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Ricoeur is one of the most significant writers in the realm of the relation of myth to Philosophy. The following is from his work “The Symbolism of Evil”:
“Myths will be here taken to mean what the history of religions now finds in it: not a false explanation by means of images and fables, but a traditional narration which relates to events that happened at the beginning of time and which has the purpose of providing grounds for the ritual actions of men today, and, in a general manner, establishing all the forms of action and thought by which man understands himself in his world. For us moderns a myth is only a myth because we no longer connect that time with the time of history as we write it, employing the critical method, nor can we connect mythical places with our geographical space. This is why myth can no longer be an explanation…But in losing its explanatory pretensions the myth reveals its exploratory significance and its contribution to understanding which we shall later call its symbolic function—-that is to say, its power of discovering and revealing the bond between man and what he considers sacred.”(P.5)
The limitations of myth may well have given birth to Philosophy, when it came to providing explanations demanded by aporetic questions, and raising issues relating to the infinite media of change, namely space, time and matter. It no longer seemed efficacious to personify Time by the figure or image of Chronos, engaging in the curious activity of eating his own children and being castrated by one of the most powerful of his children. Such images just did not seem to respond appropriately to the awe and wonder of a newly awoken consciousness in the face of the sublimity of life in a world of such complexity. These images did not possess the required universality and necessity of the philosophical principle of sufficient reason.
Cassirer in his work “Language and Myth”(Trans by Langer, S., K., New York, Dover, 1946), opens his work by reflecting upon the master of Myth himself, namely Plato. In the Phaedrus Socrates shows his impatience with claims of the god-like wind carrying someone away in order to account for their death. Reasoning in this way, he argues, risks allowing the imagination to run free which in turn merely raise the demand for explanations relating to the existence of monsters and gods. Such investigations, Socrates argued distracted one from the aporetic question par excellence of Philosophy, namely the Delphic task of knowing oneself.
Cassirer quotes Max Muller(The Philosophy of Mythology, London, 1973), and highlights his claim that myth arises from the illusions of language, making it some kind of pathological phenomenon. This conflicts with Ricoeur’s account above. Cassirer rejects Mullers account on Kantian grounds and argues instead, that the figures of myth:
“refer to some given reality by means of suggestion and allegorical renderings, but in the sense of forces each of which produces and posits a world of its own.”(P.8)
The question to raise here is whether Plato, the master of the mythical illustration we find in the later books of the Republic, would have found some truth in the above quote. His allegories of the cave, the divided line, and the sun are after all, not merely artistic embellishments, but are meant seriously to complement the rational argumentation in this work. The physical sun, for example, is an analogue of the good, and there is nothing pathological about seeing the resemblance between the sun and its relation to physical life, and the good and its relation to the ethical good-spirited, flourishing life. True, there is no obvious connection of such allegories to religion, but we also know that there have been religions in which worship of the sun played a significant role. For Aristotle, we know, Being had many meanings, and awe and wonder in the face of this Being, gave rise to the desire to understand these meanings. For Plato it was the “form of the good” which was the primary form, and this strategically suggested that for him practical rationality was more important than the more theoretical pursuit of knowledge and Truth. It is also important to point out that this priority is to be found in Kantian critical Philosophy too. Cassirer insists that the words we have for divine entities carries with it a suggestive power that ought not to be underestimated. Heraclitus, we also know, found what he thought to be a philosophical connection between what he termed “logos” and the divine. The two terms “logos” and muthos”, insofar as Ricoeur is concerned, form a coordinate system for discourse in the arena of religious discourse. This borders on the territory of Poetry which Aristotle concerns himself with, but in Aristotle there is a clear distinction between the ethical focus of the Poetics and the kind of mythical speculation that attempts to say something about the beginning of time in a context of the infinite media of change.
The term “mimesis”, however, aligns us more closely with the Socratic rejection of myth in the search for self-knowledge. For Aristotle mimesis praxeos has very clear ethical and aesthetic implications. Aristotle’s Poetics gives us an account of the function of narrative that ties the beginning, middle and end of the attempt to represent or imitate action into a composite whole. This composition or plot refuses a reduction into episodic point-like events, because the creator is concerned to connect events/actions in a universal manner. The theme of this universality is more concerned with areté(doing the right thing in the right way at the right time) and diké, than the divine logos. The Spectator of the drama learns from what he witnesses, the possibilities related to a tragic reversal of fortune from good to bad. Involved in this learning process is a recognition that we all get what we deserve, in the spirit of diké. The universals involved in this context are not theoretical but related to the logos of ethical and political action and thought. For Socrates the logos of these forms of the good were also related to his need to consult with his inner daimon, when elenchus appeared to fail to provide the wisdom(phronesis) he needed. This change of focus, from Homers Gods living on Olympus, to an inner voice, was also linked to the Socratic complaint about Homer and his depiction of the Gods as engaging in unethical actions. This shift in focus, for Socrates, was part of his search for the principles that communities need to reason their way to the telos of the good spirited flourishing life. Aristotle elaborated upon the examined life by including in his contemplative life, an account of the logos of Poetics, and the importance of plot, character, thought, language, melody, and spectacle. The plot of a tragedy, Ricoeur claims, is the “soul” or “telos” of tragedy, and he further claims that mimesis and muthos are equivalent ideas in this context. It is difficult to understand his point here, but its seems connected to his claim that the narrating of events, and the enacting of events in drama, are in some sense the “same”. The fictional enactment of events requires the temporal structure of a narrative in which the beginning necessarily “causes” the middle which in turn necessarily gives rise to an end. In this fictional process we take pleasure in the recognition of images for what they are: a recognition of the “universal intent” of the dramatist. Aristotle clearly differentiates historical narrative from poetic narratives in terms of the difference between the ordering of particular events and the universal intent of a drama in which there is a catharsis of emotions in relation to the reversal of fortune of the major. character(s) Unhappiness is a key moment in this process that is evaluated in terms of diké( getting what one deserves). The catharsis of the Spectator involves the recognition of the role of The Good and the True in what has happened and the inevitability of what has happened is recognised in relation to a set of circumstances.
Ricoeur interprets Aristotle dialectically when he links the processes internal to the composed work to what he calls the “external” role of the spectator in the process of catharsis. Cognition, imagination and feeling are all “at play” here and perhaps the idea he presupposes of “recognition” is not a sufficient characterisation of the way in which knowledge(epistemé) and areté are constitutive of the complex composition we are presented with.