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Ritual is an important activity of the human “form of life”, an expression used by Wittgenstein in grounding his “Philosophical Investigations”. Aristotle does not use this specific expression, but it is nevertheless implied in the term “psuché”, the hylmorphic account of which would contain the idea of “form” as “principle”. For Campbell it is clear that the higher the form of life the more complex the “structure” of the organism will be. He opens this essay as follows:
“The function of ritual as I understand it is to give form to human life, not in the way of a mere surface arrangement, but in depth. In ancient times every social occasion was ritually structured and the sense of depth was rendered through the maintenance of a religious tone. Today, on the other hand, the religious tone is reserved for exceptional, very special “sacred” occasions. And yet even in the patterns of our secular life, ritual survives. It can be recognized, for example ,in the decorum of courts and regulations of military life, but also in the manners of people sitting down to table together. All life is structure. In the biosphere, the more elaborate the structure, the higher the life form.” (Page 44)
This is a hylomorphic account of ritual that probably would have been accepted by Kant, but university life is not mentioned in spite of its largely secular adherence to ceremonious rituals and its very influential role in the shaping of civilisation and culture in the Western World. Many university rituals have remained the same for centuries even if the influence f Universities has been in decline since the beginning of the 20th century. These rituals include examinations, the awarding of proof of achievement in graduation ceremonies reflecting the different structural levels of knowledge, and academic staff installations, e.g. Professorial “chairs”.
Campbell then proceeds to provide an account of the instincts, beginning at the base-level manifesting itself in simple forms of lif,e and simple behaviours such as nest-buidling, beehives, anthills etc., and moving up to human psuché where , it is argued stereotypical reflexes are no longer produced by innate releasing mechanisms. In human psuché, behaviour is converted into Action via the operation of multiple psychological and mental powers which give rise, firstly, to the vicissitude of the instincts we call consciousness and secondly, to those higher vicissitudes manifested in the higher mental powers such as understanding/judgement, and reasoning. The operation of Thinking in such higher organisms attempts to achieve not just a harmony of the faculties of sensibility, understanding and reason, but also the efficient use of the multiple powers we encounter in human psuché. Campbell then makes a very interesting claim relating to the long childhood of human psuché, which, it is argued, causes our instincts to mature more slowly, a process which allows the mechanism of “imprinting” to take place in relation to a complex environment/world possessing multifarious sources of influence:
“It acquires its human character, upright stature, ability to speak, and the vocabulary of its thinking under the influence of a specific culture, the features of which are engraved, as it were, upon its nerves; so that the constitutional patternings which in the biological world are biologically inherited are, in the human species matched largely by socially transmitted forms, imprinted during what have been long known as the “impressionable years”, and rituals have been everywhere the recognised means of such imprinting. Myths are the mental supports of rites; rites the physical enactments of myths.” (Page 45)
Aristotle’s hylomorphic theory has long been a source of the idea that society maintains its structure and innovates via the generation of firstly, the forms of reproduction, secondly, forms related to tools and implements, and thirdly, forms related to ideas communicated in educational processes involving teachers and pupils.
Much of the time spent in childhood and adolescence occurs in the context of a family, living in a home, and this together with the time spent in educational institutions are the major bearers of the development of mental capacities that function in accordance with what Freud and Campbell refer to as the reality principle or reality function: a function involving the inhibition or overriding of most instinctive affective and spiritual impulses. Campbell claims that this in turn is dependent upon the individual becoming a creative innovative “centre of the life process”( Page 47). He further claims that “Modern Occidental civilisations” have been the major source of innovation in the world but he points to 1914 suggesting that things may have changed at this point in History: a point in time when man begins to question and even reject much of what mythology and Religion had to offer mankind. He interestingly cites Rousseau as the source of this attitude that led to a general discontentment with our civilisations.
Rousseau, we ought to recall was a Counter-Enlightenment figure, a modern version of Diogenes sensing a discontentment in the darkest regions of Europe. Rousseau believed that men are born free, but everywhere in chains because they are enslaved by the authorities and institutions of a corrupt social order. He did not, however, personally believe in the power of family life to moderate the sexual impulse, placing 5 of his illegitimate children in an orphanage, effectively abandoning them. It is somewhat surprising to learn that the Enlightenment Philosopher, Immanuel Kant, was influenced by Rousseaus claim that man in his natural state was a noble creature, and it is even rumoured that Kant. a creature of habit, allowed his daily walk to be disrupted because he was reading the Work “Emile”. Kant, however, would certainly have questioned the prohibition relating to Emile reading the Bible. He might also have questioned Rousseaus contention that the tears of the baby teach the infant to manipulate others in the course of getting what was wanted.
Kant may have agreed, however, that with the crying of the baby we may be witnessing the first appearance of acts of the will. Manipulative tears, Rousseau argued, was one of the first signs of an attitude he termed “amour propre”, a fundamentally negative attitude that will assist in the corrupt enslavement of man. On the political front, Rousseau sees in the middle class, not the Aristotelian enlightened class, but rather a class that has embraced the corrupt values of the upper class. Plato and Aristotle both viewed oligarchy as a deficient form of government, embracing many of the excesses of the appetitive and spiritual parts of a persons character. Such an uncontrolled proliferation of desires would have been attributed to a passionate imagination which was unmoderated by reason.
Rousseau was the father of Romanticism, furthering the myth of the “noble-savage” whose passions, Kant argued, symbolised an illness of the mind, impermeable to mediating influences. For Plato, Aristotle and Kant it is mans unbridled passions that enslaves men in the chains of self-love. Freud’s accounts of the narcissistic personality is especially relevant here, and would invoke the impulsiveness of a personality functioning in accordance with the pleasure-pain principle rather than the reality principle.
