Ep. 291: Cassirer and Langer on Myth and Ritual (Part One)

0:08 Mark: Listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 291 is something like, why do people produce ritual, mythology and religion? We read Ernst Cassirer's An Essay on Man from 1944, chapter 6 and 7, and Susanne Langer's Philosophy in a New Key from 1942, also chapter 6 and 7. For more information, please visit partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer in Madison, Wisconsin, speaker of the lingua Adamica, the real language of the first ancestors of man, which expressed the very nature and essence of things.

0:44 Seth: This is Seth Paskin, superhuman but not divine in my mythological context in Austin, Texas.

0:53 Wes: This is Wes Alwan using my half dead progenitor's jaw as a fish hook that I'm using to create the world in Cambridge, Massachuset.

1:04 Seth: Excellent.

1:05 Mark: Nice, nice. So continuing on our epic quest through these two books here, let's get onto it. We are going to finish this book and talk about aesthetics. And we didn't because it's too long and Dylan was vacationing and had people over and was not ready to do this. But he'll join us for part three because there's going to be more and at least we'll do Langer. So here, since he was the one that didn't read Cassirer to start with, let's go ahead. And chapter six for him was the definition of man in terms of his, of human culture. So it's a very short chapter that sets states out his whole project and how he's going to look at mythology and religion for one, and then art and then history and science.

And then we actually read the chapter on myth and religion here. And then correspondingly in the Langer book, she's got chapter six, life symbols, the roots of sacrament and life symbols, the roots of myth. Those are different things, apparently. So we can get into why that is a progression for her.

2:05 Wes: Once again, I think Langer is far more. It's a far more sophisticated, detailed account than Kasir's.

2:12 Seth: I think the Cassirer we are reading is a popularization of maybe a more deeper and more sophisticated work.

2:20 Wes: It's kind of interesting how this whole thing unfolded. We were supposed to read one book, now we're reading two books in tandem.

2:25 Mark: But, well, the purpose seems to be the same to me. The Langer is more linear. You can see how the argument is progressing that we are a symbol making creature. And this is A spontaneous thing. It is not a pragmatic thing. And therefore, what are the sorts of things, the activities that we engage in that have this spontaneous character? And you might think that myth and religion and speech itself and artistic creations are all just disparate things with their own explanations. But she wants to say that they have a common root.

3:04 Wes: And this is what Cassirer is kind of grasping towards as well. In his book, he's going to say they have a common root, and she's going to try to show us exactly how. Right. So she gives this very detailed and systematic account of how we go from symbols to primitive religions and totemism and all that. And magic. Magic and all that stuff, to more complicated rituals and then storytelling and different kinds of storytelling, fairy tales versus myths. And there's a natural progression towards more sophisticated ways of doing what it is that symbolizing does.

Right. Ultimately, it's an attempt to grasp something. It's an attempt to make sense of the world. Right. And human beings, their place in the world and their relationship to sort of inevitable aspects of life, birth and death and social reality and all that stuff. So part of the unity here, right. We might think of symbolism purely in analytical, descriptive terms. Right. You know, hey, we develop language so we can describe the facts of the world or something like that. But in this case, there's a deeper use of symbolism, right. To understand something that isn't purely factual and that those two things are connected.

Right. So ultimately are what will lead to science, you know, and scientific descriptions through the symbolic use of languages are not unrelated to the attempt to account for the world in terms of myth and religion and so on.

4:37 Mark: Pretty much whenever I was focusing on some particular substantial claim that was in one of them that didn't seem to be in the other, then I eventually saw some evidence that the other one believed that as well, even if it was more in passing. We hadn't read Kasir's chapter on language, which is actually after this one on myth and religion, but, you know, I just took this opportunity to do so and. Yeah, okay, that whole thing about language being metaphorical that we talked about last time, that's in there. Why did he not see the need to do that like Langer did first?

