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Review of The Power of Joseph Campbell,s Myth (Published 1991, Anchor Books) and the love of Sophia.
Campbell notes that when men become slaves to their society, we dwell in what he calls “monster-states”. Such states have no need of mythologies or Philosophies because they are technological societies in the sense that instrumental reasoning dominates rational thinking in all areas of activity and knowledge. In such an environment ethical thinking, directed at the sense of what Plato and Aristotle called “The Good”, and Kant referred to as the realm of the good will, becomes marginalised.
In all societies one of the main challenges to progress is the induction of the youth into the most important “forms of life” that constitute the society. In primitive societies this occurred through mythologically inspired rituals which, for example, inducted the youth into “manhood” or inducted couples into family-life via a marriage ritual. The long childhood of man obviously raises questions about the timing of the induction of the youth into manhood, especially if that entails taking full responsibility for ones life. This is why in modern enlightened societies much of the time in childhood and adolescence is spent in institutions dedicated to the ancient values of epistemé (knowledge), areté(doing the right thing in the right way at the right time), arché(principles, foundations), diké(justice–getting what one deserves), aletheia (truth), and last but not least eudaimonia (a good spirited flourishing life). Such institutions have in the past created the morphogenetic space for the living of a life in accordance with the above value-system, but questions have been raised by Hannah Arendt about the last “terrible century” (20th century) we relatively recently lived through.
Campbell believes, having been born, brought up and educated in this terrible century, that we have lost our bearings because of the collapse of Mythological and Religious thinking. He does not include, as many would , the collapse of Philosophical thinking in his analysis, which is a curious omission given his very astute references to Kant in his work “The Inner Reaches of Outer Space” and given the fact that Kantian thinking almost collapsed with the attack by Hegel from Berlin University.
Bill Moyers in the first interview of this series asked Campbell about the role of myths in modern society and received the following reply:
“They make them up themselves. This is why we have graffiti all over the city. These kids have their own gangs and their own initiations and their own morality, and they’re doing the best they can. But they’re dangerous because their own laws are not that of the city. They have not been initiated into the society.” (P.9)
In the follow-up to this comment, Campbell then claims that the reason there is so much violence in the American society is due to the absence of what he calls an “ethos”. He further claims that it is only the law and lawyers that hold the society together, Bill Moyers responds to this point by invoking De Tocqueville’s work, “Democracy in America”, claiming in his turn that Tocqueville discovered on his visit to the country 160 years ago, a “tumult of anarchy”. Campbell eleborates upon his position that we are now living in a “demythologised” world by referring to the education Americans receive:
“What we are learning in our schools is not the wisdom of life. We’re learning technologies, we’re getting information. There’s a curious reluctance on the part of the faculties to indicate the life values of their subjects. In our sciences today–and this includes anthropology, linguistics, the study of religions, and so forth—there is a tendency to specialisation:” (Page 11)
We ought to recall in this context that this interview was recorded over 40 years ago when computer technology was in its infancy but the technology of the moving photograph or film was in its ascendency. This was occurring during a time when mythology, religion and various other disciplines were being subjected to increasing pressures of specialisation in the paradoxical context of globalisation: a context that demanded messaging that was both universal and necessary to use the criteria of Kant’s principle of sufficient reason. The computer too, was an image-based rather than a voice based technology (like radio) and for philosophers this raises the question of the possible relation of techné to epistemé (knowledge).
In a work entitled “Philosophy and AI: Artificial Intelligence and its Discontents” this issue is raised by referring to Plotinus, an ancient thinker from the Platonic school of Philosphy:
“Plotinus subscribed to a theory of the soul (psuché) that would reject confusing artefacts with “forms of life”. When he discusses the senses and sensation there is no confusion of, for example, biologically related visual imageswith the automated digital visual images (ADVI’s) that are so commonly encountered in the world of artificial intelligence. There is, that is, a clear recognition of the difference in distinction between techné and epistemé. This is part of the knowledge the Oracle and everyday Greek took for granted, seeing in the former the need for a calculative form of reasoning that does not follow the principles of theoretical reasoning involved in epeistemological (knowledge() claims.” (Philosophy and AI, James, M., R., D., Lambert Academic Press, Berlin, 2024, P.2)
So-called “monster states” do not use principle-based knowledge but rather employ the logos of the monster, which is dedicated to instrumentally destroying and devouring its enemies. There is, we know, partly thanks to Plato, no reasoning with monsters whose modus operandi is violence. Monsters are not endowed with psuché-like feelings and passions. They live in an atmosphere of violent desires and fears. Many myths of course contain stories of monsters and their terrible deeds, and these may seem to have disappeared during our modern periods of secularisation and globalisation. Modern monsters are instead embodied in the killing machines or weapons we have invented, or in the human monsters who themselves have become killing machines. This latter reminds us of the Aristotelian comment upon the nature of man which caims that he is both potentially the best of animals as well as the worst of animals. It was, for example, a commonplace of the “terrible century” to label the tyrants of that century and their henchmen ( for example, Eichmann) as “monsters”, a label Hannah Arendt vehemently rejected.
