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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.
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 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)
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.
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.
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.
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”.
“….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.
In Freud’s work “Civilisation and its Discontents” we encounter an interesting critique of the Christian maxim “Love thy neighbour”. Freud provides us with a number of arguments, one of which points a finger at the neighbour and asserts the following:
“Men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved and who at most can defend themselves if attacked, they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness.”(New York,Norton, 1961, Pages 58-59)
Campbell, in his turn provides a very interesting argument against this position, which insists that the most interesting transcendental claim about the Metaphysics of man is that the opposites,”I and thou”, are essentially the same, and that if you do not love or respect your neighbour, you may not love or respect your own integrity as a human being, and may therefore be less inclined to risk your life to save the life of your neighbour. Indeed, you may on Freud’s formula, decide to murder him, before he murders you. There is also an Aristotelian argument intertwined with Campbells position which claims that mans practical rationality manifests itself in the creation of laws to regulate social behaviour. Such law-making activity would, of course, be a waste of time if the law-givers did not believe that men both ought to obey such laws, and can on the whole be trusted to do so. There is also a relevant Kantian argument in this context which implies that we ought to respect ones fellow man, because all men are indentically ends-in-themselves. We ought, that, is not to treat our neighbour as a means to our own ends. The conclusion that must be drawn from these arguments is that we are not savage beasts, but rather potentially rational animals with a transcendental view of each other.
Animals, of course, cannot be praised or blamed for their activities but humans can be praised or blamed for theirs, because we possess a battery of powers belonging to a self that enables us to choose to do or not to do what we are considering. We aim, as Aristotle claimed, for “the Good”, even if our reasoning as to exactly what is Good, is not always valid. The thought processes involved is evaluating both the consequences of the action, as well as considering whether the action concerned, respects the integrity of any life forms involved.
Campbell points to the Bodhisattva who, he argues:
“Voluntarily participates in the sorrows of the world.” (Page 139)
Campbell also claims in this context that:
“Life is pain but compassion is what gives it the possibility of continuity” (Page 139)
Campbell has, in earlier works, pointed to the first truth of Buddhism which is that “life is sorrowful”, and this recalls the Freudian characterisation of the ego, being the “precipitate of lost objects”, the consequence of a process involving both mourning and melancholia. Learning to live compasionately with ones own pain, and the pain of others, was cathartic for the Ancient Greeks, and for Freud. This identity of the “I and thou” then, also allows for the interpretation of the sacrifice of Christ in terms of an “atonement” for all the sins of mankind in the past and in the future. This, Campbell insists, ensures that the sacrifice is “at-one” with humanity. The event of the crucifixion, Campbell argues was meant to:
“evoke in mans heart the sentiment of compassion for the suffering of life.” (Page 140)
Campbell paradoxically refers to the Vietnam war and claims that such crises shake up the life of those involved and allows man to come onto contact with the reality of suffering and heroism once again. This too can awaken the vicissitude of the instincts which we give the name “compassion”.
The theme of the Waste-Land arises again in relation to the wounded Grail King who:
“is there to evoke compassion and thus bring a dead wasteland to life:” (Page 144)
More than one mystic has been crucified for insisting upon naming their experience of transcendence with the words “I and God are one”. This in the eyes of many was heresy, and might have the result of diminishing the idea of the deity the community embraces.
Campbell discusses the institution of marriage in relation to an image of the “wheel of fortune”. Marriage, he argues is at the centre of the wheel, (the still point of the turning wheel), and does not particpate in the ups and downs of fortune, but rather stays steadfastly in the same place all of the time:
“That is the sense of the marrige vow —I take you in health or sickness, in wealth or poverty, going up or going down. But I take you as my center, and you are my bliss, not the wealth that you might bring me, not the social prestige, but you.”(Page 147)
The continuity of marriage has traditionally been the guard-rail for the exigencies of a long childhood and provided security for the children of the marriage, so marriage has been related to a fulfilling a number of important needs for man, apart from its transcendental function related to the proposition “I and thou are one”.
Perhaps scholars in love with their subject, or the activity of examining ones life via the rituals of reading, writing, and lecturing, are also experiencing these transcendental moments of bliss. Campbell takes up the case of Poets, who:
“are simply those who have made a profession and a lifestyle of being in touch with their bliss.” (Page 148)
Campbell also notes in this context, that during his teaching career he has seen many students move via these rituals of reading, writing and examination, into the realm where transcendental experiences become possible. He also recalls that some fathers actively discourage their children from making the journey on the “transcendental path”, because they are fearful that their children will not “make a living”. In this context, Campbell’s own experiences serve as a beacon of hope. He recalls that in 1929, upon returning from being a student in Europe three weeks before the financial crash, he could not obtain employment for five years, yet:
“I did not feel poor. I just felt that I didn’t have any money. People were so good to each other at that time. For example I discovered Frobenius…. and I had to read everything Frobenius had written.” (Page 149)
Campbell was a Sanskrit scholar and could translate complex texts and complex symbolic terms. which he claimed were relevant to the understanding of certain mythological themes. He also believed in a life after death (Page 150), and felt that invisible hands guided him in the right direction and put him on the right road to bliss where the “waters of eternal life” could be found. The Philosopher would not categorically deny that what he is claiming is a hypothetical possibility, but the Philosopher also knows that the opposite thesis, namely, that life comes to an absolute end in a long dreamless sleep, is equally possible, and the context of this (namely, that death is not an experience), makes it impossible to choose between these two hypotheticals.
Wittgenstein in his earlier work claimed that experiencing death is a logical impossibility because when I am dead there is no longer any I: that is, the transcendental subject that stands outside the world is gone. He nevertheless saw religious language and behaviour to have meaning, but claimed he did not know what someone claiming that they would be resurrected could possibly mean. Wittgenstein, in relation to this idea of bliss, maintained that he did not know what the purpose of our existence was, but he was certain that it was not to be happy. Kant too would concur with this last thought, claiming as he did, that happiness was merely the principle of self-love in disguise, and that our willingness to evaluate the worthiness of our actions is what constituted our integrity. Kants claim is that happiness must be connected to our worthiness to be happy.
Chapter V entitled “The Hero’s Adventure” begins with a question by Moyers asking why there are so many stories of heroes contained in mythological literature. Campbell replies:
“Because thats what is worth writing about. Even in popular novels the main character is a hero or heroine who has found or done something beyond the normal range of achievement and experience. A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself.”(Page 151)
Campbell elaborates upon this point by claiming that there are two types of action: one in which the hero displays considerable courage in circumstances of significance, such as a battle, or alternatively, saving the life of another. Quite often a spiritual personal transformation is involved in a transcendental experience, and the story of this transformation is often told to others. Campbell uses Christian mythology, and speaks of heroic adventures in relation to death and resurrection. He includes both the experience of birth by the baby and the mother giving birth in this category of spirituality. Mothers we know, can die in the experience of childbirth, and the infant may well be traumatised in the transition from a warm watery environment to the colder air based environment outside the womb. Campbell, in relation to the mothers experience, expresses regret that society does not deem the action of raising children as a heroic act. He cites the work of the psychoanalyst, Otto Rank:
“Otto Rank makes the point that there is a world of people who think that the heroic act in being born qualifies them for the respect and support of their whole community.”(Page 154)
What appears to be necessary for us to regard an adventure as heroic, is that courage is required in an activity that has as its purpose some service to the community. He cites the Koran as well as the Old and New Testaments, in which we can encounter courageous actions in trying circumstances. These may or may not be in the presence of the experience of spiritual revelations. Moyers asks whether all leaders are heroes, and Campbell makes a distinction between empire building achievements in battle accomplished by the tyrants of Napoleon and Hitler, and genuine spiritual achievements that benefit mankind both ethically and politically. This wider concern for humanity, Campbell designates as “cosmological”.
Mythological stories such as that of Prometheus bringing fire to mankind, have cultural and planetary significance in that the use of fire may well have been the begiining of civilisation. The use of fire certainly separates us from the animals—signifying the fundamental fact recorded by Aristotle’s definition of psuché, that we are n one sense the same as the animals, but in another sense, different, having the unique capacity of becoming either the best of the animals or the worst of the animals.
Campbell also, rather surprisingly discusses Solo’s heroism in relation to Luke Skywalker, in the film “Star Wars”. This is a somewhat paradoxical reference given Campbells objection to current life styles and the influence of the technological and mechanistic, at the expense of the spiritual. The genre of science fiction would appear to have a natural home in the minds of those fascinated by technological developments and a wish to escape from the confines of the earth that was the origin of their existence. Campbell mentions some of the cultural causal factors that have brought our current state of affairs about:
“Now it has become to such an extent a sheerly mechanistic world as interpreted through our physical sciences, Marxist sociology, and behaviouristic psychology, that we are nothing but predictable patterns of wires responding to stimuli. This nineteenth century interpretation has squeezed the freedom of the human will out of modern life.” (Page 160)
We could well imagine both Aristotle and Kant saying something similar if they had witnessed what Campbell had witnessed in the name of civilisation. The genre of science-fiction with its roots in a fantasy that is not strictly speaking grounded in traditional science, may be a form of fiction with less reality-content and less contact with basic terms conneted to the human psuché than other forms of fiction. There is no doubt that the will to explore would eventually turn to what has been referred to as the “final frontier” of space, and this has been accelerated with the increase in the power of telescopes to provide information of distant solar systems and galaxies. The fantastic supernatural elements of Star Trek, however, may be the result of a desire to escape the earth conceived of as a prison.
Sitting in a cinema, and passively watching such spectacles in circumstances in which we appear to have lost the will to engage with threats to our civilisations and cultures might, then, seem to be another symptom of a pathology of “escapism”, especially given the fact that there is very little content in such spectacles relating to the Metaphysics of Nature and the Metaphysics of Man. We appear to be dealing with a form of substitute satisfaction that contributes very little to the task of beoming the “still point of the turning world” in circumstances which Campbell describes as a “Waste Land”. In this waste land, Campbell points out that our bodies are neglected, and need to be sustained by mechanical exercise programs. In such circumstances the very concept of the hero is in jeopardy. This state of affairs is well-described in Eliot’s poem “The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock”:
“No I am not Prince Hamlet
Nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant Lord, one that will do
To swell a progress start a scene or two”
Moyers specifically claims that Campbell’s scholarship embraces Science, but both Aristotle and Kant embraced Science in different ways. Kant saw Newtons Principles of Physics to be significant contributions to the Metaphysics of Nature and Aristotle painted a broader picture embracing three different categories of science, theoretical, practical and productive. It is not clear that Cambell is interested in these aspects that relate essentially to contexts of explanation/justification. He, on the contrary seems to be more interested in the explorative dimensions of science related to, for example technical investigations into whether an atom is a wave or a particle or alternatively, techncal investigations into the sources of life. This appears to be his motivation:
“Thats the reason we speak of the divine. There’s a transcendent energy source. When the physicist obeserves subatomic particles, he’s seeing a trace on a screen. These traces come and go, come and go, and we come and go, and all of life comes and goes. That energy is the informing energy of all things. Mythic worship is addressed to that.” (Page 162)
Wittgenstein in his later work claimed that scientific questions did not interest him as much as psychological, aesthetic and religious questions and one can see in his concept of “forms of life” clear connections to the Aristotelian concerns with Psuché. Wittgenstein also claimed that language-games were rooted in instinct and the mastery of techniques emerging from the hurly burly of social activity where language-use was the focus of explanation and justification. Scientific views of language such as logical atomism or systems theory often restrict themselves to the context of exploration, where theory-building activity is perhaps looking for what Aristotle called “basic terms” (is an atom a wave or a particle?) which, when found, will require a search for principles (arché) that can justify the statements of knowledge composed of these basic terms. When we are concerned with living organisms, however, it appears that any “parts” (for example, neuronal systems and their energy regulations), will be used holistically by global powers, and this fact diminishes the importance of viewing an organism as a bundle of efficent causes. The Kantian account refers instead to a totality of conditions which “form” (formal cause) the actualised unconditioned whole. (The whole is greater than the sum of the parts). This whole is, of course, connected to the transcendental unity of apperception which Kant relates to the “I think” which also is a potentiality that is actualised and is the power responsible for viewing the world not as a totality of facts but as an unconditioned totality of conditions.
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.
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.
There are miraculous events recounted in the New Testament. Events such as the ascension of Jesus up towards the heavens, Campbell claims, mark not an outward journey, but rather a journey inward into the reaches of inner space: a journey toward the true source of light after the black moment of the crucifixion. By the term “inward” is meant here not the region of the dark spaces where the inner organs of the body reside, but rather refer to the lighted “space” of the mind freed from the confines of “the dark labyrinth” within the body. This, Campbell argues, is the real denotation of the ascension myth which is a metaphor for representing the transformation involved in a living process of actualisation occurring in a medium of images generated by a concert of bodily organs. This image of Jesus ascending, leaving us to our fates, is intended for the religious man to identify himself with, and in the process strive to become a holy “I”, that has another life somehere other than on earth— a life that begins again after death.
This scenario, for some philosophers stretches the imagination to breaking point because for them the essence-specifying definition of life is that it must come to an end, in what Socrates claimed, resembled a long dreamless sleep. Moyers, the interviewer of Campbell specifically asks how man came to believe in a life after death, one of the universal motifs of mythologies all over the world. Campbell replies:
“I dont know. It would probably come from people of spiritual power and depth who experienced their lives as being inadequate to the spiritual aspect or dimension of their being.” (Power of Myth, P.70)
The images of myths are often presented to us in the form of metaphors which occur in the medium of language, a medium of sound, and these metaphors carried the intention of saying (predicating) something essential about something. When, for example, someone claims that “Man is a wolf”, the intention is to say something essential about man which will provide us with an explanation of his nature. Aristotle expressed this in his Hylomorphic Philosophy by maintaining that man had the potential to be both the best of the animals, but also the worst of the animals. Man, in accordance with the Aristotelian essence-specifying definition, was also capable of discourse, which includes using metaphors and symbolic language in myths, in order to open a window out onto the region of transcendence. Finally, man is potentially also a rational being, and it is these two characteristics, rather than his animality, which drive an actualisation process that results in a satisfactory completion of a life that can be truly described as a good-spirited flourshing life which included an understanding of the transcendence of Being. This understanding, however does not occur in the medium of metaphorical images but in the medium of the conceptual organisation of sensory data in accordance with categories of existence and judgement which, for example, separate the animal-forms of pusché from the plant and human forms. The Philosopher, the lover of wisdom, in the evolution of civilisation replaced the mystical “seer”, and provided competing views of the world and Being , seeking a form of universality which was not monadic, not confined to a particular space and time and not ethnically biased.
Campbell brings the seer back to life and attempts to articulate the relation between the seer and the community in terms of the subliminal unconscious mind, whose medium is images rather than conceptually structured thoughts. The “stories” of the seer are metaphorical, about the darkness inside or the black moments of life in a dark labyrinth that can be suddenly illuminated by the “light” of the story. We are not in the domain of rationality which only actualises itself once man had been led out into the sun outside of the labyrinth, and can search for Being in a discourse that systematically aims at the “forms”(principles) of “The True and “The Good”. What the “seer” on the other hand, brings into the light of consciousness in the medium of metaphors, symbols, and images, are elementary ideas that will serve as prototypes for the above “forms”.
Campbell, in this chapter, draws an interesting distinction between the priest and the monk of religion. The former has an ideology or theology and the latter seeks merely a particular kind of experience of transcendence. He claims interestingly that a Catholic Monk can understand a Buddhist monk better than the priests of these respective religions can understand one another.(Page 73). Moyers rsponds to this point by claiming, somewhat puzzlingly, that monks/shamans project their experience in images, and he further insists that this is an art that has been lost in our contemporary societies. Campbell paradoxically agrees with this point by claiming:
“There is more reality in an image than in a word.” (Page 74)
It is further claimed by both interlocutors that the youth of our contemporary societies attempt to seek this experience of transcendence via the use of drugs. Campbell elaborates upon this discussion with the words:
“Religions are addressing social problems and ethics instead of mystical experience” (Page 74)
The position being outlined here is not entirely clear ,especially considering the fact that Campbell, later in the text, refers to Kant’s idea of the “transcendent”, being beyond the conceptual understanding. Kant’s position is complex and for him the Transcendent ideas of God and Freedom are ideas of reason located respectively in the realms of the Metaphysics of Nature and the Metaphysics of Morals. Both ideas stand outside of the sensory realm of the space-time continuum and the intuitions of sensibility. Indeed for Kant the idea of freedom is connected to an “I” that has two aspects, as an empirical phenomenon and an ideal noumenon that man can never “know” but perhaps can “think” without contradiction, thus making the “I think” an essential element of man and his search for insight into the transcendence of the realm of Being qua Being. Here the idea is located clearly in the faculty of reason, and not in the sensible faculty of the imagination.
Campbell characterises the phenomenal world we live in, as a dialectical field created by oppositions such as good and evil, male and female, love and war, thereby embracing a Hegelian world-view in which a thesis competes with an antithesis for the resolution of a synthesis which contains the partial truth of both thesis and antithesis. This kind of thinking jettisons “Aristotelian” logic in which two premises, a minor premise and a major premise are both true and logically lead to a conclusion which is rationally secure. The most topical form of this kind of argument would be:
All men are mortal
Socrates is a Man
Therefore, Socrates is mortal.
This argument is conceptually true, that is to say, it is true in virtue of the meaning of the concepts of “Life” and “Man”. Mortality in this context means “must die” and further entails that no life can end and begin another life again in the same form. This idea of life (psuché) applies equally to plant and animal life. Forms of life must die, that is their essence, their nature, which, for Aristotle, would form the basic term for the sciences that study these “forms of life”. Images can certainly be dialectical as Wittgenstein has pointed out. I can see one and the same configuration of lines as a rabbit and as a duck . Elisabeth Anscombe in her Work, “Introduction to Wittgensteins Tractatus” also points to two stick men fencing and claims that what the picture actually denotes is ambiguous and can be interpreted depending upon the story that surrounds the stickmen fencing, for example, “this is how to defend”, “this is how to attack”.
Heroes from the past come alive for us in the stories about them and these heroes, Campbell argues, operate in the field of opposites. He begins Chapter three entitled “The First Storytellers” by referring to the Biological conditions for stories, namely, that “the nerves in our body carry the meories that shaped the organisation of our nervous system to certain environmental circumstances and to the demands of an organism.” (Page87)
This last remark resembles Hylomorphic positions and support the complex idea that the body and its organs generate the human powers of perception, memory, consciousness, speech and rationality. Ancient myths, it is then argued by Campbell, intend to unify the body and its powers, creating harmony where there was conflict. Indeed, the actualising process that moves from the darkness of the “black moment” to the “light of salvation”, is the movement toward unifying the powers of the body.
These powers subsequently wane, and demand a form of disengagement from both the body and its environment as we watch the body deteriorate and the light of life shrink to a pinpoint, perhaps leaving us with minimal powers of perception and consciousness before even these are shut down at the black moment of death. Such is the logos of the telos of our inward journey, which ends at the point of the body where it emerged. Campbell claims in the context of this discussion that the problem is not to do with the passing through the gates of darkness. We need, he claims to cease to identify ourselves with the will of our body, and identify instead with its powers of perception and consciousness ( a phenomenological dream, if ever there was one)
One of the elementary ideas of mythology is that of the old wise man who has witnessed the different phases of the actualisation process having engaged with the good and evil in the world, but is now engaging with the process of the deterioration of his powers and the prospect of pasing through the gates of darkness. Campbell points out in this context that the earlier mythologies were associated with graves, which remind one of Julian Jaynes and the Chapter “The Houses of God” in his work on the Origins of Consciousness:
“Let us imagine ourselves coming as strangers to an unknown land and finding its settlements all organised on a similar plan: ordinary houses and buildings grouped around one larger and more significant dwelling. We would immediately assume that the larger magnificent dwelling was the house of the prince who ruled there. And we might be right. But in the case of older civilisations, we would not be right if we supposed such a ruler was a person like a contemporary prince. Rather he was an hallucinated presence, or, in the more general case, a statue, often at one end of his superior house with a table in front of him where the ordinary could place their offerings to him.” (The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Page 150)
In the above Chapter Jaynes insists that we speak to the God and expect hallucinated answers for which we offer gifts in return. The archaeological evidence largely supports Jaynes’ hypothesis which extends down to the nerves of the brain in different regions including the so-called reticular activating system of nerves, which he claims are the physical substrate of consciousness. Yet no archaeological dig could uncover the hallucination of a voice so the hypothesis remains speculative. Archaeological digs have however often uncovered the presence of skulls and heads in these magnificent dwellings and these have been interpreted to be the site of the hallucinated voices which have come to be thought of as “gods”. Jaynes elaborates upon this hypothesis by referring to the Hittites from Biblical times:
“That the mountains themselves were hallucinatory to the Hittites is indicated by the relief sculptures still clearly visible on the rocks within the sanctuary….On one of the faces of this mountain temple the robed king is carved in profile. Just behind him in the stone, towers a god with a much loftier crown: the gods right arm is outstretched, showing the king the way, while the gods left arm is hugged around the kings neck and grasps the kings right wrist firmly.” (Origins, Page 153)
If we add to this scenario the possibility that the voices of authority, whilst they were still alive, were awesome and probably carried a form of hypnotic effect, that then also became associated with the skulls and the heads of these deceased gods, then the power of an admonishing and angry God becomes a formidable one. Jaynes claims that Yahwehs voice was often admonishing and angry and this in turn suggests that his subjects may well have been identifying with the aggressor as Freud suggested occurred in the case of subjects or patients with weak egos. It was probably this kind of consideration that led Freud to the inevitable conclusion that religion was a kind of mass psychosis. This in fact hindered rather than promoted the actualisation process that in his eyes led to strong egos and manageable superegos which inhibited rather than repressed strong desires and fears.
The Greek Gods were far more “rational”. Zeus was a god for strangers which the Old Testament suggested were persona non grata if they were not of the Jewish faith, as far as Yahweh was concerned. Indeed the Promised Land would be constituted of conquering the civilisations of strangers, killing the men and using the surviving women for ones own ends. Indeed sometimes killing everything that breathes is recommended. This is a very different mythology/religion to that of the Ancient Greeks who admitted females in their pantheon of gods, and used primarily females as oracles to commnicate the wisdom of Apollo who recommended an actualisation pocess involving the challenge to “Know Thyself!”.
Jaynes’s hypothesis includes suggesting that we, as a species, may not have been conscious before 1200 BC, and most of us may have been directed by hallucinated voices in our everyday life when important problems arose that fell outside of the scope of our comptetence. Such states of affirs caused anxiety, which in turn released a voice in a brain where language was bilaterally located. The voice moved from one hemisphere to another before the message contained was enacted or alternatively, recommended refraining from action (as might have been the case with Socrates’ daimon). Jaynes interestingly analyses the rise and fall of many so-called “bicameral kingdoms” such as the Aztecs and the Incas, and notes the instability of such kingdoms which did not persist in the way that the Kingdom of Greece did. Jaynes’s thesis would also explain why important men and women were buried as if they were still alive, sometimes with their partners and servants who might have been buried alive with them. Jaynes also reports that the Conquistadors noted that the people they conquered claimed that dead people stayed alive for a while before completely passing away. The moment of death presumabley was when the hallucinated voices could no longer be heard. This Jaynes also reports, was an idea also found in Plato’s writings:
“Plato refers to heros who after death become the demons that tell people what to do”( Page 164)
This possible speculative account stretching back beyond 1200 BC might also explain the pathological symptoms of those amongst us who suffer from schizophrenia,, a condition in which in moments of anxiety or hysteria patients hear voices tellng them what to do. Jaynes also points to the prevalence of so-called “eye-idols” during these times. Coming face to face and eye to eye with figures of authority must have been daunting for those who had limited knowledge of their societies and the roles authority figures played. These “eye-idols” often occurred together with a mouth that was open, as if speaking.(Page 171)
Jaynes also referred to the writings of Homer, especially the Iliad, which depicted the heros waiting for and hearing the voices of the gods. This excursus into the reflections of Julian Jaynes suggests that it is not the fear of death as such that is the transcendental focus of graves, but rather the way in which graves suggest that the dead remain in some sense alive for us. Campbell, however, takes this reasoning one step further and suggests:
“That burials always involve the idea of continued life beyond the visible one, of a plane of being that is behind the visible plane, and that is somehow supportive of the visible one to which we have to relate, I would say that is the basic theme of all mythology– that there is an invisible plane supporting the visible one.” (Power of Myth, Page 90)
This move from the wish that people important to us were still alive, to a metaphysical idea of Nature or God, is however, questionable. It is certainly true that very different forms of life will give rise to different forms of mythology. Nomadic, more primitive peoples, undoubtedly held nature and animals in nature to be sacred, in spite of the fact that the animals needed to be killed and eaten for food. These animals were never turned into objects of consumption. The paintings in the caves painted by primitive peoples not dwelling in these sacred spaces testify to the attitude of these peoples to Nature: an attitude very close to the images of the imagination.
It is clear from several different remarks by Campbell related to the primacy of experience over “theory”, that Mythology could never be a theoretical type of reflection. He turns often to art which he regards as a practical activity that aims to open a window out onto transcendence. Aesthetic appreciation, we ought to remember in the context of this discussion, for Kant, involved speaking with what he called a “universal voice”.