I think maybe just because it's not such a clear progression for him, that it's more just these are things that humans do. And, you know, apparently he wrote whole books on mythology that this is sort of just summing up. So there's a story within the mythology chapter about the difference between earlier pagan Mythology and toward Christianity and ultimately toward philosophy, towards metaphysics. So that's a story that a substantial claim that he brings in other authors and like this is an argument against. But I don't see a direct springboard.

I mean, I guess he's preparing, since he has a chapter on science later in here. He's preparing to say all this figurative talk is a necessary precondition in the dialectical step to getting us to be able to make substantial philosophical, metaphysical descriptions of the world, or even scientific literal descriptions. It's trying to say that literal and figurative are not opposed in the way of like right brain, left brain or something, or merely first there's a bunch of savages and then we grew out of that or something, that it's a more intimate dialectical connection such that the mythological thinking, the more irrational side, is still there as a necessary precondition in the form of this artistic openness.

Just like we told last time in the story about Langer's view of how speech develops, that you need metaphor, you need open ended creative thinking, symbolic thinking as a precondition to have language develop and solidify to enable metaphysics or scientific

6:44 Wes: thinking and the way Langer ends things. Right. So she, for this reading, she brings up again the general scheme, which is this idea that there are major advances in thinking that depend on new types of symbolism. So there's language and then there's symbolic gesture and ritual, totemism, and then there are, you know, there's what she calls nature symbolism. So patterns of life reflected in natural phenomena which produce the first universal insights. So mythology in a way is groping towards philosophy. That's the way she ends up at the end of chapter seven.

And so she'll say, the origin of myth is dynamic, but its purpose is philosophical. So we move in a way beyond the figurative and we get more literal and we get more analytical, and so we move on to discursive symbolism. But her point is that we have to have grist for the mill. Our ideas themselves cannot come from that analytical activity. And then ultimately we're going to have Mark, as you mentioned, art. And in a way, art via the epic poetry, which is a formalization of mythology. That's the first art. Art naturally grows out of mythology as well.

And then art and philosophy kind of live alongside each other.

8:10 Seth: I feel like I need to simplify what I just heard both of you saying for our listeners. The key traits for both Cassirer and Langer of myth is that it's trying to understand the world and the mythological representation or Mythological presentation is intended to explain how such and such a thing came about or why things are the way they are. And in that respect, it's a precursor to science or philosophy. Precursor to philosophy, which is a precursor to science. But the Cassirer book and both of them, they're talking about myth versus religion.

Those are two separate functions. And yet they're also simultaneously trying to make sure that we understand the organic interconnectedness of it, that it's not the case, that there's this eruptive, disruptive break that makes possible, you know, monotheistic religion out of a mythological past or something like that, that these things are related. And as Mark put it and Wes, you too, it's not as though myth and these things get left behind. They're overcome by these other forms of symbolism, but they don't disappear. They still linger in the background and still are a form of presentation to us in our lives, even if we don't prioritize them.

9:40 Mark: There's definitely a will to power notion going throughout here. I felt as well. I mean, I put it earlier as spontaneity, but these are all, again, everything I try to say about one, I end up citing something directly related to the other. Cassirer directly talks about the early magical thinking. What its purpose is, is teaching us confidence in our own power. So he's doing philosophical anthropology here. And we had a past episode on first nations, you know, American Indian philosophy, and had talked about rain dances and can we take. Do they really think that their efficacious rain dances actually produce.

And the way that it's put here is the rain dance is. It's not necessary that it work all the time, but it gives us a feeling, the people that do that, that they are connecting directly. We're not just helpless before the natural forces of the world. We can actually do something. So it's a way of kind of wish fulfillment. And the way I think it was put is that it's like we're dancing actually with the rain. It's not necessarily part of the ritual, is you do it when it looks like it's going to rain, and then a lot of times it does, and that ends up being sort of the fulfillment.

And if it doesn't work, it's not like a machine that you set off that didn't work. It's just it wasn't consummated in that particular instance. Like, we didn't finish the ritual. The rain didn't actually come to take the last step.

