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The inscription on Kant’s gravestone reads: “Two things fill the mind with awe and wonder, the starry heavens above and the moral law within”. Mythology shares Kants cosmological concerns but perhaps not his moral concerns. The cosmos, for Ancient Mythology:
“is normally represented as repeating itself world without end.”
The four fundamental basic elements of water, earth, air and fire will, Myhtology contends, all take turns in the termination of a period of the cosmos/world. According to the Aztecs we are currently waiting for fire to consume the universe. There is nothing moral or tragic in such rounds of ruin and destruction unless of course we imagine the destruction of all forms of life every time a period comes to its end. In this cyclical view of the cosmos the first phase is constituted by the formlessness of chaos which is transfigured into various forms, including the forms of space and various material bodies such as the planets, moons and stars. Life emerges in the next stage of transfiguration which includes animals in both male and female form. One way of characterising this evolution of forms from the state of chaos is to claim that the One is transformed into the many. Various types of myth refer to the forces operating in this transformation of chaos into Being, and Aristotle we know delves deep into the metaphysics of this state of affairs by claiming that “Being has many meanings”. But, Campbell claims:
“Herein lies the basic paradox of myth: the One breaks into the many, destiny “happens” but at the same time is “brought about”. From the perspective of the source, the world is a majestic harmony of forms pouring into being, exploding and dissolving. But what the swiftly passing creatures experience is a terrible cacophony of battle cries and pain. The myths do not deny this agony (the crucifixion); they reveal within, behind and around it essntial peace (the heavenly rose) Pages 246-247)
A prevalent theme recurs, namely, The mother universe as a common reference point in both Oriental and Occidental Myth:
“She is the personification of the primal elements named in the second book of Genesis, where we read that “the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters”. In the Hindu myth she is the female figure through whom the Self begot all creatures. More abstractly understood, she is the world bounding frame:space, time, and causality. “( Page 255)
Mother Universe must obviously be conceptually ,a virgin and this is symbolised in Christian Religion by the Virgin Mary, mother of God, who is the symbol of this female spiritual creator. Campbell, in a section entitled “The Function of Myth, Cult, and Meditation” claims the following:
“In his life-form the individual is necessarily only a fraction and distortion of the total image of man. He is limited either as male or as female: at any given period of his life he is again limited as child, youth, mature adult, or ancient; furthermore in his life role he is necessarily specialised as craftsman, tradesman, servant, thief, priest, leader, wife, nun or habit: he cannot be all. Hence the totality–the fullness of man–is not in the separate member, but in the bodyof society as a whole: the individual can only be an organ. From his group he has derived his techniques of life, the language in which he thinks, the ideas on which he thrives; through the past of that society descended the genes that built his body.If he presumes to cut himself off, either in deed or in thought or feeling, he only breaks connection with the source of his existence.” (Page 330)
Perusing our modern world Campbell claims:
“There is no hiding place for the gods…; there is no such scoiety any more as the gods once supported. The social unit is not a carrier of religious content, but an economic-political organisation…..And within the progressive societies themselves, every last vestige of the ancient human heritage of ritual, morality and art is in full decay.”(Page 334)
Campbell elaborates upon these points by claiming that the focus of life has shifted from the society to the individual. This shift, he argues, is not in accordance with the oracular proclamation to “know thyself!” if we are to avoid ruin and destruction, but rather involves a rejection of religious belief and myth as subjective falsehoods. What was once transcendental truth, has now become, in the eyes of many moderns, palpable lie or illusion. Furthermore the realm of the sacred has been divested of its meaning in favour of a world view expressed in terms of a totality of facts. Aristotle, we know objected to such a world view by claiming that we do not want just to know what something is, but we also desire to know why it is as it is. Campbell expresses this poetically:
“where light was, there now is darkness” (Page 334)
This in turn helps to define the quest of the hero which is:
“To bring light again to the lost Atlantis of the co-ordinated soul” (Page 334)
The human aporetic problem throughout the ages has been essentially the same: to bring the psuché with its long period of childhood and dependency upon others to a state of maturity in which the individual is independently self-sufficient. This is not a simple task given the conditions of contemporary life, they:
“are what have rendered the ancient formulae ineffective, misleading, and even pernicious.The community today is the planet not the bounded nation, hence the patterns of projected aggression which formerly served to coordinate the in-group can now only break it into factions. The national idea with the flag as totem, is today an aggrandizer of the nursery ego, not the annihilator of an infantile situation. Its parody rituals of the parade-ground, serve the ends of Holdfast, the tyrant dragon, not the God in whom self-interest is annihilated. These words were written in 1949 or before and contain much oracular content.”
One of the Philosophical questions preoccupying the discipline of Philosophy since Kant formulated it, is “What can we hope for?” and it certainly appears that we moderns have no convincing answer to that question unless it is a wish to return to a previous status quo that we appear to some to have outgrown. Kant’s Elightened answer to this question lingers on in the Philosophical waiting room, namely, a Cosmopolitan Kingdom of Ends in which people treat each other maturely as ends-in-themselves in a globalised cosmopolitan world. This vision, it ought to be emphasised lies , according to Kant, one hundred thousand years in the future. It would therefore be premature some 250 years after the proclamation of this vision to definitely determine whether we are progressing toward the end of this hidden plan for psuché, or alternatively, regressing backward to a darker fate. Given the fact that Campbell has in his works appealed to the ideas of Kant it is not entirely clear that he subscribes to the Kantian proclamation of a hidden plan, but he does refer quite often to Freud who called himself a Kantian Psychologist.
