Transcript
Speaker: Welcome to Philosophy on the Fringes, a podcast that explores the philosophical dimensions of the strange and the mundane.
Speaker: We're your hosts, Megan Fritz and Frank Cabrera.
Speaker: On today's episode, we're talking about mythology.
Speaker: What role has myth played in philosophy?
Speaker: What's the relationship between myths, history and truth?
Speaker: And did the ancients really believe their myths?
Speaker: Welcome back to episode 15 of Philosophy on the Fringes.
Speaker: Today, we're talking about myths, mythology, and actually, this is going to be just a part one of two parts on mythology.
Speaker: And the reason for that is that Frank went a little overboard in a good way.
Speaker: Yeah, I got really into this.
Speaker: I will admit, it was really fun learning about different myths, different theories about what myths are and what their functions are.
Speaker: So at the end of my research, we realized we had enough material for two episodes.
Speaker: So there will be two episodes about myth.
Speaker: And a really nice kind of division to divide it into two kind of coherent separate episodes.
Speaker: So, which is great for me because I am also fascinated by this topic.
Speaker: Hopefully you are too, or else you may not like the next episode that much.
Speaker: But even if you think this isn't your thing, hopefully you give it a chance anyway.
Speaker: So, the thing that comes to mind, probably for the average person when they hear the word myth, you know, unless they just got out of the classroom or something like that,
Speaker: is a falsehood, right?
Speaker: The place where we see the word myth or read the word myth the most might be on headlines like, you know, 17 medical myths about sunscreen.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: For instance, I just learned it's a myth that children are really hyper after eating sugar.
Speaker: So there is no scientific evidence that this is true.
Speaker: It's a popular misconception.
Speaker: It's a myth.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: Yeah, they're just hyper all the time.
Speaker: Yeah, right.
Speaker: So right.
Speaker: So medical myths or, you know, scientific myths, myths about quantum mechanics or something like that.
Speaker: It's just things that are it seems to be a word for things that are widely believed to be true, but that aren't and are in fact misleading in some way.
Speaker: Yeah, popular misconceptions.
Speaker: That's what I think of.
Speaker: But that's not really what we're talking about here.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So I think maybe a good place to start is like the meaning of the word myth, the history of the word, the etymology.
Speaker: So our English word myth comes from the Greek word mythos.
Speaker: And this word has a really interesting history.
Speaker: So initially, the word mythos in ancient Greek meant just a story or narration or something like that.
Speaker: It didn't have this kind of dubious connotation.
Speaker: It could just be any story or narration or even a speech.
Speaker: So in Homer's Iliad, Homer uses the word mythos when Agamemnon gives a speech.
Speaker: So he gives a stern mythos, which is a speech to his troops.
Speaker: So initially it meant something like just a story or a narration or a speech.
Speaker: And I think that's more along the lines of what we mean by myth.
Speaker: So one philosophical question about myth is just, what is it, right?
Speaker: Can we do a conceptual analysis on myth?
Speaker: So hopefully by the end of this episode, we'll have a good grasp of the concept itself, but we'll hold off on the definitional question for now.
Speaker: But
Speaker: And in fact, the Homeric use of the word, that's one of the earliest that we see in the Greek, right?
Speaker: It's one of the first instances or earliest instances we have of this word.
Speaker: And we don't really know where it comes from before that.
Speaker: We just see it pop up in the Homeric epics and there it is.
Speaker: And that's kind of the form it stays in.
Speaker: Well, it does evolve, though.
Speaker: So it evolves after that.
Speaker: So it does eventually get this kind of dubious connotation.
Speaker: So the word does evolve to mean something like an implausible story.
Speaker: And specifically, I think when we think about these stories, we think of stories about the gods, right?
Speaker: Myths typically are stories about the god.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: If you take a class in college called mythology, it's going to be like cultural stories about the particular gods of that region.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So that's a good place to start.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So stories about the gods.
Speaker: That's what we sort of mean by by myths.
Speaker: And so the ancient Greek tradition, for instance, has lots of these stories, stories about the gods in Homer, stories about the gods in another poet, Hesiod, an eighth century poet who wrote this poem, The Theogony, the birth of the gods.
Speaker: And yeah, this is sort of a kind of genealogy of the gods and the world and where these things came from.
Speaker: So Hesiod.
Speaker: For instance, in the beginning of the Theogony, he sees it says, in the beginning there was only chaos, the abyss, but then Gaia the earth came into being, her broad bosom, the ever firm foundation of all.
Speaker: And he goes on and on and on about where the other gods came from and how the world was brought into being.
Speaker: He says that Gaia gives birth to the mountains and things like that.
Speaker: So it's interesting that philosophy in ancient Greece begins with a kind of rejection of myth in this sense, that is these kinds of mythological explanations for events in the natural world.
Speaker: So we sort of talked about this in the polytheism episode.
Speaker: So if you remember way back when, we discussed how most ancient Greek philosophers were in some way critical of philosophy.
Speaker: The traditional Greek religion.
Speaker: So they weren't like all they weren't like atheists or anything like that, but they were all critical in one way or another of the Greek religion.
Speaker: They didn't have like a literal belief in like gods on Mount Olympus doing the kinds of things that we hear about them doing in these stories.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So if you take the mythological stories about Zeus seriously and you want to know why there's like lightning and thunder, well, it's because Zeus is throwing thunderbolts.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: That's why it's there.
Speaker: So at the beginning of philosophy, at the beginning of Western science, too, I guess, these ancient Greek philosophers, the pre-Socratic, specifically the Milesian philosophers, philosophers from who are living on the western coast of Turkey in the city of Miletus,
Speaker: Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes.
Speaker: They didn't like these kinds of explanations of natural events.