Freudian Psychoanalysis in its later form was of course based on the Socratic principle that the polis or society is the human psuché writ large. Freud was convinced that the categories used to describe ad explain the activities and power of human psuché, could be used in the description and explanation /justification of the powers of the State. This was the reason he could write meaningfully about the History and State of the Society he was a part of. The myth of the “band of brothers” was a Freudian constructed conjectural narrative of the origins of society before the time of civilisation and its institutions. The narrative begins with the tyranny of a ruler-father who suppresses his sons and uses the available women to meet his narcissistic sexual needs. The sons band together and kill the father in order to escape his aggression, and gain access to the females of the group/tribe, but they almost immediately regret the act realising that whoever rules will in all likelihood be subjected to the same fate. They eventually reach an agreement on a law/taboo of murder, incest and cannibalism. This, for Freud is the moment in History when the light of Reason dawns, and a significant connection is made between what has happened in the past and the future of the tribe. This is also the triumph of Eros over Thanatos and the birth of a hope for a better future. The principle behind the taboo/law is the principle of equality: the beginning of the operation of the Kantian “hidden plan” in accordance with the operation of a “good will”.It is not clear where Freud stood on this issue of the hidden plan. He did claim to be a Kantian Psychologist and Vienna was a Cosmopolitan city, but he did not like Vienna, given the fact that he was a Jew in anti-Semitic times. Rousseau, however would not have endorsed Cosmopolitanism because for him when men come together corruption increases.
Campbell claims that the long period of dependency creates a large problem for the civilisational process because it is not easy to transcend this state and move to a state of independence:
“And with the extension of the period of dependency in our own civilisation into the middle or even late twenties, the challenge today is more threatening than ever, and our failures are increasingly apparent.”(Page 46)
Campbell likens this failure to a neurosis and warns of a “substitute dependency” upon the state and the social order, which has become the source of meeting the needs of human psuché for safety and belongingness. Such is the difficulty and pain of this process that it is referred to as a “second birth”, which results in a life led in accordance with the Reality Principle:
“We ask and are expecting, rather, that he should develop what Sigmund Freud called his “reality function” that faculty of the independently observant free thinking individual who can evaluate without preconception the possibilities of his environment and of himself within it, criticising and creating, not simply reproducing inherited patterns of thought and action, but becoming himself an innovating centre, an active, creative center of the life process.” (Page 47)
There is no mention of any qualification of this position related to the conservation of the knowledge and institutions we have established: no mention of the importance of History in this so-called civilising process. 1914, however is an interesting choice for the beginning of the decline of civilisation which Campbell characterises thus:
“life, freedom and force have not ben gained but lost.” (Page 49)
Campbell connects the loss of “form” in the arts to this moment in time, and claims that form was acknowledged in the smaller community of Athens but was already disappearing in the larger community of Rome. This process of the loss of form continues in large cities like New York, London and Paris where Campbell claims artists, instead of spending their time learning about their mediums and refining their work with continuous production, attend cocktail parties to promote themselves. What the Ancient Greeks may have claimed upon being confronted with “modern art”, is that a matrix of values have been lost in the search for “innovation”, values embodied in the terms, arché, areté, diké, epistemé, aletheia ,logos, phronesis, dunamis, and eudaimonia. The so-called “ready-mades” of modern art clearly rejected the history of working in a chosen medium, preferring instead to “innovate” by rejecting classical forms and creating instead a repertoire of emotions associated with the shock, surprise and indignation that their work generated. Campbell, in the context of this discussion complains, probably correctly, that James Joyce never received the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Campbell cites Spenglers work “The Decline of the West” in relation to the decline of the influence of the hylomorphic notion of “form” (an important force in the shaping-process of our civilisations/cultures and individual characters). He notes that in spite of the goal of being great innovators we send a large proportion of our lives imitating what is occurring all around us. In the beginning of this process as primitive men, we imitated and were influenced by animals, the vegetative world, and finally the heavens above became the models for our communities. Worshipping the sun and the moon, for example, were a part of this civilising process. Myths and rituals played important roles in such a “forming process”, but these have largely been abandoned in modern times, except perhaps in the secular cases of the institutions of The Law and Universities. Part of this civilising process involved the demythologizing of the animal and vegetative worlds and the model of the heavens for the structure of our cities.(Frobenius). This resulted in man himself being placed at the centre of the universe. Unfortunately it was not the man described and justified by the ideas of Ancient Greece, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment, but rather the romantically inspired hero, troubadour and explorer who proclaims “I am who I am”: the face that Freud removed the veil from with his hylomorphic and critical theories.
Campbell appeals to the work of Joyce entitled “Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man” as part of this unveiling process, and we find Stephen Dedalus accusing Aristotle of failing to define the key emotions of pity and terror and providing us with the following definitions:
“Pity is the feeling that arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites us with the human sufferer. Terror is the feeling that arrests the mind in the presence of whatever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the secret cause.” (Page 59)
This secret cause, Campbell argues is related to our mortality, the death of which we are so certain. The fading influence of Art, of course, has led us further down the path of discontentment, the path where History and Tradition have been rejected for the romantic spirit of exploration. One could also mention here, as Arendt did, the failure of the Political forces to preserve the “forms” for posterity, or the failing influence of Education.
The rituals of Universities may have continued unchanged for centuries but they occur in a context of a theory of specialisation that has compromised the universality of knowledge and wisdom that is implied by their very names. The only institutions whose integrity has largely remained intact is that of the Law, but given the fact that the most militarily powerful country in the world, the USA, has historically refused to participate meaningfully in the process of the International Court of Justice and that the current President is an uneducated convicted felon, we may well be witnessing the death of that Ancient Greek institution which has carried us so far in the civilising process. If this is true then the words of the Oracle that:
Everything created by man is destined for ruin and destruction”
may be poignantly prophetic.