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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.