Speaker: And we know this from the sources that discussed what they thought and what they wrote.
Speaker: So we don't have a lot written from these guys.
Speaker: We have fragments, quotations.
Speaker: But based on later philosophers like Aristotle, we know that they were interested in trying to give naturalistic explanations of things in nature.
Speaker: They don't want to attribute these things to the gods.
Speaker: I mean, not only do they want to give what we might call naturalistic explanation, but they also seem particularly interested in giving monistic explanations.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: They want to know what things are made of.
Speaker: And specifically, they want to get down to the one foundational singular substance that everything is, which is going to be incompatible with these kinds of myths as foundational explanations for the world.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah, right.
Speaker: So Thales is most known for thinking that everything at the end of the day is made of water.
Speaker: So it doesn't look like water.
Speaker: Rocks don't look like water.
Speaker: And trees don't look like water.
Speaker: But if you were to dissect it, it would, at the end of the day, in some sense, be water.
Speaker: The later Milesian philosopher Anaximenes thought everything was air.
Speaker: So these sorts of views, they sound kind of silly to us for the 21st century.
Speaker: But as many commentators have pointed out, this is like a really crucial moment in the history of philosophy and the history of science.
Speaker: These guys are trying to give these naturalistic explanations of stuff in nature.
Speaker: They don't want to say that lightning happens because Zeus is throwing thunderbolts.
Speaker: They want to say that lightning happens because of the way the wind works or something like that.
Speaker: Yeah, they're trying to do these like found do like foundational metaphysics in a way that's still recognizable to us today.
Speaker: And they're responsible for this really common intuition that we still have and seems to be the foundation of science.
Speaker: So the the philosopher Rebecca Goldstein in her in one of her books called Plato at the Google Plex, I think it's called.
Speaker: Mm hmm.
Speaker: So she calls this the Ionian intuition.
Speaker: That is that the world is a law governed place, that there's order and stability and regularity.
Speaker: And that capricious gods are not going to just sort of change everything overnight.
Speaker: The world is a law governed place.
Speaker: So although we wouldn't say that everything's water, everything's air or anything like that, the modern scientists would still accept that.
Speaker: That seems to be a very foundational element of science.
Speaker: And this drive to unity and this drive for reduction, reducing everything to one single thing, this is very much a viewpoint that's alive today.
Speaker: So the fundamental physicists want to say something like things are made up of particles or they're string theorists, strings, something like that.
Speaker: So we are still trying to... Consciousness.
Speaker: Consciousness, if you're a panpsychist.
Speaker: Everyone's still trying to reduce everything to one thing, this drive toward unity and reduction.
Speaker: And explaining things in terms of these myths about the gods doesn't allow you to do – I mean, it doesn't allow you to do a lot of things, but one of the things it doesn't allow you to do is offer explanations of what happens in terms of these kinds of really predictable laws.
Speaker: Yeah, the gods can do anything they want.
Speaker: They're very capricious.
Speaker: They change from day to day.
Speaker: They change into things.
Speaker: Zeus is well known for being a shapeshifter in Greek mythology.
Speaker: So it'd be really hard to have a kind of a science about the world if you accepted these anthropomorphic gods that are always just up to things and doing whatever they want.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: But I think it is a mistake, though.
Speaker: We don't want to take this too far.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: We don't want to say that Thales and Anaximander and Anaximedes were like atheists or anything like that.
Speaker: They don't want to take divinity out of the world entirely.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: They're not like your modern, like physicalist, naturalist kind of philosopher, for sure.
Speaker: They still believe in law-governedness in a really strong way.
Speaker: Yeah, I think they want to say the world is in some sense divine.
Speaker: That law-governedness that holds in the world is the result of some kind of divine activity.
Speaker: So this is often referred to as the Logos.
Speaker: That's the thing that is the reason of the world, the thing that's responsible for why the world is law-governed.
Speaker: So that is kind of a divine thing for them.
Speaker: I mean, Aristotle attributes to Thales a quotation.
Speaker: Everything is full of gods.
Speaker: So that doesn't sound like a modern scientific naturalist.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Unclear what he meant by that.
Speaker: But maybe he just means he's referring to this idea of the logos or whatever, that the world is suffused with divine order.
Speaker: Which certainly almost all of them accepted some kind of, yeah, like irreducibly naturalistic logos.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So like the modern scientists and the modern scientific naturalist often goes back to the Milesians, the pre-Socratics as kind of the forebearers of modern science, given that they accepted those really important foundational elements that we already mentioned.
Speaker: But, you know, we got to be careful there, right?
Speaker: That it is somewhat anachronistic.
Speaker: I think it is anachronistic to call these guys naturalistic, even though they are looking for naturalistic explanations in some domains.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So they didn't necessarily reject myths because of this sort of dogmatic naturalism, but more so just because they're looking for these kind of predictable ways of explaining the world, maybe some kind of like reductive understanding of the metaphysics of the world.
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Speaker: And the conclusions they come to aren't mythological.
Speaker: They are monistic.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So, all right.
Speaker: So we've got the birth of Western philosophy starting in around the 6th century BC.
Speaker: And then around the same time, a little bit later, like maybe a century later, we see the birth of history as we understand it.
Speaker: As a kind of science.
Speaker: Right, right.
Speaker: Through the work of Herodotus, who also wants to position himself against mythology.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And this is discussed at length and in a really interesting way.
Speaker: And this book that we, Frank and I are both big fans of called The Idea of History by the 20th century historian Collingwood.
Speaker: Yeah, so really good book.
Speaker: Really enjoyed reading this.
Speaker: So he's a really underrated 20th century philosopher.
Speaker: We both really like him.
Speaker: I think we both really think that he is pretty underrated, right?
