Responding to Emily's Post on Myth as other than Explanation

This post will include various quotes from scholars concerning the nature of myth. In so doing we will find an elaboration of myth as other than explanation. Explanation only happens once we have some thing to explain. How do we arrive at such a complex and overwhelming thing such as the cosmos? We must have an idea of such a cosmos before we can begin to explain it. This is where myth comes into play. The myth gives us the picture, the idea of our cosmos and all that it entails. Theory, like explanation, rises out of an already existing idea. I can only speculate about that which presents itself in some way. Myth is the original presentation. So here are some quotes for further reflection on the nature of myth.

From Paul Ricoeur's book, The Symbolism of Evil

Ricoeur defines myth as “a traditional narration which relates to events that happened at the beginning of time and which has the purpose of providing grounds for the ritual actions of men of today and, in a general manner, establishing all the forms of action and thought by which man understands himself in his world. . . . In losing its explanatory pretensions the myth reveals its exploratory significance and its contribution to understanding, . . . its power of discovering and revealing the bond between man and what he considers sacred” (5). A further elaboration: myths are “a species of symbols, as symbols developed in the form of narrations and articulated in a time and space that cannot be co-ordinated with the time and space of history and geography according to the crucial method." (18)

Concerning the objective standpoint when it turns beyond the specifics to which it is addressed, “Anyone who wished to escape this contingency of historical encounters and stand apart from the game in the name of a non-situated ‘objectivity’ would at the most know everything, but would understand nothing. In truth, he would seek nothing, not being motivated by concern about any question” (24).

“Cosmos and Psyche are the two poles of the same ‘expressivity’; I express myself in expressing the world; I explore my own sacrality in deciphering that of the world” (13).

On the symbolic function of myth as opposed to history, a particular myth is not merely a myth, “something less than history” but has “more meaning than a true history.” “the meaning resides in the power of the myth to evoke speculation” (236). “The symbol gives rise to thought.” “The myth anticipates speculation only because it is already an interpretation, a hermeneutics of the primordial symbols . . .” (237).

Triple function of myth: “universalization of experience, as establishment of a tension between a beginning and an end, and as investigation of the relations between the primordial and the historical” (239).

“The dissolution of myth as explanation is the necessary way to the restoration of the myth as symbol” (350). 

Belden Lane writes that “myth that is understood is no longer myth. That which we analyze with thorough objectivity—turning into psychology, history, or social geography—has ceased to exercise any formative power upon us” (Landscapes of the Sacred, 24). 

From The Rehabilitation of Myth by Joseph Mali

“In his New Science Vico sought to discover the poetic logic which permeates this kind of experiential-historical knowledge, which he termed coscienza, and, by setting it over against the rational logic of the experimental-mathematical knowledge, or scienza, of the new sciences of nature, was concerned to establish upon it an equally valid, and ultimately superior, science, a truly scienza nuova, of human history. He regarded the archaic myths as the ‘true narrations’ of this history because he saw that in our (and any other) civilization the fictions of mythology illuminate the ‘real world’ by constituting or ‘prefiguring’ all its human actions and institutions: unlike natural occurrences which display law-like, repetitive regularities which are unknowable to us because they are totally alien to our form of life . . .” (3).

“The basic assumption of the Cartesians was that the world consists of facts, and that knowledge of the world rests in ideas and propositions which represent these facts” (63). That “real knowledge was gained by an immediate personal experience, not through historical collective experience” (64).

“human beings must be understood in performative rather than mechanical terms, namely as active agents who, consciously or not, are not so much obeying laws as following rules which they themselves have made. . . [culture] was not only created by the poetic fictions of the first men, but that it still consists in them” (68).

Human authority means for Vico “the ability of people to be ‘authors’ of their lives, or creators of their own ‘humanity’, by virtue  of their poetic, not rational or merely natural, capacities” (69).

. “man is first and above all an ‘author’, a being who constitutes the ‘civil world’ by authorizing its own rules” (69).

“account of human beings must be interpretive rather than mechanical science . . . to make sense of the way in which people have made sense of their world. . . . because people have always made their world as ‘authors’, and not as ‘scientists’, we must, when we seek to understand their world rationally, respond to their poetic modes of reasoning and making in adequate terms” (69).

“Vico too emphasized the ‘poetic’ rather than the ‘rational’ characteristics of man—the ability to speculate rather than calculate in thought, to express rather than designate in language, to invent rather than imitate norms and means in practical life” (82). 

Vico’s contention was “that the classical myths, however fabulous they might appear to us, must nevertheless be considered as truthful in their narration of past events, because their authors encoded in them the seminal experience gained through these events” (130).

Both ourselves and our ancestors “discover in history is not scientific law or model but only a narrative account of it, one which ‘travers’ its chaotic happenings into the coherent form of a well-ordered story of the rise, development, maturity, decline, and fall of all peoples, societies, nations, and civilizations—a fictive pattern which is not so much deduced hypothetically from scientific observations of objective natural reality as mused by poetic impressions of subjective human reality” (134-135).   