The artist works with images, it is claimed, and mythology is the song and dance of life insofar as human forms of life involve the doings and undergoings of the actons and happenings of life. Campbell refers to an experience in Japan, when a Shinto monk is confronted by a Western sociologist who failed to see any ideology or theology in Shintoism. The Shinto monk was unapologetic and agreed there was neither ideology nor theology because “We dance”. Campbell connects this reflection to an idea promoted by T S Eliot in his work “Four Quartets”, namely, that the dance occurs “at the still point of the turning world”. This of course is Campbells rejection of the role of theorising in the study of Mythology.
The idea of Transcendence does occur in Modern Philosophy and it might prove worthwhile to refer to how the themes of self-consciousness or self-knowledge are accounted for. O Shaughness in hs work “Consciousness and the World, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2000, Page 103:
“When we speak of persons we have in mind beings endowed with a distinct set of properties, consisting mostly in capacities , such as for thought and reasoning, but also in the knowledge of certain fundamentals like, self, world, time, truth.”
He continues:
“Prior to the onset of the more developed (“higher”) form of consciousness, one great sector of Reality lay outside the scope, not of experience, but of the cognition of conscious beings: namely, their own minds. then as a correlate of this lack, the full reality of the psychological life of other beings must along with it also have been inaccessible to cognition. In short, with the advent of self awareness the entire realm of the mental must for the first time have become an object of knowledge…….while rationality does not make possible self-knowledge, self-knowledge is a functionally active necessary condition of both rationality and self-determination of freedom.”
This, of course, suggests that the “experience” of a being that does not know itself may be very different from a being that does have such knowledge. Prior to becoming self-conscious, the species of man in his primitive state (nomadic forms of existence), or in the state of early settled civilisations, may not have had this power, although certain individuals may have had such powers of self reflection, and this in turn may have accounted for their superior standing amongst their peers. Is the Shinto monk capable of such self-reflection? Indeed one may even wonder whether the Western Sociologist is fully capable of this form of self reflection.
Kant, referred to this project of “knowing oneself” in both phenomenal and noumenal terms. The “I think” (transcendental unity of apperception) is the spontaneous act of our intellect and as such is transcendent: it connects all our thoughts and intuitions into a whole or unity. Our empirical self-consciousness, on the other hand ,is that which we are aware of in our mental states, feelings, and sensations. Such a form of awareness however is incapable of grasping the spontaneous and spiritual acts of a rational noumenal self. The “I think”, for Kant is a priori and a condition of experience, rather than an object. Indeed it is probably only accessible via the kind of theorising about it that we encounter in the Aristotelian and Kantian accounts. The enigmatic advice of the Delphic oracle to “Know thyself!” indeed testifies to the difficulty of this enterprise.
Campbell, as we have indicated, is somewhat ambiguous on the topic of Rationality and the Aristotelian and Kantian accounts of its importance in the actualisation process which may well contain many of the moments uncovered by mythological and artistic thinking. Freud, rather than Jung would seem to carry the keys to resolving the problematic relation between stories couched in the images of the imagination and arguments couched in concepts and rational ideas. Freud claims that Consciousness and the defence mechanism of the ego are vicissitudes of the instincts, which can be deflected into activities such as science and the arts. He never specifically included Mythology under the arts, but we know that this might have been one of the disgreements between himself and Jung, who also claimed Kant as an influence in his theorising. This would put Jung’s so called analytical Psychology into the existential field of Heidegger who claimed that Kants most important discovery was that of the transcendental Imagination, a claim that confuses the Sensible function of the mind with the intellectual function and moreover chooses to forget that Kant spent 12 years on his table of categories for the faculty of the understanding/judgement, the third realm of mind which he added to the realms of sensibility and reason. Reason in this new trilogy of powers was given the task of searching for the totality of conditions of any given phenomenon or set of phenomena. In logic this amounted to a principle of sufficent reason.
Indeed some of the descriptions of the disengagement of the Eastern mystic from both his body and the world would seem to be psychotic (as conceived of by Freud). Campbell attempts to draw a distinction between the psychotic drowning in his sea of images from the unconscious, and the mystic who in some mysterious fashion is able to swim comfortably in such a sea. The question that ought to be asked in this context is what the “knowing how to swim” means. Do the images occur in consciousness in a more orderly manner? Is this apriori knowledge–some kind of instinctive knowledge which Mythology alone can give us an account of?
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.
Campbell in this first chapter provides us with the mythological equivalent to the Kantian Philosophical distinction between the orders of the Metaphysics of Nature and the Metaphysics of Morals:
“There are two totally different orders of mythology, there is the mythology that relates you to your nature and the natural world of which you are a part. And there is the mythology that is strictly sociological, linking you to a particular society. You are not simply natural man, you are a member of a particular group. In the History of European Mythology, you can see the interaction of these two systems. Usually the socially oriented system is of a nomadic people who are moving around, so you learn that is where your centre is, in that group. The nature-oriented mythology would be of an earth cultivating people. Now the Biblical tradition is socially oriented mythology. Nature is condemned.. In the nineteenth century scholars thought of mythology and ritual as an attempt to control nature. But that is magic not Mythology or religion. Nature religions are not attempts to control nature but to help put yourself in accord with it. But when nature is thought of as evil, you dont put yourself in accord with it, you control it, or try to, and hence the tension, the anxiety, the cutting down of forests, the annihilation of native people.” (Pages 28-29)
This is a complex moment in Campbells book, requiring much analysis most of which must be left for other works. One can question the crude distinction between the natural and the sociological. In the hylomorphic account of Psyché we encounter the position that whilst inorganic forms differs significantly from organic forms, the plant form life is a lower form of life to that of animals who possess nutrition and reproduction functions alongside with perceptual functions which plant life does not.The human form of life of course possesses all the powers and functions of plant life and animal life together with a number of other powers which make this life capable of philosophical and mythological discourse and all the disciplines of science and metaphysics, It is this repertoire of powers which enabled man to create villages, towns, cities and nations, sufficient to meet the complex system of needs which emerge from possessing such a repertoire of powers. The family is the hylomorphic building block of this system of interlocking social- structures and this fact might explain the emergence of a type of mythology which was neither natural nor sociological, perhaps deserving the name metaphysical. Nature is not evil in Greek mythology which connects such value judgements with the praise and blame for voluntary actions pursued by human psuché. For the ancient Greek mentality, nature was what it was, and its form needed to be understood if it was going to be useful for man and provide the landscpe for all his achievements. Witness the bravery of Anaxagoras in procliaming that the moon is constituted of stone. For his fellow citizens who were aghast at such heresy, the infuence of the moon on mans actvitiy was obvious for all to see. Anaxagoras, the thinker, however, may well have accepted the thesis of the importance of the moon for man, but merely in true Greek fashion brought it down to earth by proclaiming its true nature. Anaxagoras was not a materialist. His writings were responsible for the reputed “Socratic turn” in which Socrates all but abandoned his investigations of physical events, objects and processes and turned toward studying the human forms of psuché in operation in the polis of Athens. Using the method of elenchus he “turned” the question “ask of everything what is its nature”, from the search for the essence of physical things, and toward a central part of his investigation of the being of man, namely the good in general and justice in particular. Aristotle continued the quest for defining the essence of man with tools he created such as the principles of logic, two of which were :
The Principle of noncontradiction and
The Principle of sufficient reason
Aristotle fixated upon voluntary action as an essential part of the being or essence of man, an essential aspect of Aristotelian Ethics and Politics. The essence-specifying-definition of “rational animal capable of discourse” defines two powers over and above the animal powers and these play an important role in lifting human psuché out of the deterministic network of instincts that “cause” animals to fight with each other, eat each other, attack humans etc. These animals have little or no self regulatory control over these activities. Humans, then, are able to consciously inhibit such instinctive impulses via amongst other things, through representations of different courses of action.
Given the above philosophical reflections, the attribution by Campbell of different forms of mythology (the sociological and the natural) to different styles of life, for example the nomadic and the earth-cultivating, may not be the whole truth of the matter. Communities that settle in one place for long periods of time, cultivating the surrounding landscape and perhaps complementing this with hunting and gathering may well have even stronger ties to their community than nomadic peoples. The complexity of their society would require forms of rationality not needed by the nomads: forms of instrumental rationality that constantly seems to meet the diversifying needs of the community as desires become more variagated. Indeed Campbell suggests in other works that earth cultivating communities have a more peaceful and ordered relation to animal life which might amount to respecting it. Such communities, he argues, are more likely to appreciate narrative mythologies relating to the continuity of life and the common appreciation of the sensory-motor life of animals, which resembles the psychological powers we possess. Animal lives, however, from a philosophical perspective, cannot engage in the act of imagining the existence of transcendental gods in the form of aesthetic ideas. Needless to say animals cannot reason via a series of linguistic premises to a conclusion about the existence or nature of God.
The question that requires investigation in this context is whether the nomadic form of life can sustain a complex idea of a God connected to both the realms of the Metaphysics of Nature and the Metaphysics of Morals. This question can also be posed in relation to the idea of Justice which actually may require the idea of a settled polis with a long history of recorded events of magnitude, events that are both relevant to the survival and well-being of the polis. The continuity of the crops of the community over time resembles to some extent, but not relevantly, the continuity of the complex form of life the Ancient Greeks enjoyed in their bustling city-states with discourse in the agora ranging over laws, morality, the efficacy of dialectic and elenchus, the gods of the Ancient Greek Pantheon, ancient tragedies and modern Platonic dialogues. It is not for nothing that we proclaim that Athens was the birthplace of our democracies. In the light of this proclamation it is somewhat surprising to find Campbell claiming that it is the USA and not the settled nations of Europe with their ancient legal and religious systems dispensing justice and salvation, that is the beacon of Reason. Reason was certainly born in Ancient Greece and Philosophical argumentation became the academic arbiter of conflicts and disagreements in courts of law, courts of Princes, universities, and the court of public opinion. Correct Jugment became the lodestar of civilisation and correct judgment demanded not the instrumental reasoning of the economists and military men, but the categorical reasoning that was initiated by Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. The USA was and perhaps still is the master of instrumental reasoning but insofar as categorical reasoning was and is concerned their Philosophers never played any decisive role at any important period of history in either its furtherance or application, except perhaps in courts of law and the justice system . But even this is no longer true now in the 21st century with the advent of the MAGA movement. If continuity alone is the measure of excellence (areté), insofar as the systems of justice are concerned, Europe has always led the way and still does. The American treatment of the American Indians and slaves, and the black people today, has been continuously unjust and inspired regimes such as the apartheid regime in South Africa who also believed they lived in the Greatest Country in the World blessed by God. Modern European countries have been united in the project of the separation of the state and religion, although admitttedly in the twentieth century nonreligious tyrants in German and Russia managed to bring Europe to the verge of political destruction. The USA’s finest hour may well have been in its determination to prevent this event happening, and in that finest hour they certainly were for a brief moment in History the “Beacon of Democracy”, “the shining polis on the hill”. The tragedy of Europe was itself brought about by the decline in categorical reasoning that was occurring at the end of the Enlightenment with the Philosophy of Hegel seeking to overturn Kantian categorical reasoning in both the realms of the Metaphysics of Nature and the Metaphysics of Morals. From the point of view of Socrates and Plato as expressed in the dialogue “The Republic”, this could be expressed in terms of Glaucons challenge to Socrates to provide a theory of justice that was both good-in-its-consequences and “good-in-itself”. This was done by establishing the categorical “Form of the Good” as the most important of all the forms that held categorically and absolutely. Plato may well have not understood the political implications of this form given that in the Republic, people who were not in the Philosophical ruling class were not treated categorically as “ends-in-themselves” and were lied to and subject to arbitrary prohibitions relating to the institution of marriage which was arbitrarily dissolved because of some obscure doctrine of eugenics. Socrates himself may have been sceptical of the so-called “noble lies”, and other matters because, for him, telling the truth was a matter established by the ideal of categorical practical reasoning.
Aristotle certainly laid the foundations for practical categorical reasoning in both his “Ethics” and “Politics”: foundations that built upon the Ethical principle that all activities of man aim at “The Good”, meaning of course the good that is both “good-in-its-consequences” and “good-in-itself”. Aristotle also insisted that the speeches of Politicians should be logical and use enthymemes to persuade their audiences of the truth of their words. Alongside all of this we also had to take account of the mythology of Ancient Greece which itself had shifted over the ages from the dominance of the Demiurge and Erinyes to the pantheon of Gods led by Zeus who attacked his father Chronos who believed he had eaten his son. Zeus overthrew the Titans in battle and divided up the kingdoms of the underworld, the sea, and the sky and a new pantheon of gods was born in the spirit of Gaia and Rhea, his mother. The predominance of female oracles also reflected this dominance which is of course at its best when perpetual peace prevails which it has not done since Ancient Greek Times. Perhaps Alexander the Great attempted to establish such a permanent peaceful regime using of course violent instrumental reasoning to establish this end-in-itself.
The Civil war in the USA was, we know, over the issue of slavery but it might also have been over the issues of very different life-styles and beliefs found in the North and the South: and as we know this occurred during the era of the emergence of populism( Arendt) and imperialism (Arendt) in Europe that brought with it a transformation or revolution in the political party system as new social forces emerged. Unfortunately the Gaia principle from Ancient Greece did not result in feminine representation at the highest political levels, and we appear to be still lacking such representation at the level of the highest political office of the US. Campbells proclamation therefore that the mythology of America ought to provide the model for the new mythology of the whole planet is mystifying. He ,of course, did not live to experience the populist emergence of the MAGA movement, but surely that was always in the cards, and had its roots in an event as old as the Civil War. It can also be argued that it was Germany that shot Europe in the foot with its populist revolution and that we have only ourselves to blame for not emerging as one of the major powers of the world. The German decision (Helmut Kohl) to establish economic relations with Russia which financed the Ukranian war, once again destabilised Europe in the 21st century. This together with the populist driven campaign in the UK to leave Europe and France’s intransigence over a possible compromise weakened Europe militarily speaking, and sent clear messages to a now economically strengthened Russia who had already claimed Crimea without any meaningful response from either Europe or the US (who were aginst the gas and oil links from the start of these projects). Talk of Mythology and its influence in such a militarised situation does seem otiose. The Military do not value life (psuche, for them a form of utilitarianism has always and will always prevail: the end is victory with the least loss of life possible: happiness for the greatest number (those still alive) is the goal. For them the categorical reasoning that it is a practical contradiction to use a life to take a life is otiose, an irrelevant form of reasoning. The Categorical Imperative which demands that one treat all human psuchë as ends-in-themselves, is of course metaphysical rather than mythological ,but this is our Greek heritage. Yet Kant’s Critical Philosophy which is a form of Aristotelian Hylomorphic Philosophy has inherited both the Philosophy of Ancient Greece and the fundamental Greek attitude toward its Gods, an attitude formed by the Aristotelian principle of the Golden Mean which had its souce in a number of oracular proclamations, for example:
Everyting created by man is subject ot ruin and destruction
Know thyself!
Knowing oneself involves obviously knowing to avoid impulsive extremes by relying on our knowledge(epistemé) of ourselves and our world. The Greeks did not over-idealise their Gods but demanded as Socrates did that their activities symbolise only the Good. Thus for the Greeks the form of the Good was a common denominator in both their Philosophy and their Mythology.
Campbell supports his proclamation with the following words:
“Reason puts you in touch with God, because the mind cleared of all its capabilities is sufficiently capable of the kowledge of God…. all people in the world are capable of reason…That is the fundamental principle of democracy.” (Page 31)
On the face of it these remarks appear Kantian, and in the spirit of the Enlightenment. Campbell argues insightfully, however, that the quote above rejects the account of the Bible which relates to the fallibility and fall of man and his exit from the garden of Eden. For the founding fathers apparently the belief in God had its origin in Reason, which, for Kant, is concerned with establishing the totality of conditions for everything that occurs in the realms of the Metaphysics of Nature and the Metaphysics of Morals, For Campbell, on the other hand, the use of Reason appears more circumscribed, connected more to the removing of obstacles to our understanding of our human “Being-in-the-world which he sometimes acutely characterises by reference to the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas in which it is stated that the Kingdom of God is both within and all around us. Sometimes he characterises this position through the following words translated from the Sanskrit:
“Thou art that”
which have their origin in Hindu Mysticism that Campbell takes to be an important element of myth:
“Myth opens the world to the dimension of mystery, to the realisation of mystery that underlies all forms.” (Page 38)
Campbell argues in this context that myth serves 4 fundamental functions:
The mystical function
a cosmological function
a sociological function
a pedagogical function
It is not exactly clear what he means with the sociological function of myth, whether, for example, it includes what the Ancient Greek and Kantian Critical Philosophers termed “ethics” and “politics”. These Philosophers placed much emphasis upon the importance of knowledge of, for example, the principles of “The Good”, and the principles of “Justice”. These principles ensured that we were dealing with matters that are both good-in-their-consequences and good-in-itself.
Campbell has been critical of many aspects of the narratives of the Bible which he claims are about events that occurred during the first millenium BC:
“It does not accord with our concept either of the universa or of the dignity of man” (page 40)
This Biblical view, Campbell argues, will not allow us to build a wise relation to animals, the water and the sea which precludes cutting down trees, uprooting lad and turning rivers into real estate, all of which amounts to:
“Killing God” (Page 40)
The Gaia principle is evoked, which views the whole planet as an organism. Campbell is here focussing on arguments that are more relevant to the Metaphysics of Nature, than to the Metaphysics of Morals which Kant associated with the dignity of man, categorical reasoning, the good will and the Kingdom of Ends. Campbell in this context fixates upon the psychological development of man:
“The maturation of the individual from dependency through adulthood through maturity, and then to exit, and then how to relate to this society and how to relate this society to the world of nature and the cosmos.” (Page 41)
The moral and political development of the individual may be implied in the above reflection but the details of this development are not clear. Political aspects of mythological narratives and parables are brought to the fore in the closing sequences of the chapter when Campbell quotes a letter by the Indian Chief Seattle in response to the American Presidents suggestion that America buy the land from the indians:
“How can you buy or sell the sky….If we do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can you buy them?….If we sell you our land, you must remember that it is sacred—the waters murmer is the voice of my fathers father….the wind that gave our grandfather his first breath also receives his last sigh. The wind also gives our children the spirit of life…..This we know: the earth does not belong to man….Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it….Your destiny is a mystery to us. What will hapen when the secret corners of the forest are heavy with the scent of many men and the view of the hills is blotted by talking wires….The end of living and the beginning of survival—will these shores and forests still be free? Will there be any of the spirit of my people left?” (pages 42-43)
Campbell claims that Mythology, (whilst manifesting itself in concrete local ethnic forms), is nevertheless concerned with timeless themes such as life, death, and justice. He refers in this context to the ceremonial activities connected with justice such as standing up for the robed judge entering and leaving the court. This, attention, is for Campbell, a sign that we are dealing with a mythological figure. (Page 14). He also mentions the ritual of the Inauguration of a President as well as the ritualistic wearing of uniforms for members of the armed forces. This latter phenomenon, he argues, denotes that these individuals are to be given special status above and beyond the reach of civil law. This is a puzzling remark, especially given the recent expansion of the remit of the International Court of Justice to include war crimes and crimes against humanity, (for example, the murdering of civilians who happen to find themselves living in the vicinity of a war.
The Metaphysics of Morals surely overshadows the Metaphysics of War in this context, focusing, as war does, upon instrumental reasoning that aims for the most effective means to the end of annihilating ones enemy. The Metaphysics of morals, on the other hand, is concerned with a moral end-in-itself which is to treat every human being as an end-in-itself thereby creating what Kant referred to as the Cosmopolitan “Kingdom of Ends”. This ideal Kingdom forms the foundation for a Philosophy of Human Rights based on the rational ideas of Equality and Freedom and this Kantian ideal is, in turn, an ideal of Cosmopolitan Justice that we cannot find in Mythological accounts and visions.
Campbell then provides us with an interesting characterisation of Consciousness:
“It is part of the Cartesian mode to think of consciousness as being something peculiar to the head, that the head is the organ originating consciousness. It isn’t. The head is an organ that inflects consciousness in a certain direction, or to a certain set of purposes. But there is a consciousness here in the body. The whole living world is informed by consciousness. I have a feeling that consciousness and energy are the same thing somehow. Where you really see life, energy, there is consciousness. Certainly the vegetable world is conscious….There is a plant consciousness and there is an animal consciousness and we share both these things. Trying to interpret in simply mechanical terms won’t work.” (Page 18)
These are reflections, which are clearly mythological but they are not completely in accord with philosophical thinking. For Aristotelian, Hylomorphic thinking, animals and humans are capable of consciousness because they are capable of representing the world through their perceptual systems. For Aristotle inhabitants of the plant kingdom are capable of nutrition and reproduction, but they are not capable of perception. The world of psuché for Aristotle is differentiated, and different principles are operating for different forms of life. Neither Aristotle nor Kant would have approved of using mechanistic explanations to explain the essence of forms of life . Mechanistic explanations are best used for motion and activity in the natural inorganic world in which a network of causes constitute a totality of facts in accord with physical non-psychological principles.
Brian O’Shaughnessy, the British analytical Philosopher, contributes to this discussion by suggesting that whilst the origins of consciousness may be construed as mysterious, its nature or essence is not :
Open Quote. “Consciousness has a determinate character of internal type and there exist logically necessary and sufficient psychological conditions for the presence of this phenomenon….consciousness is analysable into psychological parts.” Close quote (Consciousness and the World”, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2000, Page 5)
O Shaughnessy notes that consciousness interacts with the world in many ways, and requires items of knowledge–a cognitive function that is closer to its essence than the performing of intentional deeds promoting life. Indeed, O’Shaughnessy argues this latter kind of activity relies upon knowledge for its rationality. This position recalls the accounts of the soul provided by both Plato and Aristotle. According to both, O’Shaughnessy, the analytical Philosopher, and Merleau-Ponty, the Continental Philosopher, consciousness is intimately related to the psychological function of Perception, which fuels desire that in turn again enriches perception, and so on in a “universal vital cycle” (Page 7) O’Shaughnessy is providing us with an Aristotelian essence-specifying-definition of considerable complexity, considering the Post-Aristotelian, Post-Kantian, and Post-Wittgensteinian elements of his account. He claims, in agreement with Campbell, that Consciousness cannot exist without experience, claiming further that perception is an:
Open quote. “a priori-given mental concept…, being nothing but the extensional awareness of a phenomenal reality.” Close quote. (Page 18)
Plant-life cannot of course perceive its environment via representations of phenomenal objects. O’Shaughnessy agrees with this judgment ,and claims further, that animal consciousness in the form of perception is situationally-tied to the immediate environment, and to that extent is not to be regarded as capable of thought or rationality which occur at a conceptual distance from their objects. Animals, therefore, are not capable of distancing themselves from their environment and are therefore not capable of reflecting upon themselves or “knowing” themselves. It is these characteristics that enable the human form of life to transcend experience in the phenomenal world, and thereby relate to a transcendental noumenal world. The kingdom of ends and the realm of the sacred are noumenal ideals that can be accessed via various human psychological functions and powers. This, in turn, also helps to explain why a science of phenomena constituted of a network of causes and totality of facts can never completely explain all the different forms of our “Being-in-the-world”.
For Campbell, human beings are capable of levels of consciousness which he illustrates in various works by appealing to, for example, kundalini yoga (“Inner Reaches of Outer Space”, 1986) ). In “The Power of Myth” (1988) Bill Moyers asks Campbell how we can engage in the process of transforming consciousness, and Campbell responds by insisting that “All life is meditation” (Page 19). He adds, however, that many people spend much of their life meditating about money, which he implies is not a spiritual kind of reflection. In this context he places emphasis upon the importance of spiritual places and their power to provoke a meditative state:
“I walk off 51st street and 5th Avenue into St Patrick’s Cathedral, and everything around me speaks of spiritual mysteries. The mystery of the cross. “What is that all about? The stained glass windows which bring another atmosphere in. My consciousness has been brought up onto another level altogether and I’m on a different platform. And then I walk out and I’m back on the street again. Now can I hold something from the Cathedral consciousness? Certain prayers or meditations are designed to hold your consciousness on that level….And then what you finally do is to recognize that this is simply a lower level of that higher consciousness.” (Page 19)
In Episode two of this series of essays, we wrote about the phenomenon of automated photographic images, and the cave of the cinema, and questioned the claim that this modern form of entertainment could raise our level of consciousness to the higher levels Campbell speaks about. Perhaps a documentary film of the Cathedral could lift our consciousness from the level of meditating upon our economic situation, family etc., into the realm of the sacred. But the way in which the camera roams around the cathedral is not the human way, and somewhere we seem to know that we are witnessing two dimensional representations of three dimensional phenomena: that is, imitations of the real forms. One interesting question to pose in this context is to ask whether the real effect we experience in the real presence of St Patrick’s, could occur for someone with no knowledge of Christianity or the role of the Church, the rituals of prayer etc. The answer to this question depends of course upon the efficacy of the educational system we have participated in : whether, that is, it can transcend its dependence upon the principle of specialization, and evoke the universality and necessity of transcendent experiences.
