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MYTH
IN CONTEMPORARY LIFE
Volume 52 No. 2 (Summer 1985) Arien Mack, Editor Dore Ashton and Matti Megged, Guest Editors |
Table of Contents Notes on Contributors Ordering information
The term myth embraces certain
constructions that exist implicitly or explicitly in our intellectual and
emotional life,
namely, those which enable
us to connect in a teleological way the conditioned and changeable ingredients
of our
experience by relying upon
unconditioned entities like existence, truth, value...The meaning of the
term myth is derived
from the view that ancient
religious mythologies are but another version, or historical manifestation,
of a phenomenon
that we may grasp through
a more rudimentary characterization. Also, that there is an essential
functional communion
between these mythologies
and other modes of creativity that we may find even in our modern civilization,
in all the
forms of human communication:
in intellectual activities, in artistic creativity, in language, in morality,
in hope and love...
These words, from Leszek Kolakowski's The Presence of Myth (1970), may serve as the key for the conference that took place in October 1984 at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research and the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, where more than thirty writers, artists, philosophers, and scholars gathered.
Not all of the participants accepted Kolakowski's positive definitions or agreed with his attitude toward myth. Some of them doubted the possibility of defining myth, which is "non-theoretical in its very meaning and essence." as Cassirer said in his Essay on Man; many who tried to give their own definitions of myth expressed their skepticism about the positive role of myth in modern times. Yet all of them admitted the presence of myth and its appeal in contemporary life. All of them dealt with the need for myth, be it a stimulant for creativity or a dangerous and even false source for culture and politics, for conceptualization of the world.
According to all the participants in the conference, myth has never disappeared or been eliminated from culture, not even from those areas of Western culture that were or are consciously antimythological.
One may argue, then, that myth in our times is a recidivist phenomenon reflecting the primitive manifestation of culture, and that it should be rejected and disappear. Or that myth is rather a legitimate member of the family of philosophical and political thought, of art, of human aspirations. But even taking into consideration the various, and often opposing, opinions about the presence of myth, no one can or did deny that some basic human needs may be satisfied through and by myths.
The attempts to define myth, or even the need for myth and its functions in modern times, may be confused and misleading. Myth often becomes too popular; it is used or abused for many and contradictory purposes, as some of the participants have clearly proved. It is not based anymore on sacred tradition or collective rituals. Yet, in spite of all the different attitudes, it is apparently agreed that in all epochs, including ours, and on all levels, some basic elements that motivate people in their search for myth, and in their mythopoeia, maintain their strong effect and importance, positive or negative.
Stanley Kunitz asserts that "old myths, old gods, old heroes, have never died...they represent the wisdom of our race," and he finds them in contemporary poetry, in the mythic image of the absent father. Peter Brooks, on the other side, is afraid of such mythic forms as Hitler's Master Race or Falwell's Moral Majority. Theodor Gaster describes myth as a story that links two temporal experiences: the joining of "here and now" with a continuous, enduring, and universal time. His explanation of myth as created for extending values beyond the historical present is quite close to that of Leszek Kolakowski. Timothy Clark, on the opposite side, notes, like Brooks, the connection between Nazism and the romantic myths of nature and the super race. Therefore, he considers mythmaking in the twentieth century as an alibi for barbarism. David Apter is trying to locate and identify modern myth in the context of development theory; to examine how modern mytho/logics form out of particular experiences. He talks about the state as being not only a "membership" but also a psychological structure, while Sheldon Wolin asserts that myth now occupies the status of a residual category that justifies intensive, nonrational, poetic, religious experience which occurs in a world orchestrated by "post-mythic" powers. Gianni Vattimo, after describing three attitudes toward myth that show a tendency to leave aside the problem of historicity, is looking for secularization, which means to discover, as Nietzsche said in The Gay Science, the human-all-too-human basis of the system of value, its earthly essence. But he too admits the presence of myth as an effort of modernization qua secularization; as pointing toward an overcoming of the opposition between rationalism and irrationalism. William Tucker, in response to Clark, asserts that myth has to do with human experience, which is also a painful experience, like Prometheus's punishment, and it has no place in which to embody itself, except art. It can't be explained, like the mass of rock, but it remains there.
Different opinions, different or opposite attitudes; doubts about definition of myth or its necessity--but all the papers and responses that were given at the conference have one thing in common: they all manifest the tremendous interest we have in the omnipresence of myth in our time.
