Views: 10
The Delphic Podcasts by Michael R D James Ricoeur Time and Narrative Collected Volume Three episodes
Views: 5
The Dephic Podcasts Review of Ricoeur’s “History and Truth, Collected podcasts
Views: 11
The Delphic Podcasts by Michael R D James, Review of Campbells “Occidental Mythology”, Season 9 Episode 10 Conclusion
Views: 66
Campbell continues to discuss the issue of the rise of Islam in some detail noting that there is an assumption of the infallibility of the group or community (Page 436), and also that the Mind of the Community and the Mind of God are identical. To be clear, this is not in the Socratic spirit of seeking justice in the soul writ large (in the polis,) but rather something more radical, something more in line with Marxist Culture which denies the existence of the philosophical , transcendental and metaphysical realms, whilst simultaneously claiming a form of transcendence for the words of Marx-the prophet. Islamic poets/philosophers such as Mohammed Iqbal also expressed a criticism of Europe in the following words:
“Believe me, Europe today is the greatest hindrance in the way of mans ethcal achievement. The Muslim, on the other hand, is in possession of these ultimate ideas on the basis of a revelation, which, speaking from the inmost depths of life, internalises its own apparent externality……and in view of the basic idea of Islam, that there can be no further revelation binding on man.” (Pages 438-9)
We now know that for a number of Islamic societies there are radical conseqences for the freedom of the individual citizen of such Republics, but there are also consequences for an entire segment of the Islamic community, namely women, who are not treated equally in the spirit of European democracies. The birthplace of democracy, Ancient Greece, provided us with institutions and laws that grew naturally and organically from the lives of the citizens. These institutions and laws became part of the matrix from which both equality and freedom grow. The meanings of the terms arché, areté, diké, logos, psuché, aletheia,and epistemé were also critically interpreted in terms of many Aristotelian principles including the principle of the Golden Mean.
Campbell notes the challenges to Islamic logic from both the Shiítes and the Whirling Dervish Order. The former became prominent in the drama-filled attempts to find a successor for Mohammed after his death. Other significant events in the growth of the power of Islam included the shift of the Capital from Mecca to Baghdad, the city of pleasure, in 750AD, when the Umayyadi were removed from power. This period of Persian influence lasted until 1258 AD when the Mongols put the city to the sword brutally, allowing a resurgence of European influence.
Campbell discusses St Patrick of Ireland and his controversial contemporary Pelagius, who confronted the Church with the uncomfortable doctrine of the free will which probably had its origin in Ancient Greece, in particular, the work of “The Philosopher” of the period, Aristotle. This doctrine seriously questioned the thesis of Original Sin, which saw the will only in terms of the disobedience of Satan. The Neoplatonism of Erigena (815-877AD) was also condemned by Rome (Page 467).
The Celts, Cambell argues worshipped the mother of God, Mother Earth, and in the North the Vikings were roaming much of Europe and beyond, but especially harassing the Christians of Europe, embodying the hero-type of the warrior, at home in the killing-fields of war.
Pope Innocent III(1198-1215), the “greatest of the Popes, according to the Historians and Campbell, reinforced the opposition to Pelagianism and other heresies attributed to the Gnostics and Donatism. Pope Innocent himself became an object of suspicion but was never formally charged with any offence until he was moved by his own people into a state of retirement. In the context of this discussion, Campbell, referring to the avarice of the clergy, claimed:
“It is hardly to be wondered, then, why, in the course of the 12th century there should have developed throughout Europe a deep trend not merely of anti-clericalism but of radical heresy.”(Page 495)
Manichaeism, a form of Gnosticism, was also subject to the scrutiny of the Church authorities, and its leaders were burned at the stake. Campbell claims that these heresies were signs that European individuals had begun to think for themselves and cast off the yoke of the Church, refusing to believe in an “absolute Levantine consensus”. Anti-Papal polemics began to circulate and were promoted by various individuals, including Joachim of Flores, who appealed to many of the Fransciscan order who had postulated “The Age of the Holy Ghost” which involved amongst other things, a reduction in the role of the Church in everyday affairs. The Papacy entered a “time of troubles” when in 1377 there were suddenly two Popes because of a dispute between Italy and France, each excommunicating the other (Page 503), until the council of Pisa elected a third Pope. In the wake of these events John Huss (1373-1415) was burned at the stake for suggesting “Reforms of the Church”, thus preparing the way for Luther and the “Reformation”,one century later (Page 504)
Cambell has the following to say on the issue of the rise of the influence of the Europeans:
“In the broadest view of the history of world mythology, the chief creative development in the period of the waning Middle Ages and approaching Reformation was the use of the principle of individual conscience over ecclesiastical authority. This marked the beginning of the end of the reign of the priestly mind, first over European thought, and then as today, we see, in all the world.” (Page 504)
One could also characterise this period of European History in terms of a reawakening of the critical spirit and love of freedom that came down to us from the Ancient Greeks. This is a possible reading emanating from the History of world Philosophy. There would then be a possible continuous cultural thread leading to both the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. An Ancient non-European spiritual system based on revelation and miraculous happenings was never going to undermine the fundamental theoretical and practical rationalism of the Ancient Greeks. Rationality, moreover, could be widely communicated in a University system searching for the Truth, the Good, and the Beautiful, provided that the principle of specialistaion did not play the leading role in the organisation of university faculties. The University, then, was the institution best equipped to provide a life of eudaimonia, a life in which ruin and destruction could be overcome if ones knowledge was broad and deep enough and if one could also achieve the awesome task of “knowing” oneself.
Campbell also notes that a number of troubadours were connected with the Allbigensian heresy. These “popular” people spoke of Amor and the mystical rapture associated with such passion. This popular movement of course competed with the calm, collected contemplative life of the University, which appeared to concern itself more with matters of the soul than matters of the justice of the polis. Campbell notes,, however, the following:
“There is, in short, between the pagan past and High Middle Ages of Europe an impressive continuity of spirit and development. over which, for a time, the overlay of an Oriental type of spiritual despotism was heavily spread only to be disintegrated, assimlated and absorbed. In courtly and poetic circles the ideal of individual experience prevailed over that of the infallible authority of men whose character was supposed to be disregarded.” (Pages 509-510).
Such a state of affirs eventually resulted in three interesting European ages in Europe, Firstly, the Renaissance, secondly the Enlightenment and thirdly, the Romantic period in which even the authority of the rationality of the Classical and Enlightenment ages was questioned. We are now entering the “Modern Age” which, according to Arendt, began already with the Philosophers Hobbes and Descartes, who both in sceptical mood, raised doubts about the work of Aristotle which Kant attempted to dismantle in his critical Philosophy, only to have his own work partially dismantled by the “Spiritual” Philosophy of Hegel, which concluded with the Age of Romanticism that, in turn, detached us from our anchors in a stormy sea. The 20th century, according to Arendt was a “terrible century, with two world wars, the use of weapons of mass destruction upon civilian populations, a cold war, and the threat of mass-extinction hanging over us like a dark atomic cloud. All that is now needed is for a number of tyrannical “new men” to acquire power in power centres for this story of humanity to end mythologically instead of rationally.
The Delphic Podcasts by Michael R D James, Review of Campbells “Occidental Mythology”, Season 9 Episode 7
Views: 58
In Campbells opening to Chapter 6, entitled “Hellenism (331BC —324 AD”),he argues that:
“Greek Mythology declined from the status of religion to literature because of the highly critical Greek mind, which was already turned against it in the 6th and 5th centuries BC.” (Page 237)
This is an interesting and complex claim, perhaps resting on an assumption that religious texts were somehow differently structured than poetic or literary texts. There is one obvious difference relating to the events that are represented in these texts which in the case of poetry and literature might be known by the artist to be impossible in actuality, whereas in the case of certain fantastic Biblical representations we are expected to believe that these events actually occured when we know that as depicted they were impossible, given our knowledge of how the world is, and works. Religious texts are claiming actuality, reality (about real places, real people, real, events), whereas literary/poetic texts are merely claiming to be, at best, imitations of reality, laden with symbolic intention and referring to a latent content related to the aesthetic ideas of the artist.
The purposes of religious and literary texts certainly to some extent appear to be different. Adrian Stokes, the Kleinian Art Critic, compared Art and Love (Eros) in his essay on Michelangelo(The Critical Works of Adrian Stokes, Volume 3,London, Thames and Hudson, 1978), claiming that there is both an enveloping intention in Art as well as the singular idea of the essence of the object that is loved/appreciated. The art object, it is argued possesses a holistic self sufficiency which is embedded in the pulsing life of the world .The audience of literary performances often bring with them a wish to escape from the everyday life-world which Kant described as “melancholically haphazard”, containing as it does, violence, disease and many other forms of misery. The genius of the artist identifies with this spirit and uses this knowledge skillfully, in accordance with Kantian subjectively universal and necessary principles. In the middle of the constellation of such affects and effects, many have pointed out the resemblance of the appreciative state to the hypnotic state, which we know was of interest to Freud in the early days of psychoanalysis.
Now it is not out of the question that some religious texts aim at a similar hypnotic state in order to accomplish their mission of installing faith in the masses. Freud, refers to this process of envelopment as “the oceanic feeling”, claiming that it alone cannot account for our experiences of the sublimity of religious experience because of its initimate resemblance to the fantasy world of the imagination. The poet and the Philosopher have pedagogical intentions involving teaching the members of their audience something important about the world and themselves via in the former case the character and plot of the work. In the case of a Shakespearean play it is often the case that the 4 underlying questions(“What can we know?”, “What ought we to do?”, What can we hope for?”, “What is man?”, posed by Kant defines the domain of Philosophy and these are often featured as underlying themes of Shakespearean plays, conveyed via his aesthetic ideas. There is clearly, then, in both poetic texts and Shakespeare plays, both a manifest and a latent content constructed from these underlying aesthetic ideas. The Greek term Aletheia, (Unconcealment), which Heidegger claims was the Ancient Greek equivalent of Truth is also important in this aesthetic process of moving from the manifest to the latent content.
The key difference between religious and literary/aesthetic works is that the latter are not intended to be representations of actual events and people, and while they are not exactly fantasies of the kind we find in fairy-tales, they are nevertheless symbolic imitations of reality designed to refer via their manifest content to rational ideas of the good, true, beautiful, sublime, sacred, (latent content). Often poems or Shakespearean speeches have a “confessional” intention which hopes to reveal (aletheia) the state of the speakers soul/life.. One of the most important discoveries of Freud relates to the central agency of the Ego which he claimed was formed of the precipitate of lost objects. The losing of the the loved object demands at the very least a long mourning process with perhaps brief excursions into the psychoanalytic domain of the melancholic. The artis/genius knows this about himself and all other human beings and puts this truth to work in the organisation of his aesthetic ideas. In Shakespeares case we can also bear witness to the manifestation of other psychotic processes and defence mechanisms at work in furtherance of the plot of the work, for example, in Macbeths hallucination of a dagger and the ghost of Banquo, the man he killed earlier.
The world the artist is intent upon revealing the essence of, is not the melancholically haphazard world of everyday life but rather that world which contains a Kantian “hidden plan” for a hopeful future. This plan is not a utopian fantasy but rather the more down to earth hope that men in the future will treat each other with respect, in other words, treat each other as ends-in-themselves.
Religious texts are often about actions that occur “because of each other” and the correct understanding of their meaning necessitates an understanding of a complex non-linear idea of causation resembling the Aristotleian schema of fourfold causation. Ancient Greek Philosophy and Poetry both embraced the dualistic oracular proclamations:
“Everything created by man is destined for ruin and destruction”
and
“Know thyself!”
Both of these proclamations are causally related. It is necessary to know thyself if one is to minimise the human ruin and destruction that attend mans creations. This transcendental truth formed the background of Socratic, Platonic, Aristotelian, Kantian, and Wittgensteinian thought. Macbeths lack of self-knowledge, to take one example, led him to misinterpret the prophecy of the three sisters at the beginning of the play, thus leading to the desruction of both hmself and Lady Macebeth. These three sisters remind the classics student of the Ancient Greek Erinyes which were, together with Eros, replaced by the more temperate pantheon of divinities led by Zeus.
We ought to recall that oracular proclamations were received by their audience in a spirit of awe and wonder: their incantations, therefore, might have seemed hypnotic. More often than not these “messages from Apollo” (latent content) were delivered by females who claimed that the “sacred water spoke” (manifest content). It is reported that the Delphic Oracle , for example, often went into a trance-like state before delivering the incantatory proclamation. Whether or not this was a pretended state, or merely the posture needed for delivering incantatory proclamations, is not entirely clear. If the former was the case a Freudian explanation may explain why pretence was needed. The Oracle may be encouraging the natural learning mode of imitation in the audience , thus using the defence mechanism of identification. Perhaps poetry with its incantatory tone might have originated from this phenomenon, and thereafter inventively created other mechanisms to achieve its semi-hypnotic effects. The Poem, of course, is also a self sufficient object containing symbolic language and metaphors that are organised by aesthetic ideas and while not exactly sacred (a status claimed for religious texts), are certainly candidates for the status of the good, the beautiful and the sublime(a state intimately related to the human power of moral agency and the Good in General)
Cambell then claims that the critical mind of the Ancient Greeks pushed them to reject polytheism for monotheism which, of course, if true, would leave us with no option but to accept the thesis that we humans too, are self causing entities with a free will which, if used wrongly, results in evil. There is no reason to doubt that the Greek Philosophers believed that human willing was the issue behind the Oracles warning that “Everything created by man leads to ruin and destruction. Aristotle, we ought to recall in his essence specifying definition claimed that we are only “potentially” rational, and in practical contexts this means–under the condition of possessing a good will (which is the central issue of Kantian Ethics). Such a move to a conception of a will causing itself to choose or not to choose the Good necessitates a shift from the religious demand that we obey God, to the Philosophical demand that we understand what the divine Logos expects from us. Individual Responsibility thus supplamts faith in the Divine Being.
The fact that we possess such long childhoods (when compared to the animals) means that responsibility can only be expected fully from those that have left their childhoods and adolescence and are thereby free to exercise their rationality. This monotheistic conception with space for a self-causing free will was then overridden by the so-called Christian Truth, which Campbell expresses thus:
“The One God in three persons, with his pantheon of angels, counter pantheon of devils, communities of saints, forgiveness of sins, and resurrection of the Body, as well as the multiple presence of the dead and resurrected Son of God–true God and true Man—who was born miraculously of the Virgin Mother Mary.” Page 237
There are at least two supernatural events contained in this Campbellian version of the essence of Christianity—a life after death and a virgin birth, both of which would not have seemed realistic to Aristotle and other Greek Philosophers. By the time we get to Aristotle the Philosophical focus was on the universal and necessary characteristics of Being qua Being, a focus Campbell describes in terms of the Great Mother of the Pantheon and the different forms these pantheons took at different points in time. These different forms manifested the underlying power of her Being.
Campbell notes that it was Alexander the Great that put an end to the world order of divided kingdoms and Regions in the name of a universal idea/telos. Tutored by Aristotle, Alexander undoubtedly heard philosophers (perhaps even Aristotle) claiming that Greek ideas could rule the world. Alexander, in certain circumstances used Aristotles principle of the Golden Mean in his conquest of Persia, refusing to destroy the temples and shrines of conquered territories (thus refusing to follow the example of the Persians). The Persians may have been charitable to the Jews, but they did not extend this charity to the Greek territories they conquered. Campbell claims that Alexander created a new world order but in reality the principles he largely followed were both oracular and Philosophical. He announced to the Orient the substantial presence of a European spirit in the world. This new Spirit Camobell claims had 4 aspects: firstly:
“..we note not merely respect for the gods of all religions, but an almost scientific effort to recognise analogies: so the specific deities of the various lands began to be identified and worshipped as equivalent to each other” Page 240
Secondly, concerning the role of both Philosophy and Science in the interpretation of myth:-
“In the 6th and 5th century Greece, the philosophers had recognised a relationship of the Dionysian-Orphic complex to philosophical thought, and in the cults of the Orient they now discovered analogous possibilities.” (Page 241)
Thirdly,
“the breakthrough of the Greek inquiring intellect with Alexander into India, where a totally unforeseen species of philosophic inquiry had been developed in the various yogic schools of the Jain, Buddhist, and Brahmanic centers. A far deeper understanding of the practical psychological—as opposed to the cosmological—relevancy of mythology was represented in those disciplines, than anything the West was to achieve until the century of Nietzsche, Freud and Jung.” (Page 241)
Campbell also notes in this context that this practical psychological understanding included a good deal of what he called “psychosomatic mystic love”. Fourthly,
“after about two centuries of European influence upon Asia, the tide began to turn, until presently a powerful surge of reaction developed, which culiminated with the victories of Christianity over the gods and philosophies of Classical antiquity.” (Page 241)
Campbell eleborates upon this last point by claiming that the civilisation of the European West collapsed for seven centuries. There is much to unpack and clarify in the above 4 aspects but let us begin with the claim that we encountered a deeper understanding of the relation of practical Philosophy to Mythology in the Orient. It is not clear what Campbell means here. Freudian Psychology was Kantian to the core, and Kant certainly preceded Nietzsche, Freud and Jung. We have argued in earlier reviews of Campbells work that Kantian Philosophy and Philosophical Psychology does not contradict the often vague comments upon Being qua Being (Brahman?) we encounter in Hindu texts. We also noted that Kantian Philosophy is sympathetic to much that can be found in the Bible, but probably not to the postulation of events such as a virgin birth and resurrections. We pointed out that the insights Kant brought to the field of religion were very much influenced by Aristotelian Hylomorphic Philosophy. European History manifests a very clear line of development stretching from the Golden Age of Greece to the Art of the Renaissance, to the Enlightenment and Kant’s important contributions (and elaborations upon many different European ideas). There is also an imprtant Cosmopolitan thread linking Alexander the Great and Kants vision of a Cosmopolitan Kingdom of Ends. In other words the links between Kant and Freud to Ancient Greece were far stronger than the links to any Oriental conception of the relation of practical psychology to Mythology.
Insofar as Campbells fourth aspect is concerned, we also question the claim that Christianity triumphed over the Philosophies of Classical Antiquity. We are aware that all Philosophical schools were closed by Justine, a Roman Emperor, but this did not prevent Aristotle from being revered as “The Philosopher” throughout this period of so-called “collapse”. His influence upon both the European and Arabic World was considerable until the establishment of the First Universities when his influence was further sedimented in World-Philosophy and World-History. Indeed it is also important to point out that even Aquinas felt forced to confront and comment upon the works of Aristotle, translating the Greek into Latin in acknowledgment of “The master of those that know”. Aquinas claimed in Aristotelian spirit that all human life(psuché) is sacred because there is a spark of the divine within, and this certainly resembles the hylomorphic account of Noos. Yet there are tensions between these two thinkers on a number of issues including the notion of a free will undetermined by Gods natural and eternal law. It certainly appears to be problematic to project upon Aristotles Philosophy the Christian of Original Sin. Indeed, in this context, Campbell concludes with a remark on the Origin of Christian Mythology, claiming that it could be interpreted:
“as a development out of Old Testament Thought under Persian Influence, with nothing, as yet particularly Greek—unless the emphasis on love” (Page 290=
This confirms that European Culture was formed principally by journeys along two different roads: the roads leading from Athens and Jerusalem. Aquinas, then, can be admired for his attempt to reconcile these two very different accounts of man and his world, but in doing so he may well have diminished the importance of our Greek heritage which may well have pleased him. Fixating upon Love given the ambivalent nature of man does appear somewhat arbitrary, preparing the way for Romanticism and a “Modernist World.”
The Delphic Podcasts by Michael R D James Review of Campbells “Occidental Mythology” Season 9 Episode 6
Views: 65
Campbell claims that Zoroastrianism has not left a great heritage possibly because of the :
“ravages of Alexandra the Great(331BC) and then, after painful reconstruction of the zealots of Islam.” (Page 201)
The Persian work, the Bundahish(“The Book of Creation”)was written between the years of 226-881AD, and the resultant creation contained both earlier and later content. The assumption of two primeval spirits, one better and one worse, is essentially dualistic and dialectical, leaving us with a bipolar attitude toward the Divine. In the context of this debate it also ought to be pointed out that Greek Mythology had its two Freudian Giants, namely Eros and Thanatos, working toward Ananke (fate), thereby essentially resolving a potential dialectical opposition with a Good telos. Greek Philosophy built upon this foundation by ackowledging a free will in relation to the concepts of areté(doing and saying the right thing in the right way at the right time) and diké(justice) both of which regulated by arché (principle).The matrix of Greek Mythology and Greek Philosophy provided the conditions necessary for the emergence of the Great Trio of Philosophers, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, all of whom contributed to the creation of the meta-Discipline of Philosophy. The task of this discipline was to discover the myriad of principles associated with the Aristotelian Theoretical, Practical and Productive Sciences. Aristotle in his work “Metaphysics” (The study of First Principles) focussed on what he called “first Philosophy” which used the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason to explore the aporetic questions relating to Being qua Being..
There is in Persian Mythology, Campbell claims, a creative narrative relating to trees, animals and humans. Ahura Mazda, the Lord of the Light, upon seeing man said:
“You are Man, the ancestry of the world, created perfect in devotion. Perform the duties of the law, think good thoughts, speak good words, do good deeds and do not worship demons.” (Campbell, Page 205)
An antagonistic spirit caused the first two humans, who cannibalised their children, to quarrel but it is important to recognise that in this mythology, evil is conceived of as antecedent to the fall of Man, in direct contrast to the Biblical account in which a flaw in mans character is assumed, manifesting itself in disobedience in relation to the commandments of God. The Greek Philosophers thanks to thinkers like Anaxagoras, did not, like the Israeli prophets, see any relation betwee natural catastrophes such as volcanic explosions, floods or large meteor strikes and man-made catastrophes due to mans ill-will or ignorance. Anaxagoras, we recall, claimed that the moon, at the time conceved of as a divine entity, was constituted of material substance, and as such, had no influence upon the affairs of men. Campbell suggests that this problem of relating the conditions of the external world to the conditions of the human psuché, was not a serious problem for the Greeks, whose polytheistic pantheon could embrace all the nuances of physical and psychical existence. Believing in monotheism as the Jews and the Christians did, left them facing the problem of evil. Where did it originate? In God or in man? We know the choice was made to postulate that the being of man was fundamentally flawed.
The narrative of the Bundahish speaks of heaven, hell and resurrection in imaginatively dramatic terms, and also refers to a great meteor falling upon the earth, killing the serpent-divinity and purifying hell of its stench. Turning to man-made catastrophes, Cambell refers to the “strategies” of the Assyrian dynasty which included massacring entire populations or enslaving them. This occurred during the “Persian Period”(539-331 BC) which was largely a time for man-made ruin and destruction:
“Populations were being tossed from east the west, west to east, north to south and south to north, until, not a vestige of the earlier ground-in rooted sense of a national continuity remained.”(Page 214)
He elaborates upon the historical consequences for the period:
“The world-historical role of the Kings of Assyria can be described, therefore, as the erasure of the past and the creation of a thoroughly mixed, internationalised, interracialised Near Eastern Population that has remained essentially that ever since.” (Page 214)
It is fascinating to read about these tumultous upheavals, and the cosmopolitan consequences, as well as the total annihilation of the Assyrian Peoples. This pattern of annihilation and servitude was finally broken by Cyrus the Great, King of Kings, when a period of “restoration” began: a period that included restoring the people of Judah to Jerusalem. Cyrus restored Persian mastery of the region after overthrowing the Greeks. The Jews, in admiration, claimed that Yahweh himself spoke to Cyrus:
“I form light and create darkness, I make weal and create woe, I am Yahweh, who do all of these things.”(Campell, Page 216)
After a period of intensive warfare Darius ascended the throne to become the King of Kings, ruling from 521-486BC. It is said that in status he rivalled both Buddha(563-483BC) and Confucius(551-478 BC). Campbell points out that it was Oswald Spengler who claimed that the turmoil of this period was not caused by geographically situated nations but rather various sects and their churches:
“Such a group, as I have already said, is not a geographical nation but a church, a sect, the company in possession of a magical “treasure”;and the functioning of its treasure is conditioned by certain fairy-tale laws, which are the statutes of the group. Membership, therefore, is not a matter of either time or place, but of the knowledge and execution of the statutes, which are at once secular and religious, revealed, not invented by man; and categorical, not subject to review. When obeyed, they produce boons beyond anything the world has ever known—fairy-tale boons; however, when violated, even accidentally, they produce a magical catastrophe against which the force and will of the individual–or even of the now unfortunate group of which he is an organ–is as nought. Hence, finally, the weal and woe, virtue and value of all of each lie not in creative individual thought and effort, but in participation in the customs of the group: so that as far as the principle of free will is concerned, which is generally argued for in this culture, its effect is only to make the individual responsible for his decision either to obey or disobey. It is not his province to decide what is good and what bad.”(Page 223)
It is precisely at the inflection point of free will and responsibility that the Greeks saw the importance of knowledge (epistemé), and especially knowledge of oneself. Epistemé and arché form a synthesis which allow us insight into The Form of the Good and the Form of Truth (aletheia). For the Ancient Greek Philosopher, like Aristotle, the individual is embedded in his family constellation insofar as responsibilities are concerned, and to that extent, is not a completely free agent. The family can provide more than individuals without any social connection, but, as Socrates predicted, when groups grow large, desires multiply, desires which can only be fulfilled by being embedded in larger groups where responsibilities too increase in number. The Village is initially formed of a constellation of families and villages too can form the constellation of the polis. In such large constellations of people and institutions knowledge of areté (doing and saying the right thing in the right way at the right time) and diké (justice–getting what one deserves), become important values, and manifest powers of mind that are not confined to obeying a divinity or King of Kings. This knowledge embraced by the Greeks in relation to the goods of the body, the goods of the external world, and the goods of the soul, was not by any means an individual affair, but rather a universal and necessary endeavour resting on principles (arché). Here we need to undrstand what Socrates meant when he claimed that we need to search for justice and areté in the Polis, where the soul is writ large, and because of this fact requires a form of thinking that relates to the particular via universals and principles. Knowledge in this wider context, then, becomes the necessary condition of using ones will to achieve and appreciate the “Forms” of “The Good”, “The True” and “The Beautiful”. Eros, of course , was part of the Ancient Pantheon of Gods(Prior to the pantheon led by Zeus), forces and demiurges,and is present in all forms of life which, as Spinoza claims strives to maintain itself in its existence. Campbell claims that in the Greek Polis of Pericles, Eros becomes:
“the deity whose presence was the best support of law as well as life.” (Page 227)
This position, however, was specifically rejected by Diotima, the teacher of Socrates who we know so little about, and also by Socrates himself, as articulated in his speech in the dialogue, “The Symposium”. The Symposium pictures Eros with very human parents who conceive him during a drinking party. These parents are ,however, not individuals, but representative of the general characteristics of Poverty and Resourcefullness, and Eros is pictured as a poor figure padding barefoot through the streets of Athens in search of something not specifie,d but related to the desire each of us possesses, to find a soul-mate ( in Greek mythology both soul mates were united but split apart because of the fear of the gods that such a united entity would be too powerful)
This is a Freudian image of love in which once this soul mate has been found there is considerable fear that the soul-mate will be lost. Freud, in this context, charts the emotions of mourning and melancholia, locating the presence of the death instinct in the latter. Such imaginative narratives were of course sublimated by both Plato and Aristotle, who placed the “Forms”(principles) at the cente of Rationality, thereby replacing divinities with something law-like, that is a condition of all forms of activity (natural and human). In other words, love is not a God for the Philosophers, but rather a social means enabling man to overcome his natural anatagonism toward his neighbours and strangers, thereby facilitating communal forms of existence larger than the family. Love, therefore, may be more a function of mans “Spirit” than his rationality, which is in its turn connected to thought defined in terms of thinking about thinking, rather than our typically human form of thought which must think something about something. Freud points out in the context of this discussion, that marriage is the institution which formalises the end of our search for a soul-mate, but society places sometimes artificial regulations upon whom one may, or may not marry, thus causing a general sense of discontentment with ones civilisation.
The Bible contains passages claiming that God is Love and the two commandments of the New Testament are:
“Love God above all”
and
“Love thy neighbour as thyself”
If God is love, then Noos, that divine part of mans mind must also be a source of love, a source of The Good. Insofar as Kant and the Enlightenment were concerned, the first commandment requires more articulation, because, for Kant, it is the idea of freedom of the will that is a fundamental idea, perhaps more important than the idea of God, which Kant embraces strictly in accordance with his critical Philosophy, and not in the spirit of blind worship. Campbell quotes the speech of Agathon from the Symposium:
“all serve him of their own free will, and where there is love as well as obedience, there, as the laws which are the lords of the city, say, is justice.”