Dreams, of course, can be a source of transcendent experiences, but if there is no experience in our life that has a spiritual function and structure, the question to raise is whether dreams with transcendent content could occur spontaneously, given the fact that memory is to some limited extent involved in the images we experience. Do elementary ideas or collective archetypes need to be awoken by conscious experiences with mythological content?
Campbell and Moyers propose Douglas Fairbanks Jr, the romantic war hero, and John Wayne, the Western film star, as possible mythic figures of their time. Campbell seems to believe that the “magical quality” of film and our everyday admiration and treatment of film stars resembles the awe and wonder we experienced in relation to mythical gods. He does not, however, believe that the medium of television can produce quite the same effect, producing celebrities and events which do not lift us up to the rapture of bliss which it is claimed accompanies transcendental experience.
Campbell’s motivation for this judgment is related to the event of the viewing not occurring in the “temple” of the cinema, but perhaps a more salient question to ask in this situation, is whether what we are viewing either on the cinema screen, or the television screen, is an aesthetic experience . The telos of entertainment in both the cinema and television has seemed to many to be at the expense of the pedagogical function, which is required of all art. These automated moving photographs, seem more to incite desire, and are produced, that is, with the intent of moving us rather than with the intent of bringing aesthetic rest or closure after the operation of the aesthetic enveloping process. It is difficult to see in the craft of the moving photographs anything approaching either the beautiful, which is a symbol of morality (gunfights in Westerns, the hunt for murderers in detective films, the massive star-war inter-stellar advanced technology battles) or the sublime, both of which aim at a catharsis of the emotions of desire and fear.
Perhaps there is a whiff of transcendence in those films where someone helps soneone else, just because life is an end-in-itself, transcending the boundaries of any self-interest. It is difficult, however, to see in the activities of film heroes anything resembling the presence, for example, of Paul, the Christian Apostle. who claimed that he was wrestling with “principalities and powers”. What can be clearly see in these productions is the presence of Thanatos in the increasing volume and intensity of violence, taking the various forms of gunfights, war, bombings, stabbings, etc.
Bill Moyers initiates a discussion that compares cults where animal sacrifices occur everywhere in the natural world, with the cult of “Christianity”, which sought to become a “universal” religion, proclaiming Jesus to be a “temple-god”—a divinity to worship in the symbolic environment of a sacred house. As a counterpoint in favour of nature cults, Moyers reminds us of the pygmy parable of the little boy who heard the beautiful song of a bird which he brought home to his father, who then killed the bird and dropped dead immediately afterwards. Both Campbell and Moyers agree with the moral of this parable, which is that killing beautiful things will not end well for the agent.
Campbell claims in the context of the above discussion that “Mythology is the song of the human imagination inspired by the energies of the body” (Page 27). He also points to the perspectival character of mythologies in a world searching for universal and transcendent experiences, searching for what he terms the “Mythology of the Planet”. He does not mention Philosophy in the context of this discussion, a discipline and study which clearly has both universal and transcendent intentions. We have referred in earlier essays to Campbells references to Kant, who of course is a Critical Philosopher committed to Aristotelian Hylomorphism. Both Aristotle and Kant woud subscribe to the claims that the powers of Consciousness and the imagination are psychological functions and powers rooted in the energies of the body. Campbells preliminary suggestion for a Mythology of the Planet is the mythology/religion of Buddhism, which of course has its transcendental moments, but in terms of the Metaphysics of Morals and compared with the systematic ethical teachings of Kant, Buddhism appears to be rhapsodic.
Campbell claims that Consciousness and energy are the same, and he further claims that psychological functions such as imagination are “inspired” by the energies of the body. In this context we ought to consider Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the “lived body”:
Open quote. “I am not a “living creature” nor even a “man”, nor even again a consciousness endowed with all the characteristics which zoology, social anatomy, or inductive psychology recognise in these various products of the natural or historical process—- I am the absolute source, my existence does not stem from my antecedents, from my physical and social environment: instead it moves out towards them and sustains them, for I alone bring into being for myself….the tradition which I elect to carry on….” Close Quote. (Phenomenology of Perception, translated Smith, C., Routledge, London, Preface IX)
O Shaughnessy , the Analytic Philosopher, and Merleau-Ponty, the Continental Phenomenologist, are largely in agreement over the holistic aspect of the self, and both regard attempts by theoretical science to reduce the whole to the sum of its parts as otiose. Scientific Psychology of the late 19th and early 20th centuries postulated the sensation as an elementary Psychological function distinguishing it from higher functions and powers that were more remotely connected to a bodily substructure:
Open quote. “A closer analysis, however, reveals that the two kinds of function overlap. The elementary is no longer that which by addition will cumulatively constitute the whole, nor is it a mere occasion for the whole to constitute itself. The elementary event is already invested with meaning and the higher function will bring into being only a more integrated mode of existence or a more valid adaptation, by using and sublimating the subordinate operations.” Close quote. ( Phenomenology of Perception Page 11)
The above reflections would seem to follow from the Kantian claim that the human self is a self-causing entity, a unique origin-point for experience. These reflections are also, however, elaborations upon the hylomorphism of Freud, who was greatly influenced by the work of Hughlings-Jackson in the field of brain research. What all these authors have in common is a position which rejects the conception of a world or a self, constituted of a network of causes that in turn form a totality of facts.
When St Paul maintained he was wrestling with principalities and powers he is referring to answering questions not relating to what things are, but rather why they are as they are: questions of principles. Powers and functions are not principles, which are different depending upon whether they are applied to the natural inorganic world of nature, or the organic world of psuché(which can take many different forms partly because of the possession of different powers, e.g. consciousness, imagination, memory, thought).
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.
The Power of Joseph Campbell’s Myth (published 1991, Anchor Books) and the Love of Sophia (Episode 1)
Mythology is almost as ancient as the hills. It stretches back to an origin in time we cannot easily fathom—to a time when we were perhaps not as fully aware of ourselves, and our world as we are today. There was a time, for example, when we did not have particular names for particular people and may not have buried the dead. This was before the time that man was looking up to the heavens to measure time beyond the events of the hour and the day. William James, the author of Principles of Psychology defined Psychology as the “Study of Mental Life: its Phenomena and Conditions”. He noted that the tramp concerned himself for the needs of the hour whilst the Bohemian concerned himself for the needs of the day: the Bachelor for the needs of his life: the family man for the needs of his children: the politician for the needs of the nation he is leading: and the Philosopher concerns himself for the needs of humanity for all eternity. Mythology may love life and Eros, but it is not clear that it loves “Sophia” given that it conceives of the sacred in “local” spatial and temporal forms, which do not meet the universal requirements of Aristotelian and post-Aristotelian Philosophy. Mythology too stretched itself over a time period where man in general was too untutored to appreciate the experience of the sublime, fearing what he did not understand (for example. a powerful waterfall) instead of seeing its symbolic significance, seeing its relevance to the power of our human agency.
The breadth and depth of Campbell’s concerns manifest themselves clearly in this series of interviews for which the intent is neither popular nor academic, representing instead the legacies of William James’ Pragmatism and American Transcendentalism (Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Margaret Fuller).
The introductory quote to the first chapter reads: (Open quote)
“People say that what we are all seeking is a meaning for life. I do not think that is what we are really seeking. I think what we are seeking is an experience of being alive, so that or life experiences, on the purely physical plane will have resonances within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.” (Close quote)
In his first comment of the interview entitled “Myth and the Modern World” Campbell notes that we “Moderns” interest ourselves primarily in the news of the day and the problems of the hour. Such a life precludes attention to spiritual matters of the transcendental realm of the sacred: a state of affairs which, he argues, we will regret as we age. Campbell himself regrets the changes he has witnessed in education where emphasis has moved from Greek, Latin and Biblical stories to less spiritual narratives. These Greek Latin and Hebrew/Christian texts have built civilisations and supported our human communities for millennia. Even great novels such as those written by James Joyce and Thomas Mann no longer influence our lives as they used to and we are no longer exposed to the aesthetic evaluation of the lives of the tramp and the bohemian: evaluations that attempt to provide us with the truth about or lives. What is common between world-myths and these great novels is that they are both intended to provide us with a glimpse of the timeless transcendental aspect of our “Being-in-the-world” via spatio-temporal forms that are “symbolic”. The length of these narratives can be as long as Joyce’s “Ulysses” or as short as the parable of the Eastern Mystic about to give a sermon interrupted by the song of a bird which he then claims was the sermon. Such a transcendental view of life ,which sheds light on all other forms has of course been lost in our modern age but the Philosophical view of Heidegger, for example, is that this “fall” began occurring even during the time of the Greeks with the work of Aristotle. This may not be an accurate judgement but the process of alienation from the spiritual concerns of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle certainly began relatively shortly after the work of Aristotle and accelerated during the Roman era. Heidegger also indicates how the age of Techné has further estranged us from understanding the transcendental aspects of human life.
Campbell argues that Myths keep us in touch with that aspect of our minds designated as “noos” by Aristotle. Paul Ricoeur characterises this transcendental realm, which we are seeking to understand as “the realm of the sacred”. Campbell refers to this realm and its relation to our everyday institutions such as marriage: (Open quote)
“Read Myths. They teach you that you can turn inward and you begin to get the message of the symbols. Read other peoples myths, not those of your own religion, because you tend to interpret your own religion in terms of facts—but if you read other ones, you begin t get the message. Myth helps to put your mind in touch with this experience of being alive. It tells you what experience is. Marriage for example. What is marriage? The Myth tells you what it is. It’s the reunion of the separated duad. Originally you were one. You are now two in the world, but the recognition of the spiritual identity is what marriage is. Its different from a love affair. It has nothing to do with that. Its another mythological plane of existence……By marrying the right person we reconstruct the image of the incarnate God, and that’s what marriage is.” (Close quote)
This is what marriage is in the realm of the sacred: a realm in which religious confession of ones trespasses, for example, are cathartic and just because of fulfilling that function will be in some sense “forgiven”—such is the power of “knowing oneself”. For the Bohemian marriage is the love affair that will soon dissipate (as do all biological urges) and end with separation. For the bachelor there can be no ideal marriage which for him entails taking responsibility for the well being of future generations, ensuring that ones own children lead good spirited flourishing lives (eudaimonia).
Campbell opens this chapter with a characterisation of Myth:
“like dreams they are the revelations of the deeper desires, hopes, fears, potentialities and conflicts of the human will moved by the organs of the body operating variously against each other and in concert.”
The mythological view of the world is in fact, to some extent in accordance with Kant’s critical Philosophy which also claims that both life forms and inorganic physical objects are metaphysically grounded in a realm beyond phenomenal space, time, and matter: a realm that can only be reached by the mind. A temple, for example, is more than a building for worship, it is, as Campbell puts it, a concretisation of the noumenal world: a bearer of many symbolic properties that relate to the transcendental realm of the sacred.
There are many interesting relations between the mythological view of the world and the aesthetic views of the beautiful and sublime which bring us into contact with a repertoire of emotions that relate either to the form or the formlessness of the object we are confronting/contemplating. In Kant’s account of the dynamically sublime from his third Critique, the human will plays an important role and insofar as the appreciation of beautiful works of art are intentionally produced objects, the will is obviously involved in this experience too. One of the aims of the artist is to induce a feeling of pleasure in the audience of the work: a feeling that Kant argues is based on the harmony of the operation of the faculties of the imaginations and the understanding.
The task the artist sets for his audience is also one of passing judgement upon the work as a whole. This involves the application of some universal idea to the particulars of the object created. A transcendental principle is involved in this transaction: a principle Kant describes in terms of the “form of finality of the object”. The aesthetic judgement is characterised by Kant as one in which we demand agreement, on the basis of the fact that the feeling of pleasure experienced, is grounded in the harmony of the faculties. Even in this pure form, the mind, Kant argues is also prepared for moral feeling because Beauty “is the symbol of morality”. The feelings related to the experience of the sublime on the other hand relates to ideas of practical reason that are connected to our moral agency.
Mythological views of death, on the other hand, relate more closely to ideas we find in the various religions. Freud, we know, in his later writings was influenced by Greek mythology and its view of Thanatos but Freud, the scientist also grounds the phenomenon of death in Science. In his work Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud claims:
“The attributes of life were at some time evolved in inanimate matter by the action of a force of whose nature we can frm no conception. The tension which then arose in what had hitherto been inanimate substance endeavoured to cancel itself out. In this way the first drive came into being, the drive to return to the inanimate state.” ( Beyond the pleasure Principle in Metapsychological papers, P.38)
This is the beginning stage of Freuds so called “Mythology of the instincts”. Life emerged at some point in the history of the earth and just as its origin is a mystery, so is its end, because in the case of every living individual, the dead body no longer displays any signs of consciousness or life. Life as such will continue when these individuals die but only until that point at which their “time has come”, as we say. In human psuché the understanding and acknowledgment of these facts is part of the function of the Ego, which is carried out in accordance with the Reality Principle. It is the ego which is the dynamic agency responsible for the protection and preservation of the body and the self. As an agency it is situated topographically in all three zones of the unconscious, the preconscious and consciousness. The pleasure ego is the most primitive aspect of the undeveloped ego, which also has an intimate connection with the biological energy regulation principle that basically aims for the homeostasis of the body whilst still keeping some energy in reserve for some special or emergency actions. The Ego, that is, learns to postpone gratification, tolerating the painful tension involved in the postponement of desired actions. Freud appeals to Fechner’s connection of the feeling of pleasure to topographical consciousness:
“In so far as conscious impulses always have some relation to pleasure or unpleasure, pleasure and unpleasure too can be regarded as having a psycho-physical relation to conditions of stability and unstability….every psycho-physical motion rising above the threshold of consciousness is attended by pleasure in proportion, as beyond a certain limit,it approximates to complete stability, and is attended by unpleasure in proportion as, beyond a certain limit, it deviates from complete stability; while between the limits which may be described as qualitative thresholds of pleasure and unpleasure, there is a certain margin of aesthetic indifference.”( Beyond the Pleasure Principle, (226-7)
There is, then, in Freud’s work complex relations between the biological energy regulation principle and the psychological pleasure-unpleasure and reality principles. We should recall in the context of this discussion the theory of pleasure presented by Plato via Socrates in the dialogue “The Republic”. In this dialogue Plato argues for an important distinction between the pleasures of the body which are transitory and mixed with pain and the pleasures of the soul which are more aligned with the fulfilment of our more spiritual needs, e.g. our need for knowledge, reason and virtue. We note that neither in Plato’s view nor in Freud’s view are these accounts contaminated with a theory of Consciousness which insists that I cannot be mistaken about my experience of pleasure. There are, of course, affections of the body which cease before they are registered in consciousness, and the energy regulation principle will explain such phenomena adequately by reference to the telos of body/organ functioning, namely, homeostasis. Obviously homeostatic functioning of the organs is an important condition for both short term survival but also long term quality of life. There is a complex overlaying and integration of biological/psychological and mental powers which may make it difficult for the individual to categorically know what kind of pleasure that they are experiencing. Indeed Socrates in Plato’s Republic points to the relativity of pleasure/happiness when he notes that healthy people may not relate their happiness specifically to their health. If, however, they become ill they may well upon returning to a healthy state be happy about such a change in their state. If such an individual is, moreover, poverty stricken they may experience unpleasure until their toil and work takes them out of such a state. They might temporarily feel as if they could not feel happier until ,as was the case with the character Cephalus in the Republic, they have their money unjustly taken away by the state. The politicians responsible for taking the money of Cephalus may well temporarily feel pleasure until other politicians take their money away, or perhaps even conspire to have them murdered. Such a sequence of cases is of course the reason why Socrates and Aristotle recommended leading the examined/contemplative life, which according to both philosophers knows all the different kinds of pleasure and knows the pleasure of leading an examined/contemplative life is the most reliable and best. What we have described are Plato’s objective criteria for leading a life of virtue determined by the form of the Good. The subjective account of the wealthy mans transitory happiness and the politicians transitory happiness are based on subjective perceptions of pleasure. Plato even describes the life of the powerful ruling tyrant: a bloodthirsty life that ends in premature death because of the lack of understanding of the importance of the virtuous life. What gives the tyrant pleasure or makes him happy are giving in to the temptations of both unnecessary and unlawful desires.
Plato’s theoretical account of pleasure and pain maintains that they are not as common sense would have it, contraries. There is in fact a middle ground between these two types of experience. In other words, not all experience is either pleasurable or painful—some experiences are neutral. The reason we believe that the “neutral ground” belongs in the territory of these so-called contraries is that if either pleasure or pain are immediately adjacent to a neutral experience there is a tendency to give the neutral ground the name of what one has experienced immediately prior to the neutral experience. Alternatively, there is a tendency upon feeling relief from bodily pain to name the absence of pain as “Pleasing”.
Now whilst knowledge of the good must be related to desire, knowledge of the true need not be. For example, on thinking through the sequence of premises, “All men are mortal”, Socrates is a man”, “Socrates is mortal”, I know all these premises to be true irrespective of any feelings: I may have, e.g. regret at the death of Socrates. The interesting question to raise in this context is whether in knowing the truth that I am mortal, I can grasp this truth in a desire-free state. According to both Spinoza and Freud the desire to continue existing is one of the strongest of the animal desires. Yet we find Socrates in his death cell claiming that death is good . Is this because he lived the examined life as part of his his three score years and ten? The religious individuals acceptance of their death is perhaps not quite in the same spirit, believing as they do in a life after death which has no philosophical support. True acceptance of death would seem to entail being cleansed of all fear and desire, and this might not be true of religious individuals with false beliefs firstly, about their God being the only God and secondly, about a life after death.
Freud’s view of stability is certainly connected to the Greek idea of eudaimonia (the good spirited flourishing life) which requires the overlaying and integration of a number of different powers energised by eros or the life instinct. For Freud it is the secondary process of the mind which sublimates the primary process where the death instinct or Thanatos may be playing a larger role in the life of the individual. The primary process of the mind is the process in which the most primitive instinctive drives of the mind strive for uninhibited gratification. The secondary process seeks to postpone all such gratification in favour of less dangerous and more lasting , secure gratifications. Both Socrates and Aristotle agree that secondary process gratifications were part of the structure of leading the examined-contemplative life. Freud elaborates upon this theme:
“We know that the pleasure principle is proper to a primary method of working on the part of the mental apparatus, but that from the point of view of the self-preservation of the organism among the difficulties of the external world, it is from the very outset inefficient and even highly dangerous….the pleasure principle long persists however as the method of working employed by the sexual instincts which are so hard to “educate”, and starting from these instincts, or in the ego itself, it often succeeds in overcoming the reality principle, to the detriment of the organism as a whole.” (P.278)
This entails, Freud argues, that two defences are used by the ego against the primary process pleasure principle, namely splitting and repression. In the former case those instincts that are difficult to educate are split off from consciousness and they are then repressed allowing the ego to compensate for this loss of energy by using another defence mechanism, namely sublimation to produce creations of works of art.
In a long section of this essay (Beyond the Pleasure Principle), Freud discusses what we know about life at the cellular level, and in so doing admits that we know as little about the origins of the sexual instinct as we know about the origins of life. After postulating and abandoning various hypotheses he finally settles upon what he calls a “mythological” account” that originates in both Plato’s symposium and the Indian Upanishads. In these latter writings Atman:
“felt no delight. Therefore a man that is lonely feels no delight. He wished for a second. He was so large as man and wife together. He then made his self fall into two and then arose husband and wife.” (ftnt. P.331)
Freud, however, remains hesitant and treats his final position on this issue as a speculative hypothesis, naming this position as his “Mythology of the Instincts”. On this final account sexuality’s function is to reconcile the two halves of split man, each desiring the other not romantically but out of biological/psychological necessity (Platonic love?). On this account hate belongs to that other. school of instincts, death, construed as “the destroyer of worlds” (Bhagavad Gita). After a protracted hylomorphic discussion which included Schopehauers claim that the purpose of life is death, Freud finally placed his hope in future Biological Science. If Schopenhauer is correct in his characterisation of the relation of these two different groups of instincts, then this kind of account would allow us to understand more fully that Socratic moment in the Phaedo where Socrates claims that whatever death is in its nature, it must be good. Perhaps such an interpretation would also allow a more complete understanding of the oracular proclamation that:
“Everything created by humans is destined for ruin and destruction.”
The above interpretations perhaps would lead man to appreciate more fully the life he is currently leading as well as the reason why it is important to strive for the examined/contemplative life. Aristotelian hylomorphism, seems, then, to make even more sense in the context of a discussion in which life is portrayed as an irritation/excitation of inorganic matter that is temporarily displaced whist life continues to exist. Aristotle postulated the idea of prime matter, and whatever that is in its nature, we can, Aristotle argues, only know of it in some form (shape). Life for this hylomorphic view is an energetic organisation of matter, and death occurs either when this energy dissipates or the organs necessary for the distribution and transformation of energy are no longer able to maintain the minimum requirements of homeostasis.
A stone is formed matter as is a, a star and a galaxy. The kingdom of Minerals have their forms and functions as do the Kingdom of Plants and Animals. We, according to Aristotle have the potentiality to become both the worst and the best of animals, suggesting that the constellation of the powers of the human psuché may well be a mixed blessing. The question to raise here is whether the study of Mythology can lead to a greater understanding of the origins and telos of the three kingdoms proposed by Linnaeus.
Campbell claims that Mythology can release us from fixation upon false ideas which, if true, indicates an important kinship with both Ancient Greek and Enlightenment Philosophy. He initiates a discussion of Kantian Critical Philosophy, one of whose aims was certainly to neutralise the power of false claims by analysing the logical properties of judgements based on a trifold characterisation of the faculties of human psuché (sensibility, understanding and reason) Kant draws a major distinction between aposteriori judgements based upon experience, and apriori judgements which are known via the analysis of concepts. It is interesting in such a context to pose the question whether the judgement, “All men are mortal” is an example of an analytic or synthetic judgement (based on experience). The concept of mortality would appear to have a necessary relation to the concept of man because man belongs primarily to the kingdom of living things and the final cause or condition for the existence of living things is that they will inevitably die and return their inorganic elements to the earth. Freud pointed this out and claimed that this process was operating even during life in the form of a drive.
Kant’s idea of death is that it is the end of life and further that since life is the condition of all possible experience, including the experience of the soul as an object, death is the end of all experience.(Prolegomena P.76, §48). All men are mortal cannot, then, be known by experience because the species of man stretches far into the future beyond our current experience, and whether or not all men are going to die, cannot be verified at any present moment. This does not mean that this statement is either false or meaningless, but rather that it has to be supported by judgements relating to the totality of conditions constituting life and its ultimate end in death. It must therefore be a contradiction to claim that men are not mortal given all the facts that can be produced in support of this judgement., e.g. hylomorphic facts about the nature of cells, tissues organs, etc .The question that remains hanging in the air is whether All men are mortal is an analytic or synthetic a priori judgement since both are related in different ways to the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason.
Kant claims that Metaphysics rests upon a base of synthetic apriori judgements which connect concepts necessarily but not analytically, i.e. mortality may not be “contained ” in the concept of man, because it is science that classifies man as an entity within a much larger class of animals, and all living things. Now whilst the origin of life may be a mystery, its natural manifestations in accordance with principles governing such manifestations are not. It is therefore the task of the Aristotelian essence-specifying-definition of man to locate him in the animal kingdom, and at the same time to differentiate him from other members of this class, via his unique powers of discourse and rationality. All animals may be mortal, but not all animals can speak and reason. Knowledge of biology is the science we rely upon to provide us with the essence-specifying-definitions of all living things. The human psuché, on the other hand, requires not just the knowledge of Biology but knowledge of many disciplines if we are going to be able to understand the full range and limitations of its powers.
Mythology like many other disciplines , if it is to continue occupying an important role in our lives, must acknowledge the above biological, philosophical and psychological accounts of the being of human being which includes knowledge of life, death, space, time, and matter. Paul Ricoeur summarises the function of myth well in his work “Symbolism of Evil”:
“”Myths will be here taken to mean what the history of religions now finds in it: not a false explanation by means of images and fables, but a traditional narration which relates to events that happened at the beginning of time, and which has the purpose of providing grounds for the ritual actions of men today, and, in a general manner, establishing all the forms of action and thought by which man understands himself in his world.. For us moderns a myth is only a myth because one no longer connects mythical places with our geographical space. This is why myth can no longer be an explanation… But in losing its explanatory pretensions the myth reveals its exploratory significance and its contribution to understanding which we shall later call its symbolic function–that is to say its power of discovering and revealing the bond between man and what he considers sacred.” (P.5)
One recalls in this context the insistence by many “scientists” that for example the City of Troy was a fabled location until in the 19th century when it was actually discovered to have existed. Nevertheless it can be argued that mythological thinking even of the literate societies has its limitations. In a review of Paul Ricoeur’s “Time and Narrative, Vol 1 , the following is claimed:
“The limitations of myth may well have given birth to Philosophy, when it came to providing explanations demanded by aporetic questions, and raising issues relating to the infinite media of change, namely, space, time and matter. It no longer seemed efficacious to personify Time by the figure or image of Chronos, engaging in the curious activity of eating his children. and being castrated by the most powerful of his children. Such images just did not seem to respond appropriately to the awe and wonder of a newly awoken consciousness in the face of the sublimity of life in a world of such complexity. These images did not possess the required universality and necessity of the philosophical principle of sufficient reason.”(http://michaelrdjames.org)
Some commentators, however have been carried away by the desire to criticise the limitations of myth, e.g. Ernst Cassirer in his work “Language and Myth” (trans Langer, S. K., New York, Dover, 1946). Cassirer points to the Socratic complaint from the dialogue the Phaedrus.: e.g. to explain death by an image of a god-like wind whisking the soul away is to misunderstand the phenomenon of death. Neither Gods nor monsters, Socrates argued, meet the criteria of sufficient reason demanded by Philosophical explanation.
