Mythos and Logos: A productive tension

It's a platitude in the history of philosophy that Thales of Miletus was the first "philosopher," and that is defined as someone explains the world in terms of logos (or "reason") instead of mythos (or "myth"). Now, Jean-Pierre Vernant is right that this translation of "reason" as opposed to myth is too simplistic - the old cosmologies and cosmogenies were filled with their own "reason" - but in essentials this is right. The question is: what is the status of myth? 

This is a question that filled the head of ancient scholars, especially the grammarians of Alexandria. They developed full-scale allegories to explain the battles of the gods in terms of principles rather than persons. This seeped into the Judeo-Christian tradition (the most obvious example being Philo of Alexandria), and there have been plenty of thinkers in Christian history who have tried to balance these two, but who have ultimately had the logos reign over the mythos, and make sure Christianity was understood as the "true" philosophy. 

In our contemporary era we too, have something of a battle between these. I find myself at this point in my faith and thought to be stuck at the fulcrum, so to speak, of myth and reason. On the one hand, there are excellent explanations of the world thought principles instead of stories. On the other hand, reducing our understanding of the world to principles instead of stories is a choice that is not necessarily self-evident, and seems, to me at least, to loose something valuable about the world. After all, why do we model our knowledge of the world on the natural science, and knowledge about things? Why don't we model our knowledge of the world on how we know people? In my view, that is exactly the kind of knowledge religion offers. 

How do we know people? First, we 'get to know' someone by hearing their story. When we become friends with someone, the first things we want to know are things like where they're from (their "geography"), who their parents and family are (their "genealogy"), their interests, goals, and ideals (their "axiology", or what they value), and major events in their lives (their "history"). Second, we get to know someone by seeing them, hearing their voice, and by acting with them (i.e. doing things). Once we've gained knowledge through these avenues, we then say that we know them - more or less. Now, if an evolutionary biologist were to challenge this knowledge based on the canons of scientific methodology, we would probably say that they're crazy. We'd say that the biologist might know that person in general, but not that person in particular. Even then, this "general" knowledge would be pretty much worthless for our purposes - being friends, or family, etc. 

Religion, it seems to me, is modeled on the notion of knowing people. That's what the old Greek "myths" are all about. That's what the Christian "myths" (stories) are all about as well. Now, one of the major differences between Greek myth and Christian myth is that Christianity focuses much more of history than genealogy. It does focus on the latter (especially the Adam and Eve story), but anywhere to the degree of Greek religion (there is no "Theognis" in Christianity). There is a personification of God, precisely for the reason that religion sees knowledge in terms of people rather than things. And the history of Israel, and the history of the early community surrounding Jesus, is a history that precisely does not attempt to reduce humans to things, or even the community to a "thing" (as the social science would do). In early Imperial Rome this only makes sense. Because the Romans were so good at reducing people to property (something like 80% of humans in the Roman empire were slaves), it only makes sense that human dignity was important.

It is often precisely the personification of God that annoys many scientists. Scientists pride themselves on reducing every entity in the world to things, which can be explained by laws (since they all model themselves on physics). There is nothing wrong with this reduction. It is clear from the history of science this produces wonderful things in the world - vaccines, better agricultural techniques, and lots of other wonderful technology. In fact, treating every entity in the world as a thing, methodologically, helps you to do very interesting things, and there is no doubt that our world would be much harder without it.

But can we discount knowledge of people as untrue, because it does not reduce them to things? That, in my view, is what people attempt to do when they extol Darwin for changing the world. There is an assumption that after Darwin, we can no longer hold to the old "myths" (the God of Christianity, or at least 19th century Natural Theology Christianity), because they are so unconvincing "for thinking people" (as Ernest Meyer says). "Thinking" people must consider knowledge in terms of science, or else they are not "thinking." Hence religion cannot make sense to the thinking person, because it personifies everything, making them unexplainable. 

And here is the rub: their is something ultimately inscrutable about every person. When we "know" people we are not saying we have exhausted all the possibilities of that person, that we have gotten to the point where we know everything, so we can anticipate everything. It is the same with God. Christianity never purports to actually know everything about God, because ultimately we do not. There is something fundamentally unknowable about God in principle. Clearly, in terms of evolutionary biology, this is unacceptable. Even if we concede there is plenty of mystery in the world, and have some type of reverence for this mystery, this is not a mystery in principle, but rather in fact. We expect eventually to plumb the depths of this mystery, while religion never assumes it will plumb the depths of the mystery of God. 

Knowledge of people, and knowledge of things. In my view, this is not an either/or, but a both/and. We need both, because both are, because we experience both. The one is not reducible to the other, although I would not say their are complementary either. Instead, they are in tension. Hopefully though, instead of a tension where each sides waits for an apocalyptic annihilation of the other, the tension is productive of thought. Religion needs science to remind it does indeed personify things, and hence making idols out of them (and here I'm thinking of the so-called "health and wealth" gospel); on the other hand, science needs religion to remind it that there is more to the world than things, and its reduction of people to things is not absolute. I expect there always to be a tug of war between religion and science. If they both stick to their guns we can expect plenty of fruitful thought for many years to come.