11:05 Wes: The point is not to perform magic. There but to articulate the relationship between man and nature. That's the way Langer concludes with that,

11:14 Seth: yeah, magic is an invitation to the elements to perform their part in a drama. And we're talking about ritual and ritual magic here. It's not to be thought of as coercion or control over the elements. It's more that mythology sees the world as a drama in which human experience plays out against nature and against other humans. And so when we perform rituals in nature, it's not because we're trying to change a preset order. It's not magic the way that we conceive of magic post language or post discursive representation, where we know the order of the world and magic is somehow a disruption of that order of the world.

Instead, it's an attempt to simultaneously manifest and articulate a relationship with the world, and it's an invitation to participate in this drama. Langer has a really nice turn of phrase. She says on page 147 of your version, it is a fairly safe rule not to impute to the savage mind processes that never even threaten to arise in our own minds. And to think of people performing ritual as being somehow confused about their efficacy in a deterministic scientific world that they're just hopelessly flailing against is to miss the point of the whole thing entirely.

12:49 Wes: Yeah, part of the magical power. I mean, Mark, you kind of hinted at this in Cassirer's version of this, but Langer talks about this explicitly. What are we fundamentally trying to symbolize in primitive religions? Well, life and death and life giving and becoming dead, where gods are the ultimate emblems of creative power, of things coming into existence. And then animals play a big role because they are good representatives of emotions and ultimately human virtues. But to say something is sacred, it's not because it's protective. Right. So it's not that I'm praying to the gods or engaging in religion because I'm this fearful creature who thinks that I'm going to get protection.

Rather, the way Langer puts it, there's a sense of joy in the power of conception. What we're doing is we are engaged with the power of our own minds to conceive of life and death. So in a sense, symbolization conquers life and death in a weird way. Right. It does the thing that it almost looks like we're asking the gods to do.

13:59 Mark: So the thing I queued on in Langer was this contrast between fairy tales on the one hand and myths on the other hand. So this is all sort of in the first half of Cassirer just seems to talk about myths and then how that evolves to religion, proper monotheistic religion. And he puts a lot of emphasis on that development. Langer adds this other thing about how you might think fairy tales are just like myths, but actually fairy tales are more straightforwardly wish fulfillment. That they're not necessarily about the forces of nature and coming to terms with life and death.

It's not that power of conception. It's like Jack, you know, has beans and he goes and he beats some giants and gets some treasure. It's all about him. So it's like the wish fulfillment of the person who came up with the story is putting yourself in that hero's place. The opposite of that would be like, you know, we've got God of the sun and God of the moon and they're doing these things that set the balance of nature. And then she dwells on this sort of position in between those of the hero, the Hercules or Maui or whatever, who is still is kind of like Jack, but is dealing with these forces of nature sort of as secondary characters.

And so this is a way what she sees as the development from a very immature, childish wish fulfillment, self relating thing to what mythology is actually supposed to do.

15:26 Wes: Yeah. So in fairy tales we have this escapist wish fulfillment and it often involves these aristocratic beings like princes and princesses.

15:35 Seth: And they're not superhuman and they're in ambiguous geographies.

15:40 Wes: Right. And then they're in a fantasy world. Yeah. And it's non altruistic. They don't save the world, they just save themselves. They get the glass slipper, whatever. In myths it's tragic, it's facing up to reality, it's facing up to death. It's not just a happy ending. And the protagonist is superhuman or supernatural at least. But they're operating in the real world, not in the fantasy world. And they have human desires. But it's not just about a happy ending. It's these human desires get frustrated by oppressive non human powers. They're often interactions, right, with the gods.

So the protagonists and myths are. They're engaged with these fundamental truths, you know, one of which is the common fate of death that awaits us all. So what's interesting here is these are both, according to Langer, sourced in Dreams and Fantasy. And it's just the materials used differently. One is wish fulfillment, the other is about understanding, experience. So human relations, needs, fears, all that stuff. You know, Mark, you were mentioning the kind of intermediate hybrid, right, the culture hero in between the fairy tale and the myth that leads to all sorts of interesting quasi mythological stories, that they're not quite fairy tales and they're not quite myths.