We know that Plato, too, was not averse to using allegories and analogies to explain enigmatic phenomena when philosophical arguments could not be provided. The Myth of the Cave obviously relied heavily on the analogous relations between the warmth and light of our sun and the form of the good (the virtuous life). We remember too that it was in the Republic that Socrates rebuked Homer for his poetic representation of the gods as deceitful, unjust, and prone to immoral behaviour. These gods for Socrates were not manifestations of the form of the Good proposed by Plato in his Theory of Forms, but many interpretations of the intentions of Homer are possible including the possibility that he favoured certain elements of the previous pantheon of impersonal deities/forces such as the demiurge, the erinyes/euminedes etc over the “new pantheon”. The last act of Socrates was a request to a friend to make a sacrifice to Asclepius, the god of medicine, presumably as thanks for the relatively painless experience of being poisoned to death. This indicates that some of the gods, especially those connected with knowledge and leading a good spirited flourishing life, were admired by Socrates. We also ought to recall in this context that the early career of Socrates was spent as a so called “natural Philosopher”, investigating the physical world and its elements. Socrates himself attributes to Anaximander’s claim that “All is mind (noos)”, the inspiration for the turn away from this kind of physical investigation and toward the investigation of the human psuché (its powers of virtue and vice). This Socratic turn at least mitigated the accusations directed at Socrates for being an atheist, a rumour that may have aided in his unpopularity with a large part of the jury that considered the accusation levelled against him of denying the value of the gods of the polis and corrupting the minds of the youth. Anaximander claimed, as we now that the moon is made of stone, and perhaps Socrates believed this proposition to be true whilst also believing in the demiurge and noos. As far as mythology was concerned Socrates was prepared to consider myths symbolically but he refrained from interpreting Orphic and other mythological images literally ,and as we have mentioned, objected to the Homeric images of the Greek gods behaving immorally. There was probably no clear distinction in the minds of the Ancient Greeks between Religion and Mythology as there is for the modern understanding, e.g. Freud.
Freud would in his later works produce a theory with implications for both mythology and religion, in which he cautioned against embracing pathologically originated images of figures related to, for example, the Oedipus Complex. We ought, however, in this context, to recall his positive references to Greek literature and Mythology(Oedipus Rex, Eros, Thanatos, Ananke). Freud was also familiar with Ancient Greek Philosophy which he actively referred to in his later work using his “God” logos to illuminate the many meanings of “Being” referred to by the terms, areté, arché, diké, phronesis, and eudaimonia. Part of the logos of the transcendent involved the use of allegory and analogy which Campbell uses Kantian Critical Philosophy to explain:
“A is to B what C is to X points to a resemblance not between two things but between two relationships between quite dissimilar things. The relation of A to B perfectly resembles that of C to X and what X represents is a quantity that is not only unknown but absolutely unknowable, which is to say metaphysical.”
Campbell then produces examples of two Kantian analogies in order to illustrate how we can via discourse and reasoning (logos) illuminate aspects of metaphysical “quantities” or entities:
“as the promotion of the happiness of children(A) is related to the parents love(B) so is the welfare of the human race (C) to that unknown which is God’s love(X)
“The causality of the Highest Cause (X) is precisely in respect to the world (C) what Human Reason (B) is in respect to the work of human art.(A)”
This form of reasoning by analogy to “reveal” something about the unknowable X, is the Kantian equivalent of the Platonic strategy of using allegory or analogy whenever logos or argumentation failed to “reveal” the full nature of what one was attempting to explain or justify. Aristotle’s Hylomorphic Metaphysics could situate God on his pure-matter—pure form continuum, characterising God as pure form but confounding his readers when he tried to attach concrete content to his characterisation: content such as God is thinking about thinking and in doing so is thinking about himself. We are, of course, finite beings and can only think something about something, a power which originates in our experience of the world. Thinking about thinking is clearly a higher power which we might expect of a being of infinite power. If Gods thinking were in any respect related to the world, he would have to be situated somewhere in that world, and that would immediately compromise the status of his infinitude. Indeed it is this relation of infinite Being to the temporal which myth attempts to “show” in its images, metaphors, allegories and analogies. Such images immediately bring with them “the affect” connected to awe and wonder which appears to be occur more readily once we are prepared to discard our own selfish desires and fears. Campbell points out that insofar as we can speak meaningfully about this highest or first cause, it can only be done in the metaphorical mode of “as if”. This is best done he argues via:
“a psychologically affective image transparent to transcendence”
Campbell further elaborates upon this position by claiming that the Lord’s Prayer which begins “Our father..” is a metaphorical invocation, given the fact that we know we are not addressing a parent of ours, any male parent, or indeed any specific human being. Therefore, Campbell argues, this prayer’s impact is primarily psychological, especially given the fact that it is not embedded in any network of concepts and judgements, but at best inheres in a system of parent-child sentiments. The prayer, of course, also contains a confession of our sins and a request for forgiveness which Freud may well have claimed has a cathartic value in relation to the fear we all feel for the consequences of our actions. The reference to “heaven” in the prayer is of course not a real location-designation, but rather a term which designates a metaphorically constituted “morphogenetic field”, to use Campbells expression.
Campbell insightfully hypothesises that there might have been a Lord’s Prayer that began “Our Mother:::”. We ought to recall in the context of this discussion that the Greek oracles were predominantly female. It would not stretch the powers of the imagination too far to conceive of a prayer to these oracles, who thought that everything created by humans is destined for ruin and destruction ,and every human, therefore, had a responsibility to “know thyself!”
Campbell also notes the fact that ferocious wars have been fought over what he calls “tribal literal interpretations of the meaning of their own locally conceived deities”. The local deity was taken to be a fact of universal significance which, if ignored, proved that we are dealing with fundamentally irrational beings. Whereas, what in fact was occurring, was combat over different metaphorical interpretations of one and the same transcendental X.
Aristotle’s “First Philosophy”, “Metaphysics”, was groundbreaking in that it provided us with the first panoramic view of the world that was based on pure reason and science but was also in accord with the knowledge we possessed of diké, arché, epistemé. As we have seen God was interpreted in terms of this Aristotelian hylomorphic framework, and the thought that men might fight over different secular philosophical interpretations of “being” would have caused amusement amongst the followers of Aristotle. For hylomorphism and critical Philosophy, claiming that the tentative characterisations of the transcendental X that is an in- itself is absolutely unknowable, are facts, would merely reveal that one did not know what epistemé, (knowledge or science), was. Unfortunately Europe in particular has been at various points in its history transformed into “killing fields” because of a lack of knowledge of political science and ethics. Secular wars such as we have witnessed seem to have been provoked for more secular reasons, relating to national boundaries and ideologies rather than whose God was the true God.
Campbell in explaining the contrast between metaphor ,allegory, and fact, points to “symbols”: e.g. the moon as the power of life and the sun as the transcendental eternal energy/light of knowledge and consciousness. The moon symbolises life because of the allegory with the life of a man waxing and waning until a new moon/life begins the process all over again. On the 15th night of the new moon, Campbell claims, when the moon is full, the waning process begins. The denotation of this symbolism is that of a life as measured by the Biblical, namely, three score years and ten, which reaches its zenith at 35 years before the life-waning processes begin to take effect. It is at this point in mans maturity that the light/energy of his consciousness/knowledge is at its peak, and identification with the transcendental X in our lives can occur. Once this occurs, Campbell argues we can regard a part of ourselves (noos?) as consubstantial with this transcendental X which does not belong to the space and time our bodies inhabit because this part of ourselves appears to be beyond death. Campbell sums up this discussion by referring to a key thought of the Upanishads:
“Thou art that!”
Metaphysical ends transcend death. but can also be represented in the “virgin births” so common in some mythologies. The divine being is anthropomorphised, and embodied, and thereby enabled to act in our space-time continuum whilst partaking of the realm of the sacred. Poetry can also be concerned with this transcendental X. The best Ancient Greek source we have in the field of aesthetics is of course the work of Aristotle. He begins with the position that “Being has many meanings” and goes on to analyse the meaning of tragic/poetical narratives. Three of the primary meanings of Being are connected to the ideas of reason, the good, the true, and the beautiful/sublime, and it is important to understand that we can study these ideas via the three kinds of sciences , theoretical science, practical science, and productive science. The narratives of tragedy may be literally true or only partly true as is the case with Shakespeares tragedy of Macbeth who was not a fictional character, being a real historical king, but many of his actions would have been characterised by Aristotle as mimesis Praxeus whilst at the same time embodying artistic intentions to relate to the transcendental X ‘s of ethics/politics and the beautiful/sublime. Aristotles views of the function of poetic/tragic narrative are summarised below:
“Aristotles poetics give us an account of the function of the narrative that ties the beginning, middle and end of the attempt to represent or imitate action into a composite whole. This composition or plot refuses a reduction into episodic point-like events, because the creator is concerned to connect events/actions in a universal manner. The theme of this universality is more concerned with areté (doing the right thing in the right way at the right time) and diké (justice) than it is with the divine form of logos. The spectator of the drama learns from what he witnesses the possibilities related to a tragic reversal of fortune from the good to the bad. Involved in this learning process is a recognition that we all get what we deserve in the spirit of diké…… This change of focus from Homers Gods living on Olympus to an inner controlling voice was also linked to the Socratic account about Homer and the depiction of the Gods as engaging in unethical actions” (Essay 2 in Ricoeur’s “Time and Narrative” Vol.1–Aristotle’s Poetics and Muthos (http://michaelrdjames.org)
Mythology, Philosophy and Art all deal with Time in different but related ways. Tragedy, Ricoeur argues in “Time and Narrative” attempts to articulate the relations between time as opaquely lived in our everyday life-worlds, and time as transfigured in the tragic mimesis.In the constructed time of the narrative whose telos is to reveal the true denotation of tragedy, we encounter the death we all owe to nature. The scientist, fixated upon the methodology and strategies of theoretical science mistakenly universalises this agenda to all the sciences, at best sees in tragedy an experimental laboratory in which hypotheses are being tested, and at worst sees a cauldron of “subjective” emotions. Such scientists cannot see the relation of our life-world to the transcendental X Kant highlights in his “Metaphysics of Morals” and “Prolegomena” (cited by Campbell):
“The peculiar features of a science may consist of a simple difference of object, or the sources of cognition, or the kind of cognition, or perhaps of all three conjointly. On these features therefore depends the idea of a possible science and its territory.” (Prolegomena to an future metaphysics that will be able to come forward as a science, Translated Ellington, J., W., (Indianapolis, Hacket Publishing, 1977)
The transcendental X’s of nature are different kinds of Object to the transcendental X’s of a human psuché engaged in the projects of the ethical life-world. In terms of Time, the Practical Scientist is not looking into the past for the causes of a present phenomenon in order to project the future, but is rather engaged in seeing how a future telos of a project is going to determine what is to be done in the present. Indeed, it might even be claimed that the theoretical scientist, in doing what he is doing, is atomising time in a similar fashion to St Augustine’s division of time into the past-present- and future. Aristotle, on the other hand presents us with a definition of time which whilst dividing time, preserves its holistic character:
“The measurement of motion in terms of before and after”
Time, on Aristotle’s account, measures objects of motion in a space-time continuum by dividing the time-continuum into before-now-after with a view to establishing principles of motion that are embedded in a network of causes and effects discoverable by observation in either natural or laboratory conditions. The concern of the practical and productive scientist (ethics and arts) does not measure out time in coffee-spoons but seeks its phenomenal meaning in, for example, tragedies and myths. The framework of cause and effect is used in Tragedy, Myth, and History, but in these contexts we are not concerned with observation-based measurements but rather with the validation of judgements relating to The Good which are in turn related to categorical-ends-in-themselves. In other words, the “objects” we are concerned with in such contexts are “ideal objects” and “ideal causes”connected to our actions and strivings.
One interesting feature of tragedies as we enter the modern world via the tragedies of Shakespeare is the concentration on “losing ones mind” or “losing the balance of ones mind”. Macbeth, first sees a dagger freely hanging in the air when the balance of his mind is disturbed and as the play progresses he loses more and more control until in the final sections he hallucinates Banquo’s ghost at a feast taunting him for his crimes. This, then, is a “modern” tragic concern, although Plato did alert us to this kind of phenomenon with his account of the fate of the tyrant in his dialogue “The Republic”. Both Macbeth and the Platonic tyrant bring about their own deaths by actions rooted in unnecessary and unlawful desires.
Mythology, Poetry, and Philosophy are all concerned with finding answers to aporetic questions formulated by Kant in relation to the 4 questions he claims defines the territory of Philosophy, namely, “What is man?”, What can I know?”, “What ought I to do?” ans “What can we hope for?”. All three questions are related to the Delphic concern with both
“Everything created by humans is destined for ruin and destruction” and
“Know thyself!”
Some sceptically-inclined doomsday commentators claim that all hope is lost and that we are culturally experiencing, “the last days of terror”, before an apocalyptic end. In these last days it will appear that our entire value system has been upended. This of course is tragedy dramatically universalised, but it is not clear that these commentators do not have adequate grounds for their prognosis.
Kant’s Critical Philosophy claimed that we could in fact use both the concepts and principles of both theoretical and practical reasoning to characterise the History of man and his civilisations. We can, that is, attempt to describe ad explain all phenomena we encounter in terms of cause and effect using the methodology of observation, measurement and manipulation of variables in designed experiments. We can also, however, “interpret” the events or actions we witness as being regulated by categorical laws and principles, ending the process with a judgement on the value of what we have witnessed in relation to these principles and laws.
Morality and Law are twins from the same mother, diké. The moral consequences of a legal judgement that one is guilty of a crime are considerable. During such a process if we discover that the moral character of a witness is unworthy, they will not be counted on to tell the truth and their testimony can be ignored.
Conceiving of the world as a totality of facts as some theoretical scientists do and conceiving of any search after a transcendental X as irrelevant is an anti-metaphysical stance that has been very popular in certain scientific circles. Such scientists have come to regard all metaphysics as “idealism” and as anathema to the scientific project, categorising Kantian Critical Philosophy in these terms, thereby denying the dual-aspect account of explanation/justification we find in Kantian theory.
According to Kant History uses both types of reasoning in its descriptions and explanations of the facts that belong to a particular region of the world and a particular period. Yet it is criticism from this discipline that has so tarnished the reputation of traditional myths and legends, especially when it could not be immediately shown that Agamemnon or the City of Troy actually existed. There does not appear to be any obvious search for a transcendental X in historical texts, even if such an X is clearly referenced in both ethical and religious texts. We have previously argued in earlier essays (reviewing Ricoeur’s “Time and Narrative”) that History is “trans-scientific”(concerned with at least two types of science) and also connected intimately with the major thesis of Aristotles “Metaphysics” which is:
“All men desire to know”
and the major thesis of Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics, namely:
“All human activity strives for the Good”
We know that in spite of the Aristotelian essence-specifying-definition of man being “rational animal capable of discourse”, rationality per se, was only a potentiality for man. History, therefore ,would have as its major theme the attempt of the human species to collectively become rational in a hylomorphic actualisation process. History up to this point therefore has been principally a history of our desires and fears, an important aspect of the project “know thyself!” set for man by the Delphic oracle. It is difficult sometimes to disentangle the mythical from the historical content of the Bible, which Campbell claims is charting the fall of man from the Grace of God . This is a complicated agenda:
“”Mythologically, the fall is related to the separation of Heaven and Earth where the consciousness of an eternal presence is represented as lost and the mind and spirit of mankind is trapped in the phenomenal realm.”
He refers to the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas in which God claims that he is everywhere “spread upon the earth and man does not see it”. We dwell, Campbell claims, in two worlds simultaneously which are symbolised by the illuminated temporal moon and the eternally burning sun. This abyss between the world of the divine and man, was the reason, it is argued, that the Christian God sent his son to earth to save mankind–an embodied presence in the phenomenal realm that both originates from and returns to the realm of the transcendental X–the sacred eternal realm of forms.
In the Gnostic tradition the Kingdom of Heaven is not only all around you but also within. It is in this context that we ought to understand the Hindu proclamation “Thou art that!”. Campbell argues that “Man has closed himself up in his cave” and this takes us back to the famous Platonic “Myth of the Cave” where it is required that man find his way out to the sacred light and warmth of the sun which is an allegory of that transcendental X–The Form of the Good. Campbell, however prefers the allegory that originates from the Upanishads:
“”So the light of the moon( A) is to the light of the sun (B) as is moral life (C) to the lives of all around me are to that Atman -Brahma (X) which is absilutely beyond all name, form, relatin, and definition.”
This example uses the metaphysics of Nature to “picture” the moral relation and thereby subsuming the physical world of nature under the moral world of the spirit. There is no doubt that there are aspects of both worlds that awaken awe and wonder in man but here Kant’s approach whereby the awe and wonder is directed at the power of a great waterfall or storm at sea appears more convincing and illuminating especially if one believes the experience of the sublime is a key experience insofar as access to the transcendental X is concerned. One can also in the context of this discussion draw attention to the folowing Kantian example of the sublime:
Calling upon Kant only to set his reasoning on this topic aside requires explanation which I cannot provide. It would seem that Philosophy is more committed to a holistic understanding of the world as a systematic whole than religion is. Our Jewish Christian relation to the transcendental X of the Godhead is one of submission and anxiety whereas the Kantian relation to the transcendental X builds upon the moral confidence of an agent who is worthy of our moral respect at least insofar as the experience of the sublime is concerned. Perhaps Campbell feels that the Upanishads convey a message of moral confidence and respect. In this context Campbell discusses “The Way of Art” (the heading of chapter 3) and the relationship between the way of art and the way of the mystic who has no craft and who recommends a disavowal of the body:
“I spit out the body”
Whether this is a realistic attitude toward the body is of course questionable, given that the human body is the origin and home of human life and consciousness. We recall in this context, the Cartesian sceptical claim, that we can imagine the “I” without a body, but also that this modern form of dualism was well-refuted by the critical Philosophy of Kant which accepts the hylomorphic view of pusché and many hylomorphic principles. Freud, too, would have been highly sceptical of this mystical disavowal of the body and its accompanying implication that disembodied thought could be the source or origin of life and consciousness . The artist works through his body ,with physical media such as , language, paint , stone, sound, etc, thus mobilising the life force and feelings of the body in the name of the search for the beautiful which Kant claims is the symbol of morality. This physical process for Freud is a non-sexual form of substitute satisfaction which he terms “sublimation” (an important vicissitude of the instincts).
Both the artist and the mystic are, of course concerned with the transcendental X in their different ways, but Freud would certainly have claimed that the way of the artist was the healthiest form of life, and more likely to maintain a harmony and balance of the mind conducive to eudaimonia (the good spirited flourishing life). Recall too, that the first principle of psuché maintained that the soul (psuché) was the first actuality of the body with its constellation of organs and limbs. In the context of Indian Religion we ought also to bear in mind that in the spiritual exercises of the yogi, it is recommended that we discard the external world toward the end of the meditating process. Whether it is possible to separate desire and its representations completely from a body and the external world is a question that Campbell does not raise. This would seem to be an important aspect to consider given the title of the work indicates that Campbell is exploring the inner reaches of outer space.
We conclude with Kants view of the sublime in relation to both art and religion given to us in his Analytic of the Sublime, contained in the third Critique of Judgement:
“Perhaps there has never been a more sublime utterance, or a thought more sublimely expressed than the well known inscription upon the Temple of Isis(Mother Nature): “I am all that is, and that was and that shall be, and no mortal hath raised the veil before my face” ( Kant’s Critique of Judgement, Translated Meredith, J., C., (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1973), P.179
The inscription is on a statue of Isis located at the Temple. Plutarch’s Moralia characterises Isis thus:
“Moreover, many writers have held her to be the daughter of Hermes, and many others the daughter of Prometheus, because of the belief that Prometheus is the discoverer of wisdom and forethought, and Hermes the inventor of grammar and music. For this reason they call the first of the Muses at Hermopolis Isis as well as Justice: for she is wise, as I have said, and discloses the divine mysteries to those who truly and justly have the name of “bearers of the sacred vessels” and “wearers of the sacred robes.” (https://penelope.uchicago.edu/thayer/e/roman/texts/plutarch/moralia/isis_and_osiris*/a.html)
Campbell claims that human physiology has not changed over the last 40000 years, but there is a theory proposed by Julian Jaynes that with the advent of writing( ca 3000 BC), a major reorganisation of the function of the organ of the brain occurred: two areas of the left-side of the brain became firmly associated with two language functions (language comprehension and motor-language function. This reorganisation is assumed to be the result of the complex uses of language that for example culminated in highly literate civilisations such as that of Ancient Greece, where during the period from 400-300 BC, Plato and Aristotle were producing highly complex philosophical dialogues and records of lectures in areas such as metaphysics, logic, biology, politics rhetoric and the arts.
Homer too must be mentioned in this context with, for example, his Iliad , an account of the Trojan War which modern archaeology has now firmly established as a historical event. This period of Ancient Greece stands out in mythological contexts because although Homer wrote about the warrior Achilles who undoubtedly was a great hero of the times for the Ancient Greeks, it was Plato with his dialogue about the last days of Socrates that was arguing for a new kind of spiritual hero in the name of Philosophy. This establishment of a spiritual hero was obviously also related to the theoretical turning of attention to the way in which the polis was ruled. Plato named no corrupt individual Kings or rulers in his criticism of Athenian government, but merely pointed abstractly to the importance of enlightened rule and the rule according to Laws. Achilles, on Plato’s and Aristotles account of the virtuous man, did not live up to their criteria of areté (doing the right thing in the right way at the right time) when it came to his behaviour of desecrating the bodies of his enemies on the battlefield amongst other things. Socrates was named the wisest man in Athens for his intellectual pursuits, but he too had a history of bravery in battle. Socrates we should recall was also sceptical about the invention of writing on the grounds that he believed it would lead mankind to place less reliance on his memory. At this stage of its evolution, writing had not yet achieved its full potential and the phenomenon Socrates may have been referring to was those readers who were using texts blindly for source material rather than for the purposes of learning the content. Current knowledge of the way in which the brain has been organised by written texts, includes the fact that the language function of the brain may serve to enhance memory via multiple association pathways associated for example with the verbal heard image of the words and the visual written image of the words.
Modern research requires of course reference to multiple written sources representing the history of the knowledge in a particular area of research, and this practice may have been initiated by Aristotle who saw it as his scholarly duty to criticise and synthesise multiple historical sources in his reasonings about a particular topic of research.Most of Aristotles dialogues and theoretical published writings have been lost so we do not have a complete record of his evolving theoretical commitments. This was not the case with Plato’s works.
When Campbell states at the beginning of his work “The Inner Reaches of Outer Space” that both myths and dreams come from a single psychological source, namely the imagination, he connects this source to “the conflict of the organs of the body” which must include the brain. This is a hylomorphic position which we ought to recall claims that the first actuality of the body is the soul (psuché). Campbells position is also similar to that of Spinoza in which it is claimed that an adequate idea of the soul will entail realising that its first idea is the idea of its body. For Aristotle, however, it is not just the human constellation of organs that constitutes human psuché, but also the configuration of the human limb system, its extensions, and human posture that are important factors to take into consideration.
Campbell also refers to the will, a concept which in fact is a later elaboration upon hylomorphic theory best characterised by Kant in his critical writings. The will can, of course, be associated with an impulsive desire or wish to do something and in such circumstances the imagination plays a central role, but it can also be an instrument of reason. The rituals and images of myth would appear to be driven more by the imagination than reason, although as we deal with the myths of more advanced civilisations, there is an increasing presence of rational content. Insofar as primitive mythology is concerned, however, it would appear that the Psychology of Jung is a more appropriate theory than that of the Kantian Psychologist Freud. Indeed Jung’s concept of the “collective unconscious” containing as it does reference to universal human desires and fears, is more useful in this context than that of the more technical Freudian idea of the unconscious which may well contain the elementary ideas and archetypes Campbell refers to.
Freud however, may also have regarded behaviour that is directed and regulated by certain elementary ideas and archetypes as psychotic. In an account of the behaviour of the Yogi from early Indian Mythology Campbell himself claims that the yogi is swimming in the same waters the psychotic is drowning in. To record and communicate the imaginative adventures of so many peoples and civilisations, however, would certainly have seemed for Freud to be part of the “talking cure” mankind was in need of if he was to fully understand his animal origins and early mental evolution. For Freud, as was the case with Kant, the actualisation of the power of rationality in the species of homo sapiens lay in the far distant future, and perhaps we should add that whether this process would reach its telos or end was more of a question for Freud than it was for Kant. The weapons of mass destruction had not yet been created or used by the time Freud died in 1939, but we can already note in his work from 1929, Civilisation and its Discontents, that he thought the future for mankind looked problematic. Indeed it must have seemed to Freud as his books were being burned by the Nazis that in the battle between the giants of Eros and Thanatos, the latter was faring better than expected. Freud was a man of science and must have seen its civilisation building potential especially in the field of medicine. Had he lived until 1945 he might well have seen in the creation of the weapons of mass destruction by the scientists of the day, the presence of Thanatos.
