Introduction
Can myth be related to reason, let alone occupy such a central place within reason, the core of reason itself, in a way that prevents us from separating the act of thinking from the mythical dimension of thought? And are we allowed to address the dialectic of myth, which was rumored to contradict mythological thought, and surfaced to liberate humanity from the shackles of their own myths?
In this paper, I will explore the nature of mythology and provide insights that may help us answer these questions. To do this, we must first examine the meaning of myth within the context of the humanities, as our common understanding might be inaccurate. Our examination of myth in this paper will focus specifically on its cognitive and philosophical meanings, rather than the more widely circulated popular conceptions.
A Definition of Mythology:
The common consensus is that myths are nothing more than legendary tales. This perception likely arises from the fact that mythology often expresses itself through fictional imagery, which can make it seem disconnected from the tangible reality we know and experience. But is that truly what myths are all about? As in, is this the message it seeks to portray, but simply put in other words, holding a different meaning? Does it have to play its role in ‘describing’ reality to us in its physical, tangible form, just as natural science plays a natural phenomenon in experimental laboratories, only for us to judge it from the same epistemological perspective?
For example, the Philosophical Dictionary takes a different stance on mythology than the common view. While most dismiss myths as mere legends and fictional tales of superstition, the dictionary argues that they are fundamentally misunderstood. It describes myths as a “comprehensive, broader conception of the world and of man’s place in nature,” not simply fanciful stories. (Philosophical Dictionary, under ‘Mythology’) This definition ties in with Northrop Frye’s view on the subject, who argues that it is myth that expresses social reality, not ideology, which is a common misconception, for it is myth that establishes our perception of the world and the reality in which we live, and thus shapes our social and historical reality more than ideology, which in turn— even if it fulfills this same function— cannot omit the influence of myth in doing so.
The Arabic word for myth or legend is usṭūra (أسطورة). Its root comes from saṭṭar (سطّر), meaning “to write.” Interestingly, usṭūra is a polysemic word, meaning it carries a range of meanings. While it can refer to myths or legends, it has also developed a negative connotation. In this negative sense, usṭūra describes a jumbled collection of untrue stories or information. This negative view is seen in the Quran, where it’s attributed to the polytheists. They used the word to dismiss the Quran as mere myths: “It is just ancient fables (asāṭīr, plural of usṭūra), which he has had written down: they are dictated to him morning and evening.” This, of course, was a blatant attempt to discredit its divine origin. However, the word’s origin reveals a more positive meaning. It could also signify a row of things, or even writing and authorship. This positive connotation is present in the Quran itself: “And every small and great thing is inscribed (mustaṭir).” This refers to the Preserved Tablet. Writing was uncommon in Bedouin culture, due to their nomadic lifestyle rather than settled, urban living. Unlike spontaneous oral speech, writing is associated with a more “matrix” way of thinking, implying a focus on logic and reason. This association with logical thought is, ironically, what connects writing to myths, as we will explore further.
However, the word ‘myth’ entered the modern field of human knowledge from its ancient Greek roots. In its original form (‘mythos’), the word simply meant “the plot” or a poetic “story.” This focus on narrative is reflected in how the Greeks typically expressed their mythology: through epic poems and grand narratives like Gilgamesh (the ancient Mesopotamian epic), Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and Homer’s Iliad.
These myths deal with epistemological, religious, historical, social and other issues, as they are at their core a “Symbolic System” that indicates man’s perception of the world and existence, but the imbalance in the concept of the cognitive system in the modern era led to obliterating any “truth” concerning mythology, which created the impression that it is devoid of any “real” meaning, following the tyranny and dominance of material facts, and the accompanying excessive enthusiasm for the empirical method, especially among materialist thinkers in the eighteenth century. And thus, these myths were listed under the umbrella of old fictional tales and legends that are intended to entertain, and Firas Al-Sawah confirms this by saying “The crystallization of scientific methods at the beginning of modern times” led to “complete contempt for the myth, and its relegation to the rank of an entertaining tale because of its metaphysical Nasser that contradicts sound scientific thinking.” (Mughāmarat al-ʻaql al-ūlá, P.11).
