Finitude: Between Mythos and Logos

 

 

 

 

  There is in effect something that humans are and have to be, but this is not an essence nor properly a thing: It is the simple fact of one’s own existence as possibility or potentiality.

 

                                                                        - Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, 11 –

 

 

 

At the outset of The Implied Spider: Politics and Theology in Myth Wendy Doniger locates the  primordial tension between the universal and the singular within the human being (21).  It is “this tension”, she says, that “gives rise to the myth”, to myths that “form a bridge between the terrifying abyss of cosmological ignorance and our comfortable familiarity with our recurrent, if tormenting, human problems” (22). 

 

I would like to inquire into the source of this tension, which Doniger locates in the human being and which seems to pontificate between or connect the cosmos and the singular human being, by tracing a genealogy of the mythical. 

 

In a seminal passage from the Politics Aristotle defines the human being (anthrōpos) as a “political animal (politikon zōion)” who alone among animals “has speech (logos)” (1253a).  Thus, logos becomes the mechanism for the exclusion of the human being from the category of a-logistic animality.  Human being was to be henceforth indentified with logos in the history of thought.  The human being became the logical being, the reasonable, rational being.

 

A mainstay of ancient Greek was the prevalence of oppositional and hence symmetrical word pairs, among which one could often find logos/mythos.  Given Aristotle’s definition of the human being as the ‘logical’ animal and the immense influence of his thought on subsequent thinkers, one should not be surprised that mythos became the black sheep of the family.  In almost every language the word ‘myth’, a word that originally meant ‘story’ or ‘spoken word’, has come to take on pejorative connotations.  To be fair, Aristotle alone is not responsible for this genealogy.  To find the roots of this mutation, we have to go back to Xenophanes and Plato.   

 

The agonistic relationship between Homer and Plato has by now become legendary; however, Xenophanes of Colophon was the first philosopher-poet to challenge the veracity and morality of Homer’s myths, to pit mythos against logos and to call to account the great poet and his legacy.  Yet, as Friedrich Nietzsche observed in an 1872 fragment entitled ‘Homer’s Contest’, “we do not understand the full strength of Xenophanes’ attack on the national hero of poetry, unless – as again later with Plato – we see that at its root lay an overwhelming craving to assume the place of the overthrown poet and to inherit his fame.”  As Homer had become the greatest composer of verse, it was Plato’s destiny to become the greatest prose stylist of the Greek language.  Plato, not Xenophanes, was to become the great antagonist of Homer, the defender of logos contra mythos.    

 

The Homeric epics, comfortable in dwelling on the plane of mythos, never laid claim to the ‘objectivity’ of logos.  Interestingly, the word logos occurs plentifully in the entire extant body of Greek literature, both in prose and verse, save in the epics, where it occurs only once.  It was not until Xenophanes, a poet who was also a philosopher, that veracity became the criterion for judging mythos, for judging it as ‘false’, as ‘untruth’ and so as ‘immoral’.  This demonization of mythos was the basis for the powerful and sustained attack on the Homeric myths in Plato’s Republic.  In the Republic Plato accuses the Homeric myths of both untruth and immorality.  As Plato saw it, the problem with the various Homeric myths was their content.  Homer’s readings of traditional myths, which had become canonical through their brilliance, eloquence and consequent popularity, were ‘false’ because they were ‘immoral’ –  Plato was the first great moralist in the Western tradition.      

 

Plato’s motivation in attacking and destroying the hegemony of the Homeric myths was thus more complex than Doniger leads us to believe with her comment: “The myths that Plato didn’t like…were lies, and the myths that he liked…were truths” (3).  Plato was concerned with what he believed to be the ‘immorality’ of the content of the Homeric myths, which he deemed harmful and dangerous in the political realm.  His goal was to subsume the category of mythos beneath that of logos, to subsume ‘falsity’ and ‘immorality’ beneath ‘truth’ and ‘morality’, to make myth rational, moral and so logical.  As Doniger observes, Plato had no qualms about spinning myths, beautiful and highly poetic ones actually, but what is essential in his motivation to mythologize is that his myths always served to validate or prove his philosophical theories – his myths were arguments, they too were logoi.     

