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Nietzsche in many respects advocated for a reductionist program in Philosophy with recommendations for the importance of the idea of a “Will to Power”, and in his view of Art as “applied Physiology.” He also in some respects continued the Hegelian program of turning the magnificent syntheses of Kantian Critical Philosophy upside down, thereby restoring essentially destructive dualisms that both Aristotle and Kant opposed and neutralised with their respective forms of rationalism. This resulted once again in the marginalisation of important ideas, principles, and arguments that were needed to complete the actualisation process of the human species which Kant claimed would be a process lasting 100,000 years, ending in a Cosmopolitan Kingdom of Ends. Kant synthesised Cartesianism and scientific Empiricism, materialism and dualism, physicalism and spiritualism, idealism and realism, sensibility and understanding, the phenomenal and the noumenal worlds, ethics and metaphysics, religion and ethics, ethics and aesthetics, politics and ethics, aesthetics and anthropology (Psychology), biology and anthropology (Psychology).
The previous great Philosophical synthesis of dualisms, we know ,occurred with the work of Aristotle, but this was eventually successively dismantled by Christianity, Cartesianism and scientific empiricism. Of these three anti-hylomorphic forces, Christianity, and other religions like Judaism etc, were the most powerful owing to the omnipresence in communities of Churches, Temples, priests, etc. Institutions such as Schools and Universities enjoyed a more limited power to influence the communities in virtue of a vague but growing idea of academic freedom, but this power was essentially defined by the Church and the Government.
Aristotle was taught in Universities but the first translation of Aristotle’s works into Latin was strictly in accordance with the tenets and maxims of the Church which used its own set of dualisms to indoctrinate the masses: good and evil, body and soul, eternal life and temporal life, supernatural and natural. The hylomorphic syntheses was regarded by the Church as “pagan” and not in accordance with the first commandment of Christianity which was to “Love God above all”. This excluded other gods, especially “pagan” gods. Kant’s Critical Philosophy emerged from the morass of religious dualisms, and suggested a Cosmopolitanism in which important truths of Eastern Religion were synthesised with an essentially Philosophical reading of the Bible and Christian doctrines.
The Major Kantian distinction between the phenomenal and noumenal worlds probably originates in Eastern Religion(Hinduism) and its idea of the veil that needs to be lifted from the inward self ,in order for us to “know ourselves”. One of the most important concepts to emerge from Kantian Critical Philosophy was that of the “Good Will”, which was one of the foundations of his Moral Metaphysics. The will was, however, also the unknown spiritual /noumenal X which is inside of us, hidden beneath the veil of our inner experiences. Schopenhauer was one of the first Philosophers to notice that Kantian Philosophy synthesises the Metaphysics that comes from the East with the Metaphysics of the West. He also takes up the concept of the will and examines closely mans “will to live”, claiming that this is linked to one of mans most important desires, which also motivates us to overcome our fears. Campbell elaborates upon this theme:
“The world without spirit is a wasteland…..the thing to do is to bring life to it, and the only way to do that is to find in your own case where the life is and come alive youself.” (Pages 183-4)
This involves lifting the veil that Campbell speaks about in his work ,”The Inner reaches of outer space”. In this work, he invokes the Quest of Theseus and the thread of Ariadne that led Theseus out of the Cave. This thread is indeed an image of the continuity of narratives that transformed themselves into Philosophical Theories and in turn, according to Kant, this thread is destined to continue on for one hundred thousand years to the Kantian Cosmoplitan Kingdom of ends. Somewhere along this thread, the inward spiritual “I” emerged, which Campbell claims is uniquely Western, not to be found in Eastern Mythologies. In the Western Quest, which often is a heroic tale, the hero conquers his/her fear of death which in turn releases extra energy for living out the remainder of his/her life.
Courage is one virtue in the Greek constellation of virtues, which includes wisdom: wisdom is the virtue of the intellectual hero, engaged on an intellectual quest, for example, Socrates, who also demonstrated physical courage when the situation demanded it, thereby surpassing Achilles the Homeric hero who clearly had difficulties controlling his “Spirit”.