She talks about Maui and Hiawatha, these trickster figures. You can't figure out if they're divine or human exactly. One minute they're striding over mountains, and the next minute they're hungry and cold. But the distinctive feature there that's on the way to mythology is the fact that they are world savers, that they are unlike the fairy tale protagonists, not just saving themselves.

17:30 Mark: So it seems like for Langer, some of the ethical journey is within myth itself. That's all in her chapter seven. Her chapter six is all on ritual. So ritual is sort of a dialectical step behind. And in fact, I kind of wish we'd had ritual under our belt when we were talking about speech last time, because it's very much in line with the same growth. We told that whole story about what was my saying booyah at the. At the festival, and that becoming something that is solidified. That example is using ritual. That it is the formalization of overt behavior in the presence of sacred objects is about capturing an attitude.

18:08 Wes: Are you really saying booyah in the presence of a sacred object?

18:13 Mark: If that's what the ritual says, who am I to question it?

18:16 Wes: I think you're just excited by something, right?

18:19 Mark: But yeah, she says ritual starts as play. And it just gets. By repeated use, it becomes formalized. There becomes like a right way to do it. We always say booyah at this point in the. In the party. And that's just. Maybe the fun gets drained out of it at some point. But the purpose is sort of this group cohesion is. This is morale, she says, that articulates this relationship between nature and man. Before we even start explicitly telling stories about it, just with our bodies acting out something. I think she's saying that that there naturally motivates the idea that how does wish fulfillment work?

Well, one of the ways could be that it spills out into telling a story. But a more fundamental way is like, let's pretend, let's play, let's do this with our bodies for wish fulfillment. And I liked her point about how ritual play is not imitative, just like the. We were talking last time about pictorial representation, how you're not literally. It's not like you're trying to draw a little photograph, like you're doing a scheme when you're drawing a bunny head or something like that. And so she was saying, like a very ritual thing that kids will do.

In play is to pretend to eat. And that is one of the most unrealistic things. Like, you don't. As a child, when you're pretending to eat, it sort of becomes a like, just putting my hand to my mouth, nom, nom, nom. Not going through the. I don't know, I could imagine children going through a more detailed, like, fork and knife and cut and. But you're doing something weirder.

19:39 Wes: The point is that it's not expressive, it's denotative. It's a symbolic activity. And so the point is that it becomes kind of schematized or cursory. And everyone knows what you're doing. You know, you don't have to do it in detail because you're not engaged in mimesis at that point. You're communicating symbolically to say, hey, look, this is me eating. And Right, Mark, as you pointed out, it starts out as expression, right? There's something sacred. We have some sort of response to that. It might be shouting out. It might be bouncing in the beginning, or we might just, you know, anything can be sacred.

It might just be the act of eating, but certain aspects of that can be formalized. So the eating can become a feast where we do things in a certain order and in a certain way. Eating is conducted in a certain way. So things that before were actions, right, become symbolic gestures. That's, according to her, how you get rites and rituals. And the point is, you know, it's not like you're expressing haze, this sacred thing. I'm getting catharsis out of having this emotional reaction to something sacred. You are, through ritual, demonstrating a permanent right attitude towards everyone else in the community, towards life and death and then life and death and what is sacred.

These are things to be revered. These are things to be feared. But ultimately, there are things to be placated. And once it's true that those are things to be placated, that's where you move into what she calls mimetic ritual. Right? So we get this transition into storytelling because we want to start talking about, hey, what's the character of this thing that I'm placating? And how do you express the character of that of the Holy One? You have to go beyond mere gestures and you start to tell stories. Ultimately, yes.

