, syntax, and grammar) as what makes possible the highest forms of human thought. It distinguishes humans from other animals and is used to provide warrants for human claims to superiority among the creatures. It is not necessary to
Myth and phenomenology 53 regard the products of the Craftsman of the Timaeus or the J-account’s Yahweh as emanating from merely material, insensate bodies devoid of intelligence to notice that the creation of the P-account is the expression of a more distinctively human act. More of the powers and resources of Elohim goes into the creative act, and Elohim’s relation to the creation is a more intimate one. Bakers who take pre-existing, heart-shaped cookie cutters and stamp out cookies from cookie dough (to employ an admittedly inexact analogy to what the Craftsman did) put little of themselves into the task and care less for any individual cookie or even the whole batch than does a poet for one of his or her own poems, especially one judged to be “very good.” When the created poem includes the creation of another poet – i.e., a creature (humankind) who is also capable of using speech to create something good, then, however uninspired or unskilled by comparison to Elohim, this poet belongs with God to a community of poets engaged in the shared adventure of creating the good and the beautiful. Such a human poet bears the image of God and is, along with the rest of creation, a work of art cherished by the divine artist. Also, if Elohim is not possessed, as is Plato’s Craftsman, of eternal Forms (luminous models, totally intelligible because completely devoid of matter), this leaves open the possibility that God did not know explicitly what the outcome of the “Let there be” would be. On the other hand, neither are we to think that God created with a blank mind. Thus Elohim’s act falls somewhere between that of the Craftsman and that of Kumokums, the aboriginal being of the Modocs, whose mindless playing in the mud began creation and prompted him to say, “I didn’t know it would do that.” Elohim, by contrast with Kumokums, has more than idle curiosity and doodling hands (Marriott and Rachlin 1968: 45.). The formal tone of God’s command and the structure exhibited in the world of the six-day project suggest a serious purpose and at least a rough idea of what he wanted, even if there was no explicit blueprint. Indeed Elohim’s creative act resembles existential phenomenology’s description of human speaking. Imagine that you and I are engaged in a conversation. A statement from you results in an appropriate response from me. Yet the origins of that response are ultimately mysterious. Unlike constructivist accounts, which always presuppose what they seek to establish, I had no experience of visiting some storehouse of words (the memory) and selecting the right ones. Nor did I experience selecting and applying a principle by which to choose and organize the words into a meaningful reply. Indeed, in the absence of some kind of as-yet-unarticulated meaning, there would be nothing to guide such selecting and organizing. Nor did I – although I could have – self-consciously and silently review my reply before uttering it. Instead, if I am articulate, my engagement in our conversation summons from some dark regions of my being the proper response, which is launched from my tongue into the public space we jointly occupy prior to my knowing explicitly what it is. In fact, I hear my own reply for the first
54 Milton Scarborough time at the same moment you do, and I am as capable of being surprised by it as you are. Such an account of speaking seems applicable to Elohim’s creative speech-act. More technically, we might say that speaking is a mode of intentionality and that acts of speaking, even when they express an active intentionality, are also subtended by an operative one. The words of my reply to a partner in dialogue are an upsurge of a pre-reflective act. Words are present for my mind-bodily being the way my arm is available to swat a mosquito affixed to the back of my neck. Just as I need locate neither my arm nor the mosquito in explicit, Euclidean space on a set of Cartesian coordinates in order the swat the latter, so I need locate explicitly neither my words nor their intelligible target. If, by reason of possessing explicit forms, the Craftsman can be said to represent a purely active intentionality and Kumokums, because of the absence of a deliberate purpose, represents a purely operative intentionality, Elohim’s “Let there be X” expresses an active intention to create a world subtended by a pre-reflective reliance upon resources which are a background even to Him. This interpretation is confirmed by Elohim’s response to the appearance of the creation: “It is very good,” a response that was both given and possible only subsequent to the creative act. On the other hand, even before he made it, the Craftsman could have known – in the only sense that counts for Plato, namely, essentially – that the material world would be good. That is because knowledge, for Plato, is knowledge of essences or forms alone, which the Craftsman possessed in advance. Elohim, lacking such forms, had to wait and see. The reader will notice that Elohim’s operative intentionality is not given immediately in the text but is hidden. It appears as a result of hermeneutics, the last step in Spiegelberg’s list of phenomenological methods. This intentionality is a presumptively essential element of the nature of Elohim as depicted in the P-account of creation in Genesis. The words “presumptively essential” reflect, perhaps, an existentialist adaptation of the eidetic reduction or Wesenschau, an essence ambiguously created/discovered. This essence is arrived at, in part, by comparing the Elohim of the P-account of Genesis with Kumokums, the Craftsman, and the Yahweh of the Jaccount. The comparisons function somewhat like free imaginative variation in that they offer alternative possibilities for the interpretation of Elohim’s essence. That alternative is selected which accords best with the intuited meaning of the text. The interpretation given above of Elohim’s creative act has implications for the nature of both Elohim and creation. If the text is consonant with the interpretation of Elohim as possessing intentionality, then Elohim is or includes temporality, not a merely inner, idealistic or transcendental temporality, but one that is expressed in His engagement with a creation that is material and historical. He is not, as many traditional Christian theologians have maintained, a purely eternal being. This would imply that at least in
Myth and phenomenology 55 some sense Elohim’s identity is not complete but is, like our own, a projectin-the-making. This view is supported by an alternative translation of Elohim’s words in the story of the burning bush. To Moses’ request for God’s name God replies, “I will be what I will be” or “I will cause to be what I will cause to be.” He is saying, in other words, “If you want to know who I am, watch what I do.” Moreover, if God’s acts spring ultimately from a pre-reflective ground, then His identity is fully known or knowable in the present neither by us nor by Himself. Elohim’s acts of creation appear to be ongoing and not predictable in detail, even by Elohim. Some biblical scholars have translated the opening words of Genesis in this fashion: “In the beginning of His creating, God made heaven and earth” (emphasis added). The replacement of “creation” by the verbal “creating” can be read as implying the temporal character of the world, both natural and social, and also the ongoing character of creation. Creation continues. Appropriately, the myth of creation does lead, in the later chapters of Genesis, into saga and, in later books of the Bible, into history proper, both reflecting and giving rise to human history and historical consciousness. On this point John Priest observes that the Genesis account of creation effects “the reorientation of the locus of myth” such that “for Israel history itself became the mode or vehicle of mythology” (Priest 1970: 55). Both because Yahweh’s acts are not transparent, even to Himself, and because history is not yet completed, creation is in some fashion, as process thought has claimed, an adventure. Here God is not omniscient in an infinite sense but can regret, as in the case of Noah’s flood, the creation of human kind. As for creation, the text makes clear enough that it is good. In contrast to the material world made by the Craftsman in Plato’s Timaeus, Elohim’s creation is also real. If matter is both real and good, then the P-account provides no support, as does Platonism and Neo-Platonism for metaphysical or epistemological idealism, for moral asceticism, for a devaluation of the body or sexuality or material comforts in themselves. The interpretation of creation as oral poetry, a work of art cherished by God, intimately and personally expressing God’s being and including other poets bearing God’s image, constitutes a middle way between myths that depict the world (including humans) as born gods (Mother Earth and Father Sky, for example) and, consequently, as endowed with a divine nature, on the one hand, and those myths that depict the world as lacking all but a material significance, on the other. Without judging all creatures to be of equal value, it yet provides support for environmental concerns by ruling out the view that creation is merely “natural resources,” available for unrestricted exploitation, and by making creation as close to sacred as possible without making it an object of worship. Indeed, the Psalms will say that humans are “a little less than God.” Elohim’s creation is also a contingent world. For models of the material world the Craftsman is limited to the Forms. These forms, however, are
56 Milton Scarborough eternally fixed. No new ones will come into being; no present ones will vanish. They determine in advance of the Craftsman’s merely imitative and largely routine action what can be made; the world that results is a necessary one. Freed from pre-existing and eternal forms, Elohim’s creation is an upsurge of His own creativity. As a being who is depicted as free, He could have created a different world than He did. Elohim’s creation is not wholly intelligible. Plato’s forms are pure intelligibilities. They are primordially separate from the matter which the Craftsman will shape into their likeness. Indeed, their intelligibility is made possible by this separation. Given the primordial separation of matter and form, the things populating the material world produced by the Craftsman are composite in nature. Since for Plato, form alone constitutes the essence of the things the Craftsman made, knowledge of the manufactured world consists of knowledge of the essence or form alone. The composite nature of things means that this essence is distinguishable from the material component. Hence, the world constructed by the Craftsman is wholly intelligible. As we have already seen, Elohim has no pre-existing, distinct forms and His creative act originates in the chiaroscuro and shadow of a pre-reflective background. The creation, too, bears the traces of this background. If there are no pre-existing forms, what about pre-existing matter? This is certainly denied in the traditional doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, whose purpose was to reject the Neo-Platonic view of matter as inherently evil and the view that an independent, chaotic, pre-existent matter could resist the will of God, who wished to shape it. The doctrine is problematic, however, on philosophical, scientific and textual grounds.6 Genesis 1:2 refers to an “abyss” and “waters” and implies that they are the formless, chaotic material upon which Yahweh imposes order. This interpretation is strengthened by the fact that “b‰r‰,” the Hebrew term used to characterize Elohim’s creative act, means “to cut and put into shape” rather than “bring into being out of nothing.” Acknowledging the presence of matter brings the P-account into line with the J-account, the Timaeus, and accounts common in Mesopotamia. Nevertheless, an alternative, nondualistic, non-realistic, non-idealistic interpretation of the text is possible. Interpreting Elohim’s act of creation according to an Austinian performative-speech-act model in which “Let there be …” is an active intention subtended by an operative one, does not require a creatio ex nihilo, at least in the traditional sense. When Austin says that a duly licensed minister utters appropriate words, bringing into being the new reality of a married couple, he does not mean that the words magically caused two bodies to appear where an instant earlier there had been none. Nor does an existential-phenomenological approach support an account in which we are to envision a dualism of form and words or matter and meaning as merely internal to Elohim’s consciousness. Phenomenologically, words arise for us – and on this interpretation, for Elohim, too – as an upsurge from a pre-reflective background. The form-matter, words-meaning
Myth and phenomenology 57 distinctions are (at least) second-order moves made in abstract, reflective analysis. How, then, can matter be acknowledged as present neither as external to Elohim in a realistic sense nor internally in an idealistic sense (i.e., as mere concept)? The answer will require several steps. First, “abyss,” “water,” “without form or void” can be understood to refer to the pre-objective character of the matter available to Elohim. Objective thought embraces what Merleau-Ponty has termed “the constancy hypothesis,” according to which the world contains things wholly determinate and fixed in their natures. A cube has its six sides, all of which are squares of exactly the same size. But, as Merleau-Ponty notes, such a cube does not appear in experience; it is the product of reflection, which selects, simplifies, and makes more determinate perceptual experience. Phenomenologically, the perceived object is the correlate of the temporal body-subject’s integration of its modes of intentionality as it gears into and co-exists with the object and world. Thus, the object as experienced by such a subject is fleeting, less clear, less block-like, more porous, less solid, ambiguous, shifting, and contextual. It is not an actual plenitude, for such plenitudes do not exist in experience. Speaking the world into being does not mean, then, naming in the sense of inventing labels that can be arbitrarily attached to already-determinate objects, objects already “cut” out of the flux of experience. It is not like cutting out paper dolls whose shapes are already precisely outlined in thick, bold print in children’s books. It is like creating a painting on canvas from a perceived landscape or coining a word to express a novel insight. Second, unlike matter regarded objectively, pre-objective matter can be integrated into the life-world of Elohim, that pre-reflective and lived system (self-nature-others) of which Yahweh is a part, the context out of which He acts. Third, this divine world is not only the context in which Yahweh lives but also part of His being. What Merleau-Ponty says of the human subject is applicable to Elohim: “The world is inseparable from the subject, but from a subject that is nothing but a project of the world, and the subject is inseparable from a world, but a world which it projects itself” (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 430). In other words, Elohim, too, is a beingin-the-world. Thus, His creation of the world is the creation of Himself and a creation in which matter and form are primordially indistinguishable.7 And insofar as Elohim’s act of creative articulation of a pre-objective world, in which He is and which he is, springs from a pre-reflective background, it is a kind of nothingness. This brings the P-account closer to the thought of such Buddhist philosophers as Nishida Kitaro, for whom nothingness – the integration of Mahayana Buddhism’s sunyata (casually conditioned and empty of permanent substance) and Taoism’s Wu (source) – is said to be the source of all being. The pre-reflective being-in-the-world of Elohim is such a nothingness.8 Finally, the P-account has implications for knowing the creation. If Elohim’s creative acts are not fully transparent even to Himself, if He does
58 Milton Scarborough not possess pre-existing and eternal forms which are alone the objects of knowledge, and if the material and formal aspects of the creation are primordially integrated and are not subsequently strictly separable even by abstract thought, then knowing the creation requires an acquaintance with matter as well as form and, hence, the use of the senses. Scientific knowledge of the natural order must be empirical. Recall that even Elohim had to observe the newly created world before ever speaking of it as good. By contrast, Plato and the Timaeus provide grounds for a purely deductive approach to knowledge of the world. Reason, which pre-existed its descent into matter and which antecedently glimpsed the pure forms in the intelligible world, has non-sensuous access to those forms by means of recollection. Even if sensory acquaintance with the copy-forms in material objects may be useful as a mnemonic device, in principle, it is unnecessary. Thus the account in my undergraduate psychology textbook of medieval monks trying to deduce from the principles of Aristotle’s philosophy the number of teeth in a horse’s mouth reflects the legacy of Timaeus, while the non-conformist among them, who proposed that they simply catch the horse in the adjacent field and count its teeth, acted in consonance with Genesis’ P-account.9
V. In the life-world of the mythmakers Having applied the phenomenological method to the world of the work in a particular myth, I now intend to apply it to the world of the mythmakers. The first section was an exercise in noematics, an investigation of the object or content (the mythic world) of an act of intentionality. The present section is an exercise in noetics, the investigation of the intentional act itself. For existential phenomenology, however, the subject of intentional acts is a being-in-the-world; from this perspective, the life-world is part of the subject and the intentional act. For this noetic task, I will focus on a single aspect of the lived system of nature-self-others (Lebenswelt) of ancient Greece (which is an aspect of the intentional act of the mythmakers), pointing out its role in creating one important Greek way of being-in-the-world and its significance for Western culture, including its contribution to the troubled relation of myth and philosophy.10 Let me begin by telling a story. During my final year of graduate school my dissertation director took a year-long sabbatical leave to study painting in Greece. Upon his return, I and several other of his students decided to throw a welcome back party for him. Appropriately, we hired a local Greek restaurant to cater a Greek dinner. We also decided to buy him a present. Since he had been studying painting, what could be better than a painting? In nearby Chapel Hill we found an artist whose work our tiny budget could afford. He already had on hand just what we wanted – the likeness of a Greek landscape. In it, tiny, white houses clung to the edge of a cliff, which towered above the Aegean. On the night of
Myth and phenomenology 59 the dinner, when the last stuffed grape leaf had been consumed, we presented the painting to our teacher. A look of amazement flashed across his face. “Where on earth did you get that?” he asked. “In Chapel Hill,” we said. “You couldn’t have,” he replied. “Why not?” we asked. “Because this painting was painted in Greece,” he assured us. He went on to explain that the Greek landscape is suffused with a special, bright light, known to all painters, and that if a painter possesses the requisite skills, he or she paints it onto the canvas. “Just look, the light is there,” he urged. We looked with our untrained eyes and saw nothing and then reiterated that the painting had not come from Greece but from Chapel Hill. To settle the issue our only recourse was to phone the painter and put the question to him. “Oh yes,” he agreed. “I just returned from Greece; it was painted there.” Several years later, I taught a freshman humanities course for which C.M. Bowra’s The Greek Experience was a textbook and was delighted to find the following passage describing the landscape of Greece: What matters above all is the quality of the light. … The beauty of the Greek landscape depends primarily on the light, and this has had a powerful influence on the Greek vision of the world. Just because by its very strength and sharpness the light forbids the shifting, melting, diaphanous effects which give so delicate a charm to the French or Italian scene, it stimulates a vision which belongs to the sculptor more than to the painter, which depends … on a clearness of outline and a sense of mass, of bodies emphatically placed in space, of strength and solidity behind natural curves and protuberances. Such a landscape and such a light impose their secret discipline on the eye, and make it see things in contour and relief rather than in mysterious perspective or in flat spatial relations. They explain why the Greeks produced great sculptors and architects, and why even in their painting the foundation of any design is the exact and confident line. (Bowra 1957: 23–4) The “secret discipline” mentioned here refers to the creation of a sensorium – a particular, habitual configuration of the senses as a system – which embodies a perceptual “logic” privileging vision. Assisted by the visualist technologies of mathematics and literacy, the visualist sensorium influenced not just the style of epics and dramas but also contributed to the rise of philosophy. Bowra continues: Nor is it fanciful to think that the Greek light played a part in the formation of Greek thought. Just as the cloudy skies of northern Europe have nursed the huge, amorphous progeny of Norse mythology or German metaphysics, so the Greek light surely influenced the clear-cut perceptions of Greek philosophy. If the Greeks
60 Milton Scarborough were the world’s first true philosophers in that they formed a consistent and straightforward vocabulary for abstract ideas, it is largely because their minds, like their eyes, sought naturally what is lucid and well defined. Their senses were kept lively by the force of the light, and when the senses are keenly at work, the mind follows no less keenly and seeks to put in order what they give it. Just as Plato, in his search for transcendental principles behind the mass of phenomena, tended to see them as individual objects and compared his central principle to the sun which illuminates all things in the visible world and reveals their shapes and colors, so no Greek philosophy is happy until it can pin down an idea with a limpid definition and make its outline firm and intelligible. (Bowra 1957: 24) From the phenomenological perspective, the light of which Bowra speaks is not, first of all, an objective feature of the natural environment but an aspect of a pre-objective world. Its “influence” on perception and thought is not of the order of an objective causality but of a motive. Because this pre-objective world is not constituted by an active or reflective intentionality, but is lived, that motive is a pre-reflective or operative intentionality. Perhaps this most distinctive and momentous product of Greek visualism was Plato’s Forms. They epitomize the clarity visualism seeks. That clarity is achieved by separation from what is dark and obscure and by stilling what is vital and dynamic. Unlike the Elohim of the P-account, for whom form and matter are primordially united with each other and come from God, in the intelligible world the Forms are wholly distinct from chaotic matter and both are distinct from the Craftsman. That the Forms themselves are wholly discrete eliminates completely the chiaroscuro and ambiguity which prevents the achievement of ideal meaning. Here is the foundation for the Law of Excluded Middle and for the priority of logic over experience and logos over mythos, and if Aquinas’s “partes extra partes” defines “machine,” then here, too, centuries before Newton, is the basis for mechanism. Ortega y Gasset grasps the significance of the Platonic Forms: Socrates was the first to realize that reason is a new universe, more perfect than and superior to that which we find, spontaneously in our environment. Visible and tangible phenomena vary incessantly, appear and vanish, pass into one another; white blackens, water evaporates, man dies. … It is the same in the internal world of man: desires and projects change and contradict themselves. … On the other hand, pure ideas, or logoi, constitute a set of immutable beings, which are perfect and precise. The idea of whiteness contains nothing but “white”; movement never becomes static; “one” is always “one,” just
Myth and phenomenology 61 as two is always two. … There was no doubt about it: true reality had been discovered; and in contrast with it the other world, that presented to us by spontaneous life, underwent an automatic depreciation. (Ortega y Gasset 1961: 54–5) Nothing in the foregoing is intended to imply a criticism of the visual sense or even of its imaginative uses in reflection, although it does imply a critique of visualism – i.e., the exclusive valuation of vision at the expense of the other senses and their uses in epistemology and ontology. The preference for vision of the Greek mythmakers, disclosed by a phenomenological noetics, aids understanding of a peculiarly Greek way of being-in-the-world and of the cosmogonic myth of the Timaeus produced by it.
VI. To the work of the philosopher Here I wish only to make a few suggestions as to how the work of relating philosophy and myth might proceed. In Ortega’s final clause we find a clue to their possible reconciliation. The “other world, that presented to us by spontaneous life” is none other than the life-world of the existential phenomenologists. It is a world expressed most fundamentally in the form of stories (see Carr 1986). The Timaeus, itself a story, is, however, the story to end all stories. That’s because its central characters are the Forms, which are mute, dead, and immobile. They cannot act; they cannot speak; they can generate no drama. They are expressible in discursive language. They enter life only as alien, otherworldly elements, and the life they enter must be conceived of as composite, not whole. That the Timaeus became the mythic source for the intellectual standards governing serious discourse in the West necessarily resulted in the “automatic depreciation” of life and the story form which expresses it, including myth. For existential phenomenology, however, the solution lies in MerleauPonty’s effort to “put essences back into existence” and his intention of “re-achieving a direct and primitive contact with the world, and endowing that contact with a philosophical status” (Merleau-Ponty 1962: xii). That task requires reconceiving the relation between life and thought. Phenomenology has called this reconceived relationship “Fundierung,” which Merleau-Ponty describes as follows: The relation of reason to fact, or eternity to time, like that of reflection to the unreflective, of thought to language or of thought to perception is this two-way relationship that phenomenology has called Fundierung: the founding term, or originator – time, the unreflective, the fact, language, perception – is primary in the sense that the originated is presented as a determinate or explicit form of the originator,
62 Milton Scarborough which prevents the latter from reabsorbing the former, and yet the originator is not primary in the empiricist sense and the originated is not simply derived, since it is through the originated that the originator is made manifest. (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 394) Hope for resolving the myth-philosophy conflict comes with the recognition that myth is a form of the originator and philosophy is a form of the originated. For a phenomenology that has become existentialist, myth is first of all a form of intentionality, primarily an operative one, which aims at achieving a global understanding of the life-world. Its first articulation in language takes the form of a story, which reflects the character of that world as lived. It aims at getting a better grasp of that world and living in it more effectively. The visualistic impulse, however, assisted by the technology of literacy, translates oral/temporal/narrative meaning into written/spatial/discursive meaning by fixing it on the two-dimensional surface of a page, where meaning can be reflected upon, analyzed, made more abstract and determinate. But a visualistic philosophy cannot, in terms of its own abstract products, any longer admit to or even recognize its origins in the life-world and its mythic articulation. Existential phenomenology, by contrast, understands the life-world to be the necessarily ongoing context in which philosophy lives and moves and has its being and of which philosophy is the abstract distillate. Philosophy must, of course, correct and clarify views arising in the life-world, but such legitimate and beneficial improvements are limited and cannot extend to cutting itself off from and dispensing with in its entirety the matrix from which it springs. This also warrants humility with respect to methodology. If meaning originates in the body-subject’s pre-reflective inherence in a lifeworld, methodology, which is the product of a second- or third-order reflection, functions less to inaugurate meaning than to justify to others the meaning which we have already acquired in other ways. Finally, it implies that this essay itself is myth-dependent. It is dependent upon both Timaeus and Genesis, but at key points the careful reader will discern the priority of the latter. If the connection between myth and philosophy is acknowledged, philosophy can take the further step of demonstrating the ongoing influence of myth, even in the most sophisticated products of contemporary thought. According to Husserl, intention both retrotends the past and protends the future. As active intentionality, it does so as recollection and expectation; as operative intentionality, it does so as primary memory and anticipation. By attending to thematic identities, structural homologies, and common orientations, one can discern a family resemblance between current theories in science and philosophy, for example, and the ancient myths retrotended in the reflections of the theoreticians. Elsewhere, I have attempted to show how Genesis and the Timaeus have influenced, respec-
Myth and phenomenology 63 tively, the big bang and steady state cosmologies, historical and phenomenological methodologies in the study of religions, continuous series and covering law models of explanation in the philosophy of science, existentialism and essentialism in philosophical anthropology, and history and myth in Barthes’ structural linguistics (Scarborough 1994: chap. 4). It is my hope that such an approach will result not simply in the recognition of the aforementioned family resemblances between myth and philosophy, but also in the cessation of modernity’s matricidal impulse and the achievement of a family reunion, in which myth acknowledges philosophy as an adult with the right to make independent decisions and in which philosophy recognizes both its ancient source and the mythic genes it continues to bear within it.
Notes 1 One could argue that myth and philosophy appeared together and that what antedated both was a common matrix (neither myth nor philosophy, properly so-called) from which both myth and philosophy emerged as opposites, each helping define the other by way of contrast. For my purposes here, the more conventional view is preferable. 2 Tom Ryba has argued that Husserl was not the founder of phenomenology. See Ryba 1991. 3 I prefer “explores” to Spiegelberg’s “analyzing,” since the latter suggests a dissection, which Spiegelberg himself is careful to deny. 4 In focusing on Merleau-Ponty I do not mean to imply that there are no differences between his existentialism and that of Heidegger and Sartre or that those differences are not significant. His version is, however, the one I know best and the one which I find to be most persuasive. 5 “Transcendental” refers to the realm that remains open to phenomenological investigation after the existence of the world and its objects have been bracketed. That realm consists of consciousness, both its acts and its intended objects. 6 Some ingenious suggestions have been made to solve this problem. Among the most recent is the view that “space and time would have come into existence along with the appearance of matter-energy in a random quantum fluctuation” occurring shortly after the Big Bang. The fluctuation appears in a vacuum, which, for all practical purposes, is nothing. See Barbour 1990: 138. 7 I am under no illusions that such an interpretation can be squared with the traditional theology of Christendom. It is an interpretation which has much in common with process theology. 8 Since, for Merleau-Ponty, being-in-the-world is possible because of one’s inherence in a body, my interpretation may require that God, also, must have a body. If so, here is another parallel to process thought. 9 At a number of significant points in this section (“In the World of Work”), I am indebted to Foster 1969. He focuses on theology and philosophy, however, rather than myth, and his approach is not, at least explicitly, phenomenological. 10 Insofar as an existential noetics can focus on the self of the system self-natureothers, it can deal with traditional questions of authorship. Also, by focusing on the others of the system self-others-nature, it can deal with questions of audience.
64 Milton Scarborough
Bibliography Barbour, I.G. (1990) Religion in an Age of Science, vol. I, San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco. Bowra, C.M. (1957) The Greek Experience, New York: The New American Library. Carr, D. (1986) Time, Narrative, and History, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Daniel, S. (1990) Myth and Modern Philosophy, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Foster, M. (1969) “The Christian Doctrine of Creation and the Rise of Modern Science,” in D. O’Connor and F. Oakley (eds), Creation: the Impact of an Idea, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Hatab, L. (1990) Myth and Philosophy: A Contest of Truths, LaSalle, IL: Open Court. Heidegger, M. (1962) Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson, New York: Harper and Row. Marriott, A. and Rachlin, C. (1968) American Indian Mythology, New York: New American Library. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962) Phenomenology of Perception, trans. C. Smith, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Ortega y Gasset, J. (1961) The Modern Theme, trans. J. Cleugh, New York: Harper and Row. Priest, J. (1970) “Myth and Dream in Hebrew Scripture,” in J. Campbell (ed.), Myths, Dreams, and Religion, New York: E.P. Dutton and Co. Ryba, T. (1991) The Essence of Phenomenology & Its Meaning for the Scientific Study of Religion, New York: Peter Lang. Scarborough, M. (1994) Myth and Modernity: Postcritical Reflections, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Spiegelberg, H. (1971) The Phenomenological Movement: A Historical Introduction, vol. II, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
3
Myth and pragmatic semiotics William L. Power
One of the oldest conceptions of theology is discourse of the poets about the gods and its philosophical interpretation. Ancient Christianity took over this Greek understanding of theology and revised it only slightly to reflect its own monotheistic vision of God and of Jesus as the decisive sign of who God is for us and who we humans are and might become in the presence of God. The Christian Bible more or less expressed the mythopoetic discourse of the imaginative bards of Israel and the early Christian community and the interpretive works of Christian thinkers became Christian philosophy. At least this has been one of the standard ways of looking at Christian theology over the centuries and it provides or may provide a classic model for understanding theology and doing theology today. The Christian myth or the Christian narrative or story of God and God’s world provides the primary discourse for Christian philosophy, which functions to clarify and critically justify the ontological signification and existential significance of the Christian message in its myth. In short, the Christian myth along with its philosophical interpretation provides the Christian community with a worldview, which may be used like a map for the Christian way of life. Given this understanding of theology as well as the notion of theology as rational thought and speech about the gods or God, as implied by the senses of the Greek terms theos and logos, one can also speak of the implicit or acritical rationality of myth and the explicit or critical rationality of philosophical interpretation, provided one does not associate myth with discourse which is false and logos with discourse which is true. Assuming that a myth may be either true or false, it is the task of a philosophical interpretation of a myth to express its point in non-mythological terms and to show or attempt to show its truth or falsity. As such, one can distinguish these two levels of discourse without separating their logical structures. In the terminology of C.S. Peirce, the logic of mythos is a logica utens rather than a logica docens (Peirce 2.186ff.).1 Moreover, if, as Peirce claimed, logic and semiotics are one, then to understand theology and to produce theology one must understand the semiotic structure of both myth and its philosophical interpretation. As our medieval predecessors used the
66 William L. Power trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric in understanding and doing theology in their day, we might well use today’s semiotics, which consists of the three divisions of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. Present day semiotics, is the successor to the medieval trivium. In the words of Richard M. Martin, logical semiotics is “the modern trivium” (Martin 1992: xi). In this paper I want to discuss the form and function of the Christian myth and its philosophical interpretation in the context of a discussion of religions as cultural systems. Section I will be devoted to a discussion of the modern trivium as a very helpful tool in the interpretation and constructive use of linguistic and non-linguistic signs in practically all forms of human culture and domains of discourse, including the cultural systems of homo religiousus. In Section II, I will discuss the Christian myth as a mode of discourse which is used primarily to represent who God is for us and to awaken and sustain human faith in God in the context of the Christian cultural system. Section III will be devoted to a discussion of the necessity of philosophical interpretation as the theoretical means of explicating the message of the Christian myth and critically justifying its tacit truth claims and its relevance for human self-understanding.
I In l897, C.S. Peirce wrote that “logic, in its general sense, is … only another name for semiotic[s] … the quasi-necessary, or formal, doctrine of signs.” He then went on to explain that a sign or representamen, is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity. It addresses somebody, that is, creates in the mind of that person an equivalent sign, or perhaps a more developed sign. That sign which it creates I call the interpretant of the first sign. The sign stands for something, its object. (2.227ff.) These words are some of the earliest expressions of Peirce’s seminal contributions to the modern theory of signs, which in the twentieth century underwent extensive clarification and development. In its broadest sense, the theory of signs encompasses not only the human production, use, and interpretation of simple and complex sign systems but also the uses and responses of various organisms and animals to certain things as signs of other things or aspects of their environment which are significant to their survival and thriving. Given the centrality of the use of simple and complex natural languages in all forms of human culture and the various ways humans employ language systems in the arts and acts of communication, linguistic signs and their significations and significances have central importance in semiotics. Consequently, the most developed form of semiotics has been in the
Myth and pragmatic semiotics 67 field of metalogic or logical semiotics, the modern trivium of systematic syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. Early on, Peirce viewed his own work as continuous with the medieval trivium, and, following that tradition, Peirce identified the three branches of semiotics as consisting of “pure grammar,” “logic proper,” and “pure rhetoric” (2.229). Charles W. Morris re-named these three branches syntactics, semantics, and pragmatics. Rudolf Carnap followed Morris’ convention, but changed syntactics to syntax. Soon thereafter, Carnap came to recognize the need for a systematic pragmatics along with a systematic syntax and semantics. Richard M. Martin produced the first work on systematic pragmatics in a form which could be used for purposes of the investigation of the sentences of a natural language and philosophical analysis. Indeed, systematic pragmatics can accommodate most of the work on speech-act theory as well as current epistemological inquiry concerning sentence or proposition acceptance, belief, and rational justification, just as systematic semantics did in rationally reconstructing the correspondence theory of truth as well as the analytic-synthetic distinction in such a way to logically underpin not only the special sciences but also metaphysics (Morris 1938; Carnap 1939; Martin 1959). By mid-century it became well established that one could view semiotics like any other science, wherein one can speak of the history of semiotics, the systematic construction of semiotic theories, and applied semiotics. Moreover, given the work of Peirce and other pioneers in modern deductive logic, systematic semiotics usually presupposes formal truth-functional and quantification logic, including the logic of relations with identity. It also usually presupposes inductive logic, and Peirce’s own logic of abduction. Systematic semiotics may also be augmented by the calculus of individuals or mereology and a tense or event logic. Such an enriched logic can be viewed as the appropriate logic of Pragmatism in its more classical rather than neo-classical form and a very useful tool for religious and philosophical thought and methodology. It is a refined tool which is an extension of acritical logic, Peirce’s logica utens (2.188), which humans use to understand and cope with the reality of their all-encompassing environment in the full range of their cognitive, conative, and affective lives. In several articles over the years, I have attempted to apply the kind of rationally reconstructed Peircean logic or pragmatic semiotics which has been developed by Morris, Carnap, Martin and others in order to understand religious and philosophical issues, and I want to continue along that path to further clarify and improve upon what I have said in the past. Specifically, I will be using some parts of logical semiotics or pragmatic semiotics in order to understand better the Christian myth and its philosophical interpretation, both of which have historically manifested a triadic semiotic structure consisting of cultural, ontological and existential dimensions. The cultural dimension involves the signs or representamens of the Christian community, the ontological dimension involves the
68 William L. Power realities and values, which are taken to be the object or objects of Christian faith, and the existential dimension involves the faith interpretants of belief, trust and loyalty as well as such emotional interpretants as happiness, peace and joy. It is generally recognized that the primary home of myth is in religion, as is expressed in common usage that myths are stories of the gods or God, or, if one prefers, the sacred or holy. That which is sacred or holy may be many or one but is always that which is worthy of worship. While one may venerate lesser beings one may only worship that which is of superior or supreme value. The sacred or holy is alone worthy of our ultimate confidence and fidelity as source and retainer of value. But what is the nature of this religious home? From a semiotic point of view, the English term “religion” is ambiguous and vague. In terms of logical syntax it can appear as a name or predicate. If, however, one is faithful to our Greek and Latin predecessors one should affirm that the term is a general term or predicate. As such, it would seem to designate a class and multiply denote the members of that class. Yet, because of the ambiguity and vagueness of the term we can still be puzzled. While in English common usage one can discern a dual function of the word “religion,” our Greek and Latin predecessors had two terms which distinguished without separating that dual function. In Greek we have the terms threskeia and eusebeia and in Latin we have cultus and religio or pietas, the vernacular equivalents of the Greek terms. The terms threskeia and cultus designate an objective cult and the terms eusebeia and religio or pietas designate a way of life which the objective cult functions to elicit, nourish and express. And, of course, we have learned from the history of religions that one can speak of Semitic hodos, Indic marga, and Sinitic dao. As such, objective cults or religions function to acculturate folks into ways of living, living well, and living better in the whole scheme of things. This tradition lies behind the more or less common practice, based on the work of Clifford Geertz, of speaking of religions as cultural systems. Such systems function to develop and proclaim a worldview on the basis of which human beings may take account of sacred and secular realities and values for the sake of a common way of life in which humans can lead and have desirable lives in terms of their significance, worth, and purpose in their all-encompassing cultural and non-cultural environments. In this sense, Schubert Ogden is entirely correct in affirming that religion as a cultural system is “the primary form of culture in which the existential question, or the question of faith, is explicitly asked and answered” or “the form of culture in which the existential question of the meaning of ultimate reality for us is explicitly asked and answered” (Ogden 1982: 30, 37). There are strong family resemblances between the various understandings of religions as cultural systems; yet, there are material and methodological differences between members of the family, as a careful reading of Geertz, Ogden, and others like Lindbeck will disclose. Some of
Myth and pragmatic semiotics 69 these differences are so great that they inevitably lead to incompatible interpretations of religions. For example, while Ogden is committed to the position that the doctrines of a religion must be assessed in terms of their truth value, understood in their “correspondence” or semantic sense as well as their regulative value, Lindbeck proposes that doctrines only be assessed in terms of their regulative value, even though he admits that, at least in regard to classical Christianity, doctrines were viewed in both ways. In my judgment, Ogden is a critical realist in his view of the truth claims of a religion and takes seriously the descriptive and explanatory functions of the discourse of religions whereas Lindbeck is a kind of quasiKantian who finds it more appropriate to speak of such discourse in its directive or prescriptive function. Of the two, Ogden’s tacit semiotics is clearly of a Peircean sort with its background presuppositions of external realism. Moreover, Ogden is non-Kantian in his commitment to describing and explaining the structure of reality in itself as well as in its structure for us. However, unlike classical metaphysical realism, in which only monadic properties were considered essential or necessary and relational properties were considered accidental or contingent, Ogden affirms that what things are in their essential nature is understood in terms of the essential relations that hold between or among those individuals. In a Peircean vein, universals are recognized not primarily as inherent in individuals in their solitude (in re) but rather in individuals in solidarity or community (inter res) (see Raposa 1989: 17).2 In short, relational predicates have come to have a primacy in describing the common world disclosed in experience which they lacked in most pre-modern and modern modes of religious and philosophical thought. My own understanding of religions as cultural systems with intended ontological signification and existential significance is greatly indebted to the work of Geertz, Ogden, and Lindbeck, but I am even more indebted to that Peircean tradition mentioned above, which led me early on to interpret homo religiosus from a semiotic point of view. Moreover, I have attempted to use the mnemonic device of speaking of a religious cultus or cultural system as consisting of its creed, code, ceremony, and community, all of which are essential to fulfilling its ontological and existential functions (see Geertz 1973: 87–125, 126–41; Lindbeck 1984; Power 1987, 1994). In short, a threskeia or cultus is a religious community with its creeds, codes, and ceremonies. As such, its linguistic and non-linguistic signs function semantically as representamens of the divine and non-divine domains and pragmatically as evokers and expressers of eusebeia or pietas. The category of creed encompasses all those modes of discourse, which assert or imply some truth claim about extra-linguistic reality and value in their necessary, contingent and possible modalities. That which could not possibly be in reality is, of course, that which is impossible. These truth claims may be implicit or explicit and can be found in various linguistic genres such as myth or story, parable, doctrine, creed, confession, and
70 William L. Power reflective theoretical discourse. Such genres may serve other non-assertive functions or uses and therefore overlap with the “points” or purposes of other distinctive linguistic types such as directives, commissives, expressives and declaratives, which often figure prominently in a religion’s moral and legal codes and ceremonies (on the various types of speech acts see Searle 1998: 146–52). All such kinds of speech acts fall under the pragmatic dimension of semiosis. The category of code primarily encompasses the practical and political aspects of a religion and the category of ceremony, or if one prefers, rite or ritual, includes all sorts of non-linguistic artifacts which also function as signs and which likewise have ontological signification and existential significance. Indeed, as is well known, liturgical celebration, more often than not, can be viewed as a dramatic enactment of the foundation myth of the religious community, which functions to purge and purify the emotions and affections. Ideally, theoria, praxis, poeisis, and pathos and the full range of sensory and non-sensory modes of awareness and perception are engaged in the creeds, codes, and ceremonies of religious communities. In my judgment, however, the representational function of signs and the assertive function of language have a kind of primacy, for at both the tacit and explicit levels of sign use and sign interpretation, the other pragmatic uses and interpretations of signs presuppose the assumed relations that hold between the linguistic and non-linguistic signs of the community and the objects for which they stand in some respect or capacity. In short, in religions, as in other forms of human culture, the semantic dimension of representation, reference, designation, denotation, truth, and analytic (necessary) and synthetic (contingent) truth are presupposed. That is, we judge the appropriateness or inappropriateness of our actions and passions on the basis of what we take to be the case in matters of fact and value. Our existential self-understanding presupposes our ontological and axiological commitments. And it goes without saying that we often do not live the way of life that we espouse.
II At the beginning of this paper I noted that the Christian Bible more or less expressed the mythopoetic discourse of the imaginative bards of Israel and the early Christian community. As such, the Bible, with its extensive narrative or story material and its canonical ordering, expresses what might be spoken of as the foundation myth of Christianity. In speaking of the Bible as expressing the Christian myth, however, I am not suggesting that the Bible expresses the Christian myth as if there was but one such thing. In reality, the Christian myth is a kind of ideal oral or written imaginative reconstruction and fabrication, which gradually emerged in many renditions out of the social and cultural life of primitive Christianity. It is a myth which was produced out of a great diversity of oral and written
Myth and pragmatic semiotics 71 traditions, Judaic as well as Greco-Roman, and which continued to be told in various revised versions given changing historical and cultural contexts. As William Beardslee noted a number of years ago, it was not until the time of Irenaeus that the dramatic story of Christianity became relatively complete, and with this completeness the mature mind of the church settled down (Beardslee 1976: 19). Something like the Christian myth no doubt was a major factor in shaping the texts of the Christian scriptures into a functional whole or what Amos Wilder called “the dramatic and organic unity of the canon” which unfolds from Genesis to the Gospels to Revelation (Wilder 1947: 436). In turn, the Christian canon further set the scope of the epic tale of Christianity. Indeed, its epic proportions were later depicted in painting and stained glass as one can see on the magnificent ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome and in the lucent windows of Sainte Chapelle in Paris. An analysis of the ideal reconstruction goes something like the following. The Christian myth or story has a dramatic form or structure. It has a beginning and an ending, a cast of characters with their virtues and vices, their weal and woe and a plot which develops through various sub-plots and episodes toward a denouement in which evil is overcome by good. There are different personalities with their visions and voices and attitudes toward life, and different incidents that take place in different settings at different times. And, as in a well-crafted drama, there is a coherent story line with a temporal sequence that progresses from occasion to occasion in a cumulative way. There are remembrances of things past and anticipations of things future and goings on in the present. There is the past which is no longer, the present which is now, and the future which is not yet. Central to the biblical drama is that God appears in the cast. Not only is God behind the scene directing the drama, but God is present on stage as the central actor and chief protagonist who identifies himself, speaks his mind, and who works to bring about his aims for the world in spite of all efforts to oppose them. In short, God is scriptwriter, producer, director, and the actor who has top billing. He is the primal source, center, and final end of the unfolding drama of God and the world. While humankind is certainly prominent in the Christian myth, the story is not anthropocentric. The non-human creation is the object of God’s care and concern, and human beings become disloyal to God if they view nature as having only extrinsic value and if, out of greed, they plunder and pollute the Earth. In short, the Christian drama is not only the drama of human history, but of cosmic history wherein all creatures great and small share in the temporal economy of God’s creation, redemption, and sanctification. One, of course, misunderstands the Christian epic narrative if one views the rhetoric of the story in too literal a way or as if all of its tacit or explicit truth claims are infallible. There is much fictional, legendary, and quasiempirical-historical representation in the story and many representations
72 William L. Power as to the way things were, are, and might be can only be understood as in error. In short biblical narrative is primarily a form of mimetic representation. The story, tells it like it was and is, and like it might be, that is, iconically. Particular persons, things, events, places, and times – be they fictitious or otherwise – function as models or exemplars and have universal signification and significance. As many have pointed out, the Christian story is a product of weaving together two stories, the story that Israel wanted to tell and the story that the Christian community wanted to tell. For Israel, its foundation myth unfolds in eight scenarios: primeval history, patriarchal history, exodus from Egypt, giving of the Torah at Sinai, sojourn in the wilderness, occupation of the promised land, exile and return, and expectation of the day of Yahweh. The Christian community continues Israel’s story, expanding and revising it to include the story of Jesus, whom his earliest followers designated as the Messiah, the church and its mission to the world, and the story of the Apocalypse. For this community, it is the Jesus story or stories which provide the decisive signs as to who God is for the church and all humankind and how Christians and human beings should exist before God. Each story bears witness to God’s gifts, promises, and demands, and each story functions to evoke the response of faith, hope, and love, which in concert constitute authentic human piety. In this sense, speaking of the biblical drama, Bernard Anderson remarks, The Bible is not a book of ancient history. It is more like the commedia dell’arte, a dramatic form that flourished in sixteenth century Italy. In this kind of drama, the players were asked to improvise, to put themselves into the story. (Anderson 1988: 16) In the words of Abraham Heschel, “the Bible is not a book to be read but a drama in which to participate” (Heschel 1955: 254). Let me summarize this all too brief exposition of the Christian myth. In its fully developed form, the Christian fabulation tells it all – that is, the whole integral story. The foundation or classical myth of the church offers the most comprehensive narrative framework within which the imaginative vision of Christianity can be expressed. As such, it presents a complete worldview and calls for a complete way of life. And because God is the central actor in the drama, it presents the classic primitive models for understanding God and his interactions with his creatures. In short, quoting Amos Wilder, the Christian myth “locates us in the very midst of the great story and plot of all time and space, and therefore relates us to the great dramatist and storyteller, God himself” (Wilder 1978: 57). Needless to say, myriad human beings have accepted the Christian myth in one or more of its renditions and have used them as linguistic maps for their journeys through space and time as wayfarers in God’s world.
Myth and pragmatic semiotics 73 Moreover, they have found these stories to be intellectually, morally, aesthetically, and emotionally credible, and they may have good tacit reasons for doing so. However, in a Peircean vein, I am inclined to think that the beliefs we hold and the logic we use at the level of story and common sense must be explicated at the level of theory and critical common sense. That is, one must inevitably come to reflect upon the foundational stories of religions within the context of the most adequate ontological and existential theories of the day, whether they are produced by those within or outside of religious communities. This also should be the case, one might add, with all the arts and sciences. In short, the foundational myths of religious communities must be continually clarified and critically justified in every new age and socio-cultural context. In the apt words of Wilder, “the spirits are always to be tested” (Wilder 1976: 102). The pragmatic or existential reason for testing the spirits of our religious myths is really quite simple. Inasmuch as we judge the appropriateness of our actions and passions on the basis of our visions of reality in all of its modalities and mixtures of good and evil, we should do all that is possible to maximize correct belief and minimize or eliminate incorrect belief. If I am not mistaken, that is what many, if not all, Christian philosophers have attempted to do, even if they may often have failed.