From NS par. 249

The definition of [mythos] is ‘true narration’ but it has continued to mean ‘fable’, which everybody has hitherto taken to mean ‘false narration’, while the definition of [logos] is ‘true speech’, thought it is commonly taken to mean ‘origin’ or ‘history of words’” (150).

“Vico refused most emphatically to view mythos and logos as essentially opposed to each other, and regarded the two instead as complementary; for him they constituted two different yet equivalent modes of thought by which human beings have sought to make sense of reality, the one by imaginary tales projected onto reality and the other by empirical theories derived from it” (150).

“we must trace the transformation of poetic and concrete images of reality into our rational abstract concepts, and not merely impose the latter on reality as if they were absolute and eternal” (151).

“Mythology, Vico reasoned, when taken in its original etymological sense and historical perspectives, means a primeval history with logos, or a history of primeval logos” (152).

The truth of myth pertains “to humankind’s deepest need for common meaning, order and purpose in life, and one which has been created and woven by many generations into those traditional tales which still persist in our minds and cultures” (153).

The efficacy of myth “lies in its being a non-discursive kind of knowledge” (154).

Here relate this to Burns as historian in skipping the campfire story: myth “thrived on spontaneous oral-popular modes of creativity, and ere thus conceived to be subversive to the stories told by the critical authors-which were controlled by the intellectual elite and passed on in writing” (156).

Vico: “He contended that the myths in themselves were ‘true narrations’ of the communal sensus comunis, namely tales which encoded some essential practical lessons of social life, and that they retained their original messages even when later interpreters gave them ‘improper, ugly, and obscene meanings’. Above all, the poetic sublimity of these tales remained intact and effective only as long as they expressed, and touched, raw feelings” (159).

“Plato’s failure to understand this subliminal nature of myth was symptomatic of a more basic failure: he did not undertand the essentially ‘poetic’ make-up of the human mind and of history, and did not realize that men were beings ‘who by imagining did the creating’” (159).

“What Plato and other rational critics of mythology since antiquity have failed to see is that its figures and schemata are not irrational but, rather, form an alternative mode of rationalism, which stems from , and may reorientate the mind toward, a different perception of reality, one that is based not on conscious method-logical discourse on reality by means of abstract concepts and theories, but on unconscious mytho-logical figuration of reality by means of concrete images and narrations” (161).

Myths are “collective images of reality. . . . They are ‘histories’, indeed, yet not of any specific events in the past, but rather of the shared experience gained through them” (199).

Myth as narrative truth “are not easily understood by us because they are conveyed in actions, and not in ideas; their moral messages are not spelled out in creeds, but are re-enacted in the dramatic happenings of rituals and other ceremonial occasions” (202).

“What makes mythical discourse so effective is the fact that it is not an abstract treatise on social institutions, but a concrete story which relates them to dramatic persons and actions” (203).

Historical myths “must be seen, rather, as dramatic narratives which explain the present situation of a social group in terms of a creative act which took place in its past” (208).

“The duty of ‘historical criticism’, as Vico would ultimately conclude, is not to judge tradition as false just because it offends our standards  of veracity, rationality, beauty, and so forth; rather, it must be an effort to understand and interpret its truth in and on the terms of those who wrote it, to grasp its common sense” (220).

“What made the Romans so supreme were not rational ideas and moral ideals, but rather their poetic capacity to ‘imagine’ and to ‘believe’” (256).

The following are some quotes from Rollo May concerning the importance of symbols for human meaning making.

Notes from Symbolism in Religion and Literature

Rollo May “The Significance of Symbols”

“Clinical data supports the thesis that man is uniquely the symbol-using organism, and is distinguished from the rest of nature and animal life by this fact” (20).

Symbolic behavior described as the experience of “self over, against, and in relation to, a world of objects.” Using symbols opens humans to transcending their immediate concrete situation through abstraction and living toward a possible situation (20).

“Symbols are the language of this capacity for self-consciousness, the ability to question which arises out of and is made necessary by the distinction of subject and object” (21).

Symbolic action bridges the gap “between outer existence (the world) and inner meaning; and it arose out of man’s capacity to separate inner meaning and outer existence” (22). Note the vision quest, spiritual journey, or in elaborated religion, pilgrimage, involves a separation from the buzz of the world and provides space for symbolic action to take place.

“What is important to see is that a ‘hard fact’ or a description of a ‘hard fact’ can by itself never bridge that gap; all the objective, intellectualized talk in the world with words which have become signs and have lost their symbolic power about the ‘dangers of morbid dependence on the mother,’ would not help our young lawyer patient”(22). This example comes from a session May cites involving the lawyer with the cave dream.

“The individual experiences himself as a self in terms of symbols which arise from three levels at once; those from archaic and archetypal depths within himself, symbols arising from the personal events of his psychological and biological experience, and the general symbols and values which obtain in his culture” (22).