21:26 Mark: I don't know completely whether to read too much into the fact that she does ritual first. Whereas Cassirer doesn't talk specifically about, you know, he doesn't hold, like, a whole chapter on ritual, but he brings up, for instance, in the process of that old Time mythology. Moving to monotheistic religion. He brings up Taboo in the middle of that as taboo being an expression of this earlier mythological point of view where it's entirely negative. It's like naming an object as sacred. Well, okay, this one is sacred. This is unclean. This is to be avoided, you know, so it's an aspect of the sacred, and it just ends up being stultifying.

That, like, every single thing you do becomes ritual. There's a right way and a wrong way to do it. And if you do it wrong, it doesn't even matter, like, what your attitude is about that. You just, you did it wrong. Which is, again, funny because this sort of came out as, look, what we're doing to prove our power before nature to nature is so sympathetic. And it ends up creating this system, potentially of extensive taboo, which just traps you into ritualistic, repetitive, memetic behavior, I guess, in every single thing you do. And so it needs then some sort of intellectual break to get to religion and the idea of actually having a personal relationship with the gods, of actually pleasing them, of giving them faces, and not merely like, this is right and this is wrong, and this is what you do with your body.

22:51 Seth: That section in Cassirer, what he's talking about is he's very concerned because apparently it was a live thing at the time that people were talking about the emergence of religion, quote, unquote, modern religion versus primitive mythology. He talks about Bergson, again, I mentioned this earlier, this disruptive break. He's trying to show that there is a continuity between the two. And what he's trying to show is how do you make the transition from a mythological worldview to a religious worldview? And what is the significance of that? And he uses Taboo as a site where that can be very clearly seen.

So, as you mentioned, the thing about Taboo is it's entirely negative. It's stigmatization and it's related to action. Don't touch this. Don't go there. Don't cross this. Don't do this. There's a legitimate physical danger. And the act of touching the taboo thing not only infects you, but it infects your family and people around you. And then there have to be purification rites in order to expunge that. And what he's trying to show is the step from taboo to what he calls holiness. It's an additive step. The taboo doesn't go away, but you add the possibility of a positive.

So something that you should actually aspire to or be inspired by, which in turn is going to Bring an obligation. And this is the way you develop a social restriction which is not a prohibition, but is actually a positive expression of human freedom to choose to do the right thing. And that choice then gets internalized and individualized. So we go from action to this concept of, like, purity of heart, purity of soul, choosing, thinking, rightly, whatever. And this is how the whole notion of individual freedom comes up. And what Cassirer's. I think the earth shaking part of this analysis is that ironically, and we've done an episode on free will and freedom and various things, is that he essentially is saying that the concept of freedom is bound up with the concept of the ethical in the sense that prior to having an ethical choice, prior to the notion of religion, prior to the concept of having something you can aspire to, that you have an ethical choice, there really isn't a conception of human freedom in at least any meaningful modern sense that we understand it.

25:28 Mark: Yeah. Is that the concept of freedom, that voluntarism. It is the thing that is opposed to divine command theory. So in the divine command theory, justice is just whatever God says it is right. It's sort of a theory of divine power. Whereas Plato's argument in the Euthyphro and lots of other things are arguing that, no, actually goodness is an objective thing. So that it becomes a matter of not just sort of sucking up to the powers that be, but that choosing good and evil, like, you know, in the Augustinian sense. I thought that word came up in here somewhere.

26:01 Seth: I think, at least as far as Cassirer and perhaps by osmosis or imputation, Langer is concerned, when in the mythological worldview, where human actors are in a drama, the mythological worldview is a dramatic stage in which we as humans play a part and various other beings play a part. The notion of choice doesn't really make sense. It's drama in the, you know, kind of like Greek tragic sense. Things are the way they are, the forces act upon each other, but you're not exercising free will because you're still very much in the world. It's very imminent. The concept of freedom and the concept of choice which comes with religion requires a concept of transcendence in some way. And that just isn't there when you're at the stage of mythological development.

