Mythology consists of a set of traditional narratives which describe the legendary origins of a community who are notionally related to each other by their descent from Gods and Heroes who may have had their own territorially localized cults and priesthoods. We may speak of modern polities as having a mythology regarding 'founding fathers'- figures like George Washington and Benjamin Franklin or Mahatma Gandhi and Pandit Nehru- and we may equally speak of various academic disciplines having their own legendary heroes who give their names to a particular school of thought. Thus we might distinguish Platonic 'realists' from Aristolelian 'nominalists' or those who follow Adam Smith from those who follow Karl Marx.
Speaking generally, mythology merely solves a coordination problem- i.e. it provides a convenient or 'Schelling focal' way of making classifications. However, those who think some great mystery can be solved by looking at mythology tend to be stupid, ignorant or mad- unless they are stupid and ignorant people teaching some crazy shite.
A case in point is Prof Tae-Yeoun Keum who, by reason of having studied stupid shite at expensive Skools, now writes about the relationship between myth and politics. She began her study of Philosophy at Yale when Dubya was in the White House and 'Straussian' neo-cons, who affirmed the value of 'Noble Lies'- Saddam's WMD being one such- were said to hold much power. By the time she moved to England to do her MPhil and PhD at Cambridge, Obama was President and a very different political atmosphere prevailed. It appeared that collective, incremental, action of an empathetic and enlightened sort could gradually heal the world and right History's wrongs. Sadly, as Obama realized during his second term- 'American foreign policy consists of doing stupid shit'. Partly for this reason, disaster struck. Brexit and Trumpism and Orbanism and other populist movements were believed to have revived older myths of a 'Blood and Soil' type. Nazis were under the bed. Hitler was hiding in the closet. Then, in Ukraine, the neo-Nazi Azov battalion started killing Russian generals. Maybe Nazis aren't so bad.
Prof. Keum's first big book 'Plato and the Mythic tradition in Political Thought' came out just as COVID- a plague of Biblical proportions- struck and Biden got to the White House. However, the disparity in responses to COVID around the globe showed that the mythic traditions of non-Western polities might be more important, or more relevant, than our own elite Paideia's fixation on gentlemanly pederasts who conversed elegantly in Athens 2500 years ago. China had mythical Emperors who protected their subjects and instructed them in useful arts and sciences. By contrast, European pedagogues had shown disdain for utilitarian crafts and substantive, as opposed to utopian, solutions to existential threats to the polity. The difference here was that between Moh Tzu- whom legend depicts as a technologist- and Plato whose myths were similar to that of the 'Social Contract' or Rawls's 'original position' behind 'the veil of ignorance', or Dworkin's 'Judge Hercules' or Gibbard's 'Revelation Principle' or Amartya Sen's 'idea of Justice' which somehow endows Democracy with magical powers.
Biden's admission of defeat in 'the war against terror' and the formation of an assertive Eurasian bloc which is now challenging NATO in Ukraine has called attention to the wholly mythical, if not mendacious, basis for the vaunted 'rules based international order'. Political theory, it appears, was just pi-jaw, hot air, emitted by a corrupt and credentialized Ponzi scheme which had created a chorus of cretins in Academia across the globe. These bores spoke much of the value of dissent and open public discussion but proved entirely useless. They have doomed themselves to providing fodder to a circular firing squad of wokeness. I myself am filing charges of sexual harassment against the beautiful Prof. Keum who raped me with her eyes when I visited her profile page. Also she is guilty of cultural appropriation. Only Indians should be allowed to talk utter bollocks. It's unfair for a person of Korean heritage to do so.
The only question is 'does Keum talk utter bollocks? Have you actually read her book? Is there any evidence for such an outrageous charge?'
Let us examine her recent Aeon essay for evidence-
Concerns about myth are often bound up with concerns about misinformation.
There may be a concern that myths are taken for literal truths- e.g. God will destroy a town where sodomy is rampant- but this is guarded against by the assertion that the universe of myth belongs to a more primordial order than our own workaday world. What happened then can't happen now. The world has been 'disenchanted'.
Misinformation is about propaganda, fake news, 'junk social science', scientists getting paid by industry to publish lies, QAnon or ISIS using Social Media to recruit fanatics, etc, etc. It has nothing to do with Plato or Leibniz or Leo Strauss or even Ayn Rand.
But these anxieties go beyond a worry about factual inaccuracies that require correction.
Did you know St. Patrick wasn't really Irish and that St. George never set foot in England? Also Santa Claus is totes, Gay, Black, and in a polyamorous relationship with Rudolph and various elves.
Rather, when scholars and commentators designate something as a myth, they are usually grappling with a more existential threat: a symbolically powerful narrative that seems immune to correction altogether, but that, nonetheless, has the power to captivate our imaginations.
This may be said about an ideology. Myths may be part of an ideology but, equally, they may exist independently of them. In any case, 'scholars and commentators' are as stupid as shit. Their 'designations' don't matter because their reasoning is so sloppy that they end up convicting only themselves of whatever error they claim to have detected.
The language of myth, for instance, has recently been used to talk about frontier imagery in US immigration policy – ‘the myth of the border wall’ –
But such a wall is compossible with physical reality. Moreover, in the Fifties and early Sixties there was an 'Operation Wetback' which deported millions across that border. It is genuinely the case that Kamala Harris told Guatemalans 'not to come' and that Biden is seeking to prevent a big influx at the southern border. Obama was called the deporter-in-chief though Clinton deported more people. Biden is likely to be stricter than Trump in this regard.
as well as nostalgic appeals to a somehow more authentic version of a nation’s people – from the ‘myth of a “real” America’,
But it really was true that White Americans killed and ethnically cleansed indigenous people. They really did bring in slaves. Jim Crow was a real thing. Even now American States have a lot of power to restrict voting rights and gerrymander districts. There was a 'real' America defined by the one drop rule. Indigenous people were slow to receive citizenship rights though it must be said there was one Vice President from the First Nations.
to the ‘myths of Englishness’ that made rounds during the Brexit campaign.
Englishness is not a myth. Nor is Scottishness. I have a neighbour who is Sikh and to the right of Priti Patel. His cousin is a Scottish Nationalist.
The claim that Brexit Britain will be richer and more economically dynamic may be false. But it has no mythological component. Farage is not claiming to be the reincarnation of Weyland Smith or Hereward the Wake.
One reason myths make us uneasy is that we expect them not to have a place at the heart of the assumptions and beliefs that found modern culture.
No. We expect modern culture to have developed from pre-modern culture just as we expect our modern language to have evolved from more ancient dialects. Pre-modern thought- expressed as myths or legends- should feature at the kernel of every 'uncorrelated asymmetry' which distinguishes our culture from that of a neighboring nation's culture. Anglo-American Common Law is founded on Coke's Greek speaking Druids who didn't exist save by a 'legal fiction' of what is, as Coke told the wisest fool in Christendom, 'Artificial Reason'.
That is, there is an expectation that we, as a society, ought to have outgrown myths.
To outgrow something doesn't mean we can't take pleasure in it from time to time. Consider the host of super-hero movies we are now offered. Comic book characters which were pretty obscure and unfashionable when I was 9 now have their own Netflix series. I never expected to see Wanda the Scarlet Witch or the Moon Knight getting the full 5 star Hollywood treatment. Sadly, She Hulk hasn't yet appeared on the TV screen. When she does, she will reach out and grab me and do unspeakable things to me.
This expectation stems from an evolutionary account of culture that goes back at least to ancient Greece, when Presocratic thinkers adopted rhetoric that distinguished their methods of investigation from the oral tradition associated with ancient myths about the Olympian deities, by focusing on the unverifiable nature of such stories.
But there is no reason to believe that this type of thought had not existed in Homeric times. On the other hand, Alexander- Aristotle's student- had no compunction about mythologizing his own conception such that the Libyan God Ammon was his true daddy. I suppose that the Quranic Dhu al-Qarnayn (he of the two horns) refers to Alexander wearing a horned helmet in token of his supposed divine parentage. Incidentally, he built a wall to keep out God and Magog- two giants who protect the Guildhall in London and who participate in the Lord Mayor's parade. It appears that the solid burgers of the London's livery companies haven't outgrown this particular myth though they now make their money in very sophisticated financial markets.
But it was in 18th-century Europe that myth came to be seen as a cultural relic that was fundamentally at odds with modern life.
Maybe on the Continent- but the Continent soon fucked itself up till Wellington and Blucher and the Tzar restored order and legitimacy. Meanwhile Gog and Magog presided over the the growth of the biggest Empire the world has ever seen. America too grew in size and strength without giving up its own myths of Johnny Appleseed and the headless horseman and whatever atrocity Thanksgiving is supposed to commemorate.
As the Enlightenment railed against tradition and superstition, authors such as Pierre Bayle and Bernard de Fontenelle turned their attention to the legacy of Greco-Roman myths.
But they were French- i.e. fucked in the head. They probably married their drama teacher who, admittedly, is smoking hot.
In preceding centuries, classical mythology had been treated by their Baroque aficionados as part of a timeless heritage, an inherited aesthetic vocabulary that educated individuals had to learn in order to participate in high culture. The Enlightenment critics, by contrast, were eager to question the value of the myths that their predecessors had deemed worthy of valorising in their sculptures, paintings, operas and even ceiling decoration.
This is silly. Having lots of marble statues of naked dudes and naked dudesses means you are as rich as fuck. It has got nothing to do with 'valorising' shit. Anyway, there was also a fashion for Chinoiserie and Orientalism and, later on, African statues of pygmies with huge dongs. Why is this silly woman pretending fashions in interior decoration have something to do with belief in ancient mythology?
Instead, Enlightenment authors drew attention to the absurd, often grotesque, features of these same myths. With obvious relish, Bayle detailed the episodes of adultery, incest and cannibalism that littered classical mythology, and mocked the ancient commentators, who had tried to provide allegorical explanations for them. ‘They cannot be read,’ he judged, ‘without feeling pity for those philosophers who used their time so badly.’
Bayle had to flee France because he was Protestant. Everybody understood he was attacking the Catholic Church, not some long dead Greek dudes.
Fontenelle, for his part, speculated that the Olympian deities of thunder and the seas were merely what the ancient Greeks had conjured up in their imaginations in order to explain natural phenomena that they lacked the scientific knowledge to comprehend.
But, Fontenelle knew this was a view popular in Socrates's own time. Like 'Bruno the Nolan', or our own Ghalib, his argument from the necessary existence of many populated planets in our Universe tended to militate against the dogmatism of the Church. It was a plea for toleration. That was cool till the guillotine started falling on heads as tolerant as that of Condorcet. Toleration is all very well provided you have a well funded secret police- headed by a Fouche- who can quickly detect conspiracies and chop the head off dangerous nutters.
The course of philosophy can be understood as a trajectory that runs from ‘from mythos to logos’
This could be said of any discipline whatsoever. We start with a just-so story and then proceed to the nitty gritty of Bio-Chemistry or Material Science or whatever. William Blake created a complex mythology for Albion. But he insisted that savants must focus on 'minute particulars'. Those who blab about the 'General Good' are mischievous charlatans.
