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Essay 11 The Outward Journey
After the inward journey of our spirit the moon is the next Dantesque stopping point for the modern myth aiming for the further planets of the solar system. There is nothing earthly about this conversation where the earth is termed a paradise or an oasis in space. Man, Campbell argues, is filled with the Spirit of Exploration and preoccupied by the awe and wonder directed at the Magnitude and Order of the heavens. Campbell appears to neglect the moral journey proposed for humanity by the Kantian moral law which, it was claimed, is going to lead us into a Cosmopolitan Kingdom of Ends— a long and momentous journey into the future heading toward a telos that is very different to the journey of the mystics who appear to be attempting to reduce the light of ones light to a pinpoint of inner enlightenment. Ancient Greek Philosophy certainly would not regard the life of a mystic as falling under the heading of a good spirited flourishing life. In the light of this good spirited flourishing life we can then view with less scepticism Freuds claim that the mystic life does not meet the requirement of the reality principle or the requirements for a healthy mental life. Campbell discusses the influence of Apollo and the Nine muses, but he does not seek to unravel the mystery surrounding the oracles and their wisdom. Many Ancient Greek Philosophers embraced the most famous of their proclamations, namely
“Everything created by humans is destined for ruin and destruction”
And
“Know Thyself!”
Both of which require an understanding of many of the principles of Philosophical Psychology, Ethics, Politics, Aesthetics and Religion, as well as an understanding of the importance of the role that the freedom of choice plays in the drama of humanity.
Campbell rightly admires the vision of the earth from the earth that was beamed back to earth via the amazing technology we have developed for the communication of images. The images of the astronaut’s footprints in the dust of the moon must have put the final nail in the coffin of the myth of the moon being the:
“residence of the souls of those who have passed away and are there waiting to return for rebirth. For the moon, as we see it, dies and is resurrected.”(Page 235)
Campbell feels the presence of both Newton and Kant in this technical saga of mans explorations. The Copernican revolution, it is argued, proposed a universe in which the imagination was needed to apprehend the enormity of what could be perceived. What was happening in front of our eyes on the television screen, was the substitution of a scientific imagination for the imagination of an artist tied to a mortal coil. Indeed, it was both Newton and Kant that provided us with the philosophical foundations for this experience, by convincing us with their power of reasoning that mathematical calculations and judgements about space have a universal character and use our a priori knowledge of Space and Time. The laws of space and time are akin to the moral law which, according to Kant, is also capable of evoking feelings of awe and admiration in us. Campbell half acknowledges the importance of this by claiming:
“we ourselves are no less mysterious. In searching out its wonder, we are learning simultaneously the wonder of ourselves. That moon flight as an outward journey was inward into ourselves.”(Page 239)
Campbell then seeks to investigate the origins of our interest in artefacts and begins with Peking man (Sinanthropus), using fire for warmth, light and protection ca 400,000 years ago. This was also read mythologically to be a moment in which we displeased the Gods by receiving the goods of the fire stolen from them. Prometheus, we know was the thief and he was punished for this crime quite severely. In harnessing the power of fire, man embarked on his journey: a journey that, thanks to the use of his powers of imagination and thought, would make him the best of the animals: powers which would enable him to become almost anything he wanted to be:
“A lion has to be a lion all is life: a dog to be a dog. But a human being can be an astronaut, a troglodyte, philosopher, mariner, tiller of the soil, or sculptor. He can play and actualise in his life any one of any number of hugely differing destinies.”(Page 242)
Campbell elaborates upon this by paradoxically claiming that man’s choices will not follow either reason or common sense: rather passions and excitement will be the primary motivators of human psuché. This might have been the case insofar as pre-civilised man was concerned, but once the power of his imagination began to expand his life-horizons, and was subjected to categories, principles and laws, the older covenants made with the animal and plant world,s became less important. At this point the covenants made with his fellow man in the form of civil laws, the arts, the sciences, and Philosophy became more valued activities.
Campbell claims that each individual form of human psuché is unique and will therefore follow its own unique inner laws which will determine the form the individual’s life will take. Campbells implication is clear: these unique laws will be more important than that aspect of mans Being-in-the-world which makes him a part of a larger community. Both Plato and Aristotle, however pointed to the limitations of a life in which extreme choices are generated by an unregulated imagination and passions. What these Philosophers and their followers, e.g. Kant, emphasised, was the importance of actualising a number of psychological and mental powers that include language, understanding, judgement and reason. All these powers are necessary for the development of a large array of sciences that Aristotle categorised in terms of the theoretical, practical and productive sciences.
Campbell addresses the issue of the status of “modern science” and its differentiation into specialisations:
“Today , as we all know, such thoughts and forms are of a crumbling past and the civilisation dependent upon them in disarray and dissolution. Not only are societies no longer attuned to the courses of the planets, sociology and physics, politics and astronomy are no longer understood to be departments of a single science.”(Page 243)
There are many different kinds of science being taught in Universities and the principle of specialisation has perhaps usurped the role of the ideal of the universal element of knowledge (laws and principles). This point, however, runs contrary to the presuppositions of myth that often do not mesh with certain scientific principles. Campbell claims that myth has taught us that:
“There are no laws out there that are not right here, no gods out there that are not right here, and not only here, but within us, in our minds.” (Page 244)
The above could well be an implication of both Hylomorphic and Critical Philosophy (with certain reservations), and moreover teaches us to distinguish between kinds of laws and principles which in Philosophy occurs via the use of the categories of understanding/judgement as well as the logical principles of noncontradiction and sufficient reason.
Time, of course has been a concern for Philosophers throughout the ages. Kant claimed that Time was an a priori form of intuition that belongs to the faculty of sensibility which essentially provides the sensible content used by the faculty of understanding. Sensible items in motion in the external world for both Aristotle and Kant call for temporal measuring activity which occurs in terms of before and after (in accordance with Aristotles definition of Time). The Time of Human Psuché, on the other hand, is the Time of growth, maturation, deterioration and death. Campbell then refers to Leo Frobenius who fixates upon these more general aspects in his investigative characterisation of the human race:
“Its childhood was of the long, long distant period of the primitive hunters, fishers, root-foragers and planters. The second stage, which Frobenius termed the Monumental, commenced with the rise of the earlier agriculturally based, urban and literate civilisations, each structured to accord with an imagined cosmic order, made known by way of the movements and conditions of the planetary lights. For those lights were then supposed to be the residences of governing spirits whereas, as just remarked, we knew them to be as material as ourselves. The laws of the earth and our own minds have been extended to incorporate what formerly were the ranges and the powers of the gods, now recognised as of ourselves. Hence the whole imagined support of the Monumental Order has been withdrawn from “out there” , found centred in ourselves, and a new world-age projected, which is to be global “materalistic” (as Frobenius termed it), comparable in spirit to the spirit of old age in its disillusioned wisdom and concern for the physical body, concentrating rather on fulfilment in the present than on any distant future. The residence of the spirit now is experienced as centred not in fire, in the animal and plant worlds, or aloft among the planets and beyond, but in men, right here on earth.”(Pages 244-5)
But how, then, are we supposed to characterise our relation to this world of ours. Firstly it has been made ours after a long childhood and after we have been, as Heidegger puts the matter, “thrown into the world”. Campbell refers in the context of this discussion to a view held by Alan Watts:
“you did not come into this world at all. You came out of it in just the same way as a leaf comes out of a tree or a baby from a womb…Our world is peopling just as the apple tree apples, and just as the vine grapes.”(Page 245)
Watts, then, improves upon Heideggers answer to the aporetic questions raised by human existence and its origins. Campbell elaborates upon this position by maintaining that we humans originated from an intelligent energy system in which certain forms of life give rise to just those forms and not others. “Dust thou art and unto dust thou shallt return!”, the Church tells us on the occasions of death. When the astronauts left their footprints in the dust of the lost souls on the moon this was just one more moment in the process of the collective disillusionment of Humanity.
Aristotle referred to several different forms of psuché, plant, animal and human, all of which shared the characteristics of birth, life-activity and death. Animals have the form of plant life within, as the human forms have both animal and plant life systems within themselves. Trees have bee the form of plant life that most interests us humans and throughout history and poetry, they have been referred to sympathetically. Standing tall in the midst of a storm that tests the strength of their roots, they do not move and stand stoically unmoved. In the Old Testament it is trees that are the heroes in the Garden of Eden, relating to both the knowledge of good and evil and even life itself. The Cross (symbolising the tree of life), Campbell argues has become a powerful Christian symbol, but Campbell simultaneously believes that Christianity itself is maturing toward an end in which the Holy Spirit speaks directly to the hearts of men without any “ecclesiastical mediation”. When this finally happens, Campbell argues the Church will dissolve and we will then begin living in an age of “pentacostal spirituality”.(Page 248)
Campbell argues that this is the situation we moderns find ourselves in today, following as we do the symbolic heroes of the age, namely “The Astronauts”, who walked so carelessly in the dust of the moon.