This contemporary epistemological model measures “truth” at a different standard than how it is measured in myth; it creates a jumbled confusion between meaning and reality; since the latter is related to conformity, and this includes the occurrence of things “really” happening, while meaning is linked to the significance of something, and Karen Armstrong confirms this by saying: “Since the eighteenth century, we have developed a scientific view of history; we are concerned above all with what actually happened. But in the pre-modern world, when people wrote about the past, they were more concerned with what an event had meant.” (A Short History of Myth. P.6)
The positivist perception of knowledge had a big contribution in creating this confusion; science was no longer a channel of knowledge among several others, but on the contrary, it has swept all other knowledge forms under its umbrella, and imposed its cognitive pattern on all angles from which we can look at things, and many thought that it had replaced all other forms of knowledge, because it is the pinnacle of what humanity has reached. Auguste Comte, the pioneer of the positivism school, expressed that position in his divisions about the history of knowledge; he saw the history of human knowledge as a sequence between stages, every stage that made a break from what came after, and the legendary pattern promised to be the origin of human knowledge, and thus belonged to the space of metaphysics rather than science, and in his view, it was a phase that modern man had passed after advancing knowledge and access in the age of science. These were the types of theses that established the ideas of mythological thought and scientific thought being opposites, and that mythological thought belongs to the immaturity of humankind; causing it to be viewed with some sort of contempt, as if it were nothing but useless babbling to entertain children.
But was the school of contemporary thought satisfied with this traditional view of mythology?
Mythology and The Establishment of Philosophical Thought:
Some theses that attributed the formation of philosophical thoughts to mythological thought, and therefore talking about myth outside the circle of modern science lacks accuracy according to these theses, and in order to understand their premises, I find it important to stand on the arguments of these theses, which are based on the post-history of knowledge, as they searched for the relationship of myth to knowledge at the beginning of philosophy, considering that myth expresses the human cognitive heritage since ancient times.
The idea that Greek philosophy manifested out of nowhere was widespread, and it was not preceded by any philosophical proposal that the Greeks could have inherited that would contribute to the emergence of the history of philosophy. Historians who adopted this idea called this philosophical start the “Greek Miracle” and although this view claims that it celebrates rational philosophical thought, albeit at the expense of marginalizing what was contributed by the rest of the great civilizations that preceded the Greeks by centuries, the paradox here comes from the belief that this is a historical “miracle”, and that the results manifested into existence without any preliminaries! As expected, this opinion faced great criticism, because civilization does not arise from nothingness in history, it must be preceded by previous introductions, and the fact that Greek civilization created a new mode of thinking (what is recognized as a philosophical discourse based on rational logical proof) and differentiated between the Logos and the Mythos (that is, between reason/logic and myth.) Historical reading and such of the same cognitive pattern indicate that scientific and philosophical thought originated from mythology. Let us not forget that the Greek civilization, to which philosophy is born, is characterized not only by scientific and philosophical wealth, but also by symbolic aesthetics, figures of speech and rich mythology.
As documented in history, philosophy appeared in the fifth century BC in the Greek city of Ionia, (and it was known as the Ionian School of Philosophy) and it was the same Ionia whose philosophers were interested in understanding the essence of the world and its source, which prompts us to say that it is not a coincidence that these same topics are the ones that ancient myths were interested in before, which began with the eastern civilizations of Mesopotamia, and this is what the English scholar Francis Macdonald Cornford (F. M. Cornford; who rejected the idea of the Greek Miracle Theory) was referring to when he said:
“The earliest philosophy remains closer to mythological construct than to scientific theory. Ionian natural philosophy had nothing in common, in either inspiration or methods, with what we call science; specifically, it knew nothing whatever of experimentation. Nor was it the product of reason’s naive and spontaneous reflection on nature. It transposed into secular form, with a more abstract vocabulary, the concept of the world worked out by religion. The cosmologies simply took up and extended the main themes of the creation myths. They provided an answer to the same kind of question; they did not inquire, as science does, into the laws of nature; like myth, they wondered how order had been established, how it had been possible for the cosmos to emerge from chaos.” (The Origins of Greek Thought. P.104)
Regardless of our agreement with his view of mythology or even of Ionian philosophy; his statement was indicative of the relationship between philosophical (philosophy of physics) and mythological thinking in the conception of creation and the beginning of the universe, a testimony to the fact that the origin of philosophical and scientific thought was the mythological thought that originated first in the first civilizations of mankind, which began in the East long before the West.