The Symposium too, had its Enlightened thinker, Socrates, present, questioning the premises of Agathons speech, attempting to make space for Platos Theory of Forms. Later, Aristotle would see in Eros the spirit that can give rise to excesses which the Principle of the Golden Mean is meant to regulate with the help of the human power of rationality. Aristotle, however, also refers to Eros in his work on Metaphysics as being involved in the motion of the cosmos that moves regularly, he claims, for the love of God, the unmoved mover. It appears, then, that thought and desire are fused into one in the Philosophical idea of God, but separated in huan psuché. Insofar as Eros is operating in the Instincts, it resembles Platonic Spirit, which can be difficult to control in human life. Control of the instincts, for Freud, requires various powers such as Consciousness, Repression, Identification, and Sublimation. Once under control we are presented, by Aristotle with a vicissitude of Eros, namely friendship, a milder, less impulsive, more rational, form of human relationship between men living in a polis. So Eros is not in itself a divinity but rather an important counterweight to the influence of Thanatos as well as a human power that requires integration with other powers of mind, for example, practical rationality in the form of areté, used by the Phronimos to provide laws for the polis.. The Will, solely influenced by Eros(the “melter of limbs”) is not free but rather, for Aristotle, Kant, and Freud, to some extent in servitude. In the Symposium, Eros is also associated with an original loss of ones “other half”, which motivates a sometimes lifelong search for the lost loved-half, thereby providing us with a melancholic view of what has been lost and its possible restoration. In such contexts, Freud speaks of the importance of the Agency of the Ego and the Reality Principle which assists us in a final acceptance of the loss of a loved object, in the spirit of discontentment. Such is the power of the pleasure-pain principle in the life of human psuché. Friendship, then, on Freudian theory may well involve the defence mechanisms of both identification and sublimation, resulting in the Aristotelian telos of treatng the friend as en end-in-itself, wishing everything for the friend that one wishes for oneself.
Sublimation is an important element of the learning process of creative artists: one in which instinctive impulses are sublimated in the process of the learning of ones Art. Campbell notes in this respect that Greek Art and Hindu Art differed in their derivations:
“Greek Art was derived from experiences of the eye; Hindu from those of the circulation of the blood.” (Page 229)
This Hindu preoccupation with inner processes would have been puzzling for the Greeks for whom the aesthetic journey began with the love of the beauty of the body, ascended to love of the beauties of the soul, and thence to the love of the beauty of the laws and institutions of the polis, culminating in a love for the beauty of every kind of knowledge which included a love for Philosophy. The experiences of the senses were, of course of singular importance for Greek artists, as is evidenced by their construction of beautiful temples and sculptures of Appollonian nudes. Campbell points to Hesiod’s Theogony in defence of his claim that Eros is the god of Love, and a member of the four original deities; the other three being Chaos, Gaea (mother earth) and Tartarus (the pit of hades). Hesiod clearly attributes the characteristic of immortality to Eros but also, paradoxically, a power that can overcome the rational powes of intelligence and planning. Campbell acknowledges that Eros does not appear in the writings of Homer because he belongs t the older pantheon of Greek deities. According to Hesiod, Eros is the son of Aphrodite but there are a number of different accounts of his parentage, including the anthromorphic account from the Symposium which claims that he was conceived at a drinking party by a father called Resourcefulness and a Mother called Poverty.
Campbell also claims that Greek Mythology distinguishes itself by a shift on the value-scale from the impersonal to the personal—the norms of the individual, he claims, were conceived to be more important than the norms of the group (Page 136). This claim, however, may ignore the extent to which the norms of the group were consciously and intentionally formed by the process of sublimating without repressing the norms of the individual. The common element of the norms of the individual and the norms of the group is arché, (principle), e.g. the freedom to live as one wishes on the condition that there is respect for others and ends-in-themselves. This would be part of essence of areté and diké, so important to Greek life.
Eros, if not a God, must, then, on the Philosophers view be some sort of principle that in the best case cooperates actively with the rational powers of human psuché, but it is the human pantheon of human rational powers that best assists in the building of the character of the individual in accordance with the universal criteria for “The Good.” Whether it is useful to characterise these matters as a move on the value scale from group norms to individual norms, is, of course, questionable.
The Delphic Podcasts by Michael R D James Review of Campbells “Occidental Mythology”, Season 9 Episode 5
Views: 70
In the Chapter entitled “Gods and Heroes of the European West”, Campbell provides us with his interpretation of the meanings of Homers Works, “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey”. He has the following to say about the Iliad:
“The patron God of the Iliad is Apollo, the god of the light world and of the excellence of heroes. Death, on the plane of vision of that work, is the end; there is nothing awesome, wondrous, or of power beyond the veil of death, but only twittering helpless shades. And the tragic sense of that work lies precisely in its deep joy of life’s beauty and excellence, the noble loveliness of fair women, the real worth of manly men, yet it recognises the terminal fact, thereby that the end is all ashes.” Page 162)
Campbell contrasts this with his interpretation of the tale of the Odyssey:
“In the Odyssey, on the other hand,, the patron God of Odysseus’s voyage is the trickster Hermes, who guides souls to the underworld, the patron also of rebirth, and the lord of the knowledges beyond death, which may be known to his initiates even in life. He is the god associated with the caduceus, the two serpents intertwined; and he is the male traditionally associated with the triad of goddesses of destiny—Aphrodite, Hera, and Athene—who, in the great legend caused the Trojan War.” (Page 162)
We know from Homers narrative that Odýsseus killed over 100 men during the course of his Odyssey. We also know, from other sources, that Hermes was the prodigy of Zeus and the nymphe Maia, the protector of journeymen, thieves and a guide for wandering dead souls. Recognised by his winged sanadals, hat, and staf,f and carrying the carvings of gods and two intertwined serpents. This staff was wielded by both Pythagoras and Cassandra, and reputedly contains the power of immortality for its owner. The Consciousness of Aletheia is reputed to have been embedded in the staff with memories of the secrets of Altantis, which were eventually divulged to Cassandra, partly through a hallucinated reincarnation. The Odyssey is a journey in search of Aletheia, the source of the mystery of humanity. Diké is only present in the form of lex talionis: “revenge, thyself!” Areté follows this latter divine imperative rather than its philosophical essence which demands the presence of the golden mean principles (arché) which guide one to do the right thing in the right way at the right time. The form of Aletheia is also modified by its intrenchment in the matrix of psuché, logos, epistemé, and eudaimonoa.
Prior to the philosophical revolution begun with Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, we experienced a democratic revolution began by Pericles, who perhaps set the stage for all political Philosophy in the future. Campbell quotes Pericles´ famous essence-specification of democracy:
“Our form of government does not enter into rivalry with the institution of others.”
The Persian Wars and the Peloponesian War were fought essentially over the democratic life style which athough wishing to live in peace with others, was nevertheless prepared to fight ferociously to defend a state where men obey the law and are otherwise free to live as they wish. This democratic legal state provided the stability necessary for leisure-time pursuits such as religion, poetry and Philosophy. Democratically inspired Athens then produced three of the Greatest Philosophers (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle) in a relatively short period of time (470BC to 322BC), all sharing that sanctified relation of teacher-pupil. Socrates was the teacher of Plato and Plato was the teacher of Aristotle. We would have to wait a myriad of centuries until the Renaissance for a reawakening of the slumbering Ancient Greek Spirit and its love of wisdom and freedom in all its theoretical, practical and productive forms. There is no doubt that Aristotles conviction that the forms (arché) are to be found in the external world if one knew how to think about this world. His grasp of the importance of experimentation (dissecting animals) and observation in relation to all formsof psuché laid the foundations for Darwinian biological science, Newtonian and Kantian Science, and Freudian Psychoanalysis. One can indeed argue that Aristotelian hylomorphism is largely assumed in the Philosophy of Kant which embraces both empirical realism and critical idealism. Kantian Critical Philosophy is a Philosphy of Freedom as an idea of Reason. Kant is not plagued by medieval theoretical difficulties of proving the existence of God, preferring as he did to postulate a practical reason to believe in God: a practical reason based on the premise of a good will striving to live a good spirited flourishing life.
Hylomorphism and Critical Philosphy is committed to the matrix of values which includes that of areté which Pericles embraced in his Political Philosophy:
“We do not copy our neighbours but are an example to them. It is true that we are called a democracy, for the administration is in the hands of the many and not of the few. But while the law secures equal justice to all alike in their private disputes, the claim of excellence is also recognised: and when a citizen is in any way distinguished, he is preferred to the public service, not as a matter of privilege but as the reward for merit. Neither is poverty a bar but a man may benefit his country whatever the obscurity of his condition. There is no exclusiveness in our public life, and in our private intercourse we are not suspicious of one another, nor agry with our neighbour, if he does what he likes…..In doing good, again, we are unlike others, we make our friends by conferring not by receiving favours. Now he who confers a favour is the firmer friend, because he would fain by kindness keep alive the memory of an obligation; but the recipient is colder in his feelings because he knows that he, in requiring anothers generosity, he will not be winning gratitude but only paying a debt. We do good to our neighbours not upon calculation of interest, but in the confidence of freedom and in a frank and fearless spirit.”(Thucydides: Pelopennessian War II, 37-40, Trans Jowert, B.,)
The Greeks, then, were very dissimilar to the Persian servants of the gods and self proclaimed tyrants. Campbell ponts out in this context that the Greeks were proud of having defeated the Persians four times and also of having found the best way for human psuché to live. (Page 179). One issue of importance for Democracy was the fact that during the era of Pericles and forward, only males could participate in affairs of state. Pericles, however rebuilt the agora and encouraged a number of poets playwrights and philosophers to fill Athens with their reflections. Thucydides claims that after the death of Pericles from the plague that devastated Athens, the generals and rulers thereafter made a chain of unfortunate bad decisions which eventually led to the loss of the Peloponessian War.
The Time of Pericles was a time for challenging absolute ideals and dogma,s whether they be theoretical or practical. Anaxagoras, a friend of Pericles, challenged the position that the sun and moon were divinities, claiming they were made of material substance following laws of the cosmos.He was exiled from Athens for his controversial views, but later Socrates would acknowledge an intellectual debt to Anaxogoras by giving up his investigations into the laws of the cosmos and “turning” to more abstract matters such as the True and the Good and the laws of the mind (human psuché) in accordance with the Noos-principle of Anaxagoras.
Aristotle, importantly differentiated further this view of the world by giving us an account of human psuché: a view which produced the essence-specifying definition of man as a “rational animal capable of discourse”. Anaxagoras continued the philosophical journey begun by Heraclitus and Parmenides, a journey that sought not to placate imagined diviities, but rather sought the Truth in the spirit of Aletheia, however uncomfortable the results of such philosophical investigations might be. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle would also embark on these investigations, forming a unique trio of thinkers bound by a teacher-pupil relation: in marked contrast to the trio of Kant, Hegel, and Marx who sought to differentiate themselves from their predecessors. Kant was of course philosophising in the spirit of the Enlightenment which was inspired by the Spirit of Ancient Greece, both culturally and philosophically. Kant distinguished himself because of his historical insight and also because he provided us with an elaboration upon Aristotelian Hylomorphism which could then be used by Freud in the spirit of Anaxagoras. Neither Hegel nor Marx claim to be Enlightenment thinkers in the sense referred to above. Dialectical thinking, of course, has a history that takes us back to Heraclitus but dialectical reasoning leves us with major oppositions between science and Philosophy, Philosophy and Religion, Science and Art, etc which had previously been integrated in the thought of Aristotle and Kant in the spirit of Parmenides and Plato.
An important background influence on Ancient Greek Culture was that of the Orphic mythology that manifested itself in cultural rites as well as more spiritual activities such as song and lyre-playing which distracted believers from the more bloody activities of sacrifice. These more spiritual activities certainly influenced Pythagoras who, Campbell claims, was an Orphic follower as well as a thinker who believed that numbers could be heard in music, e.g. the ratios 2:1, 3:2, and 4:3. Pythagoras also believed that numbers are present in the “music of the spheres” and knowledge of these numbers was important to leading a satisfying life.
The Persian Prophet, Zoroaster is discussed in the Chapter entitled “Gods and Heroes of the Levant”. Oriental Mythology/Religion, Campbell claims, stands in contrast to Occidental mythology because in the case of the former:
“No attempt was ever made to bring into play in the religious field any principle of world reform or renovation.” (Page 190)
Zoroasters mythical Project builds upon the assumption that the world is not corrupt by design but rather had become so by a series of accidents connected to the activities of the human will. According to Zoroaster, what had been caused by the human will could be remedied by the human will under the condition of an engagement in the world which Oriental thnkers thought to be egoistic. Zoroasters teachings included appeals to the “archangels” of “Good Mind and Righteous Order” (Page 192). These “forces” engage with the powers of “Evil Mind and False Appearance”, e.g. Cowardice, Hypocrisy, Misery, and Extinction. Campbell claims that these beneficent and malevolent powers were subsequently transformed into the Christian orders of angels and devils. He argues that it is here where the ideas of free will and decision are born that would reemerge at different periods of clerical history. Such a position required too, a further appeal to a “day of judgement” in which these so-called “free actions and decisions” will be judged by the Will and Logos of the Divine Power. “Good Mind and Righteous Order” are related to thought, word and deed, and it is these that will be judged (P.196). These are the means which enable us to find our way to the Kingdom of the Divine along the “road of Zoroaster”. The evil, false form of life leads to a different destination, described as folllows:
“I saw the greedy jaws of hell; the most frightful pit, descending in a very narrow, fearful crevice and in darkness so murky that I was forced to feel my way, amid such a stench that all whose nose inhaled that air, struggled, staggered, and fell, and in such confinement that existence seemed impossible.”(Page 198)
We can see clearly here the work of the sensations, emotions and the imagination in contrast to the more abstract appeals to principles of Good we find in Greek Philosophy. The imagination has a bipolar capacity to picture conrete opposites. For the Aristotelian and Kantian Philosophers such bipolar alternatives are extremes which require the application of the principle of the Golden Mean or an account of human psuché embedded in the matrix of arché, areté, diké, aletheia, logos, epistemé, eros, thanatos, ananke, and eudaimonia. The above mythical operation of the imagination eleborated upon a vision of Arda Viraf: a vision that was adopted and transcribed and “more vividly described” by Dante (Page 199).
The above “visions” or “images” substantially influenced both Judaism and Christianity, and assisted by the emotions of fear and terror, contributed to limiting the more calm contemplative rational approaches to the realities experienced by the human form of psuché. Zoroaster may well have been a hero of the Levant but a prophet is not a Philosopher, and however wide his appeal may have been during his time, the day of this kind of hero were numbered. It was the Platonic account of the life and times of Socrates (including his death) that would introduce a new kind of hero onto the world-stage. Socrates believed in the examined life as did Plato, but it was Aristotles broad panoramic view of Philosophy and human psuché that settled the matter in favour of “The Philosopher”. It was this conceptually and rationally oriented “spirit” that inhabited the Philosophy of Kant during the time of the Enlightenment which preserved the influence of the Ancient Greeks upon our European Culture, that would remain relatively stable for the next 140 years until the First World War broke out. Hannah Arendt’s work “The Origins of Totalitarianism charts the “causes” of both the First and Second World Wars in a way that reminds one of the Platonic and Aristotelian opposition to tyrants, whose unnecessary and unlawful desires led to such ruin and destruction.
Shakespeares Philosophical Theatre
Views: 93
Final proofs sent away today. Published early next year
The Delphic Podcasts by Michael R D James, Review of Campbells “Occidental Mythology”, Season 9 Episode 2
Views: 103
Miss Jane Ellis Harrison has the following to say on the theme of Western Heroic Mythology, contrasting it to underlying older mythological forms, which centre around the serpent and powerful cosmic forces:
“A worship of the power of fertility whch includes all plant and animal life is broad enough to be sound and healthy, but as mans attention centres more and more on his own humanity, such a worship is one divine source of danger and disease.”(Harrison, Themis, Cambridge, CUP,1927, Page 459.
Mythology, we have argued earlier, gave birth to a form of reflection and argumentation that abandons or sublimates the narrative plots of the deeds of warriors like Achilles, or prophets like Moses, in favour of the words of men who use their reason to understand and pass judgement on matters of universal importance for humanity. The introverted form of the narratives relating to Achilles and his forerunners and descendants do not, for Aristotle, connect with that part of the mind of human psuché he called noos, the part of the mind that he thought was intimately related to the divine. Physical courage as displayed by Achilles is, of course, important in particular environments involving war, but it is important to note that insofar as Achilles uses rationality at all (in his willingness to die for a perspectival cause), this use is instrumenta,l and locked onto aggressive self serving ends that the Greek oracles warned lead humanity down spiralling paths of ruin and destruction.
Ancient Greek Philosophy, but especially Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, provided us with some of the text to what Campbell refers to as “the deeper song” of ancient mythology sung by human psuché: a song that engages with the eternal silence of outer space and time in a spirit of worship. The song of the Philosophers, on the other hand, was neither a lamentation nor a joyous celebration of the human which, in their eyes, left a lot to be desired.
Classical Art, inspired by Philosophy, changes form from the Art that was inspired by Mythology, and contributed to singing this deeper song, especially during the period of the Renaissance where we saw a Greek holistic humanistic spirit and transcendence, revived in relation to the human psuche and linked in turn to the metaphysical realm of the sacred.
Campbell misses the philosophical deeper song and compares the song of ancient mythology with what he regards as the more superfical song of Western Mythology, which he claims is :
“something forced, and finally unconvincing about all the manly moral attitudes of the shining righteous deedsmen, whether of the Biblical or of the Greco-Roman schools.” (Page 25)
The deeper song of ancient non-Western mythology may be better represented by Kuli of India who is both life and death, womb and tomb of the world, and for whom the opposites of right and wrong, male and female were not absolute, where each opposite annihilates the other. Certainly the Greek Pantheon (inspiration for Western “balance of mind”), at least insofar as the earlier deities were concerned, did not seek ahhihilation of opposites, but rather engaged in the more balanced synthesising behaviour of, for example, having gods and goddesses marry each other , thus preserving the power of the mother earth representatives, rather than expelling them from the Pantheon. They were not cursed but regarded as ends-in-themselves, worthy of similar status and embraced in friendship. When they were the focus of sacrifices there was no dark intent lurking, namely, the hope that the transcendental divinity will depart and become deus absconditis.
The challenge that Campbells mythological reflections presents us with, is the challenge to synthesize the deeper song of mythology with the deeper song of Philosophy: this latter song is, of course, still in the process of composition, but one can clearly see in the initial movements of the composition, a kind of worship of the Truth and The Good. This is a very different proposition to that of worshipping individual heros, however powerful they may be.
Campbell discusses the Minoan Culture which we know, contained many goddesses and female cult leaders and it has therefore been classified as matriarchal in type. There were no walls around the cities and little evidence of weapons. The “atmosphere” of the culture is gentle with a commodious life-style in which social interaction extends broadly across class boundaries. The Minoan cults surrounding the goddesses could be both benign(involving cattle) and terrible (involving lions,) and central to these, was a tree of life and death, often associated with a Bull and the ritualistic practice of regicide. We referred earlier to Zeus and the primacy of the heavens over the sea (Poseidon), and the earth(Hades), which is also indexed in the developmental stages of the monument Stonehenge in England. The first Stonehenge monument consisted of sacrificial pits and an earth goddess cult, an evolutionary process ending with erect stones paying homage to the sky and solar divinities. Campbell claims that :
“The British dates match the Cretan perfectly.” (Page 67)
Contacts between Britain and the Mediterranean, the evidence suggests, occurred much earlier than previously thought. This was during the period when architects and poets were “wandering souls”, wandering from city to city, region to region and across various land-masses. Late Stonehenge may well have been created by a Mycenean architect. The Greek Pantheon, we know, began with Zeus, Poseidon and Hades dividing up the Universe between them: no female presences were involved directly in this process, and in spite of the Greek compromises with previous female divinities, earthly divinites gradually became occluded, as did their central symbol, the Tree of Life. As a consequence we see in the Garden of Eden Myth, that another tree, the tree of knowledge of good and evil begins to occupy the centre of concern for the deities. Knowledge, we know, also became a central concern for Philosophy: both knowledge of the external world and knowledge of the self.
Otto Rank, the psychoanalyst, was concerned with the psychology involved in the myth of the hero which, it is argued, resembles the structure of a neurotic naracisstic day dream:
“where the individual dissociates himself from his true parents by imagining for himself: 1. a noble or divine higher birth, 2. infant exile or exposure, 3. adoption by a family much more lowly than himself(namely, that of his actual parents), and 4. a prospect, ultimately, of return to his “true” estate with a wonderful humbling of those responsible for the exile, and a general sense of great achievement all around.” (Page 74)
The dissociation of oneself from the categorical relation we all have to our parents, and the categorical relation we also have to the world of sky-life, sea-life, and the life of the earth, uses the defence mechanisms of denial and splitting to alleviate a weak ego from anxiety and depression. Freud reports a case of psychotic dissociation, a case of paranoia in which the patient “(Shreber) feels that his own physical body is being dissolved into the infinite matter of the universe. Spinoza is in no doubt that we humans are an individual form of infinite substance intimately related to the substantial attributes of thought and extension. We strive to maintain ourselves in existence like all forms of substance, but inadequate ideas of our self, other selves and the universe hinder us from striving to fulfill our rational potential. Inadequate ideas, Spinoza argues, produce passive emotional states of mind that are not conducive to the classical Ancient Greek ideal of living a good-spirited flourishing life, a life of eudaimonia. Freud’s case, Schreber, is a more serious case of disssociation, more akin to the psychotic breakdown of the mind, than the neurotic accommodations the mind makes to a reality it is still in tenuous contact with. Campbell elaborates upon this theme:
“Indeed, it might be asked whether the morbid state of mind is not a function of the legend rather than its cause;for, as it stands, the beyond represents the descent from the cosmological plane to individual reference. It therefore, produces an inferior meditation, namely, instead of an extinction of ego in the image of a god(mythic identification) precisely the opposite: an exaltation of ego in the posture of a god (mythic inflation); which has been a chronic disease of rulers since the masters of the art of manipulating men contrived to play the role of incarnate god and yet save their necks from the double ax.”(Page 74)
Campbell argues that this state of affairs contributed to the transformation of the state/polis from a religious entity to a political entity. The human attribute of being a tyrant can be seen early on in History in the case of Hammurabi who likened himself to the sun that illuminates all the land and is charged with the duty of providing both justice and piety for his people. The sun sublimates the moon in this changing of the guard of the gods and fundamental differences of psychic attitude follow from such mythic transformation:
Whereas the aim of the earlier mythology has been to support a state of indifference to the modalities of time and identification with the inhabiting non-dual mystery of all Being, that of the new was just the opposite: to force action in the field of time, where subject and object are indeed two separate and not the same–as A is not B, as death is not life, virtue is not vice, and the slayer is not the slain.” (Page 78)
Thus, the womb of the narrative is about he who must overcome his opposite, the villain, or alternatively overcome a hostile world with strange and various life-forms in order to find peace of mind. The narrative is, then structured in accordance with a dialectical logic of thesis and antithesis, which in the best of all worlds, produces the synthesis, and names it as a kind of victory, instead of the more psychoanalytically tempered synthesis of a balanced rational adaptation to the hostile forces encountered. In its extreme form, when the image becomes more powerful than the word, images of a man walking on the surface of the moon is far more interesting than our mundane earthly journeys. This image of modern man is an image of an ego that must master the external world , the id, and the superego, whose Kantian task is to treat every other ego as an end-in-itself.
In the dramatic world of the hero there is no Greek synthesis of the opposites which is clearly not heroic enough for our Western Kings or Gods whose egos demand mastery, conquest, and victory for the drama to be complete. We can wonder whether such egos are also related to the Age of Adam and Eve who exercised their wills so positvely and dramatically in the sacred Garden. Such egos clearly no longer belong in the post Socratic world which is built on a categorical framework of epistemé, diké, arché, and areté (all forms of rationality). In this world, forms and principles constitute and regulate mans relation to his fellow man and the external world. For both Plato and Aristotle, the political sphere was not immune and it too, was constituted and regulated by the “Form of the Good”— a form that was both good-in-itself, and good-in-its-consequences: situated in a space that allowed the harmonious coexistence of the categorical universal ideas of justice, and the realm of the sacred.
The BiblicalCreation Myth relating to Yahweh was a late-stage patriarchal myth where the heros were “prophets and saviours”. The evolutionary development of the forms of creation-myth stretched, according to Campbell over 4 stages:
“1. The world born of a goddess without consort; 2. The world born of a goddess fecundated by a consort; 3. The world fashioned from the body of a goddess by a male-warrior god; and 4. The world created by the unaided power of a male God alone.” (Page 86)
The Bible is, of course, to the extent that it is a pre-historical, mythological document, but it is also an attempt to structure the time of this later phase of myth historically. Imaginative narrative is thus sublimated by historical narrative, charting the chronology of Kings and Prophets, as the figure of God successively recedes into the background to become Deus absconditis. The narrative of the life and teachings of the son of God, Jesus, becomes, then, an important focus and precedes the Age of the Holy Ghost to come, in which, on some accounts, the Church no longer needs to take the respnsibility for communicating the holy message that the Kingdom of Heaven is now, here on earth, and inside of everyone who will search for it.
This historical narrative record in its turn gives rise to the emergence of Ancient Greek Philosophy as well as the replacement of Myth and Religion by an overarching form of rational universal argumentation which could still find a role for the Holy or the realm of the sacred in the philosophical mansion of The Forms of the Good. Spinoza and Kant eleborated upon the Forms of Plato and the Hylomorphic Philosophy of Aristotle with firstly, a monistic ontological account of infinite substance, and secondly, a metaphysical dualism, namely, the Metaphysics of Nature, and the Metaphysicsof Morals. This latter domain involved the controversial practical idea of a being whose freedom consisted in an ability to cause itself to independently act and take responsibility for this action. 20th Century followers of Aristotle and Kant, such as Freud and Wittgenstein and their followers presented us with further elebaorations that can be added to the Canon of previous Philosophical works which, to some extent can be interpreted mythologically.
The question these two competing forms of account raise is whether both can be categorised as “the deeper song”: a song sung using the Philosophical faculties of sensibility(imagination), understanding, and reason.
“
The Delphic Podcasts by Michael R DJames, Review of Campbells “Occidental Mythology, Season 9 Episode 1
Views: 99
We are all familiar with the proposition that perspectives can differ, whether that be in terms of attitudes toward some object, or in terms of the sensory conceptualisation of an object. What is, for one thinker, a rational animal capable of discourse, is for another thinker, the worst of the animals. In the former case, we obviously can share in the Logos that belongs to divinities, and in the latter case, the divinities might at best just abandon us (Deus absconditis) or in the worst case scenario, curse mankind for the rest of his days. Many of us have lived with this curse for millennia and some in modern times believe either that God is dead or that the divine has permanently absented itself from our lives.
Kant in his Metaphysics of Morals found a place for the divine and the realm of the sacred: a place in which the good will can become the holy will by, firstly, willing that ones maxims of action become universal law,s and secondly, by treating all human and divine psuché as ends-in-themselves. Following the threads of civilisation from the different regions of the Occident and the Orient, is a complex affair and testifies to the picture Aristotle painted many millennia ago, of the “Many Meanings of Being”.
Kantian Metaphysics of Mind elaborated upon the hylomorphic metaphysics of Aristotle by providing us with a relatively modern Philosophical Psychology capable of supporting the major concerns of thinkers throughout the following centuries. Kants theory assumes the essence-specifying definition of man as a “rational animal capable of discourse” in his divisions of the major faculties of mind into three: sensibility, understanding and reason. These faculties are capable of generating a number of cognitive and aesthetic powers, one of which was, of course, the imagination, which poets and religious thinkers alike, used in their various narratives of gods and goddesses, kings and queens.
One important thread leading from the Ancient Greek Philosophers, appeared during the periods of the Renaissance and Reformation, which in turn led to the Enlightenment and the emergence of the Kantian idea of the primacy of the will of man for the Metaphysics of Morals and the Primacy of the Being of God in the Metaphysics of Nature. Aristotle we recall, spoke of the role of noos in the context of the relation of human psuché to the realm of the sacred or the holy. Kant elaborates upon this by relating the noumenal self to the realm of the sacred or the holy.
Campbell, in his work, “Occidental Mythology”, points to the differences between Occidental and Oriental Mythology, in terms of topographic location, the enigma of transcendental experience, and the introverted and extraverted relation of man to the universe. He argues, paradoxically, that it is the Occidental self that is inward looking, and the Oriental Self that has an extraverted relation to Being. This difference may have been recorded in Freud’s judgement that our Western relation to religion is essentially pathological, reflecting the presence of infantile wishes and fears.