The secularisation and globalisation processes have left us in a relation of dependence upon our machines and computers which we have paradoxically classified as “artficially intelligent”. Globalisation has manifested the phenomenon of the proliferation of “technically intelligent automata” (TIA’s), which many now claim are necessary for human progress and some may even claim are necessary for human existence in the future.
If we cast our minds back to the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s of the previous “terrible century” the artefacts/art of the day included films experienced in the dark cave of the bioscope or cinema. The images on the wall were moving and mysteriously magical, images possessing enveloping qualities combined to appeal to the imagination and the senses. In the beginning of the genre of the Western, violence was contextualised and the heroes appeared to possess an inner worth difficult to define. These films were one modern response to the secular phenomenon described as “Deus Absconditis”, the phenomenon of the “absent god”, in a world searching for “the meaning of life”. Campbell specifically refutes this abstract search, claiming that what we demand from myth and religion is not a meaning but an experience of life, an experience of the rapture or bliss of leading a good life. In the cave of the cinema we find one of the more modern responses to the demythologisation process and deus absconditis. Given that the image was such an important part of this response, perhaps we should turn to Philosophy for an analysis of this curious mechanical “intelligent” phenomenon. Stanley Cavell in his work “The World Viewed” (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1971) pointed to an important ontological characterisation of the mechanically produced photograph:
” an immediate fact about the medium of the photograph is that it is not a painting.A photograph does not present us with “likenesses” of things: it presents us, we want to say, with the things theselves” (P.17)
Cavell claims that a cultural wish to escape the subjectivity of art was born during the era of the Reformation which is a startling claim given the close proximity of this period to the Renaissance which celebrated subjectivity and the logos of “forms of life (psuché). Film was composed of a sequence of photographs in motion, that Cavell claims removed the human from the equation of the the creation of the object. We are dealing here with mechanical images and not biologically constituted images, and there is no doubt that , in the former, the component of human creativity has been marginalised. In biologically constituted images we are dealing with something which is a consequence of the interaction of a constellation of living organs and the facilitation of neuronal pathways to, and from, the eyes. Films, like Shakespeare plays, are created with the help of scripts which contain “stage” directions as well as dialogue. Now Shakespeare plays were designed to be “transcendental spectacles” celebrating life in its various forms as were the plays created by the poets of Ancient greece. What we moderns lack however, are plays of the form of Platonic and Aristotleian dialogues which possessed philosophical content designed to address not the everyday questions of life, but rather those aporetic questions of magnitude which required the search for, and use of, principles in the attempts to answer them.
Heroic struggles during the time of Socrates were probably centred around the virtue of physical courage, embodied by both Socrates as a soldier, and the Spartans who so despised Philosophy, confusing it with the Sophist activity of the period. The death sentence of Socrates and the way in which he responded to it, provided Plato with a new type of intellectual hero, which in turn prepared the ground for the Hylomorphism of Aristotle: a philosophy that found a place for mythological stories and philosophical theories such as a theory of the Form-Matter-relation. Plato’s and Aristotle’s dialogues certainly had a metaphysical/transcendental denotation which very few films could claim was part of their intentional structure. Dialogue occurs in flms but it is everyday discourse where everyday ideas of knowledge and justice, for example, are intended, yet do not reach the level of complexity we can find in Shakespeare plays or Greek tragedies. The themes of the romantic and the heroic struggle would , for Freud, be instances of activities that are striving for substitute satisfactions.
Comparing the way in which these popular films dealt with the more serious issues of life, compared with the way in which the Church conceived of these issues, would inevitably give rise to a judgement in favour of the Church, and its narratives and institutions.
