Found some juicy reading and wished to share.
‘What is
The question is hard to answer, and it is safest to go for a
minimalist position, rather than immediately taking on board some
high-
This is a good starting-point, because it reminds us that a myth is a
story, and that myths evolve within traditional, often pre-literate
societies. Within such societies, a myth also has clear functional
relevance to some important aspect of life. But this function is not
just to help the society to perpetuate itself, as one school of
thought has it; it is to help explain and form consensus reality for
that community, and so to help make an individual’s experience of
life meaningful.
It is true that from the idea that myth explains reality it does not
follow that every attempt to explain reality is a myth, but nevertheless
it is true that all systems of belief evolve to elucidate the order of
things and to make sense of the world. In this sense, science is just as
much a myth as anything else; it is a framework or model designed to
explain and form reality for those people who accept it––that is, for
those people who voluntarily become members of that society––and
for only as long as there are enough people to accept it. If this is so,
then so far from banishing gods, science has merely been the matrix
for a new generation of scientia myth?’flown theory. Minimally, then, a myth is
a traditional tale.fic gods, children of the old gods.15One person’s
one of the eschatological myths with which he ends a few of his
dialogues, Plato has Socrates say exactly that. He says, ‘I want to tell
you a story. You may think it’s a
(
A related point is that no replacement is ever perfect, so that mythos, then,
is another person’s logos. In introducingmythos, but to me it’s a logos’Gorgias
523a).logoscan never entirely replace
is not entirely rational. However much scientism might want
to, it does not rule the world, only a little dusty corner of it. "mythos. The
world we have made for ourselves15 And the converse is also true: one could
also say that mythos is just another kind oflogos
its own. To repeat: it is important not to fall into the trap of thinking that
pre-literate
societies were irrational societies.
"So we can characterize the Presocratic revolution as a shift frommythos
because there is more overlap between the two domains than might
appear at
many scientists especially try to brush it under the carpet, each of us
is a bundle of rational and irrational impulses, and the attempt to
divorce the two is as doomed to failure as the attempt to divorce
science from mysticism in the Presocratics. In this sense the Presocratic
combination of vision and logic is a precise model for two
strands of future development in human intellectual endeavour,
which should not perhaps have been allowed to separate from each
other as far as they sometimes have. Or rather, the attempt to separate
them is ultimately unreal, a violation which leads to abominations
such as the rape of the planet and the dehumanizing loss of
imagination."
-The First Philosophers The PreSocratics and The Sophists
Robin Waterfieldto logos, if we like, but these terms need using with
caution,first sight. Although it is uncomfortable to admit it, and
.. The logic of myth is not Aristotelian logic, but it does follow a peculiar
rationale of
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