Kants relation to religion is, however, more sound, grounded as it was on the transcendental noumenal world that lay beyond all categories of thinking. Kant believes, like Aristotle, that self-knowledge is crucial to leading the examined contemplative life, but it was equally important to maintain a Philosophical relation to God if a good-spirited flourishing life was to be possible for the human forms of psuché possessing a good/holy will.
The Greek philosophical view of religion also focussed upon the ethical actions of human psuché, not as an individual causa sui, but rather as a necessarily social animal, ,which at their best, lived in a polis and democratically followed wise laws made by wise men. The Platonic dialogue “Euthyphro” testifies to this relation between justice and the sacred via the arguments of Socrates, namely, that the Just is a more embracing category than the sacred, and must, therefore, take precedence in the lives of man, the social animal. The role of rationality in this process was obvious, given the Socratic and Aristotelian claims that the best form of life was the examined or contemplative life, which, of course, presupposed rationality in its different practical, theoretical and productive forms. Knowledge of the Form of the Good was, for both Plato and Aristotle, the most important form of knowledge: a life based on knowledge was an examined contemplative life. It was this balanced relation to their world and themseves that allowed the more philosophically inclined Greek thinkers to sit in judgement on the character of the Gods and even question, as Socrates did, the primacy of the sacred over that of a form of reflection they called Philosophy, which Socrates named, in the course of his indictmen,t as one of the Children of the Gods. It did not, of course, end well for Socrates or Aristotle, but Plato managed somehow to avoid the persecution of the agents of religion. This challenge to religious authority was partly responsible for elevating abstract universal knowledge above concrete myth, which we know was not universal, but necessarly perspectival. One could not, for example, imagine Plato or Aristotle going to war with Socrates in relation to a difference in opinion over the “Form of the Good”. Individual heros or Gods and Goddesses, were being replaced, not by other heros, gods and goddesses, but by argumentation in accordance with logical principles and categorical conceptual distinctions. Freud would certainly have viewed the Ancient Greek Philosophy of Religion in terms of a healthy non pathological extraverted relation to the divine, free of hubris, infantile narcissism and its wishes and fears.
Both Spinoza and Kant argued for a Religion within the Bounds of Reason, insisting, for example, that reference to certain kinds of supernatural events in the Bible must not be interpreted literally but rather, metaphorically. The idea, for example, of a disembodied soul dwelling in a divine Kingdom of Heaven is, on such a view, a kind of Metaphor for the continued existence of the universal psuché.
Neither Aristotle nor Kant would deny therefore that although the enigma of Beings was difficult to decipher, the masks of these Beings did in fact reveal, for example, the presence of such Beings in Thought and in the extended world of Nature. Spinoza is the Philosopher that comes to mind in the context of this discussion, maintaining as he did that God or Substance has an infinite number of attributes, only two of which, namely, thought and extension, are accessible to mortal human psuché (an individual mode of Being). Kant, in his work, “The Critique of Judgement” referred to an inscription on a statue located at the Temple of Isis which claimed that no mortal had ever lifted the veil over the face of divine beings. This phenomenal account of the beings dwelling in the realm of the sacred comes to the attention of the individual mode of mortal human psuché via the attributes of thought and extension (only two of a possible infinity of attributes).
Now whilst Spinoza conceived of his Divine Substance in terms of the immanent cause of everything that occurs in the universe, his monistic ontology was questioned by Kant who conceived of a trinity of faculties of mind (sensibility, understanding, and reason) and a dualistic metaphysics of Nature and Morals, demanding different categorical frameworks to explain/justify natural events and moral actions. Spinoza invokes the notion of the knowledge of adequate ideas in a deterministic world-system, claimig that they play an important part in achieving amour intellectualis Dei–the joyous love of God, the infinite source of self-causing power in the universe, of which we, the human form of psuché, are a finite form, striving to maintain ourselves in existence using our finite power of reason and our inadequate and adequate ideas of the causes of our conscious experiences of the world.
Freedom for Spinoza, as it is for Kant is an idea of reason which uses its power to transcend inactive emotions and passions which are always based on inadequate ideas. It is not clear exactly, to what extent Kant agrees with this monistic ontological characterisation of God given his metaphysical dualism and his insistence upon a categorical framework of its own to characterise free human moral action, which, of course, presupposes knowledge of the operative causes of phenomenal events in the universe. Both Kant and Spinoza, however, are rationalists who are sceptical of religious texts promoting unrealistic desires and hopes and depicting supernatural events for which there could be no adequate ideas of the causes.
Kants Critical Philosophy, like the Philosophy of Spinoza allows us to conceive of the eternal in terms of its transcendence and immanence both here and now but also everywhere and for all time. Spinozas God is, of course, infinite and therefore beyond the here and now, whilst simultaneously being present here and now. God is also beyond but present in the true and the false , the right and the wrong. Critical Philosophy, however, prefers to view God as the moral guarantor for the good spirited flourishing lives of those worthy souls possessing good/holy wills. We have, Kant argues, more access to this infinite holy Being via our practical reason and our wills, than our theoretical judgements relating to Gods form of existence.
Aristotle, in his work on Metaphysics, chooses to conceive of God only through the attribute of Thought, yet transcending thought via the infinite power of thnking about thinking, whilst conceiving of the human form of psuché and its power of noos, to “participate” in this “first principle” or “form of the mind”.
Campbell claims that Art engages with both immanence and transcendence and various themes important to mythological thinking. For Kant, we know that Art engages aesthetically with life, and reference is made to the “form of finality” of the Art-object which the Art Critic, Adrian Stokes claims is a good object aiming to both envelop us in its constructed work, whilst simultaneously putting truth to work by standing transcendentally unconcealed for something good in life that gives rise to an intellectual pleasure that is perhaps related to the love one has for God via ones adequate ideas. Cambell expresses this by pointing to what he believes to be the metaphysical significance of art and its capacity to take us on a journey to:
“the shores of experience beyond the categories of thought.”(Page 3)
We appear on the above accounts to be in a realm beyond knowledge , a realm of Wisdom that incorporates both knowledge and the “form of the good” in accordance with different categorical frameworks. These categorical frameworks, for Kant, play a more decisive role, and have given birth to major criticisms of consequentialist ethical theories which invoke a theoretical linear cause-effect framework for the evaluation of what is good. Stating as these theories do, that it is good consequences that constitute the goodness of an ethical action, ignores the convoluted history of the opposition to this claim, which began by Glaucon demanding of Socrates’ theory of justice, that it be both, good-in-its-consequences, and good-in-itself. Plato produced his theory of Forms in The Republic, in response to this demand which helped to form the categorical framework for ought-statements (One ought to keep promises)–as opposed to is-statements describing a state of affairs. The modern rendition of the conflict between these categorical frameworks is the claim that one cannot derive an ought conclusion from a set of is-premises, on pain of being accused of the naturalistic fallacy. “Promises ought to be kept”, on this account, becomes a kind of justificatory principle: a constitutive condition governing the action of promising
Kant would refer to the “shore of experience” Campbel points to, in terms of a “feeling of life”, which can be described as a boundless outlook onto a future of happiness. This feeling of life is also accompanied by the pleasure at the harmony of the faculties of the imagination and understanding, which arises either firstly, because of the potential for the experience to be conceptualised in the case of the experience of the beautiful, or, secondly because of the potential for the experience of the sublime to associate itself with the moral idea of a moral agent possessing a moral will.
Art-objects created in the Greek spirit of areté (doing the right thing in the right way at the right time) and aletheia (truth being put to work in the object for the telos of unconcealment) are using the symbolic structure of transcendental analogy referred to by Kant in his work “Prolegomena”:
E.G., A is to B as C is to X
“For instance, as the promotion of the welfare of children (=a) as to the love of the parents (=b), so the welfare of the human species (=c) is to that unknown in God(=x). which we call love….But the relational concept in this case is mere category, viz., the concept of cause, which has nothing to do with sensibility.” (Page 98)
Another important form of the transcendental analogy occurs in relation to Art. Kant has the followng to say in a footnote:
“I may say that the causality of the Supreme Cause holds the same place with regard to the world that human reason does with regard to its works of art. Here the nature of the Supreme Cause itself remains unknownto me: I only compare its effects(the order of the world), which I know, and their conformity to reason to the effects of human reason, which I also know….”(Page 100)
The above is obviously a more complex structure than the use of metaphor we encounter in the poets use of this linguistic instrument, for example, in the expression “Man is a wolf” where human psuché is positioned in an epistemological structure of genus and species: thereby placing human psuché in the wider category of psuché as such and animal psuché in particular, perhaps simultaneously making the Aristotleian point that man can be the worst of animals.. Transcendental analogy, on the other hand, transports us further up the scale of rationality, to man at his best, striving via the power of noos toward possessing a divine sacred/holy will. It is in this region of Being that the Kantian idea of a boundless happy outlook onto the future, comes into play. as long as the outlook belongs to a man of moral worth and dignity. Kant’s vision is that the only viable practical argument for the existence of God is as a Supreme Cause of the “Kingdom of Ends”: an end state in which men treat each other as ends-in-themselves and as a conseqence rewarded with a good-spirited flourishing life (eudaimonia).
Campbell claims in this work that in occidental mythology the final terms God and Man stand opposed to one another, as contradictions, and therefore, pose a problem for the resolution of the problem of the opposition of the two contradictories. The Old Testament Book of Job demands absolute obedience to a jealous and angry Yahweh who chooses the tribe of the Israelites to be “his” people. Greek mythology, in contrast, prizes the judgement and dignity of man to such an extent that it is even capable of judging the character of the gods of the Greek Pantheon. The rational animal capable of discourse values his own form of human psuché almost as much as the form of God which he experiences via the proclamations of the prophets and holy men, who claim to have some kind of special access to the being behind the proclamations, or aternatively some kind of special access to, or use of, noos, the divine part of the mind of human psuché. Oriental Mythology, on the other hand, views this occidental perspective of Man as a possible equal and judge, at least insofar as his own life is concerned, as heretical, and the work of the devil.
We, in the West, communed with God in the Garden of Eden until the serpent and Eve colluded to persuade Adam to go in search for the Truth by eating the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, in contravention of the divine proclamation forbidding the act in question. The Serpent, Campbell claims, in Chapter One of hos work “Occidental Mythology” (New York, Viking Press, 2001, Page 9), was a divinity in the Levant for at least 7000 years before the book of Genesis. The Serpent symbolises death and rebirth and was a Lord of the Waters of the Earth whose activities are both constituted and regulated by the Moon. The serpent is, popularly speaking for modern men, a primitive form of life symbolising danger and the ruin of ones hopes. Previously, of course, the serpent was both a phallic symbol and a symbol for female genitalia, and we ought to recall in the context of this discussion, what whilst Buddha was sitting at the immovable spot beneath the tree of Enlightenment, he was approached in a threatening manner by Kama- Mara the creator of the world we think we know, and symbol of the desire for life and the fear of death, and it was Mother Earth who came to the rescue with the proclamation. “I bear you witness!”. This event was followed by Buddhas Enlightenment, whereupon a serpent enveloped the Enlightened one as a protective measure.
This is the Serpent the Old Testament Yahweh cursed upon learning of its role in the defiance of the divine proclamation. The female Eve, too, was cursed and the first couple were expelled from Eden and the promise of divine immortality was withdrawn, along with the company of God, who, at this point was well on his way to becoming a Deus Absconditis. The scene of the crime was the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and this tree became the centre of a plot very different to that of Buddhas Tree of Enlightenment. This experience of Enlightenment for Buddha was a transcendental experience, transcending amongst other things the illusions of the world we think we know, which may well present as knowledge of the world and knowledge of human psuché.
Greek Mythology, however, had they imagined a Garden of Eden, would not have placed the first couple in such a state of subservience to the divinity of the Garden, and certainly would not have condemned the serpent and Eve for searching for the truth and placing the divine proclamation in brackets, whilst they satisfied their dpistemological curiosities. Campbell refers, in the context of this discussion to icons from the Near East, e.g. “The Garden of Immortality”, in which all the human figures are female (two of which are related to the underworld dvinity Gula-Bau, and one of which was a mortal woman grasping a branch of fruit:
“Thus we perceive that in this early mythic system of the nuclear Near East—in contrast to the latter, strictly patriarchical system of the Bible—divinity could be represented as well under feminine as under masculine form, the qualifying form itself being merely the mask of an ultimately unqualified principle, beyond, yet inhabiting all names and forms. Nor is there any sign of divine wrath or danger to be found in these seals. There is no theme of guilt connected wit the Garden.” (Page 13)
Campbell refers also to an inversion of sense in the legacy of Greek Mythology described by Jane Ellen Harrison in relation to the field-festivals and mystery cults. An earth goddess in various forms( e.g. the Erinyes?) reigned over the living and the dead:
“Her consort was typically a serpent form; and her rites were not characterised by the blithe spirit of manly athletic games, humanistic art, social enjoyment, feasting and theatre that the modern mind associates with Classical Greece, but were in spirit dark and full of dread. The offerings were not of cattle, gracefully garlanded, but of pigs and human beings, directed downward, not upward to the light: and rendered not in polished marble temples, radiant at the hour of rosy-fingered dawn, but in twilight groves and fields, over trenches through which the fresh blood poured into the bottomless abyss: “The beings worshipped”, Miss Harrison wrote, “were not rational human law abiding gods, but vague irrational, mainly malevolent spirit-things, ghosts and bogeys, and the like, not yet formulated and enclosed into god-head.” (Pages 17-18)
Campbell elaborates upon this theme by claiming that the spirit of the above sacrificial rituals was not that of giving in order to receive, but rather, of the giving of something in the hope that something unwanted will depart. Campbell also refers to the multifarious forms of the divinities by commenting on the icon “Zeus Meilichios”, expressing his amazement, given that this form originally belonged to a local daemon who was the son/husband of the Mother Earth Spirit(s). Such cults of fertility and sacrifice continued and became well documented by Sir James G Frazers work “The Golden Bough”. Frazer describes a sacred grove in which an ominous Priest-King roams with sword in hand ready to murder, perhaps setting the tone for Royal rule for centuries to come. In one Pre-Hellenic ritual scene from Epirus there is a sacred grove in which a maiden priestess without clothing brings swarms of snakes reputedly descended from the Python of Delphi, their food. How the snakes behave portends the spirit of the coming year, whether it will be fruitful and healthy, or riddled with disease and starvation. At the centre of this Greek idyll featuring a garden at peace, were women and serpents living harmoniously together. This idyll was disrupted by the nomadic Aryan cattle herders/warriors from the North and the Semitic sheep/goat herders/warriors from the South. These were people for whom “honour” was associated with prowess in battle and the conquest of desired territories.
Zeus, in fact, was a warrior God of this kind and his presence rapidly overshadowed that of the religiously inclined goddesses. Women, who were the givers and supporters of life were usurped by these new warrior-heros from the North ad South with their furious fires and swords. In the Old Testament this shift in the form of the divinity was characterised by Yahwehs slaying of the sea-serpet, Leviathan. The Greek equivalent of this symbol was the victory of Zeus over the younger child of Gaia, Typhon.
The Serpent symbol, we know, retained its hold over the Oriental Vedic Gods, thereby questioning the spirit of the warrior-hero which became the enduring symol of all occidental mythology: The Greeks, Romans, Germans and Celts. The slaying of monster serpents of the earth, celebrated the superiority of the Gods of the Heavens over the Goddesses of the Earth which were, over time, demoted to local daemons (Page 24)
The Garden of Eden Myth is clearly not as ancient as the monster/serpent myth, and is perhaps interpreted too anthropomorphically. The serpent that could talk was certainly a divinity, as must have been both the characters of Adam and Eve, even if here too Adam was the superior being, giving up a rib for the creation of Eve. Both of these characters, living as they did in the Garden, had access to the Tree of Immortality. The plot of Eve tempting Adam with earthly desires and subsequent exile from Paradise along with the serpent did not set out to praise the character of man, as might an Aristotleian-Kantian reinterpretation of these events. The Philosophical perspective would not focus upon the sin or flaw of mankind, but rather upon the act of will by both Adam and Eve to freely acquire knowledge from this mysterious Tree.
The Tale of the Old Testament is, of course, designed to warn all of mankind of the possible ruin and destruction that might follow from mans hubris, from turning ones back on ones God, but if, it is the case, as both Aristotle and Kant claim, that human psuché can only experience God via noos, the divine part of their minds, then the human psuché also becomes a causa sui, a cause of its own potential for Being rational and approaching the divine form of Being. For these Philosophers, the Garden of Eden myth becomes a celebration of the moment man freely chose the human form of life.
The Delphic Podcasts by Michael R D James Review of Campbells “Hero” writings: Conclusion season 8 episode 6
Views: 113
The Romantic commitment to viewing man as an individual whose fundamental interest is in using instrumental foms of reasoning to survive and provide himself with Hobbesian commodious forms of life in accordance with a social contract with the state, is, of course, an anti-Enlightenment position. Yet Romanticism is, as Campbell claims,an important elemental component in our Western Traditions. T S Eliot’s “modernist” perspective on the consequences of this tradition involves characterising the state of the modern world in terms of a Wasteland”:– a land in which people lead inauthentic lives.
Campbell notes in an interview entitled “The Meeting with the Goddess” ( “The Heros Journey), how Christianity was assimilated in Europe during the 11th, 12th, and 13th centuries. In elaborating upon this theme, he notes that the bishop/abbot, Joachim of Florence, characterised the Christian Spirit in terms of “Three Ages”: The Age of the Father(Judaism), The Age of the son and the Church spreading the good news to the world, and the final Age of the Holy Spirit which dawned in the 15th century, and in which the Spirit has no need of the church, because the spirit will be directly teachable. This view was regarded by the Church as heretical but according to Campbell this is the view that is embraced by the Grand Romances and stories about the Knights of Arthurs Round Table, which mark a significant deviation from the Christian doctrines preached by the Church.
Given the history of what can only be described as the relative collapse of the role of the Church in our communities, and the subsequent wave of secularisation in the West (which may or may not retain the memory of the teachings of Christ and the Holy Spirit), it is hardly surprising that the consequences of these processes bore the poisoned fruit of the 20th century:—the century of the wasteland which Arendt described as “this terrible century”. Some psychoanalysts took the view that man was in need of treatment for his unnecessary desires and fantasies, and that the balance of mind of man had been significantly disturbed.
In an interview entitled “The Magic Flight” contained in the work “The Hero’s Journey”, Campbell is asked about his pilgrimage to Japan and, and he responded with the observation that the whole society seemed comfortably structured. He also points to the continuity of Art and Nature, and a union of the spiritual with the physical, which is a part of the Zen idea that all the things in the universe are part of a greater universal consciousness. Contained in this idea, Campbell argues, is the recognition that the separation of individual consciousnesses is a result of the organisation of our spatial- temporal experiences. On this view, reference to the particular historial events of Buddhism are of secondary importance to the general significance of Buddhist wisdom. Campbell points out this is not the case with Christian religion. If, for example one questions whether the Exodus actually took place, or whether the resurrection of Jesus actually occurred, this form of questioning suffices to call the whole tradition into question. Philosophically, of course, it is far easier to believe in the phenomenon of the Exodus than that of a physical human being genuinely dying and returning to life. Campbell notes in relation to this discussion that a particular historical perspective may well conceive of the impossibility of the end of time but this is psychologically irrelevant to the believer. In his view what is important to the believer is:
“When you have seen the radiance of eternity through all the forms of time and it is a function of art to make that visible to you, then you have really ended life in the world as it is lived by those who think only in historical terms.” (Page 185, The Hero’s Journey).
Campbell claims interestingly that the “Christ and Buddha ideas are perfectly equivalent mythological symbols” (Page 185). We in the West, however, in contrast to our Buddhist and Japanese friends, have lost the capacity to “Live in accord with nature”. Campbell responds to this point by reference to Biological science and a film of raw protoplasm under a microscope flowing this way and that, changing shape. Campbells interviewer puts the following question:
“So you think at the protoplasmic level there is some intention?”
Campbell replies:
“There has to be!”
He adds that the physicists of his time are claiming that energy and consciousness are two aspects of the same thing, which is certainly in accordance with the Kantian distinction of the phenomenal and the noumenal. Campbell elaborates further upon this vision:
“Let us say that every organ of the body has its energy impulse, an impulse to action, and the experience of the different conflicts of these energies is what constitutes the psyche.”(Pages 187-188)
One could also add here that the harmony of these energies in the collective action of several organs, is also an important part of the human psuché. Kant, the transcendental philosopher, par excellence, was called by critics, the great destroyer of metaphysics, but his works in fact are a testament to the idea of transcendence we find especially in the Oriental Mythologies.
Campbell claims that “Mythological images are transparent to transcendence” (Page 197) and this is confirmed in his constant references to the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, where it is proclaimed:
“The Kingdom of the Father is spread upon the earth and men do not see it.”(Page 197)
This Gospel also states that the Kingdom is within you, making sense of that ancient Greek oracular challenge to “know thyself!”. The wave of secularisation in the West has ensured a focus on the science of sociology at the expense of Biological science and the hylomorphic Philosophy of Aristotle and Kant, and the unsurprising consequence of this has been diminished attention to the concerns of both mythology and Philosophy.
Campbell, like Piaget, believes in Lamarkian ideas rather than the “mechanical ” view of Darwin which appears to eschew the concept of the telos of life or its intention. Aristotle, we recall, argued that psychic life cannot be completely characterised without reference to its final cause, which compliments references to the material, efficient and formal causes. Campbell refers to the Myth relating to the tree of life in the Garden of Eden from which humanity has been exiled because of the sin of eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Jesus we know was crucified on the wood of this tree. Here we are provided with a dual message about life: firstly that phenomenal life is temporal(where the final cause is the end of life (psuché) and,secondly, the noumenal eternal, immortal life, something which we however can only understand from the present here and now-perspective.
In spite of several references to the Philosophy of Kant there is no reference to the moral and political ideas of Kant, including the moral telos for humanity referred to as the “Kingdom of Ends”. This telos or final cause answers the Kantian aporetic Philosophical question posed for the whole of humanity, namely “What can we hope for?”. The answer Kant offers, is that we ought, categorically, to treat each other as ends rather than as means to ends and this in turn requires of responding to the oracular proclamation to “know thyself!” and perhaps also to the Hindu message “Thou art that!”. Kants hopeful message is, however, also tinged with a melancholic lament over mans tendency not to know of himself that he is a being that is in need of a master but whose narcissism rejects the leadership of others.
Campbell is very critical of purely historical accounts of the lives or prophets and saviours on the following grounds:
“The Buddha lived from 563 to 483 BC. The first life of Buddha was written in 80 BC in Ceylon. We dont know anything about Buddha. We dont know anything about Christ. We dont know anything about Zoroaster. All we know are the legends of what the meaning of their lives is”(Hero’s Journey, Page 205)
If, as Cambell maintains, Art is the interpreter of Myth then the Great period of the Renaissance ought to be studied more closely from this point of view. Campbell provides us with a starting point:
“What happened in the Renaissance is facinating, Cosimo de Medici received a manuscript from Macedonia that was brought by a Greek Monk. It was a manuscript of the Corpus Hermeticum, which was a body of late classical text about the symbology of the classical world, which was exactly contemporary with the formative period of Christianity the first two centurues.The text was translated by Marsilio Firino and immediately it was realised that the symbology of the Christian Faith and the symbology of the late classical myths were saying the same thing. Thats what inspired Renaissance art. Botticelli is full of it, and Michelangelo, and the whole lot of them. This gave a new vitality to the Christian imagery itself. Because they understood its spiritual sense, not its historical reference. Do you see? The reference is not to something that happened which has released us from sin. It didnt release us from sin. What the crucifixion did was give a model so you could release yourself from it…This is the big inspiration of Renaissanc Art.”(Pages 212-213)
We know from Michelangelos letters that he possessed a melancholic disposition and sought though his art to find strength to live a difficult life. He restored lost archaic objects through his art and thereby sought to restore in his appreciators an Ancient idea of “balance of mind”. He, like Shakespeare,was religious: perhaps in the spirit outlined above by Campbell: A spirit in which some of the teachings of the Church could be challenged aesthetically in the name of “artistic licence”. This challenge manifested a freedom of thought valued by the Ancient Greeks.
Adrain Stokes, a Kleinian Art Critic, uses psychoanalysis to interpret the spirit of art-works, especially those from the Renaissance period which he categorised as “QuattroCento Art”. Stokes points to two important aspects of the work of Art: firstly its tendency to “envelop” the appreciator( draw them into its world), and secondly, the tendency of the work to express the independent nature or self sufficiency of the art-object in the Heideggerian spirit of “putting truth to work”. This kind of practical truth belongs of course in the domain of the Aristotelian Productive sciences, which include artefacts and aesthetic objects. Campbell’s expression “transparence to transcendence” is perhaps another way of making the same point.
Michelangelo’s sculpture, “Times of the Day” at the entrance to the Medici tombs feature a melancholic array of figures depicting , day, night, evening and dawn. They have lost their Princes and are in mourning. The mass-effect of the stone, and the suggestion of movement are expressing the weight and difficulty of life (psuché). In this work beauty and sublimity dwell side by side and the effect is that we participate in the difficult life of the Medicis, and in their death. We, participate at a disctance(the aesthetic distance); who knows what the life of a Prince must be like? We moderns have certainly forgotten. Who knows what the life of a God is like? This too we moderns have forgotten. The distance, of course , allows us to judge both Princes and Gods and that fact expresses well the Kantian declaration of the power of Humanism expressed in the Principles “Nothing too much!” an “The Golden Mean”.
Campbell raises the question of Naturalism in relation to the issue of the search for a planetary myth and suggests the possibility of modern film, only to reject this art-form on the following grounds:
“Naturalism is the death of Art. And thats one of the big problems in our American Arts. I think they dont understand the metaphor. Its all naturalism”.
The film “Star Wars” is of course a different genre for Campbell, because, as he says, Lucas the director, understands metaphors, in particlar metaphors related to human psuché via the interaction of man with machine. The machine, according to Campbell, is a metaphor for the totalitarian state and the faceless bureaucrat. This admiration for Star Wars occurs against the background of an admiration for Spenglers work “The Decline of the West”. A society is organic, like psuché, Campbell argues, it is born, matures and ages like all forms of life. The latter aging process is obviously a process of decline. Campbell elaborates upon this theme with the thoughts of Goethe relating to the “Ages of the Spirit”. The first phase is a poetical mythical period followed by a phase he called “naturalistic prose”. Goethe concludes his reflections with the thought that out of such a phase “God himself could not generate another world”. Campbell’s respinse to this point is:
“but I do think we are at the end of a civilisation. And I do think we’re at the beginning of a Global Age.” (Pages 247-248)
We have argued earlier that since Kant we have been living in the Age of the Free Will. Campbell argues that music is the sound that awakens the will:
“The rhythm of the music awakens certain life rhythms, ays of living and experiencing life.”(Page 261)
When music is joyous it lifts the heart, but when it is sad, we, like Buddha, need to participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world.
The Delphic Podcasts by Michael R D James: Review of Campbells “Hero” writings Season 8 episode5
Views: 121
The inscription on Kant’s gravestone reads: “Two things fill the mind with awe and wonder, the starry heavens above and the moral law within”. Mythology shares Kants cosmological concerns but perhaps not his moral concerns. The cosmos, for Ancient Mythology:
“is normally represented as repeating itself world without end.”