Many modern and contemporary Philosophers paint a darker picture of our future, claiming in answer to Kants question that we dare not hope for too much. Hannah Arendt has contributed significantly to this discussion by charting some of the mechanisms that have divided us into warring factions and have also contributed to the emergence of tyranny and totalitarianism which in fact was a fear of the ancient Greeks who saw clearly and distinctly the consequences of striving for both unnecessary and unlawful desires. On her account, evil is banal and merely the result of a failure to think in the way we once were capable of thinking. Her method was both Historical and Philosophical. Freud, also contributed significantly to this discussio in his work “Civilisation and its Discontents”, published in 1929. In his later works we know he condemned Religion on the grounds of its unnecessary desires which assisted in maintaining humanity in a childish state of dependence upn an idea of the divine which may be a chldhood fantasy. Following these authors we have in earlier works designated our modern era as “The Age of Discontentment”, constituted as it is of an array of substitute satisfactions and distractions that have no holistic telos.
Campbell paints a dark picture of our modern times:
“The universal triumph of the secular state, has thrown all religious organisations into such a definitely secondary , and finally ineffectual position, that religious pantomime is hardly more today than a sanctimonious exercise for Sunday Morning, whereas business ethics and patriotism stand for the remainder of the week….And this is not a work that consciousness itself can achieve…The whole thing is being worked out on another level through which is bound to be a very long and frightening process, not only in the depths of every living pscyhe in the modern world but also on those titanic battlefields into which the whole planet has lately been converted.” Page 335)
Campbell also points out that in the course of the secularisation and globalisation processes, the symbol has lost its significance for us moderns. He notes that the causal cosmic laws have, during the course of the above processes, been transformed from an expression of a principle governing particular kinds of phenomena, to a mechanical connection of two events with one another. In the course of this reduction of the symbolic value of the world, e.g. the heavens, animals, plants etc, we are now confronted with the mystery of human psuché which needs to be reconceived in the new emerging framework of mechanical terms. Is the individual hero such a conception?
The individual as a child is essentially narcissistic and resistant to the actualisation processes tempered by the reality principle. This self-actualisation process is part of the maturational cycle which is attempting, in Campbell’s words to convert the “I” into a “thou” in accordance with the mythical proclamation, “Thou art that!” It is this transcendental proclamation that suggests we many are part of the “One.
We have maintained that there is a difficulty in interpreting the term psuche in philosophical discourse which perhaps resulted in not converting the “I” to a thou”, but rather dissolving the “I” into a network of causal processes in which the “I” disappears into a bundle of perceptions, memories, thoughts etc. The Greek mythological figure of Psyche, the goddess, and her relation to eros, who both Socrates and Plato argued, was not a God, is a narrative tale about human Psuché. In this tale, eros is always active and doing something while psyche is preoccupied with just being a woman. In our mother society Campbell argues that the institution of marriage has actually been transformed by the troubadour tradition of the 12th century. Love between two lovers whose eyes meet and whose herts race, becomes, in this tradition a psychological issue rather than , as it was during these times, a family issue, where the family would decide whom one marries. Thus began one of the major transformations of the concept of human psuché: a transformation which moved away from the Aristotelian essence specifying characterisation, namely, “man is a social animal” and moved toward a focus on the individual egocentric “I” who becomes more important than the family and village, even to the extent of ignoring the marital status of those opposite sex partners one finds attractive.
The French concept of Amor” characterises this condition very well. Rousseau, working in the Romantic tradition, invents an ideal pupil to raise and educate in this Romantic tradition. Emile, the pupil is not permitted to read the Bible but is encouraged to read works such as Robinson Crusoe–a man marooned on a desert island and forced to provide himself with the necessities of life for survival in a state of nature. Rousseau could be seen to be a figure resembling that of Diogenes, sensing as he does in the dark recesses of European society a discontentment which he both describes and explains brilliantly.
Rousseau was both a Counter- Enlightenment figure who also claimed :
“Man is born free but everwhere in chains.”
in the spirit of both romanticism and naturalism. Yet we ought also to recall that Rousseau dismissed many Aristotelian ideas and given the fact that Kant was elaborating upon hylomorphic ideas, he would have dismissed many of Kant’s rationalistic premises. Kant’s work “The Conjectural Beginnings of Human History” suggested in hylomorphic spirit that it is the business of Reason to Regulate the Passions especially when they tend to excess and violate the Aristotelian principle of the Golden Mean. For Kant, the concept of the “noble savage”was a naive populistic idea glorifying the pre-civilisational condition of a state of nature which restricted the repertoire of needs and wants that civilised beings desire.
For Rousseau,the inequalities produced in the course of mans social strivings for wealth and power, results in a disposition Rousseau names “amour-propre”, a form of social relation connected to the dispositions of pride, vanity, conceit, and egocentrism. This so called “civilised” form of amour, Rousseau contrasts with the natural form of self-love we encounter in Robinson Crusoe whose primary need is to make himself as comfortable as possible in a state of nature. This kind of solipsistic naturalism, where the individual is splendidly isolated, was to reverberate down the centuries all the way to the early work of Wittgenstein (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus) Wittgenstein, in his later work,(Philosophical Investigations) recognised in his early work a commitment to what he himself called logical solipsism which could not be defended if one was to focus on the social activities of man embedded in social forms of life playing many “language-games” as part of a demonstration of a master of language.”