The rhetoric of the absolute

As of late I have been reading Walter Brueggemann's "Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy." However, this morning something really annoyed me, a tendency in much post-Derridean critical thinking. Following Derrida's critique of people like Heidegger, Plato, and Hegel, thinkers sometimes bring out a rather simplified picture of "totalizing" and "absolutizing" picture of western thought. In my view, this is tremendously wrong: not just because it over-generalizes in its own way, but rather because it seriously misreads so much of western philosophy. Derrida's deconstruction, I would argue, is quite egregious in this. 

First Brueggemann. In explaining the concept of "countertestimony" in the Old Testament (i.e., those texts of the Old Testament that seem to challenge Yahweh's sovereignty), Brueggemann sets up the opposition between a "Jewish" way of thinking, and a "mode of reason" associated with the West, "rooted in Plato", which tries to settle all disputes, and hence "to stop the political discourse that was sponsored by the Sophists" (330). What Brueggemann is pointing to here is the difference between "eristics" and "dialectics" for Plato. E.g., in the Meno, Socrates contrasts the "contentious and eristical wise men" to a more "gentle" form of discourse, "dialectic" (75d). For Brueggemann, and I would add a number of other contemporary Biblical scholars (Elisabeth Schüssler-Fiorenza comes to mind here), this is a contrast between an "open" rhetoric and sophistical movement, with a "closed" philosophical and absolutizing movement. Derrida certainly was fond of pointing to the chinks in the supposed armor of Platonic "realism." 

But is this what goes on in Plato? Hardly. One of the most consistent mistakes in understanding Plato is forgetting that he wrote dialogues, and that "Plato" never appears in any one of them. There is a good reason for this: Plato's Academy, as many attest to later (especially Cicero), was actually the most open of all the ancient philosophical schools (especially in comparison with the Epicureans), because so much of their philosophical way of life was rooted in dialectic. Dialectic is a communal process that philosophers in Plato's school engaged in, and it was primarily an askesis, or a self-transformative practice, that aimed at enabling the student to transform him or herself into one that submitted to reasonable discourse, instead of "eristics" - which in their view, was argument for argument's sake. In other words, the point of dialectic was to transform individuals into those who could recognize that force of the better argument, and participate in argumentation in order to search for the truth. 

Furthermore, it is clear from later dialogues such as the Parmenides (which is a thorough-going critique of the supposed "theory of forms") that there is no such thing as "Plato's doctrine" (written or, as the esoterics would have it, unwritten), and that the dialogues were not meant as a "system" of philosophy. From various testimonies in the Hellenistic period, Plato's Academy never had one over-arching "doctrine," like the Epicureans or Stoics (the Peripatos did not either), but included a multitude of perspectives. The philosophical way of life for Plato's Academy was thus philosophers learning how to dialogue with one another. I suspect it was rather the Imperial Period - especially the Neoplatonists - that codified a "Platonic" doctrine. This period was marked by commentary - which the earlier Hellenistic period was not.

Be that as it may, this brings up a tendency in contemporary thought, out of a somewhat Derridean lineage, to generalize certain aspects of a thinker without a seemingly clear interpretation of that thinker. Derrida, in my view, is the Socrates of the early dialogues. That Socrates asked the impossible: define "piety," "poetry," "virtue," etc. He was never asking to actually get a definition - the terms he sets up for this definition are too impossible by half - and so most of the early dialogues end in aporia, or in a puzzle. Derrida does this by looking at the impossible in texts, the little contradictions, the peculiarities, those parts of the text that seem to intentionally be misunderstood. He does this, it seems, for a very particular purpose: like Socrates, to engage us in active re-interpretation. Derrida is too, like Socrates, repetitive and annoying (Socrates himself mentions this fact in the Apology), and if you read too much Derrida, you start to be annoying. Nevertheless, Derrida's philosophical purpose seems to me to be right in line with the Academic (in the sense of Plato's school) way of thinking. Deconstruction is "justice," as Derrida says. In other words, deconstruction is a practice, an askesis that tries to move one out from under a self-satisfied "knowledge" of our philosophical tradition, toward a constant re-engagement with that tradition. 

The problem comes in with the "disciples" of the "deconstructionist." Too many thinkers take the easy way out, and refuse to deconstruct Derrida himself, or resort to the Pythagorean "ipse dixit" - Derrida tells us that Heidegger is absolutizing, Hegel is a totalist, Plato squashes all political debate. From the beginning though Derrida has always pointed to deconstruction as a method, like the Platonic dialectic, that does not issue into doctrines, but is an end in itself. Furthermore, the reason it is an end in itself is that it seems to me, at least, to be primarily a practice. Philosophy is a way of life, and like other thinkers before - the entire ancient tradition, but also thinkers like Wittgenstein, Hegel, and Heidegger - philosophy is meant to issue forth into an entire life. And as it was for Plato, so it is for Derrida: that life is a life of justice.