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We are all familiar with the proposition that perspectives can differ, whether that be in terms of attitudes toward some object, or in terms of the sensory conceptualisation of an object. What is, for one thinker, a rational animal capable of discourse, is for another thinker, the worst of the animals. In the former case, we obviously can share in the Logos that belongs to divinities, and in the latter case, the divinities might at best just abandon us (Deus absconditis) or in the worst case scenario, curse mankind for the rest of his days. Many of us have lived with this curse for millennia and some in modern times believe either that God is dead or that the divine has permanently absented itself from our lives.
Kant in his Metaphysics of Morals found a place for the divine and the realm of the sacred: a place in which the good will can become the holy will by, firstly, willing that ones maxims of action become universal law,s and secondly, by treating all human and divine psuché as ends-in-themselves. Following the threads of civilisation from the different regions of the Occident and the Orient, is a complex affair and testifies to the picture Aristotle painted many millennia ago, of the “Many Meanings of Being”.
Kantian Metaphysics of Mind elaborated upon the hylomorphic metaphysics of Aristotle by providing us with a relatively modern Philosophical Psychology capable of supporting the major concerns of thinkers throughout the following centuries. Kants theory assumes the essence-specifying definition of man as a “rational animal capable of discourse” in his divisions of the major faculties of mind into three: sensibility, understanding and reason. These faculties are capable of generating a number of cognitive and aesthetic powers, one of which was, of course, the imagination, which poets and religious thinkers alike, used in their various narratives of gods and goddesses, kings and queens.
One important thread leading from the Ancient Greek Philosophers, appeared during the periods of the Renaissance and Reformation, which in turn led to the Enlightenment and the emergence of the Kantian idea of the primacy of the will of man for the Metaphysics of Morals and the Primacy of the Being of God in the Metaphysics of Nature. Aristotle we recall, spoke of the role of noos in the context of the relation of human psuché to the realm of the sacred or the holy. Kant elaborates upon this by relating the noumenal self to the realm of the sacred or the holy.
Campbell, in his work, “Occidental Mythology”, points to the differences between Occidental and Oriental Mythology, in terms of topographic location, the enigma of transcendental experience, and the introverted and extraverted relation of man to the universe. He argues, paradoxically, that it is the Occidental self that is inward looking, and the Oriental Self that has an extraverted relation to Being. This difference may have been recorded in Freud’s judgement that our Western relation to religion is essentially pathological, reflecting the presence of infantile wishes and fears.
Kants relation to religion is, however, more sound, grounded as it was on the transcendental noumenal world that lay beyond all categories of thinking. Kant believes, like Aristotle, that self-knowledge is crucial to leading the examined contemplative life, but it was equally important to maintain a Philosophical relation to God if a good-spirited flourishing life was to be possible for the human forms of psuché possessing a good/holy will.
The Greek philosophical view of religion also focussed upon the ethical actions of human psuché, not as an individual causa sui, but rather as a necessarily social animal, ,which at their best, lived in a polis and democratically followed wise laws made by wise men. The Platonic dialogue “Euthyphro” testifies to this relation between justice and the sacred via the arguments of Socrates, namely, that the Just is a more embracing category than the sacred, and must, therefore, take precedence in the lives of man, the social animal. The role of rationality in this process was obvious, given the Socratic and Aristotelian claims that the best form of life was the examined or contemplative life, which, of course, presupposed rationality in its different practical, theoretical and productive forms. Knowledge of the Form of the Good was, for both Plato and Aristotle, the most important form of knowledge: a life based on knowledge was an examined contemplative life. It was this balanced relation to their world and themseves that allowed the more philosophically inclined Greek thinkers to sit in judgement on the character of the Gods and even question, as Socrates did, the primacy of the sacred over that of a form of reflection they called Philosophy, which Socrates named, in the course of his indictmen,t as one of the Children of the Gods. It did not, of course, end well for Socrates or Aristotle, but Plato managed somehow to avoid the persecution of the agents of religion. This challenge to religious authority was partly responsible for elevating abstract universal knowledge above concrete myth, which we know was not universal, but necessarly perspectival. One could not, for example, imagine Plato or Aristotle going to war with Socrates in relation to a difference in opinion over the “Form of the Good”. Individual heros or Gods and Goddesses, were being replaced, not by other heros, gods and goddesses, but by argumentation in accordance with logical principles and categorical conceptual distinctions. Freud would certainly have viewed the Ancient Greek Philosophy of Religion in terms of a healthy non pathological extraverted relation to the divine, free of hubris, infantile narcissism and its wishes and fears.
Both Spinoza and Kant argued for a Religion within the Bounds of Reason, insisting, for example, that reference to certain kinds of supernatural events in the Bible must not be interpreted literally but rather, metaphorically. The idea, for example, of a disembodied soul dwelling in a divine Kingdom of Heaven is, on such a view, a kind of Metaphor for the continued existence of the universal psuché.