The four fundamental basic elements of water, earth, air and fire will, Myhtology contends, all take turns in the termination of a period of the cosmos/world. According to the Aztecs we are currently waiting for fire to consume the universe. There is nothing moral or tragic in such rounds of ruin and destruction unless of course we imagine the destruction of all forms of life every time a period comes to its end. In this cyclical view of the cosmos the first phase is constituted by the formlessness of chaos which is transfigured into various forms, including the forms of space and various material bodies such as the planets, moons and stars. Life emerges in the next stage of transfiguration which includes animals in both male and female form. One way of characterising this evolution of forms from the state of chaos is to claim that the One is transformed into the many. Various types of myth refer to the forces operating in this transformation of chaos into Being, and Aristotle we know delves deep into the metaphysics of this state of affairs by claiming that “Being has many meanings”. But, Campbell claims:
“Herein lies the basic paradox of myth: the One breaks into the many, destiny “happens” but at the same time is “brought about”. From the perspective of the source, the world is a majestic harmony of forms pouring into being, exploding and dissolving. But what the swiftly passing creatures experience is a terrible cacophony of battle cries and pain. The myths do not deny this agony (the crucifixion); they reveal within, behind and around it essntial peace (the heavenly rose) Pages 246-247)
A prevalent theme recurs, namely, The mother universe as a common reference point in both Oriental and Occidental Myth:
“She is the personification of the primal elements named in the second book of Genesis, where we read that “the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters”. In the Hindu myth she is the female figure through whom the Self begot all creatures. More abstractly understood, she is the world bounding frame:space, time, and causality. “( Page 255)
Mother Universe must obviously be conceptually ,a virgin and this is symbolised in Christian Religion by the Virgin Mary, mother of God, who is the symbol of this female spiritual creator. Campbell, in a section entitled “The Function of Myth, Cult, and Meditation” claims the following:
“In his life-form the individual is necessarily only a fraction and distortion of the total image of man. He is limited either as male or as female: at any given period of his life he is again limited as child, youth, mature adult, or ancient; furthermore in his life role he is necessarily specialised as craftsman, tradesman, servant, thief, priest, leader, wife, nun or habit: he cannot be all. Hence the totality–the fullness of man–is not in the separate member, but in the bodyof society as a whole: the individual can only be an organ. From his group he has derived his techniques of life, the language in which he thinks, the ideas on which he thrives; through the past of that society descended the genes that built his body.If he presumes to cut himself off, either in deed or in thought or feeling, he only breaks connection with the source of his existence.” (Page 330)
Perusing our modern world Campbell claims:
“There is no hiding place for the gods…; there is no such scoiety any more as the gods once supported. The social unit is not a carrier of religious content, but an economic-political organisation…..And within the progressive societies themselves, every last vestige of the ancient human heritage of ritual, morality and art is in full decay.”(Page 334)
Campbell elaborates upon these points by claiming that the focus of life has shifted from the society to the individual. This shift, he argues, is not in accordance with the oracular proclamation to “know thyself!” if we are to avoid ruin and destruction, but rather involves a rejection of religious belief and myth as subjective falsehoods. What was once transcendental truth, has now become, in the eyes of many moderns, palpable lie or illusion. Furthermore the realm of the sacred has been divested of its meaning in favour of a world view expressed in terms of a totality of facts. Aristotle, we know objected to such a world view by claiming that we do not want just to know what something is, but we also desire to know why it is as it is. Campbell expresses this poetically:
“where light was, there now is darkness” (Page 334)
This in turn helps to define the quest of the hero which is:
“To bring light again to the lost Atlantis of the co-ordinated soul” (Page 334)
The human aporetic problem throughout the ages has been essentially the same: to bring the psuché with its long period of childhood and dependency upon others to a state of maturity in which the individual is independently self-sufficient. This is not a simple task given the conditions of contemporary life, they:
“are what have rendered the ancient formulae ineffective, misleading, and even pernicious.The community today is the planet not the bounded nation, hence the patterns of projected aggression which formerly served to coordinate the in-group can now only break it into factions. The national idea with the flag as totem, is today an aggrandizer of the nursery ego, not the annihilator of an infantile situation. Its parody rituals of the parade-ground, serve the ends of Holdfast, the tyrant dragon, not the God in whom self-interest is annihilated. These words were written in 1949 or before and contain much oracular content.”
One of the Philosophical questions preoccupying the discipline of Philosophy since Kant formulated it, is “What can we hope for?” and it certainly appears that we moderns have no convincing answer to that question unless it is a wish to return to a previous status quo that we appear to some to have outgrown. Kant’s Elightened answer to this question lingers on in the Philosophical waiting room, namely, a Cosmopolitan Kingdom of Ends in which people treat each other maturely as ends-in-themselves in a globalised cosmopolitan world. This vision, it ought to be emphasised lies , according to Kant, one hundred thousand years in the future. It would therefore be premature some 250 years after the proclamation of this vision to definitely determine whether we are progressing toward the end of this hidden plan for psuché, or alternatively, regressing backward to a darker fate. Given the fact that Campbell has in his works appealed to the ideas of Kant it is not entirely clear that he subscribes to the Kantian proclamation of a hidden plan, but he does refer quite often to Freud who called himself a Kantian Psychologist.
Many modern and contemporary Philosophers paint a darker picture of our future, claiming in answer to Kants question that we dare not hope for too much. Hannah Arendt has contributed significantly to this discussion by charting some of the mechanisms that have divided us into warring factions and have also contributed to the emergence of tyranny and totalitarianism which in fact was a fear of the ancient Greeks who saw clearly and distinctly the consequences of striving for both unnecessary and unlawful desires. On her account, evil is banal and merely the result of a failure to think in the way we once were capable of thinking. Her method was both Historical and Philosophical. Freud, also contributed significantly to this discussio in his work “Civilisation and its Discontents”, published in 1929. In his later works we know he condemned Religion on the grounds of its unnecessary desires which assisted in maintaining humanity in a childish state of dependence upn an idea of the divine which may be a chldhood fantasy. Following these authors we have in earlier works designated our modern era as “The Age of Discontentment”, constituted as it is of an array of substitute satisfactions and distractions that have no holistic telos.
Campbell paints a dark picture of our modern times:
“The universal triumph of the secular state, has thrown all religious organisations into such a definitely secondary , and finally ineffectual position, that religious pantomime is hardly more today than a sanctimonious exercise for Sunday Morning, whereas business ethics and patriotism stand for the remainder of the week….And this is not a work that consciousness itself can achieve…The whole thing is being worked out on another level through which is bound to be a very long and frightening process, not only in the depths of every living pscyhe in the modern world but also on those titanic battlefields into which the whole planet has lately been converted.” Page 335)
Campbell also points out that in the course of the secularisation and globalisation processes, the symbol has lost its significance for us moderns. He notes that the causal cosmic laws have, during the course of the above processes, been transformed from an expression of a principle governing particular kinds of phenomena, to a mechanical connection of two events with one another. In the course of this reduction of the symbolic value of the world, e.g. the heavens, animals, plants etc, we are now confronted with the mystery of human psuché which needs to be reconceived in the new emerging framework of mechanical terms. Is the individual hero such a conception?
The individual as a child is essentially narcissistic and resistant to the actualisation processes tempered by the reality principle. This self-actualisation process is part of the maturational cycle which is attempting, in Campbell’s words to convert the “I” into a “thou” in accordance with the mythical proclamation, “Thou art that!” It is this transcendental proclamation that suggests we many are part of the “One.
We have maintained that there is a difficulty in interpreting the term psuche in philosophical discourse which perhaps resulted in not converting the “I” to a thou”, but rather dissolving the “I” into a network of causal processes in which the “I” disappears into a bundle of perceptions, memories, thoughts etc. The Greek mythological figure of Psyche, the goddess, and her relation to eros, who both Socrates and Plato argued, was not a God, is a narrative tale about human Psuché. In this tale, eros is always active and doing something while psyche is preoccupied with just being a woman. In our mother society Campbell argues that the institution of marriage has actually been transformed by the troubadour tradition of the 12th century. Love between two lovers whose eyes meet and whose herts race, becomes, in this tradition a psychological issue rather than , as it was during these times, a family issue, where the family would decide whom one marries. Thus began one of the major transformations of the concept of human psuché: a transformation which moved away from the Aristotelian essence specifying characterisation, namely, “man is a social animal” and moved toward a focus on the individual egocentric “I” who becomes more important than the family and village, even to the extent of ignoring the marital status of those opposite sex partners one finds attractive.
The French concept of Amor” characterises this condition very well. Rousseau, working in the Romantic tradition, invents an ideal pupil to raise and educate in this Romantic tradition. Emile, the pupil is not permitted to read the Bible but is encouraged to read works such as Robinson Crusoe–a man marooned on a desert island and forced to provide himself with the necessities of life for survival in a state of nature. Rousseau could be seen to be a figure resembling that of Diogenes, sensing as he does in the dark recesses of European society a discontentment which he both describes and explains brilliantly.
Rousseau was both a Counter- Enlightenment figure who also claimed :
“Man is born free but everwhere in chains.”
in the spirit of both romanticism and naturalism. Yet we ought also to recall that Rousseau dismissed many Aristotelian ideas and given the fact that Kant was elaborating upon hylomorphic ideas, he would have dismissed many of Kant’s rationalistic premises. Kant’s work “The Conjectural Beginnings of Human History” suggested in hylomorphic spirit that it is the business of Reason to Regulate the Passions especially when they tend to excess and violate the Aristotelian principle of the Golden Mean. For Kant, the concept of the “noble savage”was a naive populistic idea glorifying the pre-civilisational condition of a state of nature which restricted the repertoire of needs and wants that civilised beings desire.
For Rousseau,the inequalities produced in the course of mans social strivings for wealth and power, results in a disposition Rousseau names “amour-propre”, a form of social relation connected to the dispositions of pride, vanity, conceit, and egocentrism. This so called “civilised” form of amour, Rousseau contrasts with the natural form of self-love we encounter in Robinson Crusoe whose primary need is to make himself as comfortable as possible in a state of nature. This kind of solipsistic naturalism, where the individual is splendidly isolated, was to reverberate down the centuries all the way to the early work of Wittgenstein (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus) Wittgenstein, in his later work,(Philosophical Investigations) recognised in his early work a commitment to what he himself called logical solipsism which could not be defended if one was to focus on the social activities of man embedded in social forms of life playing many “language-games” as part of a demonstration of a master of language.”
The Delphic Podcasts by Michael R D James Review of Campbells Hero Writings, Season 8 Episode 2
Views: 206
Campbell, in his interview entitled “The Road of Trials” (Pages 52-53) suggests that the things that cannot be talked about are easily misunderstood because they transcend the dialectical orientation of everyday language in which opposites are generated by the negation function of such language which is oriented to everyday circumstances. In such everyday circumstances it is the selfish “I” that is speaking about worldly experiences.
Campbell acknowledges that Psychology has an important role to play in the understanding of man, the rational anaimal capable of discourse, and, of course, his myths. In the context of this discussion Campbell articulate what he sees to be the fundamental difference between Jungain and Freudian Psychology. He obviously has a preference for Jungian archetypal patterns and its home in the collective unconscious which he claims is in contrast to the Freudian notion of a personal unconscious. Freud, in fact, speaks of both forms of the unconscious especially in the later phases of his work where he refers to the battle of the Giants, namely Eros and Thanatos fighting for the fate of our civlisation. Campbell claims that Jung aspouses a more biological universal form of the unconscious that is a function of the effect of our organs on our psychic activity, and this is a hylomorphic view of how the psychic representatives of the unconscious are formed, which Freud undoubtedly in some sense embraced. Freud, of course, also spoke of the personal impact of the traumas of childhood upon the psychological well being of the individual.
Eros and Thanatos are also represented in the artistic genres of Tragedy and Comedy which is a title of a chapter in Campbell’s “The Hero with a thousand faces”. Campbell refers to “amor fati” (the love of fate) which certainly recalls the Delphic proclamation: “Everything created by humans is destined for ruin and destruction”. This proclamation haunted Ancient Greek consciousness, especially in relation to its preoccupation with the powers of the mind and the task of harmonising the powers and their relation with the external world, which, we ought to recall was a central concern of Freudian Psychoanalysis. For Freud, the driving force of unconscious instincts could be both positive (eros) and negative (thanatos), and this together with the aganecy of the ego which was constituted by a precipitate of lost objects helped to create the impression Kant had of everyday life which he described in terms of being “Melancholically haphazard”.
Modernism which according to Arendt, stretches back to Descartes and Hobbes, stretches forward to what Arendt called “This terrible century” (20th century). During this centiry we saw the pendulum of values swing between good and evil, right and wrong, lawfulness and unlawfulness, and we saw moreover, how there was an inversion of these opposites where tyants for example took the right for the wrong and evil for what was good. Many historical events were produced by Arendt in evidence for her judgements on the origins of totalitarianism, but other Philosophers, e.g. Paul Ricoeur, also pointed to the disappearance of the discipline of rhetoric during this period. The event of the divorce between Psychology as a science and Philosophy in in 1870, also testified to the collapse of many traditional political and cultural structures and practices. Stanley Cavell, for example, points to the marginalisation of many aesthetic values during the beginning of the century when so-called modern art began challenging many historical beliefs and practices. Cavell speciifically also drew attention to the refusal to consider the history of the belief or practice of the activity one was engaging in or questioning. Heidegger too, entered the arena of the deabte over the presence of confusion over the translation of key Ancient Greek terms into Latin, claiming that the Latin translations of, for example, aletheia and phusis gave rise to a number of confusions. Wittgenstein, in the period under consideration, pointed to the prevalence of conceptual confusion in the discipline of Psycholgy. P M S Hacker a Wittgensteinian scholar, also pointed out a number of conceptual confusions in the field of neuroscience. Many of these problems can be traced back to a confusion over what can and what cannot be said about the Ancient Greek concept of psuché, the human form of life.
Modern Art of the early 20th century was enveloped by a vortex of controversy, with musical compositions containing no sound, in the name of music, weightless sculptures, in the name of sculpture , blank canvasses, in the name of painting. Wittgenstein claimed that in the classical music of Brahms he could hear the sound of engines. Our contention is that many of the above confusions arise not from local factual misunderstandings but from a fundamental misunderstanding of the principles and categories of thought that are appropriate to use in relation to the concept of psuché, rather than as Heidegger claimed a “forgetfulness of Being”, which, of course, is a more abstract and general characterisation of the problems under consideration. If one accepts this line of reasoning, then one see all the above problems, including the origins of totalitarianism, under the aspect of a systematic misunderstanding of a category of Being. Heidegger however, in his investigations of the human form of Being-in-the-world, highlights the confusions relating to death in everyday dscourse which he argues fails to confront the phenomenon of death meaningfully.
T S Eliot, one of Campbells favourite writers, postulates that our modern world has become a wasteland, which is represented in the mythical figure of the wounded, impotent, Grail King. All of the above indicates the nature of the value of the objects the Ego has been forced to abandon and mourn in a mood edging toward melancholia. What transpires, as a consequence, is a consciousness preoccupied with the events of the external world which evoke the power of the imagination more than the powers of understanding and reason: a state of mind that marginalises the realm of the sacred (Ricoeur) and the Metaphysics of Nature and Morals. What is also implied by the marginalisations of historically important domains of thought, is the following: when the attention of consciousness is constantly trained upon stimulating objects, the emotional and passionate states generated require a return to a state of homeostasis, which is this state edging toward melancholia. This is a passive state which Arendt captures in her characterisation of the masses “for whom nothing is possible anymore”.
God may either be dead, or merely deus absconditis, for the modern wastelanders, who see “fear in a handful of dust”. T S Eliot we know, in his later life, sought redemption in the Christian Faith. His poem “Four Quartets” is about Time and a Spiritual Journey that circles back upon itself, tofind itself back at the beginning of the journey, but wiser for the experience, possessing more knowledge of the world and oneself. Where we are currently on this journey was earlier characterised in terms of a “wasteland”, but this situation in the “Four Quartets” is nevertheless conceived of in more positive terms of a life which can understand how formless our lives in general has become.
The tragic pair of Pity and Fear are, of course, present in different ways in Eliot’s poetry but he does not embrace the conceptual framework of Ancient Greek thought, preferring the framework of Catholicism and its fixation upon the Grail King, sacraments, and visions of heaven and hell which Campbell believes is merely a local ethnographic perspectival vision of the realm of the sacred and the divine that he believes takes us no closer to the goal of providing humanity with a universally valid planetary myth or religion. Knowledge and Rationality does not play the central role it plays in Ancient Greek Philosophy which rests upon the ideas of areté, arché, diké logos, aletheia, psuché, phusis, phronesis and eudaimonia.
The Ancient Greek conception of techné presupposed epistemé, areté, logos, psuché and aletheia, but this conceptual framework has been abandoned by the modern world largely because our modern science has limited itself to the goal of the quantification of nature via the use of the method of observation in a context of exploration: a use which rejects many rational principles, e.g. the principle of sufficient reason. The spirit of Newtonain and Kantian science was one which embraced a set of first, rational principles that the scientist approached nature with, in the spirit of a judge who puts conceptual questions to nature and expects answers in accordance with those first principles. This modern spirit of science is so difficult to characterise because of its limited focus, and its increasing complexity. What can be said, is that it is certainly embedded in a technological network of Heideggerian instrumentalities that always seem to refer beyond themselves in the sense of being “for-the-sake-of”. For the Acient Greeks, techné was situated in the domain of the productive sciences which included sculpture, builders, carpentry and weaponry, but did not include medicine, mathematics and rhetoric, all of which had intimate relations to the rational basic ides of aletheia, eåistemé and logos.
Psychoanalysis would, then, on the above account, be a skill, a technique, and an intellectual discipline. Epistemé for the Ancient Greeks was certainly a higher intellectual power and a superior form of knowledge obeying intellectual rational principles. Knowledge does not belong in the same category of instrumentalities which are not ends-in-themselves but rather means to ends or, as Heidegger expressed the matter, that “for- the. sake-of”. Instrumentalities, in other words, are cause-effect relations and do not have a telos connected to the more categorical forms of arché that we find situated in the context of explanation/justification.
The Arts of Tragedy and Comedy, as practiced by Shakespeare, occurred over a century later than the “times of the troubadour”, and several centuries later than the age of chivalry, which initated for Campbell, the romantic form of individualism he believes is central to our Western identities. Shakespeare skillfully combined these themes with the themes of Ancient Greek tragedy and Philosophy, that were being reawakened during the Renaissance. God, during the time of Shakespeare, was still an important presence, but the star of Religion was waning in importance in the light of the Protestant Revolution. Many Renaissance artists, such as Michelangelo, remained intensely religious, but were becoming more courageous in their challenges to the authority of the Church insofar as the limitations imposed by the church upon what they may or may not represent was concerned.
Science, too, with the invention of the telescope, was making space for itself in our everyday life, which now knew we were actively exploring the heavens and the movement of the stars and planets. The space of infinity and the time of eternity, were now transforming the activity of observing the heavens with a discipline which would become the discipline of astronomy. We were challenging the magnitude of the physical universe and thereby becoming so much more than a handful of dust reminding us of the lost object of a life that was no more because its powers had been extinguished. The transcendental attitude was being restored, but at the same time narrative accounts relating to the the place of the heavens, where wandering souls were domiciled, became less plausible. The image of ghosts and one soul leaving a body and entering another, was, of course, an image of the imagination which was not connected to reality in the way in which the memory or consciousness was.
Heraclitus claimed that the logos of change was to understand that two phenomena such as the road leading up the hill and the road leading down the hill were to be thought of as in soem sense the same. Aristotle saw the principles of change to be manifested in kinds of change, principles, media and causes: e complex network of considerations which was in accordance with logos, epistemé, and aletheia, which three different domains of science could investigate. These domains of science of course concerned themselves with psuché in different ways given that they related to knowledge and skills of different kinds, and given that explanations and justifications. Such explanations and justifications occurred in relation to the many principles regulating all the changes in the natural world as well as the changes in the the world of psuché.
Campbell points out that the narratives of myth are about the changes the hero undergoes in the course of his/her heroic quest, and many of the events are dreamlike, because, presumably, the changes we are witnessing are being processed by the imagination and the emotions that are being evoked by outer changes. Dreams require interpretation because they too are products of inner psychic change in the medium of images which resemble in many respects the images of film that Stanley Cavell discussed in his work “The World Viewed:Reflections on the Ontology of Film”. The imges of film, in contrast to our dream images, are automated, and the objects photographed “participate” in “the photographic presence of themselves on film”: making them, in fact, more like memories than the images of dreams (which are inserted in a wish-fulfillment complex). The dreamlike quality of film is difficult to analyse, but they too, in some sense, relate to the imagination and passions of the creator of the plot of the film. This, added to the fact that there is a form of “technical intelligence”, involved in the automation process which relates to instrumental forms of reasoning connected to the instrumental notion of “for-the-sake-of”. The camera, moving over a landscape, from object to object is an imitation of sensory experience: an automated form of sensory experience which is very different to that form that occurs in relation to a human body (the human body, that is, possesses a sensori-motor unity based on a constellation of organs and limbs typical of the human form of life(psuché)). Cavell is suggesting here that the moving automated images and mechanically induced movement of the film camera, provide us with a sense of a Being-in-the-world which is not human. The lack of real depth in the movement of the photographic images also suggest the lack of the presence of many categories associated with the understanding of human movement, because as Brian O Shaughnessy suggests:
“concepts play a causal role in the genesis of visual depth experience.” (The Will: A Dual Aspect Theory”. Page 171)
Films imitate the depth of three dimensional space in two dimensional images, and everything viewed “participates” in the real forms of the world and this might partly explain the dreamlike quality of the film experience. There is no suggestion that Campbell believes that our modern art-form of film-making could be the basis for the Planetary mythology he is seeking.
We have questioned the metaphysical status Campbell attaches to the hero, equating as he does the hero with a God in his work “The Hero with a thousand faces”. Overcoming overwhleming forces and manifesting supernatural powers against terrifying monsters are certainly not as realistic as the Socratic responses to the overwhelming forces he was confronted with. Socrates of course was not a mythological figure and would have objected to be called a God in the way Buddha was. The Buddha narrative speaks of an unnantural birth and a figure who sits under a Bodi tree “fighting a dark army” led by Kama-Mara. There was not, for Socrates, as there was for Buddha, a King of the Serpents protecting him from various supernatural dangers.
Campbell also refers to Prometheus and his world-transcending deed of stealing fire from the Gods to give to humanity. There is here an allusion to the pre-history of humanity, and the importance of the role of fire in the early phases of the primitive hunting/gathering groups living in caves. The narrative surrounding Prometheus, however, was not a clinical historical account but rather a narrative driven by the passionate desires: a narrative that desired to metaphorically communicate the sacred meaning of certain events in man’s history. Campbell claims that Jungian archetypes were involved in the construction of the Pometheus narrative, in particular the archetype of the Hero:
“Whether the hero be ridiculous or sublime, Greek or barbarian, Gentile or Jew, his journey varies little in essential plan. Popular tales represent the heroic action as physical: the higher religions show the deed to be moral: neverthless there will be found astonishingly little variation in the morphology of the adventure, the character roles involved, the victories gained. If one or another of the basic elements of the archetypal pattern is omitted from a given fairy tale, legend, ritual, or myth, it is bound to be somehow or other implied–and the omission itself can speak volumes for the history and pathology of the example.” Page 30 “The Hero with the thousand faces “
Philosophical mythology would of course not be so concerned with physical world-historical deeds such as those attributed to Achilles , but more concerned with the moral deeds of world-philosophical characters such as Socrates, e.g. his activities in the agora and his relation to death as a consequence of his death sentence by the Athenian courts.
The Delphic podcasts Review of Campbells “Hero” writings, Season 8, Episode 1
Views: 334
Philip Cousineau in his Introduction to Campbell’s “The Hero’s Journey” claims that Campbell’s search was for the Logos of the phenomena he investigated. The concern, that is, was what these phenomena had in common rather than what differentiated them from each other. The method used was described as comparative historical elucidation and it can be contrasted with the method of Wittgenstein, which sought essentially to differentiate between different phenomena. Cousineau reminds us of the proclamation we encounter in the Vedas, namely:
“Truth is one, the sages speak of it by many names”
In this regard reference is often made to the collective archetypes of Jung, which are used to justify the denotation of many sacred narratives Campbell calls these sacred narratives or myths the “Masks of god” which partly constitute the “morphogenetic field” which we presume is identified with “The Truth” mentioned in relation to the Vedas above. The role of the hero is, we have agued in previous reviews of Campbell’s work, an ambiguous reference, which appears to exclude the quiet contemplative rational transformation Philosophers like Socrates, Plato and Aristotle appear to have undergone in their essentially intellectual journeys. These are the “modern” “pathfinders” in the modern morphogenetic field. We do find Socrates engaged in inner communication with his daemon in life-crisis situations, but Psychoanalysis would have no difficulty in explaining this communication as one between the ego and the superego, in a situation where a choice of life-defining alternative actions are being considered. The life defining experiences of saints, prophets and shamans are of course a much more dramatic affair.
Cousineau claimed that Campbell’s method involved the use of the hermeneutical method. Paul Ricoeur, the Philosopher, articulates well the concern of hermeneutics for “symbols”, claiming that symbols possess the semantic property of “double meaning”. Expressions with a so-called manifest meaning provoke thought to move to another deeper meaning in what Ricoeur calls the “realm of the sacred”, which we mortals seem able to comprehend only through a glass darkly. Kant speaks in his Third Critique of Judgment of a statue of Isis and an inscription that says “no mortal has ever lifted my veil”.
Aristotle refers to this realm in terms of the realm of Being and he further claims that “Being has many meanings” . This concerns not merely our relation to God, but also our relation to life (psuché), death and the mysteries of the external world. Campbell uses the word “metaphor” in its Ancient Greek meaning of “carrying beyond”: a meaning that transcends the more modern interpretation in terms of a shift from one semantic region to another. Reference is also made to the archetypes of the soul in the spirit of aletheia (unconcealment or revelation). We encounter this spirit in the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas which articulates a framework for the “many meanings of Being”, by claiming that the Kingdom of God is both within us and out there in the world, here and now. Eastern Religion also articulates this transcendental feature of our experience in terms of “Thou art that!”.
Ambiguous references to the archetype of the hero and his journey do not, as we have claimed earlier, acknowledge the possibility that this appears to run contrary to his stated view that we ought to be wary of unnecessarily universalising particular perspectival narratives which express local ethnographic concerns. It is true that prior to the introduction of Philosophical Reasoning and its Categorical concern with Being and Principles (such as noncontradiction and sufficient Reason), the heros narrative was steered by an imaginative idea of the heros journey. But even if our physiology has stayed the same for 40,000 years as Campbell claimed, the organisation of the brain due to the introduction of writing and reading may well be responsible, as Julian Jaynes suggests, for the kind of self-consciousness that has evolved as a human vicissitude of the instincts. We can see clearly in Plato’s writings, the change of emphasis from the virtue of courage to the virtue of wisdom, and the increasing importance of various forms of knowledge insofar as leading the good spirited flourishing life (eudaimonia) was concerned. Achilles excelled in battle, but his courageous life, otherwise did not meet Socratic or Aristotelian criteria. It was Socrates and the mythical Philosophers, returning to the cave from which they originated, that became the new “ideal”, representing wisdom. Whether we can regard these figures as “heros” is not clear. With the advent of philosophers there is an important shift from the individual perspective to the perspective of the polis which, for Socrates, was the soul (psuché) writ large. Socrates was searching for the definition of justice but it was Aristotle who presented us with an essence specifying definition of Man, namely rational animal capable of discourse which transcended the old ideal of the courageous warrior, and perhaps the so called archetype of the hero dissipated with Aristotelian Rationalism and the telos of the contemplative life.
Socrates’ life was, however, in the old sense “heroic” because it ended the way it did for the reasons that it did, but it was not the battlefield but the agora which was the scene of his activities. Challenging those who thought they knew and who were trying to make the worse argument seem the better, of course, took both courage and wisdom. Socrates, like Jesus, knew the risks he was taking in attempting to persuade people to “know thyself!”. What happened to Socrates proved that the Athenian system was not quite equipped to handle appeals to “the child of the Gods”, namely Philosophy. Aristotle too, became persona non grata and was forced to flee from Athens. There is an argument for the position that the polis as a constitutional entity was not equipped to meet the demands for the “new ideals” the Philosophers were arguing for, namely justice, knowledge, and freedom. An interesting footnote to this discussion is the attempt of Alexander the Great, Aristotle’s pupil, to establish a Greek Empire, thereby helping to destabilise the existing system of polis/states. In the spirit of the Aristotelian principle of the Golden Mean, it is worth pointing out that during Kant’s time, neither cities nor empires, but nations became the entities with constitutions.