Mythology is a cognitive fabric that expresses itself in an imaginary and aesthetical way to capture fundamental human issues related to his epistemological and existential concerns, and within them we notice an in-depth philosophical vision regarding these issues, which are issues that philosophy has also been interested in, such as eternity, annihilation, desire, will, war, peace, humanity, theology, transcendent and cosmological conception of the universe… etc. Hence, it provided philosophical thought with in-depth insights into these subjects, and formed the basis that made it possible.
While Auguste Comte, as mentioned earlier, insisted that myth expresses the childhood and immature aspect of humanity, to which we should not return after we grew up with humanity’s entry into the age of science, new visions of myth began to emerge in the same era (the nineteenth century) by leading modern anthropological researchers.
The Mythological Reason and Language:
Max Müller, the renowned British philologist of German descent was one of the first to acknowledge the importance of mythology in the nineteenth century, and by virtue of being a linguist in the first place, his interest in it came from this direction, he saw that language lies in the roots of the myth, and this is due to a linguistic phenomenon he called “A disease of language”, the linguistic metaphor is the basis of mythological thought, as the roots of metaphor in its origin linguistic errors have been amplified and grown, and this is the basis that formed the content of the myth, and through these errors that have taken root with time. Even Neanderthals believed it and expressed this by formulating myths that sided with reality.
Though, of course, Müller’s theory was inconsistent, and it faced severe criticism later, as it is still subject to a narrow view of myth as opposed to reason and science, but the importance of his theory is that it drew attention—with such clarity and importance- to the relationship between language and myth, and paved the way for studies that focused on language and myth, especially in its metaphorical characteristic.
In the twentieth century, with the emergence of the linguistic logos, which broke into multiple fields of knowledge (including anthropology) a new opinion was formed about the relationship of language to reason, as reason is not something abstract, but rather an organ with deliberative activity, and such, it is impossible (at least in practice) to separate language from thinking, as reason works within the framework of a conceptual device, expressed in words and utterances, and language, then, it is itself a mental system.
As a school of thought in linguistics, structuralism focused on this relationship through its view of language as a “structure” of patterns, similarities, and differences in the text. Structure is not a phenomenon that is perceived through the text as much as it is a relationship of similarities and differences that is embedded within; therefore, it can be monitored and calculated mentally, against the experimental approach, and if we examine accuracy, the language has nothing to do with external subjects that we may be referring to, as far as mental and intellectual relationships are concerned.
The insights that there is a relationship between language and myth can be explained by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure’s thesis on the nature of language and the concept of linguistic system, a thesis that has caused some sort of revolution in the literature of humanities. De Saussure believes that language is merely “sound images” that do not directly refer to external reality, as previously thought, rather, they refer to a mental perception. For example, the word “horse” does not refer to a specific horse, rather, it refers to the mental image we perceive when we listen to the sounds that pronounce the word “horse.” This explains how we use language to denote pure perceptions or “things” that we have never seen in external reality, yet we can perceive their meaning.
Since language is “sound images” that indicate a mental perception, De Saussure has credited it to a science greater than linguistics, which is semantics (semiotics) and accordingly we can find the same linguistic structure in systems other than this ‘verbal’ language, for example, the body is a language too, because in its gestures signs, we can interpret its significance to a certain meaning, and measure it. Myth – as is the definition of language – can thus be defined as a set of symbols (signs) that indicate to a mental perception (not to objective reality); so, it is a sensory system (in terms of perception) that refers to a mental system (in terms of meaning); and therefore, we can realize its reality if we repeat its sensory symbols to mental concepts.
Just as myth is a system of symbols, so is language, and consciousness deals with language symbols (sounds) in the same way as it deals with mythological symbols (gods, ghouls, albatrosses, etc.) Hence, we find that the relationship between language and myth is almost as strong as their role in communication. Where man expresses his mental meanings through sensory perceptions, as does myth.
