Mythic Voices Reflections In Mythology Pdf

[Alana Fekety]

Atthe same time, there seems to be a perennial and perpetual primitiveness to the human consciousness that does not evolve from lower ways of thinking, but evolves further into lower ways of thinking. Anti-science convictions, skepticism, tribalism, and religious fundamentalism are not just extant, but perniciously resilient. Postulates against the age of the earth, vaccines, and anthropogenic climate change, while demonstrably false, are still held by the common man. In light of such clear evidence to the contrary, how could the human mind still grasp esoteric, parochial, contradictory, and nonsensical beliefs? This, too, is the legacy of the Western mind, and any moralizing sentiment must be carefully analyzed and synthesized with the fulls scope of our intellectual journey.

This to me is the great curiosity. After thousands of years of advancement, education, observation, heightened awareness, and deepening humanism, all culminating in various forms of a unified theory of everything, where are we to go from here? What new intellectual horizons await us beyond the 21st century (A.D./C.E.) conglomeration of the history of western thinking? If the masculine and feminine, the mystical and the brute, the creative and the analytical, the measured and the whimsical parts of our humanity are coming together, what is this new human expression? To what have we evolved?

I share these reflections and notes below in hopes of advancing a more thoughtful, critical, analytical, objective, and human understanding of the ideas that have not just shaped our views, but have transformed our behaviors, built our systems, governed our morals and ethics, and enlightened our ideals.

Every age must remember its history anew. Each generation must examine and think through again, from its own distinctive vantage point, the ideas that have shaped its understanding of the world. (xiv)

Because Socrates and Plato believed that knowledge of virtue was necessary for a person to live a life of virtue, objective universal concepts of justice and goodness seemed imperative for a genuine ethics. (7)

The Platonic perspective thus asks the philosopher to go through the particular to the universal, and beyond the appearance to the essence. It assumes not only that such insight is possible, but that it is mandatory for the attainment of true knowledge. (8)

Plato maintained a strong distrust of knowledge gained by sense perceptions, since such knowledge is constantly changing, relative, and private to each individual. A wind is pleasantly cool for one person but uncomfortably cold for another. A wine is sweet to a person who is well but sour to the same person when ill. Knowledge based on the senses is therefore a subjective judgment, an ever-varying opinion without any absolute foundation. True knowledge, by contrast, is possible only from a direct apprehension of the transcendent Forms, which are eternal and beyond the shifting confusion and imperfection of the physical plane. (8)

The Ideas are thus the fundamental elements of both an ontology (a theory of being) and an epistemology (a theory of knowledge): they constitute the basic essence and deepest reality of things, and also the means by which certain human knowledge is possible. (10)

Because it was author of its own ordered motions and transmutations, and because it was everlasting, this primary substance was considered to be not only material but also alive and divine. Much like Homer, these earliest philosophers perceived nature and divinity as yet intertwined. (19)

These rudimentary but foundational developments in logic necessitated thinking through for the first time such matters as the difference between the real and the apparent, between rational truth and sensory perception, and between being and becoming. (20)

With the exception of the relatively autonomous Pythagoreans, the Hellenic mind before Socrates followed a definite, if at times ambiguous, direction away from the supernatural and toward the natural: from the divine to the mundane, from the mythical to the conceptual, from poetry and story to prose and analysis. (24)

Despite the positive effects of their intellectual training and establishment of a liberal education as a basis for effective character formation, a radical skepticism toward all values led some to advocate an explicitly amoral opportunism. Students were instructed how to devise ostensibly plausible arguments supporting virtually any claim. (30)

It was in the course of pursuing this task that Socrates developed his famous dialectical form of argument that would become fundamental to the character and evolution of the Western mind: reasoning through rigorous dialogue as a method of intellectual investigation intended to expose false beliefs and elicit truth. (34)

The trial and execution of Socrates by the Athenian democracy left a profound impression on Plato, persuading him of the untrustworthiness of both a rudderless democracy and a standardless philosophy: hence the necessity of an absolute foundation for values if any political or philosophical system was to be successful and wise. (39)

Plato repeatedly linked light, truth, and goodness. In the Republic, he described the Idea of the Good as being to the intelligible realm what the Sun is to the visible realm: in the same way that the Sun allows objects of the visible world to grow and to be visible, so does the Good grant to all objects of reason their existence and their intelligibility. (42)

The belief that the universe possesses and is governed according to a comprehensive regulating intelligence, and that this same intelligence is reflected in the human mind, rendering it capable of knowing the cosmic order, was one of the most characteristic and recurring principles in the central tradition of Hellenic thought. After Plato, the terms logos and nous were both regularly associated with philosophical conceptions of human knowledge and the universal order, and through Aristotle, the Stoics, and later Platonists, their meanings were increasingly elaborated. As ancient philosophy progressed, logos and nous were variously employed to signify mind, reason, intellect, organizing principle, thought, word, speech, wisdom, and meaning, in each case relative to both human reason and a universal intelligence. The two terms eventually came to denote the transcendent source of all archetypes, as well as the providential principle of cosmic order that, thorough the archetypes, continuously permeates the created world. As the means by which human intelligence could attain universal understanding, the Logos was a divine revelatory principle, simultaneously operative within the human mind and the natural world. The highest quest of the philosopher was to achieve inner realization of this archetypal world Reason, to grasp and be grasped by this supreme rational-spiritual principle that both ordered and revealed. (47)

While for other contemporary cultures the heavens remained, like the overall world view, principally a mythological phenomenon, for the Greeks the heavens became linked as well to (49) geometrical constructions and physical explanations, which in turn became basic components of their evolving cosmology. (50)

All living things require powers of nutrition to survive and grow (plants, animals, man) while some also require powers of sensation to be aware of objects and distinguish between them (animals, man). In the case of man, who is further endowed with reason, these powers enable him to store up his experience, to make comparisons and contrasts, to calculate and reflect and draw conclusions, all of which make possible knowledge of the world. Human understanding of the world thus begins with a sense perception. Before any sensory experience, the human mind is like a clean slate on which nothing is written. (59)

For Plato, a person could properly direct his actions only if he knew the transcendent basis of any virtue, and only the philosopher who had attained knowledge of that absolute reality would be capable of judging the virtue of any action. Without the existence of an absolute Good, morality would have no certain basis, and so for Plato ethics was derived from metaphysics. For Aristotle, however, the two fields were of fundamentally different character What actually existed was not an Idea of the Good relevant to all situations, but only good persons or good actions in many varying contexts. (66)

Morality lay in the realm of the contingent. The best one could do would be to derive rules empirically for ethical conduct that held probable value in meeting the complexities of human existence. (67)

For Aristotle, the goal of human life was happiness, the necessary precondition for which was virtue. But virtue itself had to be defined in terms of rational choice in a concrete situation, where virtue lay in the mean between two extremes. Good is always a balance between two opposite evils, the midpoint between excess and defect: temperance is a mean between austerity and indulgence, courage a mean between cowardice and foolhardiness, proper pride a mean between arrogance an abasement, and so forth. Such a mean can be found only in practice, in individual cases relative to their specific conditions. (67)

Above all, it was an attempt to know. The Greeks were perhaps the first to see the world as a question to be answered. They were peculiarly gripped by the passion to understand, to penetrate the uncertain flux of phenomena and grasp a deeper truth. And they established a dynamic tradition of critical thought to pursue that quest. With the birth of that tradition and that quest came the birth of the Western mind. (69)

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