Einstein who cooperated with Freud on a project designed to explain the psychological mechanisms involved, in warfare, refused to participate on the infamous Manhattan Project. The success of this project in the production of a weapon of mass destruction and the decision by Truman to use the weapon on civilian populations at the end of the second world war must have seemed by many humanists to be a low point in the history of civilisation. Shortly after this catastrophic event for the Japanese however, the influence of Eros was felt when the Kantian project of the United Nations was actualised, thus providing us with renewed hope for a humanistic future, however far away that future may be.
The concept of consciousness for Freud was loaded with Cartesian implications which Freud did not accept completely given his commitment to the role of the instincts and the preconscious mind in the human form of life (psuché). The Preconscious, for him was a function related to both the meanings of words, and our knowledge, and these functions could easily be activated by questions such as “What is the meaning of the word x?” and “What is x?”. This preconscious function obviously became more complex with the advent of writing which supplemented our verbal images of words with visual images, thus providing language with a gravitas it had not possessed before, whatever the effect it might have had on our memories. That one text like Aristotle’s “Metaphysics” can be a synthesis of a large number of preceding historical texts has obvious advantages when it comes to the advancement of thought on a particular subject or in a specific area of study. Aristotles collected works are also a testament to the diversification of intellectual interests one could find in the Ancient Greece of his lifetime.
You can find a number of references to mythology in Aristotles works but his interpretations were never literal , urging us rather to search for and find the “symbolic or metaphorical meanings of the myths he referenced. Ideas such as life after death or the characterisations of malevolent or protective spirits were still subject, in his Philosophy, to regulation by the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason. For example, the emotions of fear and desire in his work were sublimated and subjected to the search for first principles. Indeed such is the range of Aristotles thought it is doubtful whether a thinker of such a kind could have been possible before the invention of writing.
We know the importance of principles and a methodology to Philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle. The distinction between what is true (Aletheia) and what is not true, required both principles and a methodology, as did the distinction between what is empirical and what is transcendent. Neither the elementary ideas or the archetypes were as such direct concerns of Philosophy. Philosophy’s concern with psuché, to take one example, was not connected to ideas relating to the question of whether there was a personal life after death. Taking such a position literally would have seemed to many Aristotelian inspired philosophers to be violating the principle of noncontradiction. An imagined personal life after death for them was just a figment of the imagination.
For Freud there was, in our unconscious minds, a sense that nothing can happen to us–the absence of a sense of our own mortality–which can be interpreted as meaning that we believe ourselves to be immortal but does not necessarily have to be interpreted in this way.
Indeed, if Aristotles dictum that the first actuality of the human body is the soul is correct, then this would also suggest that the death of the body entails the death of the soul, and insofar as the body is also the bearer of consciousness this suggests that the death of the body also entails the disappearance of consciousness. Since Socrates claimed in the dialogue, the Phaedo, that death was one long dreamless sleep this too speaks for the absence of even unconsciously motivated psychic activity. Paradoxically it was Freud, the anti-religious Philosopher that took us back to the work of Plato and the cultural battle between Eros and Thanatos. In this battle on the individual plane ,a wish or will not to die originates in the unconscious and can be used by the power of the imagination to motivate acts of heroism or even foolish acts of bravado.
Thanatos for Freud was subject to regulation by Eros and its institutions but, Freud maintained that a narcissistically inclined ego can engage in compulsive aggressive behaviour of various kinds for various reasons. Freud referred to a case history of a one and a half year old boy who engaged in repetitive compulsive behaviour in response to anxiety over the absence of his mother. Freud’s analysis of this behaviour attributed a motivating influence to Thanatos, the death drive or death instinct.
Freud was of course theorising in a very different cultural climate to that of either Aristotle or Kant. Kant, is the philosopher of freedom par excellence, but he was not living in Freudian times when a whole-scale inversion of moral values and laws was taking place. Plato we know feared the abuse of freedom that resulted in lack of respect for ones parents and teachers which was not the case during Freudian times but is becoming prevalent in our so-called “Modern times”: this extreme idea of freedom in some quarters appears to be nihilistically detaching the idea from our individual and collective responsibilities. Hannah Arendt pointed to the collapse of respect for authority that has been occurring over the centuries since Henry 8th’s dissolution of the monastries, so perhaps we can presume that Freud would not have been surprised by these phenomena and by our modern secularism and atheism. We believe we fought two world wars for the idea of freedom, but if these reflections are credible then the only conclusion we can draw is the gloomy one that we did not have an adequate idea of what we were fighting for while we were fighting against what we perceived to be evil. The Kantian idea of the good will was certainly eclipsed at the end of the second world war when the USA dropped two atomic bombs on civilian populations as part of the “final solution” to the “Japanese problem”.Indeed it is to Freud’s credit that he identified the United States as a problem in his work “Civilisation and its Discontents”, having visited the country earlier in the century. Russia was also identified as a problem for the evolution of civilisation, a prophecy that is becoming increasingly relevant as we move through the 21st century. Both of these countries, Freud claimed, are threats to the hope for the progress of Western Civilisation.
Freud, we should also recall, co-authored a book on Woodrow Wilson, the American President behind the Treaty of Versaille. With the help of a co-author who knew the President and had access to Presidential correspondence, Freud psychoanalysed Woodrow Wilson who as we now know suffered a series of mental breakdowns during his life. We can see therefore how important historical writings are, and perhaps also how important it is that they are cleansed of the material of imaginative fears and desires, cleansed of ideas of malevolent and protective spirits.
History does, however, seems to have shown us that a very materialistic view of the world has prevailed over the kind of spiritual view manifested in the work of Kant. This secularistic and atheistic spirit has however produced a backlash in the form of the art of those who wish to regress to an Ancient Indian view of civilisation which, as we know involves detaching ourselves from the external world in favour of an inner space which remains at rest amidst all the commotion and noise of the universe. This kind of retreat from the world would have been highly problematic from both the Kantian and Freudian points of view.
Freud’s Reality Principle is a very pragmatic principle requiring much knowledge of the world and oneself which is Kantian to its core. Freuds pragmatism is not however materialistic and acknowledges the need for a spiritual dimension involving a respect for both knowledge and the moral values of the society. The Ego is an important Freudian agency whose first concern is the protection of the body, but whose concerns continue in the spirit of areté (doing the right thing in the right way at the right time–the civilisation building power). These demands from our external world can only be achieved if one has knowledge of the world and of ones own powers. Knowledge of the world is defined in such contexts in terms of knowledge of relevant facts and reasons for these facts. Aristotle’s remarkable discovery of logic pointed out that if you know the principle or reason for a state of affairs you can then deduce another state of affairs, e.g.:
All men are mortal
Socrates is a man
Therefore Socrates is mortal
“All men are mortal” is a universal conceptual truth that is connected to both the facts that all men are born, live, and then die as well as the reasons for these facts such as “All life forms are mortal”, “All men are life-forms”. Reality, for Freud then, is definitely connected to rationality and the principles of thought and judgement. For Aristotle and Kant and perhaps for Freud too, the above “logical truths”and their experiential consequences belong in the realm of the study of Metaphysics which also discusses the theoretical idea of God in relation to both the principles of Nature and Morality. Amongst these principles are the logical principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason, which belong to the Kantian faculty of reason that has the telos or purpose of exploring the totality of conditions for a state of affairs to be the way it is or for human psuché to be the form of life that it is.
The Oracular proclamation, that:
“Everything created by humans is destined for ruin and destruction”
was of course very much on the minds of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle and perhaps was also on the minds of Kant and Freud, as was the challenge that we human beings need to know ourselves if we are to avoid ruin and destruction. That we are all destined for this inevitable loss of the gift of life is clear, given the facts we know and can justify, and the reasons for them. For Aristotle and perhaps for Kant too, all human activities aim at the good in spite of the fate that awaits us all. It is human psuché with its potential to be both the best of animals and the worst of animals which most clearly manifests the presence of protective ad malevolent spirits.
Socrates suggests that we seek for justice in its magnified form in the polis because it is here that it is easy to see if and how the city encourages its citizens to lead a good-spirited flourishing life (eudaimonia). Such a life entails that its citizens possess the virtues of wisdom, courage and temperance in the face of the temptations to lead lives dedicated to bodily pleasures, or the acquisition of wealth and power. Socrates in Plato’s Republic proposes a principle of specialisation for the citizens of this ideal polis: a principle that the polis should be organised in such a way that the essential work of the polis ought to be done by those that are most suited for that work, i.e. amongst other aspects, important tasks ought to be done by those that have the powers or capacities required for the tasks. To take just one key example, those that are tasked with the activity of passing laws must pass laws that are just. Plato with his class division between workers, warriors and philosopher-rulers, elaborates upon this idea with a strangely uncharacteristic materialistic idea of souls that are composed of bronze, silver and gold which are manipulated by the rulers who institute controversial “breeding programs” to maintain the integrity of the classes. There is no trace of either this programme or the rigid division Plato recommended in the Republic in Aristotle’s work but he did propose that an ideal enlightened middle class should emerge in the future to rule according to the principle of the Golden Mean : a principle which navigates a middle course between the demands for the freedom of the poor and the demands for unbridled power by the rich. Such an ideal middle class, Aristotle argued, would rule in the name of justice and rationality embodied in the Ancient Greek understanding of epistemé, areté, diké, arché, aletheia, logos, eros, and eudaimonia. The larger the middle class, he argued, the more stable will the polis be. This, by the way, is the aim of many contemporary centrist Politicians in Europe. The Ancient Greek idea of human psuché was well captured by Aristotle’s essence specifying definition: “rational animal capable of discourse”. The discourse at issue here manifested a concern for the above Greek ideas as a means of bringing about a good spirited flourishing polis that will remain stable and not fall into the abyss of ruin and destruction.
The institution of written texts and documents is also an essential aspect of the governing of the polis which requires possession of the knowledge necessary for prudent, just and wise rule: the great-souled man, (phronimos) possesses such knowledge. One important aspect of running the polis is care for those citizens who are disadvantaged in various ways, e.g. suffering from mental health issues. Without statistical data it is difficult to know just how prevalent such issues were. One assumes it was the medical profession of the time that helped these patients for obvious reasons given the Greek view of psuché where body and soul were so intimately related. Many but not all mental health issues begin with traumatic experience which of course affects the normal functioning of the body in various ways. There were of course no institutions for mental health care as was the case during Freud’s times. There is a suggestion in Plato that it was the family that took the major responsibility for patients suffering from serious mental health issues. We ought, however, to remember in the context of this discussion that institutionalisation of mentally ill patients during Freud’s lifetime could not be called either prudent or wise. We recall that whilst Freud was initiating his “talking cure” literally thousands of women were being forcibly incarcerated in European mental institutions for “hysteria”, a condition that Freud, together with Josef Breuer would investigate using the so-called “talking cure”. Their treatment was dubbed the “moral treatment” because it respected the patients wishes.
The trauma hysterical patients experienced was not always remembered or even acknowledged by them and Freud and Breuer therefore resorted to hypnosis to gain access to the traces of the traumatic experience. Hypnosis however proved not to be a viable technique because not everybody could be hypnotised, but also because the only treatment available was through post hypnotic suggestion in which the symptom would often disappear once the patient returned to consciousness. This was not a cure though because another symptom would just take its place. What was needed for a complete treatment was a state of mind in which the patient was conscious but relaxed enough to gain access to unconscious memories with the help of appropriate techniques such as free association and dream interpretation. The number one rule of the psychoanalytical discourse was that the patient honestly communicate all the thoughts they are having during the treatment period. The techniques used in these sessions also needed to identify the defensive “resistances ” that prevented the unconscious material from emerging during these sessions.
Consciousness, we know, is merely a vicissitude of the instincts and it is used by the ego in relation to the pleasure-pain and reality principles with a preference for the latter, especially when it comes to subjecting emotional gratifications and anxiety to the discipline of rationality. In this regulation process it appears as if the mind is layered and the lower layers do not easily manifest in consciousness requiring special techniques if they are to be accessed (free association, dream interpretation , and managing resistances).
For Freud it was clear from the beginning of his theorising that the unconscious was not a location in the mind which was in many other theories regarded as a special kind of substance. Rather the unconscious was part of a functional mental process regulated by the energy regulation and pleasure-pain principles. Freud, claimed he was a Kantian Psychologist and it is against the background of this claim that we should seek to understand why he wished to use the term “Mythology” in relation to his theory about the role of the instincts in psychoanalysis. Kant, we know, was engaged in a much larger metaphysical project charting the totality of conditions for mental functioning. What Freud is engaged upon could well be described as theorising about the outer reaches of inner space. Interior trauma eventually expresses itself in outer symptoms, which are both bodily and behavioural. It is important in psychoanalytical treatment that the traumatic memory become part of a cathartic process which brings it into some kind of relation both to consciousness and to language.
O Shaughnessy in his work “The Will: a Dual Aspect Theory” provides us with an account of the role of the body image in the context of normal action. The Will, he argues, in its active physical projects involving the body uses what he calls a projected “body image”(consisting of all of the parts of the body that are under the control of the will) to initiate the action desired. In seeing an apple and desiring to eat it, my arm and hand are energised in order for the reaching and picking activity to provide the necessary conditions for the activity of eating the apple. O Shaughnessy is influenced by the writings of Freud. We are, O Shaughnessy argues, mentally aware of the act of moving our arm and this awareness is non-observational: it is an immediate awareness. These explorations are obviously relevant to explaining what it is that is happening when a patient suffering from hysteria suddenly cannot use their legs or their eyes: i.e. cases of hysterical paralysis and hysterical blindness. Physical investigations of such paralysis and blindness reveal no real cause but there must be a cause nevertheless, and this must be similar to the causes that produce our imagined dream images, imagined actions and imagined sensations. The dreaming mind is to some extent a deranged mind operating in extremely unnatural circumstances, and this is also true of the hysterical patients mind. The relation of the body-image to the hysterical mind is, of course, not a normal one and perhaps what is creating hysterical phenomena is more closely connected to dream mechanisms and phenomena than to normal mechanisms and phenomena. O Shaughnessy is also critical of some of Freud’s positions, e.g. He claims that instinctive drives are not for Freud connected to representations. This criticism may have been true of Freuds very early materialistic theories but it is not true of the later theorising where Freud is insistence that he is dealing only with the psychical representatives of the instincts which otherwise for him, as is the case for Kant, are an unknown X.
Schopenhauer’s account of the will maintains that the will is independent of representation. Perhaps the best way of conceiving of Freuds position philosophically is through the lens of Aristotles hylomorphic theory. Instincts for hylomorphic theory would be matter that is organised by certain principles that typically operate in the realm of psuché, but they can also in their turn be regulated by other principles and become vicissitudes of instincts, e.g. consciousness. Now my awareness of the movement of my arm may be instinctive but it is a form of knowledge of myself, and some form of knowledge of myself is also going to be operating in my consciousness of myself as thinking. Campbell argues that the images of mythology come from a conflict among the organs of the human psuché, and the most dramatic examples of this phenomena come in the form of dream images when we are seemingly woken suddenly and seem to remember walking down some steps and missing a step after perhaps falling asleep in a very tired state. This phenomenon may have been produced by the life instinct in an emergency response to the organs of the body (including the breathing responses of our lungs) shutting down too fast and too completely. This image, like all dream images has the function of trying to keep us asleep–here the conflict is seen clearly.
Now dreams do not normally connect to the transcendent dimensions of our existence in the way in which Myth does, although Carl Jung maintains that the dreams of individuals in the later stages of the self-individuation process may relate to the transcendent and the infinite more directly. Campbell believes that many narratives of Mythology connect more directly to the metaphysics of nature and the metaphysics of moral than our Christian narratives. The growing trend of secularisation and atheism indicates however that our Christian religion is not providing us with meaningful symbols. Campbell argues that now that we have the knowledge of the universe that we do, and have walked on the surface of the moon looking at our planet from outer space, we have to develop a mythology that relates to our planet and its place in the universe. This is not an easy task given the facts that our planetary system is merely a series of specks in the galaxy which in its turn is but one galaxy in an almost inconceivable number of other galaxies. Narratives normally posses the telos or purpose of celebrating our lives on this planet, celebrating the power of being human in response to the powers of nature and space. The Greek and Shakespearean genre of tragedy, when performed on a stage as a visible spectacle may, however, be the best we can do in the form of acknowledgement of the power of nature versus the power of man, who, as the Greek oracles claimed is destined for ruin and destruction. The proclamation from the same oracles to “know thyself!” may also be the registration of an ancient pre-literate wisdom which respects that aspect of nature which is beyond human control, for example, a huge asteroid impacting the earth, a large volcano erupting and exploding, a large devastating earthquake, constant heavy rain for a long period of time, etc. Having watched men walk on the moon was significant in many respect but perhaps its primary significance is in the realisation that should something cataclysmic occur on our planet there is a t least the remote possibility of starting again somewhere else. So perhaps our modern mythology might create narratives related to the problems of moving a civilisation to an inhospitable environment. The heroes of such narratives would obviously be scientists and engineers as long as the cataclysmic event on earth was not of the scientists making. If, however, the weapons of mass destruction which they have invented produces a cataclysmic event, they will be held responsible for destroying what took tens of thousands of years to create and will in Jung’s terms be manifestations of the Shadow of the Psuché. The Shadow for Jung took many concrete forms of minsters and demons and was seemingly less abstractly conceived than the Freudian death instinct which was related to Thanatos of ancient Greek Mythology.
Campbell, in the context of this discussion, notes that contemporary popular themes of concern are health, progeny and prosperity and these seem not to acknowledge the possible tragic fate of mankind and also do not seem to acknowledge the second coming of the saviour as prophesied by our Christian religion.
In a chapter of this work entitled “Cosmology and the Mythic Imagination”, Campbell once again takes up the Apollo mission and its use of what he claims is Kantian a priori knowledge of the laws of space:
“The laws of space are known to the mind because they are of the mind…..Outer space is within inasmuch as the laws of space(known by NASA) are within us….Outer space and inner space are the same.”
We are, he claims, born out of the space containing our sun and our earth in a galaxy formed long before we were born. Our earth is on the galactic view merely a satellite of the sun. We are creations of this earth, our eyes are of this earth and our knowledge too belongs to this earth which is a creation of space. Campbell refers in the context of this discussion to the “Atlas of the Universe”. Out universe, he claims:
“Is a universe of unimaginable magnitude and inconceivable violence. In it billions of thermo-nuclear furnaces are scattering from each other…some stars are blowing themselves to pieces littering the universe with dust and gas from which new stars and their satellites are being born.”
Add to this the traces of micro-waves we have discovered and attribute to being remnants of a huge explosion ca 18 billion yers ago and we begin to understand why scientists wish to speak about a space-time continuum in which they claim we are seeing the traces of an event that occurred eons ago. Space, time, and matter, are for Aristotle and Kant in their constitution infinite, but it is difficult to believe that either Philosopher would have claimed as some scientists have that the universe came into existence with this huge explosion. They would undoubtedly have agreed that this explosion carried an important cosmological significance with it. Both Philosophers, in all likelihood would have been more inclined to side with Ovids account of the universe for which there might have been no beginning, merely a chaos of elements which Deus brought into order by sending all the elements to their places. For these philosophers anthropomorphizations of God or the gods would have been essentially contradictory since Deus for them was something abstract like the laws of space/time/matter/psuché.
Psuché, according to Plato, Jung and Campbell is the location of concrete elementary ideas or archeytpes which, if the circumstances are propitious, we can recollect. For Campbell, Mythology contains the images of Deities which are local forms of the elementary ideas and archetypes. He further claims that the mere contemplation of these elementary ideas and archetypes sends us into a state of ecstatic rapture. Kant felt aw and wonder at the mere perception of outer space and the thought of the moral law within and Aristotle probably felt the same in relation to the thought of the infinite and Prime Form.
Campbell also points out in this chapter that the book of Genesis in the OT is “merely the local and tribal mythology of one of the peoples on earth and does not therefore meet the criteria of universality and necessity sought by, for example, the philosophers. He does not specifically say so, but he probably means to level this accusation of perspectivalism at Greek Mythology. Concrete images such as the gods living on Mount Olympus would appear to support his position but we ought also recall that Zeus and the pantheon of the Greek Gods replace the earlier mythological figures of the demiurge, the erinyes/euminedes, eros and thanatos. The proclamations of the oracles seem indeed to predate the later mythology relating to the war between the gods and the titans.
Campbell claims that mythology is essentially trying to reveal what is transcendent and metaphysical in our existence and we should not therefore fixate upon the concrete manifestations of these symbols. In this context we ought to realise that Mythology is an art form and as such is presenting elementary ideas to audiences aesthetically. Now Kant has pointed out that both universality and necessity were involved in aesthetic judgements and activity, but in a subjective form. The particular province of Mythology appears however to incorporate knowledge of the transcendental ideas of nature and the transcendental ideas of the power of being human. The sublime is, then, an important focus for mythology and the communication of sublime truths may have been one of the tasks of the Ancient Greek oracles, e.g. “everything created by man is destined for ruin and destruction”. Campbell, in this context, points to the destruction of the city of Jerusalem in 70 AD. God’s chosen people had their city, their temple and the ark of the covenant destroyed. Campbell wishes to point to such events as illustration of the fact that the laws of man and his cities do not elevate them above nature and that we should always bear in mind that different mythologies are there to curb the hubris of man by reminding us of the relativity of different deities and lifestyles.
The invention of writing was of course an important cultural event that allowed mythologies to be written down and preserved for the attention of future historians. Around the time that writing and mathematics was being invented priests were curious about the immensity of the heavens which could not be explored by earth bound beings such as us. This awe and wonder was then sublimated by the invention of mathematics which attempted to find a means to measure space and time and thus project human ideas and numerals upon space and temporal duration. Numbers were obviously related not just to space but also to time. As a result of this invention and its projection, the heavens began to become associated with almost inconceivable magnitudes and events occurring in the heavens over time also appeared to manifest regularities that also symbolised the transcendent and the metaphysical. Numbers became thus associated with sacred properties especially when particular numbers began to appear in cultures as distant as Iceland and India.
Darkness is the prevalent property of the universe and light is a secondary phenomenon generated by thermo-nuclear reactors (stars) but in spite of this fact it is light that is associated with the good and darkness with evil, especially for those forms of psuché possessing the power of vision. These visual properties of darkness and light have no particular meaning for plant life which does not possess a visual system. The light and darkness for plant life are stimuli that produce not pictures of reality but a chemical reaction.
Campbell claims that the Nietzschean proclamation that God is dead was only directed at the jealous angry Gods of different tribes and he also claims that we moderns have left these gods behind for experiences of transcendence. Now Kant certainly experienced and theorised about transcendence and found space in his life-world for the sublime and the sacred. We moderns of the 21st century, however appear too preoccupied with our technological gadgets to search for the mysteries of life in our secularised societies. Campbell claims the following:
“God is the infinite sphere whose centre is everywhere and circumference nowhee.”
This is a fine characterisation of the infinite universe and also accounts for the fact that:
“Every local image of God is one among millions possible”
Mythological places may be symbolic but they may also be actual. Heaven and hell are obviously symbolic, sublime and dreaded places located in the inner space of mans psuché which may then be projected upon real geographical places such as the heavens or the bowels of the earth. We need to understand, Campbell argues, that when the Bible claims that Jesus ascended up to heaven that this event really did not take place as described, and we are dealing with something metaphysical and transcendent. In this event what we are witnessing is the retreat of Jesus as an real figure in outer space to our inner space.
Hinduism has its pantheon of deities which include Brahman, Atman, Indira, Vishnu and Shiva. In one of the Hindu narratives Indira believes he is the only god of the universe until Brahman informs Indira that is rather he, Brahman who will foresee the dissolution of the universe and that he, indira is but one of a very large number of Indiras. The hubris of Indira is thereby neutralised. We are also introduced to Atman that part of the individual psuché that is a part of Brahman and therefore eternal and unchangeable. The Buddhists deny this because for them there is no constant essence of the soul. Both religions believe in resurrections of the soul which compromises any notion of life that maintains that it is of the essence of life to come to an end in death.
The relation of Consciousness to Life is a modern enigma which has been obscured by the focus of modern thinkers upon the representational function of consciousness rather than on its relation to Will and Action. When I perceive the waters of a waterfall rapidly flowing over a precipitous cliff-face, I am , of course, in normal circumstances conscious of what I am seeing. What I am perceiving, however, may or may not be committed to memory. If I am asked in relative close proximity to the experience I ought nevertheless to be able to describe what I have witnessed, namely a spectacle in the external world that as presented did not involve my agency . The “I” that is called upon here is capable of representing sensory experience. In this process there will of course be no space for the evaluation of this experience as long as I place no evaluation in my account. Any interested third party, inquiring into what I had experienced, would be given a conceptual account of an essentially sensory experience (assuming we are no longer in the presence of the spectacle). The context of my description is a context of inquiry, and what is said is not intended as an explanation or justification of what had been experienced.
