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Marriage, Campbell argues, in the past was regarded as a family decision, and the individuals will was ignored in favour of family benefits and relations to other families. Campbell reports that in India during the 1980’s columns of advertisements for wives appeared in the newspapers. During the Middle Ages, marriages based on individual decision and desire met with disapproval and hostility by the Christian Church. The “emotion” of Amor is described as the motivating desire behind our individual-based, eye to eye, person to person contact which, it is argued, was romanticised by the troubadours.
One of the narratives of the time, namely Tristan and Isolde, became a landmark of Western Civilisation, because it is a story about an individual prepared to experience eternal damnation in hell, rather than experience the loss of Amor, the high point of individual human love. Courage was of course, also required in an act whose aim was to defy history and tradition in relation to the institution of Marriage, as defined by the Church. This state of affairs suggested to Campbell that:
“The best part of the Western Tradition has included a recognition of and respect for the individual as a living entity. The function of society is to cultivate the individual. It is not the function of the individual to support society.” (page 239)
Could Amor be the source of Freduan Discontent with Civilisation? Freuds answer to this question is a complex one. To love and to Work are ego-affirmative functions occurring against the background of the Aristotelian criterion of self-sufficiency. For Aristotle the social unit of the village was not able to meet the family’s expanding repertoire of desires. A larger social entity was required and thus was the polis born which, in Ancient Greece at least, required the support of its citizens. Indeed if the polis is to be run by laws, those laws must be obeyed , trusted, and respected by the citizens if they were to have any social function. The function of the Greek polis was also, of course, designed to support the individual by meeting a large number of biological and psychological needs. Support for the polis/state was reciprocated by the polis/state.
Kant pointed out in his reflections on the nature of man that man was an antagonistic being who was in need of a master, but at the same time did not want to be mastered by anyone except themselves, and it was partly this state of affairs which lay behind the Kantian judgment that social life was “melancholically haphazard.” In India and Ancient greece, however, the head must rule the lower desires and the heart, whether it be specifically in relation to love, or more generally in connection with matters of the Polis/State. Campbell’s thesis of the primacy of experience and compassion does not support the position of Spirit submitting to a higher mental process such as rationality. Moyers, for example, asks Campbell whether there ought to be times when the heart takes the lead over the head. Campbell replies:
“That would be the desirable situation most of the time. The five main virtues of the medieval knight might be brought in here. One is temperance, another is courage, another is love, another is loyalty, and another is courtesy. Courtesy is respect for the decorum of society in which you are living.” (Page 239)
This is a form of life in which the rules of chivalry appear to take precedence over the morality and laws of society, for example, duelling and jousting, for the purposes of killing ones enemy. Legal and moral imperatives are demoted to rules in such a situation of “parallel-values”. Honour becomes the primary virtue instead of one in which a system of a number of virtues prevails. From the perspective of Ancient Greece where wise laws were valued as ends-in-themselves, the medieval system was a regressive step backward to the ethos of Achilles, or at least, a step sideways to the value system of Sparta which valued honour above the wisdom of Philosophy. Areté, we know, for the Spartans consisted of the maxim “Sparta First!”.
Artists, Campbell claims, strive for the values of love and honour and this is certainly true of those who engage in the activity in order to sublimate sexual or other more basic desires. Great artists, like Shakespeare,(Who I have argued in a forthcoming publication is a Philosophical artist) for example, would appear to value practical wisdom and its relation to the sublime, as is testified to in his Play “Romeo and Juliet”, which clearly showed the consequences of letting the heart rule the head.
