Notes for Prof. Koranda’s Curiosity Class
A.Mawell
Essential to the subject of curiosity is learning about different ways we come to know or understand things. (In the subject area of Philosophy, epistemology is the study of the ways we go about knowing things and the ways we validate what we know.)
Most often what you know and what I know is based upon:
• Your own nature (your predisposition to specific preferences for gathering information—E.g., some of us prefer to survey a situation and understand what is going on through our intuition; others prefer to survey the same situation and learn what is happening through keen observation. These are the two extreme examples…they’re others in the middle.)
The relevant question today is: in what ways is myth a way of knowing?
Anthropologists, sociologists, scientists, psychologists, social scientists, mythologists, English professors each have different ways of defining and thus questioning myth. Some of the positions taken by this variety of interested scholars are:
• It is a story.
• It is a way that primitive people made sense of their worlds.
• It is a legend of something that happened and has been elevated to the status of myth (elevation to divine status is an apotheosis). This movement from “real event to myth or legend” is called Euhemeristic, after the Greek, Euhemerist, who believed that the stories told in ancient myths had actually happened centuries before.
• Myth is an example of primordial thinking. (Primordial meaning before logic, when thinking was mythological)
• Myth is in opposition to science. Myth is unscientific.
• Myth is akin to creationism.
• Myth is supported by science. (E.g. geologic evidence of a worldwide flood during the time of Noah of Biblical fame.)
• Mythology is dead in Western civilization. It is only connected to dead religions.
Selected (by me) writers on the function of myth:
J.G. Frazer (Golden Bough), classicist, anthropologist: myth is part of primitive religion and primitive religion is part of philosophy; primitive religion is the counterpart to science, opposite science (logical conclusion, once science rules, myth will vanish)
Lucien Levy-Bruhl, French philosopher, anthropologist, and creator of the phrase, “participation mystic”: “primitive thinking is “pre-logical”; he believes that,
“ . . . All phenomena [humans, human artifacts, creatures, the natural world] is part of the impersonal sacred ‘mystic’ realm that pervades the natural realm . . .”; “Participation in this mystic reality enables phenomena to affect one another magically and to become one another—yet retain their own characteristics . . .”;
L.-Bruhl writes that this is pre-logical because it defies the law of non-contradiction—in that something can be both itself and another; participation mystic is pre-logical, not scientific, and not philosophical (not logical)
Discussion point: Shamanism (Mircea Eliade is an excellent resource if you have interest in this topic. Carlos Castanada’s book, The Teaching of Don Juan, a Yaquii Way of Knowledge is also an excellent resource.)
Bronislaw Malinowski, anthropologist: argues that primitive peoples sought to control nature with ritual when their knowledge of science ran out; they have a basic understanding of science through their intense and discerning investigation of their habitat as hunters and gatherers; myth for Malinowski is about origins of place
Discussion point: Three categories of mythologies: cosmogonic (creation of the cosmos); cosmological (creation of the culture including place, institutions, etc); and theogonic (how deities came into being or awareness). Malinowski and Mircea Eliade both focused on cosmogonic myths.
Claude Levi-Strauss, French structural anthropologist: myth may be primitive but it is also intellectual; to understand the world around them, primitive peoples proceeded with observation, developed sophisticated knowledge, refined that knowledge through trial and error; L.-Strauss considered primitive thinking “concrete” versus modern “abstract thinking”; myth is no less scientific than science; it is part of the concrete, it is the part that is available to perception and imagination; L.-Strauss suggested naming the tribal peoples he was studying “people without writing” rather than call them primitives.
Karl Popper, born in Vienna, lived in the U.K., philosopher of science: scientific theories remain myth-like for they can never be proven.
Depth Psychological Perspective:
Def. of Myth: Myths never were but always are.
Erich Neumann, Israeli psychiatrist, philosopher: an “archetype is a mythological motif”; it is the eternally present content of the collective unconscious; as such this mythic motif can appear anywhere at any time [Greece, Egypt, Tibet, North America]
• An archetype is a dynamic directing force that influences the human psyche (unconscious)
• True object of inquiry is the symbolic self-representation of the archetype that has passed through the medium of man (Great Mother, p. 13)
• Archetypes of the collective unconscious are mythological motifs and appear among all people in an identical or analogous manner and can arise spontaneously without conscious knowledge.
