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Campbell claims that Mythology, (whilst manifesting itself in concrete local ethnic forms), is nevertheless concerned with timeless themes such as life, death, and justice. He refers in this context to the ceremonial activities connected with justice such as standing up for the robed judge entering and leaving the court. This, attention, is for Campbell, a sign that we are dealing with a mythological figure. (Page 14). He also mentions the ritual of the Inauguration of a President as well as the ritualistic wearing of uniforms for members of the armed forces. This latter phenomenon, he argues, denotes that these individuals are to be given special status above and beyond the reach of civil law. This is a puzzling remark, especially given the recent expansion of the remit of the International Court of Justice to include war crimes and crimes against humanity, (for example, the murdering of civilians who happen to find themselves living in the vicinity of a war.
The Metaphysics of Morals surely overshadows the Metaphysics of War in this context, focusing, as war does, upon instrumental reasoning that aims for the most effective means to the end of annihilating ones enemy. The Metaphysics of morals, on the other hand, is concerned with a moral end-in-itself which is to treat every human being as an end-in-itself thereby creating what Kant referred to as the Cosmopolitan “Kingdom of Ends”. This ideal Kingdom forms the foundation for a Philosophy of Human Rights based on the rational ideas of Equality and Freedom and this Kantian ideal is, in turn, an ideal of Cosmopolitan Justice that we cannot find in Mythological accounts and visions.
Campbell then provides us with an interesting characterisation of Consciousness:
“It is part of the Cartesian mode to think of consciousness as being something peculiar to the head, that the head is the organ originating consciousness. It isn’t. The head is an organ that inflects consciousness in a certain direction, or to a certain set of purposes. But there is a consciousness here in the body. The whole living world is informed by consciousness. I have a feeling that consciousness and energy are the same thing somehow. Where you really see life, energy, there is consciousness. Certainly the vegetable world is conscious….There is a plant consciousness and there is an animal consciousness and we share both these things. Trying to interpret in simply mechanical terms won’t work.” (Page 18)
These are reflections, which are clearly mythological but they are not completely in accord with philosophical thinking. For Aristotelian, Hylomorphic thinking, animals and humans are capable of consciousness because they are capable of representing the world through their perceptual systems. For Aristotle inhabitants of the plant kingdom are capable of nutrition and reproduction, but they are not capable of perception. The world of psuché for Aristotle is differentiated, and different principles are operating for different forms of life. Neither Aristotle nor Kant would have approved of using mechanistic explanations to explain the essence of forms of life . Mechanistic explanations are best used for motion and activity in the natural inorganic world in which a network of causes constitute a totality of facts in accord with physical non-psychological principles.
Brian O’Shaughnessy, the British analytical Philosopher, contributes to this discussion by suggesting that whilst the origins of consciousness may be construed as mysterious, its nature or essence is not :
Open Quote. “Consciousness has a determinate character of internal type and there exist logically necessary and sufficient psychological conditions for the presence of this phenomenon….consciousness is analysable into psychological parts.” Close quote (Consciousness and the World”, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2000, Page 5)
O Shaughnessy notes that consciousness interacts with the world in many ways, and requires items of knowledge–a cognitive function that is closer to its essence than the performing of intentional deeds promoting life. Indeed, O’Shaughnessy argues this latter kind of activity relies upon knowledge for its rationality. This position recalls the accounts of the soul provided by both Plato and Aristotle. According to both, O’Shaughnessy, the analytical Philosopher, and Merleau-Ponty, the Continental Philosopher, consciousness is intimately related to the psychological function of Perception, which fuels desire that in turn again enriches perception, and so on in a “universal vital cycle” (Page 7) O’Shaughnessy is providing us with an Aristotelian essence-specifying-definition of considerable complexity, considering the Post-Aristotelian, Post-Kantian, and Post-Wittgensteinian elements of his account. He claims, in agreement with Campbell, that Consciousness cannot exist without experience, claiming further that perception is an:
Open quote. “a priori-given mental concept…, being nothing but the extensional awareness of a phenomenal reality.” Close quote. (Page 18)
Plant-life cannot of course perceive its environment via representations of phenomenal objects. O’Shaughnessy agrees with this judgment ,and claims further, that animal consciousness in the form of perception is situationally-tied to the immediate environment, and to that extent is not to be regarded as capable of thought or rationality which occur at a conceptual distance from their objects. Animals, therefore, are not capable of distancing themselves from their environment and are therefore not capable of reflecting upon themselves or “knowing” themselves. It is these characteristics that enable the human form of life to transcend experience in the phenomenal world, and thereby relate to a transcendental noumenal world. The kingdom of ends and the realm of the sacred are noumenal ideals that can be accessed via various human psychological functions and powers. This, in turn, also helps to explain why a science of phenomena constituted of a network of causes and totality of facts can never completely explain all the different forms of our “Being-in-the-world”.