During the era of chivalry Campbell claims that the gentle heart of a suitor was an important requirement for a damsel, and this involved “compassion”, which means:
” Suffering with. “Passion” is “suffering” and “com” is “with”. (Page 241)
This connects to the Freudian idea of sublimation which also relates to the suffering for those artists who suffer for their art. Love or Amor, Campbell argues, is the sickness that lies beyond the scope of the doctors skill:
“The wounds that can be healed only by the weapon that delivered the wound……The wound is the wound of my passion and the agony of my love for this creature. The only one who can heal me is the one who delivered the blow. Thats a motif that appears in symbolic form in many medieval stories of the lance that delivers a wound.” (Page 243)
These stories are related to the knights of old, and perhaps also to the Knights of the Round Table, who went on crusades in search of the Holy Grail—the holy chalice containing Christs blood from the crucifixion. The interesting question to ask is, why was this so important? It certainly was a symbol of compassion. Campbell elaborates upon this further:
“The theme of the Grail romance is that the land, the country, the whole territory of concern has been laid waste.It is called a wasteland. And what is the nature of the wasteland. It is a land where eveybody is living an inauthentic life, doing as other people do, doing as you’re told, with no courage for your own life. That is the wasteland.”-(Page 244)
For Campbell the quest for the Grail is connected to the actualisation process of a self that is searching to achieve its highest potential. He prefers of course to describe the telos of this actualisation process in terms of consciousness, which is the term we encounter in eastern Mythology especially in relation to the 7 psychological/spiritual centres located along the spine. Recent Philosophical Psychology, inspired by Kant, however, believes in practical reasoning in relation to a good will directed to ends-in-themselves. This rather than the fever of overwhelming desire is the major issue in this actualisation process. Self-consciousness, of course, presupposes an “I” that unifies intuitive representations, and subsumes them under the rule of a concept that relates to categories of the understanding/judgement. Amor is not an intellectual attitude, but rather a mode of sensibility which is responsible for our emotions and feelings, that in turn function in accordance with the pleasure-pain principle defined by Freud. The task of the Freudian reality principle is to postpone satisfactions that are unrealistic in the long term when viewed through the lens of practical reason.
Campbell tells us more about the Grail King:
“The Grail King, for example,was a lovely young man but he had not earned the position of Grail King. He rode forth from his castle with the war-cry, “Amor!” Well, thats proper for youth but it does not belong to the guardianship of the Grail. And as he’s riding forth, a Muslim, a pagan knight comes out of the woods. They both level their lances at each other and they drive at each other. The lance of the Grail King kills the pagan but the pagans lance castrates the Grail King.” (Pages 244-5)
Campbell elaborates upon the meaning of this myth in relation to the wasteland, where there is an obvious relation of the wound to the wasteland. He claims that this myth also symbolises the separation of matter and spirit, killing the union of these two entities insofas as European life was concerned. He argues that Spirit has castrated nature. The quest of the Grail then comes to include the search for the union of spirit of matter:
“The Grail becomes symbolic for an authentic life that is lived in terms of its own impulse-system, that carries itself between the pairs of opposite of good and evil, light and dark. One writer of th Grail legend starts his long epic with a short poem, saying “Every act has both good and bad results.” Every act in life yields pairs of opposites in its results. The best we can do is lean toward the light, toward the harmonious relationship that come from compassion with suffering, from understanding the other person.” (Pages 245-6)
The Grail thus becomes identified with Amor, compassion, and the First truth of Buddhism, namely “All life is sorrowful”. Marrying whoever one wishes to, in the name of Amor, risked ignoring the long terms concerns of the reality principle, which saw marriage not as a response to an overwhelming impulse, but rather as a permanent commitment to another person: a relationship in which love and forgiveness are sacred. Campbell argues that in marriage the source of this will toward permanent commitment is mysterious:
“This has to do with the mystery of time and the transcendence of time.”(Page 253)
Love, Campbell argues, in the context of this discussion, is a divine sacred manifestation that surpasses marriage and involves the pain of being truly alive. Yet in a curious anti-Kantian exchange with Moyers, Campbell paradoxically claims that “love violates morality”(Page 254). Morality is defined superficially as “the socially approved manners of life” which is a very different characterisation to that which is to be found in Aristotelian and Kantian ethical accounts. The ethics of marriage for Kant is very simple—do not make a promise you cannot keep. The marriage vow, if it includes the promise “until death do us part” is unambiguous and categorical, and falls clearly in the purview of the categorical imperative which urges us to treat each other as ends and not as means. After having made such a vow to break the vow with the reasoning that “I promised conditionally to be married unless something unexpected happened to neutralise my commitment”, would be an indication that the agent’s words could not be trusted, thus violating the duty we have to tell the truth, to mean what we say. It is argued that if one does not understand that the above words carry with them a lifetime commitment then one ought not to make the commitment. Breaking ones commitment, then, is a practcal contradiction in Kantian Ethics. For Aristotle the term areté would also demand the same behaviour and judgement upon those who failed to honour their commitment.