Yet, from another perspective, it is important to see that this ties them in with the role of theoretical reason too, which we will seek to expand carefully in the remaining part of this short study.
Myth and Metaphor:
Perhaps now’s the time to delve deeper into the “Metaphor” considering it is the bridge between language and myth on one side, and reason and myth on the other side. Metaphors are not only a figure of speech; they are an essential element of the “linguistic system” itself. Northrop Frye’s hypothesis in The Great Code may be the best way to shed light on the strong relationship between myth and language through metaphor and its relationship to different phases of thought that humanity has experienced. Frye believes that language has gone through three phases, which are determinants of the cognitive system of the human reason, and what distinguishes the first phase (The Metaphorical Phase) is the feeling “that subject and object are linked by a common power or energy.” (The Great Code. P.6) and this explains what was (and still is) believed, that words have an impact on subjects, as in the magical pronunciation that was thought to correspond to things outside, or in perjury and vows that oblige the person who said them to the point that they are sometimes willing to pay with their lives. In this system of knowledge, “All words in this phase of language are concrete: there are no true verbal abstractions.” (The Great Code. P.6) Such words like “Soul” and “Reason” which later went on to carry perceptions with intangible (more so connected to emotions) connotations and meanings, initially carried sensory perceptions (mainly physical conceptions) in Homeric poems, because his era was governed by the allegorical and metaphorical phase par excellence. Homer implied these words in his poems as they are (as tangible perceptions of the words) rather than metaphors. The idea is that Homer wouldn’t have considered his language metaphorical. When he used figures of speech, usually similes (The Great Code p. 7), he likely meant them literally. It’s the later application of allegory that transformed these words from their original, concrete meanings to more intangible, metaphorical ones. This is determined—as mentioned earlier– within the framework of the relationship between the object and the subject at this stage, as “As we think of words, it is only metaphor that can express in language the sense of an energy common to subject and object.” (The Great Code. P.7) and that is by virtue of the characteristic of the cognitive system prevailing in this phase.
This experience, which expresses the close relationship between the object and the subject in metaphor, is also found in the concept of “word magic” or power of metaphors by Ernst Cassirer, and does not mean the traditional theory in which the supporters of the famous anthropologist James George Frazer fell into the relationship between magic and religion, which is evident in the belief in the power of the word spoken, as we find it in the belief that the magic spell and the talisman affect the external physical reality; rather, they are understood as specific things, and we find this evident in the mythological thought that distinguishes between the utterance of something and the name that refers to this thing (external), and the relationship between the subject and the object in myth is a relationship of union not separation, so objective truth has no value in the scientific concept in the study of myth and language, because it refers things to a subject separate from the self.
This explains why words like love, or hate, and revenge are attributed in mythology to and embodied by characters of Gods. This linguistic (and intellectual) displacement that resulted from the cognitive system in the metaphorical phase is still witnessing its phenomena in language, and Frye gives us an example of this in order to demonstrate that there is a relationship between “metaphors” and language, we say about the phases of governance: “The star of his rule has waned” or “his rule has reached its zenith.” These descriptions are clearly used for the sun and its orbit (the sun was the greatest god in some pagan religions) and were borrowed to describe the reigning periods of royal or imperial rule. (The Great Code)
The myth – also – is essentially metaphorical, its meanings are clothed with embodied symbols, and even if it seems to us that it is cast within the framework of an unreasonable plot, it has a rational and logical structure, and within this consideration that sees that the basis of metaphor is based on the ideals in which reason must be present, in order to establish a kind of analogy between two things, so that they are similar to a contrast or congruence, so myths were employed as examples to indicate the subtleties of philosophical ideas, as we see this -for example- in Plato’s philosophy. The parable of the cave that Plato used to denote his theory is a typical example of my idea.