III The task of producing a philosophical interpretation of “the great story of all time and space” staggers the imagination. Anyone who is familiar with the history of Christianity and of philosophical and systematic theology should know that. With a growing understanding of the history of Judaism and Christianity, especially of that span of time in which the production and canonization of the scriptures took place, one becomes ever more aware of the diversity of the ways the stories of the synagogue and church were told and re-told in different settings and to different audiences. It also becomes apparent that Christian narration and recital often misunderstands the point of Israel’s story and, even worse, Christians told their story in ways which incredibly denigrated and assailed the Jews, not to mention other social groups. Even though one can recognize the rich diversity of story telling and story hearing and the fact that a story can barbarize as well as civilize, one cannot help but notice that Judaism and Christianity continue to tell their comprehensive stories in ways which attempt to purge them of their ideological and barbaric tropes. Indeed, throughout the history of Christian theology, from ancient allegorical interpretation to contemporary hermeneutics of suspicion, Christian philosophers have tried to civilize their discourse commensurate with their visions of divine perfection and humane sensibilities. Nevertheless, even with such revisions, the complete story of Christianity continues to be foundational for the church’s creeds, confessions, catechisms, codes, arts, and ceremonies. This can be
74 William L. Power seen most clearly in the way the traditional loci of philosophical interpretation or theological construction reflect the morphology of the foundational and canonical story of the church. Most, if not all, Christian philosophers have endeavored to interpret the cosmological, anthropological, christological, soteriological, ecclesiological, and eschatological scenarios, which are dramatically portrayed in biblical imagery and rhetoric. And all of these loci may be subsumed under the all-encompassing locus of theology proper as critical reflection on God and God’s presence to and with the world as its creator, redeemer, and sanctifier. In addition to the issues of the unity and diversity of the Christian myth and the civility or barbarity of its message, there have always been the issues surrounding the role of metaphysical speculation and mystical modes of awareness and perception in the articulation, justification, and defense of the faith of the church. The dominant tradition has been one wherein the Christian myth and biblical drama have been placed within some philosophical framework and justified, at least in intent, by appeal to reason and experience. As is well known, Augustine interpreted the Christian drama of creation, redemption, and sanctification within the framework of Platonic philosophy and Aquinas did the same, more or less, in the framework of Aristotelian philosophy. The same can be said, mutatis mutandis, for traditional Jewish and Islamic theologians. Much of Protestant Liberalism turned to German Idealism, and in our own time many theologians have turned to Existentialism or the philosophies of Whitehead or Hartshorne for their interpretive schemes. In contrast to this dominant tradition, there is the tradition represented by theologians such as Irenaeus, Hippolytus, and Tertullian who protested against the violations of sound apostolic doctrine by pagan philosophy. Moreover, there are the Peter Damians of theism who say that logic is the work of Satan and that matters of faith are beyond the rationality of indirect or direct evidence. For the most part, I have never been persuaded by those who thought that philosophical interpretation of the epic narrative of Christianity was out of place. My own question for a long time has been and still is which philosophy is most compatible with the biblical vision of God and God’s interaction with the creatures in the spatio-temporal order. Nor am I persuaded that logic or semiotics is to be sacrificed at the altar of the sacred or holy. In the words of Heschel, “without reason faith becomes blind” (Heschel 1955: 20). In short, Christian philosophy must be faithful to the creative imaginative vision of the muses who fabulate Christian mythology and to its task of the critical philosophical interpretation of the subject matter of the mythology of the Christian cultus or cultural system with the best logical tools of the day. If religion is, as Ogden said, “the primary form of culture in which the existential question, or the question of faith is explicitly asked and answered” or “the form of culture in which the existential question of the
Myth and pragmatic semiotics 75 meaning of ultimate reality for us is asked and answered” (Ogden 1982: 30, 37), then the task of a philosophical interpretation of the subject matter of the Christian myth will be to understand the reality of faith and the reality of God. In the vocabulary of logical semiotics, a philosophical interpretation of the Christian myth will explicate the pragmatic and semantic dimensions of the dramatic syntax of its narrative structure. In the remainder of what I want to say in this paper, I will first focus on the existential or pragmatic dimension of Christian faith to be followed by a discussion of the ontological or semantic commitment of the discourse of the Christian community. The way of life which religions function to evoke and cultivate involves both leading a good life and having a good life, although it seems clear that the desire to have a good life is more dominant than the desire to lead a good life. Moreover, most human beings, if not all, presuppose in practice that life is worth living, in spite of the negative values or undesirables, which unsettle our beliefs and shake our confidence. Even the act of suicide or the speech-act of proclaiming that life is absurd appear to be performatory contradictions in that agents performing such acts existentially presuppose the meaningfulness of such acts. Indeed, if life were not worth living, suicide would appear to be the rule rather than the exception in human history. Likewise, the rebel without a cause who proclaims that life is absurd actually has a cause! Thus, religions aim to influence the skills, know-how, or pragmatic wisdom of living the good life and to point to that source, center, and end (or those sources, centers, and ends) which deliver or liberate us from evil and free us for good (and which is or are the ground or grounds of our confidence that life is worth living). This generic and functional understanding of religious cultural systems is nothing new. It is merely a way of expressing the rather traditional notion that religious paideia or religious “culturing” and “civilizing” is essential to human knowledge, wisdom, and happiness. And it goes without saying that humans can have much knowledge of that which is true, good, and beautiful and yet be fools and miserable. While religious answers to the existential question or the question of faith or the question of the meaning of ultimate reality for us can only be answered by specific religions which belong to the generic class and not religion in general, one can perhaps say a bit about human faith as it appears to be present in every aspect of human existence and culture, not to mention that kind of instinctive faith which seems to be present in the non-human world. Like the English word “religion,” the word “faith” is ambiguous. It is derived from three Latin terms, which indicate the three basic ways the English term can be employed. The terms are fides, fiducia, and fidelitas and are usually translated into English as “belief,” “trust” (or “confidence”), and “loyalty” (or “fidelity”). Following Peirce, one can more or less say that belief is a logical interpretant, trust is an
76 William L. Power emotional interpretant, and loyalty is an energetic interpretant. In terms perhaps more familiar, one can say that the terms “belief” and “believe” are cognitive terms, that “trust” or “confidence” are affective terms and that “loyalty” or “fidelity” are conative terms. For example, I may believe someone or I may believe of someone or something that something is or is not the case. I may trust in someone or something, and I may be loyal to someone or something. And, as indicated above, we judge the appropriateness of our passions and actions on the basis of what we believe. In regards to our beliefs, they may be beliefs which we all presuppose in practice and beliefs which are, more or less, open to question. David Griffin calls the former “hard-core commonsense ideas” and the latter “soft-core commonsense ideas” (Griffin 1990: 119). My belief that there is an external world is a hard-core belief and my belief that there is life on other planets in our galaxy is a soft-core belief. If beliefs, as Peirce claims, are habits on the basis of which I am prepared to act, then I am always prepared to act and do act on the basis of my hard-core beliefs while the same is not the case in terms of my soft-core beliefs. Also, as H. Richard Niebuhr notes, trust is the more passive aspect of faith while loyalty is its more active aspect (Niebuhr 1960: 18; Niebuhr 1989 presents a kind of phenomenology of faith which is much influenced by James and Royce). If religion is the primary form of culture which functions to elicit, nourish, and express our belief, trust, and loyalty in regard to what humans take to be the significance of ultimate reality for us or pro nobis and not ultimate reality in itself, for itself, and without us or in se, pro se, and sine nobis (although the latter may be tacitly presupposed and often is explicitly assumed, affirmed and developed), then faith is unavoidable in all religions although the substance of that faith will be or may be different, similar, or the same. Moreover, what is to be taken as authentic or inauthentic faith will or may vary from religion to religion. Thus, religions or points of view within a religion invariably speak of lack of faith and misdirected faith given their semantic commitments. In my opening introductory remarks, I mentioned that within systematic pragmatics one could accommodate epistemic issues concerning belief, acceptance, and rational justification. One can also apply pragmatics in the investigation of human modes of awareness and perception. Any adequate account of religious faith should deal with these issues, and I have made several attempts to do such. However, I have not always been as accurate and clear in explicating the full range of what is often spoken of as religious experience (Power 1992b).3 In much recent interpretation of religious experience, one often hears or reads that there are no unmediated elements in experience, and that includes religious experience. While it is true that there are many elements in experience which are highly intellectual, abstract, selective and to a great extent dependent upon habit, custom, and signs and language, which lead us to say that all experience is
Myth and pragmatic semiotics 77 mediated, I believe it is more accurate to affirm that all experience is made up of both mediated and unmediated elements. There are immediate (direct) and mediate (indirect) elements in experience, and the former are foundational for the latter, which are bound up with sign use and sign interpretation. One must be very clear, however, that these unmediated or immediate elements are very vague, not at all clear and distinct, highly corrigible rather than incorrigible, most concrete and emotional, rather than abstract, and given, not selected. These unmediated elements are the foundations for our perceptions, beliefs, understanding, and knowledge, all of which are mediated. What are these unmediated elements? I believe there are four. First, there are our unmediated experiences of the past states of our bodies, which among other things connect us to the external world. These socalled “organic sensations” or the ways we sensually experience our bodies should not be construed as non-sensory perceptions, for perceptions are highly sign dependent. If one prefers, one might say, I have a vague concrete awareness of the givenness of my body. Second, we have immediate or direct experience of the qualities of our feelings in our present experience and their being derived from our bodies. These feelings have a certain direction to them. This is why we feel we see things with our eyes, hear things with our ears, feel with our bodies, and act upon the world with our bodies. This is Whitehead’s “withness” of the body. Third, we also have immediate or direct experience of our immediately past experience, which gives rise to our memory, which is sign dependent. The qualities of our immediately past experiences seem to flow over into our present ones just as the immediately past feelings of our bodies flow over into our present experiences. As Hartshorne once said to a class in which I was a student: “You cannot turn past anger off in an instant.” These background, vague, concrete and emotional experiences provide our connection to and awareness of the external world and our past. These experiences give us our feeling of being embodied and our feeling of the continuity of our experiences as well as the concrete foundations for our anticipation of our “open” future in the world. In the contexts of my earlier discussion, these experiences are the sources of many of the background beliefs, which we all presuppose in practice. They are grounds of Peirce’s “instinctive beliefs” (5.423) and Griffin’s “hard-core commonsense ideas.” These unmediated experiences are the origins of much of our non-religious cultural life or our life in our secular or profane worlds. The fourth, and final unmediated experiences we have are those immediate or direct experiences we have of things divine. These are the experiences in which we are connected to and aware of the gods or God or the sacred or holy. These unmediated experiences, which Calvin spoke of as a sensus divinitatis, provide the foundations for our religious cultural life and our life in relation to that which human beings take to be ultimate reality. Semantically, the predicate “god” and the name “God,” as well as
78 William L. Power the terms “sacred” and “holy,” have multiple senses or intensions and may be used as denotators or designators to represent or signify that which I.M. Bochenski spoke of as “the object of religion” which is a given of the common world disclosed in experience (Bochenski 1965: 31–2). The notion of a sensus divinitatis is often interpreted, as a kind of nonsensory perception of the divine, which I believe, is not entirely accurate. Although I have not always been careful in these matters, I now want to distinguish clearly between an awareness of the divine and a non-sensory perception of the divine, given the sign dependence of sensory and nonsensory perception.4 The relation of awareness is a dyadic relation and the relation of perception is a triadic relation. Our immediate or direct experience of the divine or ultimate reality, like the other kinds of immediate or direct experience I have mentioned, is also vague, concrete, and emotional and is in the virtually undifferentiated background of experience. Our sensus divinitatis is of a pervasive presence. It is an unfocused awareness of that which is “closer to us than our jugular vein,” to cite the Qur’an (50:16). It is our experience of “that” which we semiotically perceive, metaphorize and conceptualize with the terms I have alluded to above. Religiously speaking, this reality which is present to and with all human experience is the ultimate source of our awareness of its presence and the ultimate ground of our confidence that life is worth living. It is that on which we may ultimately rely and to which we may ultimately pledge our allegiance. This presence is the original revelation of that of which we are vaguely aware and which evokes or elicits our original pre-focused or prethematized faith. It is this sensus divinitatis or awareness of the presence of the divine environment which we come to focus upon, perceive as, and interpret as in terms of our various religious cultural systems. To further borrow from Calvin, our religious cultural systems are the “glasses” which, at least by design, allow us to see clearly that without which we only see vaguely. The eyes and ears of faith need proper lenses and hearing devices with which to clearly discern and recognize things divine, which is or are present and given to be discerned and recognized. Our experiences of things divine like our experiences of things nondivine are by-products of immediate or direct elements as well as mediate and indirect elements. As John Baillie and later Edward Schillebeeckx affirmed, religious experience is a “mediated immediacy” (Baillie 1939: 18l; Schillebeeckx 1987: 66–7). To take seriously these non-cultural givens, which evoke or elicit our non-semiotic responses, is to take seriously Pierce’s category of “secondness” and Whitehead’s category of “physical prehension” wherein the nature of any concrete thing is to be acknowledged in its power of acting and being acted upon and in its essential connections to everything else. As such, the responses of human trust and loyalty may be taken as indexical signs of original revelation, which is universally available to every human being. Indeed, sacred faith, like
Myth and pragmatic semiotics 79 secular faith, has an intentional structure and vectoral character in that it is directed toward that which draws a response or that which gives us final recognition and a final cause to live for. Furthermore, to take seriously religious cultural systems is to take seriously their semiotic interpretations of their ontological commitments and their understandings of existential faith. In such religious cultural systems, types of conventional signs, Peirce’s symbols, as well as signs based on analogies, Peirce’s icons, are also present as in the Christian myth wherein the name “Jesus,” a symbol, designates Jesus, a person, who can be taken as an iconic sign of who God is for us as well as who we are or can become by being properly related to God. Last but not least, uniting Calvin’s sensus divinitatis with the eyeglasses and hearing aids of religious cultural systems may provide partial epistemic justification for the existence of a non-empty divine domain. As many have claimed, faith in its fullest sense, which includes an awareness and perception of the divine, is a mode of knowing or notitia albeit a knowledge by acquaintance mediated by signs. By means of the representamens of the Christian cultus one takes account of or notices the divine reality in its extrinsic value for us, not to mention other forms of life. This knowledge of faith provides a knowledge of who or what the divine is for us. It is contingent knowledge, if it is indeed justified true belief, because humans might not have existed or might yet not exist. But it is also partial knowledge, for we can always know more about any thing than we do. And if one takes seriously a pragmatic semiotics of a Peircean variety, one must always acknowledge human fallibility. Moreover, if religious faith is partially based on the vague evidence of unmediated awareness and the mediated evidence of sensory or non-sensory evidence, then one can affirm that in the final analysis religious faith is not based on tenacity, authority, taste or popular fad but is based on experience and reason. In short, the scientific method, broadly conceived, is not only the best method for fixing belief but also of justifying belief. In Peirce’s words: “The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the real” (5.407). Religious opinion, like the opinions of other forms of culture, is on the same footing. In my judgment, however, the partial knowledge of faith which religions have or for which they strive, needs further justification or validation within the context of some philosophical or metaphysical theory. Here is where one can properly deal with the nature and identity of the divine in itself as well as its existence and the mode of its existence. And when I speak of the divine in itself like I speak of the non-divine in itself I do not want to exclude the possibility that all beings are essentially related to other beings, in which case relations are not accidental. For example, could it really be possible in monotheism for the class of worlds to be empty, such that God could have refrained from being the primal source, center, and final end of any being at all other than himself? In traditional language, could God really choose to refrain from creating, redeeming,
80 William L. Power and sanctifying any individuals of the class of creatures whatsoever? I also mention some philosophical or metaphysical theory, for I want to keep open the issues concerning religious notions of the divine, some of which commit the religious community to the existence of one or more relatively perfect and contingent sacred or holy objects and some of which commit the religious community to the existence of one absolutely perfect and necessary sacred or holy object. There may be even other possibilities. Whatever is or may be the case, one’s ontology is decisively connected to one’s existential faith. Long ago Martin Luther wrote in his Larger Catechism that: the trust and faith of the heart alone make both God and an idol. If your trust and faith are right, then your God is the true God. On the other hand, if your trust is false and wrong, then you have not the true God. For these two belong together, faith and God. That to which your heart clings and entrusts itself, is I say, really your God. (Luther 1959: 365) In this famous passage, Luther is making the distinction between what Rudolf Bultmann spoke of as “authentic” and “inauthentic” faith and in this sense, there are no unbelievers, for it is the nature of human beings to trust in something and give their loyalty to something. However, as to who has authentic faith and who has inauthentic faith, one is wise to remain silent. It is entirely possible for a person to deny most religious worldviews, one or more of which may be correct in regard to what they take to be the gods or God, and yet have authentic faith. It is also entirely possible for a person to affirm a worldview, which bears a true witness to the real God, and yet have inauthentic faith. God only knows whose piety is genuine and whose is bogus! On the other hand, one need not and should not remain silent concerning which religious or philosophical hypotheses about the ground, center, and goal of authentic piety is the most plausible and which is or may be justified or validated by the most adequate perceptual evidence and argument. On the basis of our awareness and perception of that which we humans take to be divine and our confidence that life is worth living, one can abductively infer someone or something to explain that experience and confidence, just as one can abductively infer someone or something to explain the existence, order, and overall fitness of the environment as a support system for living, living well, and living better in spite of the fact that life is risky business. Such hypotheses should be testable and tested within some empirical or metaphysical theory in which the religious hypothesis is clarified, shown to be possible and contingent or possible and necessary, and justified with the best logical tools at one’s disposal. Certain kinds of theories would cast doubts on certain kinds of religious or philosophical hypotheses. For example, if one were a classical empiricist of a
Myth and pragmatic semiotics 81 Humean sort, one could hardly appeal to non-sensory awareness and perception, nor could one hardly appeal to a being who or which is selfexistent and necessary, given Hume’s famous “fork,” although one could appeal to a being or something which existed through another or which existed through nothing, a kind of un-explained explainer. Moreover, if all value judgments were in the eye of the beholder, so to speak, then it would be difficult to affirm the extra-mental or extra-linguistic existence of either relatively perfect beings or absolutely perfect beings. If Christian philosophy is to be faithful to the meaning of the Christian myth, it seems clear that its mythopoetic discourse could not be explicated and justified in the framework of a philosophical interpretation which denies any non-sensory awareness and perception or denies any metaphysical speculation which attempts to interpret its mythic model of God as the supreme or perfect agent-patient who is the creator, redeemer, and sanctifier of any possible world whatsoever and who is the ultimate ground of human faith. Whatever else may be claimed, a Christian philosophy would seem to involve a radical empiricism of a Jamesian sort, which allows one to take seriously non-sensory modes of awareness and perception and the kind of religious experience I have discussed in section II, and a metaphysical concept or description of God as the absolutely perfect being who is self-existent and necessary and who necessarily is the primordial source, center, and consequent end of the existence and worth of the non-empty class of creatures. Within such a metaphysical scheme of ideas, the Christian philosopher would endeavor to show the possibility and necessity of such an entity as entailed by the system. As such the concept or description of God would be a derived notion, as in the case of Aristotle’s “first philosophy” or Whitehead’s speculative philosophy. If there is tacit metaphysics in the Christian or biblical myth, then it needs to be made explicit; if not, then the Christian philosopher should seek to find one that does not violate the subject matter of the Christian myth and that more or less expresses its worldview in a nonmythological way. In so doing, the mythical ways of speaking become metaphorical ways of speaking and genuine likely stories which iconically represent the reality of God and the structure of the world and human existence. I am well aware that there are other ways of thematizing, representing, and signifying what human beings take to be of ultimate power and worth as well as what is the best explanation of the ground of human faith. There are other myths to be sure, but the Christian myth does have limited range of heuristic value. Which myths, worldviews, and ways of life are more or less credible is perhaps an open question in our religiously pluralistic and secular times. In my judgment, theism and naturalism were the major options of the twentieth century and I believe that a neoclassical sort of theism and a postmodern ecological sort of naturalism may well be the major religious and philosophical options for our time and the ones which can best provide philosophical and metaphysical frameworks for
82 William L. Power our religious faith. As such, the twenty-first century can continue the work of its recent predecessor. My own metaphysical affinities are with the process philosophy of Whitehead. At one time I was more Hartshornean than Whiteheadian while the reverse is now the case. Not only do I find Whitehead’s metaphysics more credible than that of Hartshorne, but I also find it a more adequate underpinning for Christian faith and critical interpretation (Power 1992a). My understanding of religious faith has been profoundly influenced by the works of John Baillie, H. Richard Niebuhr, and Schubert Ogden, all of whom accept a Jamesian sort of radical empiricism which allows for non-sensory awareness and/or perception. All three affirm the universal availability of the grace of creation, redemption, and sanctification and the universal possibility of authentic faith, both of which are more or less pointed to and represented by the linguistic and non-linguistic signs of the Christian cultus.5 While Baillie and Niebhur are somewhat dubious of metaphysics or speculative philosophy, Ogden is not, and he is correct in pointing out that while Christian theology is not the same as metaphysics, it “includes or implies metaphysics as an abstract aspect of itself” (Ogden 1996: 6). As such, Christian discourse involves critical interpretation of both the being of God in Godself and the being of God for us. In traditional language, Christian theology involves discourse about the eternal as well as the temporal economy of God. In short, Christian philosophy stands or falls in terms of its ontological and existential credibility. If there is no God than which none greater can be conceived who or which is distinct from and necessarily and inseparably bound in some way to this or any other possible world which might have been actual or which might yet be actual, then we still live in a cosmic environmental or ecological system in which the opportunities for good outweigh the risk of evil. If this is so, and I believe it is, then our authentic faith or piety should be a cosmic one wherein we cherish our cosmic past, look forward to our cosmic future, and in the meantime, live our lives with a confidence which Nature or the Cosmos instills and a loyalty to the good of the whole of which we are parts. Such is the message of naturalism. It seems clear to me, however, that the Cosmos is a relatively perfect system and it may be all we have if some version of theism is false. However, one question haunts me. If Nature is all that there is, is it selfexistent and necessary or is it the ultimate brute fact which exists through nothing and is contingent? If it is the latter, then it might not have been and might yet not be. I am inclined to believe that it is not possible for there to be nothing, in which case, either God exists or Nature exists, and if Nature exists and not God, then Nature must be self-existent and necessary. Which of the two metaphysical worldviews and existential ways of life is the most credible – intellectually, morally, aesthetically, and emotionally – only time will tell.
Myth and pragmatic semiotics 83
Notes 1 2
3 4
5
References to the collected papers of Peirce are by volume and paragraph number: read 2.227 as vol. 2, para. 227. Raposa’s overall exposition of Peirce’s philosophy of religion is one of the best around. His chapters on Scientific Theism and Theosemiotic are invaluable in understanding how semiotics can be applied to religious and theological topics. My own work on the application of semiotics to religious studies, theology, and philosophy of religion has profited from his insights and I am happy to acknowledge my debt to his work. In this article I too quickly asserted that all experience including religious experience is mediated. I attempt to correct that overstatement in section II of this article. It is interesting to note that in the first sentence of the introductory chapter of his Perceiving God, Alston equates awareness and perception. The same appears to be the case with Proudfoot in his review of Alston’s book. See Alston 1991: 1; Proudfoot 1995: 588–91. In his Twentieth Century Religious Thought, John Macquarrie spoke of Baillie and Niebuhr as “post-liberal theologians” and later Ogden located himself within that tradition. All three Christian theologians attempted to bring about a rapprochement from the side of a traditional interpretation of the Christian witness of faith toward the modern world and from a wholly secularistic interpretation of modern secularity toward the essential claims of the Christian faith. As such, all three took seriously the advances of modern science and technology, the socio-political revolutionary quest for freedom, and the rise of the historical consciousness and, in so doing, they rejected a reactionary orthodoxy in the name of a revisionary form of Christian theology which affirms the motifs I have mentioned. For Macquarrie’s discussion of post-liberal theology, see Macquarrie 1963: 337–50.
Bibliography Alston, W.P. (1991) Perceiving God: The Epistemology of Religious Experience, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Anderson, B.W. (1988) The Unfolding Drama of the Bible, 3rd edn, Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press. Baillie, J. (1939) Our Knowledge of God, London: Oxford University Press. Beardslee, W.A. (1976) Literary Criticism of the New Testament, Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press. Bochenski, J.M. (1965) The Logic of Religion, New York: New York University Press. Carnap, R. (1939) Foundations of Logic and Mathematics, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Geertz, C. (1973) The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays, New York: Basic Books. Griffin, D.R. (1990) “Some Reflections on Method,” Process Studies, 19: 119. Heschel, A.J. (1955) God in Search of Man, New York: The World Publishing Company. Lindbeck, G.A. (1984) The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age, Philadelphia, PA: The Westminster Press. Luther, M. (1959) “Large Catechism,” in The Book of Concord, trans. T.G. Tappert, Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press.
84 William L. Power Macquarrie, J. (1963) Twentieth Century Religious Thought, New York: Harder & Brothers. Martin, R.M. (1959) Toward a Systematic Pragmatics, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. —— (1992) Logical Semiotics and Mereology, Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Morris, C.W. (1938) Foundation of the Theory of Signs, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Niebuhr, H.R. (1960) Radical Monotheism and Western Culture, New York: Harper & Brothers. —— (1989) Faith on Earth: An Inquiry into the Structure of Human Faith, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Ogden, S.M. (1982) The Point of Christology, San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row. —— (1996) On Doing Theology, Valley Forge: Trinity Press International. Peirce, C.S. (1935–58) Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, C. Hartshorne, P. Weiss and A. Burks (eds), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Power, W. (1987) “Homo Religiosus: From a Semiotic Point of View,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 21: 65–81. —— (1992a) “On Divine Perfection,” in J.F. Harris (ed.), Logic, God and Metaphysics, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers. —— (1992b) “Religious Experience and the Christian Experience of God,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 31: 176–86. —— (1994) “Peircean Semiotics, Religion, and Theological Realism,” in W.C. Peden and L.E. Axel (eds), New Essays in Religious Naturalism, vol. II, Macon, GA: Mercer University Press. Proudfoot, W. (1995) “Review of William P. Alston’s ‘Perceiving God,”’ Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 63: 588–91. Raposa, M.L. (1989) Peirce’s Philosophy of Religion, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Schillebeeckx, E. (1987) On Christian Faith, trans. J. Bowden, New York: Crossroad. Searle, J.R. (1998) Mind, Language and Society, New York: Basic Books. Wilder, A.N. (1947) “New Testament Theology in Transition,” in H.R. Willoughby (ed.), The Story of the Bible Today and Tomorrow, Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. —— (1976) Theopoetic: Theology and the Religious Imagination, Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press. —— (1978) Early Christian Rhetoric, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
4
Myth and metaphysics Kevin Schilbrack
I. The very idea of metaphysics in myth This paper defends the assertion that among the things that religions teach, inculcate, and celebrate are understandings of the world that are metaphysical in scope, and that these metaphysical views are often taught, inculcated, and celebrated through religious myths. Its thesis and recommendation is therefore that the philosophical discipline of metaphysics can be legitimately and fruitfully used to help understand myths. A generation ago, the assertion that religions typically include metaphysics, and that religions typically express their metaphysical views in their myths, had a certain following. The historians Henri and H.A. Frankfort, for example, approached ancient Near Eastern narratives without separating the expressive function of the stories from their cognitive function (Frankfort and Frankfort 1946).1 Although they admit that the speculative thought that one might find in myths lacks “detachment,” they argue that “[m]yth is a form of poetry [that] … proclaims a truth”; myths provide “a poetic form of truth” (1946: 8). The images of myth – the representations of cosmic forces as bulls or hawks, gods or heroes – provide the terms in which a culture reflects upon its experience of the world. These reflections concern not only the forces of nature, say, storms or death, but also the abstract categories of causality, space, and time. Mythic thought about what exists is inseparable from images; it is thought through the images. “Myth, then, is to be taken seriously, because it reveals a significant, if unverifiable truth – we might say a metaphysical truth” (1946: 7). Similarly, Mircea Eliade argues that myth includes an acritical but nevertheless intelligible form of philosophy. As he says, Obviously, the metaphysical concepts of the archaic world were not always formulated in theoretical language; but the symbol, the myth, the rite, express, on different planes and through the means proper to them, a complex system of coherent affirmations about the ultimate reality of things, a system that can be regarded as constituting a metaphysics. (Eliade 1971: 3)
86 Kevin Schilbrack Myths do not use the language of “being,” “becoming,” or “non-being,” but according to Eliade, when myths describe how different features of reality were created in illud tempus, they describe not alleged prehistorical events but rather the archetypes that constitute a human world view. In this way, mythic language puts into memorable narrative the structures of “the human condition as such” (Eliade 1963: 11, cf. 91). Perhaps the most reticulate account of the relation of myth to metaphysics is that of Clifford Geertz. According to Geertz, the very definition of religion is that it weds an ethos to a world view, an axiology to a metaphysics. The metaphysical aspect of a religion “objectivizes moral and aesthetic preferences by depicting them as the imposed conditions of life implicit in a world with a particular structure, as mere common sense given the unalterable shape of reality” (Geertz 1973: 90). Myths play a crucial part in this wedding. As Geertz says, meanings can only be “stored” in symbols: a cross, a crescent, or a feathered serpent. Such religious symbols, dramatized in rituals or related in myths, are felt somehow to sum up, for those for whom they are resonant, what is known about the way the world is, the quality of emotional life it supports, and the way one ought to behave while in it. (Geertz 1973: 127) Geertz goes so far as to say that metaphysics is an essential element in all religions; metaphysics is thus a part of his very definition of religion (Geertz 1973: 90). This is, in my opinion, a good definition of religion, one whose fruitfulness has not been fully taken advantage of. Nevertheless, my proposal in this paper is not that myths necessarily or essentially include metaphysics, but only that they may include metaphysical insights and therefore interpreters of myths need to be open to the possibility of reading myths in this way. Explicitly metaphysical interpretations like these can generate fertile hypotheses for the study of myths. These include important philosophical questions, such as: to what extent can speculative thought be put into narrative form? And, what are the differences between the understandings of reality as such in one culture and those in another? Attention to the metaphysics in myths also points to (and certainly does not hinder one from asking) important sociological questions, such as: are the metaphysical myths used to justify particular social arrangements? And, does the interest in certain metaphysical myths correspond to different sections of society, or to different types of society? But although the Frankforts, Eliade, and Geertz appeal to the idea that religious myths explicitly or implicitly make metaphysical claims, they do not develop the idea from a philosophical point of view. They do not articulate what it means for a world view to be a metaphysical world view, nor how one might speak of it as true or false. Any philosophical proposal in
Myth and metaphysics 87 which one asserts that interpreters should attend to metaphysics when seeking to understand myths must have an understanding of metaphysics that is credible. This is not easy. It is, in my opinion, the general consensus among philosophers in the West since Kant that metaphysics in the sense of inquiry into the character of reality as such is no longer legitimate, either because statements about reality are unintelligible or because although they are intelligible, no such statement can be validated and thus metaphysical knowledge is impossible. Despite their significant differences, this consensus is shared by most Kantians, phenomenologists, critical theorists, analytic philosophers, neopragmatists, and deconstructionists. As a friend told me, seeking to defend metaphysics in a postmodern context when rationality itself is in question is like rearranging the chairs on a sinking ship. His own preferred approach to religious narratives is to read myths as an evocative form of fiction, and his approach is not atypical. There is little attention paid to the cognitive dimension of myths. Perhaps this is the reason that, over the last quarter of a century, the practice of reading myths as explicitly or implicitly making metaphysical claims has fallen out of favor. It is the aim of the paper to recommend a return to this approach.
II. The metaphysical interpretation of myths What is meant by saying that a given myth is “metaphysical”? What is a metaphysical interpretation of myths? In a nutshell, this approach says, first, that myths function to provide models and, second, that some of these models are all-inclusive in scope. In saying that myths provide models, one says that they provide metaphoric images through which one comes to understand diverse aspects of the world. This idea is found famously in Geertz, who argues that myths function simultaneously as models of reality (insofar as they represent the structure of what is) and models for reality (insofar as they recommend the structure of what ought to be) (Geertz 1973: 93–4, 95, 123). So far as I know, however, the most helpful philosophical discussion of this idea of myths as religious models is that of Ian Barbour (1974).2 Barbour argues that the religious models found in myths function as interpretive frameworks, drawing one’s attention to certain patterns among one’s experiences and connecting them to each other in distinctive ways. The types of experience that religious models are typically employed to interpret are experiences of awe and reverence, of mystical union, of moral obligation, of reorientation and reconciliation, of interpersonal experiences, of key historical events, and of order and creativity in the world. In all of these cases, models involve a process that Barbour calls “interpreting as.” In the light of a myth, for example, an experience of death is interpreted as a punishment. On this account, the religious person does not experience facts that the nonreligious person does not; rather, in the light
88 Kevin Schilbrack of myths he interprets the fact differently, namely, as a revelation or manifestation of the sacred that has a certain character. Some models may be of relatively local interpretive power: they tell their audience, for example, to interpret storms as hostile or to interpret the ruler as a manifestation of the divine. Others may provide patterns of a larger scale. Bultmann thought that religious myths symbolically referred to human existence as a whole; Eliade believed the same. To interpret a myth as metaphysical, however, is to say that the scope of that model is intended to include all reality. That is, to follow Aristotle’s definition of metaphysics, a metaphysical myth describes the character that anything has insofar as it exists as anything at all. It seeks to describe what exists not insofar as each thing is the particular thing it is, but rather insofar as it is anything at all. Metaphysical assertions can therefore be put into the form “All concrete realities are X,” where X might mean “ensouled,” or “created by God,” or “formed by karmic energy.” In short, then, to interpret a myth metaphysically is to say that the myth provides a cognitive framework for understanding reality as such. One should note that this understanding of metaphysics does not necessarily involve reference to the supernatural. When metaphysics is understood in the pre-Kantian sense of inquiry into supernatural, extraexperiential realities, then some religions seem to include metaphysics but others do not. The Analects of Confucius and the Majjhima Nikaya of the Buddha, for example, are famous for being uninterested in this sense of metaphysics. The pre-Kantian understanding of metaphysics is therefore not an appropriate tool for the study of all religions, for some religions are, so to speak, too pragmatic or this-worldly. Another limitation of that understanding of metaphysics is that it seems only appropriate for the study of those religious traditions which include a class of intellectuals (usually leisured and elite) that have the interest in pursuing such theories. On the understanding of metaphysics I intend, however, metaphysics concerns not supernatural entities but, rather, the general character of reality. Hence, insofar as a religion includes an understanding that reality has some general character which one should take into account, it has a metaphysics. People sometimes say that myths cannot include metaphysics because ancient or “primitive” people lacked an interest in or a capacity for pursuing knowledge for its own sake, as distinct from practical knowledge that serves human needs. There is a legitimate distinction to be had between knowledge “in itself” and knowledge “for us” and all communities are overwhelmingly interested in the latter, but the distinction should not be overdrawn or else we will not be able to make sense of the presence of metaphysics in any religion. It is true: religions typically show little interest in metaphysical knowledge for its own sake. But they typically do show an interest in the idea of metaphysical knowledge pursued as part of transforming one’s perceptions, affects, and character in order to be in accord with the true nature of things.3
Myth and metaphysics 89 The metaphysics one finds in myth is typically in service of this transformation. For example, myths often describe behavior that is presented as an admirable ideal to be emulated or a cautionary example to be avoided. When the behavior is identified as admirable and worthy of imitation because it is in accord with the way things are, or to be avoided because it is not in such accord, then such a text has a metaphysical dimension. Recall those stories whose point is that, despite appearances of wealth or beauty or status, there are more ultimate forces at work (karma, the divine will or plan, the Tao, the mandate of heaven). If these forces are not contingent but aspects of reality as such, then an ethos is being married to metaphysics. The metaphysical dimension of creation myths operates in the same transformative way.4 That is, myths of creation may describe outright the principles or forces of reality as such, and the performative, ritual context of the myth typically makes clear that the metaphysical knowledge is not presented as solely the answer to an intellectualist question but rather serves as knowledge with which one can properly orient oneself in the world.
III. Whether the metaphysics in myths can possibly be true There may be some who have read to this point who agree with the interpretive claim that at least some myths provide models of the world that are designed to orient one to the character of reality as such, but who would not wish to raise the normative issue whether such metaphysical claims might be true. These are in fact two distinct questions, and I agree with Malinowski that, ultimately, the question whether myths are true or false, whether they successfully reflect the divine, “is a problem of theology or metaphysics” rather than the social sciences: “the anthropologist has done enough when he has shown the value of a phenomenon for social integrity and for the continuity of culture” (Malinowski 1948: 62). Nevertheless, if the Frankforts, Eliade, Geertz, and I are right that at least some myths include metaphysical claims, then whether or not metaphysical claims can be true becomes an issue not only for philosophers. All those who study myths – all interpreters – approach their texts with a set of assumptions, and some of these assumptions are philosophical. One of the most basic philosophical assumptions that interpreters bring to the study of myths is whether or not to read them in the cognitive sense as cognitively meaningful or meaningless, that is, as making claims that can be true or false or as not making such claims. If one works with the assumption that myths make or imply metaphysical claims that might possibly be true, then one needs at least some implicit understanding of how they might be true, i.e., one’s interpretation requires some criterion of metaphysical truth.5 The interpreter need not take the further step of assessing whether the religious metaphysics are in fact true or false (and anthropologists, historians, psychologists, and sociologists of religion may
90 Kevin Schilbrack properly choose not to pursue this question) but if one interprets myths as “in some sense true” or “possibly true” then one must have some understanding of how this is so. To the question whether the metaphysics in myths can be true, of course, many interpreters assert or assume that the answer is no. Some hold that since metaphysical claims cannot be verified or falsified through sense experience, they are by definition not cognitive, neither true nor false, and therefore metaphysics cannot be distinguished from poetry. This was the view of the logical positivists, and though few in Religious Studies would describe themselves as members of that discredited movement, the view is still clearly assumed by some who write about myths. It is because they consider the metaphysical claims made by myths to be cognitively empty that they interpret myths as merely ideology or priestcraft; that is, they seek some sociological or psychological explanation of why people would tell tales that cannot be possibly true or false. Other interpreters answer that metaphysical claims are conceivably true or false, but they can never be known to be true or false. This not unpopular view is held, for example, by Joseph Campbell,6 Alan Watts,7 and Eliseo Vivas,8 and each of its versions can be traced back to Kant’s claim that beyond all conceivable human experience there are noumenal realities that can be thought, even though they cannot ever be known. Below I will argue that Kant’s idea of noumena is not tenable; therefore the positivist claim that metaphysical claims are unverifiable and the Kantian claim that they cannot be known to be true are equivalent. But for now it is enough to see that both the positivist and the Kantian approaches to myths reflect a criterion by which the interpreter understands how claims are true, but for both views it is a criterion which excludes the possibility of a true metaphysical claim. To show that there is a credible alternative to it is the point of the rest of this section. For reasons of space, I won’t be able to give a full-blooded defense of the possibility of metaphysics.9 But I think that I can say at least the following. The metaphysician can agree with Kant that knowledge of things as they are in themselves, knowledge of things that cannot be experienced, is not available. Kant is right that any metaphysics that seeks to describe what he calls noumena is not credible. In fact, the metaphysician can go further than Kant, and argue (with Hegel and Nietzsche and Dewey) that the category of noumena is itself unintelligible. The idea of “realities” which are alleged to be conceivable but cannot conceivably be experienced is an incoherent one. Metaphysicians can and should abandon it, and think of the scope of intelligible statements as “limited” to what can conceivably be experienced.10 Given this “limitation” of philosophy to what can conceivably be experienced, however, I believe that some interpretations of rational inquiry into the character of reality as such remain tenable. The definition of metaphysics that follows is taken from the works of Charles Hartshorne.11
Myth and metaphysics 91 The key distinction that needs to be made in order to appreciate this understanding of metaphysics is between two kinds of existential claims about what there is. There are, according to Hartshorne, two kinds of existential claims: some claims about what exists are restrictive in the sense that they purport to be true only under some conditions; other claims about what exists are nonrestrictive in the sense that they purport to be true under all conditions. The truth of a given claim belonging to the first class of claims is contingent in that the claim could be false. Such claims could be false because they designate a particular state of affairs that might or might not obtain. This class is relatively unproblematic and includes historical claims, scientific claims, and the overwhelming majority of statements about what exists. “It is raining at a given place and time” is an example. The truth of a given claim belonging to the second class of existential claims is necessary in that, if true, it could not possibly be false. This is because it does not designate a particular state of affairs but rather, designates the generic features of all possible states of affairs. Examples include “every possible existent is a substance,” “every possible existent is an event,” “every possible existent is a product of consciousness,” “every possible existent is composed of matter” and so on. On this definition of metaphysics, metaphysical claims seek to describe absolutely all things, or in other words they purport to be true under all conditions. Such claims allege to be necessary and therefore, if they are true, they cannot conceivably be falsified. Because they cannot conceivably be falsified, metaphysics cannot be understood as an empirical inquiry that compares hypotheses to states of affairs. Rather, metaphysics is a form of logical inquiry that argues that some understanding of the nature of reality is logically necessary as the condition for the possibility of the existence of anything whatsoever. Metaphysical claims purport to be about what is always and everywhere the case. Or to repeat, they concern the character of reality under all conditions. This definition of metaphysics avoids the criticisms of metaphysics prevalent in contemporary philosophy. Metaphysical claims on this account assume no “God’s eye view,” no “view from nowhere,” no privileged access or intuition into reality; they are not an attempt to pierce the “veil of ideas.” They reject the scientistic claim that all knowledge is empirical, but they do not violate pragmatic or phenomenological criteria of meaning. For this reason, I prefer to describe metaphysics using Aristotle’s formulation of metaphysics as inquiry into the character of reality as such, rather than Kant’s formulation of metaphysics as inquiry into the character of reality “in itself.” On this account, metaphysics abandons the idea of reality “in itself” and is not saddled with explaining how one can know the world as it is apart from the categories of human understanding. From Hartshorne one can draw a criterion for metaphysical truth in myths: the metaphysics is true to the extent that it represents the general
92 Kevin Schilbrack character of what is, so that it cannot conceivably be falsified (cf. Ogden 1963). From this criterion it follows that one might invalidate a metaphysical claim that is alleged to be true in two ways. One might show that it does not hold in every case, that there are exceptions to it, in which case one shows that is a (false) contingent claim rather than a properly metaphysical claim. Or one might argue that what it claims to be the case, when one considers its implications, is incoherent, that it is a self-contradictory claim. Positively put, one can seek to validate a metaphysical model by interpreting more and more areas of experience in terms of it, thereby showing its adequacy to experience. Or one can seek to show that the metaphysical claim, along with its implications, is coherent and that it is the denial of the claim that is self-contradictory.
IV. An illustrative example Of course, to say that a given myth makes or implies metaphysical claims is not to exhaust the meaning of the myth. A single myth can operate with several levels of reference, each having to do with different aspects of reality. William Doty distinguishes four such levels: the psychological, the sociological, the cosmological, and the metaphysical (Doty 1986: 52–6; cf. Campbell 1970: 138–75). On Doty’s analysis, the psychological level of reference found in myths provides a paradigm for life stages and roles; the sociological level addresses social divisions of labor, gender, and power; the cosmological renders an image of the universe; and the metaphysical level maps the differences of being, non-being, and becoming. All four of these levels are important to understand what a given myth means. The cosmological and metaphysical aspects of myths, however, receive less attention and are often confused with each other, often under the catch-all label “world view.” According to the definition of metaphysics I introduced above, cosmological models in a myth are empirical rather than metaphysical (on the relation of cosmological models to religious myths, see MacCormac 1976; Wright 1995). They have to do with the character of this particular world, whereas properly metaphysical references have to do with the character of any possible world. Another way to put this is to say that cosmological features of the world might be otherwise – there might have been or might yet be changes to the cosmological character of the world in some previous or future cosmic epoch – but metaphysical features of the world are necessary and not conceivably otherwise. The metaphysical interpretation of myths focuses on a myth’s reference to the ineliminable aspects of reality. Here is an illustration of how attention to metaphysics can add to our understanding of a myth. Consider the Buddhist story of the cyclical evolution of the world as told in the Aggañña Sutta. Although not a myth of “creation,” since in Buddhism that which is has no ultimate beginning, it is an account of the emergence of the present world. It begins,
Myth and metaphysics 93 O monks, eventually there comes a time when, after a long period, this world starts to wind down. And as the world is winding down, beings for the most part are reborn out of it, in the Realm of the Radiant Gods. Eventually, after another long period, it happens that this world that has ended begins to reevolve. And as it is reevolving, settling, and becoming established, certain beings, in order to work out their karma, fall from the Realm of the Radiant Gods and come to be once again in this world. These beings by nature are self-luminescent and move through the air. They are made of mind, feed on joy, dwell in bliss, and go where they will. (Strong 1994: 101)12 As the Earth begins to settle and solidify, one of the luminous deities, “fickle and greedy by nature,” eats of it. Others imitate him, and as they eat, they too become more solid and take on shapes. The beings begin to be able to perceive differences amongst themselves; some are attractive, others less so, and this leads to pride and arrogance. The more they eat, the more substantial they become, until sexes emerge, which leads to carnal thoughts and illicit behavior. The foodstuff they eat also becomes more and more “earthy,” until it appears as a rice which is wonderful but must be harvested. Gathering and storing rice, though, leads the lazy to thievery; this then leads to lying about one’s guilt and to violence. In this deteriorating state, the beings decide that they need to elect a king to maintain peace and administer justice. The story ends with the installation of the Great Elected One. By the end of the discourse, the world which had “wound down” at the outset has reconstituted itself into the familiar world of conflict, anxiety, and suffering called samsara. How ought such a story be interpreted? Clearly, at least some of the four levels Doty describes are present. Though the myth does not deal with a hero or savior who might symbolize a mature, healthy psyche, a psychological interpretation might still read the myth as describing the stages of ego development, including therein the emergence of desire, self-image, and sexuality. A sociological interpretation might focus on the social contract theory and the ways in which this story could justify the status of kings even while showing that kingship is not inevitable or natural but rather a socially created institution invented for the sake of the needs of the ruled. A cosmological interpretation could focus on the different realms that exist and the different kinds of beings that emerge.13 Does the myth also include metaphysics? At the heart of the story is a continuous cyclical process of evolving and de-evolving. The story makes it clear that this process concerns not just the emergence of human life but rather it is that process through which the world itself emerges. Nor is it solely a cosmological process (like, say, the development of a star) that is independent of humanity. The evolution of the world is wedded to human desires and actions. Seeing this, one might interpret the story, not as an
94 Kevin Schilbrack alternative account of creation to the Buddhist doctrine of interdependent origination (pratityasamutpada), but rather as a narrative illustration of it. This doctrine, in its classical formula, says that: When this exists, that exists or comes to be; on the arising of this, that arises. When this does not exist, that does not exist or come to be; on the cessation of this, that ceases. That is to say: on ignorance depend dispositions; on dispositions depends consciousness; on consciousness depend name and form; on name and form depend the six gateways; on the six gateways depends contact; on contact depends craving; on craving depends grasping; on grasping depends becoming; on becoming depends birth; on birth depend old age and death. In this manner there arises the mass of suffering [samsara]. (Reynolds 1985: 206; a slightly different translation can be found in Rahula 1974: 53–4) The myth takes this teaching that there is nothing that does not have an origin, and that nothing originates of its own power, and dramatizes it. Is the doctrine of interdependent origination a metaphysical teaching? The answer depends on one’s definition of metaphysics. In this paper, metaphysics describes the character that anything has insofar as it is anything at all. Interdependent origination seems to fit this description since, in this myth at least, the process of interdependent origination is not limited to human psyches, nor to society, nor even to the physical cosmos. As a nonrestrictive aspect of reality as such, it is present in and through all of these and without it none of them would exist at all. It can be distinguished from cosmology insofar as interdependent origination is allegedly true a priori whereas cosmological truths would be empirical and hence allegedly true a posteriori. For example, that there is an Earth in the cosmos is an empirical claim; that whatever exists in the cosmos originated interdependently is on this interpretation a metaphysical claim; if true, it is true whatever there is. Let’s turn to this question of truth. To repeat what was expressed above, an interpreter need not pursue the question whether or not a myth is true. But if an interpreter wants to say that the myth’s depiction of reality as such is neither unintelligible nonsense nor absolutely unknowable – in other words, if the interpreter wants an understanding of how such claims might be held as true claims by those who believe them – then the question of how metaphysical claims might be validated remains relevant. If one wanted to argue that the cosmology in the myth (in the sense of the empirical explanation of the universe) is not true, then one would seek to show that that explanation contradicts some other, better established explanation. Despite the element of speculation here, this is in essence a question for physicists. If one wanted to argue that the metaphysics in the myth is not true, however, then the procedure would have to be logical
Myth and metaphysics 95 rather than empirical. One would seek to show that there was something incoherent in the idea that everything arises interdependently, in the idea that nothing exists independently. Conversely, if one wanted to argue that the metaphysics in the myth is true, then one would argue that there is nothing incoherent in this view. One might argue that there is something incoherent in the idea of an entity that exists of its own accord. From this example one can see how myths can be read as providing models of reality as such. In fact, I think that one can see how interpreters of mythic narratives might develop from them an explicit, non-narrative metaphysics. This is true whether the interpreter is a member of the religious tradition that recounts the myth or not. The interpretive task of a Thomas Aquinas or a Sankara does not seem different from that of a contemporary academic in this respect, for as I argued in section I, metaphysical issues arise not only for the philosopher interested in assessing truth claims, but also for anyone who simply seeks to understand the myth.