Neither Aristotle nor Kant would deny therefore that although the enigma of Beings was difficult to decipher, the masks of these Beings did in fact reveal, for example, the presence of such Beings in Thought and in the extended world of Nature. Spinoza is the Philosopher that comes to mind in the context of this discussion, maintaining as he did that God or Substance has an infinite number of attributes, only two of which, namely, thought and extension, are accessible to mortal human psuché (an individual mode of Being). Kant, in his work, “The Critique of Judgement” referred to an inscription on a statue located at the Temple of Isis which claimed that no mortal had ever lifted the veil over the face of divine beings. This phenomenal account of the beings dwelling in the realm of the sacred comes to the attention of the individual mode of mortal human psuché via the attributes of thought and extension (only two of a possible infinity of attributes).
Now whilst Spinoza conceived of his Divine Substance in terms of the immanent cause of everything that occurs in the universe, his monistic ontology was questioned by Kant who conceived of a trinity of faculties of mind (sensibility, understanding, and reason) and a dualistic metaphysics of Nature and Morals, demanding different categorical frameworks to explain/justify natural events and moral actions. Spinoza invokes the notion of the knowledge of adequate ideas in a deterministic world-system, claimig that they play an important part in achieving amour intellectualis Dei–the joyous love of God, the infinite source of self-causing power in the universe, of which we, the human form of psuché, are a finite form, striving to maintain ourselves in existence using our finite power of reason and our inadequate and adequate ideas of the causes of our conscious experiences of the world.
Freedom for Spinoza, as it is for Kant is an idea of reason which uses its power to transcend inactive emotions and passions which are always based on inadequate ideas. It is not clear exactly, to what extent Kant agrees with this monistic ontological characterisation of God given his metaphysical dualism and his insistence upon a categorical framework of its own to characterise free human moral action, which, of course, presupposes knowledge of the operative causes of phenomenal events in the universe. Both Kant and Spinoza, however, are rationalists who are sceptical of religious texts promoting unrealistic desires and hopes and depicting supernatural events for which there could be no adequate ideas of the causes.
Kants Critical Philosophy, like the Philosophy of Spinoza allows us to conceive of the eternal in terms of its transcendence and immanence both here and now but also everywhere and for all time. Spinozas God is, of course, infinite and therefore beyond the here and now, whilst simultaneously being present here and now. God is also beyond but present in the true and the false , the right and the wrong. Critical Philosophy, however, prefers to view God as the moral guarantor for the good spirited flourishing lives of those worthy souls possessing good/holy wills. We have, Kant argues, more access to this infinite holy Being via our practical reason and our wills, than our theoretical judgements relating to Gods form of existence.
Aristotle, in his work on Metaphysics, chooses to conceive of God only through the attribute of Thought, yet transcending thought via the infinite power of thnking about thinking, whilst conceiving of the human form of psuché and its power of noos, to “participate” in this “first principle” or “form of the mind”.
Campbell claims that Art engages with both immanence and transcendence and various themes important to mythological thinking. For Kant, we know that Art engages aesthetically with life, and reference is made to the “form of finality” of the Art-object which the Art Critic, Adrian Stokes claims is a good object aiming to both envelop us in its constructed work, whilst simultaneously putting truth to work by standing transcendentally unconcealed for something good in life that gives rise to an intellectual pleasure that is perhaps related to the love one has for God via ones adequate ideas. Cambell expresses this by pointing to what he believes to be the metaphysical significance of art and its capacity to take us on a journey to:
“the shores of experience beyond the categories of thought.”(Page 3)
We appear on the above accounts to be in a realm beyond knowledge , a realm of Wisdom that incorporates both knowledge and the “form of the good” in accordance with different categorical frameworks. These categorical frameworks, for Kant, play a more decisive role, and have given birth to major criticisms of consequentialist ethical theories which invoke a theoretical linear cause-effect framework for the evaluation of what is good. Stating as these theories do, that it is good consequences that constitute the goodness of an ethical action, ignores the convoluted history of the opposition to this claim, which began by Glaucon demanding of Socrates’ theory of justice, that it be both, good-in-its-consequences, and good-in-itself. Plato produced his theory of Forms in The Republic, in response to this demand which helped to form the categorical framework for ought-statements (One ought to keep promises)–as opposed to is-statements describing a state of affairs. The modern rendition of the conflict between these categorical frameworks is the claim that one cannot derive an ought conclusion from a set of is-premises, on pain of being accused of the naturalistic fallacy. “Promises ought to be kept”, on this account, becomes a kind of justificatory principle: a constitutive condition governing the action of promising
Kant would refer to the “shore of experience” Campbel points to, in terms of a “feeling of life”, which can be described as a boundless outlook onto a future of happiness. This feeling of life is also accompanied by the pleasure at the harmony of the faculties of the imagination and understanding, which arises either firstly, because of the potential for the experience to be conceptualised in the case of the experience of the beautiful, or, secondly because of the potential for the experience of the sublime to associate itself with the moral idea of a moral agent possessing a moral will.