The characterisation of the East and the West is centred on the individualism of the Western hero, who is contrasted with Eastern counterparts. Campbell, in the context of this discussion, presents the example of a friend, a Tibetan Buddhist monk who, at an easly age was supposedly
“recognised as being the reincarnation of an abbot who had been reincarnating since the 17th century.” (Page 197)
In accordance with the Buddhist tradition, he was placed in a monastry in Tibet at the age of four and forced to live a rigidly determined life and follow the instructions of his masters.The Chinese massacres in Tibet began in 1959, and he, with many others, including the Dalai Lama, were forced to flee to India. Tibetan Monastry life was over, and Campbells friend chose to live in the West where he experienced discrimination and insult, but never complained about either this treatment or the earlier brutal treatment of the Chinese. This, for Campbell. demonstrated the true spirit of religion. We recall that the first truth of Buddhism is that all life is sorrowful, and Campbells friend illustrates this well. He was clearly someone who lived his life in the spirit of this and other Buddhist truths. We can also recall how Buddha responded to heckling at one of his gatherings by claiming that if he did not accept the gift of the insult he was being given, then that gift belonged to the giver.
Reincarnations of course , for Philosophy, fall under the category of supernatual events, and outside the circumference of our Western experience. For us, however, although there is a sense that something of the past lives of humanity lives on in us, we have as yet no completely satisfactory way of describing and explaining this phenomenon, given our current understanding of the Metaphysics of Nature and the Metaphysics of Man.
Campbell has, on more than one occasion in his works, referred to the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas and the claim that the Kingdom of Heaven is both all around and within you. In the context of this “transcendental truth” he describes his encounter with a Christian woman in great pain who was convinced that her pain had been sent by God as a punishment for some sin which she was ignorant of. Campbell informed the woman of the message of the Gnosticism and suggested that she should:
“affirm and not deny her suffering was her life” (Page 201)
Campbell observed a sudden transformation in the woman—a moment of illumination. She came to realise it was the God within her that was the cause of her condition and it became clear to her:
“You have no one to blame but yourself”. (Page 202)
The rest of her life was then spent not blaming herself, but rather living in acceptance of her condition. This story clearly has Stoical elements which involve an alignment with the flow of events, controlling those within your control, and accepting the outcomes of those outside your control. The Stoics also believed in the divinity of Logos which connects events according to a plan. It is the love of Logos which allows the Stoic to achieve inner peace.
Campbell, however, also loves his psychological religion, namely Buddhism which:
“starts with the psychological problem of suffering: all life is sorrowful: there is, however, an escape from sorrow; the escape is Nirvana—which is a state of mind or consciousness, not a place somewhere, like heaven. It is right here, in the midst of the turmoil of life. It is the state you find when you are no longer driven to live by compelling desires, fears, and social commitments, when you have found your center of freedom and can act by choice out of that.” (Page 203)
The idea of the good will Kant proposed, presupposes the above metaphysical background. We need to recall in this context, the Kantian attitude towards the social life of his time which he described as “melancholically haphazard”. Campbell has referred to Kant a number of times throughout his works, but otherwise his attitude toward academic Philosophy is largely negative claiming that it:
“gets tangled up in concepts”. (Page205)
Presumably he is referring to the tendency to theorise against the backgrounds of dualisms which are in need of further analysis. Campbell prefers Art, Religion and Mythology, claiming that the latter is not a lie, as some academics have claimed, but rather a form of poetry attempting to “show” the hidden ultimate truth which he further claims:
“cannot be put into words. It is beyond words, beyond images….So this is the penultimate truth.” (Page 205)
Chapter VI is entitled “The Gift of the Goddess”, and Campbell points out that whilst our Western religions are paternal, many other systems prefer a maternal source of the divine. He also points out that our Christian Religion does honour the maternal souce of life, given the fact that the cross is the symbol of the earth. At his death, that is, the soul of Jesus departs from mother earth to travel to his heavenly father. Many of our quests, Cambell has pointed out, are in search of our father who symbolises the telos of the human actualisation process or transformation:
“But its your character that is the mystery, and your character is your destiny. So it is the discovery of your destiny that is symbolised by the father quest.” (Page 209)
Mother earth-based mythologies are, Campbell argues, more common in the agricultural communities of Mesopotamia, along the Egyptian Nile and in India. Campbell invokes Kant again:
“The female represents what in Kantian terminology we call the forms of sensibility. She is time and space itself, and the mystery beyond her is beyond all pairs of opposites…..everything is within her, so that the gods are her children.” (Page 210)
We ought to recall in this context Kant’s discussion of the inscription on a statue of Isis at the Temple of Isis:
“I am all there has been and is, and shall be, and ni man has ever lifted my veil”
Isis , of course, was a symbol for death and the protection of the mother. Kant referred to this inscription and its context as “sublime”, thus connecting it to the awe and wonder that he felt for both the starry heavens of the Metaphysics of Nature and the Moral law within that manifests the Metaphysics of Man. Everything we experience in the phenomenal world was, for Kant, manifestly referring to the mysterious noumenal world which underlies all experience. This is a complex philosophical/mythological view which places the goddess, for example, at the source of everything we experience, and makes her the point of origin of the quest for the father, who thus becomes a vicissitude of the mother-goddess figure. The quest demands that one overcomes both desire and fear and demonstrates amongst other things, that the life- instinct inherited from the mother is sufficient for the hero to find what he/she is looking for—namely,the father and the subsequent transformation–and return to the source both alive and actualised.
Given that the whole universe, including the earth, is the “body” from which everything else emerges, we can characterise this in the Ancient Greek language via the notions of arché( principle or foundation) and telos (destiny). The body here is the source of the first actuality, namely the soul, which possesses various powers including the power to sensibly intuit space and time , the power to understand the world in terms of its categories, and the power to reason about the world.
Moyers makes the interesting observation that Science has discovered very specific laws related to the interaction of the sun, the seed and the soil, which might question some of the assumptions of mythology, thus sowing scepticism in relation to the narratives describing the ultimate sources and telos of the human psuché. Campbell responds to this observation by claiming that whilst science has partially succeeded in displacing mythical narratives related to the essence of life and death, myth is in fact making a comeback (Page 211). He mentions the scientific concept of a “morphogenetic field”:
“The field that produces forms. Thats who the goddess is, the field that produces forms.” (Page 211)
These statements obviously recall the Hylomorphic theory of Aristotle which, as we know, brought Plato’s Theory of Forms down to earth. Hylomorphism assumes that there are “many meanings of Being” and also assumes that psuché as a life form is a different form to the purely inorganic material forms that are to be found in the natural world, for example, mountains, rivers, planets. But all these forms are the subject of the three different categories of science that Aristotle pointed to, namely, the theoretical, practical and productive sciences which embrace a large number of disciplines.
What follows is a fascinating discussion of the role of sexuality in Myth which recalls Freudian theory that itself ranges over all three categories of science. Freud, we know focussed on the role of sexuality in the process of personality and character development, and this resembles much of what is discussed in Indian mythology where the phallus is the symbol of the generation of all life:
“The act of generating a child is a cosmic act and is to be understood as holy. And so the symbol that most immediately represents this mystery of the pouring of the energy of life into the field of time is the lingum and yoni, the male and female powers in creative conjunction.”(Page 212)
Seemingly, opposites unite in order to generate life. Freud’s God was Logos and we know this term goes back to the Pre-Socratic Philosopher, Heraclitus, who saw all the oppostes united in this divine idea of Logos. Plato, in his dialogue the “Symposium” refers to an ancient myth about the origin of the human race. Man, in the beginning of his creation, was not differentiated into sexes but united, yet was so powerful as to present a threat to the gods who split man into two, one male and one female part, and scattered these parts far and wide, making reconciliation a difficult task. Man was thereby destined to spend much of his effort and time in the quest for the reconciliation of these parts. Sexuality and reproduction thus becomes a major focus for transcendentally uniting the parts of something that was once whole. There is a hint of the pathos of this narrative in Freud’s characterisation of the Ego as the precipitate of “lost objects”.