Essentially, the mythic structure is metaphorical (which aligns with Frye placing it in the metaphorical phase of his three-phase theory). Language inherently relies on metaphor to imbue words with power and meaning, mimicking both the mind’s and imagination’s processes. As Frye himself states, “in metaphorical language lies the central concept that unites human thought and imagination […]” (The Great Code, p. 49). However, the descriptive phase diminishes the myth’s significance. This phase operates with a cognitive system fundamentally opposed to myth’s. It prioritizes objective perception, assuming the self’s world description reflects a truly “objective” external world. This necessitates a separation of self and object, a notion challenged by many philosophical schools and excessively emphasized by certain positivist tendencies that restrict philosophy to the natural sciences, neglecting the potential flow in the other direction.
Let’s take a common saying: “This man is a lion.” This is a simile, meaning it compares the man’s bravery to a lion’s. We use similes because they’re more evocative than just saying “so and so is brave.” They create a mental image by combining the concept of courage with a familiar symbol: the lion, which our culture associates with bravery. Metaphor, therefore, has both a logical and imaginative role. It unites the self and the subject, as Frye describes, and this is also evident in the embodiment of natural forces in humans or gods within myth. The self becomes connected to a certain energy or essence associated with the subject.
The metaphor serves more than one function. It is not only used to evoke an aesthetic sense and sharpen imaginative thought, but it also helps communicate about what is difficult or impossible to express through direct language. As Frye observed, “we are now about to go around the cycle again, as we seem now to be confronted once again with an energy common to subject and object which can be expressed verbally only through some form of metaphor.” (The Great Code, p.15) Mythology, in its metaphorical construction, tries to describe what cannot be described in ordinary or direct language, so its meanings are disguised with an imaginary image. Here, the metaphor penetrates and reshapes physical reality with the intention of revealing a reality that lies beyond.
Reason in Mythological Thinking:
Language cannot be separated from thought – and some would argue that language is thought itself. Similarly, the logical and reasonable cannot be neatly divided from the mythical. This is a key conclusion reached by some contemporary thinkers. Both language and myth are fundamentally systems of symbols that correspond to mental perceptions. Mythological thought contributes to the formation of our mental concepts and frameworks. Without this mythological dimension, our understanding and knowledge would be incomplete. H. Frankfort asserts that “The imagery of myth is therefore by no means allegory. It is nothing less than a carefully chosen cloak for abstract thought. The imagery is inseparable from thought. It represents the form in which the experience has become conscious.” (Before Philosophy, P.15)
Perhaps it was Cassirer, the philosopher who embodied the Kantian principle, who gave us the most important integrated epistemological theory about the relationship of language and myth on the one hand, and on the other hand their relationship to thought and reason, and it is not enough room here to simplify his theory and its connection to Kantian epistemology (which is essential to knowledge), so we will suffice to quote the American philosopher Susanne Langer in her translation of Ernst Cassirer’s book Language and Myth, when she summarized his theory in the introduction:
“Language, man’s prime instrument of reason, reflects his mythmaking tendency more than his rationalizing tendency. Language, the symbolization of thought, exhibits two entirely different modes of thought. Yet in both modes reason is powerful and creative. It expresses itself in different forms, one of which is discursive logic, the other creative imagination. Human intelligence begins with conception, the prime mental activity; the process of conception always culminates in symbolic expression. A conception is fixed and held only when it has been embodied in a symbol. So, the study of symbolic forms offers a key to the forms of human conception. The genesis of symbolic forms — verbal, religious, artistic, mathematical, or whatever modes of expression there be — is the odyssey of reason. The two oldest of these modes seem to be language and myth.” (Language and Myth. Pp.11-12)
Therefore, mythological thinking is the destiny of man, and because man is also destined to be a visual, moral, and metaphysical being, he is also destined to be a “mythical” being. Cassirer puts it this way:
“Theoretical, practical and aesthetic consciousness, the world of language and of morality, the basic forms of the community and the state— they are all originally tied up with mythico-religious conceptions, this connection is so strong that where it begins to dissolve the whole intellectual world seems threatened with disruption and collapse.” (Language and Myth P.44)
Claude Lévi-Strauss, the pioneer of the structuralist anthropological school, offers a vision that emphasizes its attachment to reason, having studied hundreds of myths from multiple cultures, in what may seem to be irrational rhetoric, as Lévi-Strauss noted: “Behind all myths is one mental apparatus. It is precisely their diversity that should allow us to derive the common structure” (Structuralism in Anthropology, p. 42). We notice this mental activity in mythology, if not in its contents; it is evident in its implicit structure, which represents a coherent logical system no less than any philosophical text subject to the known principles of logic. Thus, Lévi-Strauss relied on the fact that the primitive reason is no less than that of the progressive man, for the primitive/progressive dichotomy is not as straightforward as imagined, if we dig into the structure of culture.