V. The contribution of the metaphysical interpretation of myths I hope that it is clear that my recommendation is not that myths be interpreted as metaphysical rather than, say, social or psychological or cosmological, but that the metaphysical interpretation be added to the methodological toolkit used by interpreters of myth. This would mean that those who find that a metaphysical approach illuminates myths could use it and those who do not use it would not exclude it as illegitimate. To add a metaphysical interpretation to those already being used to interpret myths could make a difference both to the study of myths and to philosophy of religion. Insofar as myths involve metaphysics, any study of myth that excludes metaphysics distorts and truncates its object. Clearly, to assume that myths cannot involve metaphysics blinds one to the possibility that a myth attempts to describe a culture’s understanding of reality as such. This blindness in turn blinkers one to other aspects of myths. For example, the metaphysical claims in myths often play a justificatory function in the religion. That is, they often serve to legitimate what the religion considers proper attitudes, practices, and beliefs. They assert or imply that one should conduct oneself in a specified way, because such is the appropriate conduct, given the nature of things. Geertz sees this point clearly when he says that a religious ethos is typically grounded on a religious metaphysics. As he puts it, The source of [a religion’s] moral vitality is conceived to lie in the fidelity with which it expresses the fundamental nature of reality. The powerfully coercive “ought” is felt to grow out of a comprehensive factual “is,” and in such a way religion grounds the most specific requirements of human action in the most general contexts of human
96 Kevin Schilbrack existence. … The need for such a metaphysical grounding for values seems to vary quite widely in intensity from culture to culture and from individual to individual, but the tendency to desire some sort of factual basis for one’s commitments seems practically universal; mere conventionalism satisfies few people in any culture. (Geertz 1973: 126, 131) Reading myths with an attention to metaphysics therefore helps one to take into account the justificatory function of myths: that myths claim to justify a way of life by describing the way the world really is. If one ignores this cognitive dimension, one has a truncated understanding of myths as merely ideology or as just literature. Attention to metaphysics helps to avoid this. The metaphysical interpretation of myths could also contribute to Philosophy of Religion, and in particular to the philosophical study of religious metaphysics. In this capacity, it complements the approach to philosophy that has been called “ethnometaphysics.”14 Ethnometaphysics proposes as a working hypothesis the idea that different cultures have different metaphysical views and so a legitimate part of the study of a culture is the study of its cognitive orientation to reality as such. It proceeds under the assumption that understandings of the necessary features of reality are not exclusive to the Western philosophical tradition, or even of the so-called “high cultures.” Douglas Rabb and Dennis MacPherson have recently sought to articulate the program of ethnometaphysics in a way that does not incur relativism. They argue that philosophers should adopt what they call the “polycentric perspective” that says that all cultures embody particular conceptions of reality which can be accorded validity without assuming reducibility to or commensurability with others (MacPherson and Rabb 1993: 10). They hold that this perspective undermines the “save-the-savages” view that assumes that the exclusively true metaphysics has already been identified, either in scientific materialism or in Christian theistic metaphysics, and that when we do discover rival metaphysical systems we should try to free their adherents from those beliefs. Neither of those views permits the scholar to take seriously the idea that ethnometaphysical systems might have truth. I think that my proposal of a metaphysical interpretation of myths dovetails with this proposal (though I think that the goals of ethnometaphysics might best be served if it dropped the prefix). The discipline of philosophy of religion has become mired in the study of religious “beliefs” abstracted from their cultural context (what Paul Griffiths has called “denaturalized discourse” [Griffiths 1990]) to the detriment of other philosophical forms of religious discourse. The study of religious metaphysics also has a too narrow view of what the possibilities are. What is needed is an appreciation of the extent to which speculation on the nature of things is a global phenomenon and of the variety of forms
Myth and metaphysics 97 that such speculation takes. What is needed is an understanding of philosophy of religion as an open-ended inquiry that works in conversation with anthropologists and historians of religion. It is my hope that this essay might contribute to the development of Philosophy of Religion in that direction.15
Notes 1 A similar position is also found in Eric Voegelin’s treatment of Hesiod and Homer (1957: 136–7). Voegelin writes that: The mythopoetic work of the two poets was a spiritual and intellectual revolution; for inasmuch as it established the types of cosmic and ethical forces, as well as the types of their relations and tensions, it created in the form of the myth, a highly theorized body of knowledge concerning the position of man in his world that could be used by the philosophers as the starting point for metaphysical analysis and differentiation. 2 Barbour draws on Ian Ramsey (1964) and his ideas have been put to use by Sallie McFague (1983, 1987), but those authors do not share his and my focus on critical realism. Thomas M. Olshewsky (1982) provides some critical reflections on Barbour. 3 Geertz makes this point as well, saying that “[n]ever merely metaphysics, religion is never merely ethics either” (1973: 126). 4 Charles H. Long follows Eliade in regarding creation myths as involving a metaphysical dimension. Accounts of creation often describe, in his terms, “a manifestation of reality-as-being” or “the ontological dimension” (1963: 9, 27). Moreover, Eliadeans often treat all myths as referring to creation. As Kees Bolle says, “A myth, whether its subject is the acts of deities or other extraordinary events, always takes us back to ‘beginnings of all things’” (1987: 262; cf. Eliade 1963: 6). 5 As Charles Long concisely puts it, “If myths are true stories, we must ask in what sense they are true” (1963: 12). 6 Basing his view explicitly on Kant’s Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, Joseph Campbell argues that metaphysical entities are “absolutely and forever and from every conceivable human standpoint, unknowable.” See Campbell 1960: 387. 7 Citing Campbell, Watts argues that the metaphysics that one finds in myths is a prefactual form of knowledge which theology necessarily distorts, and the idea of metaphysical concepts is a contradiction in terms. See Watts 1968: 27–8n1, 57–63. 8 Following Carnap (who on this point follows Kant), Eliseo Vivas (1970) argues that since myth organizes experience, it makes possible true and false statements, but is not itself either true or false. 9 I offer a typology of three basic anti-metaphysical positions, with a critique of each, in Schilbrack 1994. 10 I understand this point to be in agreement with the metaphysics of Donald Davidson, who writes that: In giving up dependence on the concept of an uninterpreted reality, something outside all schemes and science, we do not relinquish the notion of objective truth – quite the contrary. Given the dogma of a dualism of scheme and reality, we get conceptual relativity, and truth relative to a
98 Kevin Schilbrack scheme. Without the dogma, this kind of relativity goes by the board. Of course the truth of sentences remains relative to language but that is as objective as can be. In giving up the dualism of scheme and world, we do not give up the world, but reestablish unmediated touch with the familiar objects whose antics make our sentences true and false. (1984a: 198; also relevant here is Davidson 1984b; Schilbrack 2002) 11 For a concise account of Hartshorne’s understanding of the nature of metaphysics, see especially 1970a, 1970b. Note too that I borrow from Hartshorne here only his understanding of metaphysical inquiry and not his conclusions that reality is social process. 12 Another translation, with extensive commentary, can be found in Collins 1993; other English translations can be found in J.J. Jones 1949 and in Rhys-Davids 1921. 13 Frank Reynolds interprets this sutra as a rupic (that is, material- or formproducing), devolutionary cosmogony (Reynolds 1985; cf. Reynolds 1982). 14 The first use of the term “ethnometaphysics,” I believe, is Hallowell 1960; Hallowell takes as his inspiration Radin 1957. Callicott and Overholt 1982 develops the idea and MacPherson and Rabb 1993 seeks to justify the discipline without relativism. Another, less philosophical example can be found in Davis 1984. 15 This essay originally appeared in the International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 48, 2 (October 2000): 65–80. It is reprinted here with permission from Kluwer Publishers.
Bibliography Barbour, I. (1974) Myths, Models, and Paradigms, New York: Harper and Row. Bolle, K. (1987) “Myth: An Overview,” in M. Eliade (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Religion, vol. 10, New York: Macmillan. Callicott, J.B. and Overholt, T. (1982) Clothed-in-Fur and Other Tales: An Introduction to an Ojibwa World View, Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Campbell, J. (1960) “Primitive Man as Metaphysician,” in S. Diamond (ed.), Culture in History, New York: Columbia University Press. —— (1970) Myths, Dream, and Religion, New York: Dutton. Collins, S. (1993) “The Discourse on What is Primary,” Journal of Indian Philosophy, 21: 301–93. Davidson, D. (1984a) “One the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” in Inquiries in Truth and Interpretation, Oxford: Clarendon Press. —— (1984b) “The Method of Truth in Metaphysics,” in Inquiries in Truth and Interpretation, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Davis, R. (1984) Muang Metaphysics: A Study of Northern Thai Myth and Ritual, Bangkok: Pandora. Doty, W.G. (1986) Mythography, Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press. Eliade, M. (1963) Myth and Reality, New York: Harper and Row. —— (1971) The Myth of the Eternal Return or, Cosmos and History, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Frankfort, H. and Frankfort, H.A. (1946) “Myth and Reality,” in H. Frankfort, H.A. Frankfort, J.A. Wilson, T. Jacobsen, and W.A. Irwin (eds), The Intellectual
Myth and metaphysics 99 Adventure of Ancient Man: An Essay in Speculative Philosophy, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Geertz, C. (1973) The Interpretation of Cultures, New York: Basic Books. Griffiths, P.J. (1990) “Denaturalizing Discourse: Abhidharmikas, Propositionalists, and the Comparative Philosophy of Religion,” in F.E. Reynolds and D. Tracy (eds), Myth and Philosophy, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Hallowell, A.I. (1960) “Ojibwa Ontology, Behavior, and World View,” in S. Diamond (ed.), Culture in History: Essays in Honor of Paul Radin, New York: Columbia University Press. Hartshorne, C. (1970a) “What Metaphysics Is,” in Creative Synthesis and Philosophical Method, London: SCM Press. —— (1970b) “Non-restrictive Existential Statements,” in Creative Synthesis and Philosophical Method, London: SCM Press. Jones, J.J. (1949) The Mahavastu, vol. 1, London: Pali Text Society. Long, C.H. (1963) Alpha: The Myths of Creation, Chico, CA: Scholars Press. MacCormac, E. (1976) Metaphor and Myth in Science and Religion, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. McFague, S. (1983) Metaphorical Theology: Models of God in Religious Language, London: SCM Press. —— (1987) Models of God: Theology for an Ecological, Nuclear Age, Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press. MacPherson, D. and Rabb, D. (1993) Indian from the Inside: A Study in Ethnometaphysics, Thunder Bay, Ont.: Lakehead University. Malinowski, B. (1948) Magic, Science, and Religion and Other Essays, Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor. Ogden, S. (1963) “Myth and Truth,” in The Reality of God and Other Essays, San Francisco, CA: Harper and Row. Olshewsky, T.M. (1982) “Between Science and Religion,” Journal of Religion, 62: 242–60. Radin, P. (1957) Primitive Man as Philosopher, New York: Dover. Rahula, W. (1974) What the Buddha Taught, 2nd edn, New York: Grove Press. Ramsey, I. (1964) Models and Mystery, London: Oxford University Press. Reynolds, F. (1985) “Multiple Cosmogonies and Ethics: The Case of Theravada Buddhism,” in R.W. Lovin and F.E. Reynolds (eds), Cosmogony and Ethical Order: New Studies in Comparative Ethics, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. —— (1982) Three Worlds According to King Ruang: A Thai Buddhist Cosmology, trans. F.E. Reynolds and M.B. Reynolds, Berkeley, CA: Asia Humanities Press. Rhys-Davids, T.W. (trans.) (1921) Dialogues of the Buddha, vol. 4, pt III, London: Oxford University Press. Schilbrack, K. (1994) “Problems for a Complete Naturalism,” American Journal of Theology and Philosophy, 15: 269–92. —— (2002) “The Study of Religious Belief after Davidson,” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, 14: 1. Strong, J. (ed.) (1994) The Experience of Buddhism: Sources and Interpretations, Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Vivas, E. (1970) “Myth: Some Philosophical Problems,” The Southern Review, 6: 89–103.
100 Kevin Schilbrack Voegelin, E. (1957) Order and History, vol. II, Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press. Watts, A. (1968) Myth and Ritual in Christianity, Boston, MA: Beacon. Wright, M.R. (1995) “Models, Myths, and Metaphors,” in Cosmology in Antiquity, London: Routledge.
5
Myth and feminist philosophy Pamela Sue Anderson
I. Myth in Western philosophy From a reading of the history of Western philosophy, one might conclude that myth and philosophy are opposite, even contradictory terms. Recorded in this history is the presumed fact that, since the dawn of philosophy in ancient Greece, myth (muthos) has been something philosophers have left behind in order to engage in rational discourse (logos). The assumption has been that philosophy replaces myth, so logos is given greater value than muthos. Whereas myths comprise stories about embodiment, birth and death, passion and desire, philosophy claims to be dispassionate discourse whereby pure reason takes control of disorder and rejects impure experience. Rejecting this reading, the contemporary philosopher Michèle Le Doeuff has persuasively demonstrated that myth has accompanied reason in philosophy. Myth emerges in what Le Doeuff identifies as the philosophical imaginary (Le Doeuff 1989: esp. 1–20). As such, myth consists of the imagery and narrative that necessarily, however unwittingly, accompany the rational discourse in philosophical texts. Philosophy cannot be purged completely of the images of myth. Even if myth-making has been imagined to be at the limits of pure reason, it is wrongly defined as the complete opposite of philosophical reasoning. Following Le Doeuff, I would like to contend that, despite any unwillingness of philosophers to acknowledge its presence in their texts, myth weaves passion together with reason in philosophy. Myth puts into narrative form reason and passion as two necessarily related aspects of lived experiences; both aspects are necessary for philosophical representations of the reality of embodied beings, even philosophers’ identities involve variables of sexual orientation, race, class and ethnicity. It would seem self-defeating for philosophers to claim that their accounts of reality are distinct from myth in being purely rational, without reference to the passions of embodiment. Yet ironically philosophy’s myths tend to remain unacknowledged while providing the content and form for feminist transformations (Anderson 1998).
102 Pamela Sue Anderson Women poets and novelists have long recognized and exploited the fact that classical myths constantly reappear in different forms, shaping the discourse of poetry and literature in highly distinctive ways.1 It is a more recent activity for feminist philosophers to expose and challenge the role of myth in philosophy. Simone de Beauvoir was probably the first feminist philosopher in this century to demonstrate the ways in which patriarchal myth had excluded women from Western philosophy (though both her status as a feminist and her achievements as a philosopher have been contested). In Le deuxième sexe (1949) Beauvoir exposes the classical myths of European culture which had consciously and unconsciously devalued women, excluding them from the very possibility of autonomous thinking and acting. Despite any apparent incompatibility, I will demonstrate further that myth and feminist philosophy involve sets of terms which, far from being set in opposition, are bound together in the transformation of the history of Western philosophy. I propose that an adequate account of myth should include two characteristics which admit myth to be both transmitted by the central texts of a philosophical tradition and transformed by that tradition’s ever-changing history. The first characteristic is the constancy of myth’s narrative core, which renders possible its transmission by tradition. This constancy means that a myth can be reproduced and recognized in ritual and artistic performances. The second characteristic is the variability of myth’s characters, themes and plot, rendering possible myth’s transformation by history. Myth’s variability allows for constantly new interpretations. Like music, there can be variations on a mythical theme (cf. Blumenburg 1985). There are both advantages and disadvantages for feminists to this continuing presence of myth in philosophy; these involve, on the one hand, the possibility of innovation and, on the other hand, the restrictions of a tradition. At the very least, in carefully scrutinizing myth in philosophy, it becomes evident that myth’s continuing presence provides material for a more complex, historical reading of philosophy than generally given. First of all, myth in this context is not a mere falsehood as assumed in more banal conversation. Nor is myth a single story or a single set of images. Instead myth is constituted by and constitutive of a diversity of stories taking place in many different times and spaces. Second, myth with its images, narrative, characters and plot can become the means for individual philosophers and philosophical communities to constitute themselves, i.e., create their own qualitative identity. The result is, then, a foundational myth for the identity of those individuals and that community. But this constitution of identity also implies excluding as other all those who do not control the myth-making process. For instance, classical myths have given distinctive characteristics to the identity of philosophical culture; but the opportunity to recreate myth in philosophical writing has been largely the achievement of Western men who, educated in the classics, privilege their own identity, and so women are either devalued by or excluded from
Myth and feminist philosophy 103 this identity.2 Third, myth continues to be a part of the history of philosophy, yet its use is always marked by a highly distinctive contemporaneity. In the next section I would like to develop my account of myth and feminist philosophy by considering briefly three ways in which feminist philosophers have dealt with the refiguring of myth. In the penultimate section, I will propose a fourth alternative: a post-Kantian account that is informed by hermeneutic phenomenology, feminist epistemology and aesthetics. My final section will summarize and conclude, concerning the possibilities offered to a feminist standpoint by myth and the philosophical imaginary.
II. Feminist philosophers and their different approaches to myth The refiguring of myth in this century by feminist philosophers represents their participation in a historical process of identity formation, as well as their struggle to transform the asymmetry of gender hierarchy which the dominant myths in Western philosophy have constituted and reinforced for centuries. Feminist philosophers have gradually become participants in the process of identity formation of women but, as philosophers, feminists have had their distinctive approaches to the rewriting of myth. Despite the risk of overly crude distinctions, I would like to suggest three categories for understanding the differences amongst feminist philosophers in their approaches to myth. I describe each feminist approach in terms of its political-philosophical characteristics roughly as follows: (i) a conservative-essentialist or radical-essentialist feminist approach, (ii) a liberal-existentialist or liberal-culturalist feminist approach and (iii) a progressive-poststructuralist feminist approach.3 However, in a separate section, I will defend (iv) a social-epistemologist feminist approach to myth which, as stated above, is based upon a post-Kantian, hermeneutically informed account of phenomenology, feminist epistemology and aesthetics. To address the first set of characteristics, an essentialist approach to myth in philosophy brings together feminists of two sorts of political persuasions: the conservative and the radical. However different in other ways, both the conservative-essentialist and the radical-essentialist feminists are “romantic” in insisting upon the existence of positive, natural images of women in myth. Whereas a romantic essentialist feminist can be conservative in preserving essentially timeless images of women from past mythology, another essentialist feminist can be radical in agreeing that timeless truths about women can be represented in myth; but the latter unlike the former insists upon the need to reproduce radically new versions of old myths in order to reverse the reversals of patriarchy. The conservativeessentialist and radical-essentialist feminists have a common goal insofar as they each endeavor to see behind the patriarchal images in myth, in order to
104 Pamela Sue Anderson uncover what is prior to the loss or denigration of female identity. In particular, the conservative-essentialist and radical-essentialist feminists alike assume that an original matriarchy has been forgotten or repressed in the history of patriarchy; the conservative-essentialist assumes this is original in the sense of a historical priority, while the radical-essentialist assumes original in the sense of a more fundamental set of values. In mythical terms, both of these types of romantic feminists seek to disclose the murder of the mother-goddess by patriarchy, in order to resurrect those positive images of women’s affinity with nature as portrayed by foundational myths. Although not a philosopher, the British classicist and historian Jane Harrison presented influential, early twentieth-century accounts which uncovered mythical images of women prior to patriarchy (Harrison 1963 [1924]).4 In one of her writings, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1903), Harrison discusses the process whereby early matriarchal cults in ancient Greece were displaced by the patriarchal cults of the Olympian gods. Following Harrison, the American feminist Adrienne Rich claims that men were the first to use ‘myth,’ in a negative sense, to argue that patriarchy is a myth and so “not a fact of nature” (Rich 1996). Yet Rich contends, with support from Harrison’s pioneering work, that a more primitive matriarchy in myth, understood in the positive sense of a prefiguration that is constitutive of maternal values, lies hidden behind patriarchal configurations (Rich 1996 [1986]: 56–7n*, 59–62, 72–3; cf. Harrison 1980 [1903]; Bachofen 1967 [1861]). Insofar as they seek to conserve essentially timeless images of women’s embodiment Harrison and Rich, however different, both fit under the label of the conservativeessentialist approach to myth. They each preserve truths about women’s affinity with nature which must be extricated from patriarchal constructions, e.g., natural images of female nurturing. A feminist philosopher who builds upon this tradition in going back to an original matriarchy, in order to find the reality which patriarchy has eclipsed, is the Italian Adriana Cavarero. Cavarero’s recently translated In Spite of Plato: A Feminist Rewriting of Ancient Philosophy takes up Rich’s concern with motherhood and develops a refiguration of four female figures from ancient Greece (Cavarero 1995). Cavarero claims to free the mythical figures of Penelope, Demeter, Diotima and an unnamed, young woman from the patriarchal constructions that have dominated Western philosophy since the theft of these female figures by ancient philosophers. In seeking to return the female figures to their original context in a matriarchal order, Cavarero would appear conservative. Nevertheless, her refiguring of the home-maker, the mother, the priestess and the young maidservant is wholly positive for women, in giving each female mythic figure an autonomous role in the social order. Another contemporary, feminist philosopher, Mary Daly, is a major proponent of a more radical approach to myth insofar as she digs deep to create new versions of old myths. I maintain that Daly is a radical-
Myth and feminist philosophy 105 essentialist philosopher, even if some feminists may describe her approach as radical-existentialist. I classify Daly’s approach to myth as essentialist insofar as – unlike the existentialist who rejects any sort of essential nature – she perceives the timeless truth of a women-centered civilization. In Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism, Daly assumes that patriarchal myths contain insight about a past centered on women. As she contends: a radical feminist analysis reaches the point of recognizing patriarchal myths as lies in the deepest sense, as distortions of our depths. … [W]omen elicit insights by seeing through such obvious myths as the second birth of Athena from the head of Zeus, or the birth of Eve from Adam’s rib. We do this by reversing their reversals – a complex process which involves much more than swinging to a simplistic conclusion that “opposites” of male myths are the “depths” we seek … In order to reverse the reversals completely we must deal with the fact that patriarchal myths contain stolen mythic power. They are something like distorting lenses through which we can see into the Background. … [W]e must see their lie in order to see their truth. We can correctly perceive patriarchal myths as reversals and as pale derivatives of more ancient, more translucent myth from gynocentric civilization. (Daly 1991: 46, 47; cf. 111) The additional ground for my description of Daly as an essentialist, and not a social constructionist, on myth is her assumption that women see potential in the spiritual or cosmic dimensions of nature, in images of their true self. For Daly, these mythical images serve in female forms of becoming, but to “see their truth … [in] more ancient, more translucent myth” assumes recognizing some essential nature. I would stress difficulties at this point. There are a number of problems with an essentialist feminist approach that seeks to perceive images of women’s bond with nature either in going behind patriarchy to an original matriarchy or in reversals of patriarchal myths grounded in women’s own becoming. First, this approach assumes that timeless truths exist about women which are beyond both history and culture, yet appear in myth. Second, it tends to obscure or ignore the contingent, historical garb of its refigured myths. Third, it fails to recognize the specificities that determine the myth’s emergence; these specificities include differences of sexual orientation, gender, race, class and ethnicity. Fourth, it retains or even reinforces the opposition of masculine and feminine; in the case of the radical feminist, this tends to involve a reversal of the sexism; and in the case of the conservative feminist, this tends to involve an acceptance of essential masculine and feminine natures. Either way this approach to myth tends to
106 Pamela Sue Anderson an oppositional reading of sexual differences as constituting male and female identities. A decisive problem with the above, romantic assumptions concerning myth could undermine the approach of both conservative-essentialist and radical-essentialist feminists. This problem has been called myth’s “retarding function” by Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza. As Fiorenza explains, Insofar as a myth is a story which provides a common vision, feminists have to find new myths and stories in order to embody their goals and value judgements. … Yet … myths also have a stabilizing, retarding function insofar as they sanction the existing social order and justify its power structure by providing communal identity and a rationale for societal and ecclesial institutions. (Schüssler Fiorenza 1975: 620) If this function is taken seriously, a feminist philosopher must never rest content with the configurations of myth which provide a communal identity and justify the potentially inequitable power structure of a social order. More generally, an adequate approach to myth in philosophy must incorporate a constant critical process in the activity of refiguration. Perhaps the great danger today in the identity represented by conservativeessentialist and radical-essentialist feminist refigurations of old myths is the unwitting exclusion of difference within gender. On the one hand, the conservative-essentialist feminist is in danger of excluding sexual, racial, ethnic, cultural and class differences in their assumption of a universal female identity as discoverable in myth; on the other hand, the radicalessentialist feminist is in danger of a similar exclusion as well as the devaluation of male identity in the reversal of sexism in new forms of myth. For example, Daly develops a powerful case for the reversal of the mythical murder of “the Goddess – that is, the Self-affirming be-ing of women” (Daly 1991: 111). She explains her strategy for a reversal of this myth and the accompanying rituals as follows: I will analyze a number of barbarous rituals, ancient and modern, in order to unmask the very real, existential meaning of Goddess murder in the concrete lives of women. … Those who claim to see racism and/or imperialism in my indictment of these atrocities can do so only by blinding themselves to the fact that the oppression of women knows no ethnic, national, or religious bounds. (Daly 1991: 111) Clearly, although she wants to resist racism and imperialism, Daly assumes in the above that there is a universal fact about women, beyond race, sex, religion, ethnicity and class, and resulting in women’s oppression. But the
Myth and feminist philosophy 107 obvious issue, despite Daly’s counter-claim, remains the nagging question: Is it possible to avoid the exclusion of difference in essentialized accounts of becoming woman? Aren’t univocal myths of identity precisely what have shaped racism and imperialism? The danger and problem of the previous approach are addressed by the second feminist approach to myth. However, in the end this approach may not be much more successful. In contrast to a conservative-essentialist or radical-essentialist feminist, the liberal-existentialist or liberal-culturalist feminist approach to myth in philosophy seeks to expose and eliminate myth, especially the myth of the feminine or female other.5 For the existentialist philosopher in particular, there is no essential nature. The existentialist feminist task is to disclose and transcend the myths that have served as the justificatory apparatus of patriarchal society in order to give women their humanity. For the liberal, this humanity is equated with individual autonomy and formal equality. Basically, then, the liberal-existentialist feminist maintains that myth only reinforces the false conceptualization of woman as the other who lacks autonomy and equality. To illustrate this approach, allow me to return to Beauvoir’s existentialist reading of European philosophy. According to Beauvoir, philosophy defines man as the subject of rationality by way of a contrast to the images of woman which render her “the inessential other.” Beauvoir implies that European women have assumed the myths which represent them as both innocent virgin and erotic temptress, eternal feminine and devouring mother earth. These contradictory, mythical images are central to the founding myth of Western patriarchy which prevents women from becoming rational subjects. Yet, arguably, the images of women in philosophical texts which Beauvoir deconstructs are local. That is, the mythical images reflect the philosophical imaginary that shaped the influential discussions of French existential philosophy with her life-long partner Jean-Paul Sartre.6 In particular, on the basis of their existential readings of the female body, Beauvoir concludes that gestation is naturally and universally disgusting. We can easily criticize Beauvoir’s generalizations about humanity’s spontaneous reactions of revulsion to the physicality of pregnancy; what she identifies as the horror of human carnal contingency is just that: a contingent experience, culturally delimited. But she fails to recognize the myth’s contemporaneity and so accepts it as naturalized and universalized. Beauvoir is also caught in now out-moded European explanations of rituals associated with virginity, menstruation, defloration, pregnancy and childbirth. Nevertheless, even if she did not realize fully the contingency and contemporaneity of myth, it remains significant that Beauvoir began to disclose and transcend the myth which had excluded women from the so-called purity of philosophy. Perhaps it is to some degree unwitting that she allows myth to represent a timeless truth (Okely 1998).
108 Pamela Sue Anderson In the end, Beauvoir’s liberal-existentialist feminist approach to myth attempts a critical reading of philosophy which would eliminate not only the patriarchal myth, but gender. The assumption is that a genderneutrality would restore to women their autonomy and so their subjectivity as rational beings. In other words, women would be able to achieve the liberal ideals of individual autonomy, equality and fraternity. And these ideals would give a gender-neutral identity. Thus Beauvoir seeks to transcend the philosophical myth of woman as the inessential other. The critical question is: Can we go beyond myth? Beauvoir’s transcendence of the mythical images of the female body alone, ironically, depends upon the assumption that myth contains universal truths about the body. But then, Beauvoir’s approach is contradictory since, if universal, the truths about the female body in particular cannot be simply transcended. However virtuous, the liberal-existentialist feminist approach cannot even achieve equality by claiming a gender-neutral identity for women and men. Beauvoir’s proposed gift of “humanity” to women offers only a contradictory conception of woman as identical to man. Yet there is more to the picture of liberal feminism than that provided by the existentialist approach. To see this, consider what I have called a liberal-culturalist feminist approach to myth that offers a critical advance on the contradictory assumptions of Beauvoir. This approach moves beyond Beauvoir in the sense of exposing what has been hidden in the myth of public agreement between autonomous and equal individuals, yet it remains within liberal theorizing. Representative of this approach is the feminist political philosopher Carole Pateman. Pateman demonstrates the particular weakness of the social contract theories of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, John Stuart Mill, as well as those twentieth-century philosophers who remain within this liberal cultural tradition. As disclosed by Pateman, the weakness of liberal philosophy lies in the gender-biases established by their myth of the origins of patriarchy. According to Pateman, the liberal myth – as a product of Enlightenment culture – establishes the fact that the social contract is a pact between brothers, against the father, to ensure male sexual rights; the social contract conceals, in her terms, “a sexual contract;” thus the myth justifies the restriction of women to private (family) life (Pateman 1988). Pateman exposes the ways in which philosophers since the Enlightenment have reinterpreted the classical myth of the noble savage to justify women’s exclusion from the agreements of public life. For instance, Rousseau’s myth of origins describes a state of nature as a place of innocence; according to Rousseau’s story, the emergence of property into human existence creates inequality and so the loss of innocence; contract becomes necessary in order to protect the private property and so equality of citizens. However, this contract constitutes the identity and rights of citizens only by excluding women from the agreement: as wives and mothers, they are the property of husbands and fathers.
Myth and feminist philosophy 109 Beauvoir might agree with this latter statement. Yet Pateman’s reading sheds light on a problem which Beauvoir’s call to claim the autonomy and equality of women in liberal democracy does not recognize. If contemporary women respond to the moral demands of love for their own family over and above the universal principles of equality and autonomy, then a question remains concerning the impact of such women’s maternal thinking on public life. Basically, Pateman offers an advance on the earlier liberal-existentialist approach to myth by recognizing that myth can reveal cultural assumptions concerning gender even in the liberal ideals. The gendered assumptions implicit in the sexual contract are deeply ingrained in Enlightenment philosophy. The further suggestion is that we may not be able to eradicate gender. There may be something distinctive about maternal thinking. A return to a radical-essentialist approach is one possible reaction to the inadequacy of liberal feminism. The poststructuralist approach will be another alternative. At the very least in the case of liberalism, it is wrong to assume that the individuals involved in drawing up public agreement are necessarily gender-neutral. Instead within this liberal myth, it is assumed that the individuals are men with the right to private property, including wives. And yet neither Pateman nor Beauvoir responds to the additional, urgent need to unsettle and transform gender-biases in the very conceptions of individual autonomy and disembodied reasoning. In the end, Pateman simply fails to sustain her possible insight into the specificities of female embodiment and concrete freedom which would have an impact upon women’s thinking. Thus a decisive question remains for any liberal, whether existentialist or culturalist, approach of feminists to myth: Can myth, with its gendered notions and relations, be transcended? Even if patriarchal or sexist assumptions can be exposed is this enough for their dissolution? To answer the preceding questions, I turn to the third feminist approach to myth. Unlike any of the conservative-essentialist or radical-essentialist and liberal-existentialist or liberal-culturalist feminists, a progressive-poststructuralist feminist approach to myth in philosophy intends to unsettle in order to subvert the discourse of patriarchal myth. It is also accompanied by an insistence that myth cannot be simply retrieved, exposed or negated. A representative of this progressive-poststructuralist feminist approach is the French philosopher Luce Irigaray. Irigaray asserts that: The passage from one era to the next cannot be made simply by negating what already exists … To consider the meaning of mythical representations of reality as merely incidental is concomitant to repressing and destroying certain cultural dimensions that relate to the economy of difference between the sexes. Such an approach also leads to a partial, reductive, and fruitless conception of History. (Irigaray 1993a: 24)
110 Pamela Sue Anderson Instead of negation, myth demands refiguration in Irigaray’s sense of a disruptive “miming;” but myth also always remains part of history, even in its refigured form (Anderson 1998: 143–52). Ideally, the feminist refiguration of myth by the progressivepoststructuralist does not intend the creation of an exclusive woman’s identity. Instead its aim is the disruption of any universal – and univocal – identity. And this disruption is to be accompanied by the production of sexually specific identities. Moreover, rather than calling for an end to history, to its mythical representations of male sexual identity, the poststructuralist feminist philosophers call for their mimetic refiguring – which disrupts and so transforms history. In an earlier work than the one quoted above, Irigaray stresses the need to change the social order configured by myths, as well as transforming the technical study of their material: The myths and stories, the sacred texts are analyzed, sometimes with nostalgia but rarely with a mind to change the social order. … The techniques of reading, translating, and explaining take over the domain of the sacred, the religious, the mythical, but they fail to reveal a world that measures up to the material they are consuming or consummating. (Irigaray 1993b: 81) The failure “to reveal a world that measures up to the material they are consuming” could be a veiled reference to the liberal feminist, while “to reveal a world that measures up to the material they are … consummating” refers to the conservative or radical feminist approaches to myth. The liberal-existentialist approach would endeavor to “consume” or eradicate the material of myth and the essentialist would seek to “consummate” or complete it. In contrast to both of these, Irigaray’s strategy is to mime the texts and, especially, the myths of patriarchy, in order to reveal a new social order (see Anderson 1998: 153–8). There is a rich and varied background to Irigaray’s transformation of the myths in philosophy which have constituted the history of male sexual identity. Her background in philosophy gives added weight to her statement that myth is part of history. Irigaray’s background is informed by training generally in the history of philosophy and more specifically in phenomenology and poststructuralism. And note the distinctiveness of a progressive-poststructuralist feminist approach to myth is a refusal of a simple return to the older stories and myths of matriarchy which, in turn, would be opposed to the texts of patriarchy. These points are expressed well by Irigaray: Most ancient Greek myths are of Asian or unknown origin. This is true of those concerning Aphrodite, Demeter and Kore/Persephone. Their evolution should be understood as the result of migrations to
Myth and feminist philosophy 111 different places where they were adapted to varying degrees, and the effect of historical developments. For myth is not a story independent of History, but rather expresses History in colorful accounts that illustrate the major trends of an era. … As a result, [myths] retained a special relationship to space, time and the manifestation of the forms of incarnation. (Irigaray 1994: 101) Myths have not only an unknowable, cultural origin, but are part of history in revealing the trends of an era. They are revelatory to the degree of possessing an intimate involvement with space and time. Thus myth holds a profound significance for philosophy offering insight on embodiment. According to Irigaray, mythical insight can and must be unearthed without putting an end to either philosophy or myth-making. The American philosopher Donna Haraway can also be called a progressive-poststructuralist feminist. Haraway establishes a subversive approach to myth’s relation to space and time which breaks away from the past. But she employs deconstructive strategies similar to those of French poststructuralism, seeking to collapse the binary logic and privilege of patriarchal myths, as well as to celebrate differences in new figurations of subjectivity. Rosi Braidotti compares her to Irigaray: [Luce Irigaray] emphasizes images drawn from female morphology and sexuality, such as the two lips that suggest closeness while avoiding closure. [Donna Haraway] proposes instead the figuration of a cyborg, that is to say a high-tech imaginary, where electronic circuits evoke new patterns of interconnectedness and affinity. Both, however, are committed to the radical task of subverting conventional views and representations of human and especially female subjectivity. (Braidotti 1994: 2) Both Irigaray and Haraway rely upon the possibility of refiguring myths as a way out of conventional, philosophical accounts of subjectivity. But, while Irigaray disruptively mimes ancient myths, Haraway simply rejects the structure of the Western self as ordered by the Adam and Eve myth with its portrayal of an original unity and innocence. In place of the myths of natural origins, Haraway progressively refigures human identities in terms of science and technology. However, notice that, for Irigaray, scientific and technological terms are precisely the problem: they are the distinctive, dominating features of patriarchal reality against which feminists struggle. Despite the feminist struggle against patriarchal science and technology, Haraway builds “an ironic political myth faithful to feminism, socialism and materialism.” In “A Manifesto for Cyborgs,” she claims that:
112 Pamela Sue Anderson A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. … By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs. The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics. The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centers structuring any possibility of historical transformation. (Haraway 1990: 190–1) the cyborg has no origin story in the Western sense [which] depends upon the myth of original unity, fullness, bliss, and terror, represented by the phallic mother from whom all humans must separate, the task of individual development and of history, the twin potent myths inscribed most powerfully for us in psychoanalysis and Marxism. … The cyborg appears in myth precisely where the boundary between human and animal is transgressed. (Haraway 1990: 192, 193) From the above I take the point that the cyborg emerges as a political myth, representing feminist subjects of socially and materially situated knowledges. There are potential problems with the progressive-poststructuralism of both Irigaray and Haraway. Concerning the former we might ask: Is Irigaray’s disruptive miming of myth precise enough as a method to be constructively employed? Instead of offering any answer for Irigaray here,7 I single out distinctive issues for feminists with Haraway’s approach to myth. First, the political myth of the cyborg uses the technology that has had an established pattern of manipulating human beings and dominating women in particular. Second, the images of the cyborg derive, at least in part, from both militarism and capitalism – the very doctrines which many feminists aim to reject as masculine and dangerous. Third, acceptance of the myth of the cyborg could imply rejecting images such as an original innocence or an ideal integrity, yet these images represent values that feminists should not necessarily give up. Notwithstanding this list, in the next section I will appropriate elements from Haraway’s understanding of myth’s role in achieving socially situated knowledges (some of these issues are addressed in the more recent Haraway 1997). I also acknowledge the influence of Irigaray’s disruptive, mimetic refiguring of the myths in philosophy on my rethinking of feminist philosophy.
III. Rethinking myth and feminist philosophy The fourth alternative for myth and feminist philosophy is one I would like to advocate. This builds upon my earlier contention from the first
Myth and feminist philosophy 113 section above. That is, myths put into narrative form the necessarily related aspects of lived experiences, of passion and reason. In this way, myths constitute the actual worlds of embodied beings whose gendered identities involve material and social variables of sexual orientation, race, religion, class and ethnicity. I call this fourth alternative a social-epistemologist feminist approach to myth. This assumes an essentially post-Kantian position in which an aesthetic form of mythic imagination shapes a social epistemology. In other words, the epistemology will be communal, ethical and utopian as it imagines new possibilities for sexuate beings in myth.8 So post-Kantian does not mean a revised liberal approach to myth premised on Kantian formalism. Instead the post-Kantianism I have in mind is closer to Drucilla Cornell’s feminist-aesthetic rereading of Kant’s political philosophy. Especially important is Cornell’s rereading of the productive functioning of the imagination in terms of both myth and the imaginary domain.9 Cornell has developed a feminist argument for an imaginary domain which would render possible achieving Kant’s idea of freedom for all women and men (Cornell 1998: esp. 8–19, 31–2, 191–2). For a Kantian, practical reason is freedom. Cornell addresses the question, “Where does women’s freedom begin?”, and answers, “It should begin with the demand that we free ourselves from the use of gender comparison as the ideal of equality” (Cornell 1998: 3). According to Cornell’s rereading of Kant, practical reason can constitute the place of free exploration of sexual representations and personas. If feminist philosophers are to begin the process of transforming the assumptions about reality implicit in the social representations of women’s and men’s sexuate being, then they must account for reason as both practical and theoretical. Thus Cornell defines the imaginary domain: The freedom to orient ourselves to our sexuate being is inspired by Immanuel Kant’s definition of freedom before the law, although we have learned much about “sex” since his times. Certainly, there is widespread agreement that sex is not just a simple fact of our natural being. Since sex, gender, and sexuality are not just given to us, we need the space to let our imaginations run wild. … To even aspire to the self-representation of our sexuate being we need freedom to explore without fear the representations that surround us. This place of free exploration of sexual representations, and personas, is the imaginary domain. (Cornell 1998: 8) Following Cornell, I contend further that the productive functioning of the imagination ought to be employed by feminist philosophers to create the space for transformation of gender-biased myths. The space makes possible the refiguring of human identities and actions by becoming the
114 Pamela Sue Anderson place of refiguring myth. This space of possibility in myth allows for imagining the psychic and moral identities of sexuate being. For this use of myth, I will rely to a certain degree upon a hermeneutic phenomenology to elucidate the ways in which feeling, emotion, desire and reason evoke different aspects of lived experience. These aspects of lived experience can be described phenomenologically according to three, different levels of language: the symbolic (including cosmic and psychic signs or symbols), the mythical and the philosophical (Ricoeur 1967: 7–8, 25–150; Anderson 1993: xii, 101–10). These levels are not fixed, but are employed in a phenomenological description of feeling, emotion, desire and reason to account for the movement from the more concrete signs to the more abstract concepts in philosophy. Myths, as narratives of the lived experiences of passion and reason, are on a level between the more concrete and the more abstract. They are both formed and described phenomenologically. In this way, myths mediate the meaning of the actual worlds of embodied beings. Thus the phenomenological reading of myths can become a feminist tool for uncovering the general structures of meaning which constitute various dimensions of lived experiences, including religious, sexual and familial. In post-Kantian terms, myths serve both to make possible our meaningful identities as complex reasoning, desiring, acting and believing beings and to limit our knowledge of enduring experience. Ultimately a phenomenology that only describes the necessarily related aspects of our lived experiences is not enough for feminist philosophy. In their appropriation of symbols and myths, feminist philosophers need to be able to transform the patriarchal distortions of our experience in the myths of Western philosophy, in order to gain new knowledge. At this stage, I also acknowledge my appropriation of Haraway’s use of myth in its significant role of constituting feminist socially situated knowledges. Without the tools of a feminist epistemology the transformation of gender hierarchy would be impossible. Phenomenology leaves the feminist philosopher with descriptions of lived experience, i.e. of what is. But feminist epistemology demonstrates how we know the difference between what is and what ought to be. Haraway rightly sees myths as tools for changing both action and social reality. In particular, myths can have a profound impact upon our imaginations. For example, Haraway’s cyborg myth offers a new image for feminist subjects whose knowledge is colored by the contemporary technology of gender. There may be dangers for feminists in embracing technology. Nevertheless, it is precisely myth’s role in the productive functioning of the imagination which, I insist, can inform us epistemologically. That is, the productive functioning of the imagination as manifest in myth-making can help us to achieve feminist socially and materially situated knowledges; it should enable us to know the difference between the conditions of oppression and the freedom of women and men in full view of our highly specific social and material conditioning.
Myth and feminist philosophy 115 A particular example of Haraway’s epistemological reading of a social myth can be helpfully linked to Cornell’s account of myth and the imaginary domain. Both Haraway and Cornell share the goal of exposing unjust myths and reshaping the mythical figures upon which people’s conceptions of themselves and their own interests depend. In an especially revealing article, Haraway employs the figures of myth to discover new, more appropriate representations that point the way to what she calls a nongeneric humanity (Haraway 1992). She argues that: Humanity’s face has been the face of man. Feminist humanity must have another shape, other gestures; but, I believe, we must have feminist figures of humanity. They cannot be man or woman; they cannot be the human as historical narrative has staged that generic universal. (Haraway 1992: 86) Feminist representations must ironically, in her words, “resist representation, resist literal figuration, and still erupt in powerful new tropes, new figures of speech, new turns of historical possibility” (Haraway 1992: 86). Haraway’s example is an African-American female figure who asks, in the context of a white racist society, “Ain’t I a Woman?” Haraway compares the feminist narrative of this figure’s suffering to the founding myth of the suffering servant: My focus is the figure of a broken and suffering humanity, signifying – in ambiguity, contradiction, stolen symbolism, and unending chains of noninnocent translation – a possible hope. But also signifying an unending series of mimetic and counterfeit events implicated in the great genocides and holocausts of ancient and modern history. But, it is the very nonoriginality, mimesis, mockery, and brokenness that draw me to this figure and its mutants. (Haraway 1992: 87; also 88–90)10 Creating an allusion to the figure of the Son of Man in the scriptures of Jews and Christians, Haraway employs the African-American figure to disrupt and displace the unmarked universality of the category “human” in Western philosophy and religion. However, unlike the Son of Man, Haraway’s figure points more specifically to the way in which the concept “woman” has been arbitrarily constructed. As a distinctive figure of suffering and dismemberment, the black female figure resists literal figuration and exposes not only the sexist construction of “man,” but the racist construction of the concept “woman”. The narrative of this figure’s real life also reveals the epistemological power of naming. It is the black woman Isabella Baumfree who in the 1830s asks, “Ain’t I a Woman?” and answers by calling herself Sojourner Truth. In renaming herself Sojourner Truth names truth as situated and
116 Pamela Sue Anderson moving, in a manner which is not contradictory (Collins 1998: 229–51). This complex narrative becomes for feminists such as Haraway, bell hooks and Patricia Hill Collins the myth of Sojourner Truth whose retelling reveals the imaginative power in naming and creating new realities. Sojourner Truth disrupts and displaces the category human in a way that gives new content to the “we” of humanity. But not just any woman who stands up and asks, “Ain’t I a Woman?” would disrupt the relevant universals. Sojourner Truth disturbs what are assumed to be the universal concepts or categories of woman and human. Haraway summarizes the significance of this myth of gender identity as follows: “Gender” was developed as a category to explore what counts as a “woman” to problematize the previously taken for granted, to reconstitute what counts as “human”. If feminist theories of gender followed from Simone de Beauvoir’s thesis that one is not born a woman, with all the consequences of that insight, in the light of Marxism and psychoanalysis (and critiques of racist and colonial discourse), for understanding that any finally coherent subject is a fantasy, and that personal and collective identity is precariously and constantly socially reconstituted, then the title of bell hooks’ provocative 1981 book, echoing Sojourner Truth, Ain’t I a Woman, bristles with irony as the identity of “woman” is both claimed and deconstructed simultaneously. (Haraway 1992: 96) So what ultimately distinguishes Sojourner Truth as a relevant figure for the reconstruction of the categories of not only woman and human, but also gender, into a more inclusive founding myth is the oppression she suffers as a black woman in North America at a precise time. She is a relevant figure of resistance precisely because she represents something powerfully different from the sexist oppression suffered by the white women of the same time in the 1830s and of today (for more theoretical background, see Morrison 1992). The figure of Sojourner Truth takes on the significance of a new, founding myth in generating a narrative that represents the differences between what a particular concept signifies within a system of meanings and practices and what it ought to represent. Informed by socially situated knowledge, feminist philosophers must be constantly prepared to refigure false concepts and arbitrarily fixed myths of humanity. As already seen Cornell exemplifies this critical process of seeking truth in the refiguring of the concept of freedom which can generate a more genuine conception of humanity for men and women as sexuate beings. The problem which renders necessary the mediating role of myth is that concepts such as freedom are unimaginable for all women in the terms of the current, explicitly available concept because the accepted meanings of freedom disallows it as a genuine possibility for women generally, but
Myth and feminist philosophy 117 perhaps more likely to become a possibility for particular, privileged women. Yet precisely how the fundamental meanings of concepts such as freedom which are essential to human flourishing and to ways of thinking can be disrupted, discarded and replaced is not explainable in terms of what is assumed by any particular society. To the degree that the sexist, racist or ethnocentric character of a society itself precludes adequate understanding of general (or universal) concepts of freedom, justice and integrity of all persons the problem lies in the nature of knowledge more generally. To increase this knowledge new possibilities of identity must be conceivable. Or it is necessary to imagine the impossible in new reconfigurations of foundational myths. This situation can be described as follows: in a situation in which certain options are impossible even to dream, the bringing about of the imaginability of such possibilities can be personally empowering, even if such conceivability, as is often the case, itself entails suffering. For if it were to become possible for [the woman excluded on racist and/or sexist grounds] just to dream that which in other terms is, in fact, impossible, she might have been able to deliberate about herself and eventually to act in ways, and to influence others to act in ways, that expressed the possibility of such a dream. (Babbitt 1996: 195; cf. Collins 1998: 187–91, 198–200, 229–40) Cornell also turns to myth to illustrate the broader epistemological question about how it is possible to imagine and know more genuinely human identities than currently available in racist and sexist societies. In particular, she turns to Toni Morrison’s rewriting of the Medea myth in Beloved (Cornell 1991: 186–96; cf. Morrison 1987). Morrison presents a challenging reconfiguration of the Medea myth in which a runaway slave is forced ultimately to kill her own child in order to save the child from slavery. According to Cornell, what becomes epistemologically important about the struggle of the escaped slave, Sethe, in Beloved is that, given her part in a social system (e.g. of master and slave) that totally denies her existence as a full human being, Sethe still manages to acquire the understanding of herself and her situation as a full human being. She could only do this by actively struggling – through her imagining, and acting out an alternative narrative – to realize certain possibilities. The epistemological and ethical obstacle for Sethe is that a situation or identity cannot be recognized as wrong unless a person has some idea of what is right; but the recognition of the right sorts of alternatives presupposes at the very least an indication of a vision of another identity or community as a real possibility. Moreover, this possibility must become a reality for both the oppressed persons and the racist and/or sexist oppressors before a transformation of that social world is achievable. Yet the possibilities in refiguring myths are only realizable, if their epistemological role in mediating change is critically appropriated. Myths can
118 Pamela Sue Anderson mediate change by configuring and refiguring the concepts which as practical ideals shape individual and communal identities. But crucial to the critical exploration and appropriation of newly imagined identities and ideals is the fluid nature of myth which renders truth as both situated and moving. Thus conceived myth can provide the common ground, or communal place, for struggling to overcome racism, sexism, classicism and any other constraining identity, and for replacing injustice with more humane and just social identities.
