The Presence of Myth

Leszek Kolakowski, Adam Czerniawski

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780226222257
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Histoire et théorie de la philosophie

"[An] important essay by a philosopher who more convincingly than any other I can think of demonstrates the continuing significance of his vocation in the life of our culture."—Karsten Harries, The New York Times Book Review With The Presence of Myth, Kolakowski demonstrates that no matter how hard man strives for purely rational thought, there has always been-and always will be-a reservoir of mythical images that lend "being" and "consciousness" a specifically human meaning."Kolakowski undertakes a philosophy of culture which extends to all realms of human intercourse—intellectual, artistic, scientific, and emotional.... [His] book has real significance for today, and may well become a classic in the philosophy of culture."— Anglican Theological Review

1

PRELIMINARY DISTINCTIONS

1

The labor of the analytical mind which produces science is the organ in human culture which tames the physical environment. Science is the extension of civilization’s technological core. In the scientific sense, “true” means that which has the chance of being employed in effective technological procedures. This is not to say that the criteria we employ in settling scientific questions always depend on the likely possibilities of a practical application of the acquired solution. In their general shape, however, these criteria are so constructed that they enable us to reject from the area of valid knowledge whatever has no chance of technological application. Popular thought and scientific thought, as well as language, are correlated, in the overriding evolutionary strategy, with the physical survival of the species.

2

Metaphysical questions and beliefs are technologically barren and are therefore neither part of the analytical effort nor an element of science. As an organ of culture they are an extension of the mythical core. They are concerned with the absolutely primal conditions of the realm of experience; they concern the quality of Being as a whole (as distinct from the object); they concern the necessity of events. They aim at revealing the relativity of the world of experience and attempt to reveal an unconditioned reality, thanks to which the conditioned reality becomes intelligible.

3

Metaphysical questions and beliefs reveal an aspect of human existence not revealed by scientific questions and beliefs, namely, that aspect that refers intentionally to nonempirical unconditioned reality. The presence of this intention does not guarantee the existence of the referents. It is only evidence of a need, alive in culture, that that to which the intention refers should be present. But this presence cannot in principle be the object of proof, because the proof-making ability is itself a power of the analytical mind, technologically oriented, which does not extend beyond its tasks. The idea of proof, introduced into metaphysics, arises from a confusion of two different sources of energy active in man’s conscious relation to the world: the technological and the mythical.

4

Let us attempt a description of the need which generates answers to questions that are ultimate and metaphysical—that is, incapable of conversion into scientific questions. Before considering the sources of this need in inadequately conceived and unclear conditions connected with the permanent situation of human consciousness as such in the world, let us consider the circumstances of which people are generally aware and which are visible on the surface of culture. At this level, this need can be described in at least three ways. First, as a need to make the empirical realities understandable; that is, to grasp the world of experience as intelligible by relating it to the unconditioned reality which binds phenomena teleologically. The purposeful order of the world cannot be deduced from what may validly be regarded as the experimental material of scientific thought; it cannot therefore form a valid hypothesis to explain the data of experience. An affirmation of this order represents an understanding interpretation of these data. The point of view that denies the right to such an interpretation may signify either a refusal to accept ultimate questions—that is, it may be a paralysis or a dulling of that aspect of human existence which is intentionally directed to transcendence—or it may be a conscious acceptance of the world’s absurdity. A language which attempts to reach transcendence directly violates, to no purpose, its own technological instrumentality. It reaches transcendence in myths which give a meaning to empirical realities and practical activities via relativization. A mythical organization of the world (that is, the rules of understanding empirical realities as meaningful) is permanently present in culture. The objection that such an organization does not become true as a result of its permanence, or of the reality of the needs which give rise to it, has no argumentative power for a consciousness whose mythopoeic stratum has been aroused, since here the predicates “true” and “false” are inapplicable. Here it is not the case of matching a judgment with a situation it describes but of matching a need with an area which satisfies it. Myth degenerated when it changed into a doctrine, that is, a product demanding and seeking proof. Attempts at imitating knowledge are the form which brings about the degeneration of faith. The experience of correlating a need with that area of Being which satisfies it cannot be questioned as invalid from the point of view of scientific knowledge, so long as this experience is differentiated from the justificatory procedures.

5

Another version of this need for answers to ultimate questions is the need for faith in the permanence of human values. Human values become personalized the moment natural evolution reaches the point of personal existence. Where the disappearance of personality is total, the values tied to personal existence are strictly confined to that existence, while if they are inherited in a material, objective manner by continuous human groups, they enjoy a second parallel existence while these groups last. The totality of values produced by individuals, that is, the totality of values called into existence by human beings, does therefore tend towards their ultimate disappearance. In other words, our efforts, even when extended in their material results beyond the existence of individuals, are totally dissolved in the disintegration of physical existence, since neither humanity nor the earth is eternal. Thus, the belief in personal survival is not a postulate, since it can have no conceivable justification; it is a way of affirming personal values. Such an affirmation has the same kind of validity in culture as do other mythopoeic acts, so long as they are the product of a real need.