There was another reason for the Enlightenment re-evaluation of classical mythology. Travel accounts from Asia, North Africa and the New World had introduced European audiences to mythological traditions beyond those of ancient Greece and Rome.
But this had happened in the time of Alexander! Pyrrho learnt his philosophy in the Punjab. On the other hand, Prof. Keum is right to say that medieval Europeans had never heard of Judaism and its complicated mythology which features a guy who parts the Red Sea and another guy who was super strong till his g.f cut his hair. Consider Pope Innocent VIII. He was constantly praying to Zeus or Jupiter. He had never even heard of Jesus Christ. Thankfully, 'travel accounts from Asia and North Africa' introduced Europeans to the sublime message of the Gospel.
As the first comparative mythologists began spotting similarities between classical myths and those from cultures that many Europeans at the time considered barbaric, the former lost much of their traditional lustre. They weren’t so special after all.
Comparative mythology threw Christianity into question. It turned out that Jewish myths had more ancient origins in the religions of older civilizations of the area. Prof. Keum is pretending that Christianity did not exist in Europe. Its people believed in Jove and Poseidon. This is the sort of thing an Indian professor- provided they were wholly educated at Ivy League- could say. But is is a very strange assertion for a Korean heritage savant to make. Why? India was colonized by the Brits. Thus if we are as stupid shit it must be Whitey's fault. Korea wasn't colonized by Whitey. If Korean heritage people say stupid shit we think it must be because they studied worthless shite at Uni and are now teaching that worthless shite because otherwise they'd look silly for having wasted their lives in so foolish a manner.
What emerged from these cultural reappraisals was a formula for conceptualising civilisational progress as a linear trajectory, pointing firmly away from myth.
Fuck myth. The notion was Fuerbachian/Marxist. The linear trajectory would be away from the Church towards a type of Scientific Socialism in which scarcity would disappear and everybody would have every thing they wanted and there would be no war or crime or folks saying nasty things about me just coz I iz ugly, stupid, fat and very very poor.
As 18th-century Europeans came to understand it, societies with rich mythological cultures – such as those of Greco-Roman antiquity, but also those of contemporary Indigenous peoples in the New World and elsewhere – occupied a ‘primitive’ stage of culture.
No. The idea was that the Church was primitive. Holy Communion consists of eating the flesh of Christ and drinking his blood which is totes icky.
By comparison, their own enlightened society had successfully shed its myths and superstitions in favour of more rigorous ways of thinking.
Which involved either getting sent to a Gulag or queuing up for five hours to buy a turnip.
A crucial part of this account of cultural evolution was a focus on the cognitive development of the human mind. The path from barbarism to civilisation supposedly also entailed a transformation in the character of thought itself – from the kind of credulous, superstitious mentality it takes to generate and believe in myths, to the Enlightenment mind capable of criticism and the evaluation of arguments.
Till those enlightened minds had their fucking heads chopped off. Talleyrand was smarter than Condorcet. He fled to America and returned only when it was safe to do so. His last diplomatic act was to admit his errors and submit to the Pope.
Smart Communists displayed a similar trajectory. Minds capable of criticism may still be crammed full of shit. It is better to gain powerful protectors in this life and any life which is yet to come.
This model of epistemic development had enduring effects on the self-identity of philosophy.
It turned to shit. Why? It didn't get that 'uncorrelated asymmetries' will always exist where scarcity obtains. 'Bourgeois strategies' are founded in this arbitrary dispensation. Hilbert calculi are useless. Gentzen is the way to go. Also it turns out you have to be really really smart and scrupulous if you want to use logic because logic is maths. Mathsy shite is shite because real mathematicians can do real maths. True, even a Terence Tao might waste a little time on Social Choice theory but he will move on rapidly because there is so much else that he can do. Philosophy has become a dumping ground for retards. It can only pay its way by turning into 'Grievance studies' for diverse communities of whining shitheads.
The course of philosophy, to borrow a formulation by the 20th-century classicist Wilhelm Nestle, can be understood in terms of a trajectory that runs from ‘from mythos to logos’.
Nestle returned to an irenic, ecumenical, Christianity, free of dogmatism, after the second world war. The Logos he speaks of is the 'Word made Flesh' which directs us to serve the poor and despised amongst us- that means me. Could you please do my washing up? Also bring a pizza with you. Christ commands you. Mind it kindly.
On this view, philosophers continue the work of breaking away from myth, identifying the ones that remain operative in our thinking and culture, subjecting them to critical interrogation, and replacing them with knowledge that stands up to critical scrutiny.
Sitting in an armchair can't produce knowledge. On the other hand, you can quietly go potty in an endowed chair of Philosophy while getting pottier and pottier.
It was also during the 18th century that Plato came to be adopted as the original champion of philosophy’s long and ongoing battle against myth.
This Professor studied philosophy at Cambridge. She must know that the Cambridge Platonists- Ralph Cudworth, Henry More, maybe Benjamin Whichcote etc. belonged to the Seventeenth Century. There was no 'battle against myth' back then. These guys- like most scholars- were latitudinarians who rejected rigid dogmatic theological positions and who were distressed by the wars and civil strife which sectarian rivalries had created. There was a scientific element to this which, in the eighteenth century, first led to a search for a 'natural' (i.e. canonical or non-arbitrary) law and religion and then to a 'phenomenological' turn which however quickly turned to nonsense. What prevailed was pragmatism which could have had a superior mathematical description by the end of the 19th century. Tarksi, it will be remembered, paid generous tribute to C.S Pierce. On the other hand, it must be admitted that engagement with the German idealist tradition sparked very useful work. I was reading recently of Karl Pearson's supposed influence on Einstein. Sadly, this would only have been through Pearson's own engagement with German philosophy. I suppose a 20 year old mathematician can help a 20 year old physicist more if a 20 year of philosopher is present. In other words, studying philosophy needn't make you worthless. You could serve as a catalyst. Sadly the same can't be said for teaching philosophy.
In preceding centuries, Europeans would have been more familiar with a rather different portrait of Plato. This was the account of Plato’s thought given by Neoplatonism.
What's wrong with that? Platonism in mathematics still exists. What great revolution occurred in the eighteenth century such that 'Europeans' suddenly got a 'different portrait' of Plato? The fact is the neo-platonic tradition continued and gathered momentum with the spread of education and the refinement of manners.
I suppose the author is thinking of a narrowly defined 'political philosophy' associated with the rising middle class. However, the French 'reign of terror' greatly diminished the salience of philosophy in such milieus. Indeed, Hegel was one of many savants who showed that the Philosophy Professor was ready and willing to be a sort of Civil Servant- a glorious or inglorious drudge who might notionally rank with an Under Secretary or a Lieutenant Colonel. Beamtenliberalismus wasn't actually Liberal. It was Bureaucratic. Whatever was not forbidden was compulsory.
Adherents of this wide-ranging philosophical tradition, which first flourished in late antiquity and was revived in Renaissance Italy, saw in Plato’s scattered writings a radically coherent metaphysical system, arranged around a highest, unifying Form of goodness. Neoplatonic interpretations of Plato’s philosophy often had a mystical bent – acquired, in part, as it gradually negotiated for itself a place alongside Christian orthodoxy.
Christianity, ab ovo, had Neo-Platonic and Stoic elements. The Jews were already Hellenized. Second Maccabees was written in Koine Greek. Some Neo-Platonists rejected Christianity and came to a grisly end. Others felt that Christianity represented a more perfect philosophy. Socrates was a pharmakos or korban- i.e. scapegoat- merely for his own City. Christ sacrificed himself to save all nations and generations.
In order to reassure Christians, who were wary of granting too much influence to a pagan, Neoplatonists insisted that Plato had been divinely inspired as a prophetic instrument of God’s design for human history. Pointing to Plato’s descriptions of divine poetic inspiration in the Ion and Phaedrus, they argued that Plato himself was aware of his own role as a vessel of a higher power. Such readings of Plato gained an esoteric flavour. They elevated the role of inspiration over that of reason, and they tended to focus on themes such as enthusiasm, love or – especially in the context of Renaissance humanism – the divine gift of eloquence.
The trouble was those guys also believed in magic and astrology and other such shite. The problem with Plato is the notion of 'participation' looks a lot like 'sympathetic magic'. I may mention that the Jews themselves developed an esoteric doctrine of 'partial incarnation'- ibbur. This also existed as an undercurrent in Europe- e.g. among the Cathars- and Aristotelianism was considered the appropriate remedy. However, empiricism would eventually overturn that proto-science and so it was inevitable that philosophy would be banished from all but the history of theology because the truth of religion is founded upon a profound mystery regarding which scientific reason can shed no light.
When Enlightenment thinkers such as Voltaire and his associates turned to Plato, however, they often did so in the spirit of a far older interpretive tradition, one that long predated the Neoplatonists. This was academic scepticism, which had been the dominant school of thought in Plato’s Academy from the 4th century BCE
No. 266 BC is the conventional starting date.
– about three generations after Plato’s death – and lasted into the 1st century BCE.
This is misleading. Voltaire and Co. were faced with an active and infamous evil compounded of a dogmatic Church and a despotic State. Satire, as an 'interpretive strategy', is not yet an epistemology- which is what the Academic Skeptics had.
Where the coherence of Plato’s metaphysical system was a central tenet of the Neoplatonic tradition, academic sceptics denied that Plato had any system of philosophy at all.
No. They were affirming that Socrates' synoida- his knowledge of his lack of knowledge- was plausible though certainty in such matters may be inaccessible to mortals. We might say, academic sketpticism was 'Bayesian' just as Epicurean Economics was 'behaviorist' or upheld 'satisficing' over utility maximization.
Rather, their Plato was the antisystematist par excellence, resisting dogma at all costs in favour of the critical suspension of judgment. Plato’s sceptic interpreters emphasised the mercilessly rigorous nature of Socratic interrogation and the inconclusive endings of some of the early dialogues, which seemed to represent a disavowal of certain knowledge.
This was Pyrrhonism and related to Indic epistemologies. It existed in medieval Europe as satire of the learned 'Doctors' whose erudite disputation were fundamentally foolish. Interestingly, this was also the case in medieval Hindu India. However, Aristophanes had originated this type of critique. His Socrates is a stupid swindler.
To be fair, the Academic Skeptics were not concerned with ontology and Pyrrhonism itself never developed into a Buddhist type 'kshanikavada' doctrine of momentariness or 'emptiness'. Perhaps we should think of them as using a notion of multiple realizability- after all, different diseases might cause the same symptoms- and this militated for a methodological acatalepsy such that students were weaned off the habit of jumping to conclusions. 'No smoke without fire'- true. But mist can look like smoke and dry ice produces the smoke in the music videos we watch.
Plato’s portrayal of the Socratic gadfly helped model an Enlightenment ideal of philosophical citizenship
I think Plato remains very readable because he showed a gentlemanly way to discourse about utterly meaningless things so as to while away the time while drinking good wine and winking at the handsome waiters.