The Russian philosopher Aleksei Losev, who was the pioneer of the revival of philosophical thought in post-communist Russia, was no less convinced of the truth of the myth than Cassirer and Lévi-Strauss. He paid a high price for believing in these ideas under communist rule, demonstrating his seriousness. Losev describes myth as: “the most obvious and concrete reality, it is the inevitable statement of thinking and life far from all chance or whim” and thus “myth is not a fabrication, but it involves a very strict and specific structure; and therefore logically and above all dialectically a statement necessary for perception and for existence in general” with myth as a fabrication or fantasy, “from the point of view of mythological consciousness it is in no way correct to say that myth is a fabrication or a game of fantasy” (The Dialectics of Myth. Pp.42-43)
Losev places a heavy burden on some empirical anthropologists because they see myth not from its own position, but from their own position, and it is from that perspective that myth becomes viewed as an undoubtedly— in Losev’s own words— “childish fantasy” which is “unrealistic” and “philosophically powerless.” This way, it becomes subjective, not to mention, through our dissection of the mythical consciousness itself (as a living consciousness) it becomes an “inevitably real, tangible, and always alive, and becomes an absolute necessity of thinking, neither imaginary nor fictional.” (The Dialectics of Myth. P.43)
From a purely philosophical perspective, Losev rejects the idea that myth is merely a metaphor. He argues that myth is “an authentic practical reality, not a metaphorical or allegorical reality.” (The Dialectics of Myth, p.87) However, Losev does not differ significantly from those who view myth as nothing but allegories and metaphors – at least from an intellectual standpoint on the topic. He acknowledges that myth is fundamentally symbolic, that it has significance and is therefore conceptual. But Losev differentiates between metaphor and symbolism. In metaphors, the link between the image and the idea is merely incidental, and one usually takes precedence over the other. In contrast, the connection between the symbolic representation and its meaning is more intrinsic in myth. Whereas in symbolism, the opposite happens, and the idea creates an “image,” and that image carries an idea that was not previously tied to it. (The Dialectics of Myth. P.88) There is also an interdependence between the two; the image does not negate the idea, and vice versa, even though they are their own separate entities. For example, we find that the color red symbolizes blood and bloodshed, but it is independent of them. We do not find the same relationship between the image and the idea in metaphors and allegories; for example, the fox is usually a metaphor for cunningness and tricks, and despite that, there is no relationship between the two; if anything, foxes are not animals that can understand, and think, let alone be cunning tricksters!
According to Losev, there is evidence that proves that mythological thinking is a realistic thought, and the proof is that it is the basis on which the laws of physical sciences are established. Losev, just like Cassirer, links myth to brain activity, and— once again, similarly to Cassirer— bases this on Kantian philosophy, which refers the natural laws back to mental statements, and every subject matter must be preceded by direct sense perception, and that is the mental basis of myth, to which Losev provides an example from Newtonian physics, as the basis of Newton’s classic mechanics is “based on the hypothesis of the infinite place of one nature” (The Dialectics of Myth, P.57) and this hypothesis has no material scientific basis; it is a conceptualization due to the breadth of human imagination, and thus we notice that even the “material” scientific construction is based on the ground of mythical “mental” thought with its perceptions.
