MYTH AND REFLECTIVE THOUGHT

Myths as concrete, graphic narratives of the divine and its world are a religiohistorical phenomenon, reflecting also a morphological aspect of cultural development. In their actual existence they point to a datum that must be considered fundamental for solving the general problem of the nature of man.

Although in very different ways, the narratives generally designated as myths furnish basically information on the world as a whole, on the ultimate questions of human existence, on the meaning and end of life, in short, on matters to which only the most concentrated application of reflection gives access. However, the general experience of investigators is "that all questioning of the Primitives for information in respect to reflective thinking is wont to be unsuccessful" [P. Schebesta, Die Negrito Asiens (Vienna 1957) 2.2:35]. Do the myths, then, represent a preliminary form of an, as yet, nonreflective and immediate consciousness in relation to the world as a whole, to a world view? And if so, to what extent and in what way is this possible?

If one begins with an actual phenomenon, something similar confronts him. In his conscience he chooses the good, that which accords with man in relation to the whole. The concept of the good and the whole is therefore essentially proper to conscience. This means, however, that the concepts proper to conscience, which are revealed in their characteristic content by reflection, are those that presuppose a relation to a whole that is itself first discerned only by reflection. The reality of conscience can be said to refer, therefore, to a spiritual dimension within man, even before reflective thought becomes occupied with a full elaboration of its content and thus makes its reality evident. In this way the possibility arises for a nonanalogical, graphic form of discourse, viz, myth, to become actual. Accordingly, myth is nothing but the immediate consciousness, expressed by language in a state that is still vague and imprecise, of ultimate relations or, in a total way, of human existence as conditioned in matter, life, society, and culture. This grounding of reflective thought in conscience gives the answer to that open and persistent aporia in philosophy regarding the possibility, in respect to content, of the basic relationship or connection that becomes evident in the thinking of thinking, i.e., of the problem that has entered the history of philosophy under the heading of innatism (ideae innatae ). Mythical thinking reveals itself as a constituent factor of thinking in general.

This indication of the mythical structure of man, however, raises the question of the truth and the manner of appearance of myth. One can examine the truth of the myth directly from the basic data of conscience and indirectly by means of a morphological investigation of the material of the myth's content. Accordingly, the truth in the myth dealing with origins consists in this, that man, whether in nonreflective speech or in silence (silence, insofar as it is of the same origin as speech), possesses the consciousness of his divine origin and of the divine character of the world, mankind, and history as derived from that same origin. However, myth is untrue and defective if its mythical elements are separated from their whole and are made independent—a process that can be discerned by cultural and religio-morphological study of the polytheistic forms of religion and their myths.

Myth as the constituent element of theory immediately connected with consciousness, arising out of the attitude or reaction to the world, is therefore in its truth or untruth—the transitions, at times, are necessarily fluid since there are no obvious boundaries in the defining consciousness—of decisive meaning for every age. For since man has his being in the mythical structure, the given myth is not only decisive for the possibility and truth of theory (the world view interpreted as world outlook) but also for the application that in weal or woe determines history. In fact, one might even say that man always has a world view that cannot be demythologized. In this sense reflection has before it a twofold task: (1) to investigate in what way, being mythically determined and established itself, it can find the true myth and translate it into its reality as a recognition of truth; (2) to discover in what forms myths, withdrawing into veiled silence, brought, and bring, truth and untruth to actuality in history and in the present age.

Bibliography: e. cassirer, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms 3v. (New York 1953–57) v.2. w. duprÉ, "Die methodologische Bedeutung von Sprache und Mythos und das Weltbild der Bambuti," Festschrift Paul Schebesta (Vienna 1963). m. eliade, Aspects du mythe (Paris 1963). a. andwander. Zum Probleme des Mythos (Vienna 1964), with copious bibliog.

[w. duprÉ]