IV. Myth and the philosophical imaginary In the preceding sections, I have endeavored to demonstrate that myth and feminist philosophy, far from being set in opposition to each other, are bound together in the transformation of Western philosophy. Feminist philosophers do not agree on how to transform the gendered hierarchies that have shaped philosophy. Yet their disagreements have provided new insights on both myth and philosophy. To undercover this insight, I have distinguished at least four feminist approaches to myth in terms of their political-philosophical characteristics. The following offered rough perimeters: (i) a conservative-essentialist or radical-essentialist feminist approach, (ii) a liberal-existentialist or liberal-culturalist feminist approach, (iii) a progressive-poststructuralist feminist approach, and (iv) a socialepistemologist feminist approach to myth. The first approach has a long and varied history. Most characteristic of this approach is the positive representations of woman’s intimate bond with nature which lends itself to being called romantic. Accounts of myth as different as those of the classical historian Jane Harrison and the radical feminist Mary Daly are grouped under this essentialist approach because of their singularly positive images of women’s affinity with nature, including cosmic nature. Yet the great danger of this approach is the exclusion of differences of sexual orientation, race, religion, class and ethnicity in its assumptions about gender. In particular, there is the double assumption that women have a closer association with nature than men and that this association is represented in myth. The second approach addresses the danger of false assumptions about women by proposing to expose and eliminate myth. Yet for any liberal feminist approach to myth – whether existentialist or culturalist – the decisive question becomes: Can myth be transcended or dissolved by its recognition alone? The third approach has a ready answer. The progressive-poststructuralist feminist would insist that myth cannot be simply retrieved, eliminated or negated. Instead myth is part of history, as well as part of the understanding of our selves as gendered beings with differences of sexual orientation, race, religion, class and ethnicity. So the poststructuralist feminist intends to unsettle in order to subvert the discourse of patriarchal myth. At the same time, the poststructuralist feminist is more progressive than the conservative, radical or
Myth and feminist philosophy 119 liberal feminist insofar as she recognizes the need to create new myths that are socially and materially adequate for sexuate beings who live in a constantly changing global world. Despite the real advances made by this third approach, not all contemporary feminists will be satisfied. Of particular concern is the possible loss of certain values from past myths, such as the practical ideals of freedom, integrity and justice, which feminists should not give up too easily. To address this concern I proposed a fourth approach to myth as discussed in detail in the previous section. From the above, it should be obvious that feminist philosophers cannot simply reject myth as a patriarchal construction which constitutes an entrenched gendered hierarchy, privileging masculine conceptions of reason, while devaluing passion and other concepts associated with women. Myths appear to be far more fluid in weaving together various patterns of passion and reason, and so portraying the concrete realities of lived experience. It is, then, unsurprising that feminist philosophers have developed various strategies to retrieve, transcend, subvert and/or refigure the variability and narrative core of myth. Notwithstanding these different strategies, I maintained that social myths in representing practical ideals, or Kantian regulative principles, can be especially useful in shaping feminist philosophy. Such ideals limit our claims to knowledge of reality, yet they also serve as ever-revisable guides to the best and highest aspirations of women and men. An imaginary domain is meant to create the place where the ideal of freedom and our self-representations can be reconceived and put into practice by us as sexuate beings. Myth can enhance these reconceptions, in aiming to conceive and realize the impossible dreams of women and men of every race, class, ethnicity and sexual orientation. However, some feminists and post-feminist gender theorists may not be content with this conclusion. Gender theorists could point out that “woman” or “women” no longer has a definite referent. For these theorists, the social construction of gender cannot rest on either a common biological nature or communal ideals – to which gendered notions and relations can appeal for change. Instead all there is is our discourse on sexuate being or our own performative acts (see Butler 1990: 1–3, 6–16, 32–3, 128–38; and 1993: 1–16). If this is so, myths of gender with their assumptions about nature and ideals for humanity have to go. Yet these popular criticisms of myth may not endure. In particular, the counter argument to my own that, because of their irrevocable link with patriarchy, myths should be replaced by the first-person or historical accounts of marginalized persons may not provide the conditions or content for the sought-for celebration of postmodern difference. In the light of a rich tradition of philosophy and myth, it would appear naive to think that either autobiography, which assumes some literal reading of individual histories, or performative acts, which assumes a solipsistic reading of individual action, can replace a careful understanding of how history and myth inform philosophical interpretations of gender from a feminist
120 Pamela Sue Anderson standpoint, especially in the interpretation of differences across perspectives of time and space. Ultimately, the feminist philosopher’s choice to focus upon myth instead of, or possibly along with, women’s personal histories is compatible with Le Doeuff’s argument concerning the philosophical imaginary. Myth is made up of the rich, often contentious imagery and narrative that have necessarily formed the substantive part of the rational discourse in philosophical texts. When it comes to a feminist commitment to achieve more justice, the content and form of myth becomes crucial material for the transformation of the social hierarchies that have eclipsed and excluded the contribution of women in past and present philosophy. Thus it is to myth and the philosophical imaginary that feminist philosophers can turn with a critical eye to new possibilities, never forgetting myth’s evolving relationships to the past and future, and to identity and difference.
Notes 1 For example, Pamela Clemit argues that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein exploited the novel as “a myth-making form which is capable of critical scrutiny of political ideals”; Mary Shelley “recasts the Godwinian plot as a creation story, reworking both the Greek and Roman myth of Prometheus and the JudeaoChristian myth as mediated by Paradise Lost” (Clemit 1993: 154, 155; cf. Shelley 1993 [1818]). 2 For example, the myth of Antigone appears in the texts of modern Western philosophers, representing the gendered divisions between public and private spheres of life, between state and family, generality and particularity, men and women. These gendered divisions continue to shape the identities and ideals of Western political philosophy, resulting in the inevitable double binds of female action. See Anderson 1998: 184–92, 196–200, 205n36; Anderson 1997: 51–68. 3 Each approach is modified by a pair of political-philosophical adjectives derived in part from Tong (1998). Tong follows Alison Jaggar (1983) in using political adjectives to represent feminist positions. However, unlike either Jaggar or Tong, I begin with the essentialist label to identify an early and enduring, romantic position which today varies in its use ranging between the extremes of radical and conservative feminists, next, I distinguish two sorts of liberal feminists and, then, identify two different examples of a progressivepoststructuralist approach to myth. 4 This work on the prepatriarchal origins of the goddess has been formative for feminists who develop goddess mythology as central to their spirituality and, more generally, for account of women’s experiences. See Christ 1992: 273–87. 5 Admittedly there is some irony in describing the liberal, who claims a strictly formal conception of humanity, as either existentialist or culturalist. So in adding on the adjectives, existentialist and culturalist I imply the failure of the liberal to avoid giving substantive meaning to woman’s nature in myth (e.g., woman’s role as mothers). 6 Recent literature on Simone de Beauvoir endeavors to correct any misreading of her philosophy as derivative of Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism. See Fullbrook and Fullbrook 1998, 1994. 7 For critical assessment of Irigaray, including her “miming,” see Burke et al. 1994: esp. 79–87, 120–1, 156–61, 258, 263–83.
Myth and feminist philosophy 121 8 I appropriate the use of “sexuate being” from Cornell 1998: 6–7. 9 Cornell 1991: 165–96, 224–7; 1998: ix–xii, 8–11, 14–28, 194n38. For relevant rereadings of the Kantian imagination, see Arendt 1982: 79–89; Kearney 1991: 55–73; and Kearney 1998. 10 Compare this with the mythical figure of the Son of Man as the suffering servant in Anderson 1993: 97–101.
Bibliography Anderson, P.S. (1993) Ricoeur and Kant: A Philosophy of the Will, Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press. —— (1997) “Rereading Myth in Philosophy: Hegel, Ricoeur, Irigaray Reading Antigone,” in M. Joy (ed.), Paul Ricoeur and Narrative: Context and Contestation, Calgary: University of Calgary Press. —— (1998) A Feminist Philosophy of Religion: The Rationality and Myths of Religious Belief, Oxford: Blackwell. Arendt, H. (1982) Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Babbitt, S.E. (1996) Impossible Dreams: Rationality, Integrity and Moral Imagination, Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Bachofen J.J. (1967 [1861]) Myth, Religion, and Mother Right, trans. R. Manheim, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Blumenberg, H. (1985) Work on Myth, trans. R.M. Wallace, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Braidotti, R. (1994) “Introduction: By Way of Nomadism,” in Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory, New York: Columbia University Press. Burke, C., Schor, N. and Whitford, M. (eds) (1994) Engaging Irigaray: Feminist Philosophy and Modern European Thought, New York: Columbia University Press. Butler, J. (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York: Routledge. —— (1993) Bodies that Matter, New York: Routledge. Cavarero, A. (1995) In Spite of Plato: A Feminist Rewriting of Ancient Philosophy, trans. S. Anderini-D’Onofrio and A. O’Helay, Cambridge: Polity Press. Christ, C.P. (1992) “Why Women Need the Goddess: Phenomenological, Psychological and Political Reflections,” in C.P. Christ and J. Plaskow (eds), Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion, San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row. Clemit, P. (1993) The Godwinian Novel: The Rational Fictions of Godwin, Bockden Brown, Mary Shelley, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Collins, P.H. (1998) Fighting Words: Black Women and the Search for Justice, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Cornell, D. (1991) Beyond Accommodation: Ethical Feminism, Deconstruction and the Law, London: Routledge. —— (1998) The Heart of Freedom: Sex, Equality and Feminism, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Daly, M. (1991) Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism, London: The Women’s Press.
122 Pamela Sue Anderson Fullbrook, K. and Fullbrook, E. (1994) Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre: The Remaking of a Twentieth-Century Legend, New York: Basic Books. —— (1998) “De Beauvoir,” in S. Critchley (ed.), Companion to Continental Philosophy, Oxford: Blackwell. Haraway, D. (1990) “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s,” in L. Nicholson (ed.), Feminism/Postmodernism, New York and London: Routledge. —— (1992) “Ecce Homo, Ain’t (Arn’t) I a Woman, and Inappropriate/d Others: The Human in a Post-Humanist Landscape,” in J. Butler and J. Scott (eds), Feminists Theorize the Political, New York: Routledge. —— (1997) “Fetus: The Virtual Speculum in the New World Order”, in Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse™, New York, Routledge. Harrison, J.E. (1980 [1903]) Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, London: Merlin Press. —— (1963 [1924]) Mythology, New York: Harcourt, Brice and World. Irigaray, L. (1993a) Je, Tu, Nous: Toward A Culture of Difference, trans. A. Martin, London and New York: Routledge. —— (1993b) Sexes and Genealogies, trans. G.C. Gill, New York: Columbia University Press. —— (1994) Thinking the Difference: Towards A Peaceful Revolution, trans. A. Montin, London: The Athlone Press. Jaggar, A. (1983) Feminist Politics and Human Nature, Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield. Kearney, R. (1991) “Between Tradition and Utopia: The Hermeneutical Problem of Myth,” in D. Wood (ed.), On Paul Ricoeur: Narrative and Interpretation, London: Routledge. —— (1998) The Poetics of Imagining: Modern to PostModern, 2nd edn, Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press. Le Doeuff, M. (1989) The Philosophical Imaginary, trans. C. Gordon, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Morrison, T. (1987) Beloved, New York: Penguin Books. —— (1992) Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, New York: Vintage Books. Okely, J. (1998) “Rereading of The Second Sex,” in E. Fallaize (ed.), Simone de Beauvoir: A Critical Reader, London: Routledge. Pateman, C. (1988) The Sexual Contract, Cambridge: Polity Press. Rich, A. (1996 [1986]) Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, New York: W.W. Norton. Ricoeur, P. (1967) The Symbolism of Evil, trans. E. Buchanan, Boston, MA: Harper & Row Press. Schüssler Fiorenza, E. (1975) “Feminist Theology as A Critical Theology of Liberation,” Theological Studies, 36: 605–26. Shelley, M. (1993 [1818]) Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus, M. Butler (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tong, R. (1998) Feminist Thought: A More Comprehensive Introduction, 2nd edn, Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
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Myth and moral philosophy James Wetzel
The biggest myth in moral philosophy is arguably the biblical myth of the Fall. I mean biggest in the sense of most influential. The idea that the moral life is to be measured against a lost beginning, a time when human beings were better than anyone is now in a position to remember, is one that has haunted the moral imagination of the West for millennia, mostly in its biblical form. There are other ways to read the biblical myth, of course, and other ways to mythologize a lost beginning. I will want to take a good look at one of these other ways – Plato’s – before I offer my considered thoughts on why the biblical myth has been such a source of vexation and insight for moral philosophy. My way into the thick of the issue between myth and moral philosophy is through Kant and, more particularly, through Kant’s moral interpretation of Genesis in one of his last and most controversial works, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (hereafter referred to simply as Religion).1 As a moral philosopher of influence, Kant is big enough for my purposes. I begin with a simple notion of myth, and it won’t get much fancier as matters progress; the complexity of my argument resides almost entirely in the relation of myth to moral philosophy. I think of a myth as a story that is at least partly about divine or supernatural beings. I also have in mind the connotation of a myth as a false or childish story, but I don’t subscribe to that view of the biblical myth or of many of the myths we may presume ourselves to have outgrown. Myth owes its connotation of falsehood in no small part to the cultural influence of science. It becomes harder to believe that stories about gods can be true in any straightforward way once we are sure that we don’t need divine help to be able to know things. If we are thus convinced, it doesn’t necessarily follow that the old stories will be of no value to us. There are indirect ways of getting at the truth, ways that circumvent a story’s apparent indifference to the facts as we have come to know them. I will call the effort of translating talk of gods into talk of values an attempt at demythologizing a myth. It is important not to confuse demythologizing with debunking. We debunk the stories we hope to outgrow (like the one about the toothfairy); we demythologize the ones we hope to carry with us, in some
124 James Wetzel transformed way, into adulthood. Kant demythologizes the Genesis story in order to lay bare some of the difficulties in moving from a childish belief in a supernatural father-figure of inscrutable will to a prudent and mature recognition of the divine or sublime nature of the moral law. If this is not to be a debunking, the story cannot be read to presuppose the truth of the childish belief. It must instead be credited with having a narrative structure subtle enough to suggest both the temptation of the childish belief and the means of transcending it. For Kant it is only from the point of view of moral philosophy that it is possible to tell the difference between a morally subtle myth and a morally corrupt one. There is a certain modest necessity for demythologizing in any reading of a myth. We have to stop and think about what the gods love and how they love it before we can have a good sense of what or who the gods are. But this is not a claim that makes the gods out to be different from human beings. We too are beings defined by what and how we love, but not always – if ever – transparently so. Kant’s program of demythologizing makes essential use of the difference between divine and human disclosures of value. His gods (he calls them angels or bearers of a holy will) are beings of pure reason; they can no more will the contrary of what they value than they can not be gods. In this they are like ideals; they represent an absolute standard of conduct for beings, like us, who must struggle to be good. It is not the case for Kant, however, that a divine being is simply a human projection and personification of a moral ideal. The opposite is closer to his position. It is the moral ideal that gives shape and form to human personality; we are personified by it. Kant’s God, the root power of the ideal to determine nature, is not very personal at all. I confess that I fail to see what there is to be learned from most of the more ambitious attempts at demythologizing. If I go to the Bible looking for confirmation of the values I already hold dear on moral grounds, I come away feeling disappointed if I don’t find them and vindicated if I do; in neither case do my values change. Kant’s attempt at demythologizing, though plenty ambitious, is not like most. The more he tries to demythologize the biblical text, the less transparent it becomes to moral reason, and yet he does not conclude from this that there is a better story, morally considered, to be told. Kant looks to myth for a representation of the limits to moral reason, or the ill of the fit between moral ideal and human life. It is hard to say whether success here should count as demythologizing a myth or remythologizing a philosophy. As it is the ambiguity that I find instructive, I turn to Kant’s efforts without prejudice.
I. Kant and the mystery of the serpent Not everyone who reads Genesis finds a fall described there. Those who do find a fall find it in the section of narrative that begins at Genesis 2:4b, the start of an apparently new creation story, and ends at Genesis 3:24, the
Myth and moral philosophy 125 expulsion of the first human couple from the garden of Eden. Biblical scholars attribute this section of Genesis to the Yahwist source, named for its characteristic use of the name Yahweh to name God. I am not going to speak directly to whether I think the Yahwist is telling the story of the Fall (for my answer would turn out to be, unhelpfully, yes and no); instead I will confine my attention to the Fall that Kant notices and then sets out to demythologize. But before I do that, I need to set the stage with some narrative details. There are four principal characters in the Yahwist’s tale of creation, in this order of appearance: Yahweh, the man, the woman, and the serpent. The man’s name has been commonly assumed to be Adam, though in the Hebrew text “Adam” is not a proper name but the word for human being.2 Yahweh creates the human being by forming him out of the clay of the earth and breathing life into his nostrils. There is a pun in Hebrew between adam and adamah, the word for “earth”; to be called human is to be recalled to one’s earthly origins (as an earthling). Yahweh next places the human being in a cultivated garden, Eden, where two trees are singled out for special mention: the tree of life and the tree of knowledge, good and evil. The human being is to have the run of the garden, to watch over and till it, and may eat from any of the trees but one. Among Yahweh’s first words to the human being is this prohibition (Gen. 2:17): “From the tree of knowledge, good and evil, you shall not eat, for on the day you eat from it, you are doomed to die.” The thought then occurs to Yahweh that it is bad for the human being to be alone and that he ought to have someone to sustain him. Yahweh’s remedy is to fashion the woman out of a part of the human being (his rib). Once the woman is on the scene, we have humanity that is male and female. Indeed it is not implausible to think of the creation of the woman more basically as the creation of sexual difference. The serpent enters the narrative abruptly and tries to draw the woman into an apparent misreading of Yahweh’s original prohibition (Gen. 3:1): “Though God said, you shall not eat from any tree of the garden … .” Before the serpent can finish the thought, the woman interjects that it is only the taste and touch of the fruit of the tree in the midst of the garden that is forbidden and brings death. It is worth noting that she names the tree by location, not type, and that both trees – life and knowledge – happen to be in the place she specifies. The serpent certainly encourages her to identify (or confuse) the two trees, first by cunningly implying that not eating of knowledge is like not eating at all and second by telling her directly that it is not death, but a divine point of view, that comes of knowing. The result is that seeing becomes both the object and the expression of the woman’s vivid desire. And the woman saw that the tree was good for eating and that it was lust to the eyes and the tree was lovely to look at (Gen. 3:6). She eats with no apparent hesitation, and her male partner follows her lead. Eventually, Yahweh will expel the man and woman from Eden to prevent them from eating also of the tree of life (the
126 James Wetzel two trees are apparently very different for Yahweh). Before that happens, the man will call the woman by the name of Eve. Her name in Hebrew sounds like the Hebrew verb, to live; there is also, for the etymologically promiscuous to ponder, a similarity between her name and the Aramaic word for serpent.3 I have passed over or touched lightly upon some of the details in the narrative that don’t figure into Kant’s reading of the Fall and included some that will become important only when I begin the work of revising Kant’s reading. There are two key elements to his reading. One is his assumption that divine and moral law are essentially the same. Not only does this assumption govern his reading of the original prohibition in Genesis, it more generally establishes his authority as a moral philosopher to read and evaluate sacred texts. Kant’s other assumption is that morally significant opposition to the divine law has to come from a divine and not merely a natural source, as if divinity were to carry within itself the principle of its own negation. The serpent will come to represent for him the demonic side of divinity (the anti-moral law), but the representation of this can never be other than veiled. Kant’s best efforts at demythologizing leave him laboring to fathom what has to be, by virtue of his two assumptions, the impossibly perverse wisdom of the serpent. The two assumptions I have just mentioned are not unrelated. They are in fact the twin birth of a peculiarly Kantian psychological insight: that there is no possibility of freedom apart from a law of freedom. Kant proceeds from this insight to argue for only one law of freedom, the moral law. When Kant scholars seek to explicate his reasoning, they often focus on his two paradigmatic formulations of a purely practical imperative in Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals: (1) Act so that your rule of acting can be willed as a universal law and (2) Act so that the humanity you and others share is always respected as an end and so never is reduced to a mere means. An imperative is purely practical if its reasonableness as a rule of acting is independent of the particular personalities involved; all that matters is that a capacity to reason be operative. I am going to forgo the usual preoccupation of the Kant scholar here – the question of whether either formulation of a purely practical imperative captures something essential about moral obligation – and fill out Kant’s notion of the moral law in reference to the law that resists it.4 Although Kant’s official position is that there can be one and only one law of freedom, in Religion he comes very close to affirming the impossible possibility: an immoral law of freedom, or an imperative always to make immorality the end of one’s actions. Impossibility in this context is neither physical nor logical, but practical. Unless I can assume that I was deliberating badly, I cannot make sense of myself as having acted against my interests as a free and rational being. An immoral law would actually bind my deliberation to acts of selfundermining. Hence this paradox: the more responsibility I take for the evil that I do, the less sense I will have of myself.
Myth and moral philosophy 127 The paradox of the evil will is alive and well in Kant’s representation of the serpent, but it is misleading, I think, to move immediately to a consideration of the paradox and whether it is real or contrived. For then the question of the evil will is apt to become: Is it possible for someone to will evil for evil’s sake? And that sounds like a question about how bad people can be. However illuminating a debate over this question may be – and I doubt whether it is ever very illuminating – Kant is pursuing a different line of inquiry. His interest in the possibility of an anti-moral law proceeds quite naturally and without paradox from his disposition to think of freedom in terms of the will. We don’t become conscious of having a will until we become conscious of having our will opposed. Wanting to overcome what opposes the will is what having a will is mostly about. The opposition, moreover, must be of a very particular sort. Suppose that I am one of Kant’s beings with a holy will, a good angel. It is in my nature as a holy being to be morally upright. But I am no more obligated to be moral by a moral law than an object in free fall is obligated to respect the law of gravity. It just does. If I can be said as a holy being to have any kind of will to be moral (and Kant would say that I do), it is will in an attenuated sense. Granted that nothing in me directly opposes my will to be moral, I may nevertheless experience opposition as coming from without. I am presuming here that I would have some interest as a holy being in promoting the moral development of less than holy beings, or beings who were morally inclined but imperfectly so. The opposition of these imperfect beings to my efforts on their behalf could conceivably give me some sense of my own will to be moral. That would depend on how much I have identified myself with those I am trying to serve. But enough of angelic psychology. I am not in fact a holy being but a human being, and as a human being, I have a side of my nature that identifies with holiness and a side that does not. The side that does not supplies me with amoral desires and ambitions. If I were to reflect on what kind of being those amoral desires and ambitions define, I would come to a conception of a human being who has to compete with other human beings for its share of pleasure and recognition. The humanity of others would be merely a means to my own. The other side of my nature, my moral side, is what furnishes me with my will not to identify with humanity of that conception. Ideally I would like to have in view the alternative conception, the humanity that shows me how it is possible to perfect myself without having to diminish others, for then I would know what the good is that my will serves. Short of that ideal, I have to have in view the conception of humanity that I disown as debased. Notice that I cannot disown what I have not identified with first. It is tempting when reading Kant to think of the body as the source of human imperfection. For if I didn’t have a body to identify with, I wouldn’t have a troublesome source of desire to disown; all my motives would be naturally rational, my will would be good by default, and I’d
128 James Wetzel take my place among the angels as a matter of course. Kant’s own view, however, is achingly more subtle than this. Although he certainly thinks of the body as a troublesome source of desire, he does not think of it as the agent of human corruption. The agent is a person’s willingness to let bodily desire define personality. In other words, I give authority to the desires of mine that lock me into a humanity of one and ultimately of no one. When I come to oppose these desires I oppose my own will. The subtlety of Kant’s view, as well as its perplexity, is aptly illustrated in his demythologized reading of the serpent’s seduction. On a naïve reading, it looks to Kant (and, he presumes, to most readers) like the serpent tempts the human being to put other interests before his interest in obeying a divine command. It is the man’s temptation and not the woman’s that is of interest to Kant, even though the Yahwist source is remarkably terse about what moved the man to eat. Basically, the woman ate, handed over the fruit to the man, and he ate; his motives for eating have to be inferred. Kant can admit of two kinds of motive here and still stay within the naïve reading. The woman hands the man a lusty piece fruit; he is being tempted to value bodily pleasure over law. It is the woman, his natural partner, who hands him the fruit; he is being tempted to value human company over law. If he gives into either of these temptations, he mixes good with evil and defines himself essentially as a body – something doomed to die. The naïve reading ends for Kant when he presses the further question of what makes the man susceptible to temptation at all. Perhaps this is to ask one question too many. If I tell you that I sometimes act badly for the sake of material gain or social recognition, and you want to know why I sometimes do this, I am at a loss. Am I to wear my humanity on my sleeve? If you press me further for explanation, I may be tempted to tell you that the devil makes me do it. Though aware of the force of this kind of rejoinder, Kant is prepared to press his question about the origin of evil. In the place of a Satanic figure who causes a human being to be evil, he finds a serpent-tempter who represents the mystery of evil’s origin: Evil can have originated only from moral evil (not just from the limitations of our nature); yet the original predisposition (which none other than the human being could have corrupted, if this corruption is to be imputed to him) is a predisposition to be good; there is no conceivable ground for us, therefore, from which moral evil could first have come in us. The Scriptures express this incomprehensibility in a historical narrative, which adds a closer determination of the depravity of our species, by projecting evil at the beginning of the world, not, however, within the human being, but in a spirit of an originally more sublime destiny. The absolutely first beginning of all evil is thereby represented as incomprehensible to us (for whence the evil in that spirit?). (6: 43–44; di Giovanni, 1996: 88–89)
Myth and moral philosophy 129 Part of Kant’s message in this complex passage pertains to the logic of freedom. If evil is an expression of free will, I have nothing more fundamental than freedom to appeal to when I want to know why evil comes to be. Suppose for example, that I want to know why the serpent – Kant’s “spirit of an originally more sublime destiny” – lost its good will and ended up being a spoiler of perfection. Whatever story I end up telling here will basically be of a good spirit who gives in to a bad temptation. I will then have a further story to tell about a new tempter. So either I look for a story with an infinite number of serpents in the drama, or I get clued into the idea that there is no reason for something good to become evil. The Yahwist had the sense to stop with one serpent, and that is why Kant credits the Yahwist with having told a good story about the origins of evil. Kant’s is a demythologized reading of the serpent inasmuch as he is prepared to trade in the mythical figure for a moral truth. He is, to a large extent, prepared to do just that. The story tells us that the serpent and the human being – tempter and tempted – are two separate beings, but from the standpoint of moral philosophy, they are identical. I am not responsible, morally speaking, for succumbing to temptation unless I have already freely willed my subjection to corrupting influences (my original sin). The serpent in my life is always my own evil will. Kant is not insensible to the psychological cost of this kind of demythologizing. The internalized serpent appears in the human psyche as the demonic will, a hopelessly paradoxical disposition to will evil as the good. It is less a will than the will’s question mark. I will never have an answer to the question: Why do I will evil? None, that is, that I can rest with. Kant would have me live with a question when living with an answer to it would be worse. It is admittedly tempting to let temptations, or all those amoral desires that segregate my humanity from that of others, stand as the explanation for the evil that I do. But then I would in effect be splitting my nature in two. There would be the moral side and the amoral side – two independent sources of value – and never the twain shall meet. My attempt to explain evil will not have explained evil at all; it will have indicated only my surrender of part of myself to its dubious authority. There is nothing about this demythologized reading of the serpent that Kant takes to be a correction of the biblical text. The serpent’s sudden appearance in the drama, its past history and present motives a mystery, is for Kant the sign of a pregnant omission. We aren’t told what good the serpent thinks it is serving, and that should make us think about the limits of our own knowledge of good and evil. This is where moral philosophy comes in, not to fill in between the limits, but to fix them. We are never to suppose that we have knowledge of pure evil, of the nature of the tempter; instead we must presume that the tempter stands unknowingly behind our human knowledge of good and evil, our often ineffectual awareness of being tempted by what is no good for us. To take responsibility for this knowledge is to take something unknowable into ourselves.
130 James Wetzel The ironic effect of demythologizing the serpent is to lend greater mystery to the moral life. Kant relieves us of a false clarity about good and evil and returns us, as it were, to a time before the divine knowledge of good and evil has been taken. But neither literally nor figuratively speaking can this be quite what has happened. To be relieved of a false knowledge of good and evil is not to be returned to a state of innocence, where desire for the knowledge of the gods is not yet in evidence. The temptation to want to know more than is the human place to know hasn’t gone away. When Kant confines his attention to what makes us morally responsible for giving in to temptation, he makes us out to be the agents of our own liabilities, and the serpent disappears. When he shifts his attention to the question of moral redemption, or whether it is still possible for us to be other than perennially subject to temptation, he reverts to the myth’s separate depiction of a serpent-tempter and finds his hope for human redemption there. The story is telling us – in a way that apparently can’t be demythologized – that the human spirit has not been “corrupted fundamentally”; in this respect, says Kant, the human spirit is unlike a spirit whose basic impulse is to be a tempter, “one, that is, whom the temptation of the flesh cannot be accounted as a mitigation of guilt” (6:44; Di Giovanni 1996: 89). I think that Kant is wise not to want to make too total an assimilation of the serpent’s significance to an anti-moral freedom, and yet it is very hard to see what he can do with the remainder. From a demythologized point of view, the temptation of the flesh – the serpent’s stock and trade – has no redemptive value, not even in the very minimal sense of mitigation of guilt. How could it be otherwise? Nearly the whole point of demythologizing the serpent has been to dispel the impression that amoral desires are the biggest threat, or really any kind of threat, to the integrity of the good will. Kant favors this view of amoral desires, not because he has contempt for the body, but because he places such an extraordinarily high value on autonomy. If autonomy is the key to my identity and value as a person, I won’t need Yahweh’s command to know what the law of my freedom is, and I won’t need the serpent’s seduction to be tempted to free myself from even my own law. I will need Yahweh’s command and the serpent’s seduction to imagine myself as a being who can become autonomous. Yahweh and the serpent are two powers, in other words, that work to alienate me from and return me to myself. Are they finally antithetical projections of my own will? I cannot know them to be such without making redemption – my will’s perfection – an impossibility. But nor can I know them to be otherwise. The economy that gives Kant’s moral philosophy its working relation to myth depends crucially on his being able to separate off the will to live responsibly from the desire to see into the heart of good and evil. To put it figuratively, he has to forgo the knowledge of the gods in order to keep his human possibilities of redemption open. The economic division of labor here, between seeking to know and seeking to be right, can be taken to
Myth and moral philosophy 131 suggest either the demythologizing of myth or the remythologizing of moral philosophy. I have explored the former in this section. In demythologizing the serpent, Kant has transformed the serpent into an internal feature of the human will to self-rule, but at the cost, of course, of having to give up what the serpent in the myth had to offer: divine knowledge of good and evil. In the sections that follow, I take a closer look at desires for perfection that rest on refusals of knowledge; these quests for perfection, which can be both good and evil, are best cast in a remythologized moral philosophy. I begin by taking up a myth that invites a critical and yet forgiving look at the quest for perfection of the body – the quest that Kant has had to demonize to underscore the preeminent value of the good will and the imperative of its redemption.
II. Plato and the comedy of human desire Plato tells a story in the Symposium that bears certain affinities, as at least one of his translators has noted, to the biblical story of the Fall.5 He puts the story in the mouth of Aristophanes, the same Aristophanes who once comically skewered Socrates in The Clouds. But Plato shows no evidence of having any ill will towards the mocker of his teacher and friend. On the contrary, he has the character of Aristophanes deliver a speech of great comic genius that manages at the same time to carry deeply tragic undertones. The perfect comedy in Plato’s impersonation of a comic art becomes perfectly tragic. That in itself is comic – a tribute to Aristophanes – but also an invitation to move beyond comedy. For Plato’s art, like his teacher’s, is neither comic nor tragic, but philosophical. I think of comedy and tragedy as both having to do with the disparity between nature and aspiration, between what we are given to be as human beings and what we may think or wish ourselves to be. If a dramatic representation of the disparity has been crafted to draw the sympathy of the audience to the side of nature, then the art is comic; if it has been crafted to ally the audience with aspiration, then the art is tragic. A third possibility, that the disparity is overcome and nature and aspiration made to align, is not a possibility of either comic or tragic art, where the disparity is taken for granted. In a comic or tragic universe, the parts that are human fit badly with the whole. Plato’s Aristophanes tells a story about parts and the whole. In keeping with the convention of the rest of the Symposium, he offers his story as a eulogy to Eros – the rarely praised Greek god of desire – or, more mundanely, as an account of why desire, especially sexual desire, is a good thing. The Eros Aristophanes has in mind, however, is only accidentally sexual. At its root the Eros he speaks of is desire of the whole, or perhaps better, desire to be whole. The choice of formulation turns on how the beginning of his story is to be read. Aristophanes takes us back to a strange time, a mythical time, when human beings have a nature
132 James Wetzel apparently very different from the one they have now. There are originally three kinds of human being, or rather three kinds of doubled being: malemale, female-male, female-female – all the imagination that most of us have for sexual pairings. Only these are not pairings to be made; they are given at birth, as offspring of the sun (male), earth (female), and moon (androgynous) emerge from the ground in the form of a circular personpairing, genitals on the outside. Procreation is more vegetative than animal for these circle people, who sow their seed not in flesh but soil. There is not much Eros to speak of here, not if we are bent on giving Eros a sexual origin, but we soon learn that these original human beings – whose circular shape suggests the perfection of physical form – are far from contained in their native desires. In their original condition they have, as Aristophanes puts it, “big thoughts” (phronmata megala, 190C). These thoughts are big and bold enough to move the circle people to attempt an assault on the Olympian gods, who have grown accustomed to receiving devotions from below. Since this is a story where the question of what is original is ever important, it is important to keep in mind that the Olympian gods – Zeus, Apollo, and company – are not the first generation of gods. The originals are planetary in shape and motion. Were the circle people to ascend to a sufficient height and get a good look at an original heavenly body, they would see the form that is parent to their own. Instead they lose out to a usurping generation of gods, who have the look that human beings have now. It is Zeus, the Olympian patriarch, who contrives the transformation in human nature and appearance. Wishing to end the hubris of big thinking, but not by killing off the thinkers and thereby forfeiting their devotions, he orders his son Apollo to cut all human pairings in two. The intended result is that of a weakened human being, whose original desire has been diverted into seeking its other half. Initially the plan seems to have backfired. The diverted desire is so powerful that split human beings want only to cling to one another. They neglect to feed themselves, to make sacrifices to the gods, to do anything but cling; eventually they die of want. Zeus lessens the desperation of this altered human condition by making one alteration further: he moves the genitals of human beings from back to front. From now on, sexual release can offer human beings partial relief from their otherwise tyrannical desire for wholeness. Reflecting on the tale he has told, Aristophanes wonders about the nature of the wholeness that the descendents of the circle people, their human heirs, still seek so desperately from one another. It cannot, he thinks, be sexual union, since that is, as unions go, only temporary. He asks his fellow symposiasts to imagine Hephaestus, the god skilled in the art of binding, making this offer to two human lovers:
Myth and moral philosophy 133 Is it this you desire, to be with one another in the very same place, as much as is possible, and not to leave one another night and day? For if you desire that, I am willing to fuse you and make you grow together into the same thing, so that – though two – you would be one. (192E; Benardete 2001: 21) Aristophanes encourages everyone to suppose that the answer is obvious here. Of course this is what we all want, to be forever one with a beloved and restored to what was lost. It is of the essence of Eros to desire and pursue original wholeness. I have now set out enough of the story to begin to suggest what makes it analogous to the biblical account of the Fall. Both stories seem to be about the loss of wholeness in human life, a loss prompted by a human desire for a divine point of view and exacted by the god whose point of view has been challenged. The man and woman, the perfect couple, will see as Yahweh does if they eat of the fruit that weds life to death; the circle people, all perfect couplings, will have a god’s eye view of the heavens if they take the hill from Zeus. In each case, the cost of wanting to know is spoilt perfection. I don’t deny that the two stories invite this kind of reading, and to the extent that they do, they lend support and encouragement to the perfectionist impulse in the moral life. As a perfectionist, I hold myself to an absolute standard of conduct. Whatever the imperative is that I chose to give myself, I must abide by it wholeheartedly or lose my sense of selfworth. The problem with perfectionism, as every perfectionist is destined to learn, is that people change, or to put it less prosaically, if there is an imperative that can define the value of a human life absolutely, it would have to be one that admitted of an indefinite, perhaps an infinite, number of interpretations. The serpent in Genesis encourages the woman to think about the meaning of the first divine command. Did Yahweh want her not to eat of the fruit of any of the trees? That would be to deny her a future, to condemn her to sterility. (For remember that a fruit is a seed; taken within a soil or a womb, it becomes a conception of new life – a conception not only of a beginning to life but also of a release of life and therefore of life’s end.) If Yahweh is a god of life and not death, then how can he resolve to kill his children for wanting to know as he does, for wanting to grow up and know life as a parent does? Questions like these – which emerge only when one is willing to depart from the letter of the text and start interpreting – can all be attributed to the serpent’s inspiration and condemned as corrupting. A perfectionist like Kant has to take them that way. As far as his perfectionism is concerned, the serpent in Genesis is there to represent the universally human disposition to lessen the severity of the law’s demands. The appeal of a less severe law is obvious. The morally perfect life is, to understate matters comically, hard to live. But even granting the difficulties of a perfectionism whose law
134 James Wetzel is nonetheless imperative and absolute, I don’t see any necessity to the thought that interpretation is transgressive. Not all those who interpret the law are seeking to defy it. Return for a moment to the big thoughts of the circle people. Benardete translates the Greek phrase for big thoughts more elaborately than I have, rendering it as “great and proud thoughts.” His translation underscores the element of hubris in the assault of the circle people upon the gods. There is no question that this element is there and there prominently. Plato’s Aristophanes begins his tale of human origins by placing the first human beings under the rule of gods whose nature is alien to their own; to be subject to alien rule is just what it means to be tyrannized. Part of what moves the circle people to assault Olympus is therefore their desire to shake off their tyrants and rule themselves – a desire for autonomy.6 The obvious hubris in this is that human beings think to do violence to divine beings without thinking too much (if at all) about the power of these beings to do violence to them in return. Aristophanes, after all, never describes a battle royal with gods, but only the ease with which Zeus and Apollo put their human subjects to shame. The hubris that is really damning to the circle people is, however, less obvious. For it is hubris that has less to do with recklessly defying tyrants who conquer by dividing than with recklessly denying thoughts that seek wholeness beyond division. To begin to detect this level of hubris in the story, it is important not to read the “great” in “great and proud thoughts” to signify only an intensification of hubris. There are great thoughts that aren’t proud. I think of them in the context of the story as big because they make bodily images of wholeness seem small. The circle people begin an ascent – a path of mind and heart, as well as body – to have the vision of the wholeness that is their birthright. This is not a matter of their having a perfected vision of what they take the body already to be, or they wouldn’t have to defeat gods whose primary claim to fame is their power over bodies. To defeat these gods is not to beat them at their own game, but to release divinity from a tyrannized view of the body and its desires. (This is no different from the philosophical task of separating the soul from the body.) One way to tyrannize the body (in thought) is to restrict all of its desires to expressions of poverty and lack of being; the desire for wisdom, or more basically, the desire to know good and evil, is thereby conceived to be alien to bodily desire. In this way of thinking, it will be of the essence of bodily desire to want to preserve and perfect bodily form, of wisdom to expand desire beyond the interests of bodily form and serve the good. If the desire to know the good (and so too evil) is itself a kind of need, it will be a need more contemplative than consumptive in nature – more, that is, like the need to respond to beauty than to satisfy a hunger. In both the biblical story of human origins and the fanciful tale in Plato of the circle people, an original desire to know is veiled as something else,
Myth and moral philosophy 135 and this veiling is to my mind the deepest point of analogy between the two stories. In Genesis, the human desire to know good and evil and share in a divine way of seeing is veiled as a desire to break from Yahweh’s protective but perhaps also stifling influence; in the speech of Aristophanes, the desire to know the highest things and to see one’s own nature reflected there is veiled as a desire to be free of having to serve gods who are jealous of their honor and in need of constant praise and acknowledgement. In short, a desire to know is being veiled or subsumed in each case by a desire for self-rule. If this subsumption is not noticed and challenged, then the two stories have to be about loss of wholeness in human life and the futile but inalienable drive to recover it. Aristophanes tries to gloss over the irrecoverable part by tempting his listeners to hope for some divinely contrived restoration of their original wholeness: honor the gods in their Olympian form (the form of a perfected body), and they will favor you with the body that completes your own, your proverbial other half – or so goes the logic of a marriage comedy. What this overlooks is that finding your other half would restore in you the very desire that led the first human beings to challenge the authority of Olympian rule. You would not be ending a long story; you would be reliving a very old one. The Genesis story incorporates an analogous logic of “no profit in return.” Set aside for a moment thoughts of angels with flaming swords and Yahweh’s anger. Suppose the man and woman are divinely restored to innocence and returned to Eden. They are still beings who carry the seed of knowledge – that is, the desire for it – within them. To prevent this seed from germinating, Yahweh would have to omit the tree, the woman, and the serpent. Those omissions don’t leave much for the human being to be other than a mound of flesh fashioned from the clay of the earth. Hardly worth the bother. Plato, I think, was well aware of the vicious circularity in the story of the circle people, where desire is forever chasing its own tail. Later in the Symposium, he has Diotima – who once versed Socrates in the art of love – preface her speech with an emendation of Aristophanes. Socrates reports her words as follows: “And there is a certain account,” she said, “according to which those who seek their own halves are lovers. But my speech denies that eros is of a half or of a whole – unless, comrade, that half or whole can be presumed to be really good; for human beings are willing to have their own feet and hands cut off, if their opinion is that their own are no good. For I suspect that each does not cleave to his own (unless one calls the good one’s own and belonging to oneself, and the bad alien to oneself) since there is nothing that human beings love other than the good.” (Plato 205E–206A; Benardete 2001: 36)
136 James Wetzel It may seem a fairly trivial emendation to qualify the desire for wholeness or one’s other half with such a nondescript appeal to the good, but in fact Diotima adds to the myth of Aristophanes a whole new range of narrative possibility. Take her basic idea, that what is desired is always presumed to be good in some way, and apply it to the case of the sundered circle people. Can they reasonably presume that joining with their other half is a good thing? The answer to that is yes if they are aiming to restore the wholeness of their original desire; no, if they are aiming to satisfy that desire. The latter kind of ambition assumes knowledge not yet in evidence. The circle people don’t know what they would have come to know had they won their struggle against the gods; they cannot assume, then, that what satisfies half of their original desire would also satisfy the whole. If people who live out their desire by half presume to know the whole they are seeking, then they are guilty of a kind of hubris. They presume to see as the gods do and in so doing betray the needs of their own overlooked nature. For the unemended Aristophanes, the gulf between a divine and a human way of knowing is absolute. Human beings are forever locked into a losing battle with alien power; the best strategy for coping is to find wisdom in limits and solace in otherworldly piety. Diotima’s emendation of Aristophanes offers the possibility of a different moral. Perhaps the gods we fight are alienated versions of ourselves. This is not to suggest that we create the gods, but that we are apt to settle the question of self-knowledge in the interests of something other than a desire to know – such as a desire to be whole (which is always a partial desire in Aristophanes, whether we emend him or not). Maybe at the end of inquiry the good will turn out to be what belongs to the self and nothing else; that will depend on just how generous a conception of self the desire to know permits. In the interim, it is self-defeating to insist on limits to knowing that are drawn in ignorance. It is a point of honor in Kant, part of the dignity of practical reason, to keep to the human side of the difference between a divine and a human way of knowing. Keeping to the human side, not trying to know what is not given to a human being to know, is what leaves us with our moral integrity intact, and this is all the integrity that we can ever reasonably hope for. But this proves upon reflection to be no kind of integrity at all, not because the ideal of integrity is moral and morality is too hard, but because the ideal rests on an illusion – that human beings are in a position to draw an absolute limit to knowing in thought, thereby splitting a big thought, our biggest, in two. This act of self-splitting, rendered in the Aristophanes tale as a visitation of divine punishment, is in reality human hubris continued by other means. The gods, if they can’t be conquered, are to be kept at bay, consigned to that part of ourselves we resolve not to know. Better to live without knowing than to surrender oneself to a god. One moral of the Genesis story is that it is too late for us not to want to know any part of ourselves and that it is furthermore something of a divine boon that it has been too late for us from the very beginning. Kant
Myth and moral philosophy 137 doesn’t see this moral, perhaps because he can’t afford to, and as a result he finds in Genesis matter for a tragedy or a comedy and nothing to suggest that we aren’t fated as human beings to live in the diaspora between nature and ideal – the space of the imperfect life. For all their differences, Kant and Plato are crucially alike in the philosophical ambition that they bring to bear on their reading and retelling of stories. Neither of them is prepared to abandon the perfectionist impulse in moral philosophy, or the imperative to conform life to an ideal of life. Even if falling forever short of this ideal seems to be killing human happiness and hope, it does no good in response to try to love imperfection and celebrate the stories of people who do – at least not the imperfection that is the child of frustrated will. Plato celebrates and tries to make seductive the imperfection that comes of being released from the thought that we have nothing further to learn of the good and the beautiful. In the infinitely intricate pairings that shape and reshape human life, it is the delicate openness on both sides of the pairing to a further good that heals the split in human nature, makes our thoughts bigger, and directs us to a wholeness that is other than the sum of its parts. If the story that Plato has Aristophanes tell of human origins doesn’t suggest this possibility to us, it may be because we look for wholeness where Aristophanes tempts us to look for it – in the perfection of the body. If Kant’s take on the Yahwist makes Genesis seem similarly unpromising, perhaps that is because we look for wholeness where Kant tempts us to look for it – in the perfection of the will. The temptation to look for perfection in all the wrong places is not entirely bad but is instead bound up with the knowledge of good and evil. This thought takes me to my final thoughts on the biggest myth in moral philosophy and on the resolute, albeit self-defeating, attempt of our biggest moral philosopher to demythologize it.