The medieval knight when called upon to joust and risk his life for his honour, did so because the medieval concept of the “hero” was a romanticised regression, when compared to the heroism of both Socrates and Jesus. We know that Hobbes, (the materialist Philosopher, who together with Descartes, attempted to overturn the influence of Aristotle), believed that life in a state of nature (duelling and jousting knights) was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”. In such a context of the “war of all against all”, duelling and jousting was a denial both of the value of life and the laws of those cities determined to protect the life of its citizens. Socrates claimed correctly that the polis was psuché writ large: the protection of life therefore, ought to be first on the law-makers agenda. What we are witnessing with duels and jousts for ones “honour” is a regression for the actualisation process of the polis. Again for Kant, the using of a life to take a life, was a practical contradiction in his system of ethics.
In a Hobbesian “state of nature” animal-life destroys animal life, but this ought not to occur in a world where the head must control the heart. Courage, honour, and Amor may be appropriate in the right circumstances, but in the life-world we dwell in, since the heroism of Socrates, these are virtues of a lower rank than the practical wisdom of the ethical Ancient Greeks or the Enlightenment wisdom of Kant which was to come centuries later.
In Chapter VIII entitled “Masks of Eternity” Campbell points to the human tendency to anthropomorphise natural forces but also emphasises the difference between East and West on this issue:
“Our way of thinking in the West sees God as the final source or cause of the energies and wonder of the universe. But in most Oriental thinking, and in primal thinking also, the gods are rather manifestations and purveyors of an energy that is finally impersonal. They are not its source. The God is the vehicle of its energy. And the force or quality of the energy that is involved or represented determines the character and function of the gods. There are gods of violence, there are gods of compassion, there are gods that unite the two worlds of the unseen and the seen, and there are gods that are simply the protectors of kings or nations in their war campaigns. These are all personifications of the energies in play. But the ultimate source of the energies remain a mystery.” (Page259)
Moyers responds to this point by claiming that such a position risks turning fate into an anarchic force, where warring principalities are in continual conflict. Campbells response is to maintain that this state of affairs, mirrors the structure of our minds. He rejects Moyers’ description of him as a man of faith, insisting that all he has is experience. He argues that even the organs of the body are in continual conflict, and that life emanates from the source of the universe which does not have to be personal:
“In the East, the gods are much more elemental, much less human, and much more like the powers of nature.”(Page 260)
To the extent that Religion attempts to demystify the elemental energy and forces of nature is the extent to which, it can be argued, a veil is placed over the experience of transcendence (Page 261). There is, however, one experience, namely, the experience of the sublime in which a corner of the veil may be lifted, but this experience is not related to compassion for the suffering of man, so it is to Art that we must turn for further elucidation of Amor or compassion. T S Eliots poem “The Waste Land” attempts this task:
” I will show you fear in a handful of dust…….Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many. Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled, And each man fixed his eyes before his feet, Flowed up the hill and down King William Street, To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours, With a dead sound on the stroke of nine”
Campbell focuses then on the virgin birth, claiming that this is a symbol of the birth of the spiritual experience of human psyché. Prior to this spiritual actualisation, there are a number of archetypal stages to transcend, for example, the animal desires of hunger and greed, sexual impulses, and the will to power which aggression feeds upon. These stages, need to be transcended if Compassion is to be awakened in the heart. The next stage in the process is the experiencing of god or gods in specific form out there in the world. The stage after this is the ultimate goal:
“But the ultimate mystical goal is to be united with onesgod”(Page 263)
Kant thought of God in terms of being a noumenal entity transcending all experience, a god that can be thought about, yet lies beyond our complete understanding: a god that reason may be able to postulate as an idea, but nothing more. The practical idea of freedom, on the other hand, which is crucial for leading the authentic life, and which is the foundation of the categorical imperative, provides us with additional insight into the realm of the transcendental and metaphysical that has previously been a realm left to the mystics and to the field of mythology.