On the other hand, had it been the case that in an attempt to use the power of my imagination to grasp the significance of this scene, my imagination failed to provide a relevant concept which I could subsume this phenomenon under, this experience of the extreme power of the waterfall, may change in character from a purely sensory encounter to one in which the spectacle presents itself as sublime. If this happened I would feel a transformation of my mind from being essentially receptive of the sensory event confronting me, to being active, and according to Kant my activity would take the form of me valuing my freedom and moral agency, i.e. valuing a power nature cannot possibly have.
This consciousness of myself would then not just involve the sensory power of perception but also the sensory power of the imagination and the powers of understanding and reason. The experience of the sublime, then, arises as a kind of compensatory mechanism because the idea of our moral agency (the knowledge of good and evil) has such importance for us. The transcendental X of this experience of the sublime is the noumenal self which is to be contrasted with the phenomenal self when it is having purely sensory experiences.
The consciousness we have of ourselves is not a form of consciousness other life-forms can share. Kant refers to this in his work “Anthropology from a Pragmatic point of view”:
“The fact that the human being can have the “I” in his representations raised him above all other living beings on this earth, Because of this he is a person, and by virtue of the unity of consciousness through all changes that happen to him, one and the same person–i.e. through rank and dignity an entirely different being from things such as irrational animals with which one can do as one likes. This holds even when he cannot yet say “I”, because he still has it in his thoughts, just as all languages must think it when they speak in the first person, even if they do not have a special word to express this concept of “I”. For this faculty (namely to think) is understanding. But it is noteworthy that the child who can already speak fairly fluently nevertheless first begins to talk by means of “I” fairly late (perhaps a year later): in the meantime speaking of himself in the third person (Karl wants to eat, walk, etc). When he starts to speak by means of “I”, a light seems to dawn on him, as it were, and from that day on he never again returns to his former way of speaking.—Before he merely felt himself; now he thinks himself.” (P.15, trans Louden, R.B., Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006, P.15)
Self- knowledge, as defined by the oracles of Ancient Greece is a burdensome task for those whose love of self knows no bounds, those whose self love prevents the kind of abstraction involved in moral reflection upon action. Self knowledge would also involve knowledge of how to use the powers at the disposal of the human form of psuché (in the right way at the right time (areté)). Perhaps the most important powers at the disposal of the human form of psuché, is the power of making something worthwhile of himself: the power of moral agency. The most important idea behind this power is of course the idea of freedom which does not appear to be a major concern of Oriental Mythology. In our Occidental tradition, which values Philosophy, we find the important secular movement from the theoretical idea of God to the practical idea of freedom. Yet it is also important to point out in this discussion that Kant did not diminish the importance of this idea of God located as it is in a realm of the sacred. This fact places Kant clearly in the camp of the Humanist Philosophers which include both Plato and Aristotle who also manifested a commitment to the Metaphysics of morals.
Campbell situates the Kantian transcendental X in a wider Eastern Mythological contexts: a context which is trying to explain and justify immortality and reincarnation:
“There is the immortality of the one that dies and comes back to life. That is the world of the fathers: in many cultures the ancestors are supposed to live on the moon. The other immortality is that of the one who has gone through the Golden Sun door and will never return: he has left his body as a burned out ash on this side of the Sun: his Soul has passed beyond. The idea of the reincarnating principle is that of two orders: first the reincarnating principle that puts on bodies and puts them off as the moon puts on and puts off its light body; and the other is that principle of sheer light that never dies, the light that is incarnate and immanent in all. Now one of the aims of all of the high Culture religions on the Oriental side of the line is to realise ones own identity with that solar light.”(P.44)
Campbell elaborates upon this metaphor of light with a metaphor he used in a teaching context: Looking up at the lights on the ceiling of the lecture hall he saw the multiple lights generating the light in the hall. There are two phenomena here, he argues, the light of the lecture hall and the light of the individual bulbs. If one bulb should go out because of a fault in the bulb there may not be a noticeable perceptible difference in the light of the hall and that individual bulb, of course can be replaced without disrupting any proceedings. Campbell draws the comparison between the individual bulbs and their light and the heads of the students in his audience possessing consciousness. This, he claims, is a different idea to the transcendental idea of consciousness which is more similar to the light of the lecture hall which in turn of course is like the light of the sun which Plato saw to symbolise the form of the Good that is transcendent. This latter form of light, it is argued was never born and will never die (P.45). On this mythological account the transcendent is manifesting itself in the phenomenal world and is manifested by what is in the phenomenal world. This, of course, resembles the Kantian account of the phenomenal and noumenal self which are of course not two different selves as Schopenhauer thought, but rather two different aspects of one and the same “I”.
Campbell points out in a chapter entitled “The Ever Burning Sacrifice” how, in different cultures, the invading Aryans from the North settled in the areas they conquered and became integrated with the conquered peoples. They created a hierarchy in society where the warriors and the priests were above the merchants and peasants. We can see this phenomenon clearly in Ancient Greece. The priests were superior to the warriors and became the example to be followed if one wished to become a noble and fulfilled human being. They built their alters everywhere, sacrificing to the gods, simultaneously demonstrating their power to bring the gods to them for a common meal. The emotions associated with such events are obscure but perhaps they gave rise to experiences of the sublime.
In India, the energy associated with sacrifice was called Brahman(P.52). As we move forward in time to the 8th century BC we can encounter in India the first so-called forest philosophers and it is perhaps with them that the first humanistic orientations in mythology appear. With these first Eastern Philosophers the idea of Brahman, the energy of the sacrifice, gets transformed into the energy of all life. The great texts of this period, the Upanishads, investigate Brahman and conclude that Brahman lives in the sun, the sacrifice, and in all things. This dilution, Campbell argues threatened the sacredness of the sacrifices and we can see in Ancient Greece for example, Philosophers like Plato separating themselves from religion and the priests, yet attempting to maintain the sacredness of the sun and the forms. Indeed with the exception of the reverence for the oracles, the priests are conspicuous by their absence. Plato’s perfect Republic we know was run by Philosophers and warriors and this was the beginning of a process in which the sacrifice was to diminish in importance in relation to living the good life: a life of contemplation. This may have been the beginning of a process of secularisation which would eventually wipe the realm of the sacred off the face of the earth.
The Indian Yogis and the Ancient Greek Philosophers are in many respects antithetical figures. Campbell points to one such contrast, claiming that the Indian priests to a certain extent renounced the world whereas the Ancient Greeks embraced the world in spite of the oracles proclamatory warning that “Everything created by man is destined for ruin and destruction”. There is, however a strain of world-renunciation in Plato’s Republic where we note a retreat away from the physical external world in favour of a spiritual world of forms. This perhaps to some extent disappeared in Plato’s later work “The Laws”, but we see with Aristotle a return to the physical external world and a Philosophy of psuché (form of life)that embraced the life of contemplation, God represented as a primary form responsible for all change in the world. Neither Plato and Aristotle shared the Indian reverence for sacrifice but did, via Dionysius, recognise the eternal circle of life.
Maurice Bowra in his work “The Greek Experience” (Weidenfeld and N Nicolson , London 1957):
“The peculiar nature of man determined the Greek notion of pleasure. They had no ascetic or puritanical hostility to it; in some respects they regarded it as a supreme good. But at the same time they felt it must be kept in its place and not allowed to upset the harmony of either the individual or the city. They felt too that the strongest pleasures are suitable mainly for the young, and that in due course a man passes beyond them to others which are less exciting. This distinction follows the general distinction which the Greeks made between men and the gods. If the gods enjoy power and freedom, men have responsibility, and through their use of it attain their own dignity, which is different. from anything available to the gods. The advantage of this system is that it combines a natural taste for enjoyment with a real respect for proved capacities in action and in thought. Paradoxically, it may mean that in what seems to be his more human side, man is closer to the gods than in what wins honour and respect. But it also means that goodness and happiness are brought together in a balanced harmony: for the Greeks believed that if a man is good he is happy, but also that if he is happy he is good.”
The above testifies to a “balance of mind” that involves engaging with the world through achievements in action and in thought that would survive thousands of years and found empires of the future. It is a very different frame of mind to that which we encounter in the Old Testament where, to say the least the relation between Yahweh and men is strained over the issue of the knowledge of good and evil. Man is condemned to mortality because he wishes knowledge of good and evil. Sacrifice of animals was still an important part of life in the narratives of the Old Testament, but once Jesus had been sacrificed for the fall of man, sacrifice was seen to be barbaric. Prayer, however, was an important activity for both praising of God and the forgiveness of sins which would be judged by an all powerful and all-knowing God. The Greeks were more occupied with how to attain knowledge and virtue (areté) than how to avoid sin. The Christian reverence for the realm of the sacred was very different to the respect for this realm we find in Ancient Greece. In Ancient Greece we see a reluctance to see the world from the bubble of ever present temptation and sin: a world in which one waits for judgement day, and the release of the soul from the prison of the body. The Greeks, we know, saw the body, soul, and well governed city to be amongst the beautiful things of this world, perhaps reserving the experience of the sublime for extraordinary feats of thought , rhetoric or Philosophy, and encounters with symbols of the infinite.
The Upansihads reverse the attitude of refusing to engage with the world manifested by the Dravidian Yogis. Siva and Buddha insist on more engagement. The Buddha, for example was not a Brahmin but was certainly promoting the emergent idea of an enlightened consciousness/life. Buddha in this respect resembles a forest Philosopher who believed in life being the medium for the emergence of Brahma within. Buddhist ideas resemble Socratic ideas but there is no evidence of diffusion, and so the resemblance between the positions of Socrates ad Buddha must be considered as examples of the parallel development of ideas. There are, however, considerable differences in their respective commitments given the fact that Socrates used the method of elenchus and the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason to earn the praise of the oracle that claimed he was, “The wisest man in Athens”. It is clear from the differences between the thought of Socrates and Buddha just who was the priest and who was the Philosopher. The priestly view of life as an ever-burning sacrifice or series of reincarnations was very different to the philosophical view of life arguing for the importance of areté(doing the right thing in the right way at the right time), epistemé,(knowledge of oneself and ones world) arché(principles and las), and diké(justice).
The Ancient Greeks saw their temples as a sacred space for citizens and oracles but almost equally important for them was the important life-space of the polis: a space that they believed ought to be respected. The Humanism implied by the above account is obvious. Whilst the thoughts and teachings of Buddha may well have inspired many political leaders there is no specific engagement with the problems facing political communities as there was with the thought and activities of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. There is nothing, for example resembling Aristotles Constitutional theory where an enlightened middle class emerges to save the state from division and subsequent ruin and destruction. There is nothing in the teachings of Buddha resembling speculations about ideal states such as Plato’s Magnesia: a state in which Just laws were important, and a nocturnal council of enlightened political leaders provided education for the citizens. There is in Buddha, however, the concept of an enlightened soul (who would cease to reincarnate). Buddhism, however looks upon the self or the ego as a a problem standing in the way of self-enlightenment . There is the famous parable of a man who wakes up in the morning realising he has lost his head who begins to look about him for its location. This of course is Buddhist irony and the message is that one cannot use the self to look for the self, implying perhaps that there can be no such thing as self-knowledge or at least that this form of knowledge is not as important as the Greek oracles claimed. Buddhas parable may however also be interpreted to mean that one cannot objectively observe oneself and this is especially true if one is engaged in an action which requires a particular circumspective type of awareness. It is this kind of awareness which is responsible for the detection of errors in a sequence of action Whilst one cannot engage in the act of observing whilst I am engaged in any particular act of building, I can nevertheless see the result of my work and know that it was I that brought this result about. Humans posses the power of action and they also possess a power of knowing what one has chosen to do because they have the power of freedom either to choose to do the action or alternatively to choose not to do the action. Consciousness is, of course, involved in this choice and whilst this has been historically an important concept in the problems facing Philosophical Psychology, it is a complex concept which requires philosophical analysis. Indeed, the concept of psuché (forms of life), given the Aristotelian analysis of it, may be a more appropriate concept to use in relation to the problems associated with self-knowledge. This is the route the later Wittgenstein took with his concepts of forms of life and instinct.
For both Kant and the later Wittgenstein the self is something that is very much to be found in this world, interacting with it physically via its actions, interacting with it socially via the uses of language embedded in our variegated forms of life and less directly via thought which leads to both speech-acts and actions. The issue of Consciousness surfaces once again in this kind of discussion, and we need to determine where it fits into the schema of the powers of our human minds. Freud, we have agued is a Kantian psychologist who questioned the Cartesian and phenomenological notion of consciousness. For Freud Consciousness is not the primary function of mind , but merely a vicissitude of the instincts. For both Kant and Freud the “I” that thinks must be an I that also has its preconscious and unconscious aspects which are important for a complete knowledge of the form of existence of this “I”.
Campbell joins this debate by pointing out that for the Indians a flower turning its face toward the sun is a manifestation of consciousness. For the Greeks, however this phenomenon is more a manifestation of psuché (life). For us moderns Consciousness in a sense can be associated with Campbells light analogy. If a bulb gets broken, he argues, the light goes out. Similarly with consciousness it disappears in sleep, after a severe blow to the head, and also when we are dead. Our modern suggestion, beginning perhaps with William James, is that Consciousness is tied to the material substrate of the brain, the most important organ for the human psuché. Upon awakening from a coma or sleep, I may well be conscious, but perhaps not thinking anything, merely orientating myself once again in relation to my surroundings, perhaps in the case of the coma wondering where I am. Is there an “I” at work here? Probably not. If Kant is correct, then the “I” emerges only when this “I” begins to think something about something which in turn would seem to suggest that the Cartesian Cogito argument(I think therefore I am) may still be a good argument. This, however, suggests that consciousness is not identical with this “I” even if it may indeed be an important necessary condition for the occurrence of thinking. On this account consciousness seems to be a sensory event belonging to the faculty of sensibility. Consciousness is however quickly transformed if I try to remember where I am or even who I am. Memory would then seem to be an active form of thinking that requires an “I” to function in the human psuché.
Wittgenstein in his later work discussed a phenomenon which he argued was half perception, half thought, namely seeing something as something, e.g. seeing a face in the clouds and this may be a kind of ground-zero-thinking with a minimum involvement of the “I”. If this is so ,this phenomenon helps us to understand the scope and limits of the function or power of Consciousness. For our Ancient Greek Philosophers, however, it was psuché in all its forms which was the most important idea in need of investigation, especially the human form of psuché which Aristotle defined as “rational animal capable of discourse”.This kind of account ,of course, stands in stark contrast with the mysterious art of the Indian Yogi whose intention it is to stop all spontaneous activity of the mind. In regressing to this state, it is argued:
“The notion is that you, yourself are identical with that form of forms, Brahman” (P.60)
In this state it is encouraged that you visualise yourself with a serpent coiled at the base of your spine: a serpent you shall try to mobilise through control of posture and breathing and perhaps also making the sound of “aum”, all of which supposedly encourage the serpent to move up the spine and into the meditators head, thereby fully awakening our human psuché. Once the serpent passes the level of the throat, the yoga master may pass into a trance. This is a kind of zero-level of the psuché, resembles as Campbell points out on Page 63, the experience of some psychotics:
“The yoga is somehow experiencing a psychotic break-up but is not drowning in this subconscious sea that swamps the ordinary psychotic….The psychotic is drowning in these waters while the yoga is swimming.”
During its journey which begins at the genitalia, sexual pleasure is felt in the mode of imagining and the journey progresses to its next bodily station which is the navel–“the city of the shining jewel” in which one:
“wants to consume and gain power for oneself over everything, one is driven by a will to power.”
Both of these experiences of sexual pleasure and power are of course primary regions of the human psuché. The next stage of the serpents ascent is at the heart:
“It is at the level of the heart that one comes first into relationship to the higher principle of the power of art and the spirit, which are not those of the empirical outside environment.” (P.66)
This spiritual journey requires assistance from the voicebox in the vicinity of the throat via uttering the sound “aum” which Campbell claims symbolises the energy of the divine sound produced in some mysterious way which does not involve contact between two different things (which would seem to be necessary for physical sounds in our physical world):
“Aum is God.. Aum is God as sound….this is the sound aspect of the form that we are going to find when we meet god. It is the sound of God, the sound of the Lord of the World, out of whose thoughts, out of whose being, out of whose energy, substance the world is a precipitation. Aum is the word of words, that original Logos we find in the Bible..in the Gospel according to John: “In the beginning was the word, and the word was God”(P.69)
The effect of the sound is supposed to remove attention from the lower drives and focus ones attention on the next spiritual level. As the serpent ascends further upwards, the world is excluded and at the third eye, heaven is reached. The journey cleanses us of all worldly things and finally of the world itself. The Kantian pantheon of powers is a result of another kind of discipline that attempts to acquire as much knowledge of the external world and the powers of psuché as is possible. The powers of human psuché follow from the form of the human body which includes its constellation of organs, limbs, limb extensions etc. These powers obey various principles that also organise their interaction and integration with each other.
Freud refers to three of these principles, namely the energy regulation principle, the pleasure-pain principle and the reality principle. The Energy Regulation Principle is related to our instinctive and biological needs such as breathing, sexual activity and eating. The Pleasure-Pain Principle will regulate higher activities such as Love and Belongingness and will interact with both the Energy Regulation Principle to produce the lower forms of pleasure and the Reality Principle to produce higher forms of pleasure connected to Art, Morality, and Spirituality in its various forms.
There is nothing in the Philosophies of Aristotle, Kant, Freud, or Wittgenstein that speaks for the putting off of our bodies and taking on of another body of different form. Persons, for these philosophers are particular people with particular life spans beginning and ending at specific times. For Kant and Wittgenstein who were in some sense religious in our Western sense of the term, God is not a being detached from the world, but rather is in the world and related to it in various ways, manifesting power in various forms, urging us, for example to lead better more fulfilling lives. When the light of our individual consciousness is extinguished, there is not darkness because that is the presence of something, rather there is a nothingness–a pure absence of light and darkness. The state has no relation to life. There is no form remaining which can be transmitted into, for example, the body of a swan. These philosophers see our world as composed of principles(forms) which regulate our life with things events and actions. This is a world of constant change that is determined by these principles.
The Bhagavad Gita is a religious text much of whose content rings no bells in our Western memory systems but there is one event which certainly would have rung a bell for the later Freud occupied with the power of the death instinct over mans life. This is the event of “black time”which according to the text :
“is a tremendous monstrous divinity with many mouths with great tusks in these mouths. Arjuna sees both armies flying into these mouths and smashing like grapes and the blood pouring down from the maws like spilled wine…..I am Kala. I am black time, who am here for the end of the world and am licking up mankind.” (P.87)
That the end of time will be because of War, is, of course, a general position of many mythologies, including perhaps the oracles of ancient Greece. We moderns, more than at any time in History have looked into the jaws of black night during our World Wars and have miraculously lived to tell the tale, but with the advent of the “new men” who were responsible not just for these wars but for the creation of terrible weapons of mass destruction, we dare not breathe a sigh of relief. Our hope for the future resides in the Enlightenment Philosophy of Kant who postulated the existence of a “hidden plan” that is guiding the journey of mankind to a better place, a cosmopolitan kingdom of ends. It was of course another ex-citizen of Königsberg, Hannah Arendt, who alerted us to the origins of totalitarianism and the new me who yearn for the power to destroy any hope for a better future. Indeed at a critical point during the second world war, whilst black night was roaming the world and weapons of mass destruction were being tested, one of these men, Robert Oppenheimer, turned to the Bhagavad Gita for the words to describe what was happening:
“I am become death, the destroyer of worlds”
Campbell in a chapter entitled “World Soul” claims:
“When we look at the contemporary Western Conception of the individual, of the self, it is predicated around the psychology of Sigmund Freud, Joseph Adler, and Carl Jung.” (P.88)
This remark is the manifestation of a prejudice in favour of Psychology at the expense of its mother Philosophy. Both parties had relatively recently separated in 1870, and gone their separate ways. This prejudice in favour of the fathers of Psychology who as a matter of fact also fundamentally disagreed with each other, was, of course, a phenomenon of modernism which Stanley Cavell claimed arose because we can no longer see the connection between what we are doing and the historical conditions for what we are doing.
Freud, one of the three fathers indeed produced a philosophical psychology that manifested the wisdom of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza and Kant but did so in circumstances in which his work soon became obscured by the “New science” of positivism that committed itself intensely to the elimination of all metaphysics whether it be in the domain of Nature or Morals. The agenda of these new men was to ignore the history of thought in many regions of our knowledge in favour of a methodology of observation, measurement, and the manipulation of variables in experimental contexts. Oracles and proclamations to “know thyself” became historical relics. Whether the aim of these “new scientists” was to neutralise the influence of spirit seers and Eastern Yogis is not clear but the effect on Philosophy was considerable, calling into question much of the work of Aristotle, Kant and their followers throughout the ages.
Other factors also contributed to the severing of the thread of knowledge stretching from the Ancient Greeks to Modern Times. The Latin translations of Greek texts took a considerable amount of time and when this did occur there were problems with the meaning of a number of particular key terms such as phronesis, areté, arché, psuché, aletheia, eudaimonia etc. Many generations of scholars have occupied themselves with these problematic translations but most of the problems have now, after hundreds of years, been solved .
The History of Psychology, we know, initially centred upon both a modernist view of science and a modernist view of Consciousness, both of which very quickly revealed their limitations. The response to these limitations were unfortunately led by theoretical scientists who attempted to rescue the subject from the ensuing chaos by insisting that focus should shift to what in fact can be observed in psychological investigations, namely behaviour. This of course opened a door for the argument, characteristic of our technological age, that there is no observable difference between human and machine intelligence. Wittgenstein helped to temper this debate by claiming that what observation is, my reside in the eye of the beholder, because it involves seeing something as something. Seeing a contraction of the face as a wince or a pattern of movement as a manifestation of grief appears for example to go beyond the information given on a behaviourist account which involved reducing the world to a manifold of stimuli and responses. Behavioural movements per se are amenable to a number of competing descriptions, depending upon the origins of these movements, the physiological symptoms manifested, and the circumstances of the behaviour, but it is interesting to note that there is even a reluctance to speak of the behaviour of a machine because of the connection of this term to a physiological base which the machine does not possess. This debate obviously is related to Consciousness and its necessary ties to a particular physiological base and an energy regulation principle that is regulating life functions. A certain kind of chemistry is associated with life functions which a machine clearly does not possess.
The new men of science used a sceptical methodology to undermine everything metaphysical in the domains of both Nature and Morality. Stanley Cavell in his work “The Claim of Reason illustrates the operation of this scepticism in a recital:
“Request for Bssis: How for example do we know another person is angry?
Basis: From his behaviour…,the way he acts…
Ground for Doubt: But mightn’t he do these things, act that way and not be angry? And how do you know but that he is feeling something entirely different, or nothing at all?
Conclusion: I dont know…
Moral: I never can know. Behaviour is not identical with feelings and thoughts themselves
This recital takes us back once again to the initial attempts of the structuralists (Wundt) to order our sensations and feelings into some kind of psychological system. For Kant their project would have been misguided but Kant would have found the attempt to order behaviour into some kind of psychological system equally frivolous, since behaviour is controlled by the will and the will is both linked to the instincts (sensibility), understanding and reason. What these two schools of Psychology provide us with are at best accounts of how our sensory-motor system works at a relatively low level of psychic functioning. Behaviourism emerged agains the background of the theorising of the three “fathers” of psychology Campbell points to. It was therefore natural for Freud to become a target of the different schools of psychology (structuralism, functionalism, behaviourism).
The sceptical rehearsal of Cavell’s above devolves into another recital in which an automated human being with all the human organs, limbs, tissues etc presents itself for evaluation on the question as to whether this manufactured being can be said to have a human soul. If as Wittgenstein claimed the human body is the best picture of the soul then there would seem to be an argument for an affirmative answer to the above question. What this rehearsal lacks is reference to the important variable of the origin of the human body which includes having parents, growing in a human womb, being born into a completely different environment, and leading a life of dependency upon others during infancy, childhood, and adolescence. Even if this automated being has been programmed with a history of similar experiences, the origin of the programme is different to a human origin. It is, then, not just the bare presentation of a human body that demands we treat this manifestation as a human soul: there must be a physiological, psychological and social history present too. We can of course be misled as the automaton presents itself and responds to our questions relating to its origin with a pack of lies. Upon discovering the truth eventually we would not continue to relate to this being in the same way. We ought also to point out that this imaginative projection of a human automaton with a human brain organs and tissues may never in fact be technically possible. The later Wittgenstein is not a behaviourist because he must have included their theories in his judgement that modern psychology suffers from conceptual confusion. His grammatical investigations, on the contrary are an important tool in discovering what a person is because our language bewitches us and leads us into confusing one category of thing with another.
The sensible correlate of conceptual confusion is the world of illusion that the Indians called Maya, which is the veil that needs to be lifted before we can have access to Brahman (which Campbell equates with the Kantian noumena world) or Ding-an-sich (P.90).