The Conclusion
Language is only understood in light of its metaphorical function, as a system of signs that form a mental perception. It does not necessarily have a tangible external reference, and this is the essence of metaphors in philosophy; a collection of symbols that function as standard logical approaches that combine two separate things due to their shared semblance, which is rhetorically called the presumption, the function that arises from a certain mental perception based on the cultural space of which language is one of its element: (For example, the lion, and bravery. The lion is a sign that evokes the perception of bravery in a group of social activists who speak this language.) Another one of its elements is the myth, in that it is a system of symbols that act as a sign in language, or any other discursive system, and then comes the work of reason itself, which can only practice thinking under forms and images, as Ernst Cassirer emphasizes, and all of this forms (as in the diagram here) a circle that embraces both language, myth and reason in one single diagram. It is this circle that Cassirer described to represent mental activity, hence the claim (that what is mythical is a paradox of what is rational) falls apart before this conception of reason’s activity, and the way it works. And from here we reach the claim that myth is therefore rational in that it is the way thoughts are formed, and the world is realized, and it is handed to us whether in the epistemological field (our perception of existence and the universe), in the aesthetical field (our perception of beauty and art) or in our human relations.
It is no wonder that we have recently witnessed the phenomenon of the “return of mythology” (albeit disguised under another title) having thought that it was left behind by the contemporary modern-day man, upon entering the age of science and reason, as positivism claimed; but it doesn’t seem like the age of enlightenment has quite succeeded in getting the man out of his mythical destiny. In their momentous book, Dialectic of Enlightenment, both Horkheimer, and Adorno argued that the age of enlightenment not only brought out moral values of justice, freedom and equality, but it built within us a rational and instrumental system that is devoid of humanity, which deep down is not any different from the Greek mythological conceptions that inhabit the conscience of Western culture, hence we find that myth lies even in the rational Enlightenment system, and both Horkheimer and Adorno emphasize this by saying: “The mythic terror feared by the Enlightenment accords with myth. Enlightenment discerns it not merely in unclarified concepts and words, as demonstrated by semantic language criticism, but in any human assertion that has no place in the ultimate context of self-preservation.” (Dialectic of Enlightenment, P. 51) And then there was Carl Schmitt, with his “God State” thesis that confirms the comeback of mythology, where Hegel’s view of the state— despite all its claims of rationality— displays it as the absolute spirit, which Schmitt confirmed to be its glorification as a state of Godhood; and then the fall of modern man into the abyss of nihilism that arose from the “death of God” and the “disenchantment” upon modern societies in the universe, which was followed by the absence of every possible teleological explanation of life. In the past, it was mythological thought that took care of this; it is the function of myth to give meaning to human life and the universe.
However, soon enough, The Myth of Sisyphus was reprised by Alber Camus as a witness to the absurdity of the human life in the modern age; an age that is devoid of mythology, as his tyrannical system of knowledge no longer believes in it, at least not outwardly, held back by the fact that it is not scientific, which is exceedingly ironic! Similarly in James Joyce’s case with his novel, Ulysses which modernized Homer’s epic, The Odyssey. In his version, the protagonist was no longer a king or a nobility, as Homer had written, but a simple bourgeoisie man who was destined to repeat the same myths in this modern life that lacked the halo and presence of the gods and their justice, a life with a gloomy and boring realty.
And to conclude, it may be right to say that: even though humans are rational-speaking creatures, they are also, and possibly just as much, mythical creatures with mythological reason and logic. This is mankind’s destiny, and it is a fate that we simply cannot escape!
References:
- Northrop Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982) New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
- H. Frankfort, et al. Before Philosophy: The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man (1949) England, Penguin Books
- Ernst Cassirer, Language and Myth (1946) New York, Dover Publications
- Dan Sperber, Structuralism in Anthropology
- Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (1916)
- Firās al-Sawwāḥ, Mughāmarat al-ʻaql al-ūlá, Dār ʻAlāʼ al-Dīn, Dimashq, (2002).
- Murād Wahbah, al-Muʻjam al-falsafī, Dār Qibāʼ al-ḥadīthah, al-Qāhirah, (2007).
- Aleksei Losev, Dialectics of Myth
- Max Horkheimer, and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947)
- Pierre Machiri, Comte. La Philosophie et les sciences (1989) Presses Universitaires de France
- Karen Armstrong, A Short History of Myth (2005)
Jean Pierre Vernant, The Origin of Greek Thought (1984) Ithaca, New York, Cornell University Press
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