C.G. Jung, Swiss psychiatrist, student and colleague of Freud: “Myth is the primordial language natural to these psychic processes, and no intellectual formulation comes anywhere near the richness and expressiveness of mythical imagery. Such processes deal with primordial images and these are best and most succinctly reproduced by figurative speech.” (metaphor, imagination)
(Source: C.G. Jung, Collected Works 12, p. 25.)
Note: primordial—pre-logical; mythic symbols contain both conscious and unconscious elements (E.g., consider the “O” logo for Oregon); mythic symbols unify opposites (E.g., the symbol of the Earth, also called Gaia, contains all life-giving capacity with no moral judgment regarding predators and prey)
Discussion point: Children go through stages like early humans; perceive the world mythologically; everything animate and inanimate has “life”;
“Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” (Ontogeny, the development of the individual organism, mirrors phylogeny, the history of the development of the species.)
James Hillman, contemporary psychologist, philosopher: moves psychology out of the consulting room into the culture. Bases his theory, archetypal psychology, on C.G.Jung’s ideas, but claims that naming something archetypal allows one to use one’s imagination to explore in what ways that object/phenomena satisfies the experience of the archetype. Any image can be archetypal, when you reflect upon the phenomenon using your imagination to understand what makes the phenomenon archetypal. For Hillman, the archetypal image is the center. The image is all-important. (This does not mean a literal image; it can mean an idea that has not constellated into concrete examples. Or it can be an image, but if it is concrete, the task is to look beyond the concrete boundaries using your imagination. Once the image is concrete, it becomes static, and loses capacity to generate more knowledge/understanding.
Discussion point: The unconscious is as present as the conscious (all of the time). Unconscious material is revealed through myths; imaginative endeavors—art, music/lyrics, stories, other cultural means.
• In Western civilization, as consciousness increased and mythological thinking decreased we adopted: linearity and a historical perspective; nature as the subject of science; and our deities (Christianity, Judaism, Islam) moved to the sky.
Joseph Campbell, comparative mythologist: scholarship includes extensive exploration of world mythologies. See video of Campbell; discuss the Hero’s Journey.
Notes for Prof. Koranda’s Curiosity Class
A.Mawell
Essential to the subject of curiosity is learning about different ways we come to know or understand things. (In the subject area of Philosophy, epistemology is the study of the ways we go about knowing things and the ways we validate what we know.)
Most often what you know and what I know is based upon:
• Your own nature (your predisposition to specific preferences for gathering information—E.g., some of us prefer to survey a situation and understand what is going on through our intuition; others prefer to survey the same situation and learn what is happening through keen observation. These are the two extreme examples…they’re others in the middle.)
The relevant question today is: in what ways is myth a way of knowing?
Anthropologists, sociologists, scientists, psychologists, social scientists, mythologists, English professors each have different ways of defining and thus questioning myth. Some of the positions taken by this variety of interested scholars are:
• It is a story.
• It is a way that primitive people made sense of their worlds.
• It is a legend of something that happened and has been elevated to the status of myth (elevation to divine status is an apotheosis). This movement from “real event to myth or legend” is called Euhemeristic, after the Greek, Euhemerist, who believed that the stories told in ancient myths had actually happened centuries before.
• Myth is an example of primordial thinking. (Primordial meaning before logic, when thinking was mythological)
• Myth is in opposition to science. Myth is unscientific.
• Myth is akin to creationism.
• Myth is supported by science. (E.g. geologic evidence of a worldwide flood during the time of Noah of Biblical fame.)
• Mythology is dead in Western civilization. It is only connected to dead religions.
Selected (by me) writers on the function of myth:
J.G. Frazer (Golden Bough), classicist, anthropologist: myth is part of primitive religion and primitive religion is part of philosophy; primitive religion is the counterpart to science, opposite science (logical conclusion, once science rules, myth will vanish)
Lucien Levy-Bruhl, French philosopher, anthropologist, and creator of the phrase, “participation mystic”: “primitive thinking is “pre-logical”; he believes that,
“ . . . All phenomena [humans, human artifacts, creatures, the natural world] is part of the impersonal sacred ‘mystic’ realm that pervades the natural realm . . .”; “Participation in this mystic reality enables phenomena to affect one another magically and to become one another—yet retain their own characteristics . . .”;
L.-Bruhl writes that this is pre-logical because it defies the law of non-contradiction—in that something can be both itself and another; participation mystic is pre-logical, not scientific, and not philosophical (not logical)
Discussion point: Shamanism (Mircea Eliade is an excellent resource if you have interest in this topic. Carlos Castanada’s book, The Teaching of Don Juan, a Yaquii Way of Knowledge is also an excellent resource.)