III. Exiting Eden If moral philosophy is to be the arbiter of myth, then myth must always at some level be about the moral life and the struggle of imperfect beings to live it. This is not as far-fetched a presumption as it may at first sound. If a moral value is, as Kant believes, the supreme or overriding value of an ideally practical reasoner (someone who wants above all to act with right), then a story whose plot includes thinking beings with bodies eventually gets to the part about moral struggle. The body poses a problem for thought that only a law – a supremely practical one – can work out. Namely, how is thoughtful existence possible if an embodied being has to be preoccupied with obeying its hunger and thirst, seeking a mate, and fighting for its place in the hierarchy of the pack? It isn’t possible unless there is somewhere in this being’s consciousness a law that restrains desire. This has to be a law that gets its authority from having its legitimacy
138 James Wetzel recognized and not from fear of punishment or death. If the law is obeyed only because the law-giver is fearsome, then law-abiding behavior won’t conform to any kind of value that can’t be accounted for within an economy of competing bodily desires. The law-giver commands the man, for example, not to partake in the fruit that his partner, the woman, offers him. His fear of pain and death trumps his desire for her. End of story. The Yahwist myth in Genesis doesn’t end on that kind of note because it is particularly good, in Kant’s estimation, at representing the two fundamental truths of human moral development. One is that we have to move from servile fear of a law-giver to self-rule to arrive at a moral conception of ourselves (which is, for Kant, the basis of any kind of self-conception); the other is that we will have violated the law of self-rule before we ever come to recognize its legitimacy. Both of these truths seem paradoxically to put self-rule before selfconception. Can I either respect or violate a law I give to myself if I don’t already have a conception of who the subject is here? I can well imagine having a bad conception of myself and acting in ways that either preserve or threaten the integrity of that conception, but in that case the good of self-rule is no longer unconditionally good, but a mixed blessing. I wouldn’t want so to succeed as a self-ruler that the badness of my selfconception never occurs to me (the badness of being alone), and yet I wouldn’t want so to fail that the work of reopening my self-conception seems pointless. The first human being in Kant’s version of Genesis has a bad conception of himself – as being more of flesh than spirit – but the terrible irony of his situation is that he cannot revise this conception (via the knowledge of good and evil) without also violating the authentic law of his own nature. In effect Kant turns the story of the Yahwist into an Oedipal tragedy, though the tragic hero here – the fatally flawed Adam – is more akin to the Oedipus of Freud than of Sophocles. The tragedy begins in the garden, where Adam seems to be living the ideal life. He has his material needs met (lots of nice fruit), he has a perfect mate (the woman), and his place in the order of things is well defined (Yahweh above, animals below). The source of his discontent is not that he is lacking some object of desire, but that he isn’t. The part of him that is higher, that aims at self-conception, cannot emerge until he experiences lack. In forbidding him to eat from the tree of knowing good and evil, Yahweh helps his human son transform an inarticulate need for something to be lacking into a conscious desire to create something out of nothing – a new life. The intermediate stage is for Adam to be able to conceive of not wanting the life he has been given. This is what Yahweh’s prohibition particularly enables. For the forbidden fruit is not just one among many objects of desire in the garden; it is the one object whose attainment represents the loss of everything else – except, of course, the woman. She is an ambiguous figure in Adam’s mind. Before he defies his father, he calls her woman because he thinks of her as flesh of his flesh and bone of his bone
Myth and moral philosophy 139 (Gen. 2:23), and afterwards he calls her Eve because she is to him the mother of all that lives (Gen. 3:20). Both ways of describing her hint that she is as much mother as partner to the son who has chosen her (since, for all sons except apparently the first, it is their mothers who are flesh of their flesh, bone of their bone). The Oedipal task of a son is to replace his father and wed his mother without actually having to replace his father or wed his mother. This is the way that a son moves from myth into history. The son as Kant conceives of him in the Yahwist myth is obsessively preoccupied with his relation to his father (the good and evil of it) and remarkably indifferent to his mother. Indifference is conservative; the son will not be able to conceive of becoming a progenitor of life, a father in his own right, without becoming his own father. “The human being,” writes Kant, “must make or have made himself into whatever he is or should become in a moral sense, good or evil” (6:44; Di Giovanni 1996: 89). The ill-kept secret of Religion is that self-conception of this sort is impossible. Kant’s Adam cannot find the motive to violate the law of his divine father without first conceiving of an antagonism between his father’s interests and his own, but he cannot violate that law without coming to realize (too late) that his father’s law is the law of his own nature. In this tragedy of Freudian proportions, the son cannot forever remain under his father’s protection without denying his own nature, and he cannot break from his father without breaking from himself and sacrificing his own integrity. He is, after all, his father’s son. The result, far from an original self-conception, is an endlessly belabored attempt at redemption. Seeking to regain favor in his father’s eyes, the son resolves to put his father’s will above all his other desires – a lifetime’s offering of service to the law. What dogs this endeavor is the imperfection that motivates it; it was the father’s will, Kant must suppose, for the son never to have violated his father’s will. If stripped of an absolutist father to disobey, the son of Kant’s imaging has no way to conceive of the flesh (his mother) as a distinct object of choice, and so he is forever doomed to confuse soul with body. If stuck, on the other hand, with an absolutist father to please, it will take longer than forever for the son to sort out this confusion to his father’s satisfaction. Kant’s preferred way out of this apparent antinomy is to insist on the segregation of divine and human points of view. From my human point of view I have to assume that my quest for moral perfection never ends; I always fall short of the perfection that I rightfully expect of myself. From a divine point of view, my willingness to take on the endless labor of selfperfecting and not give in to defeat and despair is what my father in heaven sees as a redeemed will. It is possible for me, then, to live the perfect life; only I will never see myself as living it. I lack my father’s knowledge of good and evil. This split between knowing and living is characteristic of Adam’s situation prior to his taste of forbidden fruit. Kant
140 James Wetzel proposes to restore Eden in human nature by having us disown divine knowledge of good and evil and live by the law of human freedom alone. This disowning is not, as Kant would have it, the innocent acknowledgement of a limit to knowing, but an attempt to draw the limit between human and divine knowing from the human side – an act of secession veiled as knowledge of one’s place. It would be my own law, and not the father’s, that would keep me from having sight of myself in my father’s eyes. The moral I take from Kant is one that he never intended to offer: that it is harder to get out of Eden than to get back. It is the former and not the latter task that puts my autonomy most at risk and compels me to find in a serpent’s wisdom something other than a rejection of spirit – something, mythically speaking, that a divine father could love. I can put this moral in demythologized terms. It is by resolving to live a morally perfect life that I run into the limits of my will to be perfect. Faced with these limits, I have a choice: either will them as my own or be open to a revision in my self-conception (one I can’t simply will to have). One way I can opt for the self-imposed limits is to reject as evil whatever subverts my will to perfection. But I should be careful here that I don’t end up tyrannizing the very self I am so anxious to rule. Not everything that I may depend on for my value is evil. What I mean to suggest by all this is not that we should surrender ourselves blindly to chthonic forces whenever our efforts to do right fail, but that we shouldn’t let our efforts to do right blind us to the generosity that comes of receiving. Saint Paul tells us that we love God because God loved us first. Only those of us who have forgotten the first thing about love are apt to find that a humiliating truth. The rest of us are released into a new perfection. And yet the rest of us is also, at any given time, none of us; love seems always to run the risk of having its offer of life construed as a way of binding the beloved’s will or corrupting it. I don’t think that this ambiguity is humanly controllable. (If it were, gardens would never have serpents.) In his great essay on the question of gods – which is less about the many gods than the two different sides of divinity – John Wisdom issued this caveat about the way we tend to read the story of our origins: “We have eaten of the fruit of a garden we can’t forget though we were never there, a garden we still look for though we can never find it. Maybe we look for too simple a likeness to what we dreamed” (Wisdom 1945: 205). If we cannot, as Wisdom suggests, escape the memory of a place we never inhabited, perhaps the problem is not that we cling to an image in a dream, but that our dreams have come to mean so little to us.7
Notes 1
My references to Kant’s text will include the volume and page number of the standard German edition of his work, put out by the German Academy of Sciences, and the page number of the translation I am using: Di Giovanni 1996.
Myth and moral philosophy 141 2 3 4 5
6
7
Robert Alter points this out in his translation and commentary on Genesis. See Alter 1996: 5, note 26. My citations of Genesis are all from Alter 1996. Alter 1996: 15, note 20. For those interested in the more traditional approach to Kant, I highly recommend Korsgaard 1996. See especially her two essays, “Kant’s Formula of Universal Law,” and “Kant’s Formula of Humanity.” With one small exception, I will use Benardete 2001, when citing Plato. See pp. 186–7 of Benardete’s commentary for his thoughts on Plato’s Aristophanes and the biblical account of the Fall. When referencing my citations of Plato, I always include the Stephanus number, as is standardly done. This reading gets further textual confirmation from the single other appearance of the phrase, phron mata megala, in the dialogue. Pausanias, who comes before Aristophanes in the order of speakers, uses the phrase to describe the mindset of Greek lovers whose Eros for one another moves them to fight against tyrannical rulers (the Persians, for instance). I would like to thank my colleague, Andrew Keller, for alerting me to this context. This essay has benefited from the comments of numerous readers. I thank especially Charles Mathewes, Anne Freire Ashbaugh, Coleman Brown, Maude Clark, and Kevin Schilbrack.
Bibliography Alter, R. (1996) Genesis: Translation and Commentary, New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Benardete, S. (trans.) (2001) Plato’s “Symposium”, with commentaries by Allan Bloom and Seth Benardete, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Di Giovanni, G. (trans.) (1996) “Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason,” in Immanuel Kant, Religion and Rational Theology, trans. and ed. Allen W. Wood and George Di Giovanni, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Korsgaard, C. (1996) Creating the Kingdom of Ends, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wisdom, J. (1945) “Gods,” in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series XLV: 195–206.
7
Myth and postmodernist philosophy William G. Doty
The postmodern is, if it is anything, a problematizing force in our culture today: it raises questions about (or renders problematic) the commonsensical and the “natural.” But it never offers answers that are anything but provisional and contextually determined (and limited). In [Michel] Foucault’s sense of the notion of problematizing – as generating discourses – postmodernism has certainly created its own problematic, its own set of problems or issues (which were once taken for granted) and possible approaches to them. (Hutcheon 1988: xi) It is a measure of the nature of postmodernist thinking that it generates intense controversy. And little wonder! At stake are questions that pertain to the deepest dimensions of our being and humanity: how we know what we know, how we should think about individual endeavor and collective aspirations, whether progress is meaningful and how it should be sought. Postmodernism questions causality, determinism, egalitarianism, humanism, liberal democracy, necessity, objectivity, rationality, responsibility, and truth. It takes on issues that are profoundly fundamental for the future of social science. (Rosenau 1992: ix) What is postmodernism? Take your pick: 1) Young Yuppie talk for “New Age”; 2) Culture-speak for “post-industrial”; 3) Anything that’s cool now; 4) A reaction to modernism and the cult of the new; 5) A bad attitude; 6) An exuberant admixture of styles, cultures, epochs, and layers of meaning; 7) Who cares? (“Postmodernism and beyond …” 1989: 51)
It would be presumptuous to seek comprehensively to survey or represent contemporary varieties of postmodernist thought (which may now be named post-postmodernist thought, in the sense that epigones are always already “post” – following, subsequent to – the originating voices). To survey would be to invite travesty, since the deconstructive phase of postmodernism sought to dismantle traditional Western pretensions to absolute truth (logocentrism, triumphalism), complete coverage (totalism),
Myth and postmodernist philosophy 143 impartial bird’s-eye views (reductionism), and subsuming master narratives of one or another persuasion or authorization (monotheism and colonialism). As Linda Hutcheon recognizes, it is typical of postmodernist reflection to be “resolutely self-undermining” (1989:1). Within the growing late twentieth-century awareness of the polyphonic, multivocalic, plurisignificative overplus of symbols (beyond, as it were, Sigmund Freud’s “overdetermination”), most ethnographically specific histories, and all hermeneutical claims to meaning-determination, became suspect. The semiotics of Roland Barthes, no less than those of Thomas Sebeok and Marshall Blonsky; the sexual politics orientation of Michel Foucault and a raft of gender studies specialists; the extraordinarily sophisticated and often solipsistic French theoreticians and critics such as Bataille, Blanchot, Beaudrillard, Nancy, Lyotard, Deleuze; the Canadians Arthur and Marilouise Kroker and their CTHEORY – an international, electronic review of books on theory, technology, and culture that is a transmogrification of the earlier journal, The Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory (http://www.ctheory.com/); architectural and arthistorical/-critical analyses (where “postmodernism” was first sighted and named) – any and all of these and many other recent philosophical divagations might suffice as an arbitrary leitmotif for a project such as mine here. Or we might reflect upon the importance for postmodernist-influenced studies of myth of the highly interdisciplinary contours indicated by this list or by the comment of Best and Kellner: Almost all postmodern theories … explode the boundaries between the various established academic disciplines – such as philosophy, social theory, economics, literature – and produce a new kind of supradisciplinary discourse. Postmodern theorists criticize the ideals of representation, truth, rationality, system, foundation, certainty, and coherence typical of much modern theory, as well as the concepts of the subject meaning, and causality. (1991: 256) And Aronowitz and Giroux, addressing focally the impact of the postmodernist attitude upon the disciplines, remark how postmodernism attempts both to delineate how borders are named and to “redraw the very maps of meaning, desire, and difference” (1991: 81). Precisely by deconstructing the canon, postmodernism fosters marginal discourses; it increases the number of ways of production of knowledge; and it problematizes the ways by which prioritizations take place, such as the privileged status of quantitative methods of research in the life sciences (17). Parallels within myth studies would be the assumption that only classicists can interpret classical texts; that the existence of a “latest and best” theory would mean that all previous interpretive schools ought to be ignored. That I relinquish the authority of the manipulative, totalizing overview,
144 William G. Doty and recognize stringent limitations upon what I present reflects my own post-postmodern positioning. The published range of overviews and introductory materials is now overwhelming; but unless one wishes to remain ignorant of our most recent intellectual atmospheres, it is after all part of being a responsible academic citizen to become familiar with recent intellectual and philosophical thought, so that I do not feel it my assignment to take on that chore here.1 My much more circumscribed project indicates just how postmodernist thought takes some of the important philosophical threads of this volume – especially that of Milton Scarborough’s existentialist phenomenology (see 1994 and his chapter here) – onto new planes, with reference to mythography (the critical study of myths and rituals, Doty 2000). Neither mythography nor postmodernism are easily circumscribed, of course, since every generation claims to be the first to be “modern,” up-to-date, antihistorical, given the regnant (because unacknowledged and implicit) Social Darwinist/Capitalist social philosophy that is only too frequently borne out in national political dramatics. On the other hand, perhaps the “postmodern” is indeed different, in that it fragments contemporary consciousness more or less voluntarily, and (succeeding modernism) it remains resolutely contemporary, up-to-themoment, even while reshuffling themes, motifs, and designs from across a polyphony from previous eras (as any of several recent surveys of postmodernism in the arts and architecture will demonstrate). T.S. Eliot’s well-known essay of 1919, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” was prescient in indicating just how extensively “the more things change, the more they remain the same.” Hence the very claim of newness trumpeted by modernism is now obsolete within the postmodernist/deconstructive/critical-theory revival of the eternal recurrence of the same (Nietzsche), as its architecture quotes Ionic columns and acacia leaves done in brushed aluminum (in several of Robert Grave’s buildings). How we treat the past – that vast dale that Romanticism first taught us to revere – demarks now this, now that philosophical movement. Should one follow the Paris/Chicago historian of religions Mircea Eliade in prioritizing the cosmogonic myth, or deconstruct all origin myths as essentially – and negatively – patriarchal? The reference in this last instance is to Marta Weigle’s powerfully revisionist Creation and Procreation: Feminist Reflections on Mythologies of Cosmogony and Parturition. But one might point in another direction, either toward Derrida’s treatments of the apocalyptic theme in Western history, or to the volume edited by Richard Dellamore, Postmodern Apocalypse: Theory and Cultural Practice at the End. The preface of this volume remarks upon the “pervasive sense of unease in contemporary existence. The attendant lack of confidence in the possibility of shaping history in accord with human desire(s) provides the bass line of culture – political, economic, and aesthetic – in the fin de millennium” (1995: xi). Perhaps, Dellamore
Myth and postmodernist philosophy 145 suggests, it is primarily the genre of apocalyptic literature (science fiction, in his example) that “includes a concept of repetition that permits the writing of new stories about the end” (xii, my emphasis). The postmodernist does not blanch at the inclusion of science fiction as a mode of thinking – through or – toward; there is an openness to a very wide range of cultural products, an attentiveness to edge-thinking very different from earlier models of centering. Philosophical psychologist James Hillman reminds us that much of our intellectual furniture has at most an 1830–90 Victorian furbishment, and indeed I have witnessed several of my own philosophical colleagues frown at my very suggestion of cross-/interdisciplinary research, given that they propose either that only analytical studies count, or that any non-Platonic (non-Aristotelian, nonRawlsian … ) method has to be ruled insufficient tout court (1995a: 27). I am less interested in either (a) sketching ways in which the wide range of postmodernist thought has been contoured over the last several decades – one might begin these, upon close reading, with Nietzsche, surely (as suggested repeatedly in Magnus and Higgins 1996) and include Dadaism as well as Benjamin (Lash 1989: 99); or (b) determining an “analytical” truth for one or another branch. I do advocate (c) something of a postmodernist/post-phenomenological perspective opening onto mythography/mythology/mythologies that recognizes its/their multidimensional/polyphasic resources for determining existential standpoints of regularized/moral positions that may provide orientation points within the widely bemoaned fragmentation of both modernism and postmodernism. Such “orientation points” would not be dogmatic, non-falsifiable truths, but rather myths are what I term “projective psyche models,” fictions recognized helping us to imagine our participation in our life worlds alternatively and critically, providing us a means with which to insight/imagine restrictive parameters creatively. “Fragmentation” (“science,” from scire, to split apart) resides at the other extreme from “religion,” derived from re-ligare, “tying things back together,” certainly a conservative and conserving gesture (like yogah, a linking, ligaturing, associational-organizing, hermeneutical-gathering). Yet I suspect that the recurrent modernist plaint of “fragmentation” represents only the contemporization of “secularization,” long tainted across the Christianist eras with decay and decline. What have the decades of deconstructive analyses meant, the social-constructionist perspectives of research in many disciplines inspired by Foucault (so dependent upon Nietzsche), so well as the incredibly striking results of feminist and post- (i.e., Third Wave) feminist studies, but recognition of the dismantling of longestablished patriarchal-Enlightenment viewpoints?2 Postmodernist philosophies disassemble much of traditional philosophy at the point of the level of rhetorical expression. Thankfully, that is not true of the sort of delicate alliterative cross-referencing (intertextuality) first sighted in the French New Novel and then in studies of postmodernist
146 William G. Doty fiction. Fragments may pile upon fragments; at times the convention of a literary correspondence on postcards (Derrida), at others vast associational networks of symbolic fretwork (Bataille). Even at times pages of fashion advertisements become part of the philosophical monograph, along with an array of inscribed bodies – tattoos, wounds … (Mark Taylor’s Hiding), and pages designed in the lurid colors and multiple fonts familiar from Wired magazine (the same author has published a virtual reality CD, The Réal Las Vegas NV). Not only intertextuality thickens the mythographic mix, but a more sensitive attention to the terms of the level of mythical expression itself, a point strongly emphasized in psychotherapeutic circles as well as in contemporary ethnographic collection. And philosopher Lawrence Hatab nicely expresses a number of the important steps such postmodernist analysis will encompass: If language is the key to meaning, we must listen to the language of a mythical age to gather its meaning, as opposed to interpretations through postmythical terminology. We will try to let myth show itself through its language. Obviously, we have to interpret (we cannot simply recount the myths as such), but we must attempt to be faithful by at least screening out extramythical assumptions. Accordingly, we aim to show the autonomy and meaningfulness of a mythical age on its own terms, thereby undermining the prevalence of certain “progressive” interpretations of ancient history (i.e., the view that mythical culture was backward or even prerational). (1990: 12) Myth, the way I have been developing this identifier, is a sort of science of the abstract become concrete, a symbolic language useful for designating meanings within the everyday that are initially discerned in the realms of particularly heightened (or sacred/religious) experiences. Myths and symbolic expressions create imaginal totems of the nature–culture system that overposition our habitus toward separative realms of discourse, so that a culture is always faced with resemioticizing. It is not historicity – considered as the opposite of the fictive – or reusable (archetypal) plot that makes myth mythic, and that literature and the arts utilize, but rather a certain propensity for discovering and forging meaningful interpretations upon the boundaries of the ordinary and the extraordinary. Had Plato’s exclusion of the mythos he disdained been less arbitrary, Western philosophical thought might have remained closer to the creative arts all these centuries. In this context, it is striking how the embodiment of bodies themselves have come back into postmodernist discourse and analysis. This was anticipated already by Scott Lash, who saw their re-insertion as important for social theory and the sort of proactive artworks now increasingly
Myth and postmodernist philosophy 147 prominent: “In (at least) Continental philosophy, there has been a shift in the locus of agency from the mind to the body” (1989: 75; see Lakoff and Johnson 1999 and the two excellent readers edited by Donn Welton). The male and female gendered bodies, bodies of desire, bodies of suffering – with abstraction and distancing (“aestheticizing”: suddenly there have been a raft of non-art school studies of the male nude, for instance) replaced by embodiment and enactment. This is particularly evident in the post-postmodernist disciplines of cultural studies (the American versions differ considerably from their British origins – see Grossberg 1997; Grossberg et al. 1992). Basically, the abstracted algebras of structuralism seemed increasingly arid and stultifying, as poststructuralists began increasingly to attend to the visual and embodied – within, for instance, the pop culture so disdained by modernism. Consequently, as David Harvey notices with respect to modernism, there was above all a “loss of historical continuity in values and beliefs” (1989: 56) that eventuated in havoc for aesthetics, so that in that direction there was a turn toward the lived experience of daily embodiment (Sartwell 1995 and 1996), whereas more contemporary postmodernist studies often begin from analysis of films/videos/contemporary advertising. Methodologically the tendency to move from universal epistemological claims to relational claims (see Fekete 1987: 24) has led to varying models of postmodernism. Lash makes the important point (1989: 13) that not all of contemporary culture is postmodernist, a point borne out by the ongoing statistical surveys according to which contemporary Americans remain – in strikingly high percentages – both religious “believers” and formidably anti-abortion, anti-progressive, and homophobic (positions which my own non-religious stance would consider anti-religious). There are clearly varying versions and various overlapping positions. (But there was never a single-model modernism, either (201); and recall that pop culture was largely a reaction to modernism having become the predominant establishment, high-culture position (see Harvey 1989: 37).) Repeatedly today it is possible to question various knee-jerk sociographic pronouncements as reflecting the normative status quo benchmarks: many accounts document that “believers” generally have only the slightest notion of philosophico-theological argumentation. Subsequently, they hand over primary conceptualizing to mass-media popularizations, a locally popular cult teacher, or immediate peers. On the other hand, long-term, more disinterested critiques speak less of essentialist truths, as they recognize the socio-historical sitedness of all knowledge, the crucial role of highly trained hermeneutical perspectives and socio-historical praxis. Clifford Geertz provides such a perspective (1995: 40):
148 William G. Doty The politics of a country lie everywhere within it, not just in the institutions, this monarchy or that republic, by which, for the moment, they are more or less focused and somewhat organized. And though they change they do so at the speed the country changes, not that at which leaders, policies, or even regimes do.3 The hoi polloi will doubtless have different views than those issued from their leaders’ dachas, but it is curious that nearly every conservative regime claims to be representing not a temporally established compact-driven temporalization, but some authorization from the ab origine: seen, of course, in the States in the way the sacred scriptures of the Constitution are repeatedly revised and endlessly reinterpreted, even as the rhetorical claim is that of “conserving the original.” In contemporary scholarship, several analytical materials identify some of these factors, within communication studies and rhetorics, especially, but also within political science disciplines. Myths and Nationhood, edited by Geoffrey Hosking and George Schöplin, provides a strong collection of explorations of the ways in which “myth” has become appropriate and useful in terms of political-science/historical study of various cultures, mostly contemporary. This volume, the most widely ranging study available, is a clear indication that the topic is no longer a no-no in serious scholarship, but provides a useful category for discussing cultural worldview, motivation, recollection, and attitudes toward history and change. Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo discloses that all of the three dominant mythographic perspectives (that he identifies as archaism, cultural relativism, and tempered irrationalism, also named the limited rationality theory) “disregard the question of their own historical contextualization far too hastily” (1992: 39). Their inability to escape the myth of demythologization (that all mythic cultural traces can be erased in postnaïve perspectives), leaves “the demythologization of demythologization … as the true moment of transition from the modern to the postmodern. This transition occurs in its most philosophically explicit form in Nietzsche” (42). Accordingly, it seems fundamentally imperative that any type of “philosophical” view incorporate socio-historico-political aspects, not only purely formally, but also recognizing that so many “absolute truths” readily affirmed in the dogmas of the past, now seem to be merely byproducts of specific historical needs (I admit readily to such a specifically marxian/social-constructionist, position). Deconstructive analysis has taught us how “concealed intentions” (Hillman 1995b: xxii) operate subliminally even in the most banal material – as Barthes (1972) famously reads semiotically such societal events as wrestling matches, the Sunday magazine instructions for preparing holiday foods, detergent advertisements, etc. And sometimes the postmodernist slant is as ironic as Kafka or Jesus:
Myth and postmodernist philosophy 149 Both Linda Hutcheon, in The Politics of Postmodernism, and Richard Kearney, in Poetics of Imagining, emphasize the importance of parodic modes within all of postmodernism, and one might propose that the genre of apocalyptic literature (increasingly highlighted as the perhaps-fateful shift in millennia happened) is something of a parody of myth. It certainly is full of mythically colored materials, to the extent that apocalyptic literature frequently mirrored Ancient Near Eastern figures and scenarios, such as a universal Flood, conquering extraordinary Chaos monsters, or a primeval First Ancestor. Perhaps not for the true believer, but for my own jaded appreciation, apocalyptic seems to graph the extreme limits of intelligibility. Maurice Blanchot neatly identifies the importance of such limits: There is an “I do not know” that is at the limit of knowledge but that belongs to knowledge. We always pronounce it too early, still knowing all – or too late, when I no longer know that I do not know. (cited in Taylor 1986: 108–19) Derrida’s différance also warns against the assumption that we can master or control either the primordial or the future; as Caputo paraphrases: “it is rather the thought, if it is a thought, of an absolute heterogeneity that unsettles all the assurances of the same within which we comfortably ensconce ourselves” (1997: 5). I focalize most mythology as being rather more this-worldly and realistic than apocalyptic, and subsequently limit and type apocalyptic as one subgenre of myth, if not, indeed, its parody. Hutcheon suggests (1989:3) that “the self-reflexive, parodic art of the postmodern [underlines] in its ironic way the realization that all cultural forms of representation … are ideologically grounded.” Parody sharpens our critical perspective toward ideology, but “postmodernism paradoxically manages to legitimize culture … even as it subverts it. … It is the function of irony in postmodern discourse to posit that critical distance and then undo it” (15). In the feminist fictions of novelist Angela Carter, according to Hutcheon (154–5), “parody becomes one of the ways of ‘rereading against the grain of the master works of Western culture’” (citing Teresa de Lauretis within that quotation). Certainly, when Tina Pippin, in a paper prepared for a Wesleyan College conference on myth and philosophy (1998:7) refers to theories of myth interpretation, noting how several of them perform a de-naturalizing function, she highlights the manner in which myth, one of whose very functions, according to Barthes, is artificially to make selected items appear historical or “natural,” she pushes the issue of the ethics of interpretation. How far, to what extent, does the semiotic net stretch before myth becomes parody? Who is to say how legitimate it is, and in which context, when, as Pippin puts it, the “apocalypticist brings the future into
150 William G. Doty the present, smashing enemies and memory and history”? (5). Consider Foucault’s distinction between the artificially hegemonic constructs of familiar utopias and the microfragmented challenges of Bakhtin’s heterotopic discourse, wherein no voice maintains privilege. The critical perspective can be regarded as a de-doxifying tool (where the doxa refers to the lowest common denominator understanding), hence denaturalizing, in which it becomes obvious that “there is nothing natural about the ‘real’ and there never was – even before the existence of mass media” (Hutcheon 1988:33); “Even nature, postmodernism might point out, doesn’t grow on trees” (2). Likewise, something like the archaism of apocalyptic (the supposition is that the ideal is situated within the ancient) has historical roots, as Pippin takes from Paul Boyer’s pointing out “that the late twentieth century forms of the mythological belief in Antichrist arose in the wake of the Second World War” (11) – What? Not at the year 32 CE? The recent “method and theory” movements within religious studies have relentlessly exposed almost unconscious assumptions about the “special nature” of religion presupposed by the long-term dominant History of Religion school. McCutcheon notes that: what a previous generation of scholars took for transparent selfevidencies are now recognized as tools developed over time, tools with a history that come with theoretical, even political, baggage, tools that are used to classify, sort, and analyze human behavior. (1998:52) The general confusion of phenomenological description with social scientific analysis has led to “the theoretical bankruptcy of the modern study of religion” (53). The term Archaism is Vattimo’s way to describe what feeds “an expectation of a possible release from the distortions and contradictions of the present techno-scientific civilization” (1992: 31). It can “give rise to purely ‘utopian’ criticism of techno-scientific civilization and capitalism” (33), and it has been complicit in supporting the politics of many right-wing European parties and movements, including such figures as the Romanian Mircea Eliade (at least in his early writings). John Girling’s Myths and Politics looks in the opposite direction, not back to putative beginnings, but forward, emphasizing that myths are not only conservative, but can indeed be important change-agents, as communities move into different socio-political realities: Myths are symbolic representations of critical changes; they do not “explain” these changes. What an interpretation of myths can do is to help to understand why people (ourselves) respond in certain ways to the situations they encounter, that is, why they behave with such
Myth and postmodernist philosophy 151 intensity, commitment, and perseverance: either creatively mobilizing popular energies, even against rational odds, as in “democratic” myths – for example, the civil rights movement in America; or else mobilizing the same psychic energies, but on a destructive course, as in “will to power” myths, such as those evoked by the Cold War. (1993: 170) The “inspirational character of myths” sustains group-bonding (17). They are “not timeless creations [but] the product of specific historical conditions” (2) – which of course means that “when new crises appear, new myths appear” (3), and we are ready for the strong claim that “most myths … serve to legitimize the existing order; but newly created myths, which are no less emotionally charged than their predecessors, may also inspire challenges to that order” (11, my emphasis). To be sure, the topic touches down into ideological, and hermeneutical, interpretive issues. In this regard, I was surprised to read the following in Richard Kearney: The crisis of the postmodern image has not always led … to declarations of the ‘death of the imagination.’ Alongside the apocalyptic reading which tends to construe the imaginary as mere imitation of imitations – a mirrorplay of simulacra (Baudrillard) – there has arisen a hermeneutical reading. (1991: 177–8, my emphasis – and I take that to refer to a proactive, positive revisioning-meaning) It is this latter re-reading that “strives to reconnect the texts of imagination to the human and historical contexts in which they emerge.” It “relocates the crisis of creativity in the context of a world which is refigured or prefigured by our imaginings [philosophically, a phenomenological emphasis – WGD]. The apocalypse of floating signifiers is reconnected once again to the discourse of a life-world of affectivity and event” (I am currently re-/reading Paul Ricoeur, where I suspect there is much to learn about a repristinizing, reaffirming hermeneutical approach that is also post-postmodernist and post-phenomenological). Here it is important to consider again the importance in myth studies of the ideological situatedness of its discourse, its historicity and semantics, as well as of phenomenological articulations, highlighting its intercourse with the phenomenologically identified Lebenswelt, and recognizing the proliferation of contemporary critical approaches (cf. Grossberg 1997: 103–35, for instance, who lays out no fewer than ten central yet different “Strategies of Marxist Cultural Interpretation”). That there are always multiplicities of mythographic approaches matters: already in Kearney’s introduction we are reminded that:
152 William G. Doty it is true that imagination lies at the very heart of our existence. … Whether one follows the Greek version which traces the imaginative power of making (technê demiourgikê) back to the Promethean theft of fire, or the biblical version of the origin of the creative drive (yetser) in the transgression of Adam and Eve, it is striking how the origins of humankind and of imagination coincide. (1991: 1–2) True enough, but Taylor helps us remember not to slip back to the traditional privileging of some primordial instance: Beginnings are always a problem, but nowhere more so than in the case of postmodernism. Postmodernism involves a thoroughgoing critique of the belief in origins and originality. For postmodernists, the notion of origin is a fiction that is first constructed and then projected back to a prelapsarian paradise in which everything is still pure and perfect. … From a postmodernist perspective, nothing is original, and thus everything is always already secondary. (1992: 189) Pippin has reminded us forcefully that it is not just the time of beginnings but also the time of the future that the apocalyptic imagination recollects in advance (technically: a prolepsis). But perhaps it does so as a futuristic parody: Hutcheon’s politicized view of postmodernism argues “that postmodernist parody is a value-problematizing, de-naturalizing form of acknowledging the history (and through irony, the politics) of representations” (1988: 94). And further, irony is one of the steps in our intertextual situation that calls “to our attention … the entire representational process … and the impossibility of finding any totalizing model to resolve the resulting postmodern contradictions” (95). Pippin’s emphasis upon the contesting by postmodernists of mastery and totalizing (37) ought to bring to our attention some of the underlying assumptions of myth studies. I have in mind in particular the tradition of the myth-handbook in Western culture: whether one looks at Edith Hamilton, Robert Graves, or more recently Timothy Gantz (1993), one comes away with the impression of mastery, of uniformity. At the same time, Gantz and a few others have broken with that tradition recently by including in the astonishingly wide range of variations (including inscriptions and designs on ceramics) across classical mythology, the importance of recognizing just how worship of any particular Greek figure differed from one locality to another (see Rose and Hornblower 1996); how images from one locale seldom fit comfortably with those of another. We begin to understand a point repeated in contemporary French classical studies, namely that the Olympic Pantheon was never really experienced as being a monolithic, monosignifying reality. We were sold a
Myth and postmodernist philosophy 153 bill of goods by the Alexandrine collectors of myth variants who tidied everything up into neat epitomes (the prime example is Apollodoros’s Bibliothêka). Nor, most likely, did many contemporaries know more than a few of the fairly extensive narratives according to which countless generations of students have memorized faithfully the traits of the gods and goddesses. But the parody, the irony, is that Greeks couldn’t move anywhere in both public and private space without encountering hundreds of visual and sculptural representations of now this, now that mythic exploit. What was recognized was not some universally coherent pattern, but the fragmentary recognitions of how a particular god had manifested in one’s own specific locality. Hopefully, several openings toward fresh, revivifying reinterpretations (what else have I been striving for across my lifespan?) have now become manifest. That they are not all driven by particular philosophical schools, but also by a plethora of late twentieth-century disciplines across the range of intellectual inquiry, is merely indicative of the vast fragmentation of knowledge that our oversupply of information has delivered to us. In this new infosituation, some 350 pages of my own writings (for example) appear on Mythology: A CD-ROM Encyclopedia, an extensive educational and research tool compiled under the direction of psychologist-mythologist Ginette Paris. I’ll not be alone, indeed certainly overshadowed, by just about every important ancient mythic text/translation one can imagine, along with all the major modern handbooks and commentaries, glossaries, myth encyclopedias, and neo-psychological studies. Within two years Questia: An Online Library of Scholarly Books plans to have more than 250,000 books and journals available for a minimal subscription price. More than one of my books was written in a plumbingfree cabin, on Chunks Brook Road, West Arlington VT, where the General Store received and shipped my faxes and emails. What a miracle that mythography in the present and future will be enabled by so many of the revolutionary developments in technological communication that came at the end of the (admittedly, arbitrarily-delineated) millennium! Beginning with 1990 studies such as Frank Reynolds and David Tracy (eds), Myth and Philosophy and Lawrence Hatab’s Myth and Philosophy: A Contest of Truths, a number of philosophical voices – many of them represented in this volume (and see Doty n.d.) – are being heard within mythography. To which I say both High Time! and Welcome!4 The whole discipline of mythographic exploration begins to bloom in an atmosphere that is not terrified by change or plurality; it may well be prognostic of eutropics of the future: visions like Messiaen’s in music, opening endlessly outward toward new angelic harmonies; or like John Tavener’s, reaching down/back so far in to Eastern European choral registers as to be almost forbidding – yet at the same time, as up to date as the latest Calvin Klein advertisement for men’s underwear.
154 William G. Doty Postscript 1: The moment comes when the avant-garde (the modern) can go no further, because it has produced a metalanguage that speaks of its impossible texts (conceptual art). The postmodern reply to the modern consists of recognizing that the past, since it cannot really be destroyed, because its destruction leads to silence, must be revisited: but with irony, not innocently. (Umberto Eco, cited in Jencks 1987: 20) Postscript 2: The most feasible style for an open society is not the integrated one of Modernism and Neoclassicism. … Rather it is one that acknowledges our fragile position of departure, where we have left the certainties of an integrated Christian culture, where we gain a certain identity from the past but are dependent on, or enjoy the fruits of, a fast-changing technology. Our sensibilities have been framed by these fragmentations and discontinuities but, far from disliking the heterogeneity which they entail, we enjoy the hybrid aesthetic for its continuity with our daily life. By contrast, integrated systems can seem artificial and constricting. (Jencks 1987: 271)
Notes 1
I have scouted the terrain already in Doty 1995, chap. 1, “Within and Beyond the Picture Frame: The Postmodernist Context and Contents of These Essays,” and the reader will find that several of the works recommended there are also cited here. In a note to colleagues in the Faculty Forum of my College, 24 February 1992, I suggested that the wide variety of shadings range across the following perspectives: analytic-descriptive; historical chronological; experiential descriptor; deontological-philosophical; moral position; and self-justification. Sims 1999 is the most convenient reference work on postmodernist thought. I am sympathetic to the arguments developed by Best and Kellner that the rupture between modernism and postmodernism has never been sufficiently theorized or adequately demonstrated (1991:256); their neo-Marxian yet multistranded proposal for a reconstruction of critical social theory enfolds many of the disciplinary perspectives I have just charted even as it recognizes some of the disastrous philosophical mismoves of postmodernist philosophies. I am also delighted by their “combining perspectives of classical modern thinkers like Marx, Weber, and Habermas with postmodern theorists like Foucault and Baudrillard” (269). However, for my own part, I would like to see included in the picture the enormous contributions that come now from the arts and humanities. Jencks notes, for instance (1987:23), that the architecture journals started announcing the death of postmodernism in the 1970s. Two quick examples of stimulating works – relevant precisely because they are not
Myth and postmodernist philosophy 155
2
3 4
restricted to traditional art-historical or aesthetic frames: Bal 1991 and Brunette and Wills 1994. Two sections of Doty 1993 are relevant here: “Recovery from Patriarchy” (8–11) and “Asking Important Questions, Feminism, and Gender” (11–16). The latter section charts what I consider to be the most important intellectual achievements of feminist discourses, achievements that ought to be integrated within contemporary scholarship in any discipline. I have been working on several of these issues, but saw no point in repeating those discussions here: See 1995 and 1999. Readers of the first edition of my Mythography (1986) will notice much more extensive discussion of philosophical issues throughout the second, which appeared in 2000.
Bibliography Aronowitz, S. and Giroux, H.A. (1991) Postmodern Education: Politics, Culture, and Social Criticism, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Bal, M. (1991) Reading “Rembrandt”: Beyond the Word-Image Opposition, New York: Cambridge University Press. Barthes, R. (1972) Mythologies, trans. A. Lavers, New York: Hill and Wang. Best, S. and Kellner, D. (1991) Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations, New York: Guilford. Brunette, P. and Wills, D. (1994) Deconstruction and the Visual Arts: Art, Media, Architecture, New York: Cambridge University Press. Caputo, J.D. (1997) The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion Without Religion, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Dellamore, R. (1995) Postmodern Apocalypse: Theory and Cultural Practice at the End, Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Doty, W.G. (1980) “‘Hermes’ Heteronymous Appellations,” in James Hillman (ed.), Facing the Gods, Irving, TX: Spring Publications. —— (1986 [2000]) Mythography: The Study of Myths and Rituals, Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press. —— (1993) Myths of Masculinity, New York: Continuum. —— (1995) “Silent Myths Singing in the Blood: The Sites of Production and Consumption of Myths in a ‘Mythless’ Society,” in W.G. Doty (ed.), Picturing Cultural Values in Postmodern America, Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press. —— (1999) “Exploring Politico-Historical Communications of Mythologies,” Bulletin of the Council of Societies for the Study of Religion, 38: 9–16. —— (n.d.) “Modern and Postmodern Mythic Existence,” in G. Schrempp and W. Hansen (eds), Symposium on Myth, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Fekete, J. (1987) Life After Postmodernism: Essays on Value and Culture, New York: St Martin’s. Gantz, T. (1993) Early Greek Myth: A Guide to the Literary and Artistic Sources, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Geertz, C. (1995) After the Fact: Two Countries, Four Decades, One Anthropologist, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gill, S.D. (2000) “Play,” in W. Braun and R.T. McCutcheon (eds), Guide to the Study of Religion, New York: Cassell.
156 William G. Doty Girling, J. (1993) Myths and Politics in Western Societies: Evaluating the Crisis of Modernity in the United States, Germany, and Great Britain, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Grossberg, L. (1997) Bringing it All Back Home: Essays on Cultural Studies, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Grossberg, L., Nelson, C. and Treichler, P. (eds) (1992) Cultural Studies, New York: Routledge. Harvey, D. (1989) The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change, Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Hatab, L. (1990) Myth and Philosophy: A Contest of Truths, LaSalle, IL: Open Court. Hillman, J. (1995a) Kinds of Power: A Guide to its Intelligent Uses, New York: Doubleday. —— (1995b) “A Psyche the Size of the Earth: A Psychological Foreword,” in T. Roszak, M.E. Gomes, and A.D. Kanner (eds), Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind, San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club Books. Hosking, G. and Schöplin, G. (eds) (1997) Myths and Nationhood, New York: Routledge. Hutcheon, L. (1988) A Poetics of Postmodernism, New York: Routledge. —— (1989) The Politics of Postmodernism, New York: Routledge. Jencks, C. (1987) Postmodernism: The New Classicism in Art and Architecture, London: Academy. Kearney, R. (1991) Poetics of Imagining: From Husserl to Lyotard, New York: Routledge. Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (1999) Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought, New York: Basic Books. Lash, S. (1989) Sociology of Postmodernism, New York: Routledge. Magnus, B. and Higgins, K.M. (eds) (1996) The Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche, New York: Cambridge University Press. McCutcheon, R.T. (1998) “Redescribing ‘Religion’ as Social Formation: Toward a Social Theory of Religion,” in T.A. Idinopulos and B.C. Wilson (eds), What is Religion? Origins, Definitions, and Explanations, Boston, MA: Brill. Paris, G. (2000) Mythology: A CD-ROM Encyclopedia, vol. I: Greek and Roman, Beta 2.1 release, Los Angeles, CA: Multimedia.com Inc. Pippin, T. (1998) “The Never-ending Apocalypse: On Myth and Postmodern Philosophy,” Conference paper prepared for Myth and Philosophy conference, Wesleyan College, Macon GA. “Postmodernism and beyond …” (1989) Editor’s introduction, Utne Reader, July/August. Reynolds, F.E. and Tracy, D. (eds) (1990) Myth and Philosophy, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Rose, H.J. and Hornblower, S. (1996) “Epithets, Divine, Greek,” in The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 3rd edn, New York: Oxford University Press. Rosenau, P.M. (1992) Postmodernism and the Social Sciences: Insights, Inroads, and Intrusions, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Sartwell, C. (1995) The Art of Living: The Aesthetics of the Ordinary in World Spiritual Traditions, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. —— (1996) Obscenity, Anarchy, Reality, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
Myth and postmodernist philosophy 157 Scarborough, M. (1994) Myth and Modernity: Postcritical Reflections, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Sims, S. (ed.) (1999) The Routledge Critical Dictionary of Postmodern Thought, New York: Routledge. Taylor, Mark C. (1986) Deconstruction in Context: Literature and Philosophy, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. —— (1992) Disfiguring: Art, Architecture, Religion, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. —— (1997) Hiding, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Vattimo, G. (1992) “Myth Rediscovered,” The Transparent Society, trans. D. Webb, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Weigle, M. (1989) Creation and Procreation: Feminist Reflections on Mythologies and Cosmogony and Parturition, Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Welton, D. (ed.) (1998) Body and Flesh: A Philosophical Reader, Malden, MA: Blackwell. —— (ed.) (1999) The Body: Classic and Contemporary Readings, Malden, MA: Blackwell.
