The Importance of Myth for a New Human Science E-Book

Rainer Höing

• Herausgeber: tredition
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 172

Beschreibung

The book focuses on the debate about myth as a counter-concept to contemporary scientific thinking. Is it possible to find perspectives in its field of meaning that are so incompatible with the current zeitgeist that they allow us to "step out" of it and look at it "from the outside"? This is what is urgently needed. For the seemingly alternative-less materialistic way of thinking has the world firmly in its grip and has so far largely taken over any criticism without consequences. In the face of a development that is rushing towards ecological, economic and social abysses, we need a reflection, a radical critique that allows us to break free from the given constraints.

Leseprobe

The Importance of Myth for a New Human Science

About the author:

Born in 1953, studied Education, Sociology and Psychology at the Philipps University of Marburg/Lahn, Germany. Graduated with distinction. Studies on the practicality and relevance of „esoteric“ approaches and traditions. Training in Physical Radiesthesia and Building Biology Measurement Techniques. 40 years of Geobiological Counselling, mainly for people with cancer. Research into the extension and standardisation of Geobiological Counselling standards and on the phenomenon of worldwide Planetary Lines. Since 2020 working as a writer with the aim of sharing his specialist knowledge with lay people and professionals.

Book Description:

Ever since the disastrous consequences of an economic „reason“ that subordinates everything to material usability became visible, ways of seeing and living that are diametrically opposed to and alienating from dominant thinking as the absolute „outside“ have taken on a key role. The quest for a radicality of critique capable of breaking through the delusion of domination that is driven into things and concepts becomes the basis of the confrontation with myth. The familiarity with the groundlessness of things and of being is one of the essential building blocks of a theory of liberation that draws, with an important modification, on Bataille’s concept of „crossing borders“.

There are several reasons why this anthropological thesis, which was passed with distinction at the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Marburg/Lahn/Germany in 1979 and was supervised by Prof. Dietmar Kamper, is now being published for the first time. Firstly, it undoubtedly represents an enrichment of the structuralist discourse, with a topicality that corresponds to the threat to ecology and humanity. Ahead of its time, it supports today’s critical movement.

The importance of myth has been demonstrated not only in philosophical reflection. In terms of the future, it even surpasses the knowledge of nature and the health benefits of today’s conventional science. However, this is the subject of further research by the author, which cannot go unmentioned because of its direct relevance.

Rainer Höing

The Importanceof Myth for aNew Human Science

© 2023 Rainer Höing - all rights reserved

Revised version, June 2023

Author: Rainer Höing

Cover design, illustration: Rainer Höing

ISBN Softcover: 978-3-347-87754-2

ISBN Hardcover: 978-3-347-87760-3

ISBN E-Book: 978-3-347-847762-7

Printing and distribution on behalf of the author:

tredition GmbH, An der Strusbek 10, 22926 Ahrensburg, Germany.

This work, including its parts, is protected by copyright. The author is responsible for the contents. Any exploitation is not permitted without the author's consent. Publication and distribution are carried out on behalf of the author, who can be contacted at: tredition GmbH, Department "Imprint Service", An der Strusbek 10, 22926 Ahrensburg, Germany.

Bibliographic information of the German National Library:

The German National Library lists this publication in the German National Bibliography; detailed bibliographic data is available on the internet at http:// dnb.d-nb.de.

Table of Contents

Foreword

1. From the Failed Enlightenment to the Megalomania of Modern Reason

1.1 The Pressure of History

1.2 The Failure of the Enlightenment

1.3 The Transition to Modernity

1.4 The Actuality of the Mythical Heritage

1.5 The Development of Questions

2. Four Basic Schools of Myth Analysis

2.1 The Symbolic Interpretation of Myth

2.2 The Historical-Materialist Approach

2.3 The Psychological Model

2.3.1 Sigmund Freud

2.3.2 Carl Gustav Jung

2.4 The Structuralist Analysis of Myth

3. Discussion of the Approaches Presented

3.1 Ideology and Myth

3.2 The Role of Symbolism

3.3 The Unanswered Question

4. The Space of Mythical Experience

4.1 Sensuality and Death

4.2 The Containment of the Concept of Myth

4.3 Silence and Perception

4.4 Contributions from the Psychology of Perception

5. The Comparison of Mythic and Structuralist Models of Thought

5.1 The Recourse to the Groundlessness of Man

5.2 Paradoxical Logic and “Non-positive Affirmation”

5.3 The Concept of Transgression

5.4 Summary

Conclusion

Selected Bibliography

Foreword

Since the disastrous consequences of economic reason, which subordinates everything to material utility, have become apparent, there has been a growing interest in distant periods of history, which Can provide a contrary picture of a society that is often only sparsely documented by archaeological, ethnological or historical data.

