Philosophy, Myth and Plato's Two-Worlds View

This paper examines one aspect of the relation between philosophy and myth, namely the function myth has, for some philosophers, in narrowing the distance between appearance and reality. I distinguish this function of myth from other common functions, and also show how the approach to reality through myth differs from a more empirical philosophical approach. I argue that myth plays a fundamental role in Plato's approach to the appearance/reality distinction, and that understanding this is important to the interpretation of Plato's frequent use of language suggesting the existence of a world of unchanging ideal objects and a world of transient, variable particulars. All things are an exchange for fire, and fire for all things, as goods for gold, and gold for goods.Footnote1 —Heraclitus DK 22 B 90 Notes NOTES 1. Puros te antamoibê ta panta kai pur hapantôn hokôsper chrusou chrêmata kai chrêmatôn chrusos. See H. Diels and W. Kranz, eds., Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 3 vols. (Berlin: Wiedmann, 1951–52), hereafter DK, v.s. Heraclitus, 22 B [ fragmentum] 90. All translations from ancient Greek, unless otherwise noted, are my own. 2. In the earliest extant history of philosophy, Aristotle calls Thales “the founder of this sort of philosophy” (ho tês toiautês archêgos philosophias, Metaphysics A.3 983b20–21), i.e. of natural philosophy (983b6–8), and he plainly thinks that natural philosophy came after mythology (983b27 ff., where eisi de, “some say,” expresses a view that Aristotle clearly does not endorse; cf. 984a1–2: ei men oun ... Thalês mentoi). While there is some hint of qualification of these views at A.2 982b18–19: ho philomuthos philosophos pôs estin (“the mythlover is, in a sense, a philosopher”), and more seriously at A.4 984b23 ff: hupopteuseie d’ an tis Hêsiodon proton ... (“Someone might suspect that Hesiod was first ...”), Aristotle never seriously considers the possibility that the myths of Hesiod or others before him expressed a philosophy of nature. According to Jonathan Barnes, “There are similarities between certain aspects of these early tales [i.e. the Greek myths] and certain parts of the early philosophers’ writings. But Aristotle made a sharp distinction between what he called the ‘mythologists’ and the philosophers; and it is true that the differences are far more marked and far more significant than the similarities” (bracketed insertion mine). The story that Thales was the first natural philosopher has an air of myth about it, of course, since it appeals to the agreeable intuition that speculation precedes reason. Jonathan Barnes, Early Greek Philosophy (London: Penguin, 1987), 16–17. 3. I want to distinguish the rivalry between philosophy and myth from the so-called “ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry.” The latter describes a more general rivalry, which includes competition over political, institutional, cultural, and religious perspectives, in addition to competition over the perspective about nature and reality. I shall only be concerned with the narrow rivalry between philosophy and myth about nature and reality here. For more discussion of the general quarrel between philosophy and poetry, see: Stanley Rosen, The Quarrel Between Philosophy and Poetry (London: Routledge, 1988); Susan B. Levin, The Ancient Quarrel Between Philosophy and Poetry Revisited: Plato and the Greek Literary Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); and Thomas Gould, The Quarrel Between Poetry and Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990). Rosen and Levin focus mostly on the political and institutional aspects of the quarrel, while Gould focuses mostly on the religious and general cultural aspects of it. The distinction that I am drawing here is admittedly difficult to sustain under some circumstances—for example, if a perspective about nature is being employed for political purposes—but it allows discussion of a particular aspect of the rivalry between philosophy and myth that would otherwise be overly complicated, viz. the appearance/reality distinction, which I discuss below. 4. In the Derveni Papyrus (DP), which contains the earliest known commentary on myth (around 420 B.C.E.), a student of Anaxagoras attacks and undermines the idea of theogony, replacing it instead with a philosophical, naturalistic cosmogony. See Gabor Betegh, The Derveni Papyrus: Cosmology, Theology and Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). The kind of demythologising project seen in the DP is parodied in Aristophanes’ Clouds (419 B.C.E.), and is described as modish in Plato's Phaedrus (see 229c–230b; dramatic date 418–16 B.C.E.), and may have been associated with philosophy since the beginning, if Barnes (op. cit. pp. 18–24) is right. He claims that philosophy since Thales is distinctively superior to myth in three ways: (1) it supposes an ordered, intelligible universe; (2) it uses a technical vocabulary; (3) it is based on argument and evidence. 5. See Aristotle, Metaphysics A.3 983b17–27. 6. See Hippolytus, Refutation of All Heresies, I.vi.1–7. 7. See Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, Anaximenes. 8. Thales, for example, held that “all things are full of gods” (Aristotle, De Anima 411a7–8); Anaximander spoke of the opposites “paying penalty and retribution for injustice” (DK Anaximander 12 B1) using “poetical” terms (Simplicius, In Phys. 24.13–25); and Anaximenes, too, sounds poetic, or at least anthropomorphic, when he says that “air and breath contain the whole world” (DK Anaximenes 13 B2). 