8
Myth and environmental philosophy J. Baird Callicott
That environmental problems do not respect political boundaries is by now a conservation truism. They also cross cultural boundaries. The migration routes of the endangered Siberian crane, for example, extend from shamanic Siberia, run through Eastern Orthodox Russia, cross Buddhist Tibet, Confucian China, Islamic Afghanistan, and end in Hindu India. So to be effective environmental ethics must be pluralistic. We (the people of planet Earth) must develop what a colleague of mine in Singapore described as “ecologically correct environmental ethics” expressed in the “grammars” of a representative set of local cultures. The West, too, is a “local culture” with a unique history and peculiar folkways. While ecology may be a household word, the majority of the people in such typically Western countries as France and the United States do not know that there exists a “biodiversity crisis,” that the Earth is in the throes of only the sixth mass-extinction event in its entire 3.5 billionyear biography (Kellert 1996; Raup and Sepkoski 1984). The previous five such events, paleontologists believe, cannot be attributed to a rogue species run amuck (Raup 1986). In all likelihood, we may well be the first biological agent of mass extinction to have plagued the planet (Raup 1988). If all five previous mass-extinction events were each caused by a collision with a large meteor, like the one that did in the dinosaurs, we may even be the first terrestrial agent of mass extinction to have plagued the planet (Alvarez et al. 1980; Rampino and Strothers 1984). Science, with its highfalutin’ vocabulary, is inaccessible to ordinary folk. Hence to reach people in the West as well as everywhere else, ecologically correct environmental ethics must be expressed in the grammars of local cultures – and that, more often than not, means religious grammars. The greening of religion is well underway in the West (Oelschlager 1994). Oversimply put, in the West, historically, two cultural codes coexist, sometimes comfortably, sometimes not: Christianity and Modern science. Although Modern (I shortly explain why I capitalize this word throughout) science may be devoid of environmental values, and although its progeny, Modern technology, may be the proximate cause of many of our most vexing environmental problems, science is also the source of
Myth and environmental philosophy 159 much of our conviction that these same environmental problems exist and are acute. Without the complicity of Modern science, in other words, there would be no chlorofluorocarbons in the stratospheric ozone, polychlorinated biphenyls in the fatty tissues of animals, or, for that matter, a global mass extinction event. But without the vigilance of Modern science, we would have no critical discourse about chlorofluorocarbons in the stratospheric ozone, about polychlorinated biphenyls in the fatty tissues of animals, or even about a global mass extinction event, which is only partially observable at a local level and is virtually invisible without taxonomic expertise. In any case, Christianity, at first, was improbably blamed for Modern environmental problems (White 1967). Genesis 1:26–8, excised from its context and uncharitably interpreted, identifies “man” as uniquely created in the image of God, gives him dominion over the Earth, and charges him to multiply his own kind and to subdue the Earth. The twentieth-century’s technological wonders and environmental crises are the legacy of twenty centuries of effort to realize this mandate, or so it has been alleged (White 1967). Such finger-pointing stimulated some of the keepers of the Christian faith to respond with a culturally encoded environmental ethic, now so well institutionalized that it has a proper name: The Stewardship Environmental Ethic (Oelschlager 1994). In the first chapter of Genesis, before the creation of “man,” the creation of other species is pronounced “good.” In the contemporary terminology of environmental ethics, the non-human creation may therefore plausibly be said to have God-given intrinsic value. Dominion may be interpreted as “care” in light of the second chapter of the same book, in which (a) man (Adam) was placed in the Garden of Eden (nature) “to dress and keep it.” The misinterpretation and mishandling of this divine charge to “man” may be chalked up to “man’s Fall”, which is described in the third chapter of that text. Feminist theologian Rosemary Radford Reuther points out that Judaism and Christianity may have more to offer environmental ethics than stewardship, which in her view is somewhat patronizing (and patriarchal), but stewardship remains the most familiar and popular species of Christian environmental ethics (Reuther 1997). In any case, here was an actual historical event in which an environmental ethic was deliberately crafted out of the raw materials of an ancient, but still vibrant religious worldview. As Reuther also points out – and I heartily agree – it makes little difference whether the authors of Genesis or any other biblical text intended to encode an environmental ethic. Texts such as the Bible are, she notes, living, changing myths and, within the limits of their narrative structures, their contemporary custodians can reinterpret them so that they can continue to serve their adherents well in the face of new challenges. And the most pressing challenge of our time is the environmental crisis. Taking this actual historical event as a model, in a recent book (Callicott 1994) I asked – and tried positively to answer – the question,
160 J. Baird Callicott on behalf of global conservation efforts: Can we do something similar with the Qur’an, the Analects, the Bhagavad Gita, the Tao Te Ching, the Kumulipo, the Dreamtime, and a variety of other religious texts by means of which the Earth’s peoples interpret the world around them? I knew that such a wide-ranging survey would attract considerable criticism. But I expected that most of it would be directed to the interior chapters devoted to exploring ways in which ecological ethics could be teased out of the prominent world religions (such as Islam, Hinduism, and Confucianism, as well as Christianity) and out of representative indigenous traditions (such as the Polynesian, the Kayapóan, and Ojibwayan). I had recklessly ventured into the territories of many area specialists and expected to be spanked for the sort of amateur mistakes that so annoy professionals. Indeed, that was part of my plan. If I could provoke those more expert than I to correct my errors of interpretation, then the overall project of the book – to develop a global library of culture-specific ecological ethics – would be advanced (even though I would have to endure some embarrassment in the process). But so far, the area specialists (with one exception [James 1998]) who have read and commented on the book have been very kind and indulgent. To my surprise, what has generated the most controversy has been my sketch of “a reconstructive post-Modern environmental ethic” and the neomythic worldview in which it is embedded. So, I want to focus here on that issue. We need environmental ethics in Southern Asia as well as in Northern Europe, in the Middle East as well as in the Midwest. In our fin de millennium multicultural global village, to try to impose Western environmental ethics on non-Western peoples is no more conscionable or effective than to try to impose Western religious beliefs or political structures on them. But at the end of the day, to work up a mere collection of culture-specific environmental ethics and leave it at that seems unsatisfactory to me. Our most pressing and daunting environmental problems – climate change, species extinction, biological homogenization, the loss of biological diversity at every organizational level from the gene to the biome – are all global in scope (Schneider 1990; Wilson 1988; Reaka-Kudla et al. 1997). There is, moreover, one global atmosphere and one global ocean. So, it seems to me that we need to have some coordination of the several ecological ethics rooted in shamanism, Orthodox Christianity, Confucianism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, and so on, if we are to have coordination in the conservation policies inspired and informed by these ethics. I heartily endorse multiculturalism and pluralism. How often have we read a putatively comparative text and felt, after reading each chapter, that old sensation of déjà vu all over again? Each tradition conveys the same universal truths, but in a language and form that is peculiar to itself: Brahman equals the Tao equals God. Not only is such a redaction boring, it is distorting. Over the millennia and across the globe, human intellectual creativity has been nothing short of wonderful. Now, well into the post-
Myth and environmental philosophy 161 Modern interregnum, we realize that intellection is less a matter of homing in on an independently existing reality than a process of socially or culturally constructing a meaningful “reality.” But no less than the tendency toward universalism and absolutism that preceded it, untempered and uncomplemented by their opposites, multiculturalism and pluralism may be just as problematic and just as distorting. We need to orchestrate the many voices singing of a harmony with nature. Otherwise these many voices may create the conservation policy equivalent of a group of people … some singing opera, others jazz, pop, rock, and rap all at once. (Not a pleasant image.) In addition to the scores for each musician in the orchestra we need the intellectual equivalent of a conductor’s score to bring all the players into symphony. I am encouraged by the thought that although we are many peoples inhabiting many (cultural) worlds, we are also one species that ubiquitously inhabits one ecologically seamless biosphere. And today – for better or worse and whether we like it or not – almost everyone is bicultural. That is, almost everyone is a member and participant in at least one local culture (indeed, many of us are fluent in several) and also a member and participant in the culture of the global village. So much for the hints and rhetorical tropes. What is the solution to the “one-many problem” (if I may thus label it) in global conservation, the problem of unifying and coordinating the multicultural ecological ethics grounded in the world religions and indigenous worldviews? I suggest that we first posit an international or global environmental ethic, articulated in the intellectual currency of the international or global culture, and then indicate how that ethic might be related to the many culture-specific ethics which it is supposed to unify and coordinate. Several discourses enjoy global distribution – those of commerce and trade, those of geopolitics and intergovernmental relations, and that of science, salient among them. The discourse of commerce and trade is generally regarded as antithetical to environmental ethics. Political discourse is generally considered to be the global framework for implementing environmental policy, but not a substantive foundation for it. That leaves the discourse of science. While the religions practiced in India, China, and the Middle East differ radically from one another, the science practiced in all these places is the same. So, if an environmental ethic could be grounded in science, it would be universally intelligible and acceptable, at least among the world’s bicultural population, which I take to be constituted by the majority of the world’s people, as we enter the third millennium. The environmental ethic most thoroughly grounded in science, more particularly in evolutionary biology and ecology, is the Aldo Leopold land ethic, which I have long championed (Callicott 1989). In brief, Leopold borrowed wholesale Charles Darwin’s account of the origin and development of ethics and added an ecological element to it (Leopold 1949). According to Darwin, Homo sapiens, a quintessentially
162 J. Baird Callicott social species, evolved ethics to foster the integrity of primitive human communities, outside of which human survival and successful reproduction would have been impossible (Darwin 1871). Basically, Darwin argued, Homo sapiens inherited social instincts and sympathies from hominid, primate, and mammalian ancestors; then, when the evolving species acquired language, a vivid imagination, and enough intelligence to assess and recall the effects of various behaviors on society, types of behavior that tended to strengthen social integration were deemed “good” and those that tended to weaken it were deemed “bad” (Darwin 1871). As Darwin puts it with characteristic color, “No tribe could hold together if murder, robbery, treachery, &c., were common; consequently such crimes within the limits of the same tribe ‘are branded with everlasting infamy’” (Darwin 1871: 93). Leopold simply points out that the living world around us is represented in ecology as a “biotic community” (Leopold 1949: 203). When this representation of nature becomes widespread, our ancestral social instincts and sympathies should be stimulated and we should develop a “land ethic.” The bulk of his chef d’oeuvre, A Sand County Almanac, is devoted to bringing his readers around to an evolutionary-ecological worldview, in which other species are perceived as our phylogenetic kin and working partners in the economy of nature. Thus, the Leopold land ethic seems to “privilege” Modern science, which many contemporary environmentalists think is more a part of the problem than the solution. Or I should say more a part, and a big part at that, of the Problems, in the plural and with a capital “P.” Granted, we environmentalists and conservationists enjoy the benefits of Modern, science-inspired technology (printing presses, automobiles, antibiotics) no less than anyone else. But Modern science has also been the inspiration for the technologies (chain saws, bulldozers, DDT) that have polluted and ravaged the natural world, for the technologies (green revolution crops, industrial forestry, and other capital development schemes) that have ridden roughshod over local, bioregional economies and material cultures, not to mention weapons technologies (machine guns, tanks, bombers, land mines) that have killed and maimed millions of human beings over the course of the last century. And if those considerations are not enough to disqualify Modern science as the lingua franca for articulating an international or global ecological ethic to unify and coordinate the many culture-specific ecological ethics that are developing around the world also consider this: The mandarins of Modern science have been so certain that they and they alone have exclusive access to the Truth (with a capital “T”) about Reality (with a capital “R”), that the venerable knowledge systems of other cultures have been dismissed as myth – mere myth, in the pejorative sense of the word – and superstition. This epistemic arrogance is not only insufferable, it has wreaked havoc upon centuries-old local hydrological and agricultural systems that are embedded in pre-Modern worldviews. The unfortunate example of Bali here comes to mind (about
Myth and environmental philosophy 163 which more subsequently), but literally thousands of other cases could be cited (Lansing 1991; Lansing and Kremer 1995). That’s why it is essential to emphasize that I am certainly not suggesting that we ground a universally intelligible and acceptable environmental ethic in Modern science, but in post-Modern science. What’s the difference? And isn’t the phrase “post-Modern science” an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms. I’ll try to explain what I mean. First what is Modern? According to the dating scheme of historians of philosophy, the Modern period begins in the seventeenth century – in the over-simplified classroom version of this history, with Descartes, the socalled “father of Modern philosophy.” I think that the most important factor precipitating Modern philosophy is the dawning in the previous century of Modern science with the Copernican Revolution. Fully formed, Modern science is essentially characterized by Cartesian reductionism, Newtonian materialistic mechanism, and the experimental method. Reductionism, materialism, and mechanism were overthrown during the course of a second scientific revolution in the early twentieth century with the advent of quantum theory and the theories of special and general relativity, the most fundamental of the emerging post-Modern sciences. Thus, the beginning of the end of the Modern period coincides with the beginning of the twentieth century. Further, the metaphysics and epistemology associated with Modern science have been under sustained and withering attack since about the middle of the twentieth century. Hence, we are now well into the post-Modern period in both science and philosophy – namely (and simply) the historical period that follows the demise of the Modern period. Descartes began and considerably advanced the process of reconfiguring epistemology and metaphysics to accommodate the natural world as it was in the process of being reconstructed by Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo, a project to be consolidated by Newton. Thus, in my view, Modern philosophy is essentially characterized by the problems attendant on the metaphysical split between the res extensa (the extended or physical world) and the res cogitans (the nonphysical world of thought), articulated by Descartes. This dichotomy lies at the heart of Modern philosophical problems. Why, one wonders, did Descartes so sharply and fatefully distinguish between thought and extension, the mental and physical? In my opinion, Descartes made such a distinction mainly because, from a Modern scientific point of view, the physical world is very different from the way we perceive it via our senses. We perceive a world rich in sensory qualities – colors, sounds, odors, textures, flavors, and the like. The “real” world is barren of all such sensory qualities, for which Modern science substitutes measurable quantities – motions, frequencies, and the like. To account for this discrepancy, Descartes argued that our perception of the physical world is wholly subjective, located in the sensorium of the res cogitans.
164 J. Baird Callicott The res cogitans also includes the divine faculty of reason, which enables us to correct the deceptive image of the world supplied by our senses and construct a true scientific model of the “external” res extensa, expressed in the language of mathematics. In short, science pictures or represents a posited res extensa. Confined, however, to the res cogitans, the Cartesian ego always apprehends only a mental image or an idea of a posited “external” reality, never that extramental reality as it is in itself. We cannot step outside our minds and directly apprehend an unmediated independent reality and compare that reality to our mental model of it. Therefore, the central problem that Descartes bequeathed to subsequent Modern philosophers is the epistemological problem of how to achieve a perfect fit – correspondence, more technically – between our subjective image or model in the res cogitans and objective nature, the res extensa. Now, what is post-Modern? The Modern philosophical problem of truth has proved intractable. Descartes himself, followed by a legion of epistemological Don Quixotes, tried unsuccessfully to escape the skeptical conclusion to which his dualism leads. But, given the dualism, skepticism is inescapable. Post-Modernism is essentially characterized by a debunking, a deconstruction of the pretensions of Modern philosophy and science, especially their claims to positive truth. A cornerstone of reconstructive post-Modern science is the Uncertainty Principle. Deconstructive post-Modernism, in effect, collectivizes the solipsism into which Cartesian Modern philosophy inevitably descends. Representations of reality – worldviews – are socially constructed, not personally constructed. The world, as we know it, exists only in our discourse, instead of only in our minds. In contemporary deconstructive post-Modernism, Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am” is reconfigured as “We name, therefore things are what they are.” Because no one can directly apprehend an unmediated independent reality and compare that reality to various socially constructed representations of it, we are tempted to draw the conclusion that all socially constructed realities are epistemologically equal. We are free to believe or disbelieve any representation of reality – any discourse – we choose. While agreeing that an independent reality is forever beyond our epistemic powers to apprehend nakedly and that all that we do apprehend is a socially constructed representation embedded in a discourse, I find it difficult to take either one of two further steps. The first is hard-core metaphysical idealism, the assertion that there is no res extensa existing independently of the res cogitans (reconfigured as the res discursus). The deconstructive post-Modern equivalent of metaphysical idealism is the assertion that nothing exists beyond the text. The second is hard-core relativism, the opinion that no socially constructed representation of ever-elusive reality is more tenable than another. There exists, I believe, a reality independent of discourse. It is not, however, directly apprehensible. It actually exists, but is mediated by our human senses and by the manner
Myth and environmental philosophy 165 in which it is represented in our socially constructed discourses about it. We cannot, therefore, compare our various cultural representations of it with it to see which one more nearly corresponds – that is, to see which one is truer. But we might offer reasons, as I will argue shortly, to determine which one is more tenable than the others. In my opinion although deconstructive post-Modernism may be a useful tool for criticism, untempered by something more affirmative, it leads to nihilism and cynicism. Fortunately, there does exist a reconstructive alternative to deconstructive post-Modernism. Reconstructive post-Modernism has also been advanced by Frederick Ferré and Stephen Toulmin, among others; currently David Ray Griffin edits a series of books for SUNY Press called “Constructive Post-Modern Thought” (to which I have, incidentally, recently added a title [see Ferré 1976; Toulmin 1982; Callicott and da Rocha 1996]). Among scientists, as opposed to philosophers of science, the late quantum physicist David Bohm has been among the most outspoken architects of a reconstructed post-Modern scientific worldview (Bohm 1994). Let me briefly note the most salient features of a reconstructive postModern scientific worldview. Ontologically speaking, science no longer supports the Newtonian representation of space and time as a theater in which aggregates of matter move, collide, and recombine. In other words, it no longer supports a materialistic-mechanistic worldview. NonEuclidean space-time is more a matrix – what Bohm calls the “implicate order” – in relation to which matter and energy are but different modes or manifestations (Bohm 1994). Entities are internally related and mutually defining. Epistemologically speaking, reconstructive post-Modernism denies the positivistic claims to certain knowledge in Modern science. The observer, the scientist, is not a disembodied spectator, synoptically gazing at the observed system, nature. Indeterminacy and uncertainty are fundamental features of our human apprehension of nature. I think that ecology, with its emphasis on relationships and wholeness, is clearly and obviously in the ambit of post-Modern sciences. And, because ecology is more accessible to laypersons, especially as it has been mediated by such writers as Aldo Leopold, it contributes more directly to the development of a reconstructive post-Modern worldview than do such arcane sciences as relativity and quantum theory. As a nineteenth-century development, on the other hand, the theory of evolution is arguably a Modern, not a post-Modern science. One might even say that, in the principle of natural selection, Darwin provides a “mechanism” to explain speciation. But the upshot of the theory of evolution when extended to Homo sapiens is further to undermine the Cartesian distinction between the res extensa and the res cogitans. Human beings are, from an evolutionary point of view, precocious primates, and the human mind is a far-from-perfect practical instrument of survival, not a quasi-divine theoretical instrument of certain knowledge. Moreover, the theory of evolution undermines a parallel dualism, that segregating humanity from nature.
166 J. Baird Callicott From an evolutionary point of view, human beings are a part of nature and our apprehension of nature is that of an embedded participant, not that of an outside observer. Hence, human knowledge is never objective, but always variously situated, contextualized, and the opposite of disinterested. As reconstructive post-Modernism has matured, the project of reconstructing a post-Modern worldview, after the collapse of the Modern one, has become the project of reconstructing a post-Modern grand narrative, a post-Modern myth. After all, the concept of worldview is suspiciously ocular, visual, and is, thus, residually Cartesian, recidivistically Modern. A mythic narrative is primarily addressed to our oral/aural sensibilities and is, when “written down,” only secondarily and derivatively available to the eye. A mythic narrative is, and is unapologetically, a mere story. Such a narrative makes no claim to be the unvarnished truth, makes no claim on certainty; it is a self-confessed representation, and nothing more. A narrative may be characterized as “grand” when it tells a comprehensive story, a story that, when most comprehensive, includes everything. Theologian Thomas Berry and physicist Brian Swimme have collaborated to compose The Universe Story (Swimme and Berry 1992). They have been joined by astronomer Eric J. Chaisson, comparativists Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim, philosopher Loyal Rue, and theologian Gordon Kaufman, among others, to compose an epic of cosmic evolution as a grand narrative on the order of, and addressing the same problematics as, Genesis, the Theogony, the Enuma Elish, the Hawaiian Kumulipo and similar traditional origin myths. In the words of Loyal Rue, The Epic of Evolution is the sprawling interdisciplinary narrative of events that brought our universe from what Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry call the “Primordial Flaring Forth” to its present state of astonishing diversity and organization. In the course of these epic events, matter was distilled out of radiant energy, segregated into galaxies, collapsed into stars, fused into atoms, swirled into planets, spliced into molecules, captured into cells, mutated into species, compromised into ecosystems, provoked into thought, and cajoled into cultures. (Rue n.d.: 4) Although I have become a charter member of the board of directors of the newly formed Epic of Evolution Society, let me hasten to say that this is not exactly my project. Rather, I project a more modest, a more terrestrial than cosmic, evolutionary-ecological (semi-grand) mythic narrative, for the more limited purpose of soundly grounding a globally intelligible and acceptable environmental ethic. My story lines, that is, are more narrowly drawn than those of Swimme, Berry, and associates, and my whole story (for reasons I’ll get to in a moment) has yet to be told. Nevertheless, parti-
Myth and environmental philosophy 167 sans of the other and more popular and familiar wing of the post-Modern movement, the deconstructive wing, have been alarmed by it. Past grand narratives, often called “master narratives,” to bring out the point, have been “totalizing” and “hegemonic.” They are totalizing because they aim to be comprehensive. And they are hegemonic because they claim to be uniquely true; they brook no alternative organization – no other, different telling – of what they comprehend. The examples are too numerous to catalog. The Pentateuch and the Qur’an are, respectively, ancient and medieval texts that still function as totalizing and hegemonic master narratives. The Wealth of Nations and Das Kapital are more Modern and secular, but they, too, function as totalizing and hegemonic master narratives. In my opinion as a philosopher, the most insidious Modern master narratives of all are Descartes’ Meditations and Newton’s Principia. But these ancient, medieval, and Modern mythic texts do not advertise themselves as narratives, as stories, as myths. They variously claim to be the infallible word of God, demonstrated rational philosophy, value-free, disinterested, objective, and certain (or “positive”) natural or social science. To advertise your story as a story, to call it a “myth,” an “epic,” or a “grand narrative” is to disavow any intention to make a claim of truth or to deny the possibility of cogently organizing experience some other way, of telling some other meaningful story. That is not to say, as I hinted already, that I do not think some stories are more believable, more tenable than others. None are true, but I think that the stories that take their plot lines from post-Modern science are more believable or tenable than those that antedate science or that ignore it, for the following reasons. First, for a mythic grand narrative to be genuinely grand, it must be relatively comprehensive; it must take into account the full range of relevant human experience. And human experience has been greatly enlarged by the inquiries of science, both Modern and post-Modern, over the past four centuries. Our spatial and temporal horizons have been enormously expanded – by light years and geological epochs. Nor can we ignore such things as quasars, black holes, the fossil record, mitochondrial DNA, keystone species, and such. Any mythic grand narrative that does ignore such things simply leaves too much out to qualify as grand. Second, any mythic grand narrative contradicted by these things is simply not believable. If a defendant’s account of events in a criminal trial is contradicted by the physical evidence, the prosecuting attorney will likely convince the jury that the defendant’s story is not credible. Similarly, a grand narrative that is contradicted by the fossil record or evidence of an expanding universe is similarly less than credible. Third, though “a foolish consistency may be the hobgoblin of little minds,” our sojourn through Modernity has left us with a demand that any account of anything be logically – if not foolishly – consistent. If a defendant’s account of events in a criminal trial is internally inconsistent
168 J. Baird Callicott – self-contradictory – then the prosecuting attorney will likely convince the jury that the defendant’s story is cock and bull. Before the Modern era, readers may not have been disturbed by the fact that the two origin myths in the first several chapters of Genesis are prima facie inconsistent; now, critics pounce on that apparent inconsistency, and simple devotees struggle to reconcile the six-day account of creation with the Garden-ofEden account. Before any critical experiments are designed, a scientific theory is brought before the tribunal of the law of non-contradiction. So the mythic grand narratives informed by post-Modern science are likely to be logically more consistent than other alternatives, and thus more tenable. Fourth, while post-Modern science may present an ontology that is radically different from Modern science and make far more modest epistemological claims, there is a continuity between Modern and post-Modern science, else the latter would not be science at all. That continuity is most evident and complete in the adherence of post-Modern science to the scientific method of testing models, hypotheses, and theories in the crucible of experience. Hypotheses, theories, and models that are contradicted by deliberately sought novel experience are abandoned. Hence, scientific conclusions are always provisional and subject to revision – now often before the ink is dry on the peer-reviewed research paper. Post-Modern science and the mythic grand narratives based upon it are, therefore, selfcorrecting and always changing, in response to changing human experience and needs. Fifth, a good story, a tenable story must have aesthetic and spiritual appeal. The Modern mythic grand narrative which divorced spirit from body, mind from matter, and humankind from nature, and reduced nature to a valueless, meaningless plenum of space, time, and qualityless corpuscles is spiritually depauperate. Admittedly it has a certain aesthetic appeal, but only to our formal, logico-mathematical sensibilities; from a more sensuous point of view, it is aesthetically impoverished. The aesthetic and spiritual potential of post-Modern science is infinitely greater. The authors of the Universe Story and the Epic of Evolution are developing some aspects of it. On the terrestrial scale, E.O. Wilson’s works, Biophilia and The Diversity of Life develop other aspects of it (Wilson 1984; Wilson 1992). Incidentally, as an authority on his work, I am sometimes asked, what the eco-prophet Aldo Leopold’s spiritual orientation was? The assumption is that Leopold must have quietly ascribed to some distinctly religious worldview – Christianity, Buddhism, whatever – in addition to his postModern scientific worldview, because his writing betrays a deep spirituality. But that palpable spirituality flows from only one source and that is the evolutionary-ecological myth. As he says directly in Sand County, It is a century now since Darwin gave us the first glimpse of the origin of species. We know now what was unknown to all the preceding
Myth and environmental philosophy 169 caravan of generations: that [people] are only fellow-voyagers with other creatures in the odyssey of evolution. This new knowledge should have given us, by this time, a sense of kinship with fellowcreatures; a wish to live and let live; a sense of wonder over the magnitude and duration of the biotic enterprise. (Leopold 1949: 109) The beauty of the biota is one of only three things – the others are its integrity and stability – that the land ethic requires us to preserve. Sixth, and finally, a tenable myth must meet a pragmatic criterion. It must facilitate the survival and prosperity of its subscribers. At first, Modern science seemed preeminently practical. Applied, it enabled its subscribers to throw projectiles ever farther, to go from here to there ever faster, to mine the Earth ever deeper, finally, even to walk on the moon. However, the twentieth-century environmental crisis has now undermined confidence in the Cartesian-Baconian dream of a human conquest of nature by means of a scientifically informed technology. The short- and mid-term successes of the Modern scientific worldview are now overshadowed by the long-term prospect of ecological cataclysm. The emerging grand narrative of post-Modern science by contrast emphasizes embeddedness, not transcendence; cooperation, not conquest; wholeness, not fragmentation. It may, therefore, inspire its subscribers to better adapt, long-term, to the ecological exigencies of the biosphere, and thus prolong human tenure on the planet. Here, I may be too keen to favorably compare reconstructive to deconstructive post-Modernism. Recently, Lois Lorentzen and Heather Eaton have pointedly reminded us of the value of deconstructive post-Modernism to environmental philosophy (Lorentzen 1997; Eaton 1997). Accordingly, we may think of the two wings of the post-Modern movement as more complementary than competitive. Deconstructive post-Modernism in Eaton’s words provides a “profound hermeneutic of suspicion” (Eaton 1997: 115). But like the Socratic elenchus it yields only negative conclusions. In his book, Post-Modernism and the Environmental Crisis, Arran Gare argues that the success of the deconstructive wing of the postModern movement has created a space, a clearing for the reconstructive wing (Gare 1995). No inherited assumption has escaped deconstructive post-Modernism’s profound hermeneutic of suspicion. Hence, any reconstructive project must be taken up with an explicit awareness of its limitations, the power relationships it structures, and its personal, social, and cultural context or situation. It must also expressly eschew any totalizing tendencies and hegemonic ambitions. So much then for the “one” aspect of the one-many problem. How do the many culture-specific ecological ethics relate to the one, the global or international reconstructive post-Modern ecological ethic that I recommend? In a word, dialectically.
170 J. Baird Callicott The first moment of this dialectical relationship is mutual validation. The posture of Modern science toward local knowledge systems is dismissive and derisive. The posture of post-Modern science is attentive, open, and occasionally thunderstruck with astonished admiration. For example, anthropologists Terrence Turner and Darrell Posey, and later geographer Susanna Hecht and journalist Alexander Cockburn, describe the agroecology of the Kayapó. The text of this story is that of the productivity and efficiency of Kayapó swidden horticulture, their management of fallows, and their creation of apêtê, or small resource-rich forest islands in the open country of their territories in Brazil. But the subtext is that this local knowledge system is valid because it resonates with – jibes with – contemporary ecological knowledge. Hecht and Cockburn are quite explicit. They refer to the Kayapó knowledge system as “native science.” And they draw out one comparison between Kayapó science and ecological science at some length. After the forest trees are felled and burned, the Kayapó: then plant short-cycle crops such as corn, beans, melons, and squash [which] rapidly cover large areas, along with longer-cycle crops that can be harvested anywhere from six months to two years after the planting. In their use of short-cycle, light-tolerant species that gradually give way to woody fruits, the principles of [ecological] succession are maintained. The grasses, corn, fast-growing vines, the squashes, sweet potatoes, and melons all mirror the types of plant families found in early [ecological] succession. The role of weedy solanum is taken on by their domestic cousins – peppers. The ubiquitous euphorbia of successional vegetation find their analogs in manioc. … The rapid uptake of nutrients by plants that root at different depths and have cycles of different lengths mimics what happens in [unmanaged ecological] plant succession in the tropics. Short-lived plants are gradually replaced with longer-lived species. [Finally] the Kayapó stimulate forest succession in their fallows by making sure that the agricultural sites incorporate the necessary elements to recuperate forests, which are often as valuable to them as the agriculture. (Hecht and Cockburn 1989: 38–9) The fact that the recently developed ecological knowledge system and the traditional Kayapóan knowledge system agree on principles of succession is mutually validating, and, moreover, the kudos go to the Kayapó for hitting upon these “ecological” principles first. Another example. In the early 1970s, with the help of the Asian Development Bank, Indonesia began switching from traditional rice cultivation techniques to Green Revolution methods (Lansing 1991). Traditionally, indigenous “land races” of grain were planted, and Hindu priests presiding over temples of the water goddess, Dewi Danu, rationed water to different regions of the Indonesian island of Bali at different times of the growing
Myth and environmental philosophy 171 season (Lansing and Kremer 1995). The water not only irrigated the crops, it drowned weeds and pests, if properly timed. Importing genetically uniform high-yield strains that depend on inputs of fertilizers, herbicides, fungicides, and pesticides, Green Revolution scientists rode roughshod over the time-honored and -tested techniques of the Balinese “rice cult,” as they disparaged it (Lansing and Kremer 1995). All farmers were encouraged to plant at the same time and grow several crops a year in the same paddies. The result was a disaster on Bali: there was a water shortage and pests and plant diseases were epidemic and out of control. After much suffering, the Balinese returned to their traditional methods. Computer models subsequently showed that the water management schedules divined by the Dewi-Danu priests were more efficient than any alternative (Lansing 1991). Here again, post-Modern science (computer modeling) and native knowledge (that of the water priests) were mutually validating. On the other hand, those local knowledge systems which conflict with post-Modern ecological science and post-Modern political values are not treated with the same respect and reverence. For example, the local knowledge systems which postulate powdered rhino horn as an aphrodisiac are indignantly condemned as superstition, just as those worldviews in which female circumcision is an appropriate rite of passage are indignantly condemned as barbaric. Respect for the discourse of the Other has its limits. I suggest its limits are often those staked out by post-Modern science. The second moment of the dialectical relationship between the many culture-specific ecological ethics and the one global or international reconstructive post-Modern ecological ethic that I commend is co-creation. Unlike the Universe Story now become the Epic of Evolution, my globalecological-ethic myth is a story that is still being made up. The discourse of post-Modern science, no less than – indeed, perhaps more than – that of Modern science, is dry, bloodless, and abstract, and accessible only to initiates. Hence, a scientific narrative can never, in itself, be a popular mythology. But to be influential, it must be popular. It must therefore be mediated. I think I know what Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers mean in Order Out of Chaos when they describe living organisms thermodynamically as “dissipative structures,” but I don’t think that such a description is going to create much excitement outside the very narrow circle of intellectual elites (Prigogine and Stengers 1984). Even more unlikely to be a popular hit is David Bohm’s idea of an “implicate order” underlying its manifestation as matter and energy. The world religions and the many indigenous traditions, on the other hand, have had centuries of experience formulating the most abstract and inaccessible ideas in arresting images, such as the Jeweled Net of Indra or the Yin-Yang mandala. When such traditions of thought resonate well with the post-Modern evolutionaryecological narrative, such images, similes, and metaphors may be incorporated into the global grand narrative. In that way the world’s diverse traditional cultures, the many, may participate in the creation of
172 J. Baird Callicott the one, the global or international reconstructive post-Modern ecological ethic that I project. And in that way they may also own it. I seek a middle path between claims to absolute truth and universality, on the one hand, and claims of absolute difference and otherness, on the other. I also seek a middle path between the politics of hegemony and the politics of identity and difference. I am inspired to seek a middle path by the observation that while we are many people – Chinese people, Kayapó people, Polynesian people – we are also just people, equally and indifferently members of one species, Homo sapiens. While we inhabit many cultural worlds – the Confucian world, the Dreamtime world, the Christian world (between which some of the more cosmopolitan among us move with perfect ease) – we also inhabit one ecologically seamless biosphere, one planet, washed by one ocean, enveloped in one atmosphere. We are many and also one. We are different and also the same. Can we not correspondingly, therefore, have many different culturally specific ecological ethics and one global ecological ethic to unite and orchestrate them? To better blend the one and the many, moreover, the new mythic grand narrative I envision, though grounded in and growing out of contemporary post-Modern science, is co-created by all cultures because in articulating it I suggest we draw on the rich fund of image, simile, and metaphor in indigenous and traditional worldviews. Moreover, the one globally intelligible and acceptable ecological ethic and the many culture-specific ecological ethics mutually reinforce and validate one another, so they exist in a reciprocal, fair, equal, and mutually sustaining partnership.
Bibliography Alvarez, L.W., Alvarez, W, Asaro, F. and Michael, H.V. (1980) “Extraterrestrial Cause for the Cretaceous-Tertiary Extinction,” Science, 208: 1095–1098. Bohm, D. (1994) “Post-Modern Science and a Post-Modern World,” in C. Merchant (ed.), Ecology, Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press. Callicott, J.B. (1989) In Defense of the Land Ethic: Essays in Environmental Philosophy, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. —— (1994) Earth’s Insights: A Multicultural Survey of Ecological Ethics from the Mediterranean Basin to the Australian Outback, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Callicott, J.B. and da Rocha, F.J.R. (eds) (1996) Earth Summit Ethics: Toward a Reconstructive Post-Modern Philosophy of Environmental Education, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Darwin, C. (1871) The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, Vol. 1, London: John Murray. Eaton, H. (1997) “Earth’s Insights … and inadequacies,” Worldviews, 1: 113–21. Ferré, F. (1976) Shaping the Future: Resources for the Post-Modern World, NewYork: Harper and Row. Gare, A. (1995) Postmodernism and the Environmental Crisis, London: Routledge. Hecht, S.B. and Cockburn, A. (1989) The Fate of the Forest: Developers, Destroyers, and Defenders of the Amazon, New York: Verso.
Myth and environmental philosophy 173 James, G.A. (1998) “The Construction of India in Some Recent Environmental Philosophy,” Worldviews, 2: 3–20. Kellert, S.R. (1996) The Value of Life: Biological Diversity and Human Society, Washington, DC: Island Press. Lansing, J.S. (1991) Priests and Programmers: Technologies of Power in the Engineered Landscape of Bali, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lansing, J.S. and Kremer, J.N. (1995) “A Socioecological Analysis of Balinese Water Temples,” in D.M. Warren, L.J. Slikkerveer and D. Brokensha (eds), The Cultural Dimension of Development: Indigenous Knowledge Systems, London: Intermediate Technology Publications. Leopold, A. (1949) A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There, New York: Oxford University Press. Lorentzen, L.A. (1997) “What is Post-Modern about Earth’s Insights?” Worldviews, 1: 123–9. Oelschlaeger, M. (1994) Caring for Creation: An Ecumenical Approach to the Environmental Crisis, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Prigogine, I. and Stengers, I. (1984) Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature, New York: Bantam Books. Rampino, M.R. and Strothers, R.B. (1984) “Terrestrial Mass Extinctions: Cometary Impacts and the Earth’s Motion Perpendicular to the Galactic Plane,” Nature, 308: 709–12. Raup, D.M. (1986) “Biological Extinction in Earth History,” Science, 231: 1528–33. —— (1988) “Diversity Crises in the Geologic Past,” in E.O. Wilson (ed.), Biodiversity, Washington, DC: National Academy Press. Raup, D.M. and Sepkoski, J.J. (1984) “Periodicity of Extinctions in the Geologic Past,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 8: 801–5. Reaka-Kudla, M.L., Wilson, D.E. and Wilson, E.O. (eds) (1997) Biodiversity II, Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences. Reuther, R.R. (1997) “Judaism and Christianity in Earth’s Insights,” Wordviews, 1: 163–6. Rue, L. (n.d.) “Confessions of a Shallow Environmentalist,” unpublished manuscript. Schneider, S.H. (1990) Global Warming: Are We Entering the Greenhouse Century?, New York: Vintage Books. Swimme, B. and Berry, T. (1992) The Universe Story: From the Primordial Flaring Forth to the Ecozoic Era – A Celebration of the Unfolding Cosmos, San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco. Toulmin, S. (1982) Return to Cosmology: Post-Modern Science and the Theology of Nature, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. White, Jr, L. (1967) “The Historical Roots of our Ecologic Crisis,” Science, 155: 1203–7. Wilson, E.O. (1984) Biophilia: The Human Bond with Other Species, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. —— (ed.) (1988) Biodiversity, Washington, DC: National Academy Press. —— (1992) The Diversity of Life, Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
9
Myth and ideology Christopher Flood
I. Introduction The present chapter examines the relationship between myth and ideology in modern societies. It adopts a definition of ideology which refers specifically to politics, and the types of myth with which it is concerned are defined as political myths. The word myth makes frequent appearances in news reports on political events. Many scholarly publications on political or historical topics refer to myth in their titles or in the body of the text. It might therefore be expected that the relationship between myth and ideology in the politics of modern societies would have received widespread attention as an object of theoretical definition and debate. But that is not the case. Theoretical work on the subject is sparse. It is scattered among publications catering for different readerships, ranging from political scientists and historians to sociologists, anthropologists, communications specialists, and literary/cultural theorists. In itself, that is not a bad thing, because it could be a source of richness in diversity. Reciprocal benefits could be derived from comparing the results given by different conceptual and methodological approaches. In practice, however, it has meant impoverishment through fragmentation, lack of debate, and failure to challenge inadequate arguments. The relative lack of theoretical work in this area is especially striking when it is compared with the large body of material devoted to the general theory of myth (which I will call the theory of sacred myth to avoid confusion) or to the theory of ideology, both of which are intimately related to the theory of political myth. The definition of sacred myth and the conceptualization of ideology have each been the object of competition between rival schools of thought within their respective fields. To some extent the very absence of consensus as to their nature or function has been a mark of their status as desirable properties for symbolic appropriation. However, while most researchers into the theory of sacred myth have shown little or no interest in the theory of ideology, and most theorists of ideology have paid little or no attention to the theory of sacred myth, so, too, the theory of political myth has been largely overlooked by both
Myth and ideology 175 camps. Conversely, scholars who have concerned themselves with political myth have tended to locate their work either in relation to the theory of sacred myth, with perhaps a few brief remarks on the concept of ideology, or, more rarely, in relation to the theory of ideology, with perhaps some cursory allusions to the theory of sacred myth. Few have given due weight to both. My aim here is to consider the nature of political myths, the forms in which they present themselves, and the functions which they can serve. Since I want to argue for a model which places political myth at the intersection of the theory of sacred myth and the theory of ideology, I will first define my use of both of those terms, because they correspond to contested concepts.
II. Sacred myth My discussion of sacred myth will be very brief since other chapters in this collection offer detailed analysis of its characteristics. For present purposes, a limited range of features need to be emphasized. First, there is the difference between the pejorative usage of the term myth in everyday language and the more neutral, technical definitions of myth found in the work of many contemporary anthropologists and historians of religion. In its popular acceptance, a myth is usually taken to be an account of events, or simply a collective belief, which is or was given the status of truth by a social group but is believed to be untrue or illusory by the person who calls it a myth. This usage has a very long history, with its roots in ancient Greece (Lincoln 2000 sheds new light on this). However, the approaches to myth adopted by many anthropologists and historians of religion start from the assumption that myth should be defined by its discursive form, types of content, cultural status and social functions, not by the question of objective truth or untruth (on the various schools of thought, see Doty 1986; Dundes 1984; Segal 1999). The discursive form is taken to be narrative – that is to say, the recounting of chronological sequences of events which are represented as being linked to each other by causal or other relationships. The specification of narrative form distinguishes myths from the theologies which have developed as bodies of argumentation within major world religions. It also distinguishes them from liturgies and hymns, as well as from non-verbal forms such as ritual movements and from iconic objects, such as pictures, sculpture or masks – though these forms may be linked with myth in various ways. As regards their content, sacred myths of ancient or modernday traditional societies are often concerned with origins: theogonies (stories of the origins of the gods); cosmogonies (stories of the origins of the world); anthropogonies (stories of the origin of human beings); or sociogonies (stories of the origins of society, often involving culture heroes). Some mythologies also include eschatological prophecies of the
176 Christopher Flood end of the world, based on varying conceptions of history (cyclical, linear or both), as is the case also in the Bible, for example (apocalyptic and millenarian prophecies). The fact that myths have the cultural status of sacred truth in the societies or groups to which they belong separates them from other types of narrative which are considered profane, whether or not they are taken to be true. For those who believe them to be sacred truths, recounting and listening to myths is a process of communication with the metaphysical world of gods and spirits, at particular times and under particular circumstances in accordance with practices required by their beliefs. But sacred myths can also be considered in terms of the range of cognitive, affective and social functions which they appear to fulfill for the communities in which they are operative. Among these we might include expressing the nature of the world and what is in it, gods, humans, animals, etc.; accounting for sacred sites, objects, practices and rituals; establishing relationships with time, the seasons, etc.; modeling beliefs and practices by reference to origins or precedent; symbolizing and cementing community; validating social forms, social hierarchy, and social segmentation (though they may also serve competition between status groups); and evoking powerful emotional responses such as fear, yearning, elation and relief.
III. Ideology What about ideology? Again, this is not the place to embark on a review of the many different schools of thought (Eagleton 1991 and McLellan 1986 remain useful overviews). Suffice it to point to some features of different approaches which are of value for the purpose of defining political myth. Broadly, there is a divide between two main traditions. The Marxist and neo-Marxist current – which had lost much of its support by the 1990s – views ideology in terms of the ways in which ideas reflect, and are used consciously or unconsciously in support of class and power relations in society (for surveys of the tradition, see Barrett 1991; Hawkes 1996). The more recent versions of this approach have concentrated on the ways in which dominant social groups have established and maintained hegemony by dissimulating, naturalizing, dehistoricizing and justifying the unequal and inequitable social order particular to a given phase of economic development. They are not concerned merely with political ideas, but more broadly with entire cultural formations in which the systems of meaning in every sphere of social activity express ideology, such that all symbolic and other forms of interaction are sites of ideological conflict between dominant and dominated groups. The old claim that only Marxism offered an objective, scientific, non-ideological view of history and society gave way to the somewhat weaker claim that Marxism was superior to other systems of social thought. Still, Marxists remained preoccupied by the need to unmask ideology insofar as it functions as a support
Myth and ideology 177 for conditions of economic exploitation and social injustice. The point to note for present purposes is that interest in the extent to which ideology pervades every sphere of social life produced valuable research into the cultural transmission of ideology through different types of discourse, different social institutions (such as the family, the education system, the media), different social contexts, including ritual and ceremonial occasions, and different art forms, for example. The non-Marxist tradition, which has been particularly prominent in Western political science, and the subject of countless textbooks, has focused more narrowly on the notion of ideologies as political belief systems (for recent examples, see Eatwell and Wright 2000; Eccleshall et al. 2001; Heywood 1998; Macridis and Hulliung 1996). The type of core definition which this produces is exemplified by Martin Seliger in his classic work, Ideology and Politics (1976), according to which ideologies are “sets of ideas by which men [and women] posit, explain and justify ends and means of organized social action, and specifically political action, irrespective of whether such action aims to preserve, amend, uproot or rebuild a given social order” (14). Thus, an ideology is a particular political belief system (anarchism or fascism, for example), whereas ideology as a generic noun covers the characteristics common to all political belief systems. On this definition any such system is considered to be an ideology. Notwithstanding their unease with the relativism to which this approach can lead, most exponents have taken it that, for methodological purposes at least, no such system is privileged or in some sense above ideology. Ideology is represented in terms of the types of thought which it manifests (from fundamental assumptions about human nature and society, normative values, ultimate goals, principles of action, to policy positions, political attitudes, and contextual responses to events), and/or questions of rationality and irrationality in ideological thinking, and/or the combinations of concepts which structure ideologies (see Freeden 1996 for a particularly sophisticated morphological model of ideologies as particular, evolving configurations of decontested concepts organized around central cores), and/or the types of social functions that ideologies fulfill (many of them comparable to those associated with sacred myth, including cognitive, explanatory, legitimatory, evaluative, affective, integrative, agitative). Theorizations of ideology within this tradition do not usually address the issue of discursive form in a systematic way. That is usually left to sociolinguists and others specializing in political discourse or studying the relationship between language and power (for example, Bourdieu 1991; Fairclough 1989; Lemke 1995). Seliger (1976) was one of the partial exceptions among political scientists theorizing ideology. He couched the matter in terms of the types of statement which constitute the formal structure of ideological argument. In Seliger’s model the structure combines moral prescriptions (normative statements relating to justice and the public good), technical prescriptions (normative statements of expediency,
178 Christopher Flood prudence, and efficiency), implements (stating ways and means of implementing strategy and policy), rejections (negations of principles and valuations in other, rival ideologies), analyses, and descriptions, since social phenomena are described and analyzed in ways which carry the imprint of the values, assumptions, goals, etc., of the producer of the discourse. Seliger makes no mention of narrative, even to exclude it from his model, and he has by no means been alone in this. The stated or unstated assumption in the political science literature is that the characteristic form of ideological discourse is argument – making and supporting sets of claims which purport to be the expression of logical reasoning on the basis of valid evidence. It may be acknowledged that the persuasive force of the arguments will also depend on the rhetorical devices used to present the argument in a manner that not only appears coherent and consistent, but which also appeals to the attitudes and emotions of the audience. But the extent to which ideological communication also depends on the use of narrative is often mentioned only in passing, if at all (see Thompson 1984 and 1990 for a valuable exception). Interest in the uses of narrative as a vehicle for ideology has been far more heavily concentrated among specialists in literature, linguistics, media or film, often working within neo-Marxist or post-Marxist frameworks but developing analytical methods which are potentially adaptable to the analysis of political discourse in the light of non-Marxist conceptions of ideology of the type associated with the political science tradition. Similarly, although there has been only limited interest among political scientists in communication of ideologies through political ritual and ceremony, artistic forms such as painting and sculpture, or memorializations in museums and other sites, the work of the minority can be supplemented with insights drawn from research in other disciplines (Horne 1984; Kertzer 1988; Connerton 1989, for example). All of these forms are relevant to understanding the importance of political myth. In the remainder of the chapter I will outline a model of political myth, then unpack some of its implications.
