Iain McGilchrist meets Karen Armstrong on Mythos and logos
What follows is a paraphrase, a mash-up, of things written online by both Iain and Karen. Done initially for the Insight Colleges book, it proved so fruitful, I made an article version too. All good ideas here can be attributed to Iain and Karen.
Karen Armstrong explores the confusion around logos and mythos. She uses the approach of Johannes Slok. According to Armstrong, myths points to timeless and repeating human experiences our left brain finds mysterious. Myth is not focused on the practical world or any practical context. Myths primarily support us learning life lessons from the confusing experiences we have as a soul here on Earth.
Armstrong says logos points to our rational thoughts. Our rational [left-hemisphere] thoughts are based on sensory evidence. Based on repeated observation and experience, we observe and learn how people behave and how things work. We use these thoughts to navigate daily on the horizontal plane of our daily lives.
In the late 1700s, in the US and Europe, many leading public thinkers lost interest in Greek-Roman myths. They started to refer to Logos as the way to truth (the so-called Enlightenment). They turned away from the right hemisphere altogether. They turned towards the practical left-hemisphere, raised it up; and too often, worshipped it one-sidedly.
Myth, feeling and intuition were downgraded to lesser functions. To push these down further, myth, feeling and intuition were accused (scapegoated?) for being the source of faulty beliefs and superstitions.
Women designing New Colleges felt “pregnant with possibility” a way could be found to integrate Logos and Mythos could be formulated and conveyed to future generations.
Defining terms
The topic of Mythos and Logos, as discussed by both Karen Armstrong and Iain McGilchrist, employs a two-axis model, a vertical and a horizontal axis. All readers will be most familiar X and Y axes from middle school math:
dg-vertical horizontal axes
For Mythos and Logos, the vertical Y axis is Mythos. This represents all legitimate, valid knowledge about the meaning of life and the purpose of soul in the human experience. As Karen says, “everyone wants to know where we came from and where we’re going.” Such knowledge is invisible, necessarily subjective, and somewhat uniquely perceived by each person [In Goethean Holistic Science, these are the First and Third Orders of Science].
The X axis is Logos. This represents all legitimate, valid knowledge about “… the pragmatic mode of thought enabling people to function effectively in the outer and social world. Logos knowledge has to correspond accurately with external reality. People have always needed Logos to make an efficient weapon, organize their societies, or plan an expedition. Logos is forward-looking, continually on the lookout for new ways of controlling the environment, improving old insights, or inventing something fresh. Logos is essential to the survival of our species. Yet it has limitations: it can not assuage human grief; nor, find ultimate meaning in life’s struggles. For this people before the Enlightenment turned to Mythos, myth and religion.”
Reference ~ “Mythos and Logos” — https://users.manchester.edu/facstaff/ssnaragon/kant/lp/Readings/Armstrong,%20Mythos-Logos.html
In Goethean Holistic Science, Logos is Second Order Science, including everything we call technology. Knowledge on the horizontal X axis must be true at all times, in all places, for everyone, regardless of subjective state. Therefore, feelings, intuition and everything subjective are ruled out.
Karen and Iain call the horizontal dimension Logos; they call the vertical dimension Mythos.
Mythos knowledge works in the vertical dimension of depth and height, the deep meaning of things.
Logos knowledge works on the horizontal dimension, on surface of things, the mundane, the everyday; including, physical comfort and convenience.
Science and its handmaiden, everyday common sense, find virtually all their work on the horizontal dimension.
The Living Real
Religion, mysticism, poetry, and other art forms, are workable in the vertical dimension. When these play a vital role in mainstream culture, they connect a society to the Living Real (Iain’s phrase). We all crave connection with the Living Real. Left hemisphere wishes to avoid this fact, wishes to avoid all territory where it feels inadequate and incompetent.
Being connected to the Living Real is the only true cure for alienation and existential separation. Guess which society, in the history of the world, experiences more alienation, with the greatest intensity? American society.
American society craves a restoration of Mythos to balance out its suffocating, alienating, overweening horizontality.
This is a big reason why superheroes and Marvel movies have been so popular in the USA. Superhero stories point to the transcendent qualities of human awareness. Even unsuccessful superhero movies point to the trials and tribulations of humans attempting to express their transcendent potentials.
When people have lived so long without any mythos, people have no sense of its loss. Uneducated adults and the young, tend to assume mythos never existed ever. People think their ancestors, who reported connection with the Living Real, were delusional; they simply didn’t have modern science to set them straight (Iain paraphrase).
As authentic mystics and all uplifting myths drained out of churches in the 1900s, Mythos disappeared without a trace. How did it disappear? It was overwhelmed underneath all the advertising and click bait distractions. Authentic Mythos has been stripped 100% out of the news, out of most politics, out of the workplace. [Only worship of the god of commerce and the billionaire are allowed in the USA.]