The sceptic portrait of Plato was especially appealing to Plato’s Enlightenment readers, who similarly adopted a principled programme of challenging authority and questioning received knowledge. Plato’s critique of Greek mythological tradition, in particular, proved newly resonant. Voltaire praised Plato’s portrayal of Socrates as a proto-scientific philosopher persecuted for proving ‘that the Moon was not a goddess, and that Mercury was not a god’.
Voltaire won the lottery and thus had private means. His being middle class in origin endeared him to the rising commercial class. His association with Fredrick the Great- who wrote a lot of poetry in between winning wars- elevated his stature. But he was not greatly ahead of his time. Rather he was representative of a period of widening horizons and, for the propertied class, rising and increasingly refined material standards of living.
Enlightenment champions of Plato were unwilling, at the same time, to accept the fully sceptic conclusion that certain knowledge was impossible. Eventually, they negotiated a compromise between the Neoplatonist and sceptic accounts of Plato. They accepted that Plato had a coherent philosophical system, and that constructive and certain knowledge was indeed possible. But the path to knowledge was not through revelation or inspiration, but through the kind of critical reason that the academic sceptics so prized.
Who were these Enlightenment 'champions of Plato'? I would have thought that the genealogy here would feature 'Bruno the Nolan', Pico della Mirandola, Erasmus etc- i.e. Hermetic and 'Humanist' Renaissance scholarship which continued to inspire eighteenth century savants- like Winckelmann- but also obscure pedagogues or minor writers- like Floyer Sydenham who died destitute- and which shaped the views of those rising in commerce and administration and even the ranks of the Church.
A professional philosopher may speak of 'negotiation' and 'compromise' between schools of thought but no such things obtained on the ground. The fact is, when Napoleon appeared as a 'Man of Destiny', some philosophers were willing to see him as an inspired figure whereas others were equally willing to consider him the Anti-Christ. Indeed, some alternated between these two views.
It is all very well to 'prize' academic skepticism but if a guy turns up who can cure a disease or locate a gold mine by reason of some innate power, we will suspend disbelief quickly enough. What matters is verification, not the logical soundness of a deduction. This was as true then as it is now. Suppose Kant had been confronted by evidence that Newton's laws break down. He would not have published his Critique of Pure Reason- or would have decided that synthetic a priori judgments don't exist in the realm of what is observable.
Plato’s Enlightenment readers also took him to be an embodiment of their own political values. His portrayal of the Socratic gadfly helped model an ideal of philosophical citizenship – of citizens as critical thinkers, refusing to take social norms for granted, but instead exposing unfounded pretences to knowledge and the vague and mystifying myths of society.
Socrates was condemned to death for asebia- 'impiety'. The Enlightenment thinkers had good reason to be wary of the Church or whatever barbarism and anarchy would replace Church and State. However, it is false to think that anyone wanted to live in a City state packed with 'critical thinkers'. The fate of Athens was to be the slave of Rome. An education in Greek philosophy might get you a cushy job as the tutor in the household of a wealthy Roman. But you would still be a slave. The Romans ruled half the world. Being the subject of a powerful King was better than ending up in an Algerian slave-market or becoming the serf of some barbaric invader.
The dominance and popularity of the Enlightenment portrait of Plato meant that the interpretations that had preceded it largely fell out of sight, and naturally de-emphasised those aspects of Plato’s thought that sat poorly with its portrait. This was the process by which the rationalist Plato, so despised by Nietzsche, was created.
But Nietzsche was mad and relatively ignorant of philology. People read him because he was against Christ and the Kaiser and Women and being weak and having wasted your life studying stupid shite.
What was the contemporary view of Plato? The answer is Jowett type piety and Humanism and crypto-Christianity. Germany, it is true, had both a 'transcendental' as well as a 'hermeneutic' Plato but their trajectories coincided in the notion that German, like Greek, was a privileged language in which the Platonic project would be completed. Then it turned out Germans were as stupid as shit and needed to have American troops on their soil to stop going mad and fucking themselves up in a manner ever more foul.
For Plato was not just the champion of rational argument that the Enlightenment presented him to be. His dialogues, significantly, contained myths: carefully constructed narrative interludes, woven into the philosophical investigation, that reworked or mimicked existing material from the Greek mythological tradition. We might take, for instance, the Myth of Metals – the myth that Popper compared to Nazi ideology – which tells the story of a race of citizens being crafted beneath the earth. A god, according to the myth, mixed metals into their makeup: gold for those most naturally equipped to be rulers, silver for the assistants to the rulers, and iron and bronze in the farmers and the craftsmen. Plato’s first readers would have recognised this myth as an original reinvention of the Hesiodic myth of ages (humans decline in character as they pass through the ages of gold, silver, bronze and iron) and the myth of the founding of Thebes by Cadmus (a race of men is born out of the earth).
But, very soon, Plato's readers could see for themselves that Alexanders and Ceasars were conquering City-States and tribal republics and Oriental monarchies and claiming to actually be Gods in their own rights. Why claim you are made of gold when you can claim to be God All fucking Mighty? Christianity's Man God triumphed over Divine Ceasars but Rome remained Rome- the eternal City- under a Pope who, if he couldn't fuck you up in this life could certainly arrange for you to be made very uncomfortable in Hell for all eternity.
Plato’s myths tend to be stylistically differentiated from the closely argued investigations that make up the rest of his dialogues. They are often set in fantastical worlds – like the subterranean workshop of the deity in the Myth of Metals, or the eschatological landscapes in Plato’s myths about the afterlife – and they are not held to the standards of argument otherwise championed in Plato’s work. The myths are simply just-so stories, presented without any attempt to justify them with reasons or facts.
But they have the quality of 'participating' in the Truth in a manner mysterious and, perhaps, beautiful. Plato, after all, was a belletrist. We read him because he was readable. Also the guy understood that Math is important.
In certain Neoplatonic traditions that celebrated the more mystical aspects of Plato’s thought, these myths were considered an important facet of his work. The Enlightenment reinterpretation of Plato, by contrast, had no good way of accounting for them. If Plato is the original liberator of philosophy from myth, his own use of myths seems hypocritical at worst and, at best, a failure to live up to a standard of critical rigour that he himself invented for philosophy. As the 18th-century portrait of the rationalist Plato gained ground, the myths began to be awkwardly ignored, or else dismissed as the vestiges of ancient tradition in the work of a philosopher who paved the eventual path to the age of Enlightenment, without having been fully enlightened himself.
I think it was accepted that for a leisured class to exist- i.e. for philosophers to get paid- society had to be horrible to most people. Anyway any actual Republic would either be as boring as Switzerland or as fractious as Holland. Enlightened despotism was the happy mean- unless you were British or American in which case the propertied could band together to make the State do stuff which increased the return on wealth. As for the 'Sublime', the thing had high Income elasticity. The richer a country got the more of that stuff would be available.
This Enlightenment Plato is, by and large, the one we have inherited today, who coexists uneasily in our imaginations with the mythmaking Plato we encounter when we read his texts.
I think we stop reading obviously shite texts like 'the Republic' and gravitate to the more poetic stuff.
This unresolved tension is a reminder of what gets missed when we take only the most readily available Plato in our heritage for granted.
No. We get that Plato was a well off White dude who wanted to fuck boys of good families but who settled for opening a School which wasn't shit because Math was given a high place there. Sure he had his silly myths but that was within a context of genteel conversation. The main thing is that he wasn't incessantly boasting of having bummed Alcibiades.
The old Enlightenment narrative can often blind us to the philosophical value of Plato’s myths. Popper, for instance, had accused Plato of deploying myths for purely political, propagandistic purposes, which were ultimately at odds with the values of philosophy itself.
In England, you had to read 'the Republic' in order to pass an Exam to get to Oxbridge. Thus we all hated Plato and eagerly devoured Popper. Then we realized that 'Scientific method' was shit. It didn't actually help anybody produce more or better Science. On the other hand, some of the smartest mathematicians in the world- e.g. Godel- were Platonists. But mathematical representations of society- e.g. Arrow-Debreu- were mischievous nonsense. So the message here was be Platonist by all means so as to get on with highly abstract, but closely reasoned, work. Sheldon, in 'Big Bang', is welcome to carry on with his String theory though we doubt that stuff will ever work. Why? Because his brain has been so sharpened that he can always help the other lads invent something cool which will make them a lot of money so that everybody ends up with a hot wife- even Rajesh. On the other hand, we don't want to listen to Sheldon on the topic of BLM or border walls- because he is bound to turn out to be as Racist as fuck.
But what Popper didn’t realise was that Plato often turned to myth in ways that were complementary, rather than antithetical, to the kind of critical reasoning exhibited in the more argumentative parts of his writing.
So, the myth is a simplified 'model' in which an 'equilibrium' can be defined. Hopefully there is a 'transfer principle' between models of rising complexity which finally converge on our own physical reality. Then any evidence for that equilibrium that we can find confirms that a 'concrete model' exists. More significantly, there must be a Structural Causal Model such that we can start tinkering with parameters so as to incrementally improve outcomes.
Plato’s myths end up being a distinct form of philosophical discourse in their own right, exploring aspects of our worldviews that are so deeply ingrained that they are difficult to pick apart solely through critical reason.
Who cares what is 'deeply ingrained' in our worldview? The question is whether we do the job we are paid to do in the approved manner and towards the proper end of that type of work. The fact is, a guy can be as racist as fuck and still promote me if my work were any good. That is why I am so careful to be utterly shit at every type of work. The alternative is that this deeply Racist society would give me a place of honor within it and thus my complaints about its Racism would appear unjustified.
Currently we believe that the Mochizuki proof of the abc conjecture is wrong. This has nothing to do with 'ingrained' bias. The thing is wholly objective. Of course, it may be there is some dude in Gabon who has found the right proof but nobody has noticed because the dude in question didn't go to Collidge and earns money as a rent-boy. However, the solution would be to get better computer proof checking online. Then this dude can just upload his proof and ten seconds later he is on his way to getting the Fields Medal and being put on a ten million dollar retainer by Google or Musk or whatever.
The Myth of Metals does not just make sweeping claims about what individuals are and are not naturally suited for. It also prompts a philosophical reimagination of the very concept of nature.
Nonsense! The same effect would be achieved with a Myth of Animals. Some have the spirit of Tigers. Others have spirit of Rabbits. Mine is the spirit of the earth worm.
The Myth of Metals appears at a particular juncture in Socrates’ description of the education of the citizens of the city envisioned in the Republic. It is intended to be told to the citizens after they have completed a basic preliminary education in music and gymnastics, at which point they are to be sorted into the various occupational classes of the city. The myth has long been read, along Popperian lines, as a piece of political propaganda appealing to the notion that individuals have natures that, like race, are determined from birth, and equip them better for certain roles in society than others.
This is the dystopia described by Aldous Huxley. However, during the Cold War, planners on both sides of the Iron Curtain began to think in a similar way. Indeed, this had already begun during the War itself. The old notion, in England, was that officers should belong to a particular 'caste' (ideally, they should own country estates and thus take a paternalistic interest in the welfare of their laborers as well as display a polite condescension to tenants and tradesmen and ranting Methodists and effeminate Jewish aesthetes and boring but earnest wogs and spear-chuckers of various descriptions. ) Sadly, this type of officer might lack mathematical or scientific ability. There was no alternative but to promote narrow chested nerds with unpleasant accents who understood Game Theory and Bio-Chemistry and ghastly stuff of that sort.