Campbell in the Preface to his 1949 edition of “The Hero with a thousand faces” refers to a Freudian critique of religion and mythology:
“The Truths contained in religious doctrines are after all so distorted and systematically disguised that the mass of humanity cannot recognise them as truth. The case is similar to what happens when we tell a child that new-born babies are brought by the stork. Here too, we are telling the truth in symbolic clothing, for we know what the large bird signifies. But the child does not know it. He hears only the distorted part of what we say, and feels he has been deceived: and we know how often his distrust of the grown-ups, and his refractoriness actually take their start from this impression. We nave become convinced that it is better to avoid such symbolic disguisings of the truth in what we tell the children and not to withhold from them a knowledge of the true state of affairs commensurate with their intellectual level.” (Pages 44-45)
Freud’s point was, according to Campbell, that the ancient muses knew what they were talking about and which metaphors to use to carry their message further. We moderns, however, need to learn again the “grammar of the symbols”. Campbell adds:
“as a key to this mystery I know of no better modern tool than psychoanalysis.”(The Hero with a thousand faces” (Page xii)
Psychoanalysis, however, has a complex history with roots both in Aristotelian Hylomorphism and Kantian Critical Philosophy, but it is perhaps the latter that is especially relevant to this discussion, given the Freudian declaration that he was a “Kantian Psychologist”. Alongside these relevant facts, however, there is also the deliberate Freudian choice of terminology drawn from Platonic Philosophy, e.g. Eros, Thanatos, Ananke, logos, which clearly transcend the technical language Freud uses to characterise the treatment of his patients. The Freudian theory of the “psychic-apparatus” and its possession of psychological powers in relation to the external world, also manifests elements of Greek thinking that presupposed the Greek view of psuché embedded in a categorical framework of areté, dike, arché, epistemé, aletheia and eudaimonia. In this Philosophical/technical framework there is no clear role for narratives of heros and their quests. The heros quest for self- transformation often contains the occurrence of supernatural events in which tremendous forces are overcome by a superhuman will and determination, communicating perhaps the narcissistic message that “anything is “possible” for such men. The Aristotelian process of self- actualisation is not embedded in a narrative or a story, but is rather part of a philosophical account of the cultural development of a number of powers of human psuché, including the powers of discourse and rationality which are integrated with a number of other psychological/mental powers or functions that in turn have important relations to the external world.
It was Plato that initiated this transition from the form of the narrative to a more enlightened philosophical form of “Philosophical dialogues” featuring the “ very real character” of Socrates, whose mode of being was one of self-efacement rather than self-proclamation. His power of persuasion was considerable, because it was founded upon areté, arché, episteme dike, aletheia, logos, and eudaimonia. One can, if one so desires, read the episodes of the dialogues in terms of the adventures of Socrates, but that would be to miss the pedagogical point of the dialogues, which was to herald in the new era of the new ideals of principles and rationality, emphasising simultaneously the rejection of heros and the rejection of the strategy of making the worse argument seem the better.
The heroic narrative is at best an exercise of the imagination and emotion in the name of the good spirited flourishing life of the individual which, in an aesthetic context, carries the subjective message of exemplary universality and necessity articulated in Kant’s Third Critique. It is true that the trilogy of dialogues, Euthyphro, Apology and Phaedo, seemingly promote a narrative of the Socratic journey to his final destination in a death-cell. The message of these dialogues, however, is more complex. A man who has dedicated his life to justice is convicted for attempting to make citizens aware of the essence of Justice. Socrates at no point proclaimed himself to be a hero or a saviour, and he did not proclaim directly that Philosophy could save us from the Delphic prophecy of ruin and destruction. He nevertheless, over time, became a symbol for the necessity and transcendence of Philosophy.
Athens was the home of three of the greatest Philosophers in history, in relatively rapid succession, and their bond of connection was a sacred one: that of teacher-pupil. Plato incorporated the spirit of Socrates into his dialogues, and Aristotle incorporated the spirits of both Socrates and Plato into his writings. Campbells account of the heros journey has a very different structure, which it can be argued, was promoted into a cult of the hero by Thomas Carlysle, which in turn was transformed into the Hegelian idea of world historical individuals such as Napoleon . This underwent a further transformation into Nietzsches “Will to power”. Associated ideas of “Domination” and Colonisation” were political ideals that have been embraced by a number of modern tyrants since Napoleon. The Greek political heritage, however, probably lies closer to Schopenhauers “will to live” and Kant’s “good will”. Its epistemological heritage encourages a belief in “scientific” explanation/justification. Its artistic heritage includes a belief in the importance of Art and its associated ideals of the beautiful and sublime.
Campbell was undoubtedly a significant explorer of the breadth and depth of psuché via the linking of distant mythologies such as that of the Navaho and Hinduism. His arguments are sometimes hylomorphic and sometimes Kantian but they lack an important philosophical dimension which we have attempted to articulate. It is true as Campbell maintains that mans physiology has not altered for 40000 years but mans most important organ is his brain and the organisation of the functions of that organ may have changed during this period. Language, Julian Jaynes has argued was originally a bilateral function like all the other physiological functions of the brain. The science of physiology teaches us that an organ can lose one function and acquire another. In the case of the origins and history of the function of language, Jaynes has interesting theories to contribute:
“Language, Jaynes argues, began as an expressive phenomenon partly connected to events of importance in the external world /e.g. hunting, and gathering). By a charted series of functions, this developmental sequence eventually reaches the level or representative thought in which we find the names for animals developing into a more complex stage in which names are given to individual people. At this stage it would be fair to say that we are definitely thinking something. As group life evolved we then find language evolving into more complex forms via the use of sentences with subject-predicate structures which illustrate the fully mental power of thinking something about something which Heidegger called the veritative (truth-making) synthesis. This, however is not the final level of the Mental which is achieved only when the principles of Logic and Truth tables begin to constitute and regulate the field of sound argumentation—the field of rationality. These higher mental operations are undoubtedly inhabitants of the realm of the mental being essentially connected to the telos of self-conscious thought.” (James, M.R.,D., The World Explored, the World suffered: A Philosophical istory of Psychology, Cognition, Emotion, Consciousness, and Action: Volume four, Page 194)
This is a hylomorphic account of the development and integration of human psychological powers that are implied by the essence specifying definition of human psuché, namely rational animal capable of discourse. Whilst different languages spoken by different races of man with different histories compel us to attend to these differences, biological reflection focuses upon what we, who are different in certain respects, have in common. In simple primitive environments consciousness may not have possessed the same level of complexity, but mythical narratives certainly appealed to the powers of the imagination and sensibility, quickening in those who had the requisite capacities, an experience of transcendence. Primitive man certainly used myths to orient himself in his environment as well as to begin the attempt to know himself. Campbell claims in this context:
“The symbols of mythology are not manufactured: they cannot be ordered, invented or permanently suppressed. They are spontaneous productions of the psyche, and each bears within it, undamaged, the germ power of its source.” (The Hero with a thousand faces, Page 2)
Many scientific disciplines contribute to our understanding of primitive man and his primitive form of life and Campbell invokes psychoanalysis amongst these. He refers to the long childhood of man, and the subsequent long period of dependence upon our care-givers. As the repertoire of human psychological and mental powers develop much can go awry to disturb this development, and identification of the causes of psychological or mental health problems are not always straightforward matters. One image which the Ancient Greeks use to provide us with an understanding of the human self actualisation process is that of the labyrinth, and psychoanalysis certainly provides us with one of the threads leading out of the cave and into the sunlight. Myth and Religion too provides us with such a thread as does Philosophy.
In an interview entitled “The Road of Trials” Campbell refers to James Joyce and the Arts as responsible for awakening in them the realisation of the universal meaning of the symbols we find in our Myths. In this context he also refers to Hinduism which already in the 9th century BC acknowledged that:
“all the deities are projections of psychological power, and they are within you and not out there. They’re out there also, in a certain way, in a mysterious way but the real place for them is in here (points to the heart).” (Pages 36-37)
James Joyce helped Campbell understand the Eastern texts and laid the foundation for the next phase of his journey, in which he discovered Freud, Jung, and Thomas Mann whilst studying Sanskrit. Yet it was another German Psychologist whom he met in 1981 who would play a large part in helping him to synthesise ideas from Myth, Art, Psychology and Literature, and relate these ideas to the fundamental problem of life, which is:
“to become transparent to transcendence: so that you realise that you are yourself a manifestation of this” (Campbells The Hero’s Journey, Page 51).
Campbell spent one hour with Karlfried Graf Durckheim from Freiburg and emerged from this meeting with a definition of myth as:
“a metaphor transparent to transcendence” (Page 51)
The Ancient Greek spirit of aletheia hovers over all these reflections because it is clear that we are in a world of symbolic language which carries us beyond the normal concerns of speech into the “realm of the sacred”, which is the realm of psuché (life) in which we feel at one with the Universe and especially with all forms of life. Schopenhauer, following Kant, highlighted this aspect of metaphysics when he pointed to the phenomenon of humans sacrificing their lives to save the lives of others, thereby transcending Spinoza’s principle of self preservation in which it is claimed all things strive to preserve themselves in existence.
The Delphic Podcasts by Michael R D James Philosophy and AI Season 7 Episode 4
Views: 243
Ebook:
Audiobook:
https://play.google.com/store/audiobooks/details?id=AQAAAEBy7FSsNM
Podcast
The Delphic Podcasts by Michael R D James Philosophy and AI, Season 7 Episode 3
The Delphi Podcasts by Michael R D James Philosophy and AI: Artificial Intelligence and its Discontents, Season 7, Episode 2
The Delphic Podcasts by Michael R D James Philosophy and AI: Artificial Intelligence and its Discontents, Season 7 Episode 1
The Delphic Podcasts Freud and Philosophy, Season 6 Episode 4
Views: 328
Audiobook: https://play.google.com/store/audiobooks/details?id=AQAAAEDyrGrsiM
EBOOK:
PODCAST Season 6 Episode 4 Conclusion
The Delphic Podcasts Philosophy and Freud Sample Introduction
Views: 429
Ebook: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D23PK936?tag=publishdriv01-20&linkCode=osi&th=1&psc=1
Audiobook: https://play.google.com/store/audiobooks/details?id=AQAAAEDyrGrsiM
The Delphic podcast
The Delphic Podcasts: Philosophy and Freud: The Metaphysics and Logos of Psuché and Psychoanalysis: An Aristotelian and Kantan Critique: Extracts from Chapter One
Views: 332
Audiobook:
Ebook
Podcast:
The imagination, according to Aristotle, is Janus-faced: it can either be subject to the will and be categorised as an active categorical power, or it can be characterised as a passive process in which the schema imposed upon what is seen, remembered, and “thought” has its source in sensations or feelings, whose essential characteristic is that they “happen to one”. Imagination in this latter case is non-conceptual. In an article entitled “Aristotle on the Imagination” by Malcolm Schofield(“Articles on Aristotle”, ed. by Barnes J., Schofield, M., Scrabji, R., (London Duckworth, 2003), it is argued that the Greek equivalent to our word “imagination” is “phantasia”:
“But Aristotle’s own unitary explanation of dreams and such pathological phenomena, on the one hand, and the similarity between pathological and normal seeing of aspects, on the other, put us in a position in which we can now exhibit the unity in Aristotle’s conception of phantasia, while retaining our characterisation of it as imagination.” (P. 125)
We should in the context of this discussion recall that for Aristotle:
“Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim.” (The Collected Works of Aristotle)
On this account dreams must aim at the good in spite of their tenuous connection to reality: they do not, that is, aim at the true. The dreamer believes that they are experiencing or seeing a man in a red shirt, and do not know that they are merely imagining that they are seeing a man in a red shirt. The absence of actual experience or actual perception in this situation means that memory must be playing a role in the production of these images, and the question then becomes: what is it that is activating the memory to produce such images. For Freud, dreams are wish-fulfilments in a double sense: they are disguised desires for something which requires the art of interpretation to make manifest, and they express the wish to continue sleeping. Two different types of “good” are being aimed at. In both cases the wish is located in the unconscious or preconscious systems of the psychic apparatus. For Freud, we should recall, dreams were the royal road to the unconscious system of our mind: memories were presented in disguised form on the dream screen in accordance with both the pleasure-pain principle and the energy regulation principle. Dreams such as the father’s dream of a child that has recently died, manifest the wish on the part of the father that the child was still alive. The memory that he is dead is overridden by other memories of the child alive, which are more in accord with the fathers desire that the child not be dead. The dream-memory of the child shouting out “father, father, cant you see that I am burning!” is a synthesis of the present near-waking experience of the body being burned by candles that have fallen over near the body, plus the memory of the event of the dying as a result of a burning fever. The dream is a phantasy: it never happened and what is wished for could never happen, now that the child is dead. Yet it is a real expression of a real wish projected onto the dream screen of a sleeping subject. It is most definitely a substantial clue in relation to the royal road of the subject’s state of mind. It is also part of the mourning process: a process that will for some time prevent the subject from fully engaging with his life-projects in accordance with the reality principle: the pleasure-pain principle(which uses feelings as regulators) rules on this royal road. The task for the father is to become fully conscious of his wish, and its role in the mourning process. Feelings are manifestations of what is happening to the body, and share with sensations, a non-active status. Bring them into a context of judgement as Kant did in his Critique of Aesthetic Judgement, and they can be subject to the activities of the imagination, the understanding and judgement. For Kant, the aesthetic judgement is concerned with the active communication of a feeling of the harmony of different powers of the mind, e.g. the imagination and the understanding. In such judgements there may even be a partial aim at the truth when, for example, one claims that the evening sunset is beautiful. Kant maintains that this is a cognitive claim on the grounds that we attempt, as Kant puts the matter, to speak with a “universal voice”. In this form of judgement, the understanding and its categories are involved in the organisation of the representations involved in this judgement. We know from his work on the Rhetoric and De Anima, that Aristotle believed Emotions can be connected to both our powers of understanding and judgement, and have therefore a claim to be cognitive (emotions have both objects and grounds for their occurrence). Anger, to take a typical Aristotelian example, connects judgement and thought via an awareness of an apparent injustice that has been done to the angry subject. Here Aristotle appeals to his hylomorphic account, and speaks of the matter of anger being the physiological response of the agitation of the blood around the heart: he also speaks of the form of the subjects anger being related to the subjects desire for retaliation or revenge. It is clear here that the subject’s judgement, in such circumstances, is only partially overcome and there is a complex relation to the pain involved in the situation. Fear, too, has a similar structure in which the matter are a number of complex physiological responses and the form is connected to the perception or thought of an evil that is related to imminent danger and the possible pain associated with this danger. Both anger and fear can be, as Aristotle claimed, praised or blamed for their positive or negative relation to the good. The angry man must believe that he has been insulted for the anger to be authentic, and the fearful man must believe in dangerous circumstances, if the fear is to be genuine. Fear and anger can be communicated in rhetorical speeches, which may also contain elements of deliberation or reasoning about the insult or danger, either diminishing its magnitude or fortifying a good spirited response to the events in question.
Modern positivist theories, we know, proposed an account of a special kind of meaning–emotional meaning–in response to the more ethical accounts of anger and fear. Such accounts focussed on the moment of persuasion involved in such circumstances, analysing the idea of the good into a feeling component and a subjective imperative component. Such an account was meant to be critical of Aristotelian accounts of ethics and emotions as well as Kantian accounts which attached great importance to the role of ethical law and principles in ethical judgements. For Aristotle, both Ethics and rhetoric involve practical reasoning in the process of praising and blaming the judgements and actions of the agents responsible for them. The grounds for such praise and blame lie in the realm of ought judgements and action—what we ought and ought not to have done. The practical reasoning used in such circumstances will, for example involve appeal to principles of judgement which claim that fear and anger can be appropriate if the circumstances and objects are appropriate. Aristotle’s account also refers to appetition, hunger, thirst and sexual desire which for both Plato and Aristotle were clearly linked to what both Freud and William James designated as the realm of instinct. Freud presupposes much of what Aristotle wrote in his account of the sexual instincts where sources, objects, and aims are all connected to the cathartic effect of a form of discourse that possessed the power to mitigate the undue influence of sexual desire in our lives. So, with respect to Freud’s account of the life instinct, we encounter a hylomorphic strategy which appeals to both form and matter. With respect to hunger and thirst for example a biological account of the physiological functions of the body suffice to explain such phenomena. Sexual instincts, on the other hand, require a more formal account to complement the bodily sources of the associated phenomena. Practical reasoning of the kind we encounter in relation to anger and fear plays an important role in the discourse we use to praise and blame agents for the appropriateness of their sexual activity(areté).
Aristotle’s work on poetic and epic tragedy speaks about the use of the emotions in dramatic works of art, in particular, the emotions of pity and fear. The cathartic process Aristotle describes is a process involving good objects that may be lost, good grounds, and associated goods such as areté and diké. All in accordance with the essence-specifying definition of tragedy:
“the imitation of an action that is serious and complete…..accomplishing through pity and fear the catharsis of such affections.”(The Complete Works of Aristotle. The revised Oxford Edition edited by Barnes J.,(Princetown, Princetown University Press, Vol 2, 1984(Poetics)
The actions concerned are concerned with what ought or ought not to be done or said, the moral quality of the actors, and the catharsis referred to is more of an educational and less of a medical-physical process. Medical catharsis involves the purging of pathological impurities related to states of health or disease of the body, whereas educational catharsis is concerned with the pathologies and the healing of the soul(psuché) in relation to areté and diké. There is, as Aristotle maintains, a kind of educational pleasure attached to this process in which one learns what the good is. Needless to say, we are concerned with the imagination and its universalisation in the process of appreciating dramatic works of art. There is an equivalent work of appreciation which helps us to understand the peculiar nature of those goods that are both good in their consequences and good in themselves. Knowledge(epistemé) of the Good is at issue in the mimetic context of an art work and the imagination therefore plays a decisive role in both the creation and the appreciation of works of art. Judgement, therefore, plays a more important role than reason in the realm of the productive sciences such as rhetoric and art.
In contexts of practical reason where we are directly concerned with action rather than imitative representations, understanding and reason play a larger constitutive role and teleological judgement and imagination a lesser role. The key idea involved in ethical forms of practical reasoning, is that of the freedom to choose ones action-alternatives. This is a direct consequence of the Kantian claim that forms of life are entities that are self-causing and can therefore negate any destructive desire that arises in their mental arena, e.g. refusing to take a drink if one is a recovering alcoholic. Sartre characterises this freedom in terms of Consciousness, and claims that the essence of consciousness is Negation. Freud, here, as in other matters, aligns himself more with Kant, and claims that the desire to take a drink as a result of the cravings of ones appetite-system arises as a so-called “primary process”, activity which can be neutralised by a secondary process reality-based operation of choosing not to imbibe. The secondary process is operating in these circumstances as an inhibitory power. In this process the representation of the drink thus becomes a lost object in the history of the individuals desire. The wounded desire that resulted in the choice not to take the drink is then required to submit to an attitude of resignation and acceptance of the wound to the self. This impulse-control triangle is for Freud related to the Greek idea of arête, which ensures that we do the right thing in the right way at the right time. Yet the whole process is haunted by feelings of mourning and melancholia, which hover like dark clouds over such kinds of action.
Paul Ricouer, in his work, “Freud and Philosophy: An essay in Interpretation”, is more inclined to place faith in the teleological aspect of action processes which he claims must supplement the so-called archeologically oriented account provided by Freud. This presupposes that Freud’s account did not contain a teleological element, which is a questionable presupposition, given Freud’s use of Platonic themes and ideas in his later work. Plato’s “Republic, we know, was an attempt to provide an account of the Good-in-itself and the Good-in-its-consequences, in relation to the ideas of areté and diké. Ricouer, in contrast, attempts to synthesise the teleological and archeological aspects he refers to with a theologically-laden eschatological meaning of justice (getting what one deserves). This places both the Socratic account of Justice (involving knowledge (epistemé) of how the laws work in the polis), and the Aristotelian account of justice (involving the virtues of a middle class who choose to rule in accordance with the principle or law of the golden mean), in a state of suspension. Behind the account given by Ricouer, lies a conviction that Psychology is not an observational science, but rather an exegetical science: a science involving language and what he regards as its relation to a dialectics of presence and absence.
The Psychoanalytical theory of Freud we know demanded a theory to guide the interpretation of dreams, symptoms, and pathological behaviour of his patients, who were providing Freud with a “story about their lives and its meaning”. This story reached back into the past and forwards out into an imagined future. Such a story could not possibly be conceived of as a collection of facts established by observational activity, but must rather be conceived of as a motivational history organised by the “types” constituted by case studies of individuals. The questions raised in this latter kind of “science” is less akin to establishing the facts (questio factii) of the case, and more concerned with what Kant would have called “questio juris”—an organisation of the facts in accordance with principles and laws that justify/explain the conditions of the possibility of the history of the patients failures and lost-objects. Psychoanalysis, then, in its theoretical aspect is concerned with the “production” of mental health, but also with areté and diké, with how the patient ought to be leading their life in order to achieve eudaimonia (a good-spirited flourishing life). The concept of “health” being presupposed, is a teleological concept that has both technological (techné) and practical ethical aspects, hence Freud’s claim that he was a Kantian Psychologist. The combination of principles of the productive sciences (techné) and the principles of ethics in psychoanalytical theory must also be part of the reason why Freud focussed on the ideas of “meaning” and “interpretation”.
Freud is sometimes characterised as an anti-phenomenological theorist, and if ones models of phenomenological theory emanate from Husserl or Heidegger, there may be some substance to this claim, but if one, instead, compares the Phenomenology of Merleau -Ponty to Freudian theory, the differences of the positions seem less striking. For Merleau-Ponty, the human body is not a set of causally related entities and processes, but rather a lived form of being-in-the-world (psuché), in which meanings relate to meanings in a way very different to the way in which material and efficient causation relate to their effects. For both Merleau-Ponty and Freud, sexuality is a form of life with global rather than “local” meaning, and is related to our freedom, which also has a global meaning. Freedom, however, has more “cultural” significance than sexuality, and there are therefore circumstances in which culture rightly demands of us that we sacrifice our sexual satisfactions for higher purposes. Freud in his work “Civilisation and its Discontents” claimed that this “giving up of sexual objects and satisfactions”, was not a straightforward sacrifice and may give rise to a form of discontentment with our civilisation. This inhibitory process is obviously connected to the work of the Ego and the defence mechanism of “sublimation”, which is, in fact, a vicissitude of instinct. What is being invoked here is the Freudian impulse-control-triangle of Desire-Demand-Refusal, and the melancholic image that emerges from this, is of the wounded self that needs to go in search of “treatment”, that hopefully results in the resignation and acceptance that comes with increased “wisdom and understanding (A process steered by the Reality Principle). This latter characterisation of the education of desire is, in fact, difficult to represent using phenomenological concepts and ideas, since there is no clear role for rational principles in this kind of account.
Consciousness is one of the central ideas of Phenomenological accounts. It is sometimes characterised in terms of its images (Heidegger’s Transcendental Imagination in his Kant-book), which appear to be regressive forms of perception. There is no obvious role for the rational principle of non-contradiction in phenomenological accounts, which claim to be searching for essential descriptions of phenomena in the dream-like world of images. There is also lacking, the space-time continuity that is present in our perception of the world. For Freud, the history of our desires could be recorded in our dream images which are in need of principles involved in self-knowledge, if the interpretative process of the meaning of these archeological representations is to be made manifest. Knowledge (epistemé) of the complex functioning of the psychic apparatus is at the very least a necessary condition of interpreting the meaning of these images. In his work “The Interpretation of Dreams”, Freud maintains that the dream-work is a regressive activity, but at the same time the work of interpretation of these images is the royal road for gaining insight into the patient’s state of mind. Returning to the Freudian triangle of demand-refusal-wounded ego, the demands of the life instinct begin the demand-process and the more materialistic these demands are, the more likely it is that anxiety will arise in relation to the stage of refusal: this anxiety can then haunt the ego. If the ego is strong enough to tolerate this anxiety, a stoical form of resignation/acceptance of the refusal will contribute to the formation of more realistic demands in conjunction with more realistic means to achieve such demands. If, for various developmental reasons, the ego is not sufficiently strong to tolerate the resultant anxiety connected with refusal, defence mechanisms (which are also vicissitudes of the instincts) such as repression, will seek to manage the pain and suffering in ways that may eventually compromise the functioning of the ego. In such cases these unconscious residues would need to re-emerge into consciousness, and be reported to the analyst who will attempt to restructure, and/or re-situate this experience in the preconscious system of the patient (with the aid of language and the memory system). This process of “working through” can occur in relation to dreams symptoms and pathological behaviour.
The Delphic Oracle suspected that the process of knowing oneself would not be an easy one, and Aristotle, Kant, and Freud would undoubtedly have agreed with such a judgement. This process of working-through requires the operation of the reality principle insofar as it regulates both the theoretical discourse connected with the treatment, and the practical activities/symptoms of the patient. With respect to the latter, the task of the therapist is to improve the life of the patient by strengthening the ego with a greater capacity to tolerate refusal and accept the patients “lost-objects” of desire. If the patient has been traumatised, and the ego is strengthened so that the patient no longer blindly and pathologically repeats an activity or “acts-out”, the consequence of good treatment will be to convert traumatic anxiety-laden images into normal memories that will fade in intensity with the passing of time. Memory of the traumatic episode ought, that is, to be recalled in the course of time with diminished levels of anxiety. During the course of this therapeutic process the patient will be subjected to a therapeutic technique that relates to the refusal phase of the Freudian triangle. The analyst, that is, will use the transference love that the patient feels for the analyst, for the purposes of overcoming the patient’s resistances to the treatment. The task of the analyst is partly to overcome the narcissism of the patient, which resists reality when the patient attempts to consolidate a defensive position via the energy regulation principle and the pleasure-pain principle. The instincts and their more positive vicissitudes, such as sublimation, need to be mobilised in a therapeutic process that aims at displacing narcissistic tendencies. If the ego remains narcissistic, lost objects of desire that are valued highly may not be merely mourned but may be subject to the self-destructive mood of melancholia which testifies to the presence of the death instinct. Aggression is the typical response of a narcissist to what is perceived as a universally hostile environment:
“One of the vicissitudes of the death instinct is aggression and it is this which is unleashed by the narcissist upon his environment if he is frustrated. If he desires an object and then loses that object, the memory system is not sufficiently structured for the work of mourning to occur, and the work of melancholia occurs. Here we can see the limited role of consciousness and the importance of the Metapsychology of the instincts and their vicissitudes.”( James, M.,R.,D., The World Explored, the World Suffered: A Philosophical History of Psychology, Cognition, Emotion, Consciousness and Action, Lambert Academic Press, Mauritius, 2020, Page 203)
The Delphic Podcasts by Michael R D James Review of Campbells Inner Reaches of Outer Speech: Four Podcasts
Views: 403
Episode 1
Episode 2
Episode 3
Episode 4
Text for the above Podcasts:
The Delphic Podcasts by Michael R D James Review of Campbells “Power of Myth” Concluding Episode 14
Views: 384
Campbell claimed earlier in this work that the separation of Nature and Spirit in mythological thinking was problematic for the spiritual development of the European mind. The question that needs to be posed here, however, is whether it is European thought with its Ancient Greek Philosophical Way of Thinking, that bears the key to our spiritual health. In this Philosophical realm of thinking, we began with the ideas of Logos and Form, which in turn allowed Aristotle to define human psuche in terms of the “rational animal capable of discourse”. This essence-specifying definition located in a hylomorphic framework of the many meanings of Being, men desire to know(Metaphysics) men aim in their activities at the Good(Nichomachean Ethics), and a theory of change specifying 4 kinds of change, 3 media of change(space, time, and matter), 3 principles of change, and 4 causes of change: enabled Philosophy to subject all the fundamental ideas of mythology to a critical scrutiny which confirmed the validity of certain transcendental truths but criticised the falsehoods and illusions of mythological thinking satisfactorily.
There is absolutely no doubt that Campbells work in the field of Mythology has been of decisive importance, especially in relation to that aspect of his work which synthesised the myths of the world in accordance with sympathetic yet critical readings and analyses. These syntheses demonstrated a grasp of many of the above hylomorphic basic terms and definitions, as well as a grasp of Kantian critical theory that was unusual in this field of thinking.
In the light of these remarks we can now ask what Philosophical thinking has to say about the Nature-Spirit distinction. Firstly, the beginning of all science and knowledge is the search for basic terms or a classification system that divides the world into regions of natural kinds, such as the organic forms of life (psuché), and inoganic forms of matter. The self- determining power of living forms are in their turn, categorised as the plant kingdom and the animal kingdom. The plant kingdom is defined by Aristotle in terms of the lack of the powers of perception and locomotion, and the presence of the biological powers of nutrition and reproduction.
On this account animals can possess a form of consciousness which they can lose if they are hit on the head. Animals do not, however, possess our form of self-consciousness, mainly because they do not possess the large repertoire of cognitive and aesthetic powers that we encounter in the human form of psuché. Life forms at this human level of complexity, interact with nature in the various ways, some of which may not, of course, respect the integrity of nature. There are also various levels of respect stretching all the way up to the highest levels in which nature is regarded as sacred, sublime and an end-in-itself.
This view does not necessarily require a belief in any particular ethically determined gestalt possessing great powers and knowledge. All that is required is the belief that “Being has many meanings”. It ought, however, to be pointed out in this context that the nature of the being of God comes with a veil that requires special techniques if it is to be lifted. Here there is no divisive separation of Nature and Spirit, but merely an account of an actualisation process that begins at the phenomenal level of the experience of the events of physical nature. This is the base out of which all life-forms emerge in accordance with a formula we, as yet, do not fully understand.