Art-objects created in the Greek spirit of areté (doing the right thing in the right way at the right time) and aletheia (truth being put to work in the object for the telos of unconcealment) are using the symbolic structure of transcendental analogy referred to by Kant in his work “Prolegomena”:
E.G., A is to B as C is to X
“For instance, as the promotion of the welfare of children (=a) as to the love of the parents (=b), so the welfare of the human species (=c) is to that unknown in God(=x). which we call love….But the relational concept in this case is mere category, viz., the concept of cause, which has nothing to do with sensibility.” (Page 98)
Another important form of the transcendental analogy occurs in relation to Art. Kant has the followng to say in a footnote:
“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 unknownto 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….”(Page 100)
The above is obviously a more complex structure than the use of metaphor we encounter in the poets use of this linguistic instrument, for example, in the expression “Man is a wolf” where human psuché is positioned in an epistemological structure of genus and species: thereby placing human psuché in the wider category of psuché as such and animal psuché in particular, perhaps simultaneously making the Aristotleian point that man can be the worst of animals.. Transcendental analogy, on the other hand, transports us further up the scale of rationality, to man at his best, striving via the power of noos toward possessing a divine sacred/holy will. It is in this region of Being that the Kantian idea of a boundless happy outlook onto the future, comes into play. as long as the outlook belongs to a man of moral worth and dignity. Kant’s vision is that the only viable practical argument for the existence of God is as a Supreme Cause of the “Kingdom of Ends”: an end state in which men treat each other as ends-in-themselves and as a conseqence rewarded with a good-spirited flourishing life (eudaimonia).
Campbell claims in this work that in occidental mythology the final terms God and Man stand opposed to one another, as contradictions, and therefore, pose a problem for the resolution of the problem of the opposition of the two contradictories. The Old Testament Book of Job demands absolute obedience to a jealous and angry Yahweh who chooses the tribe of the Israelites to be “his” people. Greek mythology, in contrast, prizes the judgement and dignity of man to such an extent that it is even capable of judging the character of the gods of the Greek Pantheon. The rational animal capable of discourse values his own form of human psuché almost as much as the form of God which he experiences via the proclamations of the prophets and holy men, who claim to have some kind of special access to the being behind the proclamations, or aternatively some kind of special access to, or use of, noos, the divine part of the mind of human psuché. Oriental Mythology, on the other hand, views this occidental perspective of Man as a possible equal and judge, at least insofar as his own life is concerned, as heretical, and the work of the devil.
We, in the West, communed with God in the Garden of Eden until the serpent and Eve colluded to persuade Adam to go in search for the Truth by eating the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, in contravention of the divine proclamation forbidding the act in question. The Serpent, Campbell claims, in Chapter One of hos work “Occidental Mythology” (New York, Viking Press, 2001, Page 9), was a divinity in the Levant for at least 7000 years before the book of Genesis. The Serpent symbolises death and rebirth and was a Lord of the Waters of the Earth whose activities are both constituted and regulated by the Moon. The serpent is, popularly speaking for modern men, a primitive form of life symbolising danger and the ruin of ones hopes. Previously, of course, the serpent was both a phallic symbol and a symbol for female genitalia, and we ought to recall in the context of this discussion, what whilst Buddha was sitting at the immovable spot beneath the tree of Enlightenment, he was approached in a threatening manner by Kama- Mara the creator of the world we think we know, and symbol of the desire for life and the fear of death, and it was Mother Earth who came to the rescue with the proclamation. “I bear you witness!”. This event was followed by Buddhas Enlightenment, whereupon a serpent enveloped the Enlightened one as a protective measure.
This is the Serpent the Old Testament Yahweh cursed upon learning of its role in the defiance of the divine proclamation. The female Eve, too, was cursed and the first couple were expelled from Eden and the promise of divine immortality was withdrawn, along with the company of God, who, at this point was well on his way to becoming a Deus Absconditis. The scene of the crime was the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and this tree became the centre of a plot very different to that of Buddhas Tree of Enlightenment. This experience of Enlightenment for Buddha was a transcendental experience, transcending amongst other things the illusions of the world we think we know, which may well present as knowledge of the world and knowledge of human psuché.