One may argue that if this need was ever satisfied, even in the so-called mythical societies, or through mythical thinking. It may be that even ancient or primitive mythologies were the expression, not of the ubiquity of a presence or eternity that is entire in each of its manifestations, but rather of the feeling that this presence of the whole and meaningful permanent is missing and needs to be refound or re-created. It might be that all mythologies are derived from the basic feeling that "paradise" is lost, and that all man can do is to try to tell the story of his lost unity and eternity through art and poetry. Talking about the presence of myth in contemporary life, it is clear that the starting point of the search for myth is that of separation, of discontinuity, of the fear inspired by the lack of unity and meaningfulness. Religion, philosophy, science--at least in our times--do not provide us with certainties about the unity and meaningfulness of the world and man's existence. History, as known to us, certainly does not promise--if it ever did--progress toward the promised land.
Yet, even according to the skeptics, we cannot give up our yearning to perceive history as meaningful; or our hunger for a total and perfect unity of the universe itself and of man's place in it. We cannot give up our need to find in nature, in the universe, the roots of our self-knowledge and we still continue to attribute to nature, to history, those elements that would enable us to belong to the same order of things.
Myth is our human conceptualization invented to find the real or contrived spaces that we identify between subject and object, historical time and the eternal, between the specific and the general, or the individual and the collective. It may be, as Hide Ishiguro said, that "myth is wish that becomes belief." It may hide in our ability of understanding, through which we can hope to modify the conditions of existence.
The dangers are here, with us, following the same need: the danger of returning to a prelogical and irrational state of thinking; the danger of using myth, or the longing for myth, as a means of self-destruction, or losing individual freedom of thought and imagination, of sinking into an irrational state of collective being. As several of the participants said, the hunger to find roots in a world that is myth-oriented is easily satisfied by self-denial, for the sake of "unity" with a collective monster, or for the sake of finding a place in a world structure that is built or given by somebody else, state, or party, or charismatic figure, or utopian ideology.
On one level, at least, the means of the search for myth are identical to the goals; the motivations, to the functions. This is the level or realm of art.
Art, like ancient myth, does not try to prove its truth, explain its motivation, or justify its goals. Hence, perhaps, it is so difficult to describe and define the presence of and meaning of myth in our times by any means that are borrowed from a nonmythical sphere. Myth, like art, cannot be sought as an answer to human problems, or as a guide to the perplexed. But we do know that myth, like art, exists as a part of our experience and as an attempt to express our aspirations for a different kind of reality.
Modern man is a product of a nonmythological world, modes of thinking, ways of life. He can face myth and mythopoeia, accept them or reject them, as an integral part of his experience, without demanding from them any absolute solutions. But he cannot cease asking questions, as the conference on "The Presence of Myth in Contemporary Life"--part of which is presented in this issue--demonstrated.
Matti Megged
Guest Editor
Table of Contents
Notes on Contributors
(at time of publication)
David E. Apter is Henry J. Heinz II Professor of Comparative Political and Social Development at Yale University. His most recent book is Against the State: Politics and Social Protest in Japan (1984).
Umberto Eco Professor of Semiotics at the University of Bologna at Columbia University, is the author of the novel The Name of the Rose (1983).
Neil Harris is Professor of History at the University of Chicago.
Melvyn A. Hill is a practicing psychoanalyst in New York City. He edited Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the Public World (1979).
Hide Ishiguro Professor of Philosophy at Barnard College, is the author of Leibniz's Philosophy of Logic and Language (1972).
Matti Megged is Adjunct Professor in the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research.
Francesco Pellizzi is Associate in Middle American Ethnology at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University and Adjunct Professor of Art History at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science in New York.
Michel Perrin is a Researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and a Member of the Laboratoire d'Anthropologie Sociale of the College de France and Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. He wrote Le Chermin des Indiens morts: Mythes et symboles goajiro (1976).
Paul Z. Rotterdam an artist, is represented in public and private collections throughout the world.
Sheldon Wolin Professor of Politics and Chairman of the Graduate Political Philosophy Program at Princeton University, is the author of Politics and Vision (1960).
Gianni Vattimo is Professor of Aesthetics and Chair of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Turin.
Bruno Zevi formerly Professor of the History of Architecture at The University of Rome, is now editor of the magazine L'architettura--cronache e storia. His books include The Modern Language of Architecture (1978).