IV. A model of political myth How is political myth to be defined in relation to sacred myth on the one hand, and political ideology on the other? Let us take the relationship with sacred myth first. As regards form and content, I take it that modern political myths are narratives of past, present, or predicted political events which tellers present to their audiences as truthful, intelligible and meaningful. They relate stories which can often be grouped in broadly similar categories to those which have been applied to the myths of traditional societies – such as stories of origins and foundings, stories of the exploits of culture heroes, stories of rebirth or renewal, and eschatological stories. In general, political myths do not have sacred status in secular societies, but they need to be accepted as fundamentally valid by an identifiable
Myth and ideology 179 group, whatever its size or constituency. The word valid in this context, should not only be taken to mean true in the sense of being sufficiently faithful to the most important facts (as those facts are understood by those to whom the account is communicated in any instance) but also being sufficiently faithful to the interpretation of the facts, sufficiently faithful to the relationship between the facts, and sufficiently faithful to their meaning and significance. In a manner analogous to sacred myth, such stories need to be transmitted and received as what Eliade calls exemplar history (1958: 430). They need to carry sufficient authority, in Bruce Lincoln’s sense, to have paradigmatic value as “simultaneously a ‘model of’ and a ‘model for’ reality” among those who believe them (1989: 24). Hence, they can have political functions broadly comparable to those served by the myths of traditional societies in relation to the distribution of power. Modern political myths, especially those established over long periods of time, will be expressed in many variants, given that no one narration of a story is likely to be absolutely identical to any other. When we allude to the existence of a particular myth, we are referring to what is more or less constant in a number of instances of narrative discourse. In other words, a political myth can be said to exist when accounts of a more or less common sequence of events, involving more or less the same principal actors, subject to more or less the same overall interpretation and implied meaning, circulate within a social group. Different political myths can also be classed together as mythologies when they are perceived as being related to each other by the fact of being circulated within a particular social group and/or by sharing elements of their subject-matter. Moreover, just as sacred myths often come to be incorporated in other literary forms, such as epic poetry, or to be echoed in folktales, political myths may be relayed in forms other than narrative prose or be echoed in works of fiction. Like sacred myths, political myths can be represented in iconic forms, such as paintings, posters, and sculpted monuments, and they can be associated with collective ceremonies, rites, hallowed dates, and venerated sites. At the same time, if we are to maintain that political myths should be considered as a type of ideological discourse, they need to be distinguished from other modes of ideological discourse but be shown to be in complementary relationship with them as to their form, their content, and their functions. They must be identified as vehicles of ideological beliefs and as supports for ideological arguments. Political myths are therefore in competition with one another insofar as they represent competing ideologies. In the modern context, then, a political myth can be defined as an ideologically marked account of past, present, or predicted political events. By ideologically marked, I mean that the narrative discourse carries the imprint of the assumptions, values, and goals associated with a specific ideology or identifiable family of ideologies, and that it therefore conveys an explicit or implicit invitation to assent to a particular ideological standpoint and potentially to act in accordance with it. The ideological marking
180 Christopher Flood of the narrative is therefore an objective property of the account, as told in any instance, though the ideological coloring may be more pronounced or less so. The notion of ideological marking includes what is there in the discourse, what it actually says by virtue of the words it uses. But the notion also covers ideologically pertinent aspects of what lies outside the boundaries of the discourse, in terms of what it might have said, yet did not say, by virtue of the value-relevant choices of topic and treatment involved in its production as this particular discourse rather than any other. The choices among possible alternatives in the selection of information, the attribution of qualities, motives, and objectives to historical actors, inferences concerning relationships of cause and effect, use of descriptive terms or other lexical items, grammatical constructions, overall organization, location of the narrative, and any other factors are all relevant insofar as they contribute to the orientation of the discourse in the direction of one ideological current as opposed to another. Hence, the term mythopoeic can be applied to any political narrative to the extent that it is ideologically marked. The term indicates that the narrative has objective characteristics which could potentially produce or reproduce a political myth. In short, the question of whether the events recounted in the narrative really did occur is only one aspect of the matter, although it is obviously important. The questions of selection, framing, and interpretation must also be taken into account. Yet, to assert that a narrative is mythopoeic does not absolutely require a judgment of the often imponderable issue of whether, or to what extent, the teller of the narrative consciously intended it to serve an ideological purpose. Naturally, inferences can be drawn from evidence external or internal to the discourse, and it is always tempting to do so. But in principle, a professional historian, a political scientist, a journalist, or some other political commentator – even a politician – may seek to explain a given political issue with what he or she takes to be absolute objectivity and with no conscious aim to influence the intended audience beyond making them better informed about the issue. Nevertheless, to the extent that the account signals its teller’s political values and is thus a vehicle for their potential transmission, it is marked by ideology and is therefore mythopoeic. Mythmaking is a communication process which involves reception as well as (re)production. To state that a narrative is mythopoeic is merely to judge the properties of the discourse itself, without reference to how that discourse is received by an audience. But to be the expression of a myth the telling of a given narrative in any particular instance needs to be perceived as being adequately faithful to the most important facts and the correct interpretation of a story which a social group already accepts or subsequently comes to accept as true. It will carry authority when it is communicated in an appropriate way, by an appropriate teller or set of tellers, in an appropriate historical, social, and ideological context. The extent to which there is latitude for variation or even questioning of particular elements in the story will no doubt depend on a range of factors
Myth and ideology 181 proper to the group within which it circulates, the type of ideology by which it is marked, and the story’s centrality or otherwise to the structure of the ideology as a whole. Conversely, the narrative will be described as myth (or some other more or less synonymous term) in the pejorative sense by those who consider the account to be factually untrue or significantly distorted in its selection and/or interpretation of relevant true facts. Among the disbelievers there may be people who broadly share the ideology by which the story is marked but still believe the story itself to be misleading in its account of the reality which it purports to represent. Ideological match does not guarantee belief. Neither does ideological mismatch guarantee disbelief. Nevertheless, rejection is especially likely among those whose ideological orientation is different. The more different the ideological orientation – the less comfortable the ideological fit between the telling and the receiving in a given situation – the more likely the rejection. In principle, academic analysts who aspire to objectivity should be honorary, permanent members of the skeptical group, even or above all when a particular account attracts their own ideological sympathy. Even if the analyst does not have evidence that a particular mythopoeic account has been challenged by others, he/she can identify the ideological marking and, where appropriate, compare the narrative with actual or hypothetical alternative interpretations of (more or less) the same events marked by different ideologies. In summary, a working definition of political myth would be: an ideologically marked narrative which purports to give a true account of a set of past, present, or predicted political events and which is accepted as valid in its essentials by a social group. A short definition of mythopoeic political discourse would be: an ideologically marked narrative which purports to give a true account of past, present, or predicted political events (for more detailed exploration and illustration of the model, see Flood 2002 [1996]).
V. Form and function Applied to politics, the loose, popular usage of myth not only covers any story, but any political belief, which is widely and deeply held to be true within a social group, but which is untrue in the eyes of those who call it a myth. It corresponds to claims of the type: “It is a myth that x exists, or that x is as described, or that x happened that way.” Likewise, many nontheoretical academic treatments of political myths do not assume that myth has a specific discursive form. For example, the entries under the heading of myth in Political Science Abstracts for the randomly chosen year of 1997 contain statements such as: “Another liberal myth is that deficits help poor people”; or “this article also examines the myth that the FDA is an overzealous watchdog imposing unnecessary burdens on the companies that it regulates”; or “the real problem is that the best case for affirmative action challenges the American myth that landing a job, or
182 Christopher Flood college admission, is based entirely on personal merit.” In other words, whether or not the misbelief is taken to have arisen from distorted accounts of events, the term myth does not necessarily refer to the stories themselves but to a belief which could equally be expressed in other forms. One strand of the theoretical literature is close to this approach. It designates political myth as a particular kind of distorted belief or idea, then seeks to define the psychological drives or needs which lead to such beliefs and the types of political situations which favor them. It does not give systematic attention to how the beliefs are expressed. That is the approach in Georges Sorel’s brief but highly influential discussion in Reflections on Violence (1961 [1908]), or in Ernst Cassirer’s The Myth of the State (1946), and in some more recent studies, such as John Girling’s Myths and Politics in Western Societies (1993). However, since the primary evidence for claiming the existence of a shared belief usually consists of the words uttered by the alleged believers, an adequate conception of myth must surely include the mode of discourse in which myths are articulated. Otherwise, the notion is too vague to produce rigorous analysis when applied to empirical cases. The danger is that it will produce simplistic claims which assume that some particular key word, phrase, or sentence is invariably used with the same meaning in many different instances and testifies to the same investment of the same belief in every instance. In any case, if the idea of political myth is reduced to cover little more than irrational, illusory, or otherwise distorted political beliefs, and is associated with functions such as mobilization, group identification, and legitimation, it becomes identical to the notion of ideology in some of its cruder, critical definitions. Besides the fact that this is an unsatisfactory, impoverished definition of ideology itself, why deplete the theory of political myth, when it is both possible and useful to define myth and ideology as distinct but related political concepts? However, many non-theoretical studies claiming to deal with myths do, in fact, focus on widely accepted narrative accounts which the commentator considers to be incorrect or seriously distorted. Journalistic writing frequently uses the term in this way, especially when purporting to unmask deliberate distortions of truth by manipulators of opinion. Similarly, it is widely found in historical works which purport to rectify a longestablished popular misbelief, or else to refute a long-standing error of interpretation within professional historical writing. A similar approach can also be found in prospective analyses by political scientists and others arguing against commonly accepted predictions of how a particular process or situation will develop in the future. In this type of context the claim to be unmasking a myth almost automatically implies the assertion that the writer is able to offer an explanation of how the myth came into existence in the first place and that he or she can offer a more accurate alternative account of what actually occurred or, in the case of predictions, will have occurred. Various types of
Myth and ideology 183 factors may be put forward to explain how a myth arose. First, a myth may be taken to have resulted partly from accident, through the inadequacy of available evidence or the incompetence of the person reporting and/or interpreting it. A second way in which myths may arise is when a story has been more or less unwittingly distorted by the ideological bias of those who generate it, as their preconceptions have led them to see what they expected to see in the evidence. This type of mythmaking has often been revealed by the work of historians investigating the work of earlier historians whose version of events has previously been widely accepted as a keystone of cultural transmission in a particular society. A third way shades over into the unmasking of propaganda by suggesting more or less deliberate manipulation on behalf of or against some particular group. Fourth, there can be other complex mixtures of processes, such as those which have been shown to occur in the production of news stories by media organizations. Even in a democracy which legally permits freedom of expression, there can be many constraints on the reporting of events and the subsequent editorial process, subject to censorship or selfcensorship within the organization concerned, pressure from advertisers, pressure from proprietors, pressure from government, legal confines, market competition for readers, etc. (see Chomsky 1989 and Parenti 1986 for radical critiques). These factors interact with questions of professional ethics, the personalities of individuals involved, the ideological values of journalists, and the nature of the events reported. All of the processes mentioned above can combine over time to shape the long-term history, currency, and mutations of myths which become central to the self-understanding of a social group, especially when they become keystones of a national culture relayed through political, educational and other institutions. Much of this type of research is very interesting, but the straightforward equation of myth with the idea of a story that is false/distorted but widely believed is rather crude and loose, although it does at least assume that myth has a characteristic discursive form, which is narrative. It leaves too many questions concerning the grounds for claiming that someone else’s account is a myth. For purposes of scholarly analysis the issue should not simply revolve around establishing the facts of the events recounted. Of course, there can be conflict as to whether a particular event did or did not occur in reality. Or there may be dispute as to whether some important facts have been accidentally or deliberately excluded from a given account. But, as any historian will know, what counts as a salient fact is itself a matter of interpretation (on recent debates among historians concerning truth and representation in historical writing, see, for example, Fay et al. 1998; Munslow 1997). So, too, is the description of the events which do figure in the account or the relationships which the teller of the story establishes between those events. After all, in a finite discourse the selection of information for inclusion necessarily entails the exclusion of other information. The degree of detail
184 Christopher Flood and emphasis given to some events represents a choice of precedence as to whether one set will be foregrounded at the expense of others. The ordering of the discourse produces particular effects, as does the rhetorical choice of vocabulary and syntax. All of this affects the conclusion which is stated or implied on the basis of the account as a whole. In other words, the problem of factual accuracy is part of a much larger problem of how political events are defined in discourse and how meaning is ascribed to them. There is a further type of approach to political myth, which is more theoretically sophisticated and closer to contemporary anthropological approaches to sacred myth. To show their distance from condescending ethnocentric assumptions, anthropologists often preface their work by emphasizing that they do not regard myth in a disparaging way as simply being the expression of illusions. Instead, they point out that they are trying to understand what myths mean to and for the people who believe in them. Similarly, some theorists who adopt technical definitions of political myth differentiate their models explicitly from the disparaging conception in common usage (Tudor 1972 was the pioneer in this respect). Within this school of thought it is argued, therefore, that the historical accuracy of the content is not the central question at issue when defining the concept of political myth: as Howard Egerton remarks, “the particulars narrated in myth may be true, false or more likely a mixture of both when dealing with values or meaning” (1983: 498). What matters is that the story is believed by a social group and that it serves particular functions for the group, such as supporting collective identity and legitimating a particular system of governance. This is not to say that the question of truth is necessarily a matter of indifference to the analyst. For purposes of empirical study of any given society, past or present, there could obviously be many reasons for attempting to establish the accuracy or otherwise of the different elements of a widely circulated account of events. Nevertheless, the exclusion of the truth versus falsehood dichotomy from the core definition of political myth is intended to avoid the danger of appearing to suggest that all myths are automatically false in all significant respects or that factual accuracy is the only question at issue. Attention can then be focused on the combination of narrative form, cultural status and social functions. This approach is valuable, but it is not entirely unproblematic. The bracketing out of the question of truth or falsehood is counter-intuitive, given the fact that the issue of truth versus falsehood is the essential feature of everyday usage of the word myth. Indeed, if the concept of political myth does not include the notion of falsehood or significant distortion as a basic criterion, it raises the logical possibility of there being true myths, and some of the users of the truth-neutral model do appear to accept this possibility (for example, Nimmo and Combs 1980; Thompson 1985), though the question is not seriously addressed. This is not only counter-intuitive. It also conflicts with the functions of political acculturation, legitimation, and mobilization which users of the truth-neutral model ascribe to myth-
Myth and ideology 185 making. These are essentially ideological functions, although the lack of consensus on terminology is such that the label of ideological is not always applied. To serve such functions, the story would have to be recounted as politically value-laden, or at least told in a context which made values implicit. In that case, it is unlikely that the story would be accepted as a valid account by an audience whose political values were significantly different from those conveyed by the teller(s) of the account. The question of truth and falsehood therefore remains central but it is caught up with the complexity of the relationship between facts, values and the conflicting ways in which they are perceived by different ideological groups. Sweeping the problem of truth out of the way is not the same as resolving it. A further problem with much of the theoretical literature is that most of the theorists who have included narrative form as part of their definitions have not gone far into what that entails in modern political discourse. More specifically, attention needs to be given to the interdependence of narrative and argument in political communication. A distinction should be made between discursive form and discursive function in this regard. For example, it is possible for the greater part of a book to be couched in the form of a narrative which has the function of substantiating and illustrating an argument set out in a mere few pages at the beginning or the end of the work. Conversely, it is possible for a book to be largely in the form of argument which has the function of interpreting and validating a narrative which is summarized very briefly. Narrative and argument constantly function in each other’s service. Both also involve the use of description/definition of persons or objects, but both can equally function in the service of description, as is the case, for example, when a racist stereotype describing the alleged negative characteristics of a particular group is supported by a series of arguments and demonstrative accounts of events which are intended to justify the deterministic ascription of traits. It also follows that due regard should be paid to the ways in which the ideological marking of narratives takes place, since this process is intimately bound up with the attribution of direction and meaning to historical events. The ideological marking of the narrative is an objective property of the account, as told in any given instance, though the ideological coloring may be more pronounced, or less so, with the result that identification of it in terms of a particular ideology will be correspondingly easier or more difficult. To an extent, the process of marking is quantitative and cumulative. It depends on the number of elements which bear the imprint of ideological assumptions, values, and beliefs. But ideological marking is also qualitative, since the construction of the discourse gives some elements greater prominence and/or weight than others. Above all, transparency of ideological message implies a high level of consistency within the discourse as a whole, so that the arguments, descriptions, and narrations reinforce each other (see Suleiman 1983 for an illuminating discussion of how this happens in politically committed novels).
186 Christopher Flood Among the more interesting macrostructural aspects of the discourse will be the operation of ideological essentialism and the logic of outcomes. These features play an important part in making myths demonstrative. Whereas grand accounts of history in the manner of Hegel, Marx, Spengler, Sorokin or, more recently, Fukuyama may posit an explicit, overarching determinism – consequential, teleological or both – most political mythmaking merely involves an implicit correlation between the ideologically pertinent qualities ascribed to the political actors and the outcomes of the actions in which they are engaged. Political myths cater to the morally satisfying assumption that, although there can be exceptions, good political beliefs are generally held by good people who therefore pursue good objectives, act in good ways, form good associations, and create good institutions. Indeed, rather like a religion, an ideology can be shown to be redemptive by bringing out the goodness which had been lost or merely latent in people who had previously been thinking and acting wrongly in an ideological sense and often in a moral or ethical sense as well. Mythopoeic political narratives characteristically show individuals or groups engaged in (re)discovering ideological “truth” or struggling for the triumph and implementation of ideological “truth” which they already possess. Struggle is itself a learning process, as Marx and others observed. Mythopoeic stories also offer counter-examples of political/historical actors who defend false beliefs, or at least fail to acquire understanding of ideological truth. Because it is natural to assume that good ought to triumph over bad and right defeat wrong, it is no less natural to imagine that those who embody the good must eventually succeed in achieving their goals as long as they remain true to themselves. The contrary will be the case for those who are bad. If it absolutely has to be accepted that things turned out differently from what should have occurred, then ways can normally be found to explain that the right outcome has merely been deferred until some future time. Likewise, the apparent triumph of those who are wrong will be purely temporary, since it occurred for reasons which did not reflect any intrinsic virtue in their group or their cause. In this way, values can appear to be “proved” by historical outcomes appropriate to their validity or invalidity and the qualities of the people who hold them.
VI. Reception This way of looking at political myth enables a clearer understanding of why such stories circulate within particular social groups and why some stories achieve mythic status, whereas others do not. It runs counter to the tendency in much of the theoretical literature, which has been to follow what could be called the irrationalist tradition that views susceptibility to mythic beliefs as a symptom of emotionally driven, collective, psychological need to believe, overriding rational knowledge or evaluation of evidence. For Sorel (1961) and for others who have followed him, myth
Myth and ideology 187 arises from people’s need for faith and vivid objects of the imagination in order to commit themselves to great collective causes potentially involving personal sacrifice. For Cassirer (1946), resort to mythical thought is a reversion to archaic patterns, encouraged and exploited in the contemporary period by ruthless totalitarian leaders. For Raoul Girardet (1986), myths are above all dream-like fantasies which are the projection of pathological states of the collective psyche tied up with the experience of alienation during periods of social crisis. For Murray Edelman (1967, 1975), the simplifications offered by myths fulfill a need to assuage anxiety in the face of situations which would otherwise appear unbearably complex and threatening. For Lance Bennett (1980), myths, once internalized, form a deep structure which seems to be intermediary between the primary process and the secondary, or the unconscious and consciousness. In my view, this type of model is inadequate. There can no doubt be cases of willful suspension of disbelief or of heightened susceptibility under particular types of circumstance which encourage irrational behavior and are open to being exploited by manipulative politicians or propagandists who may or may not believe the myths themselves. However, the notion of the irrational needs to be treated with caution. It is worrying to encounter the confidence with which Girling (1993), for example, purports to be able to distinguish the rational from the irrational in the collective beliefs which he ascribes to vast social groups over huge periods of time. It is often possible to look at the same cases from a different angle and to suggest different, or at least more nuanced, explanations which do not rely on the assumption of irrationality but consider why the positions and dispositions of believers might make it appear plausible to them that they know the truth. In any case, the question of what is considered to be rational or irrational involves culturally colored, normative judgments rather than the unproblematic categories of knowledge in which some theorists appear to believe. In this area there is a need for extreme caution and very close attention to the specific historical circumstances and social environment in which any given myth circulates. Following Raymond Boudon’s (1989) sociological theory of the genesis and circulation of ideologies, it can be valuable to approach the reception of myths by starting from the assumption that explanation in terms of the (empirically unverifiable) psychology of irrationality should be the last resort rather than the first. The initial procedure will then be to ask why particular sets of social actors might think they have good reasons to believe in a particular account of events which others might consider to be a myth. One factor will be the epistemological framework of the receivers and more particularly the extent to which the ideological coloring of the story – the conceptions, beliefs, values, and orientation to social action which infuse it – fits with the receivers’ prior understanding of the political world. However, ideological fit or misfit is not sufficient in itself to guarantee belief or disbelief. It depends on a far more complex set of conditions. A
188 Christopher Flood second type of factor will be the status of the teller of the story in the eyes of its receivers – his, her or its (in the case of an organization) relative credibility, legitimacy, authority and ability to command their attention – as well as the status of the channel by which it is communicated, whether it be written word, broadcast media, spoken discourse or by other means. In short, it is a matter of symbolic power, as Pierre Bourdieu (1991) would call it. Furthermore, it is important to take account of the actors’ social positions and dispositions – their locations in social and cultural space in relation to the proximate teller of the story and to the near or distant source(s) claimed by the teller in order to validate the account. The complexity of these combinations of factors raises enormous methodological problems for empirical analysis of historical cases, but it does not invalidate the argument that explanation in terms of rational behavior should precede, or at the very least be taken into account alongside, recourse to explanation in terms of the irrational. With regard to the currency of particular myths within particular social groups it is necessary to take account of the ways in which myths can be relayed in cultural forms other than those writings or speeches that present themselves as non-fictional. Although it is not possible to consider the intricacies of the processes here, it is worth emphasizing that myths can be relayed through fictional writing, drama or film. They can be represented iconically in paintings, cartoons and posters, for example, or in sculpture, statuary and other plastic forms. They can be transmitted through memorialization in museums or monuments or the sites of important events. Political rituals, such as coronations, inaugurations, anniversaries and other commemorations often condense a wide range of discursive and other symbolic references to one or more myths into a single occasion.
VII. Conclusion The theory of political myth needs to be demythologized. Mythmaking is an everyday practice which permeates the discourse of political communicators. There is no need to consider myths as expressions of some special form of consciousness or to situate belief in myths within a psychopathology of the irrational. There is nothing strange about mythmaking. There is nothing wrong with it. It is an entirely normal way of making political events intelligible in the light of ideological beliefs. Some stories acquire importance within a social group over a long span of time. Others have only the most ephemeral currency. But the production and the reproduction of mythopoeic narratives are constant features of political life. I have sketched a model which posits a relationship with sacred myth in terms of its discursive form, its social functions, its cultural status, and its amenability to pictorial, plastic, or kinetic representation. I have not
Myth and ideology 189 argued that the relationship is one of exact equivalence in every area. But the analogies are sufficiently strong to be meaningful. Political ideologies are the counterparts of religious belief systems – with which they coexist in varying degrees of dependence, collaboration, or rivalry in modern societies. The major religions have generated their theologies alongside their mythologies, their liturgies, their rituals, and their artistic expressions. They have accommodated local variations and accretions in the contexts of different societies. They have undergone schisms which have led to divergent traditions within broad currents of beliefs. They constitute semantic frameworks, with sets of shared concepts and terminologies for communication between believers. Much the same is true of ideologies. In the ideological sphere, theoretical argument enjoys particular prestige as a display of rational reflection and a distillation of meaning. But mythmaking is the partner of theory. Only by fitting events together as historical interpretations and predictions is it possible to “demonstrate” that particular values, beliefs, and goals have efficacy in the social world. By implication, myths purport to prove the validity of values by showing that they can be enacted. Mythmaking is therefore indispensable to ideology.
Bibliography Barrett, M. (1991) The Politics of Truth: From Marx to Foucault, Cambridge: Polity Press. Bennett, W.L. (1980) “Myth, Ritual, and Political Control,” Journal of Communication, 30: 166–79. Boudon, R. (1989) The Analysis of Ideology, trans. M. Slater, Cambridge: Polity Press. Bourdieu, P. (1991) Language and Symbolic Power, trans. G. Raymond and M. Adamson, Cambridge: Polity Press. Cassirer, E. (1946) The Myth of the State, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Chomsky, N. (1989) Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies, London: Pluto Press. Connerton, P. (1989) How Societies Remember, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Doty, W.G. (1986) Mythography: The Study of Myths and Rituals, Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press. Dundes, A. (ed.) (1984) Sacred Narrative: Readings in the Theory of Myth, Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. Eagleton, T. (1991) Ideology: An Introduction, London: Verso. Eatwell, R. and Wright, A. (eds) (2000) Contemporary Political Ideologies, 2nd edn, London: Continuum. Eccleshall, R. et al. (2001) Political Ideologies: An Introduction, 3rd edn, London: Routledge. Edelman, M. (1967) “Myths, Metaphors and Political Conformity,” Psychiatry, 30, 3: 217–28. —— (1975) “Language, Myths and Rhetoric,” Trans-Action, 12: 14–21.
190 Christopher Flood Egerton, G.W. (1983) “Collective Security as Political Myth: Liberal Internationalism and the League of Nations in Politics and History,” International History Review, 5, 4: 496–524. Eliade, M. (1958) Patterns in Comparative Religion, London: Sheed and Ward. Fairclough, N. (1989) Language and Power, Harlow: Longman. Fay, B., Pomper, P. and Vann, R.T. (eds) (1998) History and Theory: Contemporary Readings, Oxford: Blackwell. Flood, C.G. (2002 [1996]) Political Myth: A Theoretical Introduction, New York: Routledge. Freeden, M. (1996) Ideologies and Political Theory, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Girardet, R. (1986) Mythes et mythologies politiques, Paris: Seuil. Girling, J. (1993) Myths and Politics in Western Societies: Evaluating the Crisis of Modernity in the United States, Germany, and Great Britain, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Hawkes, D. (1996) Ideology, London: Routledge. Heywood, A. (1998) Political Ideologies: An Introduction, 2nd edn, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Horne, D. (1984) The Great Museum: The Re-Presentation of History, London: Pluto. Kertzer, D.I. (1988) Ritual, Politics, and Power, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Lemke, J.L. (1995) Textual Politics: Discourse and Social Dynamics, London: Taylor & Francis. Lincoln, B. (1989) Discourse and the Construction of Society: Comparative Studies of Myth, Ritual, and Classification, Oxford: Oxford University Press. —— (2000) Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Macridis, R. and Hulliung, M. (1996) Contemporary Political Ideologies, 6th edn, New York: Addison-Wesley. McLellan, D. (1986) Ideology, Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Munslow, A. (1997) Deconstructing History, London: Routledge. Nimmo, D. and Combs, J.E. (1980) Subliminal Politics: Myths and Mythmakers in America, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Parenti, M. (1986) Inventing Reality: The Politics of the Mass Media, New York: St Martin’s. Segal, R.A. (1999) Theorizing about Myth, Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. Seliger, M. (1976) Ideology and Politics, London: Allen and Unwin. Sorel, G. (1961 [1908]) Reflections on Violence, trans. T. Hulme and J. Roth, New York: Collier. Suleiman, S.R. (1983) Authoritarian Fictions: The Ideological Novel as a Literary Genre, New York: Columbia University Press. Thompson, J.B. (1984) Studies in the Theory of Ideology, Cambridge: Polity Press. —— (1990) Ideology and Modern Culture, Cambridge: Polity Press. Thompson, L. (1985) The Political Mythology of Apartheid, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Tudor, H. (1972) Political Myth, London: Pall Mall.
10 Myth and public science Mary Gerhart and Allan Melvin Russell
I. Introduction: the contradictory views of myth Opening the 4 December 1997 Wall Street Journal, we find the headline, “Science Has Spoken: Global Warming Is a Myth.” Alternatively, we pick up the 1992 publication of Mary Midgley’s 1990 Gifford Lectures, and notice the title, Science as Salvation: A Modern Myth and Its Meaning. What these texts have in common, what can be found regularly – especially in writings related to modern science and technology – is the use of the term myth as meaning a false, even deceitful, story. It is ironic that myth, meaning “a false story,” is being linked to the term science, with the root meaning “knowledge.” Research in the history of science shows that scientific work is shot through with “themata” that, among other things, have the effect of making published scientific articles, especially those in the physical sciences, mythic – but not mythic in the sense of false story. The contradictory views of myth exacerbate the relationship between science and religion as well. “Myth” in religion is already recognized as having both potentially negative and positive meanings. In everyday discourse, when someone says, “Oh, that’s just a myth,” the intention of the speaker is to call attention to the falsity of whatever claim is referred to, as in “false advertising.” But in religion, a myth has another, technical meaning: a myth is a story of origins that, when interpreted at its best, gives insight into the fundamental way that human beings make a “world” out of their most significant perceptions, memories, and desires. On the other hand, scientists and persons who advance scientific knowledge generally tend to be disparaging with respect to knowledge we understand as mythic. The subject of this last chapter is the mythic quality of science itself as practiced in the public arena. The fruit of BD dialogue here is the realization that science has its mythical dimensions. BD dialogue in religion and science encourages that exposure of myth wherever it may occur. Our particular interest is where it appears in science.
192 Mary Gerhart and Allan Russell
II. Myth and philosophy of science The philosophy of science, as it has been written over the past hundred years, describes a struggle to understand how the doing of science has been different from other cognitive activities aimed at understanding the world in which we live. We will describe some of the myth-related remarks of Karl Popper (1968) and Paul Feyerabend (1975), two philosophers who have had a major impact on the epistemological questions that hover over the accomplishments of natural scientists. Popper sees myth as the ancient form of scientific theory – the beginning of science. The work of the scientist for him is to be found in the making of observations of the world as it is described by such theories. The theories (myths) are then rewritten in the light of observations that “test” them. Popper rejects the claim that science starts with observations. Observations in plenty there may be, but science, for Popper, begins with the first explanation of observations: “Historically speaking, all – or very nearly all – scientific theories originate in myths” (Popper 1968: 38). Moreover, “scientific theories are not just the results of observation. They are … the product of myth-making and of tests” (Popper 1968: 128). According to Popper, “The great significance of myths in [science] was that they could be the objects of criticism and that they could be changed” (Popper 1968: 131) – although, we would add, often with great difficulty. Feyerabend is less sanguine about the process. For him, knowledge … is not a gradual approach to the truth. It is an ever increasing ocean of mutually incompatible (and perhaps even incommensurable) alternatives, each single theory, each fairy tale, each myth … forcing the others into greater articulation and … contributing to the development of our consciousness. (Feyerabend 1975: 30) He concludes that “science is much closer to myth than a scientific philosophy is prepared to admit” (Feyerabend 1975: 295). It is sometimes said that of all the social groups, none rivals the scientific community in the degree to which its members agree on what they profess. Even in religious communities there appears to be more variation in the degree of assent to doctrines than the average person sees in the natural sciences. However, complete agreement within science is superficial skin – that part of public science that appears not so much in scientific journals as in science textbooks, non-professional periodicals, newspapers and the screen media. When this naïve perception of agreement is coupled with a naïve understanding of myth, we encounter contradiction: How could what is true (science) be false (mythic)? This contradiction should be broken from both sides. On the one hand, there is serious conflict regarding many theories in the natural sciences. On the other hand, there is evidence that mythic narrative plays an important role in the development of scientific understandings.
Myth and public science 193 We intend to show, moreover, that “scientific mythicness” is not limited to the fabrication of theoretical understandings. Peer-reviewed, published reports from the laboratories also make use of the constructive aspects of myth-making in their presentations of even the most formal observations and measurements. We begin with the distinction between public and private science put forward by Gerald Holton, who is professor of both physics and the history of science at Harvard.
III. Holton’s discovery: private science and public science In his Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought (1973), Gerald Holton makes reference to x, y, and z axes that define a three-dimensional space in which the processes of scientific discovery and elucidation take place. The x and y axes define a plane he calls the “contingent” plane. This plane is formed by adding the empirical or phenomenic (x) dimension to the heuristic-analytic (y) dimension. To this plane he adds the third dimension (z) that includes fundamental presuppositions, notions, terms, methodological judgments and decisions – in short, of themata or themes – which are themselves neither directly evolved from, nor resolvable into, objective observation on the one hand, or logical, mathematical, and other formal ratiocination on the other hand. (57) Holton creates this intellectual space in order to further a discipline he calls the “thematic analysis of science, by analogy with thematic analyses that have for so long been used to great advantage in scholarship outside science” (57). This third dimension is “private science” in contrast to the contingent plane that represents “public science.” The work the scientist does in the laboratory moves through the twodimensional realm of the empirical, and the analytic. Holton studied the private notebook entries of scientists such as Robert A. Millikan, who was intent on showing that electric charge came in discrete chunks all of the same size, and Albert Einstein, who was so confident of his Theory of General Relativity. Holton makes it clear that one cannot study the thinking of scientists by reading and analyzing their published writings. He quotes Peter Medawar, “It is no use looking to scientific ‘papers,’ for they not merely conceal but actively misrepresent the reasoning that goes into the work that they describe” (Holton, 1978: 25). In Holton’s view, the very institutions of science – the methods of publication, the meetings, the selection and training of young scientists – are designed to
194 Mary Gerhart and Allan Russell minimize attention to [the personal aspect of scientific activity].… The success of science itself as a shareable activity seems to be connected with this systematic neglect of what Einstein called the “personal struggle” … the event E at time t begins to be seen as the intersection of two trajectories, of two World Lines, one for “public science” … and one for “private science.” (Holton 1978: 4–5) So what does Holton refer to when he uses the term “public science”? Published descriptions of scientific research are almost invariably reconstructions of events of laboratory history. Although the records of the laboratory – to be found in the notebooks of scientists – are properly written in historical time, the published story of the experiment or observations is told in a time that emphasizes the causal and rational nature of the sequence of events. In some famous instances this story is not even a “true” account, historically speaking. The scientist in the laboratory, in the grip of a “satisfactory” understanding of the phenomena being investigated, is never in the classical position of disinterested observer. All observations cannot be taken as equally valid or acceptable. Robert Millikan wrote in his notebook, “Error high will not use” (Holton 1978: 65) for one observation, and “Beauty, Publish this surely, beautiful!” (Holton 1978: 64) for another. Millikan, using individual small oil drops to measure the electrical charge of an electron, eventually selected 58 drops out of a total of 140 observed as the basis for his published value of electron charge. In today’s world, such selectivity might not escape the charge of being fraudulent. But the very style of scientific writing, the style of public science, leads to the reporting of observational methods, observational data, and conclusions that have all been disembodied – separated from the affects of the person or persons who carried them out. These reported methods, data, and conclusions have also, unlike the notations in a carefully kept laboratory notebook, been severed from the historic moment at which they were made. Holton argued that scientists are driven by their allegiances to various themata. Such allegiances affect how observational data are “seen” or analyzed. They also affect decisions about what to publish and even what to investigate. Themata function in a way that might be compared with political allegiances. For example, a liberal Democrat sees a legislated minimum wage as a device necessary to reduce poverty by supporting a minimum standard of living. A conservative Republican sees the same legislated minimum wage as a requirement that reduces the number of jobs that will be created and therefore available to those who wish to work. Both views are supportable in that neither is clearly right or wrong. But the data that
Myth and public science 195 might be advanced to support one position are not likely to be the same as the data that would be used to support the other. Physicists early in the twentieth century were divided into two camps. One held allegiance to the thema of the continuum. These physicists might be thought of as the “field” group. They saw the world as made up of things whose characteristics (position, mass, energy, charge, etc.) could vary continuously. The other camp was composed of the atomists. According to their thema, the world is made up of individual things whose characteristics vary in discrete amounts. The professional judgments of these scientists were not unaffected by the camp with which they were aligned. Holton’s research methods were historical rather than philosophical. He based his arguments on data derived from the writings of the physicists he studied. By comparing their private letters and laboratory notebooks with their published writings, he found that scientists made decisions about what methods to use and what data to publish that depended on their own view – their thematic perception – of the subject they were studying. “Analysis of the expressed motivations, and of the ever hardening attitudes of the protagonists on opposite sides of the question [often] … shows the strong role of an early, unshakable commitment by the opponents to different themata” (Holton 1978: 5). This behavior was not restricted to experimental scientists such as Robert Millikan, but extended to theoretical physicists as well. Einstein was so convinced of the correctness of his theory of gravitation (the General Theory of Relativity) that when asked what he would think if observations did not bear out the predictions of his theory, he replied that it wouldn’t matter – the theory was correct! Holton showed, in effect, that scientists do not write history when they publish their scientific findings. They tell a story of what happened in their researches, a story that is structured in such a way as to be both persuasive with respect to their chosen thema as well as descriptive of what other scientists would experience, should they undertake a study of the same phenomena. This characteristic of ahistorical storytelling is one of the features of scientific activity that makes it possible for us to understand public science as mythic. We would point out that this form of storytelling is not by any means restricted to physics and chemistry. Overarching thematic principles influence the analyses carried out in fields such as geology, where the thema of uniformitarianism has conflicted with that of catastrophism. These two themata have, over the years, had a profound effect on the interpretation of geologic data. Why does Holton find stories when he’s looking for history? Holton describes his research method as follows: “First, I try to make a detailed examination of the nascent phase of the scientist’s work, and to juxtapose his published results, on the one hand, with firsthand documentation (correspondence, interviews, notebooks, etc.), on the other” (Holton 1978: vii).
196 Mary Gerhart and Allan Russell Holton analyzes scientific work by means of “thematic analysis (a term familiar from somewhat related uses in anthropology, art criticism, … and other fields)” (Holton 1978: 5). He observes that “techniques analogous to the thematic analysis that I have applied to science have worked well in other fields, for example in content analysis, linguistic analysis, and cultural anthropology” (Holton 1978: ix), and, furthermore, that “the attitude I have taken in the task of identifying and ordering thematic elements in scientific discussions is to some degree analogous to that of the folklorist … who listens to the epic stories for their underlying thematic structure and recurrence” (Holton 1978: 5, emphasis ours). Here we have a scientist and historian of science reading the writings of other scientists and describing his research as being analogous to that of a folklorist listening to epic stories – epic stories that have an underlying thematic structure and that are recurring. To show that Holton’s description of the public writings of scientists effectively characterizes them as mythical, we turn now to the characteristics of myth.
IV. Time and narrative in myth and science In his article for The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (vol. 5: 434–7), Alasdair MacIntyre provides a concise rendering of a three-period history of the idea of myth. He moves from myth in Greek philosophy, period one, to the period of “modern thought” starting with Vico to Compte, period two. (MacIntyre sets aside the period from the Christian Era to Vico as being “predominantly negative with respect to myth.”) Modern thought, period two, is followed by period three – the nineteenth century to the present, the “science of mythology and modern irrationalisms.” Early questions in the study of myth addressed, almost exclusively, the “meaning” of particular myths, understanding them to be old false stories. Not until Vico was myth understood to “express the collective mentality of a given age” (MacIntyre 1967: 435). MacIntyre quotes Vico’s statement that “The fables of the gods are true histories of customs” (as quoted in MacIntyre 1967: 437). Here we hear questions of function replacing questions of truth and the ushering in of modern understandings. In his discussion of period three, MacIntyre contrasts the more recent work of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Mircea Eliade by noting, “Lévi-Strauss analyses the content of a myth in terms of what is local and particular to a given society,” whereas “Eliade wishes to relate the content [of myths] to general human religious interests and as far as possible divorce it from the local and particular” (MacIntyre 1967: 437 [emphases ours]). We will reprise both of these themes as we apply twentieth-century theories of myth to the customs of modern science. But first we review some major revisions in the understanding of myth that make it available for understanding science anew. We take up the role of narrative in myth with an eye toward a constructive meaning of myth in public science. This step takes us back into the
Myth and public science 197 controversial territory referred to in our introduction. The difficulty of doing a constructive interpretation of scientific myth can be seen from this excerpt from Robert M. Wallace’s introduction to one of the most comprehensive treatments of myth available today, Hans Blumenberg’s Work on Myth (1985). Wallace states that our usual interpretations of science, whether rationalist, empiricist, positivist, or whatever, are all still very much in the Enlightenment tradition, and imply a role for myth in the modern age which is restricted exclusively to the aesthetic imagination and is assumed to have no bearing on the preeminent role of scientific rationality in our serious, practical lives. On the other hand, those who concern themselves extensively with myth, such as literary scholars, anthropologists, and psychologists, often tend toward the other, Romantic extreme – interpreting myth’s modern survival as evidence of its being, in one way or another, inherent in human nature and even, given its seemingly greater antiquity and ubiquity, of its being more fundamental to human nature than our (“surface”) rationality. (vii) Since the work of the major theorists of myth – Cassirer, Eliade, LéviStrauss, Joseph Campbell, for example – would, in one way or another, be subject to Blumenberg’s criticism of the “Romantic extreme,” we will not adopt either a theory or a definition of myth from the extensive literature. Instead, we will delineate mythic features of narrative – (1) richness and durability, (2) new interpretive possibility, (3) optimization, and (4) the interweaving of fiction with fact – four features in all that will help us detect the mythical aspects of public science. These four features reflect less the Romanticist assumptions about human nature than the structural, substantive, and functional aspects of narrative that are identifiably mythic but not exclusively so. The first mythic feature of narrative is durability – a feature combined with what Blumenberg calls “pregnance” (see below). Immediate richness of interpretive potential and persistence are found in certain narrative products that have been “tested” on various audiences on whose “active approval the storyteller’s success, perhaps even his livelihood or life, depended” (Wallace in Blumenberg, xx). The durability of a surviving myth depends on the rejection of other potentially mythic narratives: As the bard selected myths to tell that were actively approved by listeners, other myths less popular or more threatening disappeared from memory and ultimately from history. In public science – the narratives found in the scientific periodicals – pregnance and durability of the work that survives are insured by the subsequent citations of the work in later publications, signaling both agreement on the part of other scientists as well as the continuing usefulness of the published account.