6

A third version of the same need is the desire to see the world as continuous. The world undergoes change by mutations and reveals discontinuities at critical points. From an empirical knowledge of the properties of the elements we are unable at critical points to educe the properties of the complexes: we have to establish independently that under certain conditions properties of elements reveal new properties of complexes. We do not know in what way the properties of the organic world are included in the construction of inanimate matter, in what manner the properties of human intelligence are included in the attributes of life. We guess at discontinuities, that is, we speculate that transitions need not have occurred on the basis of the properties themselves of a previous state. (The laws which state that under specified conditions specified phenomena always occur describe what in fact occurs; they include no indication that this must occur; they may, it is true, be explained as more precise versions of more general regularities, but these more general regularities never as a rule—and not just occasionally—cross the barrier of facticity of “contingency” in the Leibnizian sense of the word.) We therefore wish to comprehend the mutation as an act of choice which establishes continuity. A transcendence capable of choice satisfies the need to see the world as continuous. The presence of transcendence does not therefore become a hypothesis, since scientific thought does not establish any necessities for continuities. Thus, the desire for continuity is not a reason which transforms myth into a thesis—it motivates conviction.

7

In enumerating the three forms in which the need for myth appears on the surface of our culture, I treated them as three versions or variants of the same phenomenon. It does seem in fact that the same common motivation appears in all of them: the desire to arrest physical time by imposing upon it a mythical form of time; that is, one which allows us to see in the mutability of things not only change, but also accumulation, or allows us to believe that what is past is retained—as far as values are concerned—in what endures; that facts are not merely facts, but are building blocks of a universe of values which it is possible to salvage despite the irreversible flow of events. A belief in a purposeful order, hidden in the stream of experience, allows us to judge that in what passes there grows and is preserved something which does not pass away; that in the impermanence of events there is a growth of significance which is not directly perceived; that therefore decomposition and destruction affect only the visible layer of existence, without touching the other, which is resistant to decay. This same conquest of temporality is achieved in myths, which make possible a belief in the permanence of personal values. Here also mutability and annihilation may be regarded as the fate of the phenomenal layer of humanity; but seen from a mythical perspective, they themselves become stages in the growth of values. Similarly, belief in the continuity of changes, where apparent mutational leaps are the work of choice, is merely the necessary completion of an order, where what is past and is passing is capable of survival as far as its nonempirical normative layer is concerned and—with reference to a nontemporal order—can resist time.

Thus, even a most cursory glance shows us that in all instances we are concerned with the same problem: to avoid acceptance of a contingent world which expends itself on each occasion in its impermanent state, which is what it is now and bears no reference to anything else.

Only at this point, which we note as almost obvious, there appears the proper question regarding the sources of this desire which is supposed to reveal to us the location of the world in a nontemporal construct. For the appearance of this desire is not in itself intelligible and demands clarification in the very conditions which make culture possible.

8

Thus, all reasons in which the mythical consciousness is rooted, both in its initial variant, and in its metaphysical extensions, are acts affirming values. They can be fruitful to the extent that they satisfy the real need for controlling the world of experience by a meaning-giving interpretation of it, referring it to unconditioned Being. But the ultimate reasons which guide the choice of what is asserted in scientific thought are also acts of evaluation. In acknowledging the value of increased energies, which the human group can command in exploiting the physical environment, we create the necessary condition for the criteria of choice between truth and falsehood. These criteria are not in a historical sense arbitrary, that is, their coming about and triumph can be historically explained. They are, however, arbitrary in the logical sense, that is, there are no rules of logic which precede these criteria and enable us to justify them. On the contrary, the rules of logic are the product of the presence of these criteria.

