"The essence of humanity's spiritual dilemma," wrote Edward O. Wilson in Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, "is that we evolved genetically to accept one truth and discovered another." Like Wilson's dilemma, Johnathan Haidt's two ways of finding truth were accepted in most pre-modern cultures as two universal ways of thinking, speaking, and acquiring knowledge. While Wilson called the two roads to truth the transcendentalist and the empiricist world views, and Haidt called them the lawyer and the scientist, the ancient Greeks called these two ways of thinking mythos and logos.
"Is there a way
to erase the dilemma," Wilson went on to ask, "to resolve the contradictions between the
transcendentalist and the empiricist world views?" Answering his own question, Wilson wrote, "No, unfortunately,
there is not. Furthermore, a choice between them is unlikely to remain
arbitrary forever. The assumptions underlying the two world views are
being tested with increasing severity by cumulative verifiable knowledge
about how the universe works." But from the viewpoint of the ancient Greeks, it appears that both Wilson and Haidt are only seeing through half of the lens of their own mind, and denying the other half exists at all.
Like science and empiricism, logos was
the a lens that saw the world through a pragmatic mode of thought. Like physics and medicine and rocket science, it had to conform to external reality because it enabled people to function in the world. This is essential to survival of a species. Indeed, logos constituted the collective
scientific understanding of the ancient world. But like science today, it could not answer
life's ultimate questions, or do much to assuage our grief. To do that, people turned to mythos, or what today we call myth. And to understand how these two perspectives reflect the two ways our minds work, we first have to understand the house in which these two ghosts live together: our psyche.
The word psychology is derived from two Greek words “psyche” and “logos.” Psyche means soul (life) and logos means knowledge (explanation) or the study of the soul. For the ancient Greek philosophers, logos was the sum of all logic, which they equated with a
universal, and therefore divine reason, immanent in nature, yet
transcending all oppositions and imperfections in the cosmos and
humanity. This, of course, assumes we are capable of understanding not only what constitutes "perfection" regarding the cosmos itself, even though our understanding of it is woefully lacking, but what constitutes such perfection as defined by a divine and infinite intelligence, despite our limitations on the one hand, and our alleged sinful nature on the other.
While logos captured the divine reasoning of the cosmos and all worldly knowledge, mythos captured the paradox of the human experience, which is both singular and universal. In one sense, mythos was singular because it reflected something that only happened once. In another sense, it conveyed the universal because it reflected something which happened all the time. A story about someone else's unique struggles is also a story about everyone's different struggles at the same time. One person's quest to overcome cancer is another person's quest to climb Mount Everest, or overcoming the effects of trauma or crippling self-doubt. All stories, movies, even Ted Talks, reflect this universality. Catholics imagine they are collectively "the body of Christ," for example, even though Jesus's experience was universal to all human beings, not just those who happen to subscribe to one particular brand of the Jesus story.
The Jesus story is not the fulfillment of all other stories, as such, but their embodiment, in the same way each of us is the embodiment of the story of the human race in different guises. Catholic, after all, comes from the Greek adjective katholikos, which means 'universal'. Ironically, such a word is now used by those who separate themselves from the rest of the universal body of humanity as a whole because they choose to "believe" they have been given divine knowledge from a God that allows them to know right from wrong not only better than others, but to do so with all of the "infallibility" of God Himself - the very same desire the serpent manufactured in Adam & Eve and then preyed upon to rob them of their state of harmony in the Garden of Eden. Their harmony came from accepting they were part of the universe, in other words, and their disharmony came from believing they had "become like God" in how they understood right and wrong.
After they had convinced themselves they were more righteous in their "beliefs" than everyone else, they then blamed everyone who refused to believe the same thing for their suffering. If only everyone would believe it the same way they did, so the Christian reasoning goes, the world would feel so much better - at least for such Christians anyway, even if not for anyone else. In adopting such a perspective and doting oneself to never questioning it, such "believers" had separated themselves from the most natural, sacred, and divinely authored tradition of all - being part of the universal singular.
Comments
Post a Comment