In America- at least the America which I've studied on Netflix- the 'Greek' fraternities might still be able to get a goodly number of top jobs but they know they will be working, one way or another, for nerds with unpronounceable names or, worse yet, women.
But if the myth tells a story built on the idea that the natures of individuals are fixed in a particularly rigid way from birth, it is also a story involving a total reconceptualisation of what it means to be born in the first place.
It means being expelled from Mummy's tummy. I reconceptualized birth to mean I emerged from Mummy's handbag and would often open it to check if any more babies were concealed there. Mum thought I was stealing from her purse. I explained that this was not the case. She said 'get a fucking job you fat fuck. It's a disgrace for a middle aged man to still be sponging off his parents.'
The opening lines of the myth invite the citizens to think of their rearing and education up to this point in their lives as a dream. According to the myth, the citizens have not yet truly lived. They have instead been asleep through the years of their early upbringing, gestating inside the womb of their mother, the earth, while their natures were being formed. Only when this process was complete were they released above ground and made to wake from their long slumber. Citizens are not truly born, the myth suggests, until they have completed the first stage of their education. The natures of citizens, accordingly, have to be defined, not in terms of the attributes they have at the beginning of their biological lives, but by those they possess at the end of a basic education.
Many ancient societies have a 'second birth' ceremony. Originally you belong to your birth family and inherit their status. But, after your 'second birth' you join a particular occupational cohort and your status is determined by their relative ranking. Many organizations have a similar type of indoctrination or induction such that you lose whatever identity you previously had and are reborn within the hierarchy of the enterprise.
In borrowing from the conventions of Greek mythology to create his own philosophical myths, Plato was attesting to the power of myth to reach, and to reshape, the stories we take for granted about our natural and social world.
A myth is a story. So what Plato was 'attesting to' was the power of stories to reshape stories. I guess he had a lot of time on his hands. Did he also 'attest' to the power of farts to reshape farts? I hope so. If I will be remembered for anything it will be for dedicating my life to this attestation.
Such stories, in turn, can provide a stable imaginative framework of values and expectations for organising political experiences in meaningful ways, and can be vital to framing the way we think about our environment and our places in it.
Or they could just be stories. I watch a lot of movies about peeps wot got bit by Vampires or radioactive spiders or whatever. But this 'stable imaginative framework' isn't vital to shit. On the other hand, if inflation continues to rise, I and a lot of folk like me will change the way we vote. Votes matter. Stories don't because most of us are motivated by economic considerations.
Plato’s myths, read without the baggage of the Enlightenment narratives told about him, serve as a reminder that myth did not always stand for the opposite of philosophy.
It still doesn't. We can think of it as a 'model'. Thus, we might say Putin is the head werewolf. Slay him and you end the great evil afflicting Ukraine'. However, wiser heads might say 'No. Putin isn't a werewolf. He is the Wakefield to the Siloviki Dracula. Assassinating Putin increases Dracula's power because guys who eat spiders are icky. Dracula will replace icky Putin with a gorgeous android. Zelenskyy will fall for her because she inherited the Scarlet Witch's love potion.' This isn't really the opposite of philosophy because 'the Good Place' ran for four seasons.
Plato was himself well aware of the dangers of myth.
Yes. He was constantly saying to Alcibiades 'dude, there is a very dangerous myth lurking in that alleyway. It will definitely beat and rob you. Don't go outside. Come, let's cuddle'.
But this awareness was part of a broader appreciation of its power and its possibilities, one that recognised the full range of myth’s potential to be both harmful and constructive for philosophy and politics.
Plato was living in an age where everybody was just one disastrous military campaign away from military defeat and enslavement. His situation was more similar to that of people living today in Kyiv than to those teaching Philosophy in sunny California. Ukraine doesn't have nukes. America has plenty. Myths may matter in California. They don't in Ukraine or Plato's Athens.
Above all, Plato’s understanding of myth stemmed from the position that our worldviews are underpinned by deeper, more elusive narratives that may be more easily accessed and shaped by the mechanisms of myth than those of rational argument.
Fuck that. Our world views are shaped by the type of existential threats we face. Plato & Co worried that Athens might do stupid shit because Periclean democracy had gone off the rails. They didn't realize that people of their own class might do even stupider shit. Still, Plato championed training in Math and thus his Academy gained prestige. Even after the Romans enslaved you, this type of paideia could get you a cushy job as tutor to the heir to the family fortune. He might emancipate you and help you gain wealth.
This insight was something that Plato applied to philosophers themselves. As Socrates suggests to his interlocutors in the Republic, the long process of educating the philosopher-guardians of their ideal city must be approached ‘as if we were at leisure and telling myths’.
Which was cool if, like Plato, you were in the business of providing paideia to the scions of the leisured class.
Today, we don’t take this idea seriously enough, and we focus on myth only in its most pathological forms.
Who is 'we'? Anyone who matters? No.
One consequence of the Enlightenment idea of civilisational progress is that, when myths do rear their heads in modern society, they seem to suggest that a regression has taken place.
The problem is not myth. It is fake news or propaganda.
Such was the alarmed response in the 20th century when fascism spread around Europe.
But Fascism only spread because Communism was a genuine, existential, threat. So long as Fascism didn't start an unwinnable war, it was considered superior to Communism. Franco's Spain was safer and became more prosperous than any Warsaw Pact country. It even transitioned relatively painlessly to constitutional monarchy of the English type.
As Nazi propagandists peddled grand narratives about the destiny of a chosen race of people, kingdoms that would last a thousand years, and even constructed elaborate genealogies around Plato’s myth of Atlantis, contemporary commentators diagnosed the phenomenon as a deplorable ‘resurgence’ of myth in modern politics.
But Stalin won his wars as did Mao. Thus Communist propaganda gained more and more converts in the febrile atmosphere of the late Sixties and Seventies. Indeed, the Left found safe spaces for itself on Ivy League campuses. That's why these guys are still bleating about Fascism though that shite disappeared long ago. Meanwhile, the Chinese Communist Party has become the largest and strongest political force in Eurasia. It remains to be seen whether, if Putin falls, the siloviki will turn back to Bolshevism. After all, Gorbachev's mistake was to surrender residuary control rights over the economy. The Chinese, it is now clear, had always had a backup plan to retake such rights. It is an open question whether their system can out innovate the West.
To be sure, contemporary critics of myth
are doing such a swell job fighting Putin that we all respect them. I'm kidding. These guys, if they exist, are wholly irrelevant.
have good reason to argue that these might not be possibilities worth exploring. Postwar attitudes toward myth, shaped by the reckoning with Nazism,
And the rise and rise of the Communist bloc till, it turned out, private enterprise could do scientific research better and faster than Communist states where smart people didn't want to live
have inured us to a kind of anti-myth vigilance: if the horrors of Nazism are the cost of permitting myths to thrive in modern politics, this may be too high a cost to bear, no matter the potential benefits.
We can't do shit about Putin's myths of 'passionarity' because he can nuke us to kingdom come. What can't be cured must be endured. Forget Putin, we can't even tackle QAnon's myths. Free Speech is a double edged sword.
To borrow a phrase from the 17th-century poet John Dryden, myth may well represent ‘a world well lost’.
Dryden was talking about Lurve- like that between fat Tony and tony Cleopatra. It is one thing to die for love, it is another thing to die because you like some silly story.
On this view, the stance that we, as a society, ought to be taking toward contemporary forms of myth should either be a principled refusal of acknowledgement – lest doing so legitimises them, or opens the floodgates to further irrationality – or a constant readiness to combat them, whenever they occur, with an arsenal of facts and reasoned arguments.
This is a stupid view. A story should be treated as a simple 'model' which can be connected to reality by a series of more complex models. The only question is whether this simple model is useful. Is there a 'transfer principle' such that what is true of the model is also found to be true of the world?
Consider the 'myth' most of us have in our heads about how COVID is transmitted. It does not correspond to the scientific model because most of us don't know about viruses and anti-bodies and so forth. But this myth is useful enough because it enables us to change our behavior- mask wearing, doing self-isolation, getting vaccinated etc. etc.
The lessons of Plato’s myths, however, point us to another way. If we remain allergic to the presence of myths in our cultural landscape, we miss the larger point, and risk throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Plato’s insight was that myth is a powerful, enduring force in politics and culture – a point of common ground in both Nietzsche’s and Popper’s critiques of Plato. Not taking this seriously risks falling into denialism about the very real ways in which such symbolically rich narratives influence our worldviews.
Nonsense! Either the use of myths and metaphors is ingrained in human nature- in which case there is no risk whatsoever that having the wrong view of Plato will cause some catastrophe- or else myths and metaphors aren't ingrained at all. We could eliminate them without any change in outcomes. But, in fact, we find that for most practical purposes, a description of what an employee must do can be given in precise terms. No 'myths' or 'metaphors' are necessary. Indeed, more and more, we see that instead of an instruction manual, a machine has a set of instructional videos. You watch them and thus learn how to set up or operate the machine.
But Plato’s own philosophical reinvention of myth also suggests that myths can be reworked in creative ways. Myths are not monoliths impervious to change, but dynamic stories open to reinterpretation every time they are retold. Our inherited aversion to myth not only keeps us from fully appreciating Plato’s incisive understanding of myth. It also keeps us from recognising – and learning from – people in our own communities who are already doing the kind of creative work it takes to engage constructively with it.
It may be that this Professor has noticed that her colleagues and her students are all as stupid as shit. She thinks the reason is that they have become allergic to myths because they think myths cause Nazism. But myths and metaphors are useful heuristic tools. If you become allergic to them you cut yourself off from any possibility of epistemic progress. Thus, the author says, her colleagues and students can't understand Plato. Worse still, they can't learn from anybody in their community who is doing creative or constructive work.
It is now easy to understand why this Professor is getting so worked up about Plato and Popper and so forth. Her students and colleagues have become as stupid as shit and are doomed to ever increasing ignorance. But the true reason for this is that Philosophy has become adversely selective. Only stupid people study it which means that, after a lag, only stupid people teach it, which in turn means that the next generation is even stupider and more ignorant.
In the fall of 2016, representatives from more than 300 Native American tribes gathered together at a campsite near Cannon Ball in North Dakota to protest the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. The proposed oil pipeline was to run perilously close to land that belonged to the Standing Rock reservation, including under Lake Oahe, the reservation’s primary source of water and the site of several locations sacred to the Sioux who live there.
Initially dismissed as routine protesters – as any construction project of that scale is likely to generate – the activist groups themselves came to understand their work differently. They drew upon Native mythological traditions to reframe the significance of the moment, which in turn supplied a new conceptual vocabulary for their self-understanding as a community. A Lakota prophecy foretold of a time when the various tribes would come together in the ‘seventh generation’ to save their peoples and the Earth from destruction. For the activists at Standing Rock, that moment was now. Their common task was a duty that linked them to their ancestors, who had seen themselves as stewards of the environment. The activists at the makeshift camps by the construction site – the newly anointed Sacred Stone Camp – were not protesters at all: they were water protectors.