At the centre is the attempt to achieve a radicality of critique that is capable of breaking through the delusion of domination that has been driven into things and concepts. The difficulty here is that any attempt to find a solution under the totalising grip of contemporary dispositive thinking is hindered from the outset. For language and concepts themselves are permeated by the omnipresent „have“ that must be escaped.

In this situation, ways of seeing and living that are diametrically opposed and alienating to the dominant thinking as the absolute „outside“ take on a key role. The study of completely different cultures can thus become an effective lever that allows the closed circle of totalisation to be broken in an appropriate way „from the outside“. This explains the explosive nature of an investigation that plumbs the world of mythical thinking.

At the heart of the work is a debate about the concept of myth. Is it possible to find perspectives in its field of meaning that are so incompatible with the current zeitgeist that they allow us to „step out“ of it and look at it „from the outside“?

Part 1 illuminates the history of thought, beginning with myth and continuing through the emergence of science to the delusion of the supremacy of modern reason. The explanations clarify the place of the work and prepare the background for the derivation of the crucial questions.

Following the critical presentation of the four main strands of myth analysis in Part 2, Chapter 3 provides space for a discussion in which the conception of myth presented here takes shape.

Part 4 is devoted to the speculative or esoteric aspects of myth, without which it is impossible to understand the achievements and possibilities of mythic sensuality. After an introductory examination of the fundamental relationship between sensuality and death, the concept of myth is clarified, supplemented by a consideration of the astonishing capacity of mythic sensuality, an excursus on silence and perception, and complementary explanations of the psychology of perception. The final chapter leads to the understanding that it is above all the groundlessness in things and in being in which the meaning of myth unfolds, and that it is the concept of „crossing the border“ that paves the way to experience and establishes a theory of liberation.

Chapter One

From the Failed Enlightenment to the Megalomania of Modern Reason

1.1 The Pressure of History

If we take the long periods of human history into consideration, we can, in an extremely simplified way, delineate two essential periods: the age of mythical-magical thinking and, with the beginning of the Enlightenment, the age of modern science.

To be more precise, we can start with the Neolithic, the period when the Paleolithic hunter-gatherer cultures settled down and developed the basic inventions and skills of civilisation: Agriculture, animal husbandry, pottery, weaving. The form of society seems to have been matriarchal, relatively egalitarian, without any significant hierarchy, exploitation or aggression.1 Even though the social formations in subsequent development were subject to a considerable number of mutations, from the point of view of the history of ideas, there is a phenomenon that can rightly be called the „Neolithic paradox"2 - a standstill lasting several millennia between the first tremendous increase in the mastery of nature and the emergence of modern science. The extent to which the overhang of ancient history still covers almost the entire modern era becomes clear when we consider the tenacity with which popular belief, despite Christianisation, clung to the animistic, magical or shamanic fragments of the mythical tradition, that belief in demons which gave rise to the witch trials of the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries.

If one wishes to clarify the concept coined by Foucault for this epoch of the „space of signs"3, that is, of a „logic“ dominated by similarity or analogy, then the practices of circumstantial evidence and judgement in the witch trials offer both macabre and rich illustrative material.4

The astonishing resistance of the old popular belief to the Enlightenment critique that was already forming in the 16th/ 17th centuries raises the question of the extent to which the traditional explanatory model was „right“, in the sense that every self-contained theory produces ist own confirmation. Moreover, it could be assumed that the young countermovement was not lacking in rationality, but rather in a different faith that it could have effectively countered the old one.5 The fact that the competing scientific thought was eventually helped to triumph not only points to the new dimension of credibility through empirical confirmation - this also benefited the old cosmologies - or to ist greater effectiveness, but also sheds light on how closely credibility and faith have always been linked. From the worship of gods and demons to the altar of science, humanity has always fallen back on the knees of worship and submissive faith before ist objects of power.

