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Mythology in many of its different forms may well have succumbed this illusion which involves the projection or imagination of supernatural form of life occurring after death. Mythology does not acknowledge the Kantian trinity of faculties which includes the categories of understanding/judgement and the ideas of reason, preferring instead to locate its “principles” in narratives produced by and for the imagination, simultaneously mobilising a repertoire of associated emotions. Dialectical reasoning is part of the constitution of such narratives in which we encounter heroes and villains, gods and devils in transactional relations to each other.
Joseph Campbell in his work embraces Kants Transcendental Analogy, claiming that this too is a product of imagination and can be used to embody aesthetic ideas related to God and his love for Humanity. Campbell also insists that Gods, monsters and devils are not objective external presences but are rather internal phantasms projected onto the external world. Considerable pathological “energy” lies behind such projections which may well be categorised by some psychologists as “psychotic”. Campbell proposes that Gods, monsters and devils are both out there in the external world and are also within us in his dialectical approach to mythological problems.
Campbell speaks of the hero’s journey which appears to be explorative, venturing out into an unfriendly hostile environment, and challenged by a number of lethal threats. Ricoeur speaks in this context of “imaginative variations”, and this may be true in those cases the moral of the mythological tales relates to the nature of the world and the nature of man. Courage for the Ancient Greek Mythologies was a manifestation of one of the virtues, and Achilles was perhaps the archetypal hero embodying this moral quality. Campbell in his account of heroes, however, fails to acknowledge another type of hero that emerged during era of Ancient Greece, namely the intellectual hero who devotes and even sacrifices their life to accomplish a mission, e.g. Socrates who was put to death for attempting to introduce foreign Gods into Athens, i.e. Philosophy (which Socrates argued was one of the children of the Gods). In accomplishing his mission Socrates manifested in his life the embodiment of both intellectual and moral virtues. He was regarded as the wisest man in Athens because he knew what he did not know. He was a different type of hero to Achilles who excelled in Spirit but not in Reason and Understanding.
Kant in his complex account of the powers of man referred to 4 functions of judgement and 12 types of judgement and these contributed to our categorical understanding of external and internal phenomena. These together with the principles of reasoning governing the ideas of God, the soul, and the duration of the world and its complete conditions, enabled logical thinking to replace the kind of dialectical reasoning we find in mythology about human psuché and its Being-in-the-World. Mythological accounts for Kant, would be fundamentally incomplete because they do not seem to take account of the true origins of concepts and ideas. What we find in Critical Philosophy, then is a principle guided account:
“The solution of this question is as follows. Pure Reason does not, in its ideas, point to particular objects that lie beyond the field of experience, but only requires completeness of the use of understanding in the complex of experience. But this completeness can be a completeness of principles only, not of intuitions and of objects. In order, however, to represent the ideas, reason conceives them after the fashion of the cognition of an object. The cognition, as far as these rules are concerned, are completely determined; but the object is only an idea invented for the purpose of bringing the cognition of understanding as close as possible to the completeness indicated by the idea.” Page 73
Principles (arché) are also central to the Aristotelian Hylomorphic account as presented in Aristotle’s work “Metaphysics” in which “first principles” are presented as important conditions for operation of Reason. Practical Reason is also intimately related to the categorical use of the understanding based upon the practical idea of freedom which is assumed in the formulations of the categorical imperative. Practical Reason as distinct from Theoretical Reason differentiates itself significantly in that it relates to the “noumenal self” and its first principle of freedom (the disposition to cause oneself to do something) which in turn relates to the Aristotelian “Form of The Good”: a form that was both good-in-itself ad good-in-its-consequences. The categorical imperative, in other words, rests upon this pure noumenal self as an absolute subject. The understanding can know nothing about the noumenal world because it is:
“the indication of the object of internal sense.” (Page 75)
The understanding functions via concepts which predicate something of a subject, but knowledge of an absolute subject is, in a sense empty of cognitive content. This is one of the critical arguments against the postulation of the immortal soul. Indeed, the proposition:’
“All men are mortal”
Must, on this reasoning be, a synthetic apriori truth. Men insofar as they are guided by practical reasoning are guided by imperatives containing the term “ought”, e.g.
“Promises ought to be kept.”
Ought statements have a different logical form to is-statements, which are made on the condition of reference to events that have already occurred, e.g. The air has expanded in the heat. Ought statements can occur in practical syllogisms that use the principle of noncontradiction to arrive at conclusions which follow from the preceding premises. The conclusion recommends a particular action that has been previously designated: an action that rests on a synthetic apriori principle such as “Promises ought to be kept”. This in turn rests upon a first principle that freedom is a self-causing form of agency engaging with the world.
