Myth [addendum] | Research & Encyclopedia Articles

As Alasdair MacIntyre says, some philosophers have treated myth, disparagingly, as the opposite of logos, as a nonrational form of understanding the world that either has been or should be displaced by science and reason. Others have agreed that myth is the opposite of logos but have consequently valorized it as a fruit of the primordial mind, a product of an archaic form of experience or mystical consciousness that the modern scientific mind, to its detriment, has lost. There is then a range of philosophical views of the relative value of myth, but philosophers have largely agreed with Ernst Cassirer in seeing myth as a quintessential product of pretheoretical consciousness and therefore as a foil for the scientific mentality of modern European civilization. Since 1967, however, this assumption has been problematized. The concept of myth has been deconstructed, and this deconstruction represents a double obstacle for any philosopher who wants to see in myths truths about the human condition.

The first obstacle arises as scholars realize the extent to which mythical accounts of the origins of the cosmos, of the gods, or of a people have been intimately tied to the social and historical context in which they are told. Far from being the ahistorical products of the unconscious or whimsical flights of speculation—"the wonderful song of the soul's high adventure," to quote Joseph Campbell—myths have typically served to legitimate a particular social order. A clear example is the story of Purusha in the Rig Veda, a story that inscribes the divisions of the caste system as a cosmic reality rather than as a human and hence contingent arrangement. Myths are therefore partisan, not apolitical. In Bruce Lincoln's (1999) slogan myths are "ideology in narrative form." A culture will typically have more than one cosmogony, some mythical accounts of origins will seek to justify the status quo, and rival accounts will seek to undermine it. In short myths typically have a legitimating function, and this fact is concealed by traditional philosophical approaches that ignore the myths' social and historical roots.

The second obstacle arises as scholars realize the extent to which the category of myth reflects the interests of those who employ it. To identify a particular story as a myth—identifying it as the product, for example, of pretheoretical consciousness—has operated to illustrate the superiority of certain ways of thinking over other ways of thinking and, sometimes explicitly, the superiority of certain cultures over other cultures. Thus, one can see that the category of myth is ideological. From this perspective the traditional account of the emergence of mythos and its struggle with and eventual defeat by logos is itself a myth, that is, a partisan, legitimating story that modern European philosophers tell of their own origins. Myth is in this sense therefore a construction of the scholar: myths are not discovered, they are invented, and philosophers who claim to find in myths la pensée sauvage tell us more about their own worldviews than they tell us about les sauvages.

A few Continental philosophers, such as Cassirer and Hans Blumenberg, explored the idea that myths play a role in the development of consciousness, but Anglophone philosophers were not especially interested. Modern philosophers of religion (who one might think would have a natural interest in myths) have tended to focus on religious "beliefs" deracinated from the oral and literary contexts from which they were drawn. They have also tended to avoid the study of any religion that is not monotheistic. When deconstructive arguments like those mentioned earlier are added to this aversion to the concrete, the result has been that myths have been left for social scientists to study. At the beginning of the twenty-first century there is almost no philosophical work being done on myth.

But this result is not inevitable. Two observations may point to a future for the philosophical study of myths. In the first place, even when it is not a philosopher studying the myth, philosophy is still present, because answers to philosophical questions are always already embedded in the theories of myth. Social scientific approaches to myths are not philosophically neutral. They inevitably embody a particular set of normative assumptions about what is real and not real, knowable and not knowable, and good and not good, and in this way theories of myth carry certain metaphysical, epistemological, and axiological presuppositions. That the study of myths is unavoidably "philosophy-laden" is perhaps seen most easily when one looks at how the theorist answers questions about rationality, for every theory of myth assumes a judgment regarding what is and is not rational to say. For example, when the Victorian anthropologist Edward Tylor proposed that myths were rational insofar as they originated in observations about natural phenomena, his empiricism was showing.

In the second place, that some scholars pursue questions about the social or political dimensions of myths does not preclude others from asking philosophical questions about the existential, phenomenological, metaphysical, or ethical dimensions of those same narratives. That a story serves ideological ends does not rule out the possibility that it might also house truths about the human condition. To argue otherwise is to collapse the questions of provenance with those of truth, the genetic fallacy. And granting that philosophers' use of the term myth has itself been ideological, the solution is not simply to switch the focus of reflection away from the narratives and onto the way that philosophers construct categories, but to practice philosophy self-consciously, self-reflexively, and without naïveté. Philosophers who work on culture should therefore become comfortable with working with historians, anthropologists, and others who deal with the contexts in which the myths have their sense, but they need not abandon the idea that philosophy has its own contribution to make.

In short, then, a philosophical contribution to the study of myths, though now moribund, waits on an appreciation, first, of the ways in which philosophical issues are woven into the theories at work in the social sciences and, second, of the ways in which philosophers of religion or of culture might broaden their studies to include narratives. The fact is that communities often tell stories that explain how the different forms of existence were established; stories that sanction a particular interpretation of history; stories that identify paradigmatic forms of proper behavior. Such stories can provide models of the lived world and of how best to operate within it, and philosophers can analyze and evaluate the truth and the rationality of these models. It can be expected that such stories will typically have an ideological function, but coming to terms with the interpretive and explanatory work of social scientists should strengthen and not eliminate a philosophy of myths.

Cassirer, Ernest; Hermeticism; Logos; Macintyre, Alasdair.

Barbour, Ian G. Myths, Models, and Paradigms: A Comparative Study in Science and Religion. New York: Harper and Row, 1974.

Blumenberg, Hans. Work on Myth. Translated by Robert M. Wallace. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985.

Cassirer, Ernst. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Vol. 2: Mythical Thinking. Translated by Ralph Manheim. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1955.

Lincoln, Bruce. Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.

Schilbrack, Kevin, ed. Thinking through Myths: Philosophical Perspectives. London: Routledge, 2002.

This is the complete article, containing 1,196 words (approx. 4 pages at 300 words per page).