When understood as operating on the vertical dimension, mythos is not opposed, but complementary to hard science. One works on the vertical beam of human experience. The other works for the horizontal beam.
Maybe you’ve seen this image before:
dg-cross
Since before the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, the cross represented the wholeness, the two-fold nature, of soul in the human experience. Science-technology alone, the horizontal beam alone, is only half a whole (from a biography of Apostle Paul).
Science “gets out over its skis” when it tries to be Mythos. Religions get out over theirs, when it tries to be Logos.
In Iain McGilchrist’s terms, “a full, effective ‘metaphysical imaginary’ integrates knowledge from both the horizontal and vertical dimensions, from both Logos and Mythos.”
Our contemporary civilization crisis lies in how authentic Mythos no longer plays a vital role in mainstream culture. There are still artists, mystics and religious people; yet, they play no vital role in shaping the culture’s healthy, positive vertical dimension. They get subsumed into the materialist ethos of contemporary consumer capitalism. Religion, mysticism and poetry become merely consumer commodities, no more than a buying choice.
Iain says, “I do think for a society to function, it must have a broadly accepted metaphysical imaginary; which, integrates a central vertical axis, or Mythos. There must be a healthy, dynamic tension between these two axes.” — https://afterthefuture.typepad.com/afterthefuture/mcgilchrist/
What Theodore Roszak calls myth, Iain McGilchrist calls a “metaphysical imaginary.”
A metaphysical imaginary is effective to the degree it provides a meaningful ethical, moral framework for a society for both the vertical and horizontal dimensions.
The trick is to stay grounded in the vertical experience. Then, to make philosophy, or Logos, work to explain how ethical, moral and mystical aspects of the vertical serve, make sense and serve the highest good of all stakeholders on the horizontal.
Trouble sets in when philosophy/Logos is used by people detached from their connection with healthy verticality.
Too often, talking heads at podiums, or on screens, are detached from healthy moral, ethics, values, which bring us closer to the Living real. The medievals used to call these “virtues.” When talking heads are disconnected with any commitment to any virtue, then talking heads lead us astray, into mere horizontality and left hemisphere superficiality. This is why the vertical is important. It is what grounds or roots a person in the Living Real (Note ~ This is why Iain is such a popular speaker. He stays connected to the virtues he’s committed to).
In Iain’s terms, when the horizontal takes over leadership from the vertical, this is when the Emissary [the go-between] usurps the Master. The task is to hold the two — Logos and Mythos, the horizontal and vertical together.
At its deepest level, Mythos is collectively created and perceived (example: Marvel movies). You can also insert here much of what Carl Jung said about archetypes. At its best, Mythos crystallizes the great, central, truly human values of a culture. It is, so to speak, the [common sub- and unconscious language] of culture.
I do not think it’s possible to have a strictly materialist or rationalist Mythos, as many atheists propose and promote. Why? Because the horizontal plane dislikes and avoids, even denies, the dimension of spiritual depth. left hemisphere only wants to work with what it already knows, in new ways. The Living Real is too scary, too overwhelming, for the horizontal, for the logos, for left hemisphere (Iain paraphrase).
Roszak says rationalist materialists think they know the truth — as opposed to those poor dolts who believe only in myths. Yet rationalist too, live circumscribed within myth. Iain agrees.
After the old Greco-Roman Mythos wore thin, in the 1800s, many male intellectuals believed the old myths were now irrelevant. Then between 1850–1950, in the USA, for Americans “on the make,” life on the horizontal became “where it was at.” All considerations and concerns on the vertical, could be — should be — postponed to end-of-life; or, only spoken about privately in psychotherapy.
For any stereotypical 1870s-1980s, red-blooded American, life was to be lived on the horizontal. That’s where all the energy and action was. Religion was for these males primarily a transactional technology to enhance one’s flourishing on the horizontal. If I mind my Ps and Qs, I will prosper. This kind of horizontal religiosity simply cannot withstand any kind of stress test. We know this as the Protestant work ethic. This gets at the one-sided quality, a focus on the horizontal axis, out of balance with the whole of the Cross.
For mid- and late-20th-century males, to proclaim you believed in truly human values of some sort — or even worse, to propose they should work in human affairs in something called “humanism” — was like admitting you really like watching “It’s a Wonderful Life” at Christmas time. “Real men” (macho males), those attending to only the horizontal axis of life, don’t take such sentimental rubbish seriously (Iain paraphrase).