1.2 The Failure of the Enlightenment

The radical turn of the Enlightenment was directed against the unholy alliance of feudal aristocracy and clergy with the aim of securing the necessary independence for the rising bourgeoisie. In order to gain a foothold in public discourse, and thus in the sciences, for the articulation of the awakening will to self-assertion of the bourgeois subject, it was necessary to break the rigid supremacy of theology as the all-valid mode of interpreting the world. Liberating man from the bondage of maturity meant demythologising the world. The numerous mythical figures were explained by the concept of anthropormophism, which was traced back to the subject. „Oedipus‘ answer to the riddle of the Sphinx: ‚It is man‘ is repeated indiscriminately as the stereotypical information of the Enlightenment, regardless of whether it is a piece of objective sense, the outlines of an order, the fear of evil forces or the hope of redemption.“6 Making the concept of man the central point of philosophy was the revolutionary turn against the theologically ordered world and theory thus, and thus „anthropology at ist core“7.

But the blow that was originally been aimed at irrationality par excellence in the name of man, be it mythical delusions, clerical ideology or feudal rule itself, was ultimately directed back against that which legitimised it - the cry for human freedom and dignity. For with the banishment of everything that could not be reduced to quantitative values under the grip of objectifying reason and dissolved into categories of calculability and usefulness, a morality of mutilation, of the ruthless destruction of almost all human qualities and values, succeeded.

In the cold logic of the exploitation of a knowledge aimed at technology, there was no more room for images and concepts of insight and meaning. What this process has left behind is the individual who no longer recognises himself, an abstract fiction.

1.3 The Transition to Modernity

Because of the Enlightenment’s prominence as a period of upheaval and change, it is tempting to equate it with the transition to modernity and to leave it at this vague and undifferentiated view. It should be noted that the beginning of the Enlightenment is already set at the end of the 17th century. Even if the disastrous consequences of today’s mania for production can be anticipated from its very beginnings, the point of transition to modernity can be more precisely identified.

Foucault believes „…that man does not and cannot exist in the classical space of representation. Here it is always about the place of the king …“8 The birth of man comes later: „Man exists in the space of knowledge only from the moment when the ‚classical‘ world of representation collapses under the violent impact of unrepresentable and non-representable instances.“9 It is the point in time when the predominance of the identical in representation dissolves, when centred thought is deprived of ist centre.

As old as the concept of structure is in the history of thought, it has always been linked to the idea of an absolute centre, a point of presence, a fixed origin.10 „The event of the rupture, the break … perhaps occurred at the moment when one had to begin to think, that is, to repeat structurality.“11

From that moment on, a discourse began that surpassed all previous ones in its radicalism: it was now the absolute centre itself in the space of thought, the guarantor of an illusion of security and safety, against which the corrosive critique was directed. That the canonised centre was never itself but always already a substitute, that it could neither be thought in the form of a person nor had a fixed place, that it rather represented the absolutely indeterminable par excellence, constituted the liberating laughter of the new philosophy.12 Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics was followed by Freud’s destruction of the cherished notion of a sovereign consciousness. What this process of decomposition of the central concepts left behind was a world emptied of all certainties and securities. To live in it, would have required the maturity of man, the ability to take full responsibility for himself. This was undoubtedly the aim of the dismantling discourse, but the lack of human maturity made the sight of a world deprived of all traditional values a nightmare of horror, precisely because of the possibility of freedom that appeared in it. The appeal not only to endure uncertainty, but to understand it as the only reason for security, ran up against man’s excessive demands, and fear again overtook what had begun so hopefully with the courageous advance of thought initiated by Nietzsche. The central signifier, displaced from its exposed positions, insidiously reappeared through the back door of thought, for example in Freudian theory in the concept of Oedipus.13

The intensity of thought and insecurity that had broken through since Nietzsche, indeed a turning point in history, now led all the more surely to an intensification of the tendency towards the economisation of knowledge that had been growing since the early Enlightenment. Insofar as the crisis of the philosophy of the identical started from the place of the humanities, the struggle for lost security was bound to lead to a twofold revaluation of scientific-technical reason, in which the world was still „in order“, and which thus virtually took on the character of a model for all the human sciences. A qualitative change now took place in the field of reason.

In the process of imitating and worshipping the models of the positive sciences, the central, sovereign role had shifted from the sovereign representative of „classical“ thought, „the place of the king“, to reason itself. As the formal logic of abstraction, it is now more thoroughly than ever engaged in the business of unification, of totalisation, and it does so with the cold indifference of a self-acting machine that has buried ist engineer beneath it.

Not „…reduction to elements, decomposition by reflection is ist untruth, but that for it the process is determined from the outset.“14 What his thinking can only produce in regularities is repetition, the allways-same. Totalisation, on the other hand, only pretends to be all-embracing, „…for ist movement, which passes through everything, is at the Same time a reduction in every step.“15 What does not fit into the logic of use is cut away. Man’s senses are reduced to that of having, things are identified as the substrate of power. On the human side, this catastrophe manifests itself in the multiple symptoms of psychological impoverishment; on the side of things, the „insubordination of material facts“16 manifests itself in the devastating scale of environmental degradation.