For Campbell, human beings are capable of levels of consciousness which he illustrates in various works by appealing to, for example, kundalini yoga (“Inner Reaches of Outer Space”, 1986) ). In “The Power of Myth” (1988) Bill Moyers asks Campbell how we can engage in the process of transforming consciousness, and Campbell responds by insisting that “All life is meditation” (Page 19). He adds, however, that many people spend much of their life meditating about money, which he implies is not a spiritual kind of reflection. In this context he places emphasis upon the importance of spiritual places and their power to provoke a meditative state:
“I walk off 51st street and 5th Avenue into St Patrick’s Cathedral, and everything around me speaks of spiritual mysteries. The mystery of the cross. “What is that all about? The stained glass windows which bring another atmosphere in. My consciousness has been brought up onto another level altogether and I’m on a different platform. And then I walk out and I’m back on the street again. Now can I hold something from the Cathedral consciousness? Certain prayers or meditations are designed to hold your consciousness on that level….And then what you finally do is to recognize that this is simply a lower level of that higher consciousness.” (Page 19)
In Episode two of this series of essays, we wrote about the phenomenon of automated photographic images, and the cave of the cinema, and questioned the claim that this modern form of entertainment could raise our level of consciousness to the higher levels Campbell speaks about. Perhaps a documentary film of the Cathedral could lift our consciousness from the level of meditating upon our economic situation, family etc., into the realm of the sacred. But the way in which the camera roams around the cathedral is not the human way, and somewhere we seem to know that we are witnessing two dimensional representations of three dimensional phenomena: that is, imitations of the real forms. One interesting question to pose in this context is to ask whether the real effect we experience in the real presence of St Patrick’s, could occur for someone with no knowledge of Christianity or the role of the Church, the rituals of prayer etc. The answer to this question depends of course upon the efficacy of the educational system we have participated in : whether, that is, it can transcend its dependence upon the principle of specialization, and evoke the universality and necessity of transcendent experiences.
Dreams, of course, can be a source of transcendent experiences, but if there is no experience in our life that has a spiritual function and structure, the question to raise is whether dreams with transcendent content could occur spontaneously, given the fact that memory is to some limited extent involved in the images we experience. Do elementary ideas or collective archetypes need to be awoken by conscious experiences with mythological content?
Campbell and Moyers propose Douglas Fairbanks Jr, the romantic war hero, and John Wayne, the Western film star, as possible mythic figures of their time. Campbell seems to believe that the “magical quality” of film and our everyday admiration and treatment of film stars resembles the awe and wonder we experienced in relation to mythical gods. He does not, however, believe that the medium of television can produce quite the same effect, producing celebrities and events which do not lift us up to the rapture of bliss which it is claimed accompanies transcendental experience.
Campbell’s motivation for this judgment is related to the event of the viewing not occurring in the “temple” of the cinema, but perhaps a more salient question to ask in this situation, is whether what we are viewing either on the cinema screen, or the television screen, is an aesthetic experience . The telos of entertainment in both the cinema and television has seemed to many to be at the expense of the pedagogical function, which is required of all art. These automated moving photographs, seem more to incite desire, and are produced, that is, with the intent of moving us rather than with the intent of bringing aesthetic rest or closure after the operation of the aesthetic enveloping process. It is difficult to see in the craft of the moving photographs anything approaching either the beautiful, which is a symbol of morality (gunfights in Westerns, the hunt for murderers in detective films, the massive star-war inter-stellar advanced technology battles) or the sublime, both of which aim at a catharsis of the emotions of desire and fear.