Greek Mythology, however, had they imagined a Garden of Eden, would not have placed the first couple in such a state of subservience to the divinity of the Garden, and certainly would not have condemned the serpent and Eve for searching for the truth and placing the divine proclamation in brackets, whilst they satisfied their dpistemological curiosities. Campbell refers, in the context of this discussion to icons from the Near East, e.g. “The Garden of Immortality”, in which all the human figures are female (two of which are related to the underworld dvinity Gula-Bau, and one of which was a mortal woman grasping a branch of fruit:
“Thus we perceive that in this early mythic system of the nuclear Near East—in contrast to the latter, strictly patriarchical system of the Bible—divinity could be represented as well under feminine as under masculine form, the qualifying form itself being merely the mask of an ultimately unqualified principle, beyond, yet inhabiting all names and forms. Nor is there any sign of divine wrath or danger to be found in these seals. There is no theme of guilt connected wit the Garden.” (Page 13)
Campbell refers also to an inversion of sense in the legacy of Greek Mythology described by Jane Ellen Harrison in relation to the field-festivals and mystery cults. An earth goddess in various forms( e.g. the Erinyes?) reigned over the living and the dead:
“Her consort was typically a serpent form; and her rites were not characterised by the blithe spirit of manly athletic games, humanistic art, social enjoyment, feasting and theatre that the modern mind associates with Classical Greece, but were in spirit dark and full of dread. The offerings were not of cattle, gracefully garlanded, but of pigs and human beings, directed downward, not upward to the light: and rendered not in polished marble temples, radiant at the hour of rosy-fingered dawn, but in twilight groves and fields, over trenches through which the fresh blood poured into the bottomless abyss: “The beings worshipped”, Miss Harrison wrote, “were not rational human law abiding gods, but vague irrational, mainly malevolent spirit-things, ghosts and bogeys, and the like, not yet formulated and enclosed into god-head.” (Pages 17-18)
Campbell elaborates upon this theme by claiming that the spirit of the above sacrificial rituals was not that of giving in order to receive, but rather, of the giving of something in the hope that something unwanted will depart. Campbell also refers to the multifarious forms of the divinities by commenting on the icon “Zeus Meilichios”, expressing his amazement, given that this form originally belonged to a local daemon who was the son/husband of the Mother Earth Spirit(s). Such cults of fertility and sacrifice continued and became well documented by Sir James G Frazers work “The Golden Bough”. Frazer describes a sacred grove in which an ominous Priest-King roams with sword in hand ready to murder, perhaps setting the tone for Royal rule for centuries to come. In one Pre-Hellenic ritual scene from Epirus there is a sacred grove in which a maiden priestess without clothing brings swarms of snakes reputedly descended from the Python of Delphi, their food. How the snakes behave portends the spirit of the coming year, whether it will be fruitful and healthy, or riddled with disease and starvation. At the centre of this Greek idyll featuring a garden at peace, were women and serpents living harmoniously together. This idyll was disrupted by the nomadic Aryan cattle herders/warriors from the North and the Semitic sheep/goat herders/warriors from the South. These were people for whom “honour” was associated with prowess in battle and the conquest of desired territories.
Zeus, in fact, was a warrior God of this kind and his presence rapidly overshadowed that of the religiously inclined goddesses. Women, who were the givers and supporters of life were usurped by these new warrior-heros from the North ad South with their furious fires and swords. In the Old Testament this shift in the form of the divinity was characterised by Yahwehs slaying of the sea-serpet, Leviathan. The Greek equivalent of this symbol was the victory of Zeus over the younger child of Gaia, Typhon.
The Serpent symbol, we know, retained its hold over the Oriental Vedic Gods, thereby questioning the spirit of the warrior-hero which became the enduring symol of all occidental mythology: The Greeks, Romans, Germans and Celts. The slaying of monster serpents of the earth, celebrated the superiority of the Gods of the Heavens over the Goddesses of the Earth which were, over time, demoted to local daemons (Page 24)
The Garden of Eden Myth is clearly not as ancient as the monster/serpent myth, and is perhaps interpreted too anthropomorphically. The serpent that could talk was certainly a divinity, as must have been both the characters of Adam and Eve, even if here too Adam was the superior being, giving up a rib for the creation of Eve. Both of these characters, living as they did in the Garden, had access to the Tree of Immortality. The plot of Eve tempting Adam with earthly desires and subsequent exile from Paradise along with the serpent did not set out to praise the character of man, as might an Aristotleian-Kantian reinterpretation of these events. The Philosophical perspective would not focus upon the sin or flaw of mankind, but rather upon the act of will by both Adam and Eve to freely acquire knowledge from this mysterious Tree.
The Tale of the Old Testament is, of course, designed to warn all of mankind of the possible ruin and destruction that might follow from mans hubris, from turning ones back on ones God, but if, it is the case, as both Aristotle and Kant claim, that human psuché can only experience God via noos, the divine part of their minds, then the human psuché also becomes a causa sui, a cause of its own potential for Being rational and approaching the divine form of Being. For these Philosophers, the Garden of Eden myth becomes a celebration of the moment man freely chose the human form of life.