1.4 The Actuality of the Mythical Heritage

It is precisely the exclusion of the indefinable, the sphere of sensuality and imagination in general, that has earned the Enlightenment the description of being „mythical fear turned radical“.2 But has the mythical tradition now failed entirely because of the censorship of fear and its rationalisation into making the thinkable coincide with the sayable? Or should it not rather be the case that certain parts of the ancient legacy were compatible enough to find their way into modern consciousness, and others were so indigestible that they were excluded and thus became the cause of the dilemma of contemporary thought? How would these different parts then be identifiable and determinable?

The fact that the early Enlightenment at least left room for the speculative can be illustrated by the example of mysticism. In its anti-authoritarian attitude towards ecclesiastical orthodoxy, it was in a sense identical with the revolutionary movement as a valued ally. By appealing to an unmediated instance of experience, to a mystical „inner light“, it sought to „relieve modern subjectivity of the alternative between emancipation as a relapse into mere nature on the one hand and heteronomous self-sacrifice on the other.“17 The disintegration of the bond of solidarity can be traced to the incorruptibility of its emancipatory aspirations. The ground of commonality was exhausted when 17th-century French mysticism, in turning away from the concept of the the Enlightenment, renounced all individual particularity, including the self-assertive mania of the bourgeois subject.18

In response to the question of which elements of the mythical tradition were now compatible with the Enlightenment and which were rejected as unacceptable, Horkheimer and Adorno propose a historical differentiation of myths.19 According to this, it was the more recent, solar myth that flowed into the Enlightenment and in a sense prepared the ground for it. The material that the tragedians found was no longer about the local spirits and demons of animism, but already presupposed the heavens with their hierarchy of Olympian deities.

This spirit of the younger myths, patriarchal in all its severity, was perfectly at home with the dominant reason of the Enlightenment. „As a linguistically unfolded totality whose claim to truth oppresses the older mythic faith, the popular religion, the solar, patriarchal myth is itself an Enlightenment with which the philosophical can compete on an equal footing.“20 The totalitarian scope of power of both systems corresponded, on the one hand, to the all-encompassing concept of fate, of divine necessity, and, on the other, to the role of formal logic.21 In both cases, they are the crowning concepts of a process of unification of reality, which unites the multiplicity of elements qua recognition of the identical in the form of hierarchised structures and thus allows for nothing new under the sun; in each case, the non-identifiable is cut away or adapted to the given mode of interpretation in elaborate operations. The point of intersection between the two systems lies in the monotonous rotation around the same, in the repetition that is as characteristic of the principle of immanence or of thinking in regularities as it is of rites and myths. However, such a development at the level of thought is not without social consequences. In both cases, we can see that this homogenisation of knowledge on the social level was accompanied by a conformity of people, which was always accompanied by repression.22

On the other hand, the magical-animistic imaginary world of the older myths was completely incompatible with the spirit of the Enlightenment. It was the real, frightening „outside the door“, which is why a phalanx of rationalisations and prejudices built up against it, ranging from ignorance to the common cliché that it lacked rationality.

In magical thinking, things were not measured solely in terms of their usefulness as a means to power; they were on a par with humans in that they were considered to be animate. This also applied to the position of spirits and demons. Submissiveness was never the shaman’s attitude. Rather, his craft consisted precisely in making use of the spirits.23 His knowledge did not revolve around a hierarchically ordered world and its absolute centre, but was fragmentary, reflecting the multiplicity of things, anarchic as they were. Unlike science and the notion of equivalence or universal fungibility, in magic there was still „… specific defensibility. What is done to the spear of the enemy, to his hair, to his name, is at the same time done to the person…“24 Sign and image were not yet definitively separated. Similarly, the pairs of opposites themselves, such as heaven and hell, were not yet seen as irreconcilable, antagonistic, but rather as homologous, corresponding, interlocking.25

If the basic features of the more recent patriarchal myth are certainly reflected in modern thinking and are still included in it, the topicality of the older myths, together with mysticism, is constituted precisely by their exclusion from the same thinking. The anxious gesture that seeks to banish them like shadowy images is the one that incessantly restores them. Because the site of mythic-magical thinking is about being and not about having, it is competitive, and because it is fought against, it remains current.