The fact is the First Nations launched a legal challenge of a meticulous and skillful type. The Obama administration was weakening and some judges were persuaded but then Trump got elected and pushed the thing through. But in 2020, a Judge gave a favorable verdict to the protestors. This was overturned by the Court of Appeals. It remains to be seen whether Biden will be able to reverse this outcome.
The water protectors at Standing Rock are separated a long way, in geography and time, from Plato. Not only was Plato an Athenian, who lived nearly 2.5 millennia ago; he has long been the paradigmatic Dead White Man, the figurehead of an intellectual canon that has excluded the voices of peoples such as those at Sacred Stone Camp.
We are speaking of the victims of genocide and forcible ejection from vast and valuable tracts of land. This type of criminality continued under Federal Government officers and a scandalously mismanaged Bureau of 'Indian' Affairs.
First Nation leaders have been using the law and appealing to the conscience of voters for centuries. They have not mentioned Plato because it would have been foolish for them to do so. Moreover, the term 'water protector' has a lot of resonance for wealthy donors and other influential people in California etc. The message these protestors was sending was that the issue here isn't some tribal shibboleth or a demand for higher monetary compensation. The protestors are seeking to preserve, for no mercenary motive, a precious resource everybody needs regardless of creed or color. Whatever the 'Sacred Stone Camp' did was rational and for the commonweal. It is foolish to link their struggle with some bee this Academic has in her bonnet.
But Plato’s point is that the unlikely insight he shared with the water protectors at Standing Rock is a lesson for philosophers as well.
I suppose the 'unlikely insight' is that your past existence was just a dream you had in the womb of mother earth. You were born just now as a fat middle aged Indian man who must protect water- which I do by drinking my whiskey neat.
If myths turned out to be an inescapable part of modern life, Plato teaches us not to despair that our Enlightenment expectations of rational progress have gone unmet. Instead, he invites us to make theoretical space for the myths around us, and to remember our own capacity to rework them.
It certainly is a myth that studying philosophy can make you smart. True, you could get a 'theoretical space' when you can rework this myth such that you are 'protecting water' and so Putin will run away because sixty percent of the adult human body is water. You could use your super-duper 'water-protecting powers' to cause sixty percent of his physical form to evaporate. The dude is only five foot seven. Without any water in his body, he will look like a little child. All the siloviki will laugh at him. Chairman Xi will pick him up with one hand and give him a nice bottle of milk with a big rubber nipple. The new President of Korea, who is anti-Putin, will praise our Professor. He will scrap his misogynist agenda. Then the author's parents will be proud of their very special little girl. Indeed, the parents of all Philosophy Majors will get naches. Then philosophers will stop conforming to the myth that they iz as stupid as shit. All will be right with the world.
Part 2
To be fair, Aeon essays are meant for the layman. A rising academic may write nonsense in the belief that ordinary people are stupid and ignorant and so you must pretend that everybody must pay attention to you because otherwise Hitler and hordes of undead Nazis will rise up and send everybody to the Gas Chamber.
Let us now look at her interview in the LA review of books where she can give a better account of herself
ANDY FITCH: First, in definitional terms, could you sketch how various Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment humanistic disciplines have conceived of myth?
The answer is that, following Aristotle, mythos was conceived as the plot of a story which represents actions without itself being an action or 'praxis'. In other words, it may involve no 'mimesis'. One may narrate a story- this is diegesis- or one may act it out.
Some 'myths' or stories were special in that they had soteriological properties- but only to the initiated ( mystai). These 'mysteries' bound together the members of a religion (religio) through a common Faith that might be inaccessible to Reason or forbidden to the profane. Such mysteries featured myths- e.g. that of Orpheus- and this notion of mystery was part and parcel of the self-understanding and burgeoning of the early Christian Church.
Thus, in definitional terms, myth has been conceived by the Humanities as a diegesis or narrative which may or may not be associated with a mystery and thus a separate Faith Community.
TAE-YEOUN KEUM: Good question, and I’m not sure I can do it justice without going on too long. Myth is a spectacularly, almost disproportionately loaded concept. We start with this narrow, literary definition of myth, as a kind of traditional tale about supernatural characters and events.
I suppose Prof. Keum is thinking of Aristotle's use of the term mythos to describe the plots of Athenian tragedies where some great disaster befalls a mortal but where there might be a deus ex machina or other supernatural act such that things come right in the end.
But sometime around the Enlightenment, intellectuals intent on distinguishing between enlightened and “unenlightened” cultures turned the focus of their critique to ancient Greco-Roman myths.
For Heaven's sake, why? The Christians had laughed all the demigods and hobgoblins of the pagan past out of existence. Nobody in Europe believed that there had been a guy who cut off a Gorgon's head or another guy who had lifted up Mt. Atlas. The Enlightenment was about mocking dogmatic religion and superstitious practices and socially conservative guilds and despotic judges or jacks in office.
They started associating myth with superstitions, unexamined beliefs, or the kind of “primitive” mentality a human being must have in order to generate and to believe silly stories about gods behaving irrationally.
So, if some fucking Bishop or Cardinal says 'it's wrong to enslave blacks or to exterminate native Americans', you could mock him for a credulous fool who believes Satan will shove a pitchfork up his arse in Hell for all eternity just because he refused to follow Christ's gospel. Incidentally, that dude was a carpenter's son. And Jewish. Those guys are so stupid they don't get that pork sausages are delicious.
So that’s when myth, this fairly specific literary genre, also came to double as an ever-expanding philosophical concept representing a deeper, more elusive form of thought.
I suppose Prof Keun is thinking of 'thought experiments'. Imagine a body which looks human but is actually a clockwork mechanism of incredible sophistication. It may do and say everything a human might do and say. But would it have consciousness?
On the other hand, Liebniz's 'little fable' at the end of his book on Theodicy gives us a more interesting notion of myth. The thing is a model belonging to a sequence of models which more and more closely approach reality. This is useful because of what model theorist's call a 'transfer principle' but which corresponds to a principle of continuity such that what works for the finite might also work for infinities.
In other words, most people of average intellectual development would, like me, see the Enlightenment view of myth as being model theoretic or having an affinity with modal logic. Keun goes in a different direction. But it is elusive, not to say delusive. I don't think she has actually managed to get anywhere at all. She is just grokking myth and grokking Enlightenment in between babbling about Nazis and Native Americans and anything else which comes into her head.
The early-20th century was another important inflection point for this expanded conception of myth.
Why? Surely one reason was the rise of 'Scientific Racism' and 'Aryan' nonsense which sought to cut the Church down to size because it didn't get that Christ hated niggers and kikes and wogs and chinkies and everybody who wasn't WASP and male or, at the very least, Teutonic and Lutheran and didn't have a vagina.
On the other hand, you'd had dudes like Gladstone trying to show Homer was connected to the Bible and Max Mueller who had shown that everything including himself was a solar myth. Basically, the nutters had taken over the funny farm by then. You could write any shite and say that some remote Amazonian tribe didn't have a concept of Time or a sense of personal identity. Also they had lots and lots of really kinky sex.
On the one hand, you had the first anthropologists compiling the myths of various indigenous cultures in South America, sub-Saharan Africa, Australasia, and the Pacific. Early anthropologists studied these myths on the assumption that they held the key to understanding a distinctly pre-modern worldview. Studies of myth from this period had just unbelievable titles, like Les fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieure and La mentalité primitive. Myth, for their authors, meant an entire way of thinking, distinct from how modern people thought. A simplified version of this approach might say that myth was to non-modern societies what science is for modern societies. One of the pioneering anthropologists, E.B. Tylor, certainly thought this. And an equivalent contrast enters philosophical discourse in the mid-20th century with Karl Popper, who conceived of myth as the opposite of science.
During the First World war lots of English speaking philosophers explained why the German mind was so utterly fucked that Germany was bound to lose the War and then just fucking starve to death. They soon felt rather ashamed of themselves. What happened next was that the German mind suddenly went completely fucking bonkers. Frege was as nasty as any Nazi. Defeat and hyperinflation can do that to you. Myths don't matter. Money does.
Popper's big point was that teleology and essentialism represent both the singular attraction and the spectacular stupidity of non-falsifiable research projects. What he didn't get is that only verification matters. We don't care what sort of stuff is within a black box. Does the thing work? There would have been no need for Popper had some Tarski type simply taken up and developed Pierce's pragmatism. But the Americans were so pragmatic they didn't need pragmatism. Indeed, they were prepared to pay good money to import Viennese psychoanalysts and Indian Swamis and Continental psilosophers and every other type of charlatan.
But to jump back to the early-20th century, there was also a psychoanalytic tradition that ended up pushing conceptualizations of myth in a different direction.
This followed directly from the notion of 'abreaction'- i.e. acting out or talking out a trauma- and its roots in the Aristotelian notion of catharsis. Naturally, since Freud was using the same Greek myths as Sophocles- i.e. Oedipus, Electra etc- Psychoanalysis displayed the characteristic of a sect of 'initiates'. However, they had to make a living in a crowded market-place and thus quickly got round to telling healthy people they could benefit from bogus treatment. They might also scold or bully their patient, but there was always the risk they'd take their business elsewhere. Sadly, insurers wouldn't pay for this shite so 'neurosis' has disappeared from the diagnostic handbook. Also you can't charge money for curing homosexuality any more. Sad.
Freud drew a parallel between the totemic belief systems of myth-rich cultures
Freud came from a 'myth-rich' culture. That's why he had to emigrate to London.
and the mind of the adolescent (as well as the neurotic patient).
and the mind of the credulous sucker.
According to this approach, myth represented an adolescent stage in civilizational progress, just as it gave expression to the kinds of psychosexual hangups we experience as children (and are supposed to grow out of).
Are we? My reaction to Arsulla Undress is pretty much the same as it was when I was 5 and first set eyes on her in a poster for Dr. No. If I grow out of that, just shoot me.
Freud conceptualized myths as the expressed forms of forbidden desires that modern individuals secretly shared with people in tribal societies: the ancient Greeks had their Oedipus myth, and we moderns have our Oedipus complexes. The idea that mythic desires and models lurk in our unconscious minds gets a much more palatable spin by Freud’s disciple Carl Jung — and much later by neo-Jungians like Joseph Campbell, who made an influential PBS series in the 1980s that I often get asked about. But now I’ve definitely gone on for too long!
I think Haekel's notion of ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny was at the bottom of this. There was a Freudian theory of History in the Seventies. One of its propounders- Christopher Badcock- gave it up for something more Sciencey- viz. Baron Cohen's notion of a spectrum between 'European' autistic and 'Black' schizophrenics.
Could you also flesh out where, at present, political and philosophical inquiry might most confuse itself by treating today’s “deep myths” as the modern equivalent of ancient literary myths — as well as where contemporary examinations of deep myth and literary myth can in fact shed light on each other?
Right, in this book I try to differentiate the narrow, literary meaning of myth from this more elusive, contemporary idea of a template framework for imagining aspects of our world in a certain way. Just to give one quick example, when we use a phrase like “the myth of the artistic genius,” we’re talking about a very thick conventional framework for how society tends to imagine a figure like this: what kinds of personalities they have, what kinds of interpersonal relationships they have, even what their life stories look like.