Speaker: Like he's a super fascinating guy because he was not only a philosopher of history, he also did like aesthetics.
Speaker: He did philosophy of action.
Speaker: So that was Megan.
Speaker: He was a historian and a philosopher of history.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: A philosopher of action, a philosopher of art.
Speaker: And also he also did some archaeology.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So he was like an expert on Roman Britain at the time.
Speaker: He did excavations at Hadrian's Wall in Britain.
Speaker: He's writing textbook on Roman Britain.
Speaker: So very fascinating guy.
Speaker: I actually always forget that he's 20th century.
Speaker: I don't forget it, but he just seems more like a 19th century, like one of those like jack of all trades people because he did so many things.
Speaker: Yeah, and his writing style is interesting because he's writing around the time that analytic philosophy is being born.
Speaker: But he doesn't write like an analytic philosopher, but he also doesn't write like a continental philosopher.
Speaker: He doesn't write, I guess, the closest thing, the closest tradition to which he would belong to might be like British Hegelianism or something.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, I suppose.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So anyway, in this book, Collingwood is talking about the Greek invention of history, history in this kind of contemporary scientific.
Speaker: Not really like a chronicle of events.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Because obviously, since, you know, probably the dawn of written language, people have been writing down things that happened to them.
Speaker: But doing history as a science has a kind of field of study.
Speaker: So he talks about the Greeks' invention of this.
Speaker: And I'll just read this quote from the book.
Speaker: The Greeks quite clearly and consciously recognized both that history is or can be a science and that it has to do with human actions.
Speaker: Greek history is not legend.
Speaker: It is research.
Speaker: It is not theocratic.
Speaker: It is humanistic.
Speaker: Moreover, it is not mythical.
Speaker: The events inquired into are not events in a dateless past.
Speaker: At the beginning of things, they are events in a dated past a certain number of years ago.
Speaker: Yeah, great quote.
Speaker: So yeah, illustrating this point that we raised already that history, the birth of history positions itself against myth too.
Speaker: I find this really interesting.
Speaker: Both philosophy as we understand it and history as we understand it as academic disciplines begin with a kind of rejection of myth.
Speaker: where that myth means something like stories about the gods in the dateless past.
Speaker: Yeah, for Collingwood, I guess we'll spend more time talking about this later, but for Collingwood, myths are, they specifically have to be stories about the gods.
Speaker: So he has a very narrow definition of myth, and as we'll talk about in the next part of this episode, we don't think that's a very good definition.
Speaker: It's too narrow to say it's only about the gods.
Speaker: But yeah, paradigmatically, myths are about the gods, sure.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: But he is right that probably like the most well-known ancient Greek historian Herodotus is explicitly rejecting doing this kind of like mythology alongside historical chronicling.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Like he wants to be his goal is to be very literal and what we would call like scientific about it.
Speaker: Yeah, let's read the beginning of Herodotus' history.
Speaker: So Herodotus' histories are about, it's a very large work, it's about a lot of things, but what he says it's about is the Persian Wars, or the wars between the Greeks and the Persians, and how the enmity...
Speaker: between the Greeks and the Persians arose.
Speaker: So at the beginning of the histories, he says, this is the display of the inquiry of Herodotus of Halicarnassus.
Speaker: So that things done by man not be forgotten in time, and that great and marvelous deeds, some displayed by the Hellenes, that is the Greeks, some by the barbarians, that is the Persians,
Speaker: So you can see the history as we know it emerging here.
Speaker: It's about what humans did.
Speaker: You can see here that he's trying to be kind of objective.
Speaker: So he is a Greek.
Speaker: He was born in Halicarnassus, which was...
Speaker: which was a Greek city, but it was under Persian control at the time.
Speaker: He lived in Athens.
Speaker: You know, he liked the Greeks, presumably, but he wants to admit that the Persians did some good stuff, too, and he wants to write about that as well.
Speaker: And interestingly also, he wants to find out the causes of their waging war on each other.
Speaker: Yeah, I was going to say, this quote is really interesting because it seems like some stuff going on under the surface is that he is sort of implicitly recognizing what might be motivations for creating myths that give a different idea of what the cause of war was, right?
Speaker: Like you might want to instill some nationalistic morale.
Speaker: And so you create...
Speaker: Or you allow to flourish a kind of myth that makes your side look more just or more divinely appointed or something like that.
Speaker: So he's trying to ward that off from the start.
Speaker: Yeah, and he does, I haven't read the whole thing, but by all accounts, he does a pretty good job of being like very open minded.
Speaker: He's very interested in other cultures.
Speaker: He probably traveled around a lot.
Speaker: He's not only the father of history, he's also like the father of ethnography.
Speaker: One of the most widely read chapters of the book is his chapter on the ancient Egyptians and their practices.
Speaker: So just like today, where people are really fascinated by ancient Egypt, so too.
Speaker: The ancient Greeks were fascinated by ancient Egypt as well, which was a very, very old culture.
Speaker: So yeah, he's very open-minded.
Speaker: He talks about the different practices and how custom is king.
Speaker: Different customs exist in different places and all of that.
Speaker: But he's important for our purposes because he is one of the first people to use myth, mythos, to mean something like implausible story.
Speaker: So this word began just meaning a story, a narration, a speech.
Speaker: It starts to get this kind of negative connotation, something of dubious veracity.
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Speaker: So, yeah, so that's that's super important for for our.
Speaker: Even though, I mean, it it it has to be said because most there are many what we might call mythological elements, even to Herodotus's history.
Speaker: Yeah, good.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: So Herodotus, he yeah.
Speaker: So he's interesting because he does try to remove the gods from various events.
Speaker: So, yeah, it's like, let's get these myths out of here and let me tell you about the Cyclops.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But sometimes the gods show up, right?