9. See Apollonius, Marvellous Stories, 6. 10. See Parmenides DK 28 B8.12, 8.8, and 8.28, respectively. For an account of the mythic elements in the poem of Parmenides, see A. P. D. Mourelatos, The Route of Parmenides (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970). 11. See DK Empedocles 31 B17.1, 17.14. At precisely the points where Empedocles says this, he does not use the word muthos (tale), but leaves the subject implied: dipl’ ereô (“[a] double [tale] I will tell”). The subject, muthos, is made explicit in ll. 13–14. There are other places where Empedocles uses the term muthos in an interesting way; these are mentioned in note 14 below. For an account of the mythic elements of Empedocles’ poem, see M. R. Wright,. Empedocles, The Extant Fragments (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981). 12. Given the way Love and Strife are described in the fragments, it is impossible not to treat them as personifications, at least for the purposes of literary analysis. If they are to be interpreted as abstract impersonal forces, that is a further philosophical abstraction. 13. For examples, see DK Empedocles 31 B6, 17, 22, 66, 71, 73, 75, 86–87, 95, 98, 115, 122–23, 128. 14. For example, Empedocles criticises the traditional Greek myths about the gods (see DK Empedocles 31 B134, with context from Ammonius, De Interpretatione 249.1). Perhaps, then, we are to take his own muthos as vying with traditional mythology, rather than as complementing it. Moreover, Empedocles says his own muthos is true (B61, 114), and even grounds it in divine authority (B23), yet its truth, he says, is difficult to understand (B114). This comes close to describing myth as necessary whenever a non-metaphorical disclosure is impossible. We will see more of that when we discuss Plato, below. For a thorough discussion of the complex attitudes of the early philosophers towards myth, both in extra-philosophical works and in their own researches, see Kathryn Morgan, Myth and Philosophy from the Presocratics to Plato (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Morgan actually describes the rivalry between philosophy and myth as a construction by the philosophers themselves, for philosophical reasons (32–33). 15. Here I refer especially to the work of Carl Jung. For a collection of Jung's writings on myth, see Robert A. Segal, Jung on Mythology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), esp. chap. 2, “The Origin of Myth.” Jung's views were influential with the historian of religion Mircea Elade (Myths, Dreams and Mysteries [1959], Myth and Reality [1963]), and the comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell (Hero of a Thousand Faces [1949], The Mythic Image [1981]). For a review of the connections between these writers, see Robert S. Ellwood, The Politics of Myth: A Study of C. G. Jung, Mircea Eliade and Joseph Campbell (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1999). 16. Probably the most important figure in this line is Ernst Cassirer, who argued passionately against theories that explain myth in terms of error. See Ernst Cassirer, Language and Myth, trans. Susanne Langer (New York: Dover, 1946); originally published in 1925 as Sprache und Mythos. As Wilfred Sellars pointed out, Cassirer defended myth particularly against the “misconception” that it is “based on the deficiencies (e.g., ambiguity) of language. Misconceptions of this kind are traced by Cassirer to naive realism, the notion that nature confronts the mind ‘as something directly and unequivocally given’ ([Cassirer] p. 6).” See Wilfred Sellars, “Review of Language and Myth,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 9 (1948–49): 326. Sellars’ review of Cassirer's work led to his famous attack on naive realism in his 1956 paper, “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,” in Herbert Feigl and Michael Scriven, eds., Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Volume I: The Foundations of Science and the Concepts of Psychology and Psychoanalysis (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1956), 253–329. 17. Nietzsche, that most mythical of philosophers, was, it seems to me, the initiator of this line, with his famous remark that “A philosophical mythology lies concealed in language, which breaks out again at every moment, no matter how cautious we may be.” In Friedrich Nietzsche, Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1980), 547; The Wanderer and His Shadow, Aphorism 11 (1880). This is the source of the radical idea, commonly seen in postmodernism and deconstruction, that everything expressed in words is mythology. See Jacques Derrida, Disseminations (1967), trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1981), esp. “Plato's Pharmacy,” 63–171. Even Morgan, op. cit., sometimes falls prey to this way of talking: “All language, even theoretical language, is a story that interprets reality” (14), though elsewhere (39–44) she is careful to avoid it. A good example of the view that science and natural philosophy are no different from and no better than myth can be found in Paul Feyerabend, Against Method (London: New Left Books, 1975, rev. 1988), concluding chapter. 