Society is not unitary. Tastes are no longer culturally defined. By 'artistic genius' I understand 'extraordinarily prolific and at times highly innovative' people working in the arts. But my favorite Hindustani Classical musicians are likely to live very disciplined lives characterized by eusebia and 'plain living, high thinking'. By contrast, a Western pop star might have a very troubled life- e.g. Amy Whitehouse. But I understand this is because of the great difference in milieu. A young person living in London is more likely to end up in rehab whereas a similar young person in Bangalore is more likely to end up married and with a job in BPO and, over the course of time, a deepening connection to a particular Ashram or spiritual practice. I don't say one way of life is better than another. But the London life-style is backed up by an advanced welfare safety network and a pretty good National Health Service.
For the sake of simplicity, I’ve called such meanings “deep myths,” in contrast to the traditional genre of “literary myths.” Certain scholars of myth find this distinction artificial, and I respect that. But I think it’s still an instructive move to make, because it helps for distinguishing between a literary genre and a tremendously broad spectrum of cultural phenomena all lumped into this concept of “myth.”
I think she is talking of stereotypes.
This distinction helps us appreciate the historical contingency of how “myth” came to be such a conceptually bloated category.
It is clear that the thing happened because stupid people were babbling nonsense.
That historical sense helps us raise the exact questions you’ve just asked me: what do we gain from calling these things myths, and where does this categorization fail us?
What we gain is a way of acknowledging the narrative, symbolically fraught, and otherwise figurative elements of our own worldviews.
Why not acknowledge we don't have a worldview? Shite like that we can outsource. Thus if you ask me what I think about what's happening in Trinistra, I say- 'how dare you! I'm a proud Hindu man! That you can even ask such a question shows your utter ignorance of the Saundarya Lahari of Adi Sankara!' You then say something like 'So you agree with Swami Tattiananda that the Trinistra atrocity must be condemned?' I reply 'I don't agree to shit till I get paid double whatever that Swami was given.' Still, I now have a view about Trinistra- even though it does not exist.
We have these imaginative frameworks that help orient our understanding of our world and our place in it,
and then realize they are useless. Currently I care about Ukraine. But if I can't heat my house this winter I will become actively hostile to its heroic people.
and these frameworks might not always translate well into conventionally rational language.
Because they don't matter. Things which have no survival value wither and die. This lady has to pretend her shite is a magic charm against Hitler or Trump or some such shite. But it isn't really.
But this doesn’t mean that these frameworks fail to have an important influence on our thinking.
Only if we are as stupid as shit. There aren't many jobs where 'worldviews' can influence your thinking without your getting the sack.
Where I think we do ourselves a disservice by conflating “literary myths” with “deep myths” goes back to this Enlightenment narrative we’ve inherited that myths are what our ancestors had (and what people in “less advanced” societies have) in their cultures.
There was no such 'Enlightenment narrative'. Back then Europeans though the Chinese and the Koreans and so on were rational and had organized their society in a highly intelligent and humane manner. Even the savage was assumed to be 'noble'. The Patagonians might not wear hats but they were physically fit and thrived in a harsh environment.
When we internalize that narrative, we are primed to be dismissive of the myth-like phenomena in contemporary culture, and to treat them as a form of thinking we should have outgrown already.
Barthes's Mythologies came out in 1957. That type of semiotic exploration became quite complex. McLuhan and Eco reached a popular audience with their books. My memory is that even J.B Priestley got onto that bandwagon. The problem was that every cub-journalist could turn out reams of that stuff by the time I was 17. You had to be genuinely mad or evil in order to do that stuff without being utterly banal. Alternatively, you could be Pico Iyer. But Iyer went to Eton.
Here could you sketch a broader spectrum of contemporary perspectives on what we should do with myth — stretching, say, from an imperative dismantling of any cultural power that myth still possesses,
i.e. telling white men that they don't got no dicks and no money and no power and haven't ever invented anything. By pretending otherwise, they are only making themselves look foolish. Everyone knows that George Washington was a disabled lesbian goat of color. So was Albert Einstein. If you've got a dick and aint a darkie you should just fuck off and die already. Nobody likes you- not even your Mummy. She told me you smell bad and she hates kissing you. As for your daddy- he is actually the milkman.
to an embrace of myth as a vital (more or less inevitable) imaginative framework for thriving human communities?
i.e. pretending George Washington was a lesbian goat and we all attain goathood when we fist ourselves vigorously as part of an ayahuasca ceremony conducted by a genuine shaman from Luton.
And where along such a spectrum might you find traction for qualified valuations of myth as a collective conceptual tissue resistant to certain forms of critical scrutiny, yet still conducive to modern civilizational aspirations?
Personally, I'd draw the line at the vigorous fisting part. Also, I've heard ayahuasca makes you hurl. But I'm cool with Washington being a lesbian goat.
The Enlightenment narrative we’ve been discussing still informs a pretty standard view of myth in the liberal tradition. This is the view that myths are irrational phenomena that we don’t want in society, that we should get rid of.
For the low low price of 85 dollars a month you too could become a member of Richard Dawkin's merry band. But to join the 'Evolution Circle' you need to pony up 100,000 dollars a year. That's still a bargain compared to the 'Magic of Reality' circle which costs a cool half a mill per annum.
One approach to eliminating myths involves simply ignoring them, either because they’re not especially serious, or because engaging them risks activating further irrationality.
i.e. don't make jokes about the Prophet of a certain Religion because... urm... that could seriously piss off some very dangerous dudes.
Another way of getting rid of myths is to take them seriously, but to try to dismantle them through facts and reasoned arguments.
Sadly, this requires knowledge and intelligence.
By contrast, there’s an alternative, largely “continental” tradition of thinking about myths as a more or less permanent fixture of society — as phenomena here to stay, which don’t just vanish when presented with arguments.
Like migrants. Like me. Fuck. What if the Ukraine war ends with Benoist and Durgin's ideological triumph?
Theorists coming from this perspective don’t offer easy solutions for how to deal with myths, certainly nothing as clear cut as “Ignore them” or “Debunk them with facts.” Most basically, this approach would advise us to find ways of living with a reality in which myths infiltrate our lives and our thinking. There’s certainly much work to be done filling out the details of what this incorporation of myth might look like.
We know, or fear we know, how it will end- Kyiv being bombed though the Azov Battalion kills some Russian Generals.
But at least for me, this is the more compelling vision. On the one hand, we’ve seen a lot of discussion lately about how reasoning against myths just doesn’t seem to work. On the other hand, we also see a dizzying variety of fields focusing on the importance of narratives and storytelling. Just the other day, I found myself reading an article about “narrative medicine”! So my own position is that we should try to appreciate and to work with the unique figurative dimensions of myths.
Even this author thinks 'narrative medicine' is stoooopid. But that is where Continental philosophy gets you- stooopid town. Some senior French philosophers have gone gaga over Divya Dwiwedi's discovery that Hinduism was invented in 1915!
Alan Moore works with 'the unique figurative dimensions of myths'. But philosophy books nowadays are written by people not smart enough to work in comic books or even lower types of junk fiction.
In your book’s account, Plato’s ever-evolving intellectual reputation crystallizes this diverse range of responses to myth — with, over the past 2400 years, various readers detecting in Plato’s mythic evocations a worldview to embrace as doctrine, or a murky cultural inheritance for philosophy to overcome, or a dangerous proto-totalitarian precedent to resist.
That's the stupid part of Plato. Discussing it proved useless. By contrast, Mathematical Platonism is still going strong though the challenges it has faced have come from very smart people. Recently a computer proved wrong Godel's proof of God. But that proof could be repaired- indeed should be repaired- because the proof checking throws up valuable insights. Put another way, Maths keeps attracting brighter and brighter people and the 'returns' to pure math keep increasing. Philosophy has gone down the toilet. It can only babble about Nazism and join a ayahuasca ceremony presided over by a shaman from Luton.
And in present-day academic contexts, Plato’s legacy might get celebrated, strangely enough, for its “methodological purification,” for “decoupling philosophy from the uncritical mode of thought particular to myths.”
Actually, it is Category theory which is doing the heavy lifting here. We see that 'naturality' or 'non-arbitrariness' is associated with 'universal properties' such that adjoint functors show duality and this gets linked to optimization problems. More may be possible. The Platonic 'palinode'- i.e. an intensional phase shift within an extensional class- may be mathematically representable. William Lawvere may be right. Perhaps there is a way to show that Hegel and Plato weren't shitting higher than their arseholes. Leibniz definitely wasn't- but you have to be quite smart to read him with any profit.
But could we turn to the Republic’s Myth of Metals, and consider some challenges it poses to depictions of Plato as divinely inspired, or as divorcing rational logos from pre-rational mythos, or as cynically deploying myth to naturalize existing social hierarchies? How instead might you situate this particular myth amid the Republic’s broader political vision?
Plato was arguing that his Academy was useful to the Polis and should get state support the way fucking Sophocles got money for his horrible plays. This lady too is saying 'fund my shit. It will keep Nazi werewolves at bay'. Even Socioproctology has its hands out for Public money. I propose that terrorists be forced to read the collected volumes of all my worthless books. I bet they will soon find ways to top themselves thus sparing us a lot of expense.
Of all the myths Plato wrote, the Myth of Metals (or the “Noble Lie”) is probably the one people tend to have the greatest problem with. Karl Popper, for instance, hated this myth. He actually described it as a direct antecedent to Nazi “Blood and soil.” For Popper, the very fact that Plato appropriated the resources of myth for political purposes was in and of itself objectionable, an affront to the ideals of an open society — and, indeed, an act that seems very much in tension with this reverent portrait we have of Plato as the champion of a rationalized way of doing philosophy.
But mathematical logic did burgeon till a point came where we could see why philosophy was shit except in so far as it was a displacement activity for mathematicians such that insights got 'dammed up' as capacitance diversity such that at a later point they might turn into theorems and lemmas.
I don’t want to deny that this myth helps set up an inegalitarian political structure in the city the Republic envisions.
But that myth didn't actually help set up shit. It may have justified existing inequality. It may have prescribed yet more inequality. But it didn't change anything at all.
But I also don’t consider that point the most interesting takeaway from this myth.
The Myth of Metals penetrates deep down into our conceptualization of individual nature, and then tries to write over that concept. If you read the myth closely, you find that its central task is to convince the citizens of the kallipolis that their true natures consist in traits and characteristics they’ve acquired through a basic education in music and gymnastics — the first rung of this city’s educational curriculum. That is, the myth tries to displace any notion people might have about their individual nature as an enduring set of traits predetermined at birth and carried throughout their lives. The Republic takes all this language of gestation and birth and applies it not to the moment of a citizen’s biological birth, but to the moment they have completed this preliminary phase of education.
This is perfectly sensible. It is only through education and training that you discover you can't be a Doctor like Dad or a prostitute like Mum because you are stupid and ugly. You'll have to accept whatever station in life your slender talents can secure you.