Speaker: So at the beginning of the book where he's telling the story of how the Persians grew to hate the Greeks, he rationalizes these old myths.
Speaker: So he says, there's a myth where Zeus turned into a bull and kidnapped Europa and all of that.
Speaker: It wasn't really Zeus.
Speaker: It was probably just a Greek who kidnapped an Asiatic princess named Europa, and that's part of why the Persians hate the Greeks.
Speaker: So he does this sort of thing where he just makes up a historical, non-theological basis for an old myth.
Speaker: But yeah, the gods do show up from time to time.
Speaker: The Cyclopses show up.
Speaker: He will say things like, oh, and then the gods decided to destroy the Persians' ships because of their hubris.
Speaker: He will say stuff like that too.
Speaker: So he doesn't quite succeed in demythologizing history.
Speaker: His successor, his spiritual successor Thucydides,
Speaker: who wrote the history of the Peloponnesian War, which incidentally I just got for my birthday.
Speaker: Megan, I'm entering my Thucydides in Eris.
Speaker: I hope you're okay with that.
Speaker: Yeah, I've raced myself for that.
Speaker: Thucydides is much more rationalist than Herodotus.
Speaker: He removes the so-called romantic element that you find in Herodotus.
Speaker: He says, I'm going to give you just the facts here.
Speaker: and only the facts.
Speaker: He talks explicitly about evidence.
Speaker: You know, really, really interesting guy.
Speaker: It's really interesting.
Speaker: That sounds boring.
Speaker: No, it's it's it's there's a kind of austere beauty in his insistence that we need to be very, very skeptical and critical, say, of eyewitness reports and all of that.
Speaker: He recognizes a really important principle that we tend to forget.
Speaker: People don't remember things very well.
Speaker: Their eyewitness reports are often biased.
Speaker: We need to cross examine the witnesses.
Speaker: So he's like the original well actually guy.
Speaker: Yeah, kind of.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But one thing that he doesn't do well that historian that present day historians criticize him for, he doesn't show his work.
Speaker: So he'll give you what he thinks is the true best, most substantiated account based on who he talked to and what he read.
Speaker: But he doesn't he doesn't show us his primary sources.
Speaker: So he can't know whether he cross examined the witnesses successfully.
Speaker: Was that common at the time?
Speaker: Herodotus mentions his sources for these stories, at least sometimes, right?
Speaker: Herodotus is, yeah, he does.
Speaker: Herodotus mentions the sources much more than Thucydides does.
Speaker: So Herodotus has this reputation of being someone that's kind of credulous, but that's a little unfair because he's just telling us what people say.
Speaker: People say there's dog-headed people out there.
Speaker: People say there's people without necks out there.
Speaker: He's just telling you what people say.
Speaker: But, you know, Thucydides also does make some stuff up.
Speaker: My favorite part of Thucydides thus far is the speeches that he invents.
Speaker: He puts speeches into the mouths of people like Pericles, a famous Athenian statesman.
Speaker: Pericles probably gave a speech at a funeral, but we don't know exactly what he says.
Speaker: Thucydides says, I'm going to make this up best that I remember or what I think the situation called for.
Speaker: So he does sort of make stuff up.
Speaker: I think that kind of happened.
Speaker: That was sort of like a thing.
Speaker: I don't want to say it was common, but I remember other ancient writers would sort of do that as just a way of really establishing the character of the person they're writing about and maybe giving a just so explanation for some things they did or something like that.
Speaker: Yeah, because history is a narrative, too.
Speaker: A good history is a good narrative.
Speaker: It's a substantiated narrative that if we're going to buy the Greek conception of history is lacking mythological elements.
Speaker: But it's still a narrative nonetheless.
Speaker: And a good narrative might require a good speech.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So let's go back to philosophy.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I love history, but yeah, let's go back to philosophy.
Speaker: Yeah, let's go back to philosophy since that's in theory what we're supposed to be good at.
Speaker: So you have the the Ionian intuitions, right?
Speaker: The Milesian philosophers talking about you're wanting to move away from mythological explanations of things.
Speaker: But, of course, in like the origins of Western philosophy or something close to the origins, we also see a lot of mythology being employed in classic philosophical texts.
Speaker: Probably most people know what I'm talking about.
Speaker: Plato loved myths.
Speaker: And, you know, according to Plato, Socrates was pretty fond of them, too.
Speaker: We see eschatological myths showing up all through the Gorgias and the Phaedo and probably most famously the myth of Ur at the end of the Republic.
Speaker: Plato likes to put myths at the end of his dialogues as, I guess, presumably as a way of making a kind of philosophical point or painting a philosophical picture about whatever the dialogue is about.
Speaker: Yeah, so those myths at the end, the Gorgias and the Phaedo and the Republic, they're about like the afterlife, right?
Speaker: Right, yeah.
Speaker: The myths about how in the afterlife, the good are going to be rewarded and the wicked are going to be punished.
Speaker: And this is sort of, I guess, needed.
Speaker: Plato or Plato's characters think that this kind of, you know, afterlife justice is kind of needed for the picture of justice that he's trying to paint in these dialogues.
Speaker: Namely that it's worse to commit injustice than to suffer injustice.
Speaker: Right, right, right, right.
Speaker: Yeah, you can give all the metaphysics in the world that you want in this life, but you still need this kind of like thing happening in the afterlife that rectifies all of it in order for this to like really be convincing.
Speaker: And that seems to be the role that these myths are playing in these dialogues.
Speaker: All right, so we have these myths about the afterlife.
Speaker: What other myths do we have in Plato?
Speaker: Plato.
Speaker: On the Timaeus, we have an account of the creation of the world.
