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We intend in this work to begin our analysis with the Aristotelian notion of Muthos, which is a form of narrative with both transcendental religious and moral/political functions as conceived of in both Hylomorphic and Critical Philosophy. Aristotelian enthymemes are practical arguments meeting practical/ethical criteria related to the Golden Mean Principle, the principle of sufficient reason and the principle of noncontradiction, and these can be encountered, for example, in tragic poetry. According to Ricoeur the discipline of rhetoric only collapsed into a theory of pure style (abandoning compositional and argumentative ends) in the 20th century, which means that Shakespeare’s Renaissance tragedies and Tragedies during the Enlightenment would have still exhibited these elements of practical reasoning.
Two of the central ideas behind many of the proclamations by the Ancient Greek oracles were
Everything created by man is destined for ruin and destruction, and
Know Thyself!
These ideas were embraced by Tragic works of the time and afterwards because although we were dealing with mimesis, or imitation of actions, thoughts etc, there were still moral/political/religious lessons to be learnt, and it was these that provided the pleasure we derived from such works. Technical imperatives obviously were also involved in the creation of such works, e.g. the beginning of the narrative will cause the middle of the narrative to take a particular form and this in turn will also determine the form of the end. There will be reversals of fortune for the characters of the narrative and the effect of this upon the audience will be cathartic, i.e. the audience will learn in a measured fashion to experience the emotions of pity and fear in the right way at the right time and in the right way (areté). It is, however, important to point out that the medium of mimetic narrative texts is a different medium to that which we find in Biblical texts which proclaim to have some historical basis. These latter texts also have grandiose intentions to record events from the beginning of time (itself a questionable assumption), e.g. the creation of the universe and the breathing of life into man. Mimetic texts strive instead to imitate reality and life via the actions thought (language) and emotions of the characters of the discourse. The form of finality of such aesthetic objects, to use Kantian language, is such that there can be religious/moral/political universal lessons to be learned in the course of the appreciation of such objects.
Biblical texts certainly strive via the symbolic use of metaphor and analogy to bring us closer to what Ricoeur called the “realm of the sacred”, but the presence of supernatural events, challenging sometimes the foundations of our belief systems contaminate such an intention. “Miracles” can, on the other hand, be interpreted to be metaphorical devices but they can also in the case of making the lame walk, draw attention to the complex lives of humans, lives in which hysterical paralysis can be alleviated by suggestion. Even raising the dead might be understood to reference phenomena we experience even today when people declared to be dead by the expertise of the day suddenly begin breathing again. Modern science however refuses to believe that those that find themselves alive were ever actually dead. The expertise concerned was simply mistaken: such is the character of the refusal to engage in the transcendental illusion that there is a life after death. Other “miracles” such as virgin births are more difficult to interpret and must be viewed as metaphorical/literary devices marking the place and time of an important event. The major message of the New Testament, however, is a testament to the relevance of the Kantian Transcendental Analogy which attempts to bear witness to the Love the Christian God has for mankind.
Joeph Campbell, the American Mythologist, also refers to Kants Transcendental analogy in the course of his mythological investigations. He also refers to the Kantian analogy of our human relation to a work of Art, and the divine relation to the order and design of the world. Kant also, in the context of discussion relating to the human experience of the sublime, refers to an inscription on a statue of Isis located at the Temple of Isis:
“I am all that has been, and is, and shall be, and no mortal has ever lifted my veil.”
There can of course be various mystical interpretations of this phenomenon: interpretations which deny the role of the reason and understanding and focus instead on the imagination and a repertoire of emotions, but these accounts more often than not fail to explain and justify the broad range of phenomena associated with religion, morality, the sublime and the beautiful. Campbells mythological analyses are enlightening in this context. He raises the issue Gnosticism and the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas and echoes the sentiments of the above Isis inscription. He claims that the inscription defines the realm of the divine which is both present in the external world and within us. It is important to note however that our Western interpretation of such phenomena may bring us very close to the lifting of the veil from the face of the divine.
The Theoretical /Analytical idea of Existence in and over time, then, is a form if generalisation which does not contain much information about the “realm of the Sacred”. This may have been the reason why Kant preferred to refer to our relation to this Being in practical terms of the good consequences that flow from leading a worthwhile (holy) life. This places the responsibility upon human psuché to use his practical understanding and rationality in relation to his “mechanical powers”. This evokes the Kantian categorical ideas of duty and freedom. The Kantian Transcendental Analogy refers to the duty of parents to love their children on the model of the love God has for the human species. Christian Religion is consistent in its messaging on this theme: it is the “worthy” humans that are saved from ruin and destruction.