Perhaps there is a whiff of transcendence in those films where someone helps soneone else, just because life is an end-in-itself, transcending the boundaries of any self-interest. It is difficult, however, to see in the activities of film heroes anything resembling the presence, for example, of Paul, the Christian Apostle. who claimed that he was wrestling with “principalities and powers”. What can be clearly see in these productions is the presence of Thanatos in the increasing volume and intensity of violence, taking the various forms of gunfights, war, bombings, stabbings, etc.
Bill Moyers initiates a discussion that compares cults where animal sacrifices occur everywhere in the natural world, with the cult of “Christianity”, which sought to become a “universal” religion, proclaiming Jesus to be a “temple-god”—a divinity to worship in the symbolic environment of a sacred house. As a counterpoint in favour of nature cults, Moyers reminds us of the pygmy parable of the little boy who heard the beautiful song of a bird which he brought home to his father, who then killed the bird and dropped dead immediately afterwards. Both Campbell and Moyers agree with the moral of this parable, which is that killing beautiful things will not end well for the agent.
Campbell claims in the context of the above discussion that “Mythology is the song of the human imagination inspired by the energies of the body” (Page 27). He also points to the perspectival character of mythologies in a world searching for universal and transcendent experiences, searching for what he terms the “Mythology of the Planet”. He does not mention Philosophy in the context of this discussion, a discipline and study which clearly has both universal and transcendent intentions. We have referred in earlier essays to Campbells references to Kant, who of course is a Critical Philosopher committed to Aristotelian Hylomorphism. Both Aristotle and Kant woud subscribe to the claims that the powers of Consciousness and the imagination are psychological functions and powers rooted in the energies of the body. Campbells preliminary suggestion for a Mythology of the Planet is the mythology/religion of Buddhism, which of course has its transcendental moments, but in terms of the Metaphysics of Morals and compared with the systematic ethical teachings of Kant, Buddhism appears to be rhapsodic.
Campbell claims that Consciousness and energy are the same, and he further claims that psychological functions such as imagination are “inspired” by the energies of the body. In this context we ought to consider Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the “lived body”:
Open quote. “I am not a “living creature” nor even a “man”, nor even again a consciousness endowed with all the characteristics which zoology, social anatomy, or inductive psychology recognise in these various products of the natural or historical process—- I am the absolute source, my existence does not stem from my antecedents, from my physical and social environment: instead it moves out towards them and sustains them, for I alone bring into being for myself….the tradition which I elect to carry on….” Close Quote. (Phenomenology of Perception, translated Smith, C., Routledge, London, Preface IX)
O Shaughnessy , the Analytic Philosopher, and Merleau-Ponty, the Continental Phenomenologist, are largely in agreement over the holistic aspect of the self, and both regard attempts by theoretical science to reduce the whole to the sum of its parts as otiose. Scientific Psychology of the late 19th and early 20th centuries postulated the sensation as an elementary Psychological function distinguishing it from higher functions and powers that were more remotely connected to a bodily substructure:
Open quote. “A closer analysis, however, reveals that the two kinds of function overlap. The elementary is no longer that which by addition will cumulatively constitute the whole, nor is it a mere occasion for the whole to constitute itself. The elementary event is already invested with meaning and the higher function will bring into being only a more integrated mode of existence or a more valid adaptation, by using and sublimating the subordinate operations.” Close quote. ( Phenomenology of Perception Page 11)
The above reflections would seem to follow from the Kantian claim that the human self is a self-causing entity, a unique origin-point for experience. These reflections are also, however, elaborations upon the hylomorphism of Freud, who was greatly influenced by the work of Hughlings-Jackson in the field of brain research. What all these authors have in common is a position which rejects the conception of a world or a self, constituted of a network of causes that in turn form a totality of facts.
When St Paul maintained he was wrestling with principalities and powers he is referring to answering questions not relating to what things are, but rather why they are as they are: questions of principles. Powers and functions are not principles, which are different depending upon whether they are applied to the natural inorganic world of nature, or the organic world of psuché(which can take many different forms partly because of the possession of different powers, e.g. consciousness, imagination, memory, thought).