Speaker: We have the myth of the Demiurge who creates the universe.
Speaker: The divine craftsman.
Speaker: Right, right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Importantly, the Demiurge is not like a god or like the Logos or anything.
Speaker: He's really just like a craftsman.
Speaker: Not a god with a capital G.
Speaker: Right, right.
Speaker: Not like a supreme god.
Speaker: I mean, obviously the Demiurge is pretty powerful because he can create a whole universe just from some like kind of formless matter.
Speaker: And then like the form is, the forms are in the Demiurge's mind and he imposed those onto the matter.
Speaker: And from this, the universe exists.
Speaker: This is a kind of creation myth or Plato describes a probable tale.
Speaker: You know, he's not committing himself to saying this is what happened, but it seems pretty good.
Speaker: And interestingly, that term, probable tale, that's the translation.
Speaker: The Greek is mythos, right?
Speaker: Eikos mythos.
Speaker: It's a probable mythos, like a story.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So that's still using the Homeric understanding of myth, right?
Speaker: That it's a story.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Famously, for anyone who watches the History Channel, you'll know Plato is known for the myth of Atlantis.
Speaker: That is where... That's really the only... Or the first, at least.
Speaker: The first ancient source of the myth of Atlantis and every other ancient source, I think, of Atlantis is just kind of harkening back to Plato.
Speaker: Yeah, I think that's right.
Speaker: I think the originator of the Atlantis myth is Plato.
Speaker: Yeah, in the Timaeus and also in the Critias, right?
Speaker: And then also the myth of the Ring of Gyges, a famous myth in Plato's Republic, which is, well, so there's multiple myths of Gyges.
Speaker: There's a Gyge story and Herodotus, I think, right?
Speaker: And then who I guess Gyges must have been a real ruler or something.
Speaker: So in Herodotus, if I recall correctly, it's like the king is in love with his wife and he wants to show Gaijis how beautiful she is.
Speaker: So he has Gaijis like hide while she's getting undressed.
Speaker: She finds out and conspires with Gaijis to kill the kings.
Speaker: I think he's like some kind of advisor, just court person.
Speaker: He's not the king.
Speaker: Good for her.
Speaker: Yeah, but that differs from... That's very different from Plato's myth of Gyges.
Speaker: But similar, right?
Speaker: In the Plato's Gyges myth, Gyges finds a ring that makes him invisible.
Speaker: So Plato's kind of riffing on, I guess, the older Gyges.
Speaker: Makes him invisible and he uses it to... Kill the king.
Speaker: Kill the king and marry the queen.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So, okay, good.
Speaker: So lots of Plato employs myths throughout his dialogue, and he's employing them not just as like thought experiments or illustrations, but also not as this kind of like literal scientific history.
Speaker: It seems more like a story that helps bring understanding to some idea that just may or may not be fully true.
Speaker: Does that sound right to you?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, yeah, it seems like I guess he I think he thinks of myths as ways of conveying a truth, even if the surface narrative is not not true.
Speaker: Does that sound accurate?
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, a lot of people, including me, as you know, read a substantive portion of Plato's dialogues as like an early instance of this kind of indirect way of communication that might be called like esotericism in philosophy.
Speaker: This way of reading Plato is, it's not the only way of reading Plato, but it is a way of reading Plato.
Speaker: I tend to think it's right for a lot of his dialogues.
Speaker: The idea that the best way to
Speaker: bringing understanding of something to a reading audience is not to directly discuss it, but to indirectly discuss it.
Speaker: And you can do that through stories.
Speaker: You can do that through dialogue.
Speaker: Obviously, most of what Plato wrote was dialectical.
Speaker: You can do that through other kinds of indirect communication.
Speaker: And so, myth seems like a really perfect vehicle for this kind of way of doing philosophy.
Speaker: Plato's obviously interested in convincing people of the things he's trying to talk about.
Speaker: And a lot of the things he's trying to talk about are really hard to talk about.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And a logical argument might not be convincing, but maybe if you pair that with a good story, a good myth that's entertaining, that might be more persuasive.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: I mean, I think that the book The Republic is a really great instance of the kind of failure of straightforward uses of logos for convincing people of a position.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: You see Socrates engaged with all of these interlocutors, all of whom are giving arguments for various pictures of what justice is.
Speaker: And all of them kind of end up tripping over themselves.
Speaker: And even Socrates, when he tries to give arguments, presumably for some position, ends up giving kind of bad arguments.
Speaker: They're not that good.
Speaker: And what happens in the book is we slowly, you know, these tales unfold that aren't direct arguments for a picture of justice, but they are...
Speaker: Pictures themselves of things that are just things that are good.
Speaker: And that that's kind of a more a better way to convince people of a picture of justice than just using, you know, like modus ponens or something like that.
Speaker: So I think that Plato does a good job of putting pressure on what we might think of as a strict dichotomy between these two things, right?
Speaker: Myth and logic, mythos and logos.
Speaker: There are instances where something is obviously pure logos, instances where something is obviously pure mythos, like just story, mere mythos or something like that.
Speaker: And then there's something kind of in between.
Speaker: You see both used in the same dialogue.
Speaker: Sometimes you kind of see instances of a dialogue that are functioning somewhere in the middle, which I think is really important because even though we might take myth to mean a falsehood,
Speaker: as opposed to a true fact, it kind of opens up this third way for us to think of myth as something to which it's maybe improper to ascribe it as having like a strict T truth value or strict F truth value, but in the sense that it's not trying to give us like a literal, like camcorder capture, literal picture of events that happen, but it's trying to show us something beneath the surface of that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, so it's common for commentators on Plato to say that Plato plays with the distinction between mythos and logos.
Speaker: So we have a Herodotus saying a mythos is an implausible story.