Our Western roots in Ancient Greece were to flourish via Christianity, the religion chosen by the Military minded Romans and this in turn would give rise to individualism —a fruit that perhaps belongs more to the tree of the knowledge of good and evil than to the tree of life. Campbell cites Carl Jung and an actualisation process Jung refereed to as individuation. We live in societies, argues Jung, that demands we play a part , take on many roles as Shakespeare indicated. Individuation involves seeing these parts to be masks veiling the individual behind them. Jung, for Campbell, expresses in his Psychology the wisdom of Occidental mythology which is very different to Eastern Mythology where the the individual actually identifies with the part or the role that is being enacted. This ability to take on another form is typical of Eastern mythology and even becomes important in life after death when one may take on even an animal form in the next life. In such circumstances it is not necessary to worry about judgement day in the presence of God because the soul has a specific weight as a result of the life it has led: a weight that automatically determines what one is going to become. This is a system in which the ego is no longer merely regulated by other agencies (Freud) but is actually effaced because it is regarded as essentially unnecessary in processes that endure over long cycles of time..
The major difference, then, between Oriental Mythology/Religion and our Occidental Mythologies/Philosophies is that the former focuses upon God and the fruits of the tree of life and the latter upon Man and the fruits of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. In the Occidental tradition we also notice a major shift from the Mythological/Religious to the Philosophical/Secular. Kant, of course, was the major philosopher leading this shifting emphasis from the theoretical idea of God to the practical idea of freedom. Involved in this shifting emphasis was also a focus upon the beautiful and the sublime which of course were major concerns of Ancient Greek Philosophy.
The effacement of the ego, the thesis of reincarnation and the formlessness of the soul belong of course together, and are to be contrasted with our Western religious commitments to resurrection and the retained identity of ones soul . Whether one reincarnates or not, on the Eastern account, appears to depend upon the extent to which we can master our desires and fears, and by that is meant possessing the capacity to desire nothing and fear nothing. On this account this is not a matter of controlling or regulating the self, but rather of removing this “noise of the I” from the world. Only then, on the Buddhist account, will we rid ourselves of participating in the unending cycles of sorrow.(P.152). The fire or light of life is only finally extinguished for Hinduism when the individual dismisses the body and ceases all activity. Buddhism differs in that one can burn oneself or ones body out, but continue in an enlightened state doing ones duty, but in doing so one is like a tree acting just as the world acts without desire or fear.. There is no need, Campbell claims for the Buddhist to withdraw completely from the world and kill oneself:
“This idea is the basic Buddha idea, and it broke the grip of this literal yoga of killing yourself….when a person has purged himself of ego, he is like a string that has been burnt lying on the ground; it looks like string still but if you blow on it , it wisps away—it isn’t there. And so it is with a person who has quenched his commitment to ego and has pulled back. He is, as it were, in the centre, and life moves through him in a rolling process. This is the basic ideal, I would say, for the individual living in the world, whether in Buddhism, or Taoism or Hinduism.”(P.156)
Campbell further distinguishes between Hinduism and Buddhism by pointing out that whilst Buddhism is a creeded religion, initiated by a chosen figure or prophet, Hinduism is an ancient ethnic religion that one is born into, and whose laws one obeys blindly and without choice. Hinduism is split into castes, but the ultimate untouchables are those who have chosen creeded religions from across the seas, e.g. Christianity. The laws of the creeded religions come from the prophets who have a very special relation to God , but who are in a certain sense inferior beings. Whereas in the case of Hinduism the brahman who participates in rituals that can summon the gods are regarded as more powerful and therefore even superior to the gods. Hindu laws, however, have their origin not with the Brahmans, but issue direct from the universe. In Judaism and Hinduism, for example,the laws come from God even if in the former case Moses was the divine messenger. The religion of Ancient Greece as practiced around the time of the Great Philosophers, appears, however, to fall into a very different category given the fact that the laws are chosen by a great-souled human, a phronimos:
“It is from the Greeks that we get the idea that the human intelligence is competent to determine prudent, noble appropriate aims for human life and to contrive laws by which those aims may be achieved….This is not the traditional view either in the bible or in the Hindu tradition. The traditional view is that the law comes from the universe–or from the creator of the universe in the biblical tradition–and is imposed upon man. It is mans function to adjust himself to that law and then live by it, not to criticise it.”(P.163)
This suggests that we are dealing with essentially different types of mentality: the traditional form of religion the creedal form of religion and the Ancient Greek form of religion/philosophy. These different mentalities believe in the laws of the universe, laws that come from prophets, and laws that come from rational men who are great souled beings. It is these great souled beings that, in accordance with a Greek cultural-value framework—arché, areté, diké, epistemé eros, eudaimonia— best understands that knowledge and reason are the most reliable guides for that form of psuché we call human and whose essence specifying definition is “rational animal capable of discourse”. We are, according to Aristotle capable of being both the best of the animals and the worst of the animals, but we also possess a rational faculty (noos) that enables us to relate to the gods and the realm of the sacred. Reincarnation is not an important theme for the phronimos or Greek law-maker: it plays little or no part in the laws of the city, although respect for the chosen gods of the polis is also important for its stability.
Criticism of the gods is not permitted although it would seem that poets like Homer were given a poetic licence which allowed them to portray the gods anthropomorphically. Divine law, on the other hand, cannot be criticised, and in traditional religions is much more important than the laws instituted by man. Solon’s laws, for example, could be subjected to scrutiny and criticism by his peers. This criticism was offered with varying degrees of severity, the very worst criticism being that a law was unjust. This, according to St Augustine implied that unjust laws were not laws at all.
In our Western Christian religion we have a complex religious system composed of a respect for the traditional laws and commandments found in the Old Testament which form the foundation for the Christian law/commandment to “Love thy neighbour”. This commandment would appear to be more universal in scope than the OT commandment not to covet my neighbours wife and goods. Christianity however is anti-caste and anti-privilege, and favours the poor over the rich insofar as entering the kingdom of heaven is concerned, presumably because a rich mans ego is driven by selfish desires and paranoid fears that corrupt his soul.
Obeying the laws of the universe unreservedly as happens in the Hindu religion involves silencing the “noise of the I” in favour of the stillness of spirit sought after by the yogi. The Christian system, on the contrary, is equally critical of selfish desires and paranoid fears, but suggests that the individual take responsibility for their thoughts, actions and life on pain of censure from the community they live in which includes their families. We can see clearly the differences between these two systems in the practices of arranged marriages and the fate of the widow who must cast herself on her dead husbands funeral pyre. These for us Western rational animals capable of discourse would be irrational acts.
The Hindu system also has its duties connected with the role of the family head for example. When those duties are deemed to have been fulfilled the father is called upon to abandon all worldly things and seek a guru in a forest to teach him the discipline of yoga. In extreme cases the brahmin or guru can urge their pupil to bury themselves in the ground with just the nose above ground for several months. This is part of the process of abandoning of the body:
“You must shatter the life in yourself so that there is nothing there.”(P.176)
This theme that life is somehow something illusory is a part of Buddhism, the religion of enlightenment. Whilst the primary symbol for life is light, the end for which one is striving, after many reincarnations, is the extinction of the light. The Knowledge that is acquired on this journey of Enlightenment is that suffering and sorrow are to be found everywhere:
“The beautiful surface of things” (P.180)
Behind this veil resides a sense of evil, horror and ruthlessness. The Buddha withdraws from this spectacle when he sits under the Bodhi tree, preparing to teach the ways leading to Buddhism. The favoured image is that of the ferryboat that takes you from a wind-swept shore to a windless shore where nothing is in flux. There is no need of a Buddhist church because life is their church, and there is no need of any texts. This is a religion in which enlightenment can also occur via an athletic form of meditation in action: one can, for example, be a samurai dedicated to killing ones enemies without fear of breaking any divine laws or commandments.
Mythology is the remarkable attempt to address questions of fundamental importance for mankind: it is the form of study that not only demands to know the world and the self, but also demands some kind of practical justification or guarantee for such knowledge.
The Ancient Greeks formulated what they called aporetic questions, realising that the journey of knowledge is long, arduous and sometimes dangerous. They were the first to concentrate their attention on the art of thinking in the hope that the journey will end well, in spite of oracular proclamations to the effect that it is ruin and destruction that awaits mankind.
The Ancient Greek Philosophers also attempted to answer the so-called aporetic questions they formulated methodically, by developing the tools of dialectic, elenchus and logic. This exploration, however, was preceded by the obscure and secretive methods used by the Oracles to arrive at two of the truths relating to mans essence that were expressed in the hylomorphic account of Aristotle’s “rational animal capable of discourse.”:
Everything created by man is destined for ruin and destruction
2. Know thyself
These truths were proclamatory warnings agains the hubris of man who had proceeded by this time, to build complex civilisations. governed by the rule of law. These warnings, indeed may have been Parthian shots by the Oracles, whose influence was already beginning to wane in Greece. Socrates and Plato were, we now know, abandoning the temple for the agora, the ampitheatre and the Academy. Plato, we also know, chose to present the thoughts of Socrates in dialogue form, which were then performed in the ampitheatres and also in the Olympic Games. Aristotle’s Lyceum was, on the other hand, engaging in early biological experiments alongside lectures on the principles of psuché .
Plato, then may well have been the first of the institutional professors, and together with Aristotle, symbolised a concept of “The University”, which was never pursued, namely that which was striving to produce polymaths in the name of the love of wisdom. Nevertheless in the case of Plato and the case of Aristotle, there is deep respect for religion and the oracles of the temples. Some of Plato’s ideas, however, can be construed as the beginning of a process of the marginalisation of religious practices and institutions.
Socrates, we know, as part of his defence against the charge of heresy claimed that Philosophy was one of the children of the Gods and this at the time, might also have been regarded as heretical. We do not know exactly how it was received by the 500 man jury most of whom probably did not understand what Socrates was attempting to do in the agora or even why the Oracle thought he was the wisest man in Athens. Both Plato and Aristotle believed that the proclamation by the oracle to “Know thyself” was an important one, and the failure to follow this piece of advice might well end in the ruin and destruction of civilisation. The Ancient Greeks we know when confronted by the gigantic Persian army were proud of their own civilisation and their Independence from what they saw to be an autocratic tyrannical form of government.
The characterisation of Justice that Socrates provides us with early on in the Republic is that justice consists in citizens of the Republic working in accordance with a principle of specialisation where they work in occupations suited to their abilities and capacities and not interfere with the work of occupations they have no ability for. This argument for justice in the city, of course ,builds upon the Socratic account of justice for the individual which is that those guilty of unjust conduct get what they deserve. This, in turn, relates to the Oracular proclamation that Everything created by humans is destined for ruin and destruction in the sense that it is unjust conduct on a large scale that will lead to the ruin and destruction of the city-state.
Campbell refers to this principle of specialisation when he points out that the first early civilisations that endured over time were characterised by the professionalisation of various important occupations. He names priests, merchants and farmers but interestingly fails to mention teachers and warriors. Perhaps it was not yet evident that a civilisation needs, according to Aristotle, three different kinds of forms, namely reproduction of children, reproduction of important artefacts and tools for living and finally but perhaps most important, the reproduction of important ideas via the process of teaching. All three kinds of forms were necessary according to Aristotle if a city-state was to become self sufficient and not be dependent on external circumstances for its survival. As the civilisation progresses, the need for a greater differentiation of occupations becomes necessary for self sufficiency. We ought to recall the evolutionary development of the city state for Aristotle begins in the large extended family, continues with a number of extended families forming a village ,and then ends with a number of villages coalescing to form the city-state. Self sufficiency is a difficult concept to define but it almost certainly refers to the needs of the citizens which would be exceedingly difficult to list.
The Psychology of Maslow may, however, serve as a guide in this matter. Maslow argues that certain needs are more fundamental than others and some needs arise when the more fundamental needs are met. Given the fact that we are animals, survival and reproduction are obviously important needs and Maslow includes both sexual and physiological needs for food, water and oxygen etc. If these needs are consistently and systematically met the next needs to arise are security/safety needs which, in our more complex societies can take a manifold of foms, e.g. Physical safety from physical harm, health safety which follows from access to medical care,, emotional security follows from not being subjected to anxiety fear and stress consistently and systematically, financial and work security follows from having a job which provides us with money and resources to meet our maintenance needs, legal and social security follow from the prevalence of justice in the society and the sense of being part of a whole.
The next level of needs are love and belongingness needs which follow from the need for intimate relations and friendships. Self-esteem needs are next in the hierarchy and this follows from the more abstract need for respect. All these hierarchical levels also require that our cognitive and aesthetic needs are met, and these are also relatively abstract and concerned with knowledge, justice and freedom. if, Maslow argues, all these needs are consistently and systematically met we will as individuals become self sufficient and relatively independent of our circumstances.
Self sufficiency for a city-state is relative because of the obvious difficulties in obtaining justice and freedom for everyone. It would seem as if the fundamental condition for such a state of affairs would be the citizens all being friends and treating each other as ends-in-themselves which is something that according to Kant might take one hundred thousand years to achieve. It is clear now why the wisest of the Ancient Greeks, namely Socrates, thought Philosophy to be a child of the Gods and a necessary discipline if one was to be able to answer all the aporetic questions arising about our human political, religious, artistic and ethical lives. Mathematics was of course taught to some professions who needed such knowledge for the instrumental purposes of the state such as tax collecting ,designing temples etc. Pythagoras, was a teacher of mathematics as a form of epistemé, but his life is shrouded in mystery.
The transmission of skills is obviously an important civilisation builder and various instrumental forms of practical knowledge are necessary for such technical matters. These forms of knowledge obviously differ to those forms of knowledge that are categorical such as the knowledge of arché (principles) and diké(justice). The logical principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason are then, necessary to justify categorical answers to categorical questions such as “What is justice?”. St Augustine, for example, uses the principle of noncontradiction to point out that “An unjust law is no law at all”. The importance of knowledge to Ancient Greece, then stands in sharp contrast to the role that knowledge plays in the Garden of Eden myth whose moral is that we ought not to have eaten the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil because this was a divine matter to be left to divine beings. Questions relating to the knowledge of good and evil are clearly aporetic questions, and Socrates, Plato and Aristotle took us some way along the path of answering these questions . Kant took us further along the path, but the journey has not ended and Kant was probably correct in his judgement that the journey to the cosmopolitan kingdom of ends that lies at the end of the path is going to occupy us for a very long time indeed. The complex interplay of the threads of arché, epistemé, areté, logos, and aletheia will need to be unravelled to lay bear the nature of such knowledge of “The Good”. Given the obvious importance of knowledge in the process of the actualisation of the idea of “The Good”, one implication for the professions occupied with city-state business is that teachers play a vitally important role in the fate of the city-state. Institutions such as the Academy and the Lyceum were indeed originally used as blueprints for our Universities, but that blueprint appears to have used a principle of specialisation in an exceedingly narrow sense and as a consequence lost the grasp of many universal aporetic questions such as “What is knowledge?” “What is The Good?”, “What is the beautiful and sublime?” and perhaps also the questions, “What is Justice?” and “In what sense does God exist?”
Perusing the educational system of the ancient Greeks we find that doctors were trained in temples using an apprenticeship system . This may have been due to the promotion of Aeschylus to the status of a God. Priests, paradoxically were not trained in the temple but in specialised religious institutions, and perhaps here too the principle of specialisation was conceived too narrowly. Plato’s Academy contained an area devoted to the worship of the gods and we also know that the last request of Socrates before he was put to death by drinking from the poisoned chalice, was to request that one of his friends sacrifice a cock to Asclepius, presumably in gratitude for the relatively painless effect of the poison he was forced to imbibe.
When Socrates was practicing his new method of elenchus in the agora it was clear to him that his method needed to justify the oracles claim that he was the wisest man in Athens. His chosen targets were powerful people, politicians, sophists, priests who were prepared to use the law to retain their power over the community, using it as a means to their ends, that is to say unethically. This particular use of the law brought Athens into disrepute and established Philosophy as an important subject in the task of educating the citizens of a society. The early Philosophers, we ought to recall were so called natural philosophers interested in the phenomenal happenings of the physical world, especially what is happening in the heavens. We recall the curious role of Anaxagoras in this respect who proclaimed that the moon was not a God-like ethereal entity but rather a solid body similar to that of the earth reflecting the light of the sun. Anaxagoras claimed also that noos was the initiator and regulator of all change, a kind of cosmic mind. Apparently Socrates was convinced by Anaxagoras ‘s writings to abandon his investigations into the physical world and concentrate instead upon the cosmic mind or noos. Socrates eventually transferred his efforts into the field of the life-world and focussed upon those various powerful experts in the polis who thought they knew what they were doing but were simply making the worse argument appear the better to those who questioned what was being done. The Socratic method then was both philosophical and educational.
Plato’s Theory of Forms, we ought to recall proposed that the Form of the Good was the most important of all the forms and Plato sought to justify his claim by using both argumentation and allegory, thus combining both philosophical and mythological thought. Forms are forms of thought which according to Plato, determine the template for everything we name or talk about and Plato furthermore characterises external world entities as imitations or copies of the original forms. Forms, for both Plato and Aristotle are that which justifies and explains what we encounter and question in the external physical world . For Aristotle, However, the formal “cause” (explanation) of something is only one kind of explanation and furthermore this is not as Plato claimed situated in some kind of non physical spiritual realm but rather, for Aristotle, something that is situated in the world.
The mythology and religion of Plato’s times was one source of the “form of the good” and good art for Plato refused to present the gods fighting, arguing, stealing etc., as we encounter them in Homer. Eros in relation to the beauty of the human body, the human soul and the human laws of the city involved the power of the imagination, the emotions, understanding and reason, all of which were necessary for leading the examined contemplative life characteristic of eudaimonia. Divine powers as represented by the demiurge and the erinyes/euminedes formed part of the Greek pantheon of powers which have a complex relation to what Plato and Aristotle called the formal causes or what religion regarded as the “realm of the sacred”. Both of these mythical impersonal powers belonged to an older conception of the divine and sacred which was later supplemented by Zeus and his anthopomorphised pantheon of personalities which included many goddesses such as Athena who concerned herself with principles of wisdom and justice.
Ancient Greek Philosophy did not disassociate itself from the realms of the divine and the sacred, preferring instead to include mythological concerns under the umbrella of Philosophy, the latest supplement to the pantheon of the Gods. Indeed this realm is definitely included in the Aristotelian position that “being has many meanings”. As mentioned previously for Aristotle, the forms were transmitted down the generations in fundamentally three ways, reproduction of children, the creation of artefacts and tools and learning of skills associated with them, and thirdly, the transmission of important ideas from teacher to pupil,
Doctors, politicians, priests, warriors and Philosophers, were also involved in the care for the body, soul, and city which all Greeks thought to be important. Lawyers too, were emerging given the complex legal system of Athens which permitted citizens to lodge indictments against each other, as instanced by the infamous indictment of Socrates by Meletus. Sophists became paid experts in “making the worse argument seem the better” for payment and thereby provided the legal profession with an inauspicious beginning.
As the centuries passed however, the Philosophy of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle endured as an intellectual activity concerned with the answering of aporetic questions, usually reserved for the oracles, questions concerned with Being, the sacred, the true, the beautiful, the sublime, and justice. Mythology, however was experiencing a decline owing firstly, to the ascendency of Christianity which historically has proved itself to be one of the more intolerant religions, secondly, due to the decoupling of the forms (the true, good, beautiful etc) from religious practices and institutions. Scientific knowledge, then, became more and more dependent upon a mathematical form of thinking and as a result promoted a general scepticism about anything that could not be observed, measured or manipulated. The formulating of aporetic questions relating to abstract ideas such as Being and other transcendental and metaphysical matters were lost in the wave of secularisation that began sweeping over Europe. One reaction to this state of affairs was the emergence of “spirit seers” who appealed to supernatural experiences that were appearing increasingly delusional with the passing of the centuries. Kant warned us of this emerging phenomenon, yet as late as the 1900’s Carl Jung was still attempting to rehabilitate the supernatural world of spirits in the name of psychology.
In relation to this wave of secularisation, Campbell claims the following:
“The word myth now means falsehood, and so we have lost the symbols and the mysterious world of which they speak. But we need the symbols, and so they come up in disturbed dreams and nightmares that are then dealt with by psychiatrists. It was Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and Jacob Adler who realised that the figures of dreams are really figures of personal mythologisation….At present our culture has rejected the world of symbology. It has gone into an economic and political phase where spiritual principles are completely disregarded…Our religious life is ethical not mystical. The mystery has gone and society is disintegrating as a result.”(The Myth of Light…P.18-19)
We see a sign of this decay in the writings of the psychiatrist Jung. Campbell talks about this in terms of the transcendent and the metaphysical mysteries being transposed into the so-called “Mystery” of an after-life populated with ghosts and spirits. For Freud, these are fantasy laden figures generated by psychological processes that we need his later work to give a full account of. The clinical Freud and his technical language, indeed, help us to understand the defence mechanisms operating: sometimes these spiritual experiences relate to trauma and sometimes to modern mans fundamental discontentment with a life without obvious meaning which Kant decribed already during his time as “melancholically haphazard”. Kant we know explored in detail the mysterious aporetic questions relating to God, the soul and freedom and he was perhaps the last great philosopher who could write with an open mind about a transcendental ego situated in a noumenal world which we can merely glimpse from our lives in a phenomenal world of space, time and causation.
Freud claims he is a Kantian Psychologist but does not seem able to capture the Kantian penchant for exploring the transcendent and metaphysical realm of the sacred. When Freud speaks of god and religion he tends to focus upon popular attitudes toward spiritual figures, which are clearly childish projections of anxieties and wishes. Fear and desire are the major characters of the Freudian religious drama: characters that do not perform any cathartic function. From Freudian times onward (dating perhaps from 1929) it appears as if the mystery of life is no longer the concern of anyone. The aporetic question of “Being and its many meanings” has all but disappeared from our intellectual concerns. Campbell evokes Eastern Myth in general and the Upanishads in particular which he claims retains a concern for one of the many meanings of being, namely ,the mystery of life:
“Bring me a fruit of that banyan tree,
Here is is venerable sir,
Break it
It is broken venerable sir,
What do you see there?
These seeds exceedingly small,
Break one of these my son,
It is broken venerable sir,
What do you see there?
Nothing at all venerable sir
The father said: That subtle essence, my dear, which you do not perceive there, from this very essence this great banyan arises. Believe me my dear. Now that which is the subtle essence. In it all that exists has its self. That is true,. That is the self.. Thou art that Svetaketu (The Chandogya Upanishad Ch 12)
Nothingness, then, is not nothing but a something that appears to defy the normal categories of understanding and therefore, perhaps the normal principles of judgement. Hence the tendency toward the use of allegories, parables and dialogues. The Self or transcendental ego is not in the world like the banyan tree, but rather lies at the boundary of the world. There is no difficulty in identifying the above form of the banyan tree even if nothing can be seen. In the above however it seems that this truth is also connected to the truth of a Self which also cannot be seen. “Thou art that”–it is stated. This is a transcendental truth and reminds us of the Wittgensteinian dictum:
“Whereof one cannot speak thereof one must consign to silence.”(Prop 7 Tractatus- Logico-Philosophicus)
This, however, would not have been the view either of the Upanishads or Aristotle’s Metaphysics. The above mythological/religious text appears to be attempting to reveal “The Truth” in the Greek spirit of aletheia. This is not being done in the way in which Aristotle seeks “The Truth” of the “many meanings of Being”. Aristotle is a rationalist and sees arché ( founding principles) to be the most reliable component of Logos, and for him it is clear that there are principles or forms connected to that realm of Being called psuché which is that form of life which inhabits the physical realm of space, time and matter. For Aristotle matter is essentially connected to that which forms it into the entities we experience, and it is these forms that function like organising principles. Life is as much, for Aristotle, defined by its origins, as its end in death, and the origin mythology focuses upon insofar as life is concerned is that of mother earth.
The mystery for mythology is simple: How can a living entity emerge form a non living environment? The many different forms of life are, of course, fascinating but none is more fascinating than the human form who is capable of significantly changing the environment he lives in by building cities and civilisations, whilst inquiring into his own nature and the nature of everything around him. The powers of human nature, then, are important areas of study more for the Philosopher than the priest or mythologist.
Campbell claims that we no longer live in an age of mythology, religion art or philosophy, but rather appear to have succumbed to the more materialistically constituted forces of economics and politics. Campbell, notes, for example, with considerable regret that after Thomas Mann went to live in America he became engaged with political issues and lost his creative flair. This was around the time when Wittgenstein was complaining about the sound of engines in the music of Brahms and some time after Renoir made his aesthetic complaint about modern architecture:
“We get too accustomed to these things and to such a point that we dont realise how ugly they are. And if the day ever comes when we become entirely accustomed to them, it will be the end of a civilisation which gave us the Parthenon and the Cathedral of Rouen. Then men will commit suicide from boredom or will kill each other off just for the pleasure of it”(Stokes, A, The Collected Writings of Adrian Stokes, Vol 3, The Invitation in Art, London, Thames and Hudson, 1978, P 278)
The 1900 s of course began with the “ready-made urinal ” of Duschamps and in the name of this “Modern Art”we also experienced a number of paradoxical “works ” in several mediums, from weightless sculptures to empty canvasses, to soundless musical performances. T S Eliot also contributed to the spirit of these times with his poem, “The Waste Land.” and Hannah Arendt noted that the political party system was already collapsing around the turn of the century: the conditions were being laid for the emergence of totalitarian regimes and the subsequent deaths of millions of people, amongst them those hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians that died from the dropping of two atomic bombs.