18. Some would describe the whole movement known as Logical Positivism as inhabiting this camp, with the chief of police as Rudolf Carnap (The Logical Structure of the World, 1928) and the desk sergeant as A. J. Ayer (Language, Truth and Logic, 1936). Although the vehemence of logical positivism has been mitigated, there are still many who would like to keep the boundary lines between philosophy and myth sharp. For one view of the intellectual grounds for this, see Lloyd Reinhardt, “Patrolling the Borders,” Literature and Aesthetics 5 (1995): 123–29. 19. See Martin McAvoy, “The Myths of Philosophy, or the Longing Forever Satisfied,” in this volume. McAvoy grounds his view in the authority of Aristotle, Metaphysics A.2 982b18 cited in note 2 above. 20. See J. Barnes, The Presocratic Philosophers, Arguments of the Philosophers, ed. T. Honderich, rev. ed. (London: Routledge, 1982), chap. 18, “Philolaus and the Formal Cause,” 381. 21. For a catalogue of approaches to Plato's myths that takes a somewhat different perspective, see Kent F. Moors, Platonic Myth: An Introductory Study (Washington: University Press of America, 1982). 22. See Luc Brisson, “Scientific Knowledge and Myth,” Journal of the International Plato Society 4 (2004): 1: “Plato was the first Greek author to take the already-existing term mÛthos and make systematic use of it, opposing it to the term lógos (rational discourse), and giving it the meaning we are accustomed to give it even now, when we use the term ‘myth’.” This position is developed and argued for extensively in Luc Brisson, Plato the Myth Maker (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998); originally published as Platon: les mots et les mythes (Paris: Éditions La Découverte, 1982). Hereafter this book is identified as PMM. 23. The classical example of this is Protagoras 320c–328d, where Protagoras presents in sequence both a muthos (320c–323a) and a logos (323a–328d). The ultimate aim of both is the same, but the structure, content, and logic of the two differ quite dramatically. Brisson (op. cit. 1998) discusses at length the difference between the narrative order of myths as opposed to the logical order of argument. 24. See Lawrence J. Hatab, Myth and Philosophy: A Contest of Truths (Chicago: Open Court, 1990). Hatab speaks about the “incommensurability of myth and rationality” for Plato, and about “Plato's ... demotion of traditional myth.” Many scholars see the muthos/logos distinction as a fundamental Platonic dichotomy. For example see Veda Cobb-Stevens, “‘Mythos’ & ‘Logos’ in Plato's Phaedo,” in Anna Teresa Tymieniecka, ed., The Philosophical Reflection of Man in Literature (Boston: Reidel, 1982), 391–406; Francesco Adorno, “Thinking Historically about Myths: Myth, Myths and Logos in Plato,” Philosophical Inquiry 21 (1999): 57–64; Max Statkiewicz, “The Wisdom of the Mirror in Cocteau's Orphee,” in Anna Teresa Tymieniecka, ed., Analecta Husserliana: The Yearbook of Phenomenological Research, vol. lxxviii: Gardens and the Passion for the Infinite (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003), 253–68. 25. One reason often given for Plato's proliferation of myths is that his aim is to create better, or truer, myths than those of his predecessors. See Mary Margaret McCabe, “Myth, Allegory and Argument in Plato,” Apeiron 25 (1992): 47–67; Robert Scott Stewart, “The Epistemological Function of Platonic Myth,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 22 (1989): 260–80; John F. Miller, “Why Plato Wrote Myths,” Southwest Philosophical Studies 3 (1978): 84–92. Some, however, have argued that Plato's myths are not really myths at all. See J. N. Findlay, “The Myths of Plato,” in Alan Olson, ed., Myth, Symbol, and Reality (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 1980), 165–84; originally published in Dionysus 2 (1978): 19–34. 26. In the Timaeus, Timaeus’ ‘likely’ (eikôs) theoretical cosmological narrative/account is sometimes called a muthos and sometimes a logos (see eikota muthon: 29d2, 59c6, 68d2, and eikota logon: 29c2, 30b7, 48d2, 90e8; cf. 29c8, 49d6, 53d5–6, 55d5, 56a1, 56b4, 57d6, 62a4, 67d2, 68b7). For the argument that Plato collapses the muthos/logos distinction in Timaeus (and elsewhere), see Janet E. Smith, “Plato's Myths as ‘Likely Accounts’ Worthy of Belief,” Apeiron 19 (1985): 24–42. Brisson (PMM), however, argues that Timaeus maintains a distinction between muthos and logos. According to him an eikôs logos concerns a verifiable discourse, while an eikôs muthos concerns an unverifiable discourse. Most scholars treat the phrases as synonyms, however. Ssee especially Anne. Ashbaugh, Plato's Theory of Explanation (Albany, NY: SUNY, 1988). The use of these phrases in the Timaeus is exhaustively discussed in Ryan McBride, Eikos Logos and Eikos Muthos: A Study of the Nature of the Likely Story in Plato's Timaeus (Marquette University Ph.D. Dissertation, 2005). 27. For works that discuss the quarrel between philosophy and poetry, see note 3 above. 