It is true that Mythology is a kind of systematic attempt to deal with the problems that burden human existence but it is also true to say that Modern Mythology does not share the concern with Metaphysics and Logos that we find in our Western Philosophical Cannon. On the contrary, what we instead encounter is the denial of the relevance of these elements in favour of an idea of the transcendental imagination construed as an active faculty that relates to the pleasure-pain principle and an accompanying repertoire of emotions. The imagination and the emotions have been a concern of Modern Psychology(from ca 1870) but given the active separation of the discipline from Philosophy at this time in the name of positivistic science, there would on such accounts appear to be little space for the idea of a transcendental imagination. Consigning both the transcendental imagination and its accompanying emotions to the realm of subjectivity would therefore seem to entail consigning mythology to a zone of academic irrelevance. An alternative approach to this issue would be to seek a perspicuous representation of Mythological themes with the assistance of Aristotelian Hylomorphsm, Kantian Critical Metaphysics, Freudian Psychoanalysis and Wittgensteins later grammatical investigations.
It ought to be recalled in the context of this discussion that Existentialist and Phenomenological Philosophers like Heidegger, Husserl, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Ricoeur, all criticise the Kantian project for failing to ground critical Philosophy in the Transcendental Imagination—rejecting both the categories of the understanding/judgement and their relation to the principles, in favour of a realm of sensible powers. Kant was, of course convinced that the role of sensibility in our knowledge and our moral/political lives played an important but not a dominating role in the way the above Philosophers suggested.
The Kantian view of natural science is not confined to the investigation of external objects but also extends to the internal functions and powers of sensibility including its apriori conditions, e.g. space and time. Kants Critical investigations seek both to articulate and justify the laws and principes of natural science whether they be laws governing the behaviour and motion of external objects or the laws and principles governing our inner experiences. Kant points out in the context of this discussion that perceptions conjoined or associated in consciousness are subjectively related and their order, for example, is not regulated by consciousness or the “I” of the “I think”. If the judgements we make transcend such associated perceptions and are regulated by a pure concept of the understanding then the judgement is “universally valid” and deemed therefore to have an actual object that is subsumed under a concept, e.g.:
“For instance, air belongs under the concept of cause which determines our judgements about it with regard to its expansion as hypothetical. Thereby the expansion of air is represented, not as merely belonging to the perception of the air or my present state or in several states of mine, or in the state of perception of others, but as belonging to it necessarily. The judgement that air is elastic becomes universally valid and a judgement of experience only because certain judgements precede it which subsumes the intuition of air under the concepts of cause and effect; and they thereby determine the perceptions, not merely as regards one another in me, but as regards the form of judging in general (which is here hypothetical), and in this way they render the empirical judgements universally valid.” (Pages 44-5)
The major difference, then, between ideas of Reason such as God, and immortality of the soul and the categorical and conceptual powers of the understanding is that the former by Kants definition cannot be related directly to an object of experience, and the latter must relate to the immanent given of experience. This difference is important to bear in mind when considering that reason can be subject to illusion unless reason can itself, together with the understanding, determine the scope and limits of its own activity which aims necessarily at completeness, i.e. the totality of conditions of everything that is conditioned. Kant defines “Illusion” as follows:
“Since all illusion in holding the subjective ground of our judgement to be objective, a self-knowledge of pure reason is its transcendent (hyperbolical) use is the only safeguard against the aberrations into which reason falls when it mistakes its destination, and transcendentally refers to the object in itself that which only concerns reasons own subject and its guidance in all immanent use.” Page 70
It is, Kant argues, therefore essential that one understands the origins of different cognitions. Failing to do this, Kant points out, results in confusing the different elements originating from these faculties of understanding and reason with one another. Avoiding such a state of affairs requires an investigation into the origins of the different kinds of cognitions: an investigation that both the Delphic oracle and Aristotle regarded as extremely difficult, falling as it does under the heading of the Oracular challenge to Humanity to “Know thyself!” The example we are given of a dialectical illusion relates to the idea of the immortality of the soul when conceived of in terms of the actual survival of some kind of psychic entity or presence once the body of the individual concerned is dead. Perhaps at best it might be maintained that the body of the individual might be mortal but the soul not because it does not belong to the category of living organic things. Postulating some kind of psychic existence which once freed from the body engages in some form of “life” similar to that on earth involves “projecting” or imagining anthropomorphic forms disconnected from their real physical conditions. Aristotle, we ought to recall in this context claimed that the soul was the first actuality of the human body.