9

That is why the opposition between a meaning-generating faith and an explanatory science has a somewhat different sense than is generally considered by positivists. Both have their own reasons embedded in cultural values; neither is rooted in transcendental norms of cognitions, because such norms, if they exist, cannot be known by us. The values on which each flourishes are different. We shall have to reflect upon the sense in which their irreconcilability is accidental (that is, defined in civilizational terms) and the sense in which it appears irreversible. But undoubtedly it is possible to remove the logical form of collision if we do not attempt to fix the value of myth as technologically (that is, scientifically) valuable. However, a faulty differentiation between the mythical, the ritualistic, and the technological functions performed by various elements of communal life is all too common. Undoubtedly, certain activities and products of culture perform a dual or a triple function, particularly if they have a common root—for instance, certain areas of art. This makes confusion in interpretation more likely, but it does not make differentiation impossible. Stagnant societies drew technical activities into a ritualistic and mythical order, so that they had their sacred aspects and took place within a wider order, which gave sense to them; nevertheless—as Malinowski observes—the differentiation between effectiveness arising from a sacred order and technical effectiveness is clear in these societies. Technologically orientated culture has taken up a contrary effort: It wishes to include myth in the technological order, that is, to turn myth into an element of cognition in the same sense in which science is cognition—it seeks justification for myth. This grotesque effort at rationalization has created caricatures of myth which have affected the Christian religion in particular. Attempts to arrest this decadence. which was for long perceived as a sign of progress, are now being undertaken. These are attempts to reestablish myth in its primal dignity. There is no certainty they will succeed.

10

Myth cannot be reached by persuasion; persuasion belongs to a different area of interpersonal communication, that is, to an area in which the criteria of technological resilience of judgments have their force. From time to time discursive philosophy has contributed to a flowering of mythical consciousness, even though it was unable in a valid manner to press the content of myths into the resources of analytical reason, where in general it is able to survive only thanks to its own passivity—inert and barren, like empty book jackets on library shelves. So, first, philosophy may awaken self-knowledge regarding the significance that ultimate questions carry in human life. Second, it can in the light of these questions reveal the absurdity of regarding a relative world as a self-sufficient reality. Third, it can open up the possibility of interpreting the world of experience as a conditioned world. It can do no more. The passing of this possibility into actuality is the achievement of personal consciousness, initiating a spontaneous movement of understanding at the moment when a dormant particle intentionally targeted at mythical reality comes to life in it. This motion is neither proof nor ratiocination. It is the awakening of mythical consciousness.

11

The sense of continuity in relation to tradition may, but need not, help mythical consciousness. There is always a reason which needs to be revealed in the permanence of myths and the inertia of conservatism. Values are transmitted only through social inheritance, that is, thanks to a radiation of authoritative tradition. The inheritance of myths is the inheritance of values which myths impose. Thus, coherence of human coexistence demands that tradition as such—and not just because in the past it had been judged a good tradition—should radiate authority. But from this it does not yet follow that the values of myth are wholly immanent in relation to these values which myth transmits and which human societies require. Nor does it follow that one ought to worship tradition unreservedly. Particular traditions stay alive or lose their force and wither, depending on a variety of conditions; they live and die like human beings. Jung and Eliade have attempted to demonstrate that individual myths are locally and historically determined particularizations of that myth which makes up the common archetypal pool of mythical consciousness, although it manifests itself only in culturally designated specifics. These attempts themselves appear to form part of mythopoeic endeavors, and it is difficult to imagine how one could endow them with the status of a hypothesis. They are perhaps worthy of our attention as ecumenical efforts, that is, as elements of an endeavor which remains within mythical consciousness; but, it seems, they are unlikely to succeed as an effort which attempts to make mythical consciousness the object of scientific reflection only.

2

MYTH WITHIN THE EPISTEMOLOGICAL INQUIRY

1

What were philosophers after when they inquired whether an object is outside or beyond an act of perception? The term “beyond” and similar ones characterize a purely topological relationship, or, in a wider sense, the negation of any relationship of belonging of an element to its class. The topological sense suggests itself most readily, but it is equally easy to reveal the absurdity of its application in such an inquiry. For it would mean that we know what space is and are consequently asking whether an object spatially defined is situated in a place where the perceiving ego—also defined spatially—is not. No philosopher who has understood the question in this way has ever replied that the object is a spatial part of the perceiving body, since space itself appears in so-called subjectivist doctrines as derivative from the act of perception.

If the word “beyond” indicates that the element does not belong to a class, what is the class in question? A class of the so-called acts of experience? But we do not know the meaning of the claim that a perceived object is not an element of the act of perception as a whole. (The distinction—in Meinong and Twardowski—between the act, the content, and the object of perception is a derivative abstraction, implying a realist metaphysic, and cannot therefore appear in the assumptions of the inquiry into the validity of that metaphysic.) But, they would say, the question is whether it exists in reality, whether there is an object present in a situation in which an act of perception does not occur. We do not, however, possess any obvious intuition of existence other than that of belonging to a particular class. So the question would be: does the object belong to a class of objects irrespective of the perceptual situation? In order to answer it we would have to have at our disposal an intuition of presence (of existence) of that class of objects which would itself be capable of description in relation to that class of which it wo...