Speaker: Plato comes along and he says, well, hold on, is the distinction so sharp?
Speaker: And you can see this just based in some dialogues when he uses these words interchangeably.
Speaker: So in the Gorgias, when he's about to give his myth of the afterlife, the same story we've already mentioned, where the good are rewarded and the evil are punished, Socrates says to his interlocutor,
Speaker: Listen, then, as storytellers say, to a very pretty tale, Logos, a pretty tale, which I dare say that you may be disposed to regard as a fable-only, Mythos, but which, as I believe, is a true tale, Logos, for I mean to speak the truth.
Speaker: And he goes on to give the story, right?
Speaker: And he says, when he concludes the story, So in the myth that Socrates tells in the Gorgias,
Speaker: The gods first judge people with their clothes on, but they do a bad job because they're distracted by how beautiful the clothes are of the rich and they're judging poorly.
Speaker: So the gods decide to judge everyone naked, right?
Speaker: So they cannot be distracted by the nice jewelry and the rich clothes that the affluent have.
Speaker: So it's a silly kind of tale.
Speaker: It's silly to imagine Zeus judging everyone naked or whatever.
Speaker: Yeah, what if they're distracted by their hotness or something?
Speaker: But yeah, so it sounds silly, but the point that Socrates wants to convey is that the soul is judged on its own merits and it doesn't matter if you were a beautiful person in your life.
Speaker: If your soul is bad, then that will be clear in the afterlife and that will be judged.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So there's a truth.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: The myth conveys a truth or contains a truth, even though the surface was kind of kind of silly.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: So in these quotes, we explicitly see the term like pretty tail going between the Greek words mythos and logos.
Speaker: Yeah, that's pretty interesting.
Speaker: Socrates is calling this story about the afterlife where the dead go to the island of the blessed and they go to Tartarus in the underworld.
Speaker: He calls that a logos.
Speaker: That's interesting.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So myth is pretty central to Plato's philosophy.
Speaker: I mean, I would say.
Speaker: Yeah, and I think that's right.
Speaker: And I think this is something people often neglect, especially people who aren't like historians of Plato, right?
Speaker: It's easy to forget this when you're just teaching Plato to undergrads.
Speaker: I'm interested in the metaphysics.
Speaker: I don't care about the gods.
Speaker: I'm going to skip this part.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And so this is something that has been noted by commentators in the literature.
Speaker: So I have this paper here from Julia Anas.
Speaker: So she's a pretty distinguished contemporary historian of ancient Greek philosophy and Plato's.
Speaker: So in a paper called Plato's Myths, she points out that the myths in Plato's dialogues have been in general neglected by philosophers.
Speaker: So this paper was written in 1982.
Speaker: I think this has changed by now.
Speaker: This is 40 years ago now.
Speaker: So you can find books on Plato and myth written by contemporary historians of philosophy.
Speaker: That has changed, it seems to me, based on my brief survey of the literature.
Speaker: But yeah, it is easy to neglect the myths in Plato and how central they are.
Speaker: It is notable that Plato ends the Republic with a myth.
Speaker: He ends the Republic with the myth of Ur, another one of these afterlife myths.
Speaker: Well, it's not just contemporary philosophers who want to maybe not talk about or don't really care about the myths in Plato.
Speaker: His own student, Aristotle, did not seem super into the mythological aspects of Plato's philosophy either.
Speaker: He famously discards with the Phaedo myth by just saying, hey, look, sadly, you know, Plato gets all these geographical facts wrong, all of these...
Speaker: aspects of the myth that talk about like the water flowing from the earth into tartarus the underworld um yeah the underworld that's uh this is this obviously doesn't happen as as we know uh the rivers flow into the sea um so sorry plato you know it maybe it was a it was a good thought but it was just wrong so uh it turns out this this is a failure
Speaker: Yeah, and this seems like a little unfair of Aristotle to focus on this aspect of the myth.
Speaker: So in the Phaedo, there's another myth about the afterlife.
Speaker: Aristotle's focusing on Plato's offhand comments about how the rivers work in the myth.
Speaker: They all flow down to the underworld.
Speaker: Pretty on brand for Aristotle.
Speaker: He's a bit of a nerd.
Speaker: He's a little more of a nerd than Plato.
Speaker: Let's be honest here, right?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: When it comes to the natural world, he's like, you're talking about rivers?
Speaker: We should be doing science on this.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But to be fair, elsewhere in Aristotle's corpus, he does express a positive view of myth, too.
Speaker: So he uses the word mythos in the poetics when he's discussing poetry.
Speaker: He says a good play has a good mythos, good narration.
Speaker: And he also is willing to accept this thing that we saw in Plato, that myths contain or express important truths beneath the surface of a silly story.
Speaker: So Aristotle says in the Poetics, he says he actually contrasts poetry with history.
Speaker: And he seems to say that poetry does a better job of conveying truth than history.
Speaker: He says, poetry is something more philosophical and serious than
Speaker: than history because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular facts.
Speaker: That's really fascinating.
Speaker: Aristotle's poetics is, of all the things I've read of Aristotle's, both incredibly dry given its content.
Speaker: And also just really kind of confusing.
Speaker: It's very technical, very confusing.
Speaker: Yeah, I read the poetics quite a while ago and I really have no desire to ever read it again.
Speaker: But no, you're right.
Speaker: I mean, he does.
Speaker: He sees it.
Speaker: He certainly at least recognizes its rhetorical power.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And, you know, he's he's saying it's better than history there at conveying truth.
Speaker: And you can see here then general truth, general truth.
Speaker: You see.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So you can see here like the prejudice of the ancient Greek thinkers for general, universal, eternal truth.