Wittgenstein, prior to these traumatic political events had left Vienna to study Philosophy at Cambridge University and within a relatively short period of time produced a work entitled “Tracatatus Logico-Philosophicus” (1922), which claimed that it was the “final solution” of the problems of Philosophy. Wittgenstein himself, of course was forced to retract this claim when he was preparing another work “Philosophical Investigations”, which would not be published in his lifetime: a work which moreover would contribute to mitigating some of the negative developments of modern Philosophy that in their turn were neutralising the arguments of Aristotle and Kant. In his final solution from his earlier work it is stated that “the world is the totality of facts” (not things like a banyan tree) . Language pictures facts, and the soul was essentially characterised as a linguistic solipsistic soul. The later work abandoned these positions in favour of the activity of language being embedded in Aristotelian “forms of life”, and the meaning of language was characterised as its use in various language-games. The solipsistic self was dropped for a soul embedded in a life world which was essentially public and communal. yet it was the early work which most reflected the spirit of the times and Campbell notes how such a spirit affected the interpretation of important religious texts:
“We take the Old Testament God to be a fact, not a symbol. The Holy Land is a specific place and no other, man is superior to the beasts, and nature has fallen. With the fall in the Garden of Eden, nature becomes a corrupt force, so we do not give ourselves to nature…..What do we read? We read newspapers concerned with murders, rapes, politicians and athletes and thats about it. This is the reading that people used to devote to worship, to legends, of deities who represent the founding figures of their lives and religion. People today are hunting around for what they have lost. Some know they are hunting. The ones who dont are having a really hard time.” (P.19-20)
Viewing the Bible as a totality of historical facts displaces the true locus of mythological and religious texts which is, according to Paul Ricoeur:
“For us moderns a myth is only a myth because we can no longer connect that time with the time of history as we write it, employing the critical method, nor can we connect mythical places with our geographical space. This is why the myth can no longer be an explanation; to exclude its etiological intention is the theme of all necessary demythologization. But in losing its explanatory pretensions the myth reveals its exploratory significance and its contribution to understanding, which we shall later call its symbolic function–that is to say, its power of discovering and revealing the bond between man and what he considers sacred.” (Symbolism of Evil, P.5)
Evil is a critical idea in the realm of the sacred : it is Ricoeur claims the critical point of our bond to the realm of the sacred. It involves the:
“threat of the dissolution of the bond between man and the sacred and makes us most intensely aware of mans dependence on the powers of the sacred. Therefore the myth of “crisis” is at the same time the myth of “totality”: in recounting how these things began and how they will end the myth places the experience of man in a whole which thus receives orientation and meaning from the narration. Thus, an understanding of human reality as a whole operates through the myth by means of a reminiscence and an expectation.” (Symbolism of Evil, P.6)
So, our newspapers are filled with atomic facts which we read in a curious frame of mind that does not resemble the way in which we traditionally read our sacred texts. We no longer refer what we read to these holistic humanistic concerns with, for example, mans capacity for evil, his capacity to bring down ruin and destruction upon himself and everyone around him. “Sin” was a universal idea of faith that evoked expectations that man shall be worthy of the life he possesses and leads. This moral dimension disappears when the emphasis upon the symbolic nature of mans existence is replaced by a myriad of different economic and political concerns. of course, if one tires of economical and political news, there is always the latest news about our sporting or entertainment heroes who always seem to be getting themselves into trouble, at least insofar as news reporting is concerned. It does rather appear as if concern with the news has become what Freud would call a substitute satisfaction, especially when we no longer desire to reminisce or concern ourselves with eudaimonia (leading a good spirited flourishing life). Modern man does not appear to be aware that he has lost something, and the question is whether we have regressed in relation to Campbells observation that we all appear to be hunting for something.
Campbell provides us, however, with a pedagogical item of news, namely the return of the Apollo mission where the first men walked on the moon. Returning to earth from the mission the crew received a question from mission control asking who was navigating the craft. The surprising answer given by one of the astronauts was “Newton”. Here were a group of scientists/ engineers for whom trust in the laws of nature was absolute and unquestionable and for whom the world was so much more than a totality of facts. It is clear from this example that the actual practice of science involves trust in the metaphysics of nature: Campbell’s response to this was the following:
“I immediately thought of Kant’s Transcendental Aesthetic, the first section of his “Critique of Pure Reason” where he says that time and space are forms of sensibility and that they are essential to our mode of experience. We can experience. anything outside of them. They are apriori forms. So it seems we know the laws of space before we get there. In his introduction to metaphysics, Kant asks, “How is it that we can be certain that mathematical calculations made in this space here would work in that space there?” The answer came to me from these men. “There is only one space because there is only one mind at work here.”….Enough was known of the laws of space to know just what energy should be put out of the rockets and what angle to bring the space-ship down within a mile of the boat waiting for them in the Pacific Ocean…The knowledge of space is the knowledge of our lives. We were born from space. It was from space that the Big Bang came that sent forth galaxies and out of galaxies, solar systems. The planet we are on is one little pebble on one of these things and we have grown out of the earth of this pebble. This is the fantastic mythology thats waiting for someone to write poems about.”(P-19-20)
These astronauts also manifested the reverse of what the ancients felt looking out into space, when they looked back at the awe inspiring view of the earth from the heavens. Kant in his writings about the mathematical sublime pointed out that experiences involving vast magnitudes such as that of outer space, quicken in us a feeling of the sublimity of the experience. Part of this experience is the realisation that the experiencer possesses cognitive powers that are appropriate to appreciate this magnitude. Kant takes this experience of nature and uses it in an example that he uses to demonstrate the metaphysics of morals.
Carazans dream is a dream of a man who had throughout his life been using the people around him for his own ends, He dreams one night of a judgement on his life and a punishment of speeding out into the vast infinity of space far away from even the light of solar systems. He awakens in a state of despair and resolves never to abuse his fellow man again. Carazan felt the consequences of a life of evil. This vice of acquisitiveness has, of course, existed throughout the ages in different forms, but up until modern times it has been seen to be what it is, namely a vice or evil that is detrimental for the character of man which, according to Aristotle and Kant, by nature strives for the good.
Hannah Arendt’s perceptive analysis of the banality of evil was proposed even in relation to the Nazis that decimated the Jews of Europe. They were not capable, she argued, of thinking, which on her account of the importance of human thought for bringing about the good, was a significant criticism, much more significant than the emotional reactions to this deed that insisted on calling the Nazis monsters. The Carazan of her time was probably Cecil Rhodes who upon perusing the planets did not experience the awe and wonder of the ancients, but a far more modern response of wondering whether they could be colonised (presumably for profit). She characterised him and a number of others beginning with Descartes as the “new men”: men who no longer thought as men once did but for whom anything was possible if you could persuade the masses that it was. Many, a significant minority, of these masses of course knew that with modern resources, nothing of significance was possible any longer. During these modern times the call has gone out several times from intellectuals for a “Newton of the moral universe” but no candidate has been found apparently, in spite of the obvious cultural presences of Aristotle and Kant.
What have we done to ourselves if the above claims are true? Many things, but one important thing is that we have objectified ourselves into a hypothetical totality of facts without any relation to the sacred, the good, the beautiful and the sublime. Hume was the leader of a movement which claimed that one cannot find a self in our perceptions even if the self is a bundle of perceptions. Kant of course combatted such a view in his Critical Philosophy but his views were vey quickly turned upside down by Hegel, and the self of modern Psychology in the 1900s moved from being a science of sensations, feelings and consciousness to being a science of observable measurable behaviour. In this process all the intellectual powers of the self or the soul fell away, until we find the lonely logical solipsist of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus proclaiming that the world is a totality of facts and the self is a subject about which nothing can be said. Of course, waiting in the wings of the universities there were followers of Aristotle and Kant and the later Wittgenstein, trying to restore something of the Ancient Spirit of Greece and the more recent spirit of the Enlightenment. Ideas of the good will and the importance of the proclamation “know thyself!” continued to be significant for these scholars working in the shadow of a modernist flow of ideas that disregarded the importance of historical approaches. This flow of ideas included regarding religion either as anathema or in terms of the fantasy-laden idea of a day of judgement in the after-life up in the heavens or down in the fires of hell. This belief in the after-life had no real connection to experience.
We pointed earlier to Campbells failure to take into account Kant’s ideas from the third Critique, the “Critique of Judgement”. In this Kantian work we encounter explanations of, and justifications for, the idea of God as well as descriptions/explanations of the idea of the sublime which Campbell refers to in the following way:
“This is what is known as the sublime, the experience either of space or of energy that is so prodigious that the individual simply diminishes out of sight. I have talked with people who were in some of the German cities during the British and American saturation bombings in World War 2 and they told me it was a sublime experience. So there is more than beauty in the world—there is the sublime. The mythology comingto us from space is sublime.”
Kant in his third Critique, “The Critique of Aesthetic Judgement” ,discusses two kinds of sublimity, the mathematically sublime and the dynamically sublime. In both cases the phenomenon that causes the response defies our power of imagination and the faculty of reason steps in either with the idea of infinity or the idea of moral agency. In the case of space that Campbell refers to above, it is clearly the idea of infinity that reason is using, but the case of the Germans who had been bombed is less clear, but might involve the idea of freedom and moral agency. The citizens, that is, take solace in the fact that they are not succumbing to the ruin and destruction wrought upon them from mechanical machines in the air. In both cases the Aristotelian faculty of noos is involved in appealing to the idea of infinity or the power of causing oneself to act freely in an expression of moral agency. In terms of the Upanishad idea of “Thou art that”, both ideas of infinity and freedom may be involved.
We in the West are obviously more familiar with the origins of our civilisation and those of the Near East than we are with the origins of civilisations in the far East, e.g. India and China. Campbell is attempting to increase our familiarity with the mythology of these distant cultures. In his discussion of Hinduism, he notes:
“The Earth is the energy of which some god is the personification and of which matter is a concretisation, and these things exist in eons and eons of time.” (Myths of Light, P.21)
He then tells us a story about the hubris of the god Indira and the intervention of Brahma who has the task of humbling Indira’s pretensions.Indira is informed, for example that he is only one of a multitude of Indiras that came before him and will come after him and all of them will descend into the life-forms of ants at some point in the future. These texts that use the idea of the infinite come to us from ca 400 AD, during the period of the decline of the Roman Empire. During this period both Plato’s and Aristotle’s ideas were still influential through the teachings of philosophical schools and academies which would just over a century later be closed by the emperor Justinian. The translations of Plato’s works were , however, more widely available than those of Aristotles, many of which were lost.
Campbell argues that civilisations in the West and Near East were more susceptible to invasion than those in the East which were more naturally protected by their geographical locations. The Northern Nomadic Aryans, from the North and the Semites from the Middle Eastern desert continually caused many settlements considerable difficulty, forcing them to adapt to radical changes in their lives. The first organised settlements arose in the Near East around 8000. BC with higher forms of culture emerging around 2500 BC in India and 1600 BC in China. Nomadic hunting and foraging were replaced by agriculture and animal husbandry. Around 4000 B C the first city-states emerged in the Tigris-Euphrates valley. Campbell points out that these city-states developed a division of labour based on a principle of specialisation, e.g. politicians, priests, merchants and farmers. He does not mention teachers, which is curious given the obvious importance of knowledge in the transmission of ideas in the society. Around 3500 BC we see the emergence of writing , mathematical calculation, astronomical observation and tax collection arising as a result of the principle of specialisation.
Village agricultural communities emerged somewhat later in Ancient Greece, ca 7000 BC. Settlers from the Near East probably brought the necessary skills and knowledge to form these communities. As a consequence organised city-states emerged somewhat later in Ancient Greece. The first city state was probably Iklaina (ca 1600-1100 BC). Persian city-states in contrast to those in Ancient Greece were autocratic and it was not long before rulers began to desire larger territories. Athens and Sparta soon became targets. The Athens of the 5th century BC was a city state with a complex system of law that had recently humanised an earlier Draconian system of law by, for example, redressing injustices between the rich and the poor.
Campbell argues that the mythology of the above system of city states as well as those of the Far East possessed the structures they did owing to being expressions of archetypal patterns of the human mind. These archetypal patterns were both models of the cosmos and the human mind. Archeology, for example has revealed that many civilised settlements had a mandala structure. in which the god/king/ruler was centrally placed in the settlement with his servants all around him. Campbell notes the calm acceptance of Far East peoples of the world the way it is , resting calm in the daily presence of their religions. They do not need to anthromorphise the powers of nature because their primary concern is not to harness these powers but see them rather as divine conditions for human existence. For them whatever is transcendental lies beyond the scope of human thought and there is therefore no attempt to understand God, because only God can know God. For the Eastern mind God is the infinite both without and within man: an infinite that has no name. Campbell contributes the following problematic reflection:
“in Occidental theology the word transcendent is used to mean outside of the world. In the East it means outside of thought. To imagine that your definitions of God have anything to do with that ultimate mystery is a form of sheer idolatry from this standpoint.” (P. 33)
Aristotle’s God is not defined, but portrayed as a special form of thinking which is completely different from human thinking , which is thinking about the world. On this account God is neither outside the world nor outside of thought. God as a prime mover is sometimes characterised in empirical thought as a force or power which imparts movement or motion to the world. On Aristotles account, however, God is a prime form which is more akin to a first principle. This does not put Aristotle’s God outside the world because for him forms are inside the world and not, as was the case with Plato’s forms something spiritual and beyond the physical world. Whilst on such an account Gods thinking is beyond our range of thinking , Gods thought about himself is nevertheless, not transcendent. Campbells formulation above is therefore awkward.
Similarly for Kant the transcendental x means something more akin to a first principle than anything more concrete or more spiritual. Indeed the relation of what Kant refers to as the noumenal world of things-in-themselves has a far more complex relation to our phenomenal world of experience. It is, for example, that which we can think and therefore cannot be outside or beyond our thought–but it is beyond our knowledge because it is beyond our experience or sensible intuition. God is therefore an idea of pure reason, a pure thought.
Theology, being a rational systematic study of God whether he be idea or existence, contrasts itself with mythology, which relies on the narrative forms of allegory and parable to communicate the meaning of its religion to us. For us in the West there does not see to be any reason to deny Aristotles or Kant’s thoughts on religion the status of theology. Indeed the clouds of mythology appear to condense into the drop of one question: “Can the relation of the world of man to his gods be the same as the relation of principle to the world and thought of man?” The mythological proclamation of “Thou art that” appears to raise other types of question relating to the principle of psuché and its relation to first principles. Campbell claims:
“You yourself are that which you would know”(P.34)
This rings true insofar as it hearkens back to the oracle of Ancient Greek and the challenge thrown down to us to “Know thyself!” Whilst we cannot have knowledge of the noumenal world in which God dwells we can nevertheless, according to Kant, think about God without being able to think like him. For Kant this kind of human thinking is not conceptual because given the fact that God is not in space and time, we cannot have any intuition of something that has the characteristic of being omnipresent in the past, present, future: no intuition of what is eternally present is possible. Man may well be made in God’s image but what it is that brings us closer to God is the relation of God, the first principle to mans cognitive powers, noos, for Aristotle, or Pure Practical Reason for Kant. In the third Critique Kant maintains that:
“we are wholly unable to cognise apriori whatsoever the ends of nature in the physical order, and above all it is impossible to see that a nature could not exist apart from such ends.” (Critique of Teleological Judgement, P.112)
Kant elaborates further upon this point:
“While fear in the first instance may have been able to produce gods, that is demons, it is only reason by its moral principle which has been able to produce the conception of God.”..” (P.112)
Kant has been arguing throughout his work that the theoretical proofs for the existence of God fail, and the only satisfactory proof we have for the existence of this first principle is a moral proof. Insofar as we can never have a conception of a nexus finalis in physical nature, we cannot definitely attribute any worth to, for example, a speck of dust floating in a shaft of light, a range of mountains, a waterfall etc.. Worth begins in the realm of thought and cognitive powers which only human psuché is capable of. The Categorical Imperative , then, is a principle that urges us to treat all men as ends-in-themselves which implies not using them instrumentally without their consent for our own narcissistic purposes. Whilst it is not the first principle for Kant, it is so connected to that first principle which Kant describes as the moral author of our world, situating it squarely in the holy space of the sacred.
Kant relates this moral argument for the existence of God to religion and theology:
“The fact that in respect of all our ideas of the supersensible, reason is restricted to the conditions of its practical employment is of obvious use in connection with the idea of God. It prevents theology from losing itself in the clouds of theosophy, i.e. in transcendent conceptions that confuse reason, or from sinking into the depths of demonology, i.e. an anthropomorphic mode of representing the Supreme Being. Also it keeps Religion from falling into theurgy which is a fanatical delusion that a feeling can be communicated to us from other super-sensible beings and that we in turn can exert an influence on them, or into idolatry which is a superstitious delusion that one make oneself acceptable to the Supreme Being by other means than that of having the moral law at heart.”(P.130)
Insofar as life after death is concerned, Kant argues that this at best is a theoretical issue which cannot be resolved because we have no choice but to construe the thinking self as alive (P.132) which we interpret to mean that the idea of life after death is a practical contradiction. It is of course possible to think about someone after their death, but that has no implications for their continued existence as a person. After ones death, a corpse continues to subsist, and it may resemble the body when alive in a state of sleep, but it cannot be woken. A physical analogy might assist us to understand the role of the body in life, e.g. when a light bulb fails to function because it is permanently damaged, i.e. ceases to produce light when connected to electricity. As such it is a light bulb in name only. A light bulb’s primary function is to produce light, but when the physical conditions for this function are no longer present, the bulb is no longer a medium for the production of light. Typically in such circumstances we discard the light bulb and think no more about it. This is a useful analogy in that light is like life, which also requires functioning material if it is to express itself in its various forms, performing certain functions through the use of its powers, e.g. in thought and thinking. Imagining oneself speaking , thinking or perceiving after ones death violates the principles of life articulated by both Aristotle and Kant.
Furthermore, one of the implications of the above Kantian account of religion is that our idea of our souls(psuché) are only possible on practical grounds and because of the ideas of reason, God, the soul, and freedom. Yet it is only the latter that:
“proves its objective reality by its possible effect there. By this means it makes possible the connection of the other two ideas with nature, and the connection of all three to form a religion.” (P.149)
This is a secular vision of religion and it further suggests why the rule of law was so important for those early civilisation-builders like Solon and Pericles during the Golden Age of Greece. On Kant’s reading morality would be the primary focus for the law, and Religion only a secondary concern. This puts into perspective the trial of Socrates, the wisest man in Athens who, together with Aristotle was arguing for the importance of morality in the civilisation building process. Aristotle too, we recall was accused of heresy, and there is an argument for claiming that these three Ancient Philosophers, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, began the secularisation process that prioritised morality over religion. Kant, continued this secularisation process by producing a moral system that formed the basis for international law and human rights as well as a basis for the telos of a cosmopolitan kingdom of ends one hundred thousand years in the future. In such a cosmopolitan world, war will no longer occur, and the spare resources will be used for relieving poverty and education of the masses.
On the above view one might in one respect regret the diminishing importance of mythological religion in our modern societies, but given the sordid history of the use of religion to prosecute and kill so called heretics, perhaps the secularisation of religion was the only solution to prevent those in power from persecuting their enemies. In retrospect, now we have been exposed to the vast array of gods from different civilisations, the accusation of not believing in the one particular god a particular civilisation had chosen at a particular point in its history, the killing of people for such preudo-offences had no real justification. Kant’s secularism is however not the secularism we experience in our modern societies, where many people refuse to believe in the moral author of the Categorical Imperative, indeed refuse to believe in anything of significance. For Kant there is an important place for the realm of the sacred. This is not an invitation of the kind we find in mythology to “unite with the divine” (as Campbell put the matter, P.35):
“So, here we are in our exile. What can we do about the mysterious transcendent X? To find, as many a mystic has, that he was one with X and then be united with it on a martyr’s pyre, this was not permitted. In our religions we can only achieve a relationship to X. Our religions–and this is a very important point–seek a relationship to God, not the experience of identity with the divine. How does oe achieve a relationship to God? Well there are several ways of being related to this particular deity. One is the way of the Jewish tradition, another is the way of the Christian, and a third is the way of Islam.”
“Envelopment” as it occurs in religious contexts is an extreme response to sacred experiences and one advantage of the Kantian relation to the divine is that it occurs via understanding the self-sufficiency and independence of the moral principles associated with the categorical imperative. The religions mentioned above have, unfortunately, through their persecution of their enemies throughout their History exhausted their credibility by using their victims for their own ends—accusing them of pseudo-offences such as blasphemy and heresy. Socrates certainly sensed this when he defended himself against the charge of heresy by claiming that he was the midwife of Philosophy, one of the children of the gods. Kant almost set the record straight but he too was warned by his Emperor not to voice his opinion upon sacred matters.
Campbell virtually ignores this secular viewpoint and hails the recent arrival of Oriental religious influences such as Buddhism and Hinduism, as representing an awakening of our pre-Christian hearts (P.37), whatever this is supposed to mean. He refers to the great Greek tradition, but also to the not so great Roman tradition as well as Celtic and German mythology and fails to recognise the fundamental differences between these traditions. Can there, for example, be any greater difference between the Golden Age of Greek civilisation building in the spirit of Reason and the dark age of Roman military/engineering which chose Christianity as its religion : a religion which then built a bureaucratic Church around it, defending it by the cruellest means.
One candidate for the Transcendental X is of course the self. Campbell elaborates upon this possibility by referring to Indian writings:
“So in the beginning that was no beginning, there was nothing but the Self. And the Self at a moment that was no moment said: “I. Aham.Ego”. And as soon as it thought “I”, it experienced fear. Then it reasoned, though it was not very complicated reasoning—this was the very first attempt at reasoning after all–“Since there is nothing else in the world what do I have to be afraid of?” That eliminated the fear. Of course, no sooner was the fear eliminated than it had desire:”I wish there were another.” Well, in that state of being, a wish is as good as a fact. The Self swelled and split in half and voilá–there were two…” (p.38)
The process of splitting continued down the line of animal forms and the self named all the animal forms but soon became bored with the activity until God put the “I” to sleep and generated the female Eve. Campbell points to the resemblance between this narrative and that contained in Plato’s Symposium where a whole monstrous human being is divided into two to reduce its power, and separated, placing the two separate parts far away from each other:
“In their efforts to find each other again, they built cities and civilisations. This is really a basis for the Freudian view that all civilisation is a sublimation of disappointed sex.” (P.39)
The symposium dialogue however was about Eros not sex. Freud’s later theorising was also centred around Eros, a wider concept than sexual libido but the reference to Freud is certainly relevant. Campbell continues:
“In the Greek world a god is not a creator: rather the gods are our big brothers, and you know how it is with big brothers, you’ve got to be careful with them: but they really dont have the right to order you around. Still you’d better do what they tell you or else you’ll get hurt. This is a quite different attitude from that of the Biblical, Near Eastern Tradition, where God creates men to be his servants and He gives the orders.” (P.39)
So, in our Christian tradition, which is not the Greek tradition, we submit to God even in the most extreme circumstances such as those Job found himself in. No Greek would have accepted what Job was forced to accept. Yet both of these traditions form our heritage. The Greek demigod Prometheus embodies Greek defiance. Prometheus steals fire from the gods to give to man, and is punished by Zeus by being chained to a cliff face and tormented by an eagle, but Prometheus remains undaunted and expresses contempt for Zeus. Prometheus was free to determine his own fate and this freedom surfaced again during both the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Socrates modelled himself not on Zeus who had a problematic relation to his father but rather on Prometheus, attempting to define the idea of justice for man. Socrates did not, however, show contempt for the Athenian justice system when it sentenced him to death unjustly. Socrates, indeed, was in many respects the new kind of hero, the hero of the examined life, freeing himself from religion and unjust tyranny. Socrates, we know, regrettably published nothing and we only glimpse the contours of his life thanks to his pupil Plato who himself was no doubt influenced by the thought of Socrates, but nevertheless went off in a direction Socrates may not have agreed with. Indeed if any direction was true to the spirit of the Socratic examined life it was either that of Aristotle’s hylomorphism or Kant’s Critical Philosophy of Freedom.
Well Kant’s work certainly testified to the importance of separating the metaphysics of nature from the metaphysics of morals via the rational idea of freedom. Kant pointed out that when it comes to action one can view the self as a phenomenal object acting in an instrumental network of means and ends and the utility of the act is obviously an important aspect of this. Yet it is important to realise that this has nothing to do with our ethical evaluation of action which is an end in itself exactly because we are free to choose to do what we ought to do or not. In this process guilt plays an important role in the process of helping us to become the person we would like to be. This inner tribunal evaluating the worthiness of our action in accordance with our own conception of the person we would like to be, uses amongst other things guilt which is just a form of anxiety which in turn is a very useful emotion for bringing about what we desire for ourselves because it can also be used not to feel guilt but to feel disappointed with oneself because something good has been lost. The entire legal system is based on a judgement of being guilty indicating on the contrary that guilt is a very useful concept in either its subjective or objective form. Society relies on its citizens continually striving to improve their character. Guilt does not have to be an emotion it can be merely an internal judgement that one has not done what one ought to have done. Anxiety attenuates with maturity.