198 Mary Gerhart and Allan Russell The second mythic feature of narrative, new interpretive possibility, derives most likely from the richness that Blumenberg called pregnance. This second feature gives rise to the expectation that a story may suddenly and discontinuously be subject to novel interpretation, what Blumenberg referred to as “wholly new and unsuspected aspects” (Wallace in Blumenberg, xxx). Whereas the Romantic theories of myths generally tried to ground the meaning of myth in a fundamental original nature of the human species, Blumenberg thinks it better to understand myths as functioning instead like the “‘limit’ that is approached by a mathematical function that converges asymptotically” but never in fact arrives at a precise limit. This mathematical concept of limit serves as a correction to the Romantic expectation that humankind could know something fundamental about the origin of the human species from representations in myths of beginnings: instead, we are always in a position of coming close to (but never reaching) an understanding of the human condition. Blumenberg suggests that myths of endtime, “final myths,” serve a similar function in that they represent an understanding and an effort actively to shape reality rather than be passively shaped by it. Whatever “human condition,” we can conceive lies between these two limits: mythical beginnings and mythical endings. The corresponding scientific rendering of the second mythic feature of narrative can be found in the revisions that subsequent published articles make to those published earlier. The third mythic feature of narrative is optimization. Like pregnance and duration, optimization is a characteristic of some myths but not others. Optimization or developmental change occurs in response to the audience. Perhaps the storyteller gets bored with the story or has an aesthetic preference for another. Then the storyteller tells a different story and finds that it is more acceptable. It is of special interest to us that Blumenberg uses Darwinian natural selection as the model for this process. Optimization is not the same as the nineteenth-century idea of progress. Optimization is observed by noticing that change has occurred and that some change is for the better. Wallace makes the point more succinctly than does Blumenberg: “This ‘objective progress’ occurs not only in theory … and in technology, or in them and, by an odd combination, in myth as well, but also in the whole sphere of ‘modes of behavior and thought structures’ ” (Wallace in Blumenberg, xxii). Blumenberg calls these various modes which result in some kind of objective progress, institutions.1 Optimization can be understood to play a role in the development of scientific understanding that results in the termination of scientific publications relating to a particular topic. One is not likely to find, in scientific journals of today, additional data or discussion of scientific findings related to Millikan’s investigations of the charge on the electron – although, we hasten to add, the issue could again burst into print if it were discovered that Millikan’s methods could be, for example, used to measure the fractional charge of a quark.2
Myth and public science 199 The fourth mythic feature of narrative is to be found in the interweaving of fact with fiction. This feature, perhaps more than any other, accounts for myth’s openness to transformation and to new, as well as perennially affirmed, meaning. We borrow this fourth feature of mythic narrative directly from Paul Ricoeur’s theory of narrative: namely, his argument that, rather than merely replicating reality, narrative “configures” reality and that reading “refigures” it. Ricoeur restricts his theory to the “interweaving of historical and fictional narrative … where the past in history is united with the imaginative variations of fiction” (Ricoeur 1984–88, vol. 3: 192). We suggest here that Ricoeur’s approach be applied to a weaving together, not merely of historical and fictional narrative, but more generally to non-fictional and fictional narrative. This enlargement will open up the possibility of analyzing time in narrative and scientific time in terms of historic time and elapsed time, respectively. The remainder of the paper will explore the constructive possibilities of Ricoeur’s theory of narrative – here with respect to fiction and non-fiction – when applied to Holton’s distinction between private science and public science. With respect to historical time, Ricoeur sees the invention of the calendar as a technological invention or device for bridging between different kinds of time. The calendar makes possible the computation of “chronicle” time, which is the foundation for historical and other forms of non-fictional time. If the focus of the narrative plot is designed primarily to support events that have otherwise been documented in relation to a calendar, historical time results. If the focus of the narrative plot is primarily on imaginative possibilities that are undocumented or related only tangentially to the calendar, mythic time results. At the outset it would seem as though the calendar is of little use to public science, for which physical time is simple duration (with the exception of astronomy which needs to identify the historic time of events in the sky). Nevertheless, the calendar makes possible the computation of “chronicle” time, which is the foundation for historical time and other forms of non-fictional time. The important point is that both typologies – fictional/historical narrative (Ricoeur’s typology) and fictional/nonfictional narrative – are likely to contain both events unconnected with history and events correlated with a calendar. Most often these texts presume a greater or lesser degree of emancipation from events recorded in diaries, chronicles, and notebooks. But included in the foregoing typologies at their extremes, are two kinds of narratives which, according to Ricoeur, have been “freed from the constraints requiring it to be referred back to the time of the universe” (Ricoeur 1984–1988, vol. 3: 128): myth (which either pre-dates extant calendars or has lost its connection to them) and imaginative fiction (which deliberately ignores, distorts or distends its connection with the calendrical time beyond recognition). Eliade has described myth as a narrative sequence taking place in sacred time. We have previously rejected this traditional meaning because the
200 Mary Gerhart and Allan Russell definition is arguably insufficient for the myths we will identify as scientific. Nevertheless, we may here retrieve a partial link with the traditional meaning: in terms of religious meaning, what is mythical is repeatable – for example, the Eucharist is different in detail every time it is celebrated, but the important form of the ritual is the same. Public science evinces a correspondence here since the content of different reports differ even though the form of the reporting remains the same. With respect to public science one might at first suppose that myths identifiable within the bounds of science would be those that took place in historic time. However, the ubiquitous nature of time in scientific theories – it is a concept so central that it is hard to think of any scientific theory in which it is absent – suggests that scientific time needs to be identified separately. We will characterize scientific time as “duration.” For the purpose of this paper we will understand myth to be like and unlike history in the following ways. First, with respect to similarity, we take both the mythic and the historical to be expressed as story – as narrative with conventional structures of beginning, sequenced events, and ending. Second, with respect to differences, we take mythic time to be devoid of historical temporality. Instead, the time in mythic narrative is purely elapsed time or duration, a form of temporality that is not required by historical time, although elapsed time can be extracted from historical time by the mathematical device of calculating differences between dates/times. It is a necessary characteristic of myth that the time within a myth is not historical time. Myth is a narrative that, because it is a narrative, must contain elapsed time (which is the same as scientific time). But a myth is a narrative that takes place not at a particular time in history (historical time) but at any time. Notice how this requirement parallels the requirement that a scientific experiment be repeatable at any time. Time in historical narrative is a sequencing unless some element in the narrative needs duration. By contrast, time in mythic narrative must be a version of duration (elapsed time). A significant affective shift occurs when one separates a narrative from its grounding in historical time. Consider the following renditions of the same sequence of events. Fragment One Natalia Petrovski was born in Eastern Europe – what is now the Czech Republic – in 1898. Natalia sailed with her parents to the United States, leaving Copenhagen on 19 April 1906, and arriving in New York on 4 May of that year. The Petrovskis stayed in New York with friends and took a train west from the Pennsylvania Station on 12 November. Natalia’s family eventually settled in Minneapolis where her father found work as a postal clerk. After his death from influenza
Myth and public science 201 in 1918, she worked as a postal clerk until she married John Wilson on 5 June 1920. Her husband drowned on 3 June 1942, in the battle of Midway. Her one child, John, Jr., was born on 7 June 1942. Fragment Two When Natalia Petrovski was 8 years old, she and her parents sailed from Copenhagen to New York. The crossing took 15 days. After spending 27 weeks with friends in New York City, they left by train for Minneapolis where they made their home. Natalia’s father, a postal clerk, died in an influenza epidemic when she was 20 years old. She married US Navy Lt. John Wilson 2 years later and had one child, a son, born 4 days after the death of her husband. Each of these fragments tells the same story. But our affective response to them is likely to be significantly different. In Fragment One we have a sequence of personal events attached to calendar dates – historical time. We can synchronize the personal events with historic ones and are likely to understand the personal in relation to the civic world. Fragment Two gives us a sense of what it must have been like to experience the personal events because we can empathize more easily with the person in the narrative and can more easily understand the person in relation to ourselves. The framework of public history (civic time) has been replaced with the framework of our own personal experience. In Fragment One the story tends to have the same meaning for all readers. In Fragment Two the meaning of the story will depend significantly on the life experiences of the reader. (You probably remember being twelve years old. You probably do not remember the year 1906.) Fragment One is set in historical time, whereas Fragment Two is set in mythical time. In the public science of physics and chemistry (but not necessarily in geology or cosmology) the variable t is almost always elapsed time rather than historical time. If a physicist describes a falling object near the Earth, the height is generally the vertical coordinate y and the time is a horizontal coordinate, t. Where the axes intersect (the origin) the time is zero. Thus, all of the values of t along the horizontal axis are times relative to the origin. These are elapsed times because they represent the differences between a particular t, say ta, and the time at the origin, t0. The elapsed time is ta t0. However, since t0 = 0, the elapsed time ta t0 = ta. This arrangement is markedly different from historical time lines where the numbers along the axes are dates. The situation in chemistry is the same as in physics: A chemist publishes the description of a reaction by writing that components must be heated for some length of time (elapsed time) rather than for a time beginning on one date and ending on another. In each case the variables under study are understood as general
202 Mary Gerhart and Allan Russell coordinates of length or time and not specific places and dates, even though – and this is a vital difference – in every instance the laboratory experiments themselves each took place at particular places on particular dates. Thus, the laboratory experiments are historical, written down in the laboratory notebooks with dates, whereas the published coordinates are mythical, because they can be invoked anywhere at any time. Scientific time or duration is easily distinguished from the time of history. The latter can be understood as an idealized time line of arbitrary “length,” any point on which may be given a date and time, such as 14 October 1923, at 34 minutes and 27 seconds after 11 (or 11:34:27 – 10/14/23). By contrast, scientific time can be understood as a time segment of particular length, such as 02:14:36.3, which is equivalent to 8076.3s (in SI units). Such durational time is to be distinguished from an historical period of the same length which is understood to be related to a particular location on the date line (say, the period between two historical events). For those of us who hold that there is no absolute truth outside formal postulational systems such as mathematics (where truth is restricted to the system and does not apply to the phenomenal world), the issue of the true or false nature of myth must be couched in other terms. Outside formal systems the claim that such-and-such is the case can be true only with some probability (0
Pf>0). What then can we say about myths? For us myths are “truth-ful” narratives. They do not tell “the truth,” they contain truth – in much the same way that a truthful person is one who is inclined to tell the truth (as she or he sees it). The concept of myth used in this paper emphasizes the role of myth in the creation of scientific understanding. Modern scientific societies (particularly in the physical sciences) rely on an affirmation of scientific understanding that derives from the mythical structure of the “stories” of scientific discovery. When we focus on knowledge as created understanding (what elsewhere we have called knowledge-in-process) rather than knowledge as truth, it makes it easier to understand that myth can contribute to the development of understanding: myth should be valued for truthfulness, not examined for the formal truth-value of its utterances. And myths can be valued for more – they can be appreciated for their aesthetic qualities.
V. Idealization in public science A further distinction between private (laboratory) science and public (journal) science is to be found in the aesthetics associated with the particular scientific field. These aesthetics, we believe, are intimately connected with Holton’s themata although they are not equivalent. First we consider, as an example of public science, Millikan’s article on the electronic charge:
Myth and public science 203 The result of one somewhat elaborate series of observations which was first presented before the Deutsche physikalische Gesellschaft in June, 1912, (note 1) is shown in Figs. 5 and 6. The numerical data from which these curves are plotted are given fairly fully in Table IX. It will be seen that this series of observations embraces a study of [oil] drops. These drops represent all of those studied for 60 consecutive days, no single one being omitted. (Millikan 1917: 106) It will be seen from Figs. 5 and 6 that there is but one drop in the 58 whose departure from the line amounts to as much as 0.5 per cent. It is to be remarked, too, that this is not a selected group of drops, but represents all of the drops experimented upon during 60 consecutive days, during which time the apparatus was taken down several times and set up anew. (Millikan 1917: 111 [italics in the original]) In the next quotation we have Holton’s remarks based on his reading of Millikan’s laboratory notebooks (private science): The first notebook begins with an entry dated October 28, 1911, … and ends some 110 pages later with a run dated March 11, 1912. On each page there is typically an experiment of one oil drop.… The second notebook begins with a run on March 13, 1912, and the last run, about 65 pages later, is dated April 16, 1912. Again there is usually one experiment per page. In all, there are about 140 identifiable runs [oil drops] during the six months. (Holton 1978: 63) What Holton finds is an experimental scientist making aesthetic judgments as he goes along – judgments (and interpretations) that will result in his obtaining the most accurate determination of the charge of an electron to date.3 Millikan’s book (and his 1913 paper) contained no fabricated data, no fudged calculations. What Millikan did was to choose the most representative experiments (58 of them) from a set of about 140 to form the basis for his best (average) value of the electronic charge. His effort to imply that he was driven by all that he encountered (his claim that he used all of the drops) was misguided. The thought that the presuppositions of a researcher might influence observations was anathema at that time in the history of science (as might be the thought that we today are seeing published scientific work as mythic). But his recognition of the beauty of some of what he sees is what made it possible for him to write the journal article. As Holton observes, “This [critiquing of individual experiments] continues [in successive pages of the
204 Mary Gerhart and Allan Russell notebooks], with beauty appearing more consistently as the work progresses …” (Holton 1978: 71). What we see here is a process of idealization – an aesthetic process. Understanding a published account of a scientific research project as being aesthetically satisfying – an important positive characteristic of myth – helps us to understand why themata can become so entrenched and why the repeatability, in principle, of the actions that produced the grounds for the claims made in a scientific narrative can give rise to the generally high degree of epistemological solidarity found in the scientific community. Complaints that science eliminates essential aspects of human experience from its accounts of the world may be responded to by saying that the aspects that fall by the wayside in the production of scientific research articles are those that would not contribute to the repeatability (in principle) that is the basis for the acceptance of such reports by the scientific community. That the individual scientist should select those data and observations that most clearly support the case being made should not be understood as misrepresentation so long as data that would falsify conclusions have not been suppressed (unless those data were clearly dubious on entirely other grounds). Holton’s observation of the role of themata in the development of scientific understanding shows that scientific research that results in observations that fail to support the prevailing thema often go unpublished. And, furthermore, when they are published, research activity in search of data which will support the prevailing thema often continues. Changes in thema come about most often on the heels of new theoretical understandings, rather than on grounds of definitive counterexamples. Is all science writing mythical? No. It is not an accident that Holton’s research has focused on the work of scientists such as Steven Weinberg, Robert Millikan, and Albert Einstein. These men are more than scientists – they are also philosophers. Their pursuit of knowledge is driven by a desire to understand the natural universe, not by a need to find solutions to technological problems. Science is a complex interaction between technology (tool making in the most general sense) and natural philosophy (the creation of understanding of the natural universe). The epic story of the physical universe is written by those scientists who are natural philosophers. This epic story and the public science narratives that support it are what we are characterizing as mythic. Both the character of our experience and the character of the universe disclose that there’s more to “see” than just pieces of raw data. We strive constantly to fit what we see into an arrangement of what we have seen already – hence the extension of “things” perceived into a sense of understanding. The aesthetic sense so important in this process is one of proportionality within a whole. In the Greek experience, the golden mean was a kind of model for this experience of fitting things together as a
Myth and public science 205 perceivable unity. In the experience of other cultures and in contemporary Western culture, there are other models. Beauty is not a criterion – not everybody can see beauty. Not everyone could agree with Dirac’s claim that it is more important that equations be beautiful than that they fit experiment. Aesthetic forms get at an aspect of truth; they introduce fluidity into a judgment about what is at hand. The aesthetic dimension of science (or any other way of understanding) means, on the one hand, that we cannot expect everyone to make the same judgment. On the other hand, preferred views develop or evolve through the feature of optimization introduced above. In a recent article in American Scientist, James W. McAllister puts the issue this way: Scientists working at different times disagree over what aesthetic properties a theory must possess to count as beautiful. Astronomers from antiquity to the time of Nicholas Copernicus had an aesthetic predilection for particular symmetries.… Mechanics in the 18th century was pursued largely in an abstract style, not dependent on visualization.… Dirac saw beauty in theories that contain simple mathematical equations, whereas Weinberg regards a theory as beautiful if there is a sense of aptness or inevitability about its principles. (McAllister 1998: 175–6) In spite of these disagreements, McAllister thinks, scientists “ascribe aesthetic value to an aesthetic property proportionally to the empirical success scored by theories that exhibit that property.” Moreover, these preferences “can be revised as circumstances change” (McAllister 1998: 179). People seem content with the idea that a fictional story can contain some truth. However, they seem to reject the idea that a truthful story can contain some fiction. The latter is seen as a sort of swindle; the former is not. But, following Ricoeur, fiction and non-fiction must be interwoven so that the narrative configures reality in the way that allows the reader to reconfigure reality in the act of understanding.
Notes 1 2 3
One of the troubling aspects of Blumenberg’s thought is that, in his eagerness to overcome the Romanticist monopoly on myth, he disparages imagination (unnecessarily, we think). Holton includes excerpts from a letter written by P.A.M. Dirac regarding an anomalous charge reported by Millikan and an experiment designed to detect the presence of free quarks (Holton 1978: 304 n12). Millikan’s selection of what to include (publish) and what to ignore can be compared with the choices made by an author (Sebastian Junger) of the nonfiction account of the great North Atlantic storm of late October, 1991. In the foreword to his book, The Perfect Storm, the author writes,
206 Mary Gerhart and Allan Russell On the one hand, I wanted to write a completely factual book.… On the other hand, I didn’t want the narrative to asphyxiate under a mass of technical detail and conjecture.… I’ve written as complete account as possible of something that can never be fully known. (Junger 1997: xi–xii) Both Millikan and Junger made selections from the information available.
Bibliography Barbour, I. (1974) Myths, Models, and Paradigms: A Comparative Study in Science and Religion, New York: Harper & Row. Bazerman, C. (1988) Shaping Written Knowledge: The Genre and Activity of the Experimental Article in Science, Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press. Blumenberg, H. (1985) Work on Myth, Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press. Eliade, M. (1963) Myth and Reality, New York and Evanston: Harper & Row. Feyerabend, P. (1975) Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge, London: Verso. Gross, A.G. (1990) The Rhetoric of Science, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Holton, G. (1973) Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought: Kepler to Einstein, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. —— (1978) The Scientific Imagination: Case Studies, London: Cambridge University Press. Junger, S. (1997) The Perfect Storm: The True Story of Men Against the Sea, New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Knox, J. (1964) Myth and Truth: An Essay on the Language of Faith, Charlottesville, VA: The University Press of Virginia. Lévi-Strauss, C. (1958) “The Structural Study of Myth,” in T. Sebeok (ed.), Myth: A Symposium, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Lonergan, B. (1980) “Reality, Myth, Symbol,” in A.M. Olson (ed.), Myth, Symbol, Reality, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. MacCormac, E. (1976) Metaphor and Myth in Science and Religion, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. MacIntyre, A. (1967) “Myth,” in Paul Edwards (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, New York: Macmillan, vol. 5: 434–7. McAllister, J.W. (1998) “Is Beauty a Sign of Truth in Scientific Theories?,” American Scientist, 86: 174–83. Midgley, M. (1992) Science as Salvation: A Modern Myth and Its Meaning, London: Routledge. Millikan, R. (1917) The Electron: Its Isolation and Measurement and the Determination of Some of Its Properties, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Poincaré, H. (1952) Science and Hypothesis, New York: Dover Publications. Popper, K.R. (1968) Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge, New York: Harper & Row. Ricoeur, P. (1984–88) Time and Narrative, vols. 1–3, Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.
Index
Achilles 25 Adam 105, 125–6, 138–9, 152, 159 aesthetics: Greece 204–5; science 202–4 African-American female figures 115–16 Aggañña Sutta, Buddhism 12, 92–4 agroecology 170–1 alienation 40–1 allegorizers 25, 28, 42–3n8 Alvarez, L. W. 158 Analects of Confucius 88, 160 Anderson, Bernard 72 Anderson, Pamela Sue 12–13, 101, 110, 114 Andromeda 25 animals/humans 26–7 animism 18–19, 26, 36, 42n4 anthropology 46, 184 Antigone 120n2 Aphrodite 110 apocalyptic literature 145, 149 Apollo 132 Apollodoros 153 Aquinas, Thomas 60, 74 Aristophanes 131–3, 134–5, 137, 140n6 Aristotle 1; Aquinas 74; first philosophy 81; horse’s teeth example 58; metaphysics 88, 91 Aronowitz, S. 143 Asian Development Bank 170 astronomy 205 Athena 105 Atlas 25 Augustine, Saint 74 Austin, J. L. 52, 56 authenticity of faith 80 authority 8, 179 autonomy: circle people 133–4; desire
133–4; humans 104, 139; knowledge 34 avant-garde 154 Babbitt, S. E. 117 Bachofen, J. J. 104 Baeten, E. 2 Baillie, John 78, 82, 83n5 Bakhtin, Mikhail 150 Bali 162–3, 170–1 Barbour, I. G. 63n6, 87–8 Barrett, M. 176 Barthes, Roland 143, 148, 149 Bataille, Georges 143, 146 Baudrillard, Jean 143, 151 Baumfree, Isabella 115–16 Beardslee, William 71 beauty 205 Beauvoir, Simone de 102, 107–8, 116 beings-in-the-world 50 belief 68, 75–6; animism 18–19; Christianity 5; culture 96; ideology 189; instinctive 77; Peirce 75–6, 77; scientific method 79; shared 182 Benardete, S. 132, 133, 134, 135 Benjamin, W. 145 Bennett, Lance 187 Berry, Thomas 166 Best, S. 143, 154n1 Bhagavad Gita 160 Bible 20, 40, 72; see also creation stories; Fall myth; Genesis biculturalism 161 Big Bang 63n6 biodiversity 158 biotic community 162, 169 Blanchot, Maurice 143, 149 Blonsky, Marshall 143 Blumenberg, Hans 2, 30, 102, 197, 198
208 Index Bochenski, I. M. 78 body 111, 127–8, 146–7; female 107, 171 Bohm, David 171 Boudon, Raymond 187 Bourdieu, Pierre 177, 188 Bowra, C. M. 59–60 Boyer, Paul 150 bracketing 48–50, 52 Braidotti, Rosi 111 Brazil, Kayapó 170 Buddhism: Aggañña Sutta 12, 92–4; Kitaro 57; Majjhima Nikaya 88; pratityasamutpada 94; satori 5; suffering (samsara) 12, 93; sunyata 57 Bultmann, Rudolf 23, 40–2, 80, 88 Butler, Judith 119 calendar 199 Callicott, J. Baird 14, 159–60, 161, 165, 166–7 Calvin, Jean 77, 78, 79 Campbell, Joseph 23, 92; personification 24; poetry of myth 42–3n6; Romanticism 197; truth of myth 90 The Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 143 canon 71, 143 Caputo, J. D. 149 Carnap, Rudolf 67 Carr, D. 61 Carter, Angela 149 Cassirer, Ernst: ideology 36; Malinowski 35–6; The Myth of the State 182; mythic thinking 34; mythopoesis 34; political myth 187; Romanticism 197; science 34; symbolic thought 2 causation, personal/impersonal 20–1, 22, 38, 42n3 Cavarero, Adriana 104 ceremony 70 Chaisson, Eric J. 166 Chase, Richard 30 chemistry 201 chlorofluorocarbons 159 Chomsky, N. 183 Christ, C. P. 120n4 Christian, Sr., W. 15n2 Christianity: Augustine 74; beliefs 5; canon 71; community 67–8; cultus 82; environmental ethics 159; epic
narrative 71–2; Judaism 72, 73; Middle Ages 46; myth 72, 81; mythopoesis 65, 70–1; philosophy 74–5, 81; representamen 79; science 158–9; theology 65, 82; see also Bible; Fall myth; Genesis; God circle people: Aristophanes 132, 134–5; autonomy 133–4 circumcision, female 171 class 118, 176 Clemit, Pamela 120n1 Cockburn, Alexander 170 co-creation 171 Collins, Patricia Hill 115, 116, 117 colonialism 143 Combs, J. E. 184 comedy 131 commedia dell’arte 72 commonsense 77 community: biotic 162, 169; Christian 67–8; identity 13, 102; politics 150–1; religious 69, 80; scientific 192 Confucius 88, 160 Connerton, P. 178 consciousness 2, 50, 192 conservation, global 161 conservative-essentialist feminist approach 103, 106, 118 consistency, modernism 167–8 constancy hypothesis 57 constitution 48 contingent plane 193 continuity, historical 147 Copernican Revolution 163 Cornell, Drucilla 113, 115, 117 Cornford, F. M. 44n15 cosmogony 144 cosmology 94–5 Cosmos/Nature 82 creatio ex nihilo 56 creation 55, 56 creation stories 89; Elohim/Yahweh 52–3, 54–8; Genesis 11, 47, 51, 55, 124–5; Long 97n4; see also origin myths creed 69–70 CTHEORY 143 culture: belief 96; faith 74–5; metaphysics 96; primitive 20, 26–7; religion 68–9, 75, 76; social groupings 188 cultus 68, 69, 82 cyborgs 111–12, 114
Index 209 da Rocha, F. J. R. 165 Dadaism 145 Daly, Mary 104–5, 106, 118 Daniel, S. 46 Darwin, Charles 161–2, 198 Das Kapital (Marx) 167 Davidson, Donald 97–8n10 death as punishment 87–8 deconstruction: canon 143; feminism 145; Haraway 111; postmodernism 143, 164, 169; subliminal intentions 148 Deleuze, Gilles 143 Dellamore, Richard 144–5 Demeter 104, 110 demonic will 129–30 demythologizing 13, 123–4; Bultmann 40, 41; Jonas 41; Kant 123–4, 126, 129; political myth 188–9; Vattimo 148 denaturalization 149–50 Derrida, Jacques 144, 146, 149 Descartes, René 50, 163–4, 167 description 49, 52 desire: autonomy 133–4; body 127–8; diverted 132; Eros 131; experience 114; knowledge 134; law 137 Dewi Danu 170–1 Di Giovanni, G. 128, 130, 139 Diotima 104, 135–6 Dirac, P. A. M. 205 discourse 185, 186; Foucault 142; heterotopic 150; ideology 178; marginality 143; myth 6–7, 15–16n3, 182 divine 30, 79–80 Doniger, Wendy 2 Doty, William G. 13–14, 92, 144, 153, 175 doxa 150 Dreamtime 160 Dundes, Alan 2, 175 durability 197 duration 200, 202 Eagleton, T. 176 Eaton, Heather 169 Eatwell, R. 177 Eccleshall, R. 177 Eco, Umberto 154 ecology 158, 161–2, 165; see also environmental ethics Edelman, Murray 187 Eden, Garden of 125–6, 138–40, 159
Egerton, Howard 184 Einstein, Albert 193, 195, 204 electronic charge see Millikan Eliade, Mircea 23, 97n4, 150; authority 8; content of myth 196; cosmogony 144; exemplar history 179; metaphysics 85–6, 89; religious myth 88; Romanticism 197; sacred time 199–200; true story 9 Eliot, T. S. 144 Elohim/Yahweh 52–3, 54–8 embodiment 111, 146–7 emotion 77, 114 empiricism 2, 81 Enlightenment 108, 109, 145 environmental ethics 158; Christianity 159; coordination 160, 161; Islam 160; Judaism 159; religion 158–9 environmental problems 159, 160–1 epic narrative 71–2 Epic of Evolution Society 166–7, 168 epistemology 115, 117 epoche 48–9, 50, 51 Eros 131–2, 141n6 eschatology 175–6 essentialism: feminism 105, 120n3; Merleau-Ponty 50; myth 103; Ogden 69; phenomenology 49; presumptive 54 ethics 20; see also environmental ethics ethnometaphysics 96, 98n14 euhemerists 24–5, 28, 43n7 eusebeia 68, 69 Eve 105, 125–6, 138–9, 152 evil: free will 127–8; matter 56; philosophy 5; rejected 140 evolutionary-ecological myth 168–9 Excluded Middle Law 60–1 exclusion of women 102–3 exemplar history 179 existentialism: feminism 107; MerleauPonty 63n4; metaphysics 91; myth 40–1; phenomenology 49–50, 58, 61–2, 144; philosophy 51; theology 74 experience: desire 114; imagination 1; immediate 77; logic 60–1; narrative 113; religious 76; unmediated 77–8 experimental methodology 163 fable 8 fact–fiction 199 Fairclough, N. 177 faith 75–6; authenticity 80; culture
210 Index 74–5; interpretants 68; knowledge 79; Power 82; sacred/secular 78–9 Fall myth 124–5; Kant 123–4, 126–30, 138–9; moral philosophy 13, 123; Yahweh 125–6 falsity 181–2, 183, 191; see also truth fantasy 187 Fay, B. 183 feeling 114 Fekete, J. 147 female body 107, 171 feminism: deconstruction 145; essentialism 105, 120n3; existentialism 107; gender 116; Kant 113–14; liberal 109; poststructuralism 118–19; symbols 114; technology 114; transformations 101 feminist philosophy 13, 102–3; conservative-essentialist feminist approach 103, 106, 118; identity 103; liberal-existentialist feminist approach 103, 107–8, 118; mythopoesis 13; progressivepoststructuralist feminist approach 103, 118; radical-essentialist feminist approach 103, 106, 109, 118 feminist representation 115 Ferré, Frederick 165 Feyerabend, Paul 192 fidelitas 75–6 fides 75–6 fiducia 75–6 Fink, Eugen 52 Flood, Christopher 14–15 form/matter 56–7 Forms, Platonic 52, 60–1 Foster, M. 63n6 Foucault, Michel 142, 143, 145, 150 foundational myth 117 fragmentation 145–6 France 111, 143 Frankfort, H. A. 85, 86, 89 Frankfort, Henri 85, 86, 89 Frazer, James 31, 36 free will 127–8 Freeden, M. 177 Freud, Sigmund 143 Freudians 42–3n8 Fundierung, Merleau-Ponty 61–2 Gantz, Timothy 152 Gare, Arran 169
Geertz, Clifford: metaphysics 86, 89, 95–6; politics 147–8; reality/myth 8, 87; religion 68, 95–6 gender: Beauvoir 116; elimination 108; feminism 116; Foucault 143; hierarchy 103, 118; myth 113–14, 119–20; post-feminism 119 Genesis: creation stories 11, 47, 51, 55, 124–5; Fall myth 124–5; knowledge 135, 136; Oedipal tragedy 138–9; origin myths 168; stewardship 159 genres 69–70 Georges, Robert 2 Gerhart, Mary 15 German idealism 1–2, 74 gestation 107 Girardet, Raoul 187 Girling, John 150–1, 182, 187 Giroux, H. A. 143 global conservation 161 Gnosticism 41 God 71; alienation 40–1; eternal/temporary economy 82; gods 77–8; humans 30; love 140; metaphysics 81; monotheism 79–80, 143; piety 80; see also theology goddess 106, 120n4 gods: God 77–8; Greece 30, 152–3; humans 20; myth 19; poetry 65; Tylor 25; Wisdom 140 golden mean 204–5 good life 75 grand narrative 14, 143, 166, 167, 171–2 Graves, Robert 144, 152 Greece: aesthetics 204–5; gods 30, 152–3; quality of light 59–60 Griffin, David Ray 76, 77, 165 Griffiths, P. J. 3, 96 Grim, John 166 Grossberg, Lawrence 14, 147, 151 Grünbaum, Adolf 21 Guthrie, Stewart 43n13 Hallowell, A. I. 98n14 Hamilton, Edith 152 Haraway, Donna 114; AfricanAmerican female figures 115–16; cyborgs 111–12, 114; feminist representation 115; “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” 111–12 Harrison, Jane 104, 118 Hartshorne, Charles: emotion 77;
Index 211 metaphysics 12, 82, 90–1, 98n11; theology 74 Harvey, David 147 Hatab, Lawrence 46, 146, 153 Hawkes, D. 176 Hecht, Susanna 170 hegemony 167, 169 Heidegger, Martin 49, 51 Helius 25, 28 Hempel, Carl 29–30 hermeneutics 2, 49, 114, 151 heroes 24–5, 30 Heschel, Abraham 72, 74 Hesiod 30, 97n1 Heywood, A. 177 Hick, John 14 Higgins, K. M. 145 Hillman, James 14, 145, 148 Hinduism 160 Hippolytus 74 history 8, 147, 199, 200–1 Hobbes, Thomas 108 holiness 78 Holton, Gerald 193–6, 202 Homer 30, 97n1 Homo sapiens 161–2; see also humans hooks, bell 116 Hornblower, S. 152 Horne, D. 178 Horton, Robin 38–9, 40, 43n13, 43n14 Hosking, Geoffrey 148 hubris 134, 136 Hulliung, M. 177 humans: animals 26–7; autonomy 139; God 30; gods 20; loss of wholeness 132–3, 134–5; man of action/thinker 33; nature 165–6; see also circle people; primitive people Hume, David 81 Husserl, Edmund 47, 48, 50, 62 Hutcheon, Linda: denaturalizing 150; The Politics of Postmodernism 149; postmodernism 142, 143, 152 icons of myth 179, 188 idealism: German 1–2, 74; metaphysical 164–5 idealization in public science 202–3 identification, mystic 32 identity: community 13, 102; conservative-essentialist feminist approach 106; epistemology 117; feminist philosophy 103; radical-
essentialist feminist approach 106; refiguration 113–14; univocal 107 ideology 176–8; belief 189; Cassirer 36; discourse 178; genesis/circulation 187; Marxism 176–7; mythmaking 189; narrative 179–80, 181, 183, 185; non-Marxist 177–8; politics 14–15, 174–5; sacred myth 174–5; theory 177–8 imaginary 115, 120 imagination 1, 28–9, 30, 152 immateriality 21 imperialism 107 indeterminacy 165 indigenous traditions 160 Indonesia 170–1 Indra, Jeweled Net 171 intellection/reality 161 intellectual space 193 intellectualism 37 intentionality: consciousness 50; existential phenomenology 58; Husserl 62; Merleau-Ponty 50, 52; speech 54 interdisciplinary approach 143 interpretants 68 interpretation of myth 146; denaturalization 149–50; literal 23–5; metaphysics 87–90, 95–6; religious experience 76; religious texts 2; truth 94–5 intertextuality 145–6 intuiting 49, 52 Irenaeus 71, 74 Irigaray, Luce 109–11 irony 148–9, 154 Islam 5, 74, 160; see also Qur’an Jaggar, Alison 120n3 James, G. A. 160 James, William 76, 81 Jencks, C. 154 Johnson, M. 147 Jonas, Hans 40, 41–2 journalism 182, 191 Judaism 5, 72, 73, 74, 159 Jung, Carl Gustav 23 Junger, Sebastian 205–6n3 Kant, Immanuel 140n4; Adam 138–9; demythologizing 123–4, 126, 129; Fall myth 123–4, 126–30, 138–9; feminist rereading 113–14; knowledge 90, 139; metaphysics 87,
212 Index 91; noumena 90; Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason 123, 138–9; will 137 Kaufman, Gordon 166 Kayapó 170 Kearney, Richard 149, 151–2 Kellert, S. R. 158 Kellner, D. 143, 154n1 Kertzer, D. I. 178 Kitaro, Nishida 57 Klein, Calvin 153 knowledge: autonomy 34; consciousness 192; desire 134; Eden 139; faith 79; Genesis 135, 136; Kant 90, 139; local systems 171; perfection 133; Plato 54; primitive people 26, 27, 88; science 58; understanding 202 Kore 110 Korsgaard, C. 141n4 Kremer, J. W. 163, 171 Kroker, Arthur 143 Kroker, Marilouise 143 Kumokums 53, 54 Kumulipo 160 Lakoff, G. 147 land ethic 161–2 language 4, 70, 114, 146 Lansing, J. S. 163, 170–1 Lash, Scott 145, 146–7 Lauretis, Teresa de 149 law 127, 137 Le Doeuff, Michèle 101, 120 legend 8, 24–5 Lemke, J. L. 177 Leopold, Aldo 161–2, 165, 168–9 Lévi-Strauss, Claude: Freudians 43n8; intellectualism 37; myth 29, 37–8, 196; Romanticism 197 Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien 32–3 liberal-culturalist feminist approach 103, 107, 108–9, 118 liberal-existentialist feminist approach 103, 107–8, 118 liberal feminism 109 life-world 50, 58–61 light quality 59–60 Lincoln, Bruce 6–8, 175, 179 Lindbeck, G. A. 68–9 Locke, John 108 logic/experience 60–1 logic of mythos 65, 67 logical positivists 90
logocentrism 142 logos 101 Long, Charles H. 97n4, 97n5 Lorentzen, Lois 169 love 140, 140n6 loyalty 76, 78–9 Luther, Martin 80 Lyotard, J.-F. 143 McAllister, James W. 205 MacCormac, E. 92 McCutcheon, R. T. 150 MacIntyre, Alasdair 9, 196 McLellan, D. 176 MacPherson, Dennis 96 Macquarrie, John 83n5 Macridis, R. 177 magic 35, 36 Magnus, B. 145 Majjhima Nikaya 88 Malinowski, Bronislaw 8, 35–7, 89 man of action/thinker 33 marginality 143 Marriott, A. 53 Martin, Richard M. 66, 67 Marx, Karl, Das Kapital 167 Marxism 176–7 mass-extinction events 158 matriarchy 104, 110 matter/form 56–7 meanings 49, 86, 146 mechanism, materialistic 163 Medawar, Peter 193 Medea 117 Memnon 25 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice: constancy hypothesis 57; essentialism 50; existentialism 63n4; Fundierung 61–2; intentionality 50, 52; phenomenology 49–51; subjectivity 57 Messiaen, Olivier 153 metalanguage 154 metaphysical idealism 164–5 metaphysics 12, 85–7; Aristotle 88, 91; culture 96; Davidson 97–8n10; Eliade 85–6, 89; existentialism 91; Geertz 86, 89, 95–6; God 81; Hartshorne 12, 82, 90–1, 98n11; immateriality 21; interpretation of myth 87–90, 95–6; Kant 87, 91; preKantian 88; religion 18, 86, 96; truth 90, 91–2 Middle Ages 46, 65–6
Index 213 Middleton, John 2 Midgley, Mary 191 Mill, John Stuart 108 Millikan, Robert A. 193, 194, 195, 198, 202–4, 205–6n3 mind–body dualism 21, 50, 147 Modern science 158–9, 162–3 Modern technology 158–9 modernism: consistency 167–8; fragmentation 145; pop culture 147; science/technology 158–9, 162–3 Modocs 53 monotheism 79–80, 143 moral philosophy: Fall myth 13, 123; myth 137–8; perfectionism 136–7 moral thinking 13 morality/law 127 Morris, Charles W. 67 Morrison, Toni 116, 117 motherhood 104, 107 Müller, Friedrich Max 24, 42n5 Munslow, A. 183 murder, ritual 106 myth 1–2, 7–10, 191, 196; content 11, 30–1, 196–7; discourse 6–7, 15–16n3, 182; functions 85, 186–7; literal interpretation 23–5; philosophy 1–2, 11, 18, 46–7, 63n1, 101–3; reality 8, 12, 86, 87, 92–5; religion 26, 73, 87–8; science 15, 18–23, 39–40, 192–3; truth 8, 10, 51–2, 85, 184–5; see also political myth; sacred myth myth-handbooks 152–3 mythmaking 180–1, 186, 189; see also mythopoesis mythography 144, 151–2, 153 Mythology: A CD-ROM Encyclopedia 153 mythopoesis: Cassirer 34; Christianity 65, 70–1; feminist philosophy 13; narrative 180; poets 97n1; political narrative 180, 186 naming 115, 164 Nancy, J.-L. 143 narrative 9, 196–7; epic 71–2; experience 113; ideology 179–80, 181, 183, 185; mythopoeisis 180; politics 180, 186; Ricoeur 199, 205; thinking mode 29; truth 7–8, 167, 202; see also grand narrative native science 170 natural selection 198
nature: Cosmos 82; humans 165–6; personification 24; women 104, 105 neomythic worldview 160 Neo-Platonism 56 neo-Tyloreans 20, 38–9 Neville, Robert 3 news stories 183 Newton, Sir Isaac 163, 167 Niebuhr, H. Richard 76, 82, 83n5 Nietzsche, Friedrich 144, 145, 148 Nimmo, D. 184 noble savage 108 noematics 48 noetics 48, 58–61, 63n10 noumena 90 novel 120n1, 145–6 Oedipal tragedy 138–9 Oelschlager, M. 158, 159 Ogden, Schubert 68–9, 74–5, 82, 83n5, 92 Okely, J. 107 ontology, science 168 oppression of women 106–7 optimization 198 Origen 21 origin myths 144, 166, 168, 191; see also creation stories; Genesis Ortega y Gasset, J. 60–1 paganism 46 paideia 75 pantheism 5 Parenti, M. 183 Paris, Ginette 153 parody 149 partnership/reciprocity 172 Pateman, Carole 108–9 pathos 70 patriarchy 103–4, 105, 144, 145 Patton, Laurie 2 Paul, Saint 140 Pausanias 141n6 Peirce, Charles S.: belief 75–6, 77; logic of mythos 65, 67; secondness 78; sign 11–12, 66–7 Penelope 104 Pentateuch 167 perception 49, 70, 76 perfection 133, 136–7 performativity 52–4 Persephone 110 Perseus 25 personification 24
214 Index persuasion 7 Pettazzoni, R. 9 phenomenology: description 52; essentialism 49; existentialism 49–50, 58, 61–2, 144; hermeneutics 114; Husserl 47; Merleau-Ponty 49–51; philosophy/myth 11, 46–7; post-Kantian 103; reduction 48–9; Spiegelberg 47–9 Philo of Alexandria 52 philosophy: Christianity 74–5, 81; empiricism 2, 81; evil 5; existentialism 51; myth 1–2, 11, 18, 46–7, 63n1, 101–3; mythography 153; phenomenology 11, 46–7; polycentrism 96; postmodernism 14; social science 2–3; Tylor 18; Western 102, 142 Philosophy of Religion 2, 3–5, 96 philosophy of science 192 physics 195, 201 pietas 68, 69 piety 80 Pippin, Tina 149–50, 152 Plato 30, 146; Diotima 135–6; Forms 52, 60–1; knowledge 54; poetry/myth 46; Symposium 13, 131–7; Timaeus 47, 51, 52, 55, 58, 61–3 Plotinus 30 pluralism 7, 8–9, 160–1 poeisis 70 poetry: Campbell 42n6; creation 55; gods 65; mythopoesis 97n1; Plato 46; truth 85; Tylor 23–4, 28–9 political myth 178–81; Cassirer 35, 187; demythologizing 188–9; ideology 14–15; sacred myth 178–9, 184, 188–9; truth/falsity 184–5 Political Science Abstracts 181–2 politics: community 150–1; Geertz 147–8; ideology 15, 174–5; narrative 180, 186; ritual 188; themata 194–5; see also political myth polycentrism 96 polychlorinated biphenals 159 polytheism 5 pop culture 147 Popper, Karl 29–30, 39–40, 192 Posey, Darrell 170 post-feminism 119, 145 post-Kantianism 103, 113 post-liberal theology 83n5
postmodernism: beginnings 152; deconstruction 143, 164, 169; fragmentation 145–6; grand narrative 14; Hutcheon 142, 143, 152; interdisciplinary approach 143; irony 148–9, 154; parody 149; philosophy 14; reconstruction 165, 166, 169; relational claims 147; science 163, 168, 170; science fiction 145; self-reflexivity 149; Sims 154n1; Tylor 30–1; uncertainty 164, 165 “Postmodernism and beyond” 142 post-postmodernist thought 142–3 poststructuralism: embodiment 147; feminism 118–19; France 111; liberal feminism 109 Power, William L. 11–12, 69, 76, 82, 83n2 pragmatics 66, 67, 76 pratityasamutpada doctrine 94 praxis 70 pregnance 197, 198 pregnancy 107 prehension, physical 78 prelogical thought 31–2, 34 Prigogine, Ilya 171 primitive people: culture 20, 26–7; knowledge 26, 27, 88; prelogical thought 31–2, 34; religion 19, 37; sense impressions 27; Tylor 19, 21, 26–8 primitivism 35 probabilism 21 process philosophy 82 progress 198 progressive-poststructuralist feminist approach 103, 118 projective psyche models 145 propaganda 183 Protestantism 74 psychotherapy 146 public science 191, 194, 200, 202–3 Questia: An Online Library of Scholarly Books 153 quests 13 Qur’an 78, 160, 167 Rabb, Douglas 96 race 118 Rachlin, C. 53 racism 107, 117
Index 215 radical-essentialist feminist approach 103, 104–5, 106, 109, 118 Radin, Paul 33–4 Rahula, W. 94 Rampino, M. R. 158 Raposa, M. L. 69, 83n2 Raup, D. M. 158 Reaka-Kudla, M. L. 160 reality: cosmological level 92, 93; intellection 161; metaphysical level 92, 93–4; myth 8, 12, 86, 87, 92–5; psychological level 92, 93; representations 109; social constructs 164; sociological level 92, 93 reason 26–8, 114 reciprocity/partnership 172 reconstruction: postmodernism 165, 166, 169; public science 194 reduction 48–9 reductionism 143, 163 refiguration 110–12, 113–14, 117–18 reincarnation 5 religio 68 religion: culture 68–9, 75, 76; doctrine 15n2; environmental ethics 158–9; ethics 20; Geertz 68, 95–6; history of 68; Horton 38–9; hypotheses 80–1; interpretation 76; language 4; metaphysics 18, 86, 96; myth 26, 73, 87–8; practices 4–5; primitive 19, 37; science 18, 42n2, 191; semiotics 68 religious community 69, 80 Religious Studies 2, 7, 8–9, 16n5, 90 religious texts 2, 160 repeatablity 200 representamen: Christianity 79; sign 66–7, 67–8 representations: feminism 115; reality 109; sign 70 res cogitans 163–4 res discursus 164–5 res extensa 163–4 resistance 116 Reuther, Rosemary Radford 159 Reynolds, F. E. 94, 153 rhino horn 171 rice cultivation 170–1 Rich, Adrienne 104 Ricoeur, Paul: hermeneutics 2, 114, 151; narrative theory 199, 205 ritual 18, 70, 106, 188 Romanticism 197
Rose, H. J. 152 Rosenau, P. M. 142 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 108 Royce, Josiah 76 Rue, Loyal 166 Russell, Allan 15 sacred 78, 199–200 sacred myth: content 175–6; ideology 174–5; political myth 178–9, 184, 188–9 Sainte Chapelle, Paris 71 Salmon, W. C. 22 samsara (suffering) 12, 93 Sartre, Jean-Paul 49, 107 Sartwell, C. 147 Scarborough, Milton 11, 46, 63, 144 Schilbrack, Kevin 12, 89, 97–8n10 Schillebeeckx, Edward 78 Schneider, S. H. 160 Schöplin, George 148 Schüssler Fiorenza, Elizabeth 106 science: aesthetics 202–4; Cassirer 34; chemistry 201; Christianity 158–9; knowledge 58; Modern 158–9, 162–3; myth 15, 18–23, 39–40, 192–3; native 170; ontology 168; physics 195, 201; postmodernism 163, 168, 170; private 193–4; probabilism 21; religion 18, 42n2, 191; testability 21–2; themata 191, 194–5, 204; time 200, 201, 202; see also public science science fiction 145 scientific community 192 scientific method 79 Searle, J. R. 70 Sebeok, Thomas 143 secondness 78 secularization 145 Segal, R. A. 175 Segal, Robert 2, 10–11 self-conception 137–8, 139, 140 self-consciousness 50 self-knowledge 136 self-reflexivity 149 self-rule 137–8 Seliger, Martin 177–8 semantics 66, 67, 77–8 semiotics 12, 66, 67, 68 sense impressions 27, 77 sensus divinitatis 77, 78, 79 Sepkoski, J. J. 158 serpent 125–6, 129–31
216 Index sexism 117 sexual contract 109 sexual difference 13, 118, 125–6 sexual politics 143 sexuality 113–14, 118, 119, 132–3 Shelley, Mary 120n1 sign: Peirce 11–12, 66–7; representamen 66–8; representation 70; see also semiotics signifiers, floating 151 Sims, S. 154n1 simulacra 151 Sistine Chapel 71 Smith, Adam, The Wealth of Nations 167 social constructs 164 social contract theory 108 social-epistemologist feminist approach 103, 113–14, 118 social groupings 188 social philosophy 144 social science 2–3 society, closed/open 38 Socrates 60–1, 135 Sorel, Georges 182, 186–7 speculative philosophy 81 speech acts: absurdity of life 75; intentionality 54; performativity 52–4; Searle 70; systematic pragmatics 67 Spiegelberg, Herbert 47–9, 54 Stengers, Isabelle 171 stewardship 159 Stewardship Environmental Ethic 159 Strong, J. 93 Strothers, R. B. 158 structuralism 147 Stump, Eleanor 3–4 Sturma, Dieter 1 subjectivity: Merleau-Ponty 57; refigured 111; sexuality 113–14, 119; transcendental 49, 51 suffering 12, 93 suicide 75 Suleiman, S. R. 185 SUNY Press 165 sunyata 57 Swimme, Brian 166 symbolic power 188 symbols: feminism 114; language 146; meaning 86; polyphonic 143 Symposium (Plato) 13 syntax 66, 67 systematic pragmatics 67
Tao Te Ching 160 Taoism 57 Tavener, John 153 Taylor, Mark C. 146, 149, 152 technology 114, 158–9 teleology 22 temptation 127–8, 129, 130 Tertullian 21, 74 testability 21–2 themata 191, 194–5, 204 theology 65, 74, 82, 83n5 theoria 70 theory 177–8 thinker/man of action 33 thinking mode 10, 33–4; concrete/abstract 37; constancy hypothesis 57; narrative 29; prelogical 31–2, 34; symbolic 2 Thompson, J. B. 178 Thompson, L. 184 threskeia 68, 69 Timaeus 11 time: chronicle 199; elapsed 201; historical 199, 200–1; sacred 199–200; science 200, 201, 202 Tong, R. 120n3 totalism 142–3, 167, 169 Toulmin, Stephen 165 Tracy, David 153 tragedy 131, 138–9 transcendentalism 63n5 transformations 101, 110–11, 199 tree of knowledge 125–6 tree of life 125–6 triumphalism 142 trivium 65–7 trust 75–6, 78–9 truth: absolute 142, 148; cosmology 94–5; creed 69–70; genres 69–70; interpretation 94–5; metaphysics 90, 91–2; Modern science 162–3; myth 8, 10, 51–2, 85, 184–5; narrative 7–8, 167, 202; poetry 85; political myth 184–5 Truth, Sojourner 115–16 Tucker, Mary Evelyn 166 Tudor, H. 184 Turner, Terrence 170 Tylor, Edward Burnett 10–11, 41–2n1; animism 18–19, 26, 35, 42n4; content of myth 30–1; divine 30; gods 25; imagination 28–9; literal reading of myth 23–5; myth/science 20–3; personal/impersonal causes
Index 217 20–1, 22, 38, 42n3; philosophy 18; poetry 23–4, 28–9; postmodernism 30–1; primitive people 19, 21, 26–8; religion/science 42n2 uncertainty 164, 165 The Universe Story 166, 168 Vattimo, Gianni 14, 148, 150 Vico, Giambattista 196 virgin/temptress myth 107 visualism 61 Vivas, Eliseo 90 Vodun possession 5 Vogelin, Eric 97n1 Wall Street Journal 191 Wallace, Robert M. 197 Watts, Alan 90 The Wealth of Nations (Smith) 167 Weigle, Marta 144 Weinberg, Steven 204, 205 Welton, Donn 147 Western culture 152–3, 158, 160
Western philosophy 102, 142 Wetsel, James 13 White, Jr., L. 159 Whitehead, A. N. 74, 77, 78, 81, 82 Wiebe, Donald 16n5 witchcraft 5 Wilder, Amos 71, 72, 73 will 127–8, 129–30, 137 Wilson, E. O. 160, 168 Wired magazine 146 Wisdom, John 140 women: autonomy 104; devalued 102–3; exclusion 102–3; nature 104, 105; oppression 106–7; virgin/temptress myth 107 Wordsworth, William 24 Wright, A. 177 Wright, M. R. 92 Yahweh: Elohim 52–3, 54–8; Fall myth 125–6, 133, 135; serpent 130 Yin-Yang mandala 171 Zeus 25, 105, 132, 133