The trouble is that the Price equation militates for a correlated equilibrium where financial wealth can be turned into 'human capital' in a manner such that status is heritable and thus the defect of one 'link in the chain' doesn't bring down the entire lineage. Sadly, foreign invasions could destroy this 'human capital'. A low born guy who managed to acquire some Greek paideia might rise up in the household of a wealthy Roman whereas an aristocratic wastrel ends up as a galley-slave. Education can matter a good deal. That is why people of refugee backgrounds often acquire more credentials than average. You never know when you may have to up-sticks and start again.
And what’s especially fascinating about this move is that Plato repeats it two more times in the Republic. At the next juncture in the educational curriculum of the kallipolis, Socrates revisits this question of what an individual’s nature consists in, by offering the famous Allegory of the Cave. In this story, Socrates ends up once again writing over the concept of nature that he had revised just three books ago. Now we are told that the traits individuals discover about themselves through a philosophical education in dialectic were their true natures all along. And on my reading, something analogous happens in the Myth of Er as well.
This is the testimony of a guy who died but didn't drink the waters of Lethe and thus retained memories of the after-life when he was resuscitated. Thanks to modern medicine, we now have plenty of such accounts of tunnels of light etc.
My point is that the Myth of Metals has to be read as the myth that gets this whole chain going.
Why? It isn't particularly interesting. Man may have been formed from clay and, okay, some clay is rich in gold while other clay might have more lead, but it is obvious that people have different traits and, depending on circumstances, some may be more useful now and some may be more useful under a different contingency.
In the broadest sense, it sets up a philosophical inquiry into the relationship between nature and education, an inquiry that Plato keeps developing across these three myths.
But it doesn't get very far because there wasn't much educational material around back then. You teach the kids to sing and dance and swim and run and recite Homer and maybe compose an oration or a poem and then you've run out of stuff to teach them. There wasn't enough maths and chemistry and so forth to keep up the charade for very long. Anyway, a smart kid- like Alexander- might march off and conquer half the world by the age of 30. But so might an illiterate kid.
Pivoting then to a broader literary/philosophical/political legacy of authors engaging and emulating Plato’s mode of myth-writing, how might you see, say, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s Enlightenment-era Petite Fable “reconciling the disconcerting gap between what is theoretically intelligible and what is practically knowable”?
The 'little fable' has to do with a guy who is told he is destined to do evil who doesn't get why it is his fault if he does that evil. The answer is obvious. He could do something different. The future isn't fixed if people, forewarned or acting out of an abundance of caution, refrain from what they might otherwise do. What is 'theoretically intelligible' is the possible states of the world. What is knowable is only what actually transpires. Obviously, theories can get more and more 'fine-grained' and become better and better 'simulations' of reality. We might say there is a partial order over 'theoretically intelligible' models such that they converge to reality. On the one hand, a stochastic integral helps us calculate probabilities to improve decision making- which is why models will get better if resources are available for such research. On the other hand, Liebniz- an irenic and ecumenical Christian- is making an assertion about the goodness or justice of God. It is that God chooses the best of possible worlds under perfectly rational constraints. One way this could happen is 'Occassionalism'- i.e. God is the only efficient cause. Another is that we can adjust our idea of God as our information set expands and we see that any inactivity on God's part might give rise to a greater good than his performing a miracle. Something similar could be said of the Justice system. 'Hard cases make bad laws'. We may want to hang a rapist but may have to let the fellow off on a legal technicality. There is a greater benefit in our country being known for its scrupulous observance of the letter of the law though there is an undoubted psychic cost for the population which observes a horrible man walking free.
Liebniz wrote another book about the story of a female Pope at this very time. The point he is making about fables is that they may be 'compossible' with reality but nevertheless not actually appear in the 'just order of time'. There's a 'sexual politics' angle to this which, thankfully, our lady Professor does not play up.
How might Leibniz’s vivid break here from his Theodicy’s more abstruse argumentative mode help establish some bounds to an active, progressive, emancipatory human reason’s striving (itself forever imperfect, incomplete) towards perfect knowledge?
I suppose we might say that emancipatory 'myths'- e.g. George Washington was a disabled lesbian goat- could give way to something better yet- e.g being nice to goats and disabled people and pretending lesbians aren't boring and so on and so forth. We can all be the change we desire to see in the world. I myself have decided to marry Queen Elizabeth (now Prince Phillip is out of the way) so as to become the first disabled lesbian goat of color in the British Royal Family. Daddy always said I'd end up a big fat Queen.
I believe the Petite Fable at the end of Leibniz’s Theodicy was modeled after the Myth of Er at the end of Plato’s Republic.
Or the dream of Scipio etc. Leibniz was frighteningly well read. But he was also good at Math. That's why he is still relevant.
Both are eschatological myths about the harmony of the cosmos, placed at the very end of a philosophical treatise on justice. Leibniz even went out of his way to give his broader treatise this fancy Hellenizing title, Theodicy (from theos and dike, the justice of God).
Liebniz's motivation was always to find orderings on logical truths but his notion of the derivative is not that it is a limit. Rather, what is approached is a metaxy- a middle ground- this is the barzakh of the Muslims and the antarabhava of the Hindus or the bardo of the Buddhists. There is a 'chorismos'- a gap- between what is perfect and what exists but the nature of that gap is not necessarily negative. It may be imaginal. It may be spiritual or Swedenborgian. Indeed, there is room for a vitalism here which accords well with an essentially agnostic mysticism. The appeal here is that of an irenic ecumenicism which is undulatingly sunlit and dappled with easeful shade.
Like Plato’s myth, the Petite Fable is a philosophical myth carefully constructed to make a philosophical point — not just to rehash in a more rhetorically flashy way a philosophical argument that’s already been made, but to actually convey something deeper and more distinctive.
What is that?
In this case, Leibniz uses myth to draw our attention to a more foundational framing narrative that we must subscribe to in order to move forward with philosophy.
There is no such narrative.
The framing narrative is his doctrine of theodicy, that a perfectly rational God chose to create “the best of all possible worlds.”
That is an assertion. It isn't a narrative. Anyway, an immanent God not different from the world could have made a perfect world rather than a 'best possible' world where he himself was a deus absconditus. But maybe that doesn't matter. Imaginatively, God is immanent- for you.
But bound up in that framing narrative is this thick, imaginatively fleshed-out mythic vision of a universe that is supposed to make sense, so that we don’t have to actively question it all the time.
No. The book is an erudite and elegantly written disputation with another exceedingly erudite scholar- that too a native Frenchman.
Leibniz shows that to maximize 'first order' good there must be a restriction on 'second order' good. This means that God shouldn't change the will of a person if that will could achieve the first order good equally well on its own. This is in keeping with the book's argument for parsimony in the number of principles appealed to. Ad hoc adding to their number is inelegant and soon becomes ridiculous.
Theodore is a guy who wonders why Jove doesn't give the bad dude a good character. Jove sends him to Athena who shows him
'the palace of the fates, where I keep watch and ward. Here are representations not only of that which happens but also of all that which is possible. Jupiter, having surveyed them before the beginning of the existing world, classified the possibilities into worlds, and chose the best of all. He comes sometimes to visit these places, to enjoy the pleasure of recapitulating things and of renewing his own choice, which cannot fail to please him. I have only to speak, and we shall see a whole world that my father might have produced, wherein will be represented anything that can be asked of him; and in this way one may know also what would happen if any particular possibility should attain unto existence. And whenever the conditions are not determinate enough, there will be as many such worlds differing from one another as one shall wish, which will answer differently the same question, in as many ways as possible. You learnt geometry in your youth, like all well-instructed Greeks. You know therefore that when the conditions of a required point do not sufficiently determine it, and there is an infinite number of them, they all fall into what the geometricians call a locus, and this locus at least (which is often a line) will be determinate. Thus you can picture to yourself an ordered succession of worlds, which shall contain each and every one the case that is in question, and shall vary its circumstances and its consequences. But if you put a case that differs from the actual world only in one single definite thing and in its results, a certain one of those determinate worlds will answer you.
The notion of a locus- in particular the connectedness locus- became more interesting from the Seventies onwards for more and more ordinary people. On the one hand we might say if a thing is 'fractal' then it is 'law-like' even if the appearance is 'natural'. On the other it takes us to Yoneda's lemma in category theory and thus to questions of optimality. I suppose there are clever people who have written about this aspect of the petty fable. But Prof. Keum isn't one of them. Sad.
Critical reason, as conceived by Leibniz and his Enlightenment contemporaries, is incredibly powerful, but can also be indiscriminately corrosive.
This was Bayle's point- It [reason] is a guide that leads one astray; and philosophy can be compared to some powders that are so corrosive that, after they have eaten away the infected flesh of a wound, they then devour the living flesh, rot the bones, and penetrate to the very marrow. Philosophy at first refutes errors. But if it is not stopped at this point, it goes on to attack truths. And when it is left on its own, it goes so far that it no longer knows where it is and can find no stopping place
Leibniz wanted to commit to the premise that nothing in the universe is categorically closed to human knowledge, that if we apply our critical faculties of reason with the right amount of persistence, we can, in theory, eventually figure anything out. That’s what I mean by Leibniz taking the world to be theoretically intelligible. But practically, if we let our reason loose on anything and everything all at once, that would be extremely disorienting and unsatisfying — if not actually destabilizing on an existential register. For Leibniz, there ends up being a gap between what is theoretically intelligible in the world, and what is practically knowable in it.
But that's coz God chose to be distinct from Creation.
So Leibniz needs something to frame this project of philosophy, something that tells us it’s okay to suspend our critical-reasoning faculties from time to time.
But Leibniz wasn't really framing the project of philosophy or that of belles lettres (though he was an able poet). He was trying to do something useful in the political and religious sphere- viz. achieve European peace and a reconciliation between Christian sects- and was actually doing very useful things in math and science.
Athena tells the priest Theodorus (who had wondered why Jove had not given Sextus a virtuous will)
'my father did not make Sextus wicked; he was so from all eternity, he was so always and freely. My father only granted him the existence which his wisdom could not refuse to the world where he is included: he made him pass from the region of the possible to that of the actual beings. The crime of Sextus serves for great things: it renders Rome free; thence will arise a great empire, which will show noble examples to mankind. But that is nothing in comparison with the worth of this whole world, at whose beauty you will marvel, when, after a happy passage from this mortal state to another and better one, the Gods shall have fitted you to know it.'Leibniz’s particular solution to this problem is to suggest that a rational God has done our thinking for us already, so we can trust that the things we know and the things we don’t yet know all fit into a coherent whole.
No. Like Sextus we have to do our own thinking and acting (at least in this context). We can trust knowledge based on 'simple intelligence' will 'fit together' because that's how the maths was working out for Leibniz and Newton and so forth.
And the concrete vision of Leibniz’s Petite Fable allows us to appreciate where this framing narrative is coming from: why a story like this is necessary, but also how this story remains a provisional solution to an enduring problem built into the human condition.