26:56 Wes: So I think you're. You know, what you guys have been getting at is for Cassirer, this difference between functioning within a system of social restriction and obligation in a passive way. That's the taboo system. It's very effective for getting people to do things, but There's a transition to something more positive, something involving inspiration and aspirations. So religion. And it's not that there's not obligation, but it's just obligation that is more profound. I think it's probably. I don't know if Cassirer says this, but it's rooted in a more articulated conception of the other and articulated conception of the divine. So it's not just I'm doing this because it's the thing to do and

27:40 Mark: that's that, you know, ultimately both of them are trying to say religion and reason are not in conflict in the way that you might think. Was that lesson argued persuasively as far as you were concerned? And I had said at the beginning that there's a dialectical connection between them, that what we might call irrational thinking, but is really pre rational. It's like we haven't even. One of the later points, I don't remember which of them make. I think they both make the point that when you're talking in terms of myth or taboo, somehow doubt does not even enter the picture. So it is improper to then accuse those people of being rubes or something like that because doubt was just not on. It's only when you develop further.

28:27 Wes: Well, in Langer it's because there's not a question of doubt because it's not being taken literally. Or what's literal and figurative are not distinguished in the primitive mind. So you can't doubt the gods, right, in ancient Greece if you don't have a kind of literal mindedness that would allow you to become doubtful of them. What myth making does is it appeals purely to the symbolic, purely to ideas. So the Greeks didn't believe in Apollo exactly in a literal fundamentalist sense, because that wasn't really the point. So when we talk about Apollo and everything, you know, Apollo is representative of some fundamental reality and the myths are supposed to be good expressions of the character of that reality and that's all that matters.

So, you know, it sounds like I'm saying, oh, they took it figuratively and poetically. But what she wants to say is that distinction never, even, even arises. So you don't say, oh, this didn't literally happen. I'm, I'm taking it figuratively. It's just those two are kind of fused together.

29:32 Mark: I think Cassirer says, or one of them says that it is neither the case that these beliefs are taken literally, nor is it the case of like someone who knows better, who's merely pretending. I think of it maybe as you're playing a very serious Game, right. You're engaged in this ritual activity that is part of the self expression, part of the way that you're relating to the world. And gradually, as correlations to that, when we're elaborating what is the meaning of this thing that we're doing. So again, it could have started that we were all just after the hunt, we're all saying booyah, we're all moving our dishes in the appropriate patterns, whatever.

And then we start as part of this incessant symbol making activity, we start coming up with what exactly are we appeasing. And then these forces of nature that we're supposedly appeasing by this ritual start gaining faces. But if you ask like okay, that one has the face of Apollo now, does Apollo really exist? Well, Apollo exists as a correlate of this activity. It is not primarily an activity of theorizing that there is an Apollo there. That is no, it's an activity of doing that is given some color by the presence of an Apollo pull to the experience.

Is that seem right?

30:42 Wes: That sounds right. Although you know, she does want to say, right, that the gods are not anthropomorphizations of. Of nature. It's not like, hey, I'm primitive, I have to anthropomorphize the sun or I need to explain why there's lightning. So I come up with Zeus or something like that. So she gives a pretty complicated account of why it is we anthropomorphize. So it's not just that we're projecting, right. Our own subjectivity into things that don't have it, or that we're trying to understand astronomical and meteorological events that way, you know, ultimately will turn out that because the superhuman protagonist in our story is battling forces of nature and that protagonist has filial relations and social relations, those forces, right.

So those forces created us. So we are related to them in an important way. And we are subjects and we are social. So if you want to talk about those relationships, you have to do it symbolically and you have to personify the other pole of the relation. Right. I want to talk about how I'm related to nature. What better way to do it than to make nature a person and then spell that out symbolically.

32:02 Seth: I think that's well stated.