This does not, Kant argues, preclude providing a perspicuous representation of the activities of the phenomenal self, provided via concepts of the understanding which do not rest on reference to an absolute noumenal subject about which, nothing can be said (conceptually). Both kinds of justifications using principles of freedom (self-causation) and causation, then, are permissible and accord both with the principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason. The Prolegomena presents the complex relation between the phenomenal and noumenal accounts in the following way:
“We have in us a faculty which not only stands in connection with its subjective determining grounds that are the natural causes of its actions and is so far the faculty of a being that itself belongs to appearances, but is also related to objective grounds that are only ideas so far as they can determine this faculty; this connection is expressed by ought . This faculty is called Reason, and, so far as we consider a being (man) entirely according to this objectively determinable reason, he cannot be considered a being of sense; but rather this property is that of a thing in itself, and we cannot comprehend the possibility of this property—I mean how the ought (which may never yet have taken place) should determine its activity and could become the cause of actions whose effect is an appearance in the sensible world….Now I may say without contradiction that all the actions of rational beings, so far as they are appearances (encountered in some experience), are subject to the necessity of nature; but the same actions, as regards merely the rational subject and its faculty of acting according to mere reason, are free. For what is required for the necessity of nature? Nothing more than the determinability of every event in the world of sense according to constant laws, i.e. a reference to cause in the appearance; in this process the thing in itself at its foundation and its causality remain unknown.”(Pages 85-6)
This would be the Kantian Justification for the claim that God is to be found both within the mind and without in the external world. Monsters and devils may on this account be found also both within and without, but the final explanation for their being may be different. Paul Ricoeurs discussion of the symbolism of Evil is informative in this context, because it appears to focus on the ultimate evil within the human psuché: an evil that must be confessed if it is not to destroy its owner. If, for example, I have murdered someone I may have become the monster or devil of mythological narratives. Christianity we know, postulated that men’s souls were flawed and prone to great evil and this state hinders his search for the love of God.
The Garden of Eden Myth presents us with a picture of man as a being that follows his desires blindly wherever they may lead and without considering his relation to God who alone knows the scope and limits of knowledge and life. Humankind was exiled from the Garden because man failed both to know and to love God above all else. Our exile has, however, it might be argued, not been completely fruitless, building as we have civilisations and institutions devoted to the Good such as the University, the Church, and the United Nations which we believe may help provide us with the good spirited flourishing life (eudaimonia). Freud points out that we are nevertheless discontent with our lives. Kant might have disputed this on the grounds that his “hidden plan” of a Kingdon of Ends coming in one hundred thousand years has not had time to evolve sufficiently.
Hannah Arendt called the 20th century “This terrible century”, and she was not alone in this judgement considering the events of two world wars, the dropping of two atomic bombs on civilian populations, and a cold war and its continuing consequences. Kant would not have been unduly concerned about the events of one century when the plan he refers to appears to be operating on a more cosmic time plan. Such is the philosophical account of man’s destiny which sometimes appears to correlate with the content and message of mythological narratives and sometimes not. Insisting, however, as Myth does that the Categories of the Understanding/Judgement and the Principles and ideas of Reason play no role in our future Being-in-the-world would be questioned by both Aristotle and Kant. On these kinds of Philosophical accounts, the roles of the transcendental imagination and associated emotions alone are not sufficient to provide the explanations and justifications we search for in the realms of theoretical and practical reason. Modern tendencies to deify science and reject Aristotelian and Kantian Metaphysics are not helpful Cultural tendencies given the complexity of our civilisations and the human powers required to build and sustain them.
Kant points to the importance of Transcendental Analogy in the process of increasing our awareness of ourselves and our relation to the “realm of the sacred”. Kant insists that analogy at issue is not that between two things but rather that between two relations, i.e. a is to b as c is to X:
“The promotion of the welfare of children (=a) is to the love of parents(=b), so the welfare of the human species (=c) is t that unknown in God (=X) which we call love.” Page 98)
The role of the family and the importance of the love of parents for their children are obviously things that are both good-in-themselves and good-in-their-consequences. Freud spent much of the time with his patients discussing family relations and clearly saw the terrible consequences when parental love was absence or was substituted with parental abuse of their children. Freuds focus was clearly more “practical” than his theoretical colleagues who, in 1870, implemented the divorce between psychological and philosophical accounts of human psuché.
Kant produced another example of a Transcendental Analogy in a footnote on page 100:
“I may say that the causality of the Supreme Cause holds the same place with regard to the world that human reason does with regard to its works of art. Here the Nature of the Supreme Cause itself remains unknown to me; I only compare its effects (the order of the world), which I know,, and their conformity to reason to the effects of human reason, which I also know; and hence I term the former reason, without attributing to it on that account what I understand in man by this term, or attaching to it anything else known to me as its property.”(Page 100)
This is a significant reference to the role of the Work of Art in the conversion of civilisations into Cultures. Mythology has certainly played its role in the building of civilisations but perhaps it alone does not suffice to form Cultures which require a manifold of concentrated social forces, e.g. Religion within the bounds of Reason, Laws and legal institutions formed by great souled men (Phronima), Philosophy, Art, Universities and educational systems that prize epistemé and arché as goods-in-themselves. Aristotle’s Phronima interpret arché dike, and episteme in terms of the principles of the Golden Mean, noncontradiction and sufficient reason. Kantian Philosophy and its hidden Cosmopolitan Plan proposes the creation of International Organisations built by great souled men leading eventually to moral/legal Kingdom of Ends. The Kantian view of the Beautiful and the Sublime are, of course, also matters of importance to Mythology.
Art, for Kant, is classified as a technical practical activity (given the requirement for the skills within the various mediums) that relates to moral-practical activity because it is as Kant claims a “symbol of morality”. Aesthetic pleasure, Kant argues, is related to the feeling of pleasure that supervenes because of the harmony of the faculties of the understanding and the imagination (which strictly speaking is a power of the faculty of sensibility). This experience, Kant argues is not cognitive, but we nevertheless speak with a universal voice when we judge something to be beautiful (judgement of taste). Insofar as an aesthetic object is capable of producing this special feeling of pleasure at the harmony of the faculties, we attribute to the experience a “form” which in the case of the sublime can even emerge when objects are “formless”, e.g. terrible storms, the raging sea, powerful waterfalls, The feeling of the power of nature, Kant argues “quickens” in us a psychological movement to a feeling of pleasure at the thought of our own freedom and moral power, which is also something that inspires the experience of awe and wonder in us. This may be the cultural “power” par excellence.