28. These criticisms are made extensively in Ion, Protagoras, Gorgias, Symposium, Republic, Phaedrus, Sophist, and Laws, i.e. across the whole of Plato's career. For an interesting discussion of Plato and the poets which suggests that Plato's concern is not primarily the moral and intellectual superiority of philosophy, see Gerald D. Stormer, “Plato's Theory of Myth,” Personalist 55 The work in this is Friedrich Plato's Theology University Press, this the University of Press, See and Philosophy from Plato's to the Journal of the of Philosophy and Michael Morgan, “Plato and Greek in R. ed., The Cambridge to Plato (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, for example, This is not to that Plato's views about religion no For the see A Platonic Philosophy of (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2005). focuses particularly on the Timaeus and Laws, and argues that they a in which is as as For the myths those in Gorgias, and see “Plato's Myths of discuss this would take far from in this paper, but the is a one for scholars of Plato's myths and be Plato's has often been associated with and particularly For see G. Myths of the Plato, and the (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). For see The of Greek Myth in trans. Janet Lloyd University Press, See For discussion of this distinction in terms of see The of Plato's Between the and the (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, chap. 1. See also and in Plato,” in ed., New on Plato, and Ancient University Press, course, one way of Plato's be through the use of In that (3) and would be In this I am to on by Lloyd calls the two of the appearance/reality distinction and respectively. seems to that these are but in his of the two I is For his distinction on Wilfred Sellars, and the Image of in Science, and Reality (New York: & is, the sort of from which of or or even of own See In of vol. trans. S. and C. Martin (London: Books, is interesting how of this of the appearance/reality it is difficult to of of or to these of There are many of the distinction between and The earliest explicit of it seems to be the one in though the distinction is by famous by by ... in reality and (DK Most of the distinction, however, from and are from the in what it his are in the themselves, but to in by their The only of distinction that I to here is the difference between in things from the and that through with in distinction is by the that the he are by on the view I am describing these be as from of the they out to In this sense, the distinction I am drawing is to the distinction found in or the distinction found in Many with drawing the distinction this that here I no use the terms or is the may i.e. not and the things that of may not be objects at but or even of and to these See Sellars See The (New York: 1999). Most famous for this, was a philosopher of the In the known as the chap. 2, he a I was a and to all and purposes a I was only of my as a that I was I and there I was, I not I was a I was a or I am a I am a Wisdom of and York: See (New York: Press, See J. of Philosophical I have in mind here includes not only under a but a whole of where the of what a See on Philosophy, The of University Press, speaks about the as others of it as (see The University of a that Plato was these lines is that too, speaks of the from an of things to a more one as cf. and he speaks of philosophy as the of the ... I that to truth, or One about or in I theories which not only that is but which also that it is to of an to which reality. This includes theories is as most construction The work in this is and Thomas The of Reality (New York: Books, as as see Ernst (London: Routledge, 1999). I not to here in (see The Psychology of York: Routledge, it seems to me, is with realism, and with the view that may reality. For example, the different that on the account of in the where he has a view and his aim is to describe a of the world (see and The chap. and the way he it in the Philosophical where he takes at least a view not an and his aim is to show how the idea of a (see Concepts or The of Philosophy 9 I have made use of to the way and about but I make no about and one way or For discussion of see op. cit., For an example of an who the distinction but not the distinction, see the of in Plato, The is by as who that are can about them as true and and in what sense, over and I discuss here. As for Plato, it seems that he sometimes thinks of as the sort of that can be true or while at the that of things in is only of of There is about this, (see Plato on Knowledge and Oxford University Press, 2004). For the view that we eikôs in terms of rather than see Janet (op. cit., note I am at that Plato is to the in the see One philosopher who seems to have this view is the Paul and Open Court, suggests that reality is and from moral and reality. I to that this is however. There may be elements of that one which may be These may be or fundamental I have been to with the first use of this in R. D. speaks of Plato's of two of the The 9 and A. E. speaks of Plato's world” and world” the Interpretation of Plato's 5 even using the but author suggests he is using like the phrases of of of (and are the by the most influential Plato John J. A. Stewart, J. R. G. A. S. Paul R. S. A. C. A. J. E. R. and the of an by the author in which the phrases can be after are to The is not The idea if not to Plato See R. ed., (Oxford: Oxford University Press, See and in in ed., (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, in Plato on Knowledge and (Oxford: Oxford University Press, and in ed., Plato 1. Metaphysics and (Oxford: Oxford University Press, The full seems to be to all of those cited in note 55 of the two only in a general of on the The seems to be of Plato's of the in “A and of the Philosophical and of Reality in R. ed. New on Plato and Aristotle & were the source of of the (op. takes the narrow of the view in terms of is however, argument is but a I it will that Plato's view was never as as the him I have argued elsewhere that of the view in terms of a of be See

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