Really what males were telling us, is many men became incapable of responding to a feeling for truth coming thru parables, fables, myths and religion. They’d lost the imagination for it, the vertical capacity for it. …
[Rudolf Steiner pointed to Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. These are only available when one looks up to and listens to what’s coming from the vertical axis of life.]
Back to the ancients
Excepted from the Preface to: Karen Armstrong, The Case for God (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009), pp. x-xii:
In most pre-modern cultures, there were two recognized ways of thinking, speaking, and acquiring knowledge. The Greeks called them Mythos and Logos. Both were essential; neither was considered superior to the other. They were not in conflict; they were complementary. Each had its own domain of competence and influence.
For example, if your child dies or you witness a terrible natural disaster, you don’t want, to hear only a scientific or rational explanation. You want something like a mythology or a ritual [a process] to help you deal with the turbulence of your own grief, despair and horror at the time. This was recognized in the ancient world. This was how myth and science — logos — were complementary. They were not antagonistic to one another.
It was also considered unwise to mix the two. Logos (“reason”) was the pragmatic mode of thought enabling people to function effectively in the practical world. Logos wisdom and insights had to correspond accurately with external reality. People have always needed Logos to make an efficient weapon, organize their societies, or plan an expedition. Logos was forward-looking, continually on the lookout for new ways of controlling the environment, improving old insights, or inventing something fresh. Logos was essential to the survival of our species.
Yet it had its limitations: it could not assuage human grief or find ultimate meaning in life’s struggles. For this ancient peoples turned to the myths of the Greek and Roman gods, to the mystery temples and later to Christianity.
Today we live in a society dominated by one-sided scientific Logos, to an astonishing degree. Myth has fallen into disrepute. In popular parlance, a “myth” is something not true.
In the past, myth was not self-indulgent fantasy. Like Logos, myths helped people to live effectively in our confusing world. Why do you think so many Greeks of 500 BC attended the plays and dramas of Aristophanes, Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides? Myths were an early, primitive form of psychology.
Myths told stories starring the gods; yet, they were really focused on the more elusive, puzzling, and tragic aspects of the human predicament which lay outside the remit of logos. Did I mention myths were an early, primitive form of psychology? When a myth described heroes threading their way through labyrinths, descending into the underworld, or fighting monsters, these were not understood as primarily factual stories. They were designed to help people accept, become curious about and negotiate the obscure regions of their own psyche.
[end of preface excerpt slightly revised]
Good and bad myths
Ms. ARMSTRONG: I think we’ve become rather inept in our dealing with myth. In the 18th and 19th century, logos, reason, science achieved such spectacular results, myth became discredited. So nor we often find it quite difficult to interpret a myth. Our skill at interpreting myths has atrophied [hence Superman and Captain America et al are primitive new beginnings at learning from myth).
Very often what we’re seeing today is bad mythology. The Nazi myth of the German-chosen people, for example, was a retelling of an ancient German folkloric myth, which had developed since the time of the Crusades. The Nazis made this a reality in Germany, together with huge rituals, with devastating and terrible effect. Writers, artists and poets continue to use myths because these are the building blocks of our [subconscious]. They influence how we relate to the world and to each other.
There are good myths and there are bad myths. Bad myths make us cruel, narrow our horizons, inflate our pride, our sense of self-sufficiency; and, a sense of our self-importance. Good myths make us confront hard reality [and our own shadow selves]. Myths are not escapism. They encourage us to confront the limits of ourselves. They’re supposed to make us open our hearts to other human beings and to the natural world. I mean, we’ve rather lost the mythological reverence we once had for the natural world. We had this in ancient times. Now we only think of the natural world as a resource, something we can ransack for our own benefit. We’ve lost the old myths which helped us to relate to the natural world as something sacred, holy and precious.
Slightly revised from https://www.npr.org/transcripts/4992705
Mythos and Logos in dynamic tension
When it was at its best, healthy Western culture was the product of a fundamental dialectic or tension, between reason~imagination, between logos~epos (or mythos). For the Greeks of 500 B.C. spirituality and rationality, muthos (mythos) and logos, could coexist without conflict
it was the fixation of linear written texts which destroyed the free genesis and flow of myth and the creativity of intuitive thought. Homer is, in fact, already a man of Logos. The ancient philosophers already understood a rupture had occurred, an asymmetry had developed between the world of the imagination and the world of reason. These two were no longer in dynamic balance with each other. The two began to be framed by men thru the lens of competition: it was a contest between logos and mythos. Only one could win, Logos was starting to dominate Mythos (Iain paraphrase).
References and To Learn More
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theatre_of_ancient_Greece)
“A Genealogy of our collective insanity” series on AftertheFuture.typepad.com:
https://afterthefuture.typepad.com/afterthefuture/mcgilchrist/