Detective movies were also principally organised around instrumental means-ends reasoning, but in these works there are at least attempts to illustrate the importance of eliminating ones prejudices, and a method of investigation which relies on the knowledge of the physical world, life, and psychological motivation (popularly conceived). Comparison with Shakespeare plays reveals a very different dramatis personae .The fate of Emperors, Kings, countries, Princes and Nobles are surely matters that are of greater magnitude than the fate of tramps, cowboys, indians, gangsters, and detectives. Everyday tragedies replaced the tragedies of great magnitude for a society. The awe and wonder an audience may have felt witnessing a Greek tragedy or a Shakespeare play where everyday emotions such as sympathy, pity and fear, were “sublimated”–(that is, conceived of in terms of a transcendental ideals of the world and the self) –have become philosophically suspect and are suffering the same fate as mythical narratives. In Aristotelian terms it seems as if idealism is being replaced with a type of functional/instrumental materialism which has no transcendental denotation, and all dispute revolves around different “interpretations” of what is happeing in a completely phenomenal world.
So, when Stanley Cavell suggests that film leaves us with the impression that we are witnesses to what the world might look like to a God, we must admit to being somewhat surprised. Surely, we might argue, this impression loses its force when we pose uncomfortable questions relating to whether in fact an automated process can be conceived of as “Intelligent” (which must be the minumum qualification for being divine).
If film is to provide us with what Campbell refers to as a Global “Mythology of the Planet”, what has been claimed so far casts suspicion on the thesis that Myth, or indeed any narrative in the form of the events of the everyday life of a particular ethnic community, could capture the complexities of a metaphysics of nature and a metaphysics of morals. Both Aristotelian and Kantian, and perhaps also Wittgensteinian Philosophy, would argue that technical intelligence or so-called “artificial intelligence”, cannot fully understand the transcendental/metaphysical aspects of either the physical or the moral world. Film, of course, is not merely a designed sequence of images but also uses language in various complex ways. The language used, however, does not possess a historical relation to the Philosophical theories that have evolved and developed systematically over the ages, with for example, Kantian Critical Philosophy being an elaboration upon Aristotelian Hylomorphic Theory, Indeed the words used seem to be used neither poetically nor philosophically. The product of film seems to have emerged as part of a technical revolution which later evolved into the products of the computer and the internet. These phenomena might initially have been favourably received by a Philosopher who might have intepreted them as being merely the media for a possible bearer of Philosophical discourse. The principle of Specialisation, however, as we have pointed out, is a principle that runs contrary to the more universal principles of the categorical reasoning that occurs in all our sciences. Our Culture appears to have undergone a reduction during this technological revolution and this has had serious consequences for our educational systems which also have been subject to the principle of specialisation and various pragmatic/instrumental revolutions during the 70’s and 80’s.
There is also no doubt that there is more than a grain of truth in Marshall McLuhan’s claim that the medium has become the message in a world that has become prematurely globalised. Stanley Cavell insightfully characterised the spirit of the modern by claiming that in modern art, for example, the current practice of the activity has a questionable relation to its history. Empty canvasses which claim to be paintings, 4 minutes 23 seconds of performed silence which claims to be “music”, ready made urinals exhibited in museums claiming to be works of sculpture, all testify to some kind of revolution in art which may be related to Stanley Cavells claim that the automation of the world viewed, is connected to the difficulty of art activity to appeal to any audience. What is certainly the case is that such modern works of art do not appeal to any of the transcendental principles we find in the moral sciences. Some kind of revolution appears to have occurred in art, but its exact nature remains to be defined. Is Art dead or dying or is it leading a new form of life.? That is the question.
The dream-images of film appear to be related to the dream-images of mythological narratives. Every film, however, aims to tell a different story but an analysis of the use of language in these works reveal that it is embedded in a form of life that does not have any scientific or transcendent intent. In these cases it is the images that are intended to produce, not the Kantian harmony between the faculties of the imagaination and the understanding, but rather sensational and emotional responses which certainly meet the criterion of Campbell for the “experience of life”. In such a context, the Ancient Socratic recommendation of leading the “examined life” has fallen away in the course of this technological reduction to the experience of everyday life.
The “mechanism” of the artefact, then, is to continually turn up the “volume ” of the sensational or emotional effect, even if this involves violence. In such contexts there is no Ancient Greek or Shakespearean “catharsis” of the passions into virtues, but rather a pathological release of energy through the psychological medium of pain and suffering, as if the only pleasure worth having was that which occurs when pain recedes until the next wave reaches its target zone once again.