32:04 Mark: Yeah, that's a good point. I was a little confused early on in the cassir. He makes a comment. This is like 106. Not nature, but society is the true model of myth. All its fundamental motives are projections of man's social life. By these projections, nature becomes the image of the social world. It reflects all its fundamental features, its organization and architectures, its division and subdivisions. So this is sort of the other pole. Seth, you said early on that through myth we dramatize the world. Well, as Wes just pointed out, that doesn't mean as it might sound, that like we're looking up at the open sky and immediately saying, okay, that's the sun God and that's the moon God.

And they're kind of like people and they're, you know, giving them all personalities. That's what eventually comes out in mythology. But it is more. More fundamentally affirming this attitude of our fundamental connectedness with the world by, I want to say, is there a difference between projecting society out there and pretending that all the stars are friends, that kind of thing, rather than incorporating nature into the social world. So the social world is something we understand, something we actually do have power over. And by saying, oh, yeah, we're doing a rain dance right now.

That's something you and I can do together in the social world. It's kind of like we're going out and plowing the fields. It's like there's all these things that we can do socially that somehow help us to cope. And this is actually the beginning. Maybe this again goes with the. That this is a form of wish fulfillment. This is a form of, damn, I wish we weren't so helpless in the face of the world. I'm instead going to exert my. We're going to exert our power. Let's make this social by just saying it's all a big party that we sit at the head of the table.

33:50 Seth: What Cassirer is doing in that section when he's talking about is he's trying to say there is actual value in taking a mythological worldview as a given. Right now we see it from the perspective of science, and seeing the mythological worldview from the perspective of science means it's wrong. But he goes through this progression where he talks about sense experience, sense perception, and then what he calls generalization. So what science describes as universality, he describes as generalization. Essentially, you can think of mythology is operating at the level of sense perception.

So it's a perception of what's given in our sense experience without this abstracted, generalized scientific layer on top of it. And he talks about how everything in our everyday life is impregnated with feeling and emotion, like something is threatening or something is silly or something is whatever. And the quote you mentioned, he actually attributes that to Durkheim. That myth is the model of society. And what he's saying is myth is not a modeling of nature, it's a model of society. So in other words, it's a projection. It's treating, again, nature as a canvas or a drama on which we project this human experience.

And he further, in that same section, talks about this guy, Lévy-Bruhl, that mythology is collective representation. And so the important point out of this section is that, at least for Cassirer, is that the mythological worldview views life as synthetic. It's unified, and man has no human beings have no privileged place in it. So humans and trees and animals and plants and the stars, we're all connected somehow. It's all one synthetic unity. And human beings are just actors in this field of other actors and forces and so forth. Right. So that view of the world is not theoretical or practical, but, as he calls it, it's sympathetic.

And in that view, there's a continuum from plant to animal to human, and these things are fungible. So, as he says, the fundamental law of mythology is metamorphosis, that anything can change into anything else. And this is not just a continuum in space and form, but also in time. So you. You talked about death earlier. Right. The idea is that the past and the future and the present are not distinguished in this way. Any individual is a product of the previous generations and will be an influencer, progenitor on the future generations. So this is how Cassirer is saying, that with the concept of metamorphosis, and this succession in time, things being connected in this unity, there really is no death.

You act as though you live on through others and that you will live on through others. And then he talks about ancestor worship and the cult of death and all this sort of thing. This is all a setup where you have this tableau of community where any given individual only makes sense in the unified community. And that he references the Stoic sympathy of the whole. Right. And he says the break that gets you from myth to religion is the introduction of sympathy for the individual. Right. I'm not going to recap what I said earlier, but essentially the idea that you have an individual obligation to perform this ethical activity that supersedes your connection, sympathetic connection to the other world.

And all the talk about the gods and how that develops and the personification of the taglines and all that stuff is part of the evolution of that. Was that too textual? Was that too.

37:43 Mark: No, that was great. That was great. I guess the only little thing I take issue with there is that we don't Have a privileged position. Yes. He wants to say there is a continuity of man with nature. Right. That's part of the seeing the world as sympathetic. Because one of his early opponents in this is Schleiermacher, somebody that we read for old episode, though not in this context, who stresses our fundamental. That what religion is all about and even back to mythology is about is releasing our fundamental dependence on as in subservience to nature.