 

By the time Aristotle came around to defining the human being, the genealogy of mythos, its subsumption beneath logos, had been all but forgotten, especially to the philosophers, who had themselves systematically fought to conceal it.  It was only natural that Aristotle went on to define the human being, the creature at the top of the hierarchy of being, as what possessed truth and morality, or, what was the same, logos.  For Aristotle, the human being became an actual human being in possession of logos, when he reached adulthood, the telos or end of his linear progression.  A child, for example, was not a human being in actuality, but only in potentiality, because he was atelēs, that is, ‘without telos’ or ‘incomplete’.  I mention this, because the subsumption of mythos beneath logos and of potentiality beneath actuality are interrelated – this formulation is essential to the source of the tension Doniger identifies. 

 

Just as the myths Doniger draws on in her first chapter, so too do Job and Yashodha, the myths’ characters, oscillate between the cosmic or macro and the singular or micro.  Job and Yashodha “never entirely forget” (21) that they have seen the cosmic, that they have seen through the eyes of the Divine, but they must make themselves ignorant or cause a forgetting within themselves, whether consciously or not, so as to be able to continue living and not be crushed beneath the immense weight of existence, beneath the infinite potentiality of being.  Unlike Atlas, they cannot bear the immense infinitude of the heavens, they are merely human, merely finite.  Herein lies the source of the tension Doniger identifies: human finitude.  As she says, “myth is the most interdisciplinary narrative” (6), because it is the human narrative: the expression of our finitude.  Just as myths oscillate between infinitude and finitude, between the universal and the singular, the human being oscillates between infinite potentiality and finite actuality: human finitude is mythical.  We take refuge in our limited actualities, in a forgetful “serenity”, as Doniger puts it (21), while at times we transcend ourselves, our actual finitude and catch a glimpse of the potential infinitude of the cosmic of which we are a part. 

 

Yet, Doniger doesn’t pursue this mythical logic to its logical end: when we take this refuge, when we bring about this forgetting in ourselves, we necessarily abandon the mythical oscillation and our human finitude, which maintains within it potential infinitude, for sheer actualized finitude, for pure actuality.  Forgetting is comfortable, a solace amidst suffering.  Faced with the immense weight of cosmic existence and its sheer infinitude, the other edge of human finitude, we take refuge in a blissful forgetting.  He who knows of nothing beyond himself, has no vision beyond himself, beyond what is actualized before him.  Aristotle’s subsumption of mythos beneath logos and of potentiality beneath actuality is meant to heal the wound of human finitude, to stop the blood flowing from our potential infinitude, to conceal our oscillation, our mythicality.            

 

In a famous passage at the end of the Enneads, Plotinus asks “how is it that the soul does not remain in the vision of the Divine?”  His response and promise: “because it has yet to wholly depart; but there shall be a time of vision unbroken, the self weighed down no longer by the body” (VI.9.10).  As God says about the human being in the Qur’an: “I created [him] with My own two hands” (38:75), with His spirit blown into our clay.  Though we share in the divine light or breath, we are creatures of the earth, of the soil, we are heavy, more easily weighed down by the force of gravity.  In La Pesanteur et la Grâce Simone Weil writes “two forces rule over the universe: light and gravity (deux force règnent sur l’univers: lumière et pesanteur)” (41).  With language reminiscent of Plotinus, in The Confessions Augustine writes: “I was caught up to You by Your beauty and quickly torn away from You by my weight”(VII.xvii.23) and goes on to quote Wisdom 9:15, which reads: “The body, which is corruptible, weighs down the soul, and our earthly habitation drags down the mind to think many things.”  For Augustine and all other mystics, this being ‘torn away’ from the vision of the Divine is painful, it gives rise to what Augustine poetically calls the core inquietum or ‘distraught heart’.  It is easier to forget this pain, to conceal the wound, rather than let it fester. 

 

Yet, perhaps we don’t have to read this tension of human finitude beneath a horizon of an otherworldly atemporal infinitude, of which we are mere temporal fragments, like the shattered pieces of the originary Truth, which, as the Midrash on Psalm 85:11 tells us, occurred after God had hurled Truth to the ground (41).  Such an originary Truth cannot be recovered insofar as we are mythical, insofar as we oscillate between potential infinitude and actual finitude, insofar as we are human beings.  Any attempt at recovering an actual originary Being beyond being, at ascending to the heavens, has the contrary effect of re-covering or concealing and forgetting any potential infinitude and so of forcing us to remain in an uncreative and limited actuality, a banal finitude. 

 

Doniger speaks of a “bottom up” method, wherein “contradictory impressions” are sought in order to engage in cross-cultural comparative analysis (73).  Yet, why is there any need for vertical movement?  Can we not merely move horