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Campbell argues that a nation is in need of :
“….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.
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