This is nonsense. Nobody believed in Athena or Jove back then. Most did believe in Lord Jesus Christ though there was some doubt as to how much authority he had placed in the hands of his Vicar on Earth. I think what stands out in Leibniz's work is the elegance of his French and his vast literary knowledge. But it is because he can bring in a bit of maths- the sort of maths which might predict a comet and thus rid Society of superstitious fears in that regard- that he can hold our attention. True, we now have all sorts of mathematical reasons for being less sanguine than Liebniz- unless we actually are smart mathematicians and can see a way to something better even than 'univalent foundations'- but that has nothing to do with 'narratives' or stories about Gods and Demons or Xena the Warrior Princess.
What does engagement with Platonic mythic traditions then have to do with reconceiving German Idealism as a fulcrum for broader human flourishing, dynamically blending community-minded rational/ethical concerns with poetic/spiritual quests for personal freedom? What might it mean to see this Idealist project (at least as formulated in the “Oldest Systematic Program”)
a manuscript penned by Hegel but which might be the work of Holderlin or Schelling or some other such adolescent. It's about Beauty and Lurve and Poetry making the State really nicey nice.
neither as an apolitical aesthetic movement, nor as some “philosophically bereft antecedent to the totalitarian politics of the Third Reich,” but as a reinvention of the Republic’s isomorphic, mutually enhancing interplay between polis and soul?
It was published in 1917, when the Kaiser was still around. The Weimar Republic was a Ponzi scheme based on borrowing more than was being repaid in reparations. It collapsed when Wall Street crashed- though this was not immediately obvious because the Germans were as thick as shit as was everybody else when it came to that country.
The German Idealists I look at in the book were developing the theoretical foundations for what they conceived of as “a new mythology” for the modern age.
Those poor bastards were struggling to get jobs as pedants. They weren't creating Sherlock Holmes or Batman or Dracula. Still, there can be no question that some German pedants were extraordinarily industrious. Look at Hermann Grassmann. He translated the Rg Veda and originated the field of linear algebra. Yet he never got a university post. It was hard work of this sort which raised up Germany. Stupid psilosophers babbling nonsense held it back.
This project often gets dismissed in the ways you mention, but I consider it an extraordinary work of political theory. These German Idealists (Friedrich Schlegel, Friedrich Schelling, Hölderlin, Novalis, and the unknown author of this document called the “Oldest Systematic Program of German Idealism”) diagnosed what they regarded as a pressing problem in modern politics. Developing a new mythology was their proposed solution to that problem.
But the thing was already old hat. Ossian fooled many but it turned out to be a forgery. Then the real thing came along and it was even more dire. Still, you can't blame a bunch of adolescents who will either go mad or lead pedantic lives of extreme tedium for daring to dream a little.
Briefly, they felt that the conditions of modernity
from which they were excluded because Germany was a backward shithole.
forced an unnatural dichotomy between the spiritual and creative freedom of individuals,
they couldn't get well paid jobs and thus get to marry their sweethearts whereas young Englishmen and Scotsmen and some Frenchmen and a fair numbers of Dutch people and almost all Americans could do so without fear of losing caste.
and the kinds of political community made possible in a modern state organized around rational laws.
Something severely missing in Germany though, admittedly, things had improved a little in Wurrtemberg since the days of Jew Suss. Still, the Duke could throw you in jail if you pointed out he was the fattest fucking fairy the world had ever known.
A new mythology could help bridge this dichotomy, by offering a shared imaginative vocabulary linking together the creative pursuits of individual artists — and, in turn, a communal project that these individual artists contribute to through their work.
The artists could definitely protect the country from Napoleon or the Tzar or just a bunch of marauding peasants who decided they'd had enough of Dukes and Bishops.
This vision was also heavily shaped by a distinctive understanding the German Idealists had of how knowledge unfolds in history.
is it through Beauty, Peace and Lurve?
They really did think of myth as a medium that could open up new ways of knowing, a medium that could extend the accomplishments of modern philosophy, so that it can start tapping forms of knowledge which don’t typically get captured by the toolkits of conscious reason.
Very true. You must use unconscious passion to learn to levitate and thus emanate 'peace rays'. Also astral projection is way cooler than tele-commuting. You can now get a D.Phil in Astral Levitation for the low low price of $ 3.99. Buy a few for your friends. Also your cat. Then you can call her Dr. Snookums.
As you point out, the German Idealists also had their own version of the city-soul analogy. Like Plato, they believed that one part of the soul is more responsive to reason, and one part of the soul is more responsive to poetry,
and another part of the soul just wants to get laid
and that corresponding classes of people exist in society with more developed philosophical faculties, or with stronger emotional and aesthetic drives.
or magical koochies.
But the German Idealists took this analogy in a different direction. Plato’s vision of a well-ordered soul and a well-ordered city relied on hierarchical rule, with the reasoning part ruling over the other parts in a harmonious relationship. The German Idealists, by contrast, envisioned everyone having well-rounded souls, with both the philosophical and aesthetic faculties fully developed.
and big big knockers
They thought that new mythology, in particular, could help achieve this corresponding change in society, with the “rational” philosophers meeting the “sensuous” people halfway.
Also, everybody would get a lot of sex and free sausages and full tenure at a University of your choice.
Finally then, how might this book’s much more textured conception of Plato’s foundational undertakings (beyond some supposedly decisive turning of one’s back on myth) point towards your concluding case that “literary experimentation with the genre of myth was more prevalent in the Western philosophical tradition than commonly recognized”?
But philosophers were constantly publishing shitty novels or poems or whatever. Anybody can tell stories. But Sciencey guys- like H.G. Wells- were better at it than philosophical shitheads.
How, in turn, might this recognition unlock potential for a broadly reconceived study of the enduring prospects for constructive, visionary, inclusive (and of course ever-provisional) mythmaking — a field “that promises to be a fertile ground for better understanding an array of cultural phenomenon that often elude our attention and analysis”? And how may practitioners of this field themselves actively participate within the Platonic mythic tradition?
Attend an ayahuasca ceremony presided over by genuine shaman from Luton while vigorously fisting yourself and denouncing White males for having dicks and not being bleck. Also keep telling stories about how George Washington, as a lesbian goat of color, forged alliances with gay Korean dragons protesting against institutionalized origami.
In different ways, the protagonists of my book were writing (or in the German Idealist case, trying to write) philosophical myths somehow modeled after Plato’s myths.
Coz Cicero had done so and back then everybody thought he was one smart dude.
They noticed that Plato used myth for philosophically constructive purposes in his writings, and they, too, experimented with the genre. The fact that they did this is more surprising in certain cases (Leibniz and Ernst Cassirer) than in others (Thomas More, some of the German Idealists). But it’s worth taking stock of the fact that there was this distinct tradition of philosophical myth-writing — in a discipline that often has been conceived as the very opposite of myth.
In the sense that shit is the opposite of myth- sure. Why not mention that the Muslims too sometimes wrote Platonic myths? Indeed, this directly affected the European tradition. It has been suggested that the Arabs gave a higher place to narratives and this was transmitted to Europe through Islamic Spain etc.
This might just be one particular glimpse into the formal vibrancy of philosophical writing.
I think, for English speakers, the test would be whether Bertrand Russell's 'Satan in the Suburbs' is 'vibrant'. Russell, of course was a scholar of Leibniz and his theme appears the opposite of Leibnizian. Similarly his 'Mathematician's nightmare' disposes of Plato. But are either of these works any good? Russell had a fine literary style. He understood many more things about mathematics and physics and politics and economics and the great personalities of his day than most professional philosophers. But, his 'myth-writing' made little impression though his fame (thanks to CND) continued to grow.
I suppose the honest answer to the question is myth-writing isn't helpful for philosophy. Gedanken- sure, no problem. But Russell's satire or Sartre's tedious tomes are about as philosophical as Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance. Why? No love for knowledge is evinced. All we have is arbitrary attitudinizing. The thing soon becomes shrill. Manic protestation is not mantic prosody. It is merely the literary equivalent of eating your own shit while banging your head against a wall.
But appreciating this history can help us rethink some default assumptions we tend to make about philosophy, and especially about what philosophy ought to look like.
But why rethink default assumptions unless we are actually losing something tangible?- in which case it is enough to draw our attention to that loss to motivate us to get better information.
We’re sometimes led to imagine philosophy as this rarefied discipline that is fundamentally about formulating and refuting arguments.
No we aren't. We know that stupid people can't formulate or refute arguments except in a stupid manner. Moreover, there are some 'open problems' and philosophy is only concerned with these. Since a principle of maximum uncertainty obtains we might as well have as full and comprehensive a description of alternative state of the world. Once some other discipline- physics, chemistry, etc- closes a particular question, philosophy should move on. The sad thing is that philosophy is no longer getting the memos, or has become too stupid to understand the memos, and so it keeps trundling along as a bunch of dead in the water availability cascades.
But actually, that narrow image represents neither the essence of philosophy nor its history.
Yet this philosopher feels it worthwhile to mention it. This is like the Head of Women's Studies at a University saying 'the narrow image of women as brainless sacks of meat who should be regularly raped and beaten to death represents neither the essence nor the history of Feminism as an academic discipline.'
I’m not sure if I can say what the Platonic mythic tradition’s future will look like, though I don’t doubt that it will get taken up again for as long as Plato continues to inspire philosophers.
One way of showing your work is not vacuous is by showing you can predict what will happen next. I can't say what the future of Platonic mathematics will look like because I iz as stupid as shit and Math makes my brain hurt. But I can confidently predict there will be more 'the Good Place' like myth-making dealing with the Forms of the Good and the Just and so forth. Perhaps Netflix, in desperation, will create an A.I to trawl philosophy texts for plots for such series. If so, it might flesh out an unfinished 'Nightmare' of Russell's concerning the possibility- in connection with Socrates's trial- of an absolute Injustice. The notion of 'original sin' is anathema to a Hindu like me, yet I can see that a powerful case could be made for why we must all 'participate' in a judicial act of ultimate infamy. We 'are as Gods' but must approve absolute Evil. Philip K Dick's Blade Runner has the Christ like figure of Mercer whom- I now see- we must all kill.
But staying true to the broad spirit of this tradition will entail, for a start, ensuring that philosophers are open to different styles of philosophical presentation, especially from the margins of their discipline,
why are so few lesbian goats getting tenure in Ivy League philosophy Departments?
and that they acknowledge the diverse insights we have yet to gain from unconventional forms of knowledge.
e.g insights gained from fisting oneself vigorously while tripping out on shrooms. Also how come I get marks for quoting Hegel in an essay about German philosophy but don't get marks for quoting my Aunty Hema who once lived next door to a guy who visited Germany in 1976?
This mythic tradition should also invite philosophers (and really, all of us) to take the concerns of Plato and his successors seriously, and to pay more attention to the role that imaginative elements like metaphors, narratives, symbols, and images play in politics.
Otherwise Hitler will rise from the dead and we will all be sent to the Gas Chamber.
When such forces take hold in seemingly irrational ways, we shouldn’t be too quick to dismiss them — nor should we just pick them apart with facts and reasons. We should instead be engaging them.
in what? Sex? Table tennis? Sexy table tennis? Hey, if that's what it takes to keep Zombie Hitler at bay, sure, why not? Henceforth, to get tenure we must insist that all Philosophy professors engage QAnon in sexy table tennis. Otherwise we will defund that shite Gangnam style.
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