That we are these cringing little beings that must just beg for the big scary world to not kill us. And I feel like he's in this more positive will to power version of this. It is more that we. We have some sort of inversion of values kind of thing going on, wish fulfillment going on by saying that magic does work, that we are not just powerless, we are not merely a cog in the machine. We are a member of the community more than a cog in the machine. I guess that would give us the requisite dignity without us necessarily being the spiritual being standing above nature.

No, we're still in nature. But it's a nice place. Is that right? I mean, it seems like it. It shifts throughout the history here. Like Taboo doesn't make it sound like it's a nice place. So it's kind of. This is an ever changing aspect of it, of how nice it is, how well the wish fulfillment works.

39:10 Seth: Yeah. I'm hesitant to touch the. To even say the words wish fulfillment or to try to get into anything that's going to touch on dreams and psychoanalytic stuff, but I feel there's something here, and I'm not 100% sure yet exactly what it is, but what has really got me wrapped around the axle is Cassirer and Langer are talking about the emotional, sympathetic, communal, unified sense of. Let's call it human being in the stage of mythology or mythological stage of development. And this idea that individuality is tied to the emergence of the ethical, which in turn is connected to starting to abstract from the world and create generalizations and understand that there's some level of transcendence.

I mean, it kind of scares the shit out of me in a weird way because you were talking about trying to reconcile reason and faith. But what this is essentially saying is that no religion gave birth to the possibility of reason in some respect. And that's just unnerving. It's hard for me to. To get my mind wrapped around it.

40:29 Mark: So maybe this is some of what we've been saying is a point that's in Cassirer and not in Langer. That Langer from the start is it's about when Wes was describing the relationship between fairy story and myths. The myths are about the orientation to the world, right? Actually dealing with the world and not just trying to escape it through some sort of wish fulfillment. I do want us to talk in part two to see, because I also re. Listened to the Jung episode because there's so much about mythology and, you know, this is very. I want to hear Wes's thoughts about how this relates to psychoanalysis and whether there were any insight there, you know, in terms of the psychoanalytic take on dreams and wish fulfillment and acting according to patterns, you know, magical thinking that you think are going to somehow put you in balance with the world, like that just begs to be psychoanalyzed.

Here we get more of a anthropological analysis of why that kind of stuff is going on. But underlyingly, this is why I keep coming back to will to power. That there's an underlying psychologism behind the anthropology is we, I don't know, want to feel good about ourselves. We want to be in tune with the world. And so these various strategies and so ethics ends up actually being a strategy by which we can do that. That it becomes again, less restrictive than the merely negative of the taboo. That we can develop ideals, we can develop positive things to strive for and to encourage others to strive for maybe that are even, you know, as we talked about many times in virtue ethics, beyond the actual possibility of fulfillment.

42:11 Wes: Right?

42:12 Mark: How you actually become a Confucian sage or something like this, or a perfect imitatio Christi. How do you become like the Christ? You know, all these things might just be ways in which I could see what Nietzsche might say about how we use these idols as a way to put ourselves on the side of the gods, to assert our power, even if we're actually in a fairly impotent position. Right? Even just rooting for the team that's going to win, rooting for the universe, even if I'm a small cog within that is still a powerful thing, a way that you put yourself.

And again, part of that spontaneous outpouring of energy, of expression, of symbolization. So I did really enjoy this whole thing as a picture of how through our bubbling, fruitful creativ, we might come up with rituals and religions and all this stuff that one might think actually work in contrast to that, at least in their pathological. But that's the way that Nietzsche gave these explanations too, is that even the things that he was calling despising life or against the will to power. They were products of the will to power. They were strategies of the will to power.

So I'm seeing something similar throughout this. All right, well, we'll get into that and actually read more from the texts here in part two. If you're a supporter, you will see part two is the next thing in your feed, unless you support us through Apple Podcasts, in which case it might be next week before you see that.