Our human form of psuché passes through different stages of awareness up to the level of self-consciousness that possesses a repertoire of powers which, in turn, enables us, under the right circumstances, to acquire extensive knowledge which might include a History of our human form of being and a vision of a future which, if these powers are used wisely, might end positively for the human species. This journey toward the telos of a positive future which Kant specified as a “Kingdom of Ends”, is a long and arduous journey, filled with all the dangers of Ancient mythical quests and adventures. Kant believes this journey is part of a “hidden plan” and that our powers will suffice after a long period of struggle (one hundred thousand years) to take us to this Cosmopolitan Kingdom of Ends. The danger of failing in this quest was emphasised by the Oracular prophesy in the proclamation:
“Everything created by man is destined for ruin and destruction”
If this comes to pass it will be because we ignored another proclamation, namely:
“Know thyself!”
Campbell refers to an authentic life in relation to the myth of the wounded Grail King, whose impotence has created a wasteland of our civilisation: a wasteland in which people cannot live courageously and authentically, and are also in need of others to tell them how to live. Insofar as our Western modern civilisations are concerned there may be much truth embodied in this myth, yet the Kantian Critical Philosophy and its reconnection with the heritage of Ancient Greek ideas, allows us to view this myth as an unnecessarily romanticised account.
There are two roads leading to our modern Western civilisation, one leading from Athens (lined with Philosophical texts based on rational and methodical arguments) and one leading from Jerusalem (lined with a number of mythological books of the Bible), which orbits around the emotion of “compassion” (“suffering with”) and a number of mythological ideas in need of Philosophical analysis. The Philosopher is not imagining a God without form, but is instead thinking and reasoning about a God which Aristotle characterised as “Pure Form”. We can aim to be “One” with such a Being, but this will take, not an emotional envelopment process, but rather a knowledge(epistemé) of the opposites of Good and Evil, Right and Wrong. In Kantian theory, this knowledge is linked to a number of powers of mind, for example, sensibility, imagination, understanding, judgement and reason. Each of these powers have their sphere of application and their limitations. The higher mental powers (understanding, judgement, reason) contribute significantly to the areas of knowledge or sciences that Aristotle claims fall into the three categories of theoretical, practical and productive science. These bodies of knowledge require a network of basic terms and principles along with a rational and empirical methodology for their constitution. Basic terms and principles operate in a framework of matter and form which unites Nature and Spirit in living actualisation processes that accounts for why, and how, rabbits, for example, maintain themselves in existence, but more importantly accounts for why, and how, humans strive to lead good-spirited flourishing lives (eudaimonia). There is, here, no artificial separation of Spirit as Campbell maintains. Kantian Critical Philosophy is also hylomorphic, enabling us to perspicuously investigate the many meanings of Being and Psuché.
Campbell claims that we do not know very much about the life of Jesus but we do know that his main teaching was “Love they enemies”, a teaching also embraced by Buddhism. The kind of Christianity we encounter in the Middle Ages, however,was a militant form which was embodied in the Myth of the wounded Grail King that clearly proposed the killing of ones enemies. Campbell, however, paradoxically claims that :
“we are all made in the image of God. That is the ultimate archetype of man” (Page 273)
Campbell also attempts to defend this point by referring to what he terms the “mysticism of war and perfect courage”. This, for the more peacefully oriented Christians and Buddhists, is an example of one of the consequences of overspiritualising certain activities of man: namely, “pathologically “projecting” ones aggression onto an external enemy. The Ancient Greek Philosopher we know, would prefer to locate the virtue of “courage” in a hierarchy of virtues, in which wisdom is the crowning virtue and the product of using the powers of noos and phronesis.
Moyers asks Campbell about they relation of Myth to Ethics and receives the following reply:
“Ethics is a way of teaching you how to live as though you were one with the other” (Page 281)
Unless of course the other was your enemy, in which case it was acceptable to kill him, according to the Grail-King myth. In Kantian critical theory, the idea of being one with the other is perspicuously represented in terms of both parties treating each other as ends-in-themselves in accordance with a good will and universal moral law.
Campbell refers to Schopenhauers idea of a universal will in nature which Campbell claims is linked to the living of a life in accordance with the kind of plot one can encounter in novels:
“So who composed the plot? Schopenhauer suggests that just as your dreams are composed by an aspect of yourself of which your consciousness is unaware, so too, your whole life is composed by the will within you. And just as people whom you will have met apparently by mere chance become leading agents in the structuring of your life, so, too will you have served unkowingly as an agent, giving meaning to the lives of others. The whole thing gears together like one big symphony, with everything unconsciously structuring everything else. And Schopenhauer concludes that it is as though our lives were the features of one great dream of a single dreamer in which all the dream characters dream, too; so that everything links to everything else, moved by one will to life which is the universal will in nature.” (Page 284)
This theme of “life is a dream” has recurred as a problem throughout Philosophical History. We recall, for example, Descartes strangely claiming that everything we have experienced and remember, may be a dream whose real status only becomes apparent should we awaken as we do from a dream-filled sleep, and the only guarantee we have that this is not the case is a reliance upon the truthfulness of God who would, Descartes argues, not deceive us in such a fashion about our lives. If the plot of our life is unconscious, it could include episodes of dreaming, for example, that I was born, or dreaming I was a schoolboy, lover, soldier, justice and pantaloon and a child once again. It could also include an episode of awakening to a world completely unlike my dream life, a world in which one does not live through the seven ages of life: a world which is not at all temporally structured or lived in three dimensional space, but rather a life of pure form and pure thought, in which there is no thinking about a phenomenal world but only thinking about thinking.
The above might be the starting point of Spinozas reflections about the substance of God. He claims that we can know ouselves and our bodies under the aspect of eternity. For Spinoza the mind is composed of ideas and concepts rather than percepts (which are passively constituted). For Spinoza, a concept is an act of mind generated by the will: The first idea of such a mind is the idea of a body which of course has extensive relations with the external world. The extent to which the mind is ordered, is the extent to which our ideas of the body and the external world are “adequate”, by which Spinoza means “justified”. He has this to say on the general topic of “experience”:
“After experience had taught me that all things which are ordinarily encountered in common life are vain and futile, and when I saw that all things which were the occasions and objects of my fears had in themselves nothing of good and evil except in so far as the mind was moved by them; I, at length determined to inquire if there were anything which was a true good, capable of imparting itself, by which alone the mind coud be affected to the exclusion of all else; whether indeed anything existed by the discovery and acquaisition of which I might be put in possession of a joy continuous and supreme to all eternity.” (On the Correction of the Understanding)
What we see above is an example of a rationalist position that both Plato and Aristotle would have, for the most part, endorsed. These remarks were, of course, made in an age in which Science and Philosophy had not yer parted company. Spinoza lived in an age of Mathematicians: Descartes, Lebniz etc., who also claimed to be rationalists, but who were more theoretically inclined than Spinoza. Stuart Hampshire, in his work entitled “Spinoza” (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1951):
“The terms of a proposition are clearly conceived or understood in so far as the words which occur in its expression do not derive their meaning from any particular images which may from time to time be associated with them; for instance, I can be said to have in this sense a clear idea of God in so far as the word “God” is not indissolubly connected in my mind with any particular image or images (for example, of an old man above the clouds), but stands for a notion or a concept which is logically connected with the idea of other ideas, (for example of omnipotence and omniscience) exactly as the concept of a three angled figure is logically connected with the idea of a three sided figure. Most men, even those who, as philosophers are supposed to be capable of thought which is in this sense abstract, in fact lapse when thinking and arguing into a figurative or imaginative use of language; when thinking of the attributes of God, they come to accept some proposition as true, which when examined are seen to depend, not on any clearly defined concepts of divinity but on some partiulcat imaginative picture which they have formed of God.” (Pages 19-20)
Hampshire also notes that Descartes, Leibniz and Spinoza wrote in “learned Latin”, which he claimed had lost its “poetical and conversational uses”: this learned language was, it was argued, not subject to the “shifting and figurative uses of ordinary speech” (page 21). Hampshire also interestingly notes that the movement of Romanticism would later restore the power of imagination and its use of metaphor and analogy to a central place in European Culture. Whilst this is undoubtedly an insightful remark, especially in the light of Kantian Critical Philosophy, and the reflections contained in the second and third Critiques, it is also, nevertheless important to recognise the substantial differences between an Ancient Culture that prized the laws of democracy and the discipline of Philosophy, and the Roman Culture’s fascination with military prowess and engineering.
Martin Heidegger claimed with considerable authority that the difference between these two cultures was also registered in the fact of the mistranslation of certain key Ancient Greek terms such as Psuché, phusis and aletheia. He claimed that the ancient Greek term “aletheia” was connected to the idea of “the Truth, which in Latin was defined in terms of its opposite, namely, what is false. Both Psuché and phusis were also affected and both terms lost their logical connection to “forms of life”. The consequences of the mistranslation of psuché, for example, may well have paved the way for the separation of Psychology from Philosophy in 1870. The Greek term, Phusis, was cleansed of all trace, not just of life, but also all trace of the idea of “form”: an idea that is related to qualitative principles connected to perception that explained the essence of objects of perception. Quantitative principles, on the other hand, were connected to the perception of motion, and speed, both of which were important in the understanding of certain aspects of material nature in relation to the category of causation.
Campbell’s Mythology of Nature is complex, referring as it does to the role of experience and the Kantian power of the imagination which uses analogical reasoning such as A is to B, as C, is to X, to attempt the lift the veil from the “transcendental deity” that is the source and origin of everything we experience phenomenally in Nature. We can, then, in some respect gain access to the noumenal X, either through an experience of the beauty of some spectacle, or through the experience of the sublime which unveil the X in different ways. In the case of the beautiful, the experience pleases disinterestedly, and without the controlling influence of the concept), via the free play of the imagination which is universally communicable in accordance with an idea of common sense(which may or may not be connected to an idea of reason (Kant was undecided)).
The experience of the sublime may take the form of the mathematically sublime, in which the imagination is frustrated in its attempt to grasp the nature of what is experienced, because of its absolute greatness : as a consequence many other powers are mobilised and quicken in us a sense that what is absolutely great in nature is small in comparison with the superiority of our mental powers. In the case of the dynamically sublime, on the other hand, the imagination is again found to be inadequate to the task of apprehending the significance of the great forces of nature such as powerful waterfalls or a stormy sea and the experience “quickens” in the mind the sense of the superiority of our moral agency in relation to these mighty forces of nature.
Once upon a time these experiences gave rise to the ideas of God controlling what is experienced, but, if, as Kant claims, God is merely an idea of theoretical reason, a theoretical principle, our practical experiences are better characterised in terms of a humanism which gives us a better account of our powers in terms of practical idas such as freedom, and principles.
Both Kant and Spinoza recognise the role of the mind in the production of the ideas of God, the morally good, the beautiful, and the sublime, but they also recognise the limitations of the imagination and its images in fully comprehending the significance of these ideas. The difference between Kant and Spinoza relating to the powers of the imagination and reason, is that Spinoza does not believe in the romantic idea of the imagination or even the idea of “the imaginative analogy within our experience”, when it comes to lifting the veil from the pure form of God. Kant, on the contrary, claims that the category of judgment, namely relation, permits us to reason our way forward to the connection the human species has to the pure form of God. Kant refers to a form of transcendental reasoning in his work entitled “Prolegomena”:
“By means of such an analogy, I can obtain a relational concept of things which are absolutely unknown to me. For instance, as the promotion of the welfare of children (A) is to the love of parents (B), so the welfare of the human species (C) is to that unknown in God (X)”
This clearly lifts the veil from the pure form of God and Campbell acknowledges this problem in a later work entitled “The inner Reaches of Outer Space”. This work raises the question as to whether Campbell believes as Kant and Spinoza did not, that it is experience and imagination, and not. Reason, that are the operative causes of the above Transcendental Analaogy. Transcendental Analogy appears for Kant to be a means to form concepts of what we do not understand. The question to raise, in conclusion, is whether Campbells later position was an elaboration upon his position in “The Power of Myth”, or whether it was rather a distinctive shift in position toward a more philosophical approach to Mythology.
The Delphic Podcasts by Michael R D James Review of Campbell’s “Power of Myth”: Episode 13
Views: 394
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.
The Delphic Podcasts by Michael R D James: Review of Campbells “Power of Myth” Episode 12 Birth of Civilisation, Mother of God, Eros and Amour
Views: 394
A key moment on the History of Religion/Mythology occurs around 4000 BC when invasions from the North and South overwhelmed the agricultural river-valley goddess cultures, temporarily replacing the mother goddess with the father god of the hunter/killer invaders. Campbell claims that this:
“certainly has made a psychologica difference in the character of our culture. For example, the basic birth of Western Civilisation occurred in the great river-valleys—the Nile, the Tigris-Euphrates, the Indus and the Ganges. That was the world of the Goddess. The name of the river Ganges (Gangá) is the name of a goddess, for example. And then there came the invasions. Now these started seriously in the fourth millenium BC and became more and more devastating. They came in from the North and South and wiped out cities overnight. Just read the story in the book of Genesis of the part played by Jacob’s tribe in the fall of the city of Schechem. Overnight the city is wiped out by these herding people who have suddenly appeared. The Semite invaders were herders of goats and sheep, the Indo-Europeans of cattle. Both were formerly hunters and so the cultures are essentially animal oriented. When you have hunters you have killers because they are always in movement, nomadic, coming into conflict with other people and conquering the areas into which they move. And these warriors bring in warrior gods, thunderbolt hurlers like Zeus and Yahweh.” (Page 212)
It is the father who is now equated with death and protection, and the goddess is retired, becoming a grandmother goddess who is killed and dismembered (by Marduk, for example). By 1750 BC matriarchial societies disappeared. Yet, in Ancient Greece the Goddess remained a powerful figure and this was also the case in Christianity where the Virgin Mary is still widely worshipped as the mother of God:
“Holy Mary, mother of God,
Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen”
Campbell notes in this context that all The French Cathedrals of the 12th and 13th centuries were called “Notre Dame” (Our Lady). This is a very different state of affairs to that which prevailed during the invasions in which women were prizes of war and raped:
“With the fall of a city, every woman in the city would be raped.” (Page 215)
Campbell regards the hunter mythologies as “sociological”, and he includes the Hebrews in this category:
“The Hebrews were absooutely ruthless with respect to their neighbours. But this passage (in Deutoronomy) is an extreme statement of something that is inherent in most sociologically oriented mythologies—that is to say, love and compassion are reserved for the in-group, and aggression and abuse are directed outward. Compassion is to be reserved for members of your own group. The out-group is to be treated in a way described there in Deutoronomy.”(Page 215)
One of the key words here is “projection” which, according to Freud, occurs in pathological forms of Aggression in those groups led by manipulative leaders. This is till occurring today in spite of the fact that, according to Campbell, there are no outsider groups left on the planet.
The first phase of a three phase process, then, is that of the Goddess who is replaced by the Father God in the second phase ,who is, in turn, replaced in accordance with the principle of the Golden Mean by a pantheon of gods and goddesses interacting with each other, for example, as occurred in both Ancient Greece and India. In the early books of the Old Testament it is the father-god that creates the world, but by the time we get to the book of Proverbs we are presented with a female goddess, Sophia, the Goddess of wisdom:
“who says, When he created the world, I was there, and I was his greatest joy” (Page 217)
There is however, no trace of the idea of Virgin birth in the Hebrew tradition. This comlex idea originated in Ancient Greece:
“When you read the four gospels for example, the only one in which the virgin birth appears is the Gospel according to Luke and Luke was Greek.” (Page 217)
Campbell then explores the Indian system of Psychology by mapping out the 7 psychologically significant zones of the body , located at different regions of the spine, accordng to the Indian system:
“The first is at the rectum, representing alimentation, the basic life-sustaining function. The serpent well represents this compulsion, as a kind of travelling esophagus, going along just eating, eating, eating. What you eat is always something that just a moment before was alive. This is the sacramental mystery of food and eating which doesn’t often come to our minds when we sit ourselves down to eat. If we say grace before meals we thank this figure out of the Bible for our food. But in earlier mythologies when people woud sit to eat they would thank the animal they were about to consume for having given of itself as a willing sacrifice.” (Pages 217-218)
The above reminds one of course of the Freudian oral stage of psycho-sexual development and we ought also to recall that Freud studied primitive cultures closely, especially in the later phase of his theorising. The second centre is that of the genitals connected to the act of reproduction or urge to procreate. The third centre, also located in the pelvic basin is a centre of aggression, the will to power. As we ascend the spine to the next centre at the heart this is a critical move because we shift from the region of purely animal instincts to that of compassion, the transformative passion connected to the suffering of others. Compassion is, of course the navigational star of Christianity, of Jesus, born of the Goddess Maria.
Campbell claims that the male warrior-god began to be joined by the Goddess around the 7th century BC, quoting a revelation from the Upanishads in which a woman appears and begins to instruct the gods about the source of their own Being. The father, Campbell argues, is the disciplinerian, concerned with social order and the tranformation of character, an important element in the forthcoming new planetary mythology because, it is argued, we need:
“a whole new way of experiencing society” (Page 228)
If it is true, as many Philosophers and Artists claim, that civilisation is currently in a state of decline in the West, then there would appear to be some urgency in the task of the creating this new mythology for our times, and for all seasons. Stanley Cavell has argued convincingly that an essential disturbing characteristic of our modern form of life is that there is a fundamental lack of understanding of the role of History in our creative lives and in our present experiences. If this position is correct then, this may be an argument for returning to the Ancient Greek concern with the virtues of Justice and Courage(as exemplified in the life of Socrates) for inspiration in the forming of this “new planetary mythology.” Indeed this would in turn entail that the species of man embrace the Ancient Greek framework of psuché, logos, arché epistemé, eros, thanatos, ananke and eudaimonia. The Enlightenment rational telos of a Cosmopolitan Kingdom of Ends would be the hoped for outcome of the transformative power of any “new planetary myth”.
Kant’s Philosophy is an elaboration upon many Ancient Greek themes and it also reflects the first truth of life for Buddhism, namely that life is “melancholically haphazard”, a description that harks back to the carefully considered maxims of Ancient Greek Oracles, namely:
“Everything created by man is destined for ruin and destruction.”
and
“Know Thyself”
The Kantian rationalist account of the human psuché is in fact a complex elaboration upon Aristotelian hylomorphism(cf. the Goddess creator of all forms), which looks more toward the telos of an actualisation or tranformation process than towards its origin(arché). Kant, as does Aritotle, looks to the various sciences and arts, and seeks to clarify their Metaphsyical dimensions(Metaphysics of Nature, Metaphysics of Man), but he also finds a place for rational religion during a period in which men were conceiving of freedom in a very different way to the way in which it was being conceived in Critical Philosophy. Many, during Enlightenment times, were trying to free themselves from tradition and duty and the rituals and institutions of a society in transition to the Modern Era. Kant’s account of Space and Time, the Categories of the understanding/judgement, and the Principles of Reason, remained essentially Aristotelian, but focussed specifically the role the human mind plays in the formation of its own cognitive/practical/aesthetic states and processes. The major distinction between the phenomena we experience ,and the thing itself which is veiled, is critical in order to understand the Kantian synthesis of the ideal nature of the principle (form, arché), and the real nature of that which the principle regulates. Newtons “Principles of Natural Philosophy” was the kind of natural science that interested him most, because of the way in which it integrated Mathematics into its theorising about space, time, and causation in relation to motion on the earth, and motion in the starry heavens above. Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals was of course revolutionary in its theorising about Freedom in its delineation of the responsibilities of governments to honour the Human Rights of their citizens. This, in turn, led to the preservation of such rights in the Kantian inspired institutions of the United Nations and the International Court of Justice. We ought also to recall once again in the context of this discussion, that Kant found a role for religion in his Critical Philosophy that accords well with Campbell’s search for the transcendental dimensions of mythological thinking.
Many who have studied Newton became fixated with outer space and the cosmos, perhaps at the expense of the inner dimension of our experiences, dreaming of exploring the cosmos instead of the “Kingdom of God within” (Gnosticism). T S Eliot reminds us of the consequences of outer exploration:
“We shall not cease from Exploration, And at the end of all our exploring, Will be to arrive where we started, And know the place for the first time.” (Little Gidding, Four Quartets)
This quote perhaps explains the Eastern fixation upon the “inner search” for transcendence. If there is a message to be understood from the journey of Ariadnes thread from Ancient Greece through the Renaissance, the Reformation, and Enlightenment, it is that Being may be One, but it has many meaings, and understanding our beginnings in terms of the Kantian Totality of Conditions is vitally important for both the knowledge of ourselves, the knowledge of how our societies function, and the knowledge of our universe.
Campbell and Moyers both agree that journeying into outer space will not be transformative of our human form of Being-in-the-world, and perhaps all that is needed is to think about Space in the way in which Science does. That may, however, not be sufficient insofar as the inner reaches of outer space are concerned. We May, that is, need a transcendental account of the Kantian intuitions of space and time, if we are to understand this latter aspect. Campbell does not follow this line of thinking but rather draws our attention to a World Atlas showing:
“our galaxy within many galaxies, and within our galaxy, the solar system. And here you get a sense of the magnitude of this space that we’re now finding out about. What these pages opened to me was the vision of a universe of unimaginable magnitude and inconceivable violence. Billions upon billions of roaring thermonuclear furnaces scattering from each other…. Many of them actually blowing themselves ro pieces, littering the outermost reaches of space with dust and gas out of which new stars with circling planets are being born right now.” (Page 229)
It is difficult to know exactly how Newton and Kant conceived of stars, but it would be a safe guess to suggest it was not quite in the above terms of roaring thermonuclear furnaces. Newton’s concerns for example, seemed to focus upon gravitation, light, motion and speed. Kant, too, focused upon these phenomena but we also know he experienced awe and wonder when gazing at the starry heavens above, suggesting that the unimaginable magnitude of the universe strained our powers of imagnation and understanding, to such an extent that we experienced a feeling of the sublime. For Campbell, it appears as if both the magnitude of the universe and the power of its suns filled him with awe and wonder.
Chapter VII is entitled “Tales of Love and Marriage”, and it begins with an investigation of the concept of love which Campbell claims was transformed by the troubedours of the 12th and 13th centuries into a romanticised person-to-person intimate encounter. Campbell contrasts this with the more biological impersonal forms of Eros and Agape. The latter form of compassion being more akin to that love which Jesus proclaimed was necessary in both my relation to my neighbour and my enemies. Freud, we know, was highly sceptical of these Christian maxims, on the grounds that men were not gentle creatures but were capable of considerable accounts of aggression and cruelty. Men coud be, as Aristotle put it, the worst of the animals, with no thought of anyone else’s well-being other than their own.
Agape for Campbell, surpases the individual-based amor, because the latter is passionate, whilst the former is connected more to a principle- based compassion. Amor, Campbell argues, is aroused by the eyes which in turn quickens the activity of the heart. The Church, therefore, does not understand this very Western passionate phenomeon, and perhaps sees in this form of individualism, potential rebellion against all that is traditional and holy.
The Freudian libido is obviously related more to Amor and Eros than to Agape, which he would have characterised as a vicissitude of Eros. For Freud, one of the foundation stones for cvilisation, is Aristotelian, namely the Family. For Freud, family love resists transportation to the wider circles of society, yet to love and to work are both tasks the ego has to take responsibility for. Work relates both to the well-being of my family and the well-being of society, so perhaps there is not any problem in ths case with reconciling these two aspects. This, it has been pointed out, is how I can “love” my neighbour, by being useful to the society through my work. Work, in this sense, is truly reciprocal, because I can reasonably expect him too to be working for the benefit of society. Freud, however, points out that society, in turn, is not satisfied with just my work: it also expects other things of me, for, example, obedience to the laws and prohibitions of the social order which are not always rational. This is the reason, Freud argues, for mans discontentment with his civilisation, which, in turn, may lead to questioning the value of the entire project. The Church, of course does not care about Society. Its message that all men are brothers is, of course, a Cosmopolitan message that Kant has referred to in his Philosophcal reference to “The Promised Land”, namely the Kingdom of Ends.
“
The Delphic Podcasts Review of Campbells “Power of Myth” Episode 11 Mother Earth, Goddesses, The Quest and Logos
Views: 415
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”.
The Delphic Podcasts by Michael R D James Review of Campbells “Power of myth”: Episode 10: Constellating images and The truth and rational orientation of Consciousness
Views: 459
Campbell argues that a nation is in need of :
“….constellating images to pull together all these tendencies to separation, to pull them together in some intention.” (Page 163)
The Ancient Greeks believed both in the unity of the mind and the unity of the polis, but may not have agreed that the work of unity could be done by “constellating images”. For them it was the intellectual concepts of justice, knowledge and good judgement, that provided some of the conditions necessary for a unified mind and a unified polis. The “image” of the hero is, of course, important but that is not constructed solely of a constellation of images of the heroes deeds and what has happened to him/her. Rather the “idea” of the particular hero is given via the medium of a narrative which in its turn probably contains transcendent aesthetic and rational ideas. These ideas refer to concepts such as areté (doing the right thing in the right way at the right time), arché (principles) diké (justice) logos (explanation/justification)and epistemé (knowledge).
The Platonic allegory of the cave is a mythological parable designed to call into question the role of “images” in those cognitive processes and states so necessary to leading the enlightened life Plato sought. Images certainly play a very limited role in our understanding and use of the Law which appeals rather to ethical and transcendental ideas such as “The Truth”, or “The Good”. These “ideas” have transcendental significance in the realms of the Metaphysics of Nature and the Metaphysics of Man. Plato argues that images are mere imitations of reality, and can therefore be ambiguous bearers of meaning, unless they are tied together by cognitive processes and principles. Justice, for example, is a form of The Good which needs to meet Glaucons criteria of being both good-in-its-consequences and good-in-itself. Take the narrative of Jesus which might be composed of the images of his birth, images of his transformation, images of his teaching, and images of his death and resurrection. Now, it was the intention of the storytellers of the Gospels to communicate a number of transcendental ideas in connection with their narratives and they did this via the language they used rather than these ideas somehow manifesting themselves purely in the above chain of essentially ambiguous images. The idea of the “virgin birth” , for example, could not be communicated via an image of Mary not having had sex with Joseph. The narrative must rely on knowledge of the relevance of that negative proposition. The language structures of such narratives can also be analysed in terms of Wittgensteins later work on language-games and forms of life. There is a “language-game” played with “symbolic language” which Paul Ricoeur argues possesses a “double meaning”: in such language-forms, when they are concerned with the evil we do and confess, or the evil we experience, there is a manifest or surface meaning that in turn denotes a deep or latent meaning that has a home in the transcendental realm of the sacred. A confession of ones sins, for example, relies on a Kantian transcendentally constituted analogy which Campbell referred to in his work “The Inner Reaches of Outer Space”. If, for example, I confess to feeling unclean, contaminated, impure because of a stain on my soul, this manifest meaning refers to a deep latent content that signifies my standing in the realm of the sacred in relation to my deity. This, Ricoeur argues is obvious because no physical action or experience could possibly rid me of this stain or feeling of impurity (for example, lady Macbeths continuous attempts to wash the blood from her hands). The elements of this transcendental analogy are: “My soul is to the stain as my character is in relation to God”. What is being articulated here is the assertion that the two “relations” are identical. We can, of course, attempt to claim that the words “My soul is impure” form an image, but such an image cannot possibly have any relation to what may be needed to remove such an impurity, namely a cathartic confession that is really about re-establishing the relation of my moral character to God (The confession is interesting becuase it concerns both the Metaphysics of Nature and the Metaphysics of Man).
This “talking cure” uncovered by Ricoeurs analysis of symbolic language, is a transcendental ritual that is of fundamental importance to the Church, and this may be the entire point of the language game-of religious confession. It is also important in the context of this discussion to recall that the later Wittgenstein and one of his followers, Elisabeth Anscombe, demonstrated that one and the same image-phenomenon can be seen in different ways depending upon the concepts that are used to organise what is being seen. There is, that is, a fundamental ambiguity attached to the image when we are at the very basic level of perception. The suggestion that “constellating images” could bear an intention to unite a community or the powers of a mind is, therefore somewhat unclear in its meaning. The “idea” of a heroic leader may well call to mind a constellation of images related to his/her deeds, some of which may have transcendental sigificance in the realms of “the Good” or “The Sacred”, but this, of course, requires a prior understanding or knowledge of these forms. What is also required is an understanding of the kind of ratonality that is manifest in the Kantian Transcendental Analogy: A is to B what C is to F. Campbell illustrates this analogy with the example: the father is to the family, what God is to the community. Campbell rightly points out that different communities have different deities and there are Mother-related deities which can be found in the Greek Pantheon and Hinduism. The way in which the sacred has been represented, that is, varies in accordance with many different factors such as life-style (hunting, gathering versus planting, animal husbandry) and geography and climate (desert, mountainous terrain, plains etc).
