Myth & Understanding

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Myth & Understanding

I have been reading about mythology written by Joseph Campbell. In his attempt to make it possibly for the reader to comprehend how myth works he speaks about the human ability to ‘make-believe’.

He speaks of the universality of childhood make-believe and of how this same characteristic is exhibited in human rituals. For example he uses the Catholic Church practice of mass when the priest changes the wine and bread into the body and blood of Christ. In other words it seems to be inherent in humans to make-believe and in the process to truly believe and in truly believing experiences a form of ecstasy.

Such is probably our experience of understanding. In the process of trying to understand I create a model and then somewhere in this process of creating and modifying my model I pass to the point of believing the truth of my model thus the feeling of ecstasy.

In an attempt to explain to the novice the meaning of myth Campbell says that the “grave and constant” in human suffering may, and sometimes does, lead to an experience that is the apogee of our life. This apogee experience is ineffable (not capable of expression). Campbell considers this to be true because it is verified by individuals who have had such an experience.

“And this experience, or at least an approach to it, is the ultimate aim of religion, the ultimate reference of all myth and rite.”

“The paramount theme of mythology is not the agony of quest but the rapture of a revelation.”

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It seems to me that if this argument is used as counter-religious, it would work against all forms of truth – even philosophy and science – as well. :-k

Given that, I would hesitate to accept this argument at first sight.

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Myth, the “mother of arts”, cannot be understood by reason but by emotional “impact”. Joe tells me, here in the beginning, that myth is an art form that can be understood by its impact upon me. Just as myth impacted the primitive (and everyone I guess) so I can understand it only if I use an entirely different way of understanding than I used to understand the “conceptual metaphor”.

Evidently an understanding can be created by more than one method. Can I will an impact? Can I find a means to become impacted? How does one set a stage for self-impact not through reason but through, not through feeling, but through ‘what’?

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Coberst, I will suggest that you read more than Campbell. Read a lot of myths. Read Nietzsche. Read Huxley’s “The Perennial Philosophy”. Keep reading Campbell.

Reading about art is not the same as seeing or hearing a lot of it. You may practise from the beginning, of course.

How do you learn to play jazz? One way to help is to listen to a lot of it. It’s a but mysterious how one day you will play a lick that you hread somewhere without deliberately trying. But you do.

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Faust,
=D> Wow!!! Someone else who has read Huxley’s “Perennial Philosophy”. Very appropriate reference.

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One of the great books. Don’t know why it’s not more read. I have read it several times.

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Faust,
My copy is underlined and annotated to the hilt. Huxley was one of the last great intellects who sought a synthesis of disperate ideas from what they had in common. I did my master’s thesis on Huxley’s projected futures, but read more than I needed to for the thesis because of his ideas of ecological morality and his sane, lucid, articulate concepts of inclusive being. His wife Laura said he would have loved the hippies of the 60s (he died before that came about). There is actually an experimental society based on his book “Island”. Google subcultures.
The Jung/Campbell connection should be explored here.

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Yeah, that’s true I guess. I’m not a big fan of Jung. But he certainly spoke to the issues. Probably gives a valuable view, as long as no one takes him as an actual scientist.

Huxley’s thesis was brilliant from the start. He developed it thoroughly and convincingly. He reminds me a bit of Kiergekaard in that way he used synthetic reasoning, and of Nietzsche in how he used a multifaceted approach to develop his thought. He was far superior to Jung as a psychologist, in my view.

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Faust,
Yes. And Huxley’s psychological superiority over Jung includes Campbell; but what we have here is Campbell.

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Campbell adds that the primitive wizard is as capable of this experience as is any person of the highest modern religious repute and is capable “also of wantonly producing parodies of his own mythology to intimidate or impress his simpler fellows” as is the highest modern religious personage. Since the ultimate reference of religion is ineffable it is often used to bamboozle and to manipulate simpler fellows.

I quote Joseph Campbell–“poetry is not the thing said but a way of saying it…the intellect is not the font of poetry, it may actually hinder its production…the first axiom of all creative art…is that art is, not like science, a logic of references but a release from reference and rendition of immediate experience: a presentation of forms, images, or ideas in such a way that they will communicate, not primarily a thought or even a feeling, but an impact.” “Mythology was historically the mother of arts” and cannot be understood rationally.

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I woulod read Campbell to mean that the worldview that mythology presents cannot be analysed scientifically, which is a similar but different thought. Campbell has actually made a career out of understanding mythology rationally.

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Faust,
=D> Isn’t it amazing how all who denigrate intellect, reason and logic do so with intellect, reason and logic? There’s your irony, Coberst. The split mentality that opposes intellect and poetry does not understand either!

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I have for a long time tried to comprehend the meaning of ‘understanding’ and this is what I have understood ‘understanding’ to mean. I have never had the epiphany that some speak of so this may not be the same kind of thing.

Awareness + Attention = Consciousness

Comprehension is a hierarchy, resembling a pyramid, with awareness at the base followed by consciousness, succeeded by knowing, with understanding at the pinnacle.