Bronislaw Malinowski, anthropologist: argues that primitive peoples sought to control nature with ritual when their knowledge of science ran out; they have a basic understanding of science through their intense and discerning investigation of their habitat as hunters and gatherers; myth for Malinowski is about origins of place
Discussion point: Three categories of mythologies: cosmogonic (creation of the cosmos); cosmological (creation of the culture including place, institutions, etc); and theogonic (how deities came into being or awareness). Malinowski and Mircea Eliade both focused on cosmogonic myths.
Claude Levi-Strauss, French structural anthropologist: myth may be primitive but it is also intellectual; to understand the world around them, primitive peoples proceeded with observation, developed sophisticated knowledge, refined that knowledge through trial and error; L.-Strauss considered primitive thinking “concrete” versus modern “abstract thinking”; myth is no less scientific than science; it is part of the concrete, it is the part that is available to perception and imagination; L.-Strauss suggested naming the tribal peoples he was studying “people without writing” rather than call them primitives.
Karl Popper, born in Vienna, lived in the U.K., philosopher of science: scientific theories remain myth-like for they can never be proven.
Depth Psychological Perspective:
Def. of Myth: Myths never were but always are.
Erich Neumann, Israeli psychiatrist, philosopher: an “archetype is a mythological motif”; it is the eternally present content of the collective unconscious; as such this mythic motif can appear anywhere at any time [Greece, Egypt, Tibet, North America]
• An archetype is a dynamic directing force that influences the human psyche (unconscious)
• True object of inquiry is the symbolic self-representation of the archetype that has passed through the medium of man (Great Mother, p. 13)
• Archetypes of the collective unconscious are mythological motifs and appear among all people in an identical or analogous manner and can arise spontaneously without conscious knowledge.
C.G. Jung, Swiss psychiatrist, student and colleague of Freud: “Myth is the primordial language natural to these psychic processes, and no intellectual formulation comes anywhere near the richness and expressiveness of mythical imagery. Such processes deal with primordial images and these are best and most succinctly reproduced by figurative speech.” (metaphor, imagination)
(Source: C.G. Jung, Collected Works 12, p. 25.)
Note: primordial—pre-logical; mythic symbols contain both conscious and unconscious elements (E.g., consider the “O” logo for Oregon); mythic symbols unify opposites (E.g., the symbol of the Earth, also called Gaia, contains all life-giving capacity with no moral judgment regarding predators and prey)
Discussion point: Children go through stages like early humans; perceive the world mythologically; everything animate and inanimate has “life”;
“Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” (Ontogeny, the development of the individual organism, mirrors phylogeny, the history of the development of the species.)
James Hillman, contemporary psychologist, philosopher: moves psychology out of the consulting room into the culture. Bases his theory, archetypal psychology, on C.G.Jung’s ideas, but claims that naming something archetypal allows one to use one’s imagination to explore in what ways that object/phenomena satisfies the experience of the archetype. Any image can be archetypal, when you reflect upon the phenomenon using your imagination to understand what makes the phenomenon archetypal. For Hillman, the archetypal image is the center. The image is all-important. (This does not mean a literal image; it can mean an idea that has not constellated into concrete examples. Or it can be an image, but if it is concrete, the task is to look beyond the concrete boundaries using your imagination. Once the image is concrete, it becomes static, and loses capacity to generate more knowledge/understanding.
Discussion point: The unconscious is as present as the conscious (all of the time). Unconscious material is revealed through myths; imaginative endeavors—art, music/lyrics, stories, other cultural means.
• In Western civilization, as consciousness increased and mythological thinking decreased we adopted: linearity and a historical perspective; nature as the subject of science; and our deities (Christianity, Judaism, Islam) moved to the sky.
Joseph Campbell, comparative mythologist: scholarship includes extensive exploration of world mythologies. See video of Campbell; discuss the Hero’s Journey.
Gods
Hermes – the great communicator, but also mischievous.
Athena – strategist and god of knowledge, born out of the head of Zues. Is also considered the god of the Hero's Journey.
Hero's Journey ala Luke Stywalker
Everyone is the hero of their own journey.
The development of the fetus can be considered a hero's journey. They evolve in the whom and struggle through the birth canal, then are born.
“We think he brain is in control; however it is the secondary organ.”
Some ideabooking ideas:
Dedicate a page to a Greek God.
Take a movie or story and point out its Hero's Journey (departure, initiation, and return)