Cavell eleborates upon his thesis of the relation of automated film to deus absconditis, or the absent God:
“To say that we wish to view the world itself is to say that we are wishing for the condition of viewing as such. That is our way of establishing our contact with the world: through viewng it or having views of it. Our condition has become one in which our natural mode of perception is to view, feeling unseen. We do not so much as look at the world as look out at it , from behind the self. Its our fantasies , all but completely thwarted and out of hand, which are unseen and must be kept unseen. As if we could no longer hope that anyone might share them.” (P.102)
The Platonic myth of the cave is about prisoners in a cave watching the play of shadows upon the wall: prisoners who are eventually rescued by the Philospher who has been liberated and learned to live in the warmth of light outside. These Philosopets bring with them transcendence in the form of knowledge of the forms of the Good and Truth. The role of myth surely must be to suggest solutions to the aporetic questions related to life, justice, freedom, and death etc. The cinema has in the course of its history largely abandoned the search for the type of character that embodies a worthwhile form of human existence, and moved rather in the direction of constructing more and more shocking and surprising plots containing events which become more and more fantastic. There are, of course, so-called documentary and historical films that seek to capture on film the more important ideas of our cultures, but these films circulate for a while and then disappear from the cinema. Television is another technological revolution that can extend the life of such creations, but television largely is steered by the same expectations that we find in relation to the cave of the cinema.
Given the fact that the essence of the moving image is as Cavell expresses it “The World viewed”, God could in such circumstances only appear in this scenario as a being unseen. There is no credible historical record of God having been seen. The medium of contact seems rather to be the voice, which uses language in the spirit of self-revelation, attempting to say what cannot strictly speaking be said. Mystical utterances such as “I am I” or “I am all that is, has been and will be” are not related in any obvious way to concrete perceptions but are utterances from the realm of the sacred, challenging men to lead not examined lives but rather lives based on faith in the divine being.
For many of us moderns, “seeing is believing”. Even Shakespeare saw the importance of visual experience combined with the auditory experience of his poetic use of language. To appreciate this fact all that is needed is to compare the experience of attending one of Shakespeares plays with the experience of merely reading the play. The play comes alive with its performance. Films of course are one remove away from the transendental spectacles we can experience in the Shakespearean cosmopolitan theatre, and this as Cavell points out leaves us with the impression that we are viewing events that have already happened sometime in the past (Page 23):
“It is tempting to suppose that movies are hard to remember the way dreams are, and that is not a bad analogy. As with dreams you do sometimes find yourself remembering moments in a film and a procedure for trying to remember is to find your way back to a charateristic mood the thing has left you with. But unlike dreams other peope can help you remember, indeed are often indispensable to the enterprise of remembering. Movies are hard to remember the way the actual events of yesterday are….It is as if you had to remember what happened before you slept. Which suggests that film awakens us as uch as it enfolds you..”(P.17)
The relation of a dream to its history is certainly problematic as Freud taught us through his work on the Interpretation of Dreams. Special techniques are required to unearth this history, and this may also be true of Mythological images and stories. Indeed, it came as a surpise to many to learn that the Homeric characters, Agamemmnon, and Achilles were real people, and the battle of Troy, a real event in History. This phenomenon suggests that the most important element in Homer’s work was a type of character and their relevance to the cathartic process of transforming passions into virtues.
The Western films that helped launch the Americal film industry had special relevance for Campbell who became very interested in Native Indian Mythology, especially considering the fact that his parents owned a property in the woods close to where the Delaware Indians lived. The “strategy” of characterising the Indians in Western films as primitive savages must have seemed problematic to Campbell, but this merely testifies to the superficial plot-construction of such fims: plots which polarised the world into heroes and villains.
Campbell in his comparative studies of Mythology, recognized the relevance of American Indian Mythology to the mythology of Hinduism. Later in his studies of Arthurian legends, he stumbled on many of the same themes once again. Given the unlikelihood of the explanation of diffusion, he was more inclined to believe in the thesis of parallel development, in which the same elementary ideas or collective archetypes, gave rise to very similar stories. Campbell attributed the differences between mythologies to local ethnic differences.
Campbell also notes that with the collapse of the influence of mythological narratives, certain social rituals such as that of marriage, may also have lost some meaning, as had the studying of many subjects at school lost life-meaning and historical-meaning, owing to the influence of the principle of specialisation. Universities too, had since Kant’s time, embraced this principle, modeling as they did their organisational structure in accordance with the structure of the Guilds. In such an environment it becomes increasingly problematic for scholars to write academic works with global appeal. Campbell, however, succeeded in this venture without being directly associated with a famous International University, using the medium of television to acquire global recognition.