There is a great difference between knowing and understanding. Everyone can answer “yes” when asked if they know music. We receive answers that go on forever when we ask a teenager if they know music. We awaken instant and sentimental memories when we ask an older person to tell what they know about music.

Silence and puzzlement is our response when we ask a person “do you understand music?” Occasionally the question “do you understand music?” receives an expression of delight and a verbal outpouring. The person who understands music–they are few and far between–has studied music in a way very few of us have. I suspect such a person is not only a lover but also a student of music. I do not understand music but I do understand the meaning of “understanding music”.

I create this musical metaphor for the purpose of illuminating a state of affairs of which we are seldom conscious.

Our formal educational system teaches us the knowledge required for making a living. Our formal education does not teach us the understanding required to live well. The development of understanding is something each of us must create on our own. If we do not recognize this fact we will not pursue this understanding and if we do not pursue this understanding we will remain intellectually naive.

We start our formal education experience as intellectually naïve children and end it twelve to eighteen years later as well informed intellectually naïve grown ups.

After formal education ends our understanding begins. The task of understanding is a private enterprise by me and for me. Understanding begins with this recognition and continues as one creates a process for the solitary activity of self-learning. I think a person could look at self-learning as a hobby, it could be one of your hobbies like tennis or golf, just a few hours each week and I suspect after a while it will become a very important part of your life style. Developing a sophisticated intellect is a solitary study lasting a lifetime.

Awareness–faces in a crowd.

Consciousness—smile, a handshake, and curiosity.

Knowledge—long talks sharing desires and ambitions.

Understanding—a best friend bringing constant April.

Carl Sagan is quoted as having written; “Understanding is a kind of ecstasy.”

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I am not sure I comprehend your statement. I am not famaliar with someone who has done this. I recognize that many who are anti-intellectual but I attribute that to ignorance. But I guess you are speaking about something else here.

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Coberst,
The remark relates to the Campbell quote you gave. “The intellect is not a font of poetry” misinterprets both intellect and poetry.

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OK, thanks. I did not comprehend, probably because I have little understanding of poetry. I had kind of gone along with Campbell because I thought of poetry more as form than content. Perhaps that is the same way I feel about music, which I also have little understanding.

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Coberst,
I cannot, in all honesty, discredit all of Campbell’s efforts from a single sentence I might find objectionable and, which, may not have been his contextual argument. I admire his efforts to present mythology as a viable worldview, given its time and place, and not just a bunch of irrelevant how so stories.

In my own studies in bioepistemology I realize that what I admire and write about are probably “myths of a cortex” and most certainly “views from a mesocosm”. For me, truth is always an approximation.

What have you found in Campbell’s writings that you consider personally meaningful?

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I was recently listening to an interview on NPR with an individual acquainted with a nun how had been murdered by a woman the nun had been trying to help. The nun was a member of a group trying to help women who were still in prison and also those who were discharged from prison but having a difficult times reestablishing their lives outside of prison.

The nun had been killed by a person she had been helping and this individual being interviewed was part of the group with the nun. This person was asked by Scott, the NPR news person, what he thought she might have said about this whole event had she been alive to comment.

The interviewee choked up and said that probably she would have said something that she had often said to him that she, the nun, had received far more from her experience with these prisoners than she probably had given them. The nun said that she had experienced through these former and present inmates a vicarious experience that was very important. She had gained an experience of human suffering she would never have experienced on her own.

This was the sort of response I had expected because it is like the response such living saints seem to respond on other occasions I am aware of. But this time this particular response had a new resonance for me.

I have recently read Joseph Campbell writing about myth and the logic of myth.

In an attempt to explain to the novice the meaning of myth Campbell says that the “grave and constant” in human suffering may, and sometimes does, lead to an experience that is the apogee of our life. This apogee experience is ineffable (not capable of expression). Campbell considers this to be true because it is verified by individuals who have had such an experience.

“And this experience, or at least an approach to it, is the ultimate aim of religion, the ultimate reference of all myth and rite.”

Does anything in your life experience indicate “that the “grave and constant” in human suffering may, and sometimes does, lead to an experience that is the apogee of our life.”?

It is Campbell’s statement regarding the ‘grave and constant’ that really sticks with me. I am still trying to fully comprehend it.

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I agree with Campbells’ comments on the “grave and constant” as being the origin of religion. If there were no suffering or death, religion would not exist as reaction to those experiences. And religion is a child of mythology. For me the best of religion, as you described in your anecdote about the nun, are such as Mother Teresa, who considered herself unworthy and was thereby able to help others whom society had considered as unworthy, such as Simone Weil, the French intellectual who put her beliefs into action and died of empathy, such as Mahatma Ghandi, who had gotten all of his worldy possessions down to a change of clothes and a knapsack holding sewing equipment. (Winston Churchill loathed him.), such as Deitrich Bonhoffer, who agonized over a plot to kill Hitler, and on and on. Mythology gave us a sense of being the pawns of external gods and personified energies. Religion, if worth its salt, should put us all in the same boat together, all of us deserving, all of us combatting inner and outer demons.