Speaker: And this is something that Collingwood notes in the idea of history.
Speaker: He says it's it's surprising.
Speaker: It's it's amazing that history was born in.
Speaker: in ancient Greece because the ancient Greeks have this kind of anti-historical tendency, this anti-historical viewpoint.
Speaker: They don't care about the particular truths.
Speaker: In fact, it's not even really anti, it's just more like apathetic.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And or they can't convey knowledge.
Speaker: Plato says this a lot of times in the dialogues, like not like you can't have genuine knowledge of the things in the earthly realm, the messy realm.
Speaker: You can only have genuine knowledge of the forms.
Speaker: So so call it what things it's.
Speaker: Or you at least have to start there.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: You can't start from the particular facts and build up.
Speaker: There is a preference, though, right?
Speaker: Clearly, like they care more about the eternal, the forms than the changeable stuff here.
Speaker: Care more about the form of the table rather than the table.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Collingwood has a nice line where he says Plato writes as though Herodotus does not exist.
Speaker: I thought that was a really good one.
Speaker: But yeah, Aristotle, you know, he's not he's not so hard on myth elsewhere.
Speaker: He does.
Speaker: He does say he does acknowledge its power to convey general truth.
Speaker: And elsewhere also in the metaphysics, he's I think we mentioned this in our polytheism episode.
Speaker: He doesn't want to discard the gods entirely.
Speaker: He says in some of these silly stories about Zeus and and then Kronos and stuff, you can still see glimpses of a truth.
Speaker: Yeah, there's some nugget of something there.
Speaker: That's why he stayed pious, even through his skepticism.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So in learning about myths for this episode, I came across a lot of myths I had never heard of before, not just in the ancient Greek tradition, but also in other cultural traditions.
Speaker: And we'll talk more about those in the next part.
Speaker: But there's a lot of like weird stories in ancient Greek mythology.
Speaker: So for instance, when...
Speaker: When Cronos, one of the sons of Gaia and Uranus, sky and earth, revolts against Uranus, he cuts off Uranus's male member, which he throws into the sea, and that becomes the goddess Aphrodite.
Speaker: That's one of them.
Speaker: That was a weird one.
Speaker: There's another weird story where Zeus tries to overthrow Kronos, his father, and he's spirited away to a cave and he is nursed by a magic goat.
Speaker: And one day Zeus pulls the horn off the goat and from the horn emerges fruits and vegetables and a bunch of nourishment.
Speaker: And that's the cornucopia.
Speaker: That's where the cornucopia comes from, from this magic goat.
Speaker: So a lot of those are just a handful of them.
Speaker: There's a whole bunch of other weird ones.
Speaker: So I guess one question I always have when thinking about this is like, did the ancient Greeks and other people from other cultures who have myths that seem kind of bizarre from our point of view, did they really believe these sorts of things?
Speaker: I don't know, Megan, you have thoughts on this.
Speaker: Um, yeah, yeah, I've had thoughts on this for a while.
Speaker: I actually didn't.
Speaker: I mean, I still don't really know.
Speaker: I don't think that I have like a settled view.
Speaker: But the I mean, one place I think it'd be good to start with this question is just that belief is kind of a fraught concept, especially since how we think of beliefs in maybe like contemporary philosophy, especially analytic philosophy is, I think, has like pretty anachronistic to apply to
Speaker: There's a discussion of this all throughout one of my favorite books called The Secular Age by Charles Taylor on belief and how it relates to religion and ritual and practices and stuff like that.
Speaker: um in the ancient world where it wasn't the focus just wasn't really on what was in your mind in terms of you know like uh epistemic ascent uh you know would i say yes to the proposition that that you know a bunch of fruits sprang out of this magical or divine goat horn when it was pulled off of the goat by who was it zeus yeah yeah
Speaker: Um, right.
Speaker: So I think that that's the question that like, it seems like your average, like Greco Roman civilian just wouldn't have been asking themselves, you know, what what it means to like, believe that myth is just to like, act in a court like any kind of relevant actions that might prescribe on the part of like, the the pious people that you just like do those things.
Speaker: You know, obviously, in that in that particular myth, it's not clear that it prescribes any actions.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I wonder I wonder about some of the more bizarre ones that they don't.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: They don't seem really connected to any ritual or anything like that.
Speaker: Well, and also, I mean, something that we should note is that a lot of these stories, we don't have a lot of like it's not like there's a Greek mythology Bible.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Good point.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: There is.
Speaker: We you know, we have the Theogony.
Speaker: We have Ovid's Metamorphosis, which is really different.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: He's a Roman author.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Well, he's a Roman citizen.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And that's really different.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It has a lot of different takes on these stories.
Speaker: And then you have snippets of them in the work of other ancient authors that aren't trying to give, you know, write like a Bible type thing or a scripture type thing.
Speaker: Like we don't have anything like that.
Speaker: There's not like an authoritative source for these stories.
Speaker: So right from the start, you have...
Speaker: You have the ability to.
Speaker: And in fact, it's necessary to question, you know, well, which of these stories about Zeus is right?
Speaker: Like in some cases they're incompatible.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: So, yeah.
Speaker: Hesiod's theogony is just one account of the birth of the gods.
Speaker: There were other ones out there.
Speaker: Presumably, we just don't have them.
Speaker: We have his.
Speaker: So his gets pride in place in our discussions.
Speaker: So, yeah, that's a really good point that these myths aren't like they're not part of a creed or anything like that, because the Greek religion wasn't wasn't very creedal in the way that, you know, Western monotheistic religions are.
Speaker: So we have a book on our shelf called Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths by Paul Vane, an essay on the constitutive imagination.
Speaker: So I leaf through this book.
Speaker: You didn't like it.
Speaker: I didn't like this book.
Speaker: It was full of really a lot of like turgid prose and jargon and all that.
Speaker: Seemed like his main point was trying to defend some kind of social constructivist view of truth.
Speaker: But he does say something about the central question.
Speaker: So here's what he says.
Speaker: But of course they believe in their myths.
Speaker: They believe in them, but they use them and cease believing at the point where their interest in believing ends.
Speaker: You have any thoughts about that?
Speaker: Okay, I see.
Speaker: So, well, I think that this is sort of kind of maybe what I was getting at.
Speaker: Like, to the extent that they're relevant for religious praxis, they can be relevantly said to believe them.
Speaker: And to the extent that they're not, I just think it doesn't really matter.
Speaker: They're just stories, you know?
Speaker: Maybe meant to give the gods a kind of, like, dimension, you know, or fill in these gaps in their character or something.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: But yeah, I guess I just think that this idea of like really asking oneself, you know, do I do I do I really think that this story is like literally true?
Speaker: I just I don't see a lot of evidence that people were doing that or asking themselves that question.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Why?
Speaker: I think this is a great time then to shift to the definitional question, right?
Speaker: Like, what is a myth?
Speaker: So we've sort of avoided this.
Speaker: We've presupposed some things throughout our discussion.
Speaker: So we don't want to say that a myth is just some debunked or popular misconception.
Speaker: But if it's not that, then what is it?
Speaker: So we have presupposed that it's something like a traditional story.
Speaker: that maybe takes place in a distant time, the dateless past, to use Collingwood's phrase.
Speaker: It seems weird to say a myth happened last year.
Speaker: It would be weird to be like, oh, yes, the society tells us this story, this myth about events in the previous year.
Speaker: That seems weird.
Speaker: So it does seem like the subject matter, the events that are described have to be at least old or timeless or something like that.
Speaker: And here, I think you're right that we should be neutral on whether the story is true or false.
Speaker: It shouldn't really loom large in our analysis of the myth.
Speaker: It's a story about things that take place in the past, the dateless past, maybe.
Speaker: Maybe it's true.
Speaker: Maybe it's false.
Speaker: But something like that seems to be a decent definition of a myth.
Speaker: I guess we might want to add the myth plays some significant function.
Speaker: So we've been focusing on the function that it plays in Plato, which is conveying some kind of philosophical truth.
Speaker: But there's a lot of different disciplines that study myths, psychology, anthropology.
Speaker: And they'll point out lots of different functions that myths play.
Speaker: Something like that seems like a decent definition.
Speaker: Yeah, I think like, you know, you can imagine this thought experiment can show why I think I agree with you on this.
Speaker: You can imagine, you know, somehow we discover that some of these Greek gods really do exist and they really did do these things.
Speaker: Would we like take those stories out of like a mythology class?
Speaker: Probably not because it's part of like the canon.
Speaker: Yeah, right.
Speaker: So the term is at least the way, and this is the way that a lot of scholars of myth use it.
Speaker: They use it in this kind of neutral sense.
Speaker: They're not, by calling something a myth, you're not necessarily calling it false.
Speaker: That's not really the focus.
Speaker: So they will speak of like the myth of Genesis, right?
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Speaker: Obviously, those that believe in the Bible is like the literal word of God, they'll say, well, no, that's not a myth.
Speaker: That's like history.
Speaker: That's true.
Speaker: God did create the world in seven days.
Speaker: So I guess like this term myth then, like it does seem kind of like an outsider's term.
Speaker: Like the Greeks wouldn't say that they have myths.
Speaker: To go back to that book, did the Greeks believe their myths?
Speaker: If you ask the Greek that, they'd be like, what myths?
Speaker: What are you talking about?
Speaker: This is what Zeus did.
Speaker: I think it's an outsider term now, but like, so we can just take the example you just used of like the creation myth in Genesis, the creation myths in Genesis.
Speaker: There's two different creation myths, one in Genesis 1 and one in Genesis 2 that are different retellings of the same story that even for like really devout Christians like Augustine,
Speaker: So you have this thing that Augustine wrote where he's trying to give a more literal interpretation of the creation myth than other people, the other Christians that he has been reading who have been writing about this.
Speaker: And even he is going to say, look, yeah, a lot of this is mythological.
Speaker: Still, because it has these like obvious markers.
Speaker: So I so I think maybe myth might be more of like an outsider term now, but I don't think it always was.
Speaker: I mean, I guess, you know, I wouldn't consider Augustine like an outsider or anything, even as he's discussing, you know, Genesis one and two through the literary lens of myth.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, that's a good, that's a good, that's a good example.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, right.
Speaker: So he's not like a literalist about these things.
Speaker: He recognizes them as.
Speaker: He's a literalist about something, like he, I think he believed in like a literal Adam and Eve, but he's not, he's not going to be like a dogmatic literalist about any kind of like chronology or something like that.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah, interesting.
Speaker: So there's a lot more to say about myth.
Speaker: We've only scratched the surface.
Speaker: So in the next part of this two-part episode, we're going to shift from philosophy to, I'm not sure what you want to call it, like myth studies or mythography.
Speaker: We're going to talk about different academic disciplines and the ways in which they study myth.
Speaker: So we'll talk about different theories of myth, different theories of the function of myth, different theories about what myth is about, and different accounts of
Speaker: whether to what extent myths should be interpreted literally or symbolically.
Speaker: So that'll be fun.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So on that very special episode, you can listen to me and Frank B. Armchair, sociologists, anthropologists, mythographers, and maybe even a little bit of psychoanalysts.
Speaker: Oh, no.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So that's all the time we have for this episode.
Speaker: Make sure to join us in the next episode, part two of our discussion of mythology.