One of the issues raised continually by Campbell in many of his works is that of the collapse of “forms of life”, for example, the sacred form of life. There is no doubt that for many commentators this “secularisation” process, which results in a lack of respect for the sacred, has been going on for some time. But when did it begin? Arendt in her work “Origins of Totalitarianism”, points all the way back to Henry the 8 ‘s “dissolution of the monastries”. We would point to both the Renaissance and the Reformation, which furthered the cause of secularism in various ways, as did the period of the Enlightenment where Kant, who had been censured by the Emperor for his writings in religious matters, openly claimed that the idea of God was not as important as the idea of Freedom. This unleashed forces(Hegel, Nietzsche, etc), which would both undermine the Philosophy of Kant, but also undermine the respect for the realm of the sacred: forces that are inspired by both materialism and “spiritualism” which Kantian arguments had synthesised in his Critical Philosophy.
Hegel, in his criticism of Kantian Critical Philosophy, embraced dialectical reasoning which focussed upon opposites, and attempted to synthesise them at the conceptual level, a lower level than the level of principles (arché) and judgements . For Hegel there is not the “Many Meanings of Being” that can be found espoused by Aristotle, but only Absolute Spirit. This spirit he further argues is best exemplified by Christianity, whose God Nietzsche, shortly afterwards, would declare to be dead, thereby helping to replace the respect for the sacred with a modern idea of a “will to power”. This idea inspired a Philosophy that reconceived man to be in search of a superior mode of being that only some could achieve. Traditional rationalism such as Aristotle’s, defined human psuché in terms of “rational animal capable of discourse”, and this, in the wake of secularism, was also dismantled, along with Kant’s rationalism . This latter occurred in accordance with Hegels declared intention of turning Kants work on its head.
Arendt coined a term in her Origins of Totalitarianism”, namely the “new men”, and she characterised the Philosophy of these new men in terms of “Everything is possible!” ( if only one could manipulate the emotions and opinions of the melancholic masses). Many tyrants (new men) of the twentieth century upended traditional practices and traditional values coupled to justice, the law, freedom, natural rights. They did this by characterising certain groups or races of men as superior to others and proposing an agenda of violence. This idea of a “superior race or group” was of course a “construction”, with no foundation in fact or principle. Traditional ideas and practices were also called into question. The only surprising consequences of such a state of affairs, were, firstly, the fact that there were only two world wars during the 20th century (what Arendt called “this terrible century”), and secondly, after the second world war, we did not see a third world war, but rather the actualisation of a Kantian idea of the United Nations and International Court of justice based on the concept of Human Rights. These International institutions were not founded upon a constellation of images, but were rather a consequence of Aristotelian and Kantian Philosophy which supports a vision of a cosmopolitan kingdom of ends in which the rational ideas of justice, freedom, equality, the truth, the good, the beautiful, the sublime and the sacred all play constitutive roles.
It is not clear from Campbell’s characterisation of a hero that it does not fall into the category of the “new men”, Arendt suggested:
“A legendary hero is usually the founder of something—the founder of a new age, the founder of a new religion, the founder of a new city, the founder of a new way of life. In order to find something new, one has to leave the old and go in quest of the seed idea, a germinal idea that will have the potentiality of bringing forth that new thing.” (Pages 166-7)
The “new men” of Arendt certainly created a new age but perhaps one can argue that they possessed no germinal ideas. “The will to power”, “Everything is possible if you will it”, “God is dead” “There is no truth, all is interpretation”, “There is no absolute God, its all preference and interest”, are not ideas that have the power to mobiise masses over long periods of time, because there is nothing in these ideas that is “True” in the transcendental sense of the term. Greek heros, before the birth of the intellectual heros like Socrates, founded cities and democracy. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, on the other hand, founded not just Philosophy, but the disciplines of Logic, Biology, Politics, Philosophical Psychology, and Aesthetics. The new heros sought to overturn this Greek classical intellectual heritage in favour of a number of fragmentary anti-rationalistic views, including a scientific view well expressed by Wittgensteins earlier work. This latter view claimed that “The World is a totality of facts”, and all these views, together with a form of scientific realism embraced by the logical positivists, created an empirical attitude toward human action that placed the reasons for actions outside the category of so-called objectivity and empirical rationality. A romantically inspired spiritualism was one response to the growing movements of materialism in its different forms. This spiritual movement in turn suffered the objections of “subjectivism” from the materialsts.
Moyers introduces Thomas Berry’s idea that the key cultural driver of progress is the story, and if a civilisation is in trouble, heading for Delphic ruin and destruction, it is because the old stories do not have the power to shape our lives anymore. Campbells response to this is interesting. He maintains that given the fact that the inward life of man does not change (and has not changed for 40,000 years)–we are still seeking a myth that explains the origin of the world and currently scientists are constructing a “story” that fits the facts as they know them. The myth of the human quest is also still a living story, he argues.
The hero of the Orient, Campbell argues, is Buddha whose message is “Enlightenment”, which on the face of it seems to resemble the Philosophical message of Ancient Greek Philosophers, but in fact is very different, in virtue of the fact that Buddha is more focused on suffering than on the awe and wonder of the world, and the actualisation process of a rational animal capable of discourse. For the Ancient Greeks, awe and wonder in the face of Nature and Man, was the theme of their contemplative lives. Knowledge (epistemé)) of good and evil played a much greater role in Western thought than it did in the Orient.
Philosophers embracing Principles and their justification of facts, are confused by the presentation of supernatural events in stories: events such as “Walking on water” which we encounter in the narratives of both Jesus and Buddha. These, for them, are at best metaphors or symbols for the “superpowers” of these heros. At worst, they encourage the directing of awe and wonder to inappropriate fantasy-laden objects. If the latter is the case, this might indicate that these narratives were constructed more for the purposes of entertainment than for the purposes of shaping our lives significantly: a kind of “magic-show” designed to hypnotise rather than to enlighten. This was, incidentally, a tactic used extensively by the new men in their “communications” with the masses.
Campbell, instructively, attempts to reject the implicit relativism of the idea of “different stories for different times” and refers to Carl Jungs Psychology of the collective archetypes based on “elementary ideas” that are , it is argued, in the final analysis, rooted in the organs and instincts of our bodies. Aristotle, we know, argued that the first actuality of a body composed of a human collection of organs and a particular human configuration of limbs was the human “soul”.
Campbell informs us the course of his own personal actualisation process and he attributes importance to the writers James Joyce and Thomas Mann:
“…both of whom had applied basic mythological themes to the interpretation of the problems, questions, realisations, and concerns of young men growing up in the modern world.” (Page 177)
Campbell is obviously referring in the above quote to the world of the 20th century. Campbell, then, however, refers to the fantasy-world of Star Wars for what he claims to be an example of the inspiration the youth of the day might find in the figure of Darth Vader whose robotic existence, it is claimed, symbolises the danger we all face today. Darth Vader, of course, raises the question of whether we will control the sytems we have created, or whether they will begin to control us as we become more and more passive (Page 178). Is the movie “Star Wars” bringing an unconscious fear into the realm of Consciousness?
In an interesting, possibly Freudian characterisation of the term “Consciousness”, Campbell asserts the following:
“You see, consciousness thinks its running the shop. But its a secondary organ of a total human being and it must not put itself in control. It must submit and serve the humanity of the body. When it does put itself in control, you get a man like Darth Vader in Star Wars, the man who goes over to the consciously intentional side.” (Page 181)
This echoes Freud’s characterisation of the Ego which serves three masters, the id, the external world and the superego. For Freud, however, the agency of the Ego has both preconscious and unconscious dimensions. Darth Vader’s problem seems to be more connected with the failure to create a human superego which can regulate the ego and its interventions in the external world, than with “Consciousness”.
William James contributes to this discussion in his Principles of Psychology by pointing to the positive functions of Consciousness in non ethical contexts. According to James, Consciousness is necessary in instrumental contexts of learning and performing physical skills, to “monitor”, via the power of attention, the performance or sequence of actions in case something goes wrong, so it can identify and implement the next correct step. Conscious Attention, as a power, also emerges at the end of the task presumably to survey the world for what comes next in the way of tasks to perform. Embedded skills involving relatively long sequences of action become, according to James, habitual and can proceed without any intervention of sustained conscious attention.
O Shaughnessy’s contribution to this discussion involves a claim similar to that of Willam James, namely, that Consciousness is, in fact, running the shop, insofar as cognitive events are concerned. The human form of consciousness is of the self-conscious variety, which has a truth orientation that is in turn connected to human rationality. If James and O Shaughnessy are correct, then consciousness must play a significant role in both life-sustaining activities which require knowledge of some kind, and thought which is oriented toward “What is True”. Such thought also demands explanations or justifications of the truth of a judgement.
If the Truth-orientation of Consciousness is necessarily connected to the power of rationality, then we must be using the self-conscious “I” to understand the transcendental moments of religion, mythology and Philosophy. Consciousness, of course, is, for Freud, a vicissitude of our instincts, and because it is connected to both the preconscious and unconscious aspects of the human psuché. It is also connected, firstly, as far as the preconscious is concerned to both the knowledge we possess and the meanings of the words and sentences of our power of language, and secondly , as far as the unconscious is concerned, to life-preservation and life threatening desires.
In conclusion, the above reasoning highlights a feature of the Consciousness of the new men which Campbell may have thought applied to Darth Vader, namely, the tendency to “instrumentalise” all our relations to the external world This involves treating everything we encounter in both the natural world and the human world, as a means to our individual ends. It is, of course, this which neutralises the awe and wonder connected to the realm of the sacred. This instrumental attitude toward the worlds then, assists in the dismantling of our traditions values and laws. Heidegger speaks of this as “the ready-to-hand” aspect of our dealings with the world, which he claims, whilst it is related to what he calls circumspective concern embedded in an equipmental world, a purely relational world, does not meet the criteria of Care. Care is both “for-something that is an end-in-itself” and substantial”, but also is connected to the attitude of solicitude and our attitude toward death.
Care, for Heidegger is of course connected to the essence of Dasein, our human way of existing in the world. Care is also related to conscience which, he claims, is the call of Care which, he further claims is not a utilitarian call by the new men for whom “life is a business”, an instrumental undertaking with no clear connection to ends that have been valued by civilisations for eons. There is no call of Care for such men who believe everything is possible even outside the bounds of human decency and the law. Platos warnings in The Republic about the unlawful desires of the tyrant have certainly not been heeded in this “new age”, the new men are in the process of creating.
“
The Delphic Podcasts Review of “The Power of Myth”, Episode 8 Silence, Sound, Matriarchial and Patriarchial Myths
Views: 438
Chapter IV is entitled “Sacrifice and Bliss” and begins with the claim that many primitive peoples, originating from the plains and the forests, who engage in hunting and farming, saw the surrounding landscape to be sacred land located in a transcendental cosmic order. Forest peoples, for example, very often worshipped old trees, experiencing what Campbell described as a state of bliss whilst doing so. We moderns, he notes, have few sacred places and to the extent that these are not available to us, and we have no means of experiencing bliss, we are lost in our world. Campbell further claims that with the establishment of the metropolis, sacred buildings and locations become of secondary importance compared to the financial skyscrapers and political buildings that surround and fill our city-landscapes.
He returns to the experience of walking into a Cathedral in Chartres and examines the idea of the cosmic significance of such a Cathedral, insofar as the Metaphysics of man was concerned:
“Yes, The Cathedral is in the form of a cross, with the altar in the middle there. Its a symbolic structure. Now many churches are built as though they were theatres. Visibility is important. In the cathedral there is no interest in visibility at all. Most of what goes on goes on out of your sight. But the symbol is what is important there, not just watching the show. Everybody knows the show by heart.” (page 119)
The rituals we see performed in the Church appear to overshadow the logos contained in the sermons, the prayers, the psalms etc., but these rituals too may contain symbolic language that is both cosmic and theatrical. (for exampe, at funerals: “Ashes to ashes, Dust to dust. Dust thou art and to dust thou shallt return…..”)
Many visit the church or the cathedral to experience the silence, the peacefulness. Moyers, the interviewer, emphasises the great silences that we encounter in such buildings which of course contrasts with the organisation of sound we experience in the theatre. Campbell elaborates upon this theme:
“All final spiritual reference is to the silence beyond sound. The word made flesh is the first sound. Beyond that sound is the transcendent unknown, the unknowable. It can be spoken of as the great silence, or as the void, or as the transcendent absolute.” (Pages 120-121)
Campbell in other works such as “The inner reaches of outer space” referred to the idea of a transcendental “sound”, located in the cavity of the mouth: a sound which strictly speaking does not fit the definition of a sound which Campbell defines in terms of two substances physically colliding or interacting. The breath circulating in the cavity like the wind in a cave, is more like a spirit than a substance: a spirit that seems to spring up from nowhere from hidden forces. Words(logos) are born in this cave.
Mythology does not deal with supernatural phenomena, Campbell argues, but with “natural” phenomena experienced innocently. Indeed in referring to the supernatural aspect of religion, he discusses how in the Middle Ages, the clergy and their supernatural references contributed to the creation of a “Waste-land” citing the title of one of T S Eliots most famous extended poems. These references to the supernatural, week after week, were a spiritual killer, Campbell argues. The myth of the Garden of Eden and the Fall from the Grace of God, was used in many sermons to view the spontaneity of man as something sinful: a very different approach to the mother earth religions in which mans nature and all of nature are sacred.
In answer to the question relating to the disappearance of the shamans, Campbell insists that it is the task of the artist to preserve what is important in Mythology, and perhaps also contribute to the creation of what Campbell calls a Planetary myth: a myth that can be embraced by the whole world. Moyers asks Campbell what the ordinary man can do to assist in this task, and he receives the answer, that we can all read the right books by the right people.
Reading, writing and examination are rituals that we engage in throughout our schooling, and when we leave school and university, we are then burdened with the responsibility of increasing our awareness of what is sacred about ourselves and the world we dwell in. Our reading and writing, that is, must occur in the spirit described by the Ancient Greek terms, psuché, arché, areté, epistemé and logos.
Campbell argues that religion begins with the psychological transformation of an individual. Such individuals inevitably attempt to communicate something about their transcendent experiences by creating rituals. The rituals of reading, writing and examination woud then be an answer to the earlier question Campbell posed in relation to the initiation rituals of the youth who were joining gangs. These rituals, are of course, less dramatic than the primitive rituals Campbell referred to , for example, circumcision, or physical beatings, but the long process of studying does correspond positively to the fact of our long childhoods. A long initiation into maturity may be appropriate given these strange circumstances.
The Institutions of Schooling and the University assume important roles, but the Principle of Specialisation in the University system which may have been modelled on the role of the specialised Guilds in Society, works against the universal mission of initiating students into the kind of maturity envisaged by Aristotle, and perhaps also Campbell. This aspect of the Ancient institutions of the Academy and the Lyceum has been lost.
Training individuals to occupy certain roles in the community appears to have become the priority of the educational system as a whole. If we continue down the path of discontentment with society, reflected in Eliots “Waste Land”, the Delphic prophecy of ruin and destruction looms large as a possible telos for our civilisation.
Campbell claims that the role of the shaman was more important in hunting cultures than in the more settled form of life we call civilisation. In the transition from one form of life to another, shamans are looked upon as entertainers (clowns, magicians), as priests take on the role the shamans once occupied. In our Western Societies, the maxim of “The name of the Father” slowly eclipses the ethos of, in “The name of the mother”, as we move away from an attitude where the land and people are regarded as sacred, toward an attitude in which we see everything around us instrumentally, as means to ends in the spirit of specialisation: the land, for example, is for the growing crops, building railways, creating real estate, etc. People must be “useful” to the society. The landscape and people in this scenario lose their transcendental and metaphysical significance.
Resources are multiplied and accumulated like standing reserves, and as a result new institutions emerge, for example, the University operating on the principle of specialisation which neutralises the heritage from Ancient Greece, a heritage that urges us to lead the examined life on the basis of knowledge of ourselves. For the Ancient Greeks epistemé (knowledge), is sacred, and not the root of all evil as the Garden of Eden Myth may have suggested.
The personal transformations that occur in relation to the rituals of reading, writing and examinations, are of course less dramatic than our ancient traditional rituals of primitive societies, and even less dramatic than the more modern rituals of sacrificing, praying, and lamenting our flawed natures. Yet three years of Unversity may well have produced a more significant transformation than three years of engaging in these older rituals, for example, attending Church where attention is focused upon one ancient text, the Bible, which we know has been subject to multiple interpretations by mutiple sects. Knowledge is the means the University uses to assist in a self actualisation process that moves the individual toward maturity or the condition of life the Greeks called eudaimonia (the good spirited flourishing life). In this context we need to recall that it was eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, that caused mans exit from the Garden and the fall from the Grace of God. From the point of view of the Church, then, the secular institution of the University is not sacred in the sense that it is not specifically concerned with the central task of the Church which involved obeying the will of God, the Father.
The Humanism of the University system since the Enlightenment Philosophy of Kant has shifted more decisively in the Kantian direction of the Idea of Freedom which was more important for Kant than the Philosophical idea of God. The idea of Freedom together with the idea of the importance of epistemé (knowledge) created a position which in turn distanced itself from the supernatural aspects of the Biblical texts. The Processes of Secularisation and globalisation have favoured the University over the Church, and whilst the University has in a sense contributed to the globalisation process, there are signs that the principle of specialisation is not fully contributing to the Enlightenment Aim of the Kantian Cosmopolitan Kingdom of Ends where all persons freely treat each other and the law as ends in themselves.
Given the obvious limitations of the attitude of treating the earth as a means to the ends of Humanity without concern for the effect, this is going to have for future generations, the attitude of the the future citizen of the Kingdom of Ends toward the earth, must be one of Respect. The Socratic debate with Euthyphro is enlightening in this context. Euthyphro comes to the court to indict his father for the death of a slave. His motivation is that his action is in the name of what is holy and sacred. Socrates counters with the argument that something is right not because the Gods love it, but rather that the gods love what is right because it is right. This is a strong argument for Justice being the more important issue, and initiates the Ancient Greek commitment to Humanism. Respect for what is right is the foundation of the Law and this is reflected in the Ancient Greek idea of areté (doing the right thing in the right way at the right time). It ought also to be pointed out that for the Ancient Greeks, the organisation of the polis was conducted in the spirit of it not being a mechanical entity like a watch, requiring an understanding of technological mechanical laws, but rather a living organism like Psuché. For Socrates the polis was merely “the soul writ large”.
The Arts, of course, have a place in our Universities, and have a place in relation to other institutions such as libraries, theatres, opera houses etc. The arts have their rituals too which extend back to Ancient Greece. A tragic play, for example imitates life with the purpose of a catharsis of the emotions of fear and pity : a catharsis that is organised rationally by the artist who understands for example that the polis is the soul(human psuché) writ large. These principles can be related to the idea of the beautiful or the sublime and relate to the Metaphysics of Man.
Campbell claims that Society (in the West?) is patriarchal, whilst nature is matrilineal (Page 125). In the context of this discussion it is important to point out that when we think of the University or schools we attended , we refer affectionately to them, using the term “Alma Mater”(our bounteous mother). This indicates, given the presence of Gaia in Greek Mythology, the female goddesses and the femal oracles, that these institutions have more in common with the Platonic Academy where there were female scholars studying, than with Patriarchal Clerical institutions. In Ancient Greece, the “priestesses”, the oracles, were closer to the Philosophers than the clergy of the the Christian Curch who believed Philosophy to have been corrupted by its “pagan” roots.
Campbell claims that the transition from hunting to agriculture favoured the Goddess-based religions, because women played an important role by working in the fields etc., but with the invention of the plough the balance of work shifted back to the males. This, and many other technological innovations over the centuries, reinforced the return to patriarchal patterns. Campbell also claims that geography was a significant factor determining the nature of the gods and goddesses: forests, plains, deserts, mountainous terrain could significantly influence the character of the pantheon of the deities. The shift, however, from hunting animals to growing of crops was a significant change in the Mythologies and the forms of life associated with these life sustaining activities:
“There is a dramatic and total transformation, not just of the myths but of the psyche itself, I think. You see, an animal is a total entity, he is within a skin. When you kill that animal, he’s dead—that’s the end of him. There is no such thing as a self-contained individual in the vegetal world. You cut a plant and another sprout comes. Pruning is helpful to a plant.” (Page 127)
This is an interesting observation that ought to be connected to the Aristotelian distinctions between the plant form of psuché and the animal form of psuché, where it is noted that we and the animals share more with each other than animals share with the plants. This has consequences for our attitude toward death:
“So, in the forest and planting cultures, there is a sense of death as not death somehow, that death is required for new life” (Page 127)
Life and death on such a view is on the continuum of psuché, a continuum where the event of death is less traumatic and dramatic than the event experienced by the hunter killing the animal and described by our poets (“passing through the gates of darkness”). Socrates, conceiving of death as a long dreamless sleep, gives us one philosophcal view which stoically accepts ones fate as a natural consequence of the beings we are (“All men are mortal”) : a view which refuses to deny that life comes to an abrupt, sudden and dramatic end one day.
Campbell also claims that in the patriarchal religions :
“The death and resurrection of a saviour figure is a common motif in all these legends.” (Page 131)
Our Christian religion may be an “Our father” religion but it nevertheless contains vegetal images:
“Jesus is on the Holy Rood, the tree, and he is himself the fruit of the tree. Jesus is the fruit of eternal life which was on the seond forbidden tree in the Garden of Eden. When man ate of the fruit of the first tree, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, he was expelled from the Garden. The Garden is the place of unity, of nonduality of male and female, good and evil, God and human Beings. You eat the duality and you are on the way out. The tree of coming back to the Garden is the tree of immortal life, where you know that I and the father are one.” (Page 133)
It is interesting to add a footnote relating to the Philosophical idea of unity and reconciliation of the opposites of a duality. Heraclitus, we know thought he had achieved divine status when he discovered not just that the world is in flux (one can never step into the same river twice) but that it was logos that helped us to reconcile opposites, for example, the road up is the same road as the road down. Aristotle we know invented the discipline of logic and “discovered” its principles, but compared to Heraclitus, brought us down to earth with the claim that an understanding of logos was part of the human contemplative life where we do not become divine, but rather activate the divine part of our minds, noos. It is noos that provides us with access to transcendence and the Metaphysics of Man and Nature.
The above quote outlines an abstract image of the meaning of this complex parable relating to the Garden of Eden and the fall from the Grace of God. It is clear from this myth that it is our fears and desires that prevented us from enjoying eternal life and immortality. Aristotles adherence to the rituals of reading, writing, and lecturing becomes then, the foundation stone of new form of existence where maturity only comes after the age of 30 years at the end of a long self-actualisation process which probably included a broad understanding of reality as determined by the Greek framework of psuché, arché, areté, diké, epistemé, logos and eudaimonia. Aristotles essence-specifying definition of man, we ought to recall in this context, was “rational animal capable of discourse”. It is important to remember that hylomorphic theory does not claim that as a matter of fact man is rational, but only that he ought to be. Part of the complex task of actualisation involves the catharsis or transformation of our animal-like desires and fears into contemplative objects.
Campbell further maintains that if one dies for a good cause this is a moment we ought to celebrate. He considers the example provided by Schopenhauer of one human being sacrificing their life to save the life of another human being. This, he argues, transcends the instinct for self preservation which reflects itself in the Freudian first task of the ego to protect ones body. The life instinct and the death instinct, for Freud became an important part of what he considered his “mythology of the instincts”, and both were involved in an actualisation process that depended upon a transformation of instincts into various vicissitudes which provided us with sources of satisfaction. Included in this process was the vicissitude of “sublimation”, a defence mechanism which many artists used to channel their creativiity in the right direction. Non-literary Artistic activity also had its own rituals which initiated the artist into their respective art-forms. These forms were in the name of creating something beautiful with perhaps sublime moments in the case of Great Theatrical Art such as that of Shakespearean plays.
In the sphere of spontaeous voluntary action–the sphere of ethical action– Campbell elaborates upon the sacrifice Schopenhauer refers to by recalling a happening from his own personal experience in which a policeman risked his own life to save someone attempting to commit suicide by jumping off a cliff. When the policeman is asked why he risked sacrificing his own life, he gave a Socratic reply, claiming that he would not be able to live with himself if he did not do what he did (Socrates claimed that he would never be able to murder anyone because he would not be able to live with the knowledge that he was a murderer). This is one source of our Ethical Principles and Kant’s ethical categorical Imperative—Life is an end-in-itself. In accordance with this law we must preserve all human life, if we can. It is not clear that we, who have not chosen to serve the community in the form of being a police officer, are called upon in the name of the moral law to risk our own life in order to save someone else. If we do, this may be something that is not merely ethical but sublimely so, because we are ignoring our most basic fear of death in order to do something in the Abstract name of The Good. The idea of a saviour dying for large numbers of people may also be a sublime ethical action, and is of even greater significance. Hence the importance of the death of Jesus who, it was claimed, was dying for the sins of mankind. On those grounds we might include Socrates in the category of “saviours”, dying as he did in the name of “Philosophy” and the right to lead an examined life which might include criticising existing religious opinions (on what constitutes the ideas of the Holy and Justice, for example)
It has been maintained that the roads leading from Athens and Jerusalem to our present-day civilisation are very different roads, leading in very different directions and there is something that rings true in this claim. On the road from Athens lie Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the Academy, Lyceum, the Universities of the Renaissance , Reformation, and Enlightenment. On the road from Jerusalem we find the Middle Ages, the closing of the Philosophical schools, the persecution and torturing of heretics and the burning of women at the stake, everything , that is, we might exprect to find on the road leading to a “Waste Land”. These roads are opposites that cannot be reconciled in thought and require a choice, where we use Aristotelian ideas of psuché, arche´, areté, diké, epistemé, and eudaimonia as well as the Kantian ideas of Freedom, the good-will, and the Cosmopolitan Kingdom of Ends.
The Delphic Podcasts: Review of Campbells “Power of Myth”, Episode 7 Art, Cave paintings, Cathedrals, and the Shaman
Views: 652
Campbell addresses the problem of beauty in the following manner:
“And with respect to the problem of beauty—is this beauty intended? Or is it something that is the natural expression of a beautiful spirit? Is the beauty of the birds song intentional? In what sense is it intentional? Or is it the expression of the bird, the beauty of the birds spirit you might say? I think that way very often about this art. To what degree was the intention of the artist what we would call “aesthetic” or to what degree expressive? And to what degree is the art something that they had simply learned to do that way? When a spider makes a beautiful web, the beauty comes out of the spiders nature. Its instinctive beauty. How much of the beauty of our own lives is about the beauty of being alive? How much of it is conscious and intentional? That is the big question. ” (page 100)
The art being referred to in the above quote is the art of the cave painting, painted during a time when humans did not live in settlements and during a time when death, or “passing through the dark gates” was probably experienced on a regular basis in a relatively small group struggling every day to meet their most basic needs. The “Either/Or” structure alluded to in the above quote appears to eliminate the possibility that both the premise “The bird song is intentional” and the premise “The bird song is expressive of its spirit.”, could both be true. There are of course difficulties with both premises. Animals are beings not capable of discourse and they therefore do not possess the capacity to see that one and the same act can fall under , for example, four different descriptions.
To take the example discussed by Elisabeth Anscombe in her work “Intention”, the bodily action of moving ones arm up and down is done with the intention of operating the pump, with the intention of pumping the water into the house, and with the intention of poisoning the inhabitants of the house. The first description is of the physical action performed by an agents body and it is a condition of the second and both are a condition of the third and so on. “Poisoning the inhabitants of the house” is then an answer to the questions “Why are you moving your arm up and down?, Why are you operating the pump?, Why are you pumping water into the house? The operating of the pump is the reason for moving the arm up and down, and the pumping of the water into the house is the reason for operating the pump and the poisoning of the inhabitants of the house is the reason for pumping the water into the house. Human Instrumental action is rational and dependent upon knowledge that a totality of conditions is necessary for a desired outcome.
Animals, not being capable of discourse (logos) cannot be said to understand that anything they do falls under a decription, but they are capable of purposive behaviour such as hunting, which may involve being in some sense instinctively aware of the conditions necessry for catching the prey. The bird song, similarly, may be one condition for attracting a mate and it would not be very difficult to assert that the bird in some sense is instinctively aware that there is a relation between what it is doing and the possible consequence of attracting a mate. Given these facts it would not be difficult to assert that both premises must be true. There is also no doubt that the bird in singing is naturally expressive of its spirit: the bird is, according to Spinoza, endeavouring to persist in its existence.
O Shaughnessy’s account of “Life” (psuché) in his work “The Will: A dual Aspect Theory”, contains a notion of the will which refers to the ideas of “an impulsive urge to act” and “striving” , and he cites Freud’s theory of the instincts and the ego against a background of firstly: that the first idea of the ego is the body, and secondly, that the sensations of pleasure are differently located throughout the different stages of development of a body that has a long childhood, a longe period of dependency upon its parents. O Shaughnessy’s essentially hylomorphic position thus links the expression of a bird song with the intention of attracting a mate.
Aristotle pointed out in his work “History of Animals” that bird songs as distinguished from shorter bird calls, are learned, and whilst it would be associated with the pleasure/pain of survival, it would nevertheless lack the logos of speech. The consequence of this claim is that human intentional action would be a more complex phenomenon that that of the simpler animals like birds. In accordance with Aristotel’s methodology of the biological investigation of forms of life, thie science of Biology is in agreement that there is a firm associative-relation between the expression of the song and the pleasurable activity of attracting a mate. This is in accordance with Anscombes criterion that an intentional action is one in which a certain sense of the question “Why?” has application. Given, however, O Shaughnessy’s claim that animals are tethered to their environment, and are not therefore as future oriented as human beings, (who can readily represent absent objects through their language), we would not expect to find an embedded sequence of conditions of the kind we find in Anscombes example of poisoning the inhabitants of a house, which is the end of the plot of a story containing relatively abstract objects located in the future.
With more complex animals than birds, however, the intentional action of hunting may well contain a large number of enveloped conditions causally related to each other and to the end of the sequence, which may end in success or failure. The articulation of these enveloped conditions would also, for example, be expressive of the “spirit” of the hunter, a big cat, for example.
The cave painting therefore, can be both viewed as an expression of the spirit of human psuché and an intentional action whose ultimate telos is not entirely clear as yet given the location of the phenomenon in the long distant past. One can of course investigate the cave paintings of contemporary primitive tribes but the time lapse between the two sets of phenomena makes it very difficult to arrive at any categorical claims.
When, however, we move to art objects produced by artists living in larger less primitive societies in which the needs being met are more complex, the nature of the “striving” also becomes more complex, especially given the presence of cultural activities such as story-telling and Philosophical argumentation about the “forms” of phenomena encountered in relation to both the Metaphysics of Man and the Metaphysics of Nature. Indeed, the primary point of the striving in such complex communities perhaps ceases to be survival, but rather the quality and the length of the life that is being lived. There is, however a discernible link between the experience of the cave painting and the paintings in the vault of the Sistine chapel. Campbell, in the context of this discussion sees fundamental similarities in relation to the cave painting and the interior of a modern cathedral which contains an array of intentional objects designed specifically for spiritual purposes.
Perhaps both phenomena invoke responses that are more akin to the experience of awe and wonder characteristic of the sublime, rather than the experience of pleasure associated with the experience of beauty. Campbell elaborates upon the experience one has in walking into a modern cathedral:
“a temple is a landscape of the soul. When you walk into a Cathedral, you move into a world of spiritual images. It is the mother womb of your spiritual life—mother church. All the forms around are significant of spiritual value. Now, in a Cathedral the imagery is in anthropomorphic form. God and Jesus and the Saints are all in human form. And in the caves the images are in animal form. But it is the same thing believe me. The form is secondary. The message is wht is important.”(Page 101)
Campbell argues that the cave-paintings were used to educate young hunters which is a plausible hypothesis, given the cirumstances. If so, the painting would have had an instrumental significance–serving an interest—which runs contrary to the Kantian account of the experience of beauty. This experience, Kant maintains, is not instrumental but rather associated with a categorical disinterested form of pleasure that is in turn related to the harmony of the faculties of the imagination and understanding. The fact that we know so little about the life of these primitive peoples does, however, suggest that we hesitate before categorising the experience of those associated with the cave paintings as “beautiful”.
Campbell is surely correct in his claim that our bodies are esentially the same as they were during the era of Cro-Magnin man, but we ought also to point out that the human form of life has significantly altered in this period of 40,000 years. During this period there has occurred the transition from the nomadic to the more settled form of life in larger communities with a greater diversity of purposes and aims. Survival needs were more easily met in these larger communities (longevity increases). The agenda of man then changes from mere survival to the quality of life, owing to the increase in the complexity of institutions (the law, education, etc) and the range of human powers which needed to be developed in relation to them.
These powers, for example, being capable of discourse and reasoning, were essence-defining powers for Aristotle and both contributed to creation of the sciences and the arts, which have proliferated significantly over the last 2500 years. We call this settled form of life “civilisation” and whilst it has had its critics over the centuries, it appears that it is the best means we as human forms of life have for achieving the quality of life the Ancient Greeks referred to via the term “eudaimonia” (good spirited flourishing life).
An Aristotelian self-actualisation process is needed not just for the development of what Freud would call a strong personal ego but also in order to avoid the extreme forms of life connected to striving after Wealth and Honour without due respect for the Principle of the Golden Mean. What Aristotle did not comment upon in his investigations of human Psuché, is the long childhood or period of dependency we humans experience. Campbell notes that that he is familiar with men who need psychoanalytical treatment to assist in breaking the chains of this dependency upon their fathers (Page 102)
It is not clear whether the phenomenon of discontentment with our civilisations has increased with the disappearance of the formative influences of religion, mythology and art, but Campbell does insist that we need, and are in search of a planetary mythology. He evaluates modern movies as one means of replacing initiation rituals for the youth into society, and notes that the stories or plots of the movies we encounter, are not created responsibly with a concern for the experience of Transcendence. He believes that the lack of effective initiation rituals has had the consequence that many male youths join gangs which have a problematic relation to the laws and morals of society. Females, he argues, are not affected as much because the biological changes to their body, for example, menstruation, are in themselves dramatic signals fo what their future role in society is going to be. Campbell elaborates upon this point:
“..the boy does not have a happening of this kind, so he has to be turned into a man and voluntarily become a servant of something greater than himself.” (Page 104)
Campbell also notes that in primitive societies ungovernable children who refused to participate cooperatively in relation to initiation rites, might be killed, and this partly reflected a different attitude to death than we moderns have, and partly an undeveloped respect for the dignity of each living human being as an end-in-themselves which has become our heritage from the Ancient Greeks. Campbell claims that it is the artist alone who attempts to shoulder the cultural burden of assuming the history and responsibility of mythology and the various rituals that were once so important to us. Campbell characterises the artist thus:
“There is an old romantic idea in German, das Vol dichtet, which says that the ideas and poetry of the traditional cultures come out of the folk. They do not. They come out of an elite experience, the experience of people particularly gifted whose ears are open to the song of the universe. These people speak to the folk, and there is an answer from the folk, which is then received as an interaction.. But the first impulse in the shaping of a folk tradition comes from above, not from below.” (Page 107)
T S Eliot, one of Campbell’s favourite poets, was writing poetry whilst personally struggling as a Christian with this problem of the disappearance of rituals that included the disappearance of the awe and wonder connected with the experience of the sublime transcendence related to the Metaphysics of Nature and the Metaphysics of Man. Campbells idea of the song of the universe can be combined with Eliots idea of the dance being at the “still point of the turning world”, but neither of these ideas seem to address our metaphysical concerns. The “song” of the universe is obviously a metaphor, but it is interesting in that it links in an interesting fashion the Metaphysics of Man with the Metaphysics of Nature, which perhaps Eliots notion of “the dance” does not. The link the idea of the song establishes is with the idea of the “Music of the spheres”, and also with the idea of the sound “Aum” that we find in Eastern mysticism.
The fundamental form of Aristotelian “Prime matter” may well be energy as such, but sound waves are one manifestation of energy. Light waves are obviously another fundamental mode of energy which may be more closely related to the conditions of life as such, relating to the temperature conditions for the body and the sense data communicated to the organ of the eye. That sense data as such is essentially two- dimensional according to O Shaughnessy, and the interesting question that needs to be asked is how a three dimensional “model” of the world comes to manifest itself in our thoughts. The most obvious candidate is that this three dimensional understanding occurs in the sensory motor spehere via the use of a body-image which is mobilised in intentional action.
Music, defined as “sound pleasurably organised in time” is, no doubt, an interesting phenomenon in both primitive and civilised societies (even if not all primitive societies possessed musical instruments), especially in relation to dance, where the aim of the activity was to induce a changed state of consciousness that transcends our everyday states.
Campbell introduces an idea of elitism into the debate but fails to note that there are many different kinds of elitism. Some kinds would be frowned upon by the Ancient Philosophers, for example, the elite of the powerful, or the elite of the wealthy oligarchs whose major motivation was to benefit themselves or their particular group within society. The elites of the gifted or the educated, on the other hand, would appear to be more in line with the agenda of these Philosophers. Many Greek stories have as their theme the hubris of individuals who lead themselves and everyone around them onto paths of ruin and destruction. These Philosophers understood that not everyone was in tune with the “song of the universe” or “music of the spheres”. The possession and understanding of higher mental powers such as understanding, judgement and reasoning would seem to be necessary to fully accept the responsibility of continuing the heritage we have recieved from both mythology and religion and this requires an understanding of both Aristotelian Hylomorphic and Kantian Critical theorising. Given Campbells claim that a shaman or seer is a being who has undergone an overwhleming psychological experience perhaps Freudian theory is also relevant to this discussion:
“The shaman is a person, male or female who, in his late childhood or early youth has an overwhelming psychological experience that turns him totally inward. Its a kind of schizophrenic crack-up. The whole unconscious opens up and the shaman falls into it. The shaman experience has been described many, many times. It occurs all the way from Siberia right through the Americas down to Tierra del Fuego.”( Page 107)
We find ourselves once again on the territory of an earlier discussion relating to mystics and their ability to swim rather than sink into a psychosis-like mental state. The differentiation between the mental state of the mystic and the mentally ill patient would seem certainly to require Freudian theory for a full articulation. The difference would seem to reside in the extent to which the unconscious material which erupts into consciousness does so in a cathartic fashion, thus strengthening the individuals ability to experience the associated desires and fears in a spirit of areté (in the right way and at the right time).
The bushmen of the Khalahari are still to be found dancing all night around their women until the overwhelming psychological experience causes an individual to collapse at the peak of a frenzy. The individual concerned reports his experiences, and as a result is regarded as a shaman. Campbell notes that whipping a whole group into a frenzy often occurs in wartime situations immediately before battle.
It ought also to be noted in this context that such an overwhelming psychological experience is viewed negatively by both Christianity and Medicine. In the former case the suspicion is that the individual has been possessed by an evil spirit and in the latter case the individual is daignosed with a mental illness and sedated with medicine. Nietzsche, Campbell notes, warns us about not taking the phenomenon more seriously:
“Be careful in casting out the devils, you cast out the best thing thats in you.” (Page 110)
Julian Jaynes in his work on the Origins of Consciousness is also however hesitant about the medical response to frenzied hallucinatory behaviour, believing that what we are experiencing might be cathartic. If this were so, then we ought to see the patient taking possession of the state rather than the state overwhelming him. This, however, does not appear to occur if the hallucinatory frenzy is allowed to run its course. Perhaps some specific technique of embedding these experiences in a linguistic and cognitive framework is required if the experience is to become fully cathartic.
Delphic Podcasts. Review of Joseph Campbells Power of Myth”. Episode 5 AI assisted Julian Hale
Views: 705
Chapter Two, entitled “The journey Inward” poses many interesting questions in the domains of Metaphysics, Poetry, Biology, and Psychology and much analysis is required that must wait for a later work on Mythology. Campbell cites the following transformational/developmental sequence of events:
The black moment—-transformation—–the light of salvation
Philosophers of course will immediately recognise two items of importance. Firstly, the work of the Aristotelian formal cause in the actualisation of the essence of the human psuché (the rational animal capable of discourse), and secondly, the Platonic Allegory of the cave is an image that lies embedded in the above transcendental process of self- actualisation. We recall, however, in that allegory that it was Philosophers who returned to the cave of ignorance from which they came, to liberate their fellow men obsessed by the play of images on the cave wall. Those that could be persuaded could then look forward to a life of freedom in the sunlight.
Bill Moyers, Campbell’s interviewer, sets the stage for the chapter by claiming:
“These myths speak to me because they express what I know inside is true.”(Page 44)
Moyers, in this claim, is not referring to some psychological process of introspection that mystically guarantees the truth of what one “introspects”, but is rather referring to the existential ground of Being which he is prepared to call “the unconscious” (in the spirit of Jung rather than Freud). Campbells response to this claim was:
“That’s right. You’ve got the same body with the same organs and energies, that Cro-Magnon man had 30,000 years ago. Living a human life in New York City or living a human life in the caves, you go through the same stages of childhood, coming to sexual maturity, transformation of the dependency of childhood into the responsibility of manhood or women hood, marriage, then failure of the body, gradual loss of its powers, and death. You have the same body,, the same bodily experiences and so you respond to the same images. For example, a constant image is that of the conflict of the eagle and the serpent. The serpent bound to earth, the eagle in spirited flight—isn’t that conflict something we all experience? And then the two amalgamate, we get a wonderful dragon, a serpent with wings. All over the earth people recognise these images.” (Pages 44-45)
The Freudian and Jungian ideas of the unconscious differ both in their origin and nature. Freud’s idea is undoubtedly psychological in the sense of being a part or an aspect of a mind that is formed from the energies of the organ system of the body. Freud’s idea is also psychological rather than strictly biological because Freud claims that he is dealing with the psychical representatives of the instincts. Jung’s images, according to Campbell have their origin in the biology of the human psuché, in the emotions and feelings that the organs generate in concert.
The transformation of the mind of the Freudian patient that we encounter after the catharsis of bringing unconscious representations into the “light” of consciousness, occurs in the unique context of an animal that passes through a very long childhood and in doing so, needs to master the various processes of the Oedipus/Elektra complex. Processes which assist in the maturation of the individual and the initiation into a form of life in which one takes responsibility for ones own life, through taking responsibility for various roles related to ones love-life and work-life. To love and to Work adequately require a strong ego and a manageable superego, Freud claims. Freud defines the ego as a precipitate of object losses over the period of ones life, indicating that he believes in the Greek regulation of pleasure/desire by a reality principle following various principles. Various defence mechanisms of the ego are brought into play in the individuals love-life and in his work-life. If, for example he decides to become an artist and the Oedipus/Elektra complex has been resolved in favour of a strong ego the sexual component is replaced by a nonsexual form of substitute satisfaction, and the defence mechanism of “sublimation” will regulate the transformational process that will hopefully take the individual the rest of the way to the “good-spirited flourishing life” (eudaimonia). On this journey identifications with key transitional authority figures become important, if this process of self-actualisation is to take place satisfactorily. The Ego needs, for example, to be able to tolerate substantial losses if Culture is to be successfully introduced into this personality equation. It is here that Mythology may perhaps play a substantial role in the catharsis of the artist’s life: a role in which both desires and fears need to be regulated by the Reality Principle.
Turning to our Christian Mythology/Religion: Our “saviour” endured betrayal and a painful premature death, which he needed to be psychologically prepared for. Jesus accepted his fate in Greek stoical style with the words, “Forgive them father for they know not what they do”, but almost spoiled the whole plot at the end by the lament ” Father, why has thou abandoned me!” One can of course argue that this was a cry of human agony, but it certainly will not have sent positive messages to his disciples. Jesus is nevertheless a “symbol”, perhaps a sublime symbol, of the importance of salvation for mankind. The message of the life and times of Jesus is meant to have a cathartic affect upon the egos of humanity, pointing to the necessity for sacrifice, if one is to lead a good spirited flourishing life. This moment before his death, when he wondered if his heavenly father had abandoned him, was the black moment Campbell referred to earlier. His passing away from this world thus needed a moment of light for the whole experience to make sense. A “life-after death” would appear to be the only way out of a dead end in which life must come to a final and inevitable end— a long dreamless sleep as Socrates put the matter. But with the categorical hylomorphism of Aristotle it is possible that life in its essence must be defined as something that comes to a final and irrevocable end. If this is the essence- specifying-definition of life, it would then be a contradiction to claim that there was another life after death. After all Socrates who was agnostic about what death was, left us with the possibility that it was a long dreamless sleep. Plato did not twist the end of the Socratic tale by picturing Socrates to be alive somewhere living in eternity with the Theory of Forms. The tale of Socrates did not suffer, and he is in the only sense possible “immortalised” in Plato’s writings, partly through his response to the unjust death sentence passed upon him by the Athenian state. The circumstances of the death of Jesus and the death of Socrates were indeed very different. Jesus had come to save the sinners of the world, almost all of us, whereas we find none of that Christian pessimism about man in Greek Philosophy or Mythology. We do find an oracular pessimism relating to whether mans creations can ever lead to anything other than ruin and destruction, that is to say death may be the inevitable fate of civilisation and the only reasonable individual response to such a state of affairs is to live out the time we have in Socratic fashion. There does seem to be in the refusal of the Greeks to twist the tale of life into something that transcends our knowledge completely, a more balanced view of life than that we find in the Christian scriptures. The same point can be made in reaction to all the resurrection myths that we find in the world mythologies, namely, that the idea of a life after death seems to be a Freudian wish-fulfillment, an idea born of a wish for life and a fear of death. For Freud, Reality demands the catharsis of such a desire and fear, and this may be the Socratic/Platonic/Aristotelian view. The Greeks seem, that is,to focus more on the idea of “The Good” than the idea of evil and sin. The death of Socrates was therefore never a sacrificial act ,but rather a pedagogical lesson relating to linking the ideas of “The Good” and “Death”. With Socrates we are not dealing with a Being hidden behind the scenes but rather with difficult to understand transcendental principles (arché) of life (psuché) which include episteme (knowledge) and diké (justice). The Greek narrative of Socrates urges us to lead the examined life and see what happens. There are no guarantees that it will all end well. Given the oracular proclamation relating to human creations and ruin and destruction, the best that can emerge from such a story is “hope”. Kant gave voice to this pedagogical lesson by claiming that leading a rational worthwhile life would indeed be a good-in-itself and would justify a hope for happiness.
Socrates, through his method of elenchus, may well have thought that what he was doing, in the medium of discourse was cathartic, was a kind of “talking cure”, which would bring his interlocutors into a closer relation with reality, and also simultaneously improve their knowledge of themselves. The unjust nature of his death suggests that his method, to some extent, failed, if viewed over his whole life, but this was not his own death-bed view and we ought also to recall that both Plato and Aristotle followed in his footsteps. Aristotle of course replaced face to face confrontation and Platonic dialogue with written academic logos. As a consequence of the work of all three of these great Philosophers, in a teacher pupil relation wit each other, the historical verdict favours not demoting Socrates to a lower status just because his method of elenchus deflated the over blown egos of those authorities who thought they knew what they did not know. (the Cardinal “sin” for the oracles).
The Socratic ego is strong enough and has rid itself of all dependency in its self-sufficiency, making no reference to any father or divine being when the tragedy is upon Socrates. This indeed may be the only genuine fatal criticism of authorities who must know what they claim to know if we, who depend upon them, are to avoid the ruin and destruction prophesied—whatever the cost for the individual.
Mythological monsters like the Minotaur and the unnamed thousand-headed monster populated the dialogues of Plato. The latter was a symbol of what happens when desires multiply in an organism (each head representing a desire) to such an extent, that even should reason determine to cut off a head, a new head immediately grows to replace it. The monster is a representation of what happens when raw desires( Epithumia) are not controlled by Reason. Monsters are there to be slain in Plato’s dialogues and in Greek mythology, for example the Minotaur (half man half bull) living in the Cretan cave of Daedalus until it was slain by Theseus.
Theseus is famed for the unification of Attica and also played important roles in helping Hercules through his trials and enduring a series of trials of his own. In the narrative about Theseus we also encounter the problematic relation that can exist between fathers and sons. King Aegeus, Theseus’s father had instructed his son that upon returning from his dangerous adventures he should exchange his black funeral sails for white neutral sails. Theseus forgot his promise, and his father committed suicide upon sight of the incoming black sails. This deed was of sufficient magnitude for the Greeks to name the sea he jumped into, the Aegean sea. Theseus, like Jesus was reputed to have two fathers, one mortal and one divine, (Poseidon, god of the sea). Theseus did not however, die like Jesus, he died by being cast off a cliff on the island of Scyros, and the Delphic Oracle ordered the retrieval of his bones to be buried in the country he united, namely Attica. It is clear from the narratives from Greek Mythology, that it was the fate of cities not individuals that were of primary importance, The Spartans were prepared to sacrifice themselves for honour and Sparta, and the Athenians for justice and Athens. Whether or not individuals were to find salvation via their faith in whatever religion, would hardly have interested Socrates, Plato or Aristotle. Focusing on the sins of the forefathers of man to explain the “fallen” nature of mankind would have mystified the Ancient Greek Philosophers, who believed in leading the examined contemplative life in accordance with the knowledge of good and evil. The thought of having been cast out of the Garden of Eden and future generations being punished for the eating from the fruit of the tree of knowledge would have cast doubt upon the Being who would do such things.
Campbell claims that a myth is the dream of a society and we know that from Theseus down to Socrates, Plato and Aristotle via Solon (one of the seven sages of Greece), that unity of the polis was a matter of transcendental importance given the oracular proclamation that “everything created by Humans is destined for ruin and destruction” Plato’s work “The Republic”, attempted to unite myths related to the Metaphysics of Nature and the Metaphysics of Morals: the Sun was the allegory of the Good bringing both the heat the human psuché needs to function, and the light the human needs to both see and understand. It seems that in the very early days of Philosophy, myth was needed to support the principles of argumentation, if one was to make sense of the unity of Being. Aristotle de-mystified his argumentation by placing his moral faith in the laws of the state, the Rhetoric of Politics and “the Good of Ethics. He replaced mysticism and magic with Principles such as that of the Golden Mean, non-contradiction, sufficient reason etc. Throughout the Dark Ages he was referred to as “The Philosopher” because his hylomorphic Philosophy of Change provided us with the conditions to both Know Ourselves and repair the insidious affects of the divisive conflict between the oligarchs and their “democratic” sons lusting after the power of their fathers in the name of freedom.
Campbell’s high praise for the USA in the light of the advent of the MAGA movement was historically premature given that a tyrant oligarch was elected twice and upon the second occasion proceeded to dismantle all the significant institutions of “Democracy” as understood by the Europeans: the justice system, (including the Supreme Court) law-enforcement, the role of the military, the role of the media, scientific institutions, foreign policy, finance, immigration etc. Rationality has been displaced with an extreme right wing agenda that oscillates between the criminal and the ridiculous.
The Democracy we inherited from the Greeks and a long history (millennia) of the rule of common sense and principles included the Principles (arché) of logic, the sciences, the arts and the Principle of the Golden Mean. We also inherited ides for an educational system that aimed to enlighten a growing middle class that prised the values of knowing themselves, and the nature of the society they lived in. The oligarchs of Ancient Greece with their lack of “knowledge” were indeed laying the foundations for the coming to fruition of the oracular prophesy relating to ruin and destruction.
It was another of the seven sages, namely Thales with his mystical claim “All things are full of Gods” that began the long uncomfortable relation between the rationality of knowledge/philosophy and the spiritualism and mysticism of mythology/religion. Aristotle provided us with the first systematic account of the relations between these two competing views of the world, a task that Kant elaborated upon in his Critical Philosophy, which saw a place for a rational idea of God related to his Categorical Imperative and telos of the Kingdom of Ends.
The narratives of the OT and NT are not closely aligned with the idea of philosophical rationality we inherited from Thales, Solon, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle etc. This might be due to the fact that Philosophical discourse is in a dialectical argumentative form that was meant for both aesthetic political/legal appreciation. These are clearly different forms of discourse to the OT and NT narratives that use images, symbols and metaphors to accomplish their persuasive goals. The Ancient Greek concept of areté, for example, was related to a correct or justified system of beliefs that aimed either at The True” or “The Good”. The criteria of judgement that is used to evaluate the appeal of a series of images representing various states of affairs must be backed by an appropriate principle. The Energy Regulation and Pleasure-Pain Principles operating as they do at the Biological and lower Psychological levels do not however engage readily with the transcendent and continuous nature of being. The image of the serpent for example is a positive one in most Cultures but not with the Hebrew Yahweh who curses the serpent by removing its legs and making it crawl on its belly as a punishment for its evil influence. The female Eve is also persona non grata with the Hebrew God who constructed her from Adams Rib. Mortal sex and reproduction too was not good enough to produce Jesus whose mother ,Maria, needed to be impregnated by the Holy Ghost whilst remaining a virgin. The Christian sect, in many ways was very different to the other religious sects of the time, yet the imaginativeness of the writers of the Gospels was, in the matter of the birth of the son of God via the Holy Spirit, indeed impressive. Jesus according to them was born without pain, like an idea in the mind, except that he was born in physical life-form but not according to biological principles. The Divine Being, according to Aristotle in his work on “Metaphysics”, thinks about thinking. We humans, on the other hand, in our finitude, can only think something about something. We need, however to turn to the Ethics of Spinoza to understand that the divine Being can take an infinite number of forms but we human beings, can only know of divinity via two forms, thought and extension in reality.
When the divine Being thinks about thinking this manifests itself in changes in the physical universe, which is one with divine thinking. This kind of description/explanation is transcendent for us because we can only think something(represent) about something (extension in reality). Spinoza argues it is by forming adequate ideas and reasoning according to the principles of non-contradiction and sufficient reason, that we can lift the veil off the face of Divine Being. Kant, in the context of this discussion, reminds us of the inscription on one of the statues representing the divine Being at the Temple of Isis:
“No human has ever succeeded in lifting this veil.”
This Being declares itself to be all that was, that is, and that will be.
To the extent that, as Campbell points out, the divine is within us, as well as all around us, is the extent to which we can in some sense be said to have something in common with the divine being, but this might nevertheless still preclude us from being able to think something about this divine Being.
Campbell refers in this chapter to the symbolic account from the Upanishads in which the creator “realised” that he is the creation. If a human using a divine principle were to come to the same conclusion then they (per impossibile) would have identified with the divine principle of creation (Page 52). Knowing oneself in this kind of context, is knowing what one cannot know or think—-the criterion the Delphic oracle used to identify Socrates as the wisest man in Athens.
For both Ancient Greek Mythology and Ancient Greek Philosophy the divine is not just good-in-itself, but also what Plato called “The Form of the Good”, from which all good consequences flow, including the good which flows through us into the world. There is one complication which ought to be observed in the above discussion relating to Spinozas claim that we can only “know” of the divine being in two of a possible infinite number of modes, namely thought and extension in reality: namely the complication that when we are made aware of the fact that our human origin is in material realm of extension, a fundamental limitation of human psuché presents itself. We are more likely to lift the veil of essence off material things, than things in the realm of thought, which are also related to the other infinite modes of Being. Kant attempts to deal with these issues by distinguishing between the Metaphysics of Nature and the Metaphysics of Morals. The former would certainly include the material basis of life and its principles, including the energy regulation principle and the pleasure-pain principle. The emergence of life from material surely is in accordance with the energy regulation principle, and ascending levels of complexity resulted in the emergence of the pleasure-pain principle. The Perception of pain by a dog kicked by a passer-by in a street in Greece invoked the wrath of Pythagoras, who is said to have complained at the treatment on the grounds of the dog having a soul(psuché-life) The dog wished for better treatment as all complex living beings do. A dog may not be rational or be capable of discourse but it can nevertheless give voice to being unjustly treated. A dog, as we learn from the writings of O Shaughnessy, is tethered immediately to its environment in a way that we húman psuché are not. We have the capacity to relate to representations of absent environments, events, people, objects etc. We can also form very complex ideas such as “Lets build Rome on this site!” The reality of such an idea formed eons ago stands as testament to our powers to build cities that endure, thereby contesting the oracular proclamations relating to ruin and destruction. Of course the Rome that stands where it does today is not the same as the one that fell into ruin and destruction in accordance with the oracles proclamation. Rome never succeeded in replacing Greece, in spite of, or perhaps because of, its military and engineering prowess. Ancient Greece was the birthplace for these powers, but it was also the venue for the birth of the use of categorical reasoning that would in the Enlightenment free us from our childhood dependency upon our religions and mythologies. There are, of course, as Campbell testifies to, adult religions and mythologies, and those of Ancient Greece must be counted amongst these. We ought also to recall that it was Ancient Greek Philosophy that took us into the rational realm of the categorical logos which transcended the dialectical interplay of opposites such as good and evil, male and female etc. Heraclitus, we recall, claimed that with logos we can realise that the road going up the hill is the same road going down the hill. It was Aristotle who formalised the categorical thinking of logos into logic and began the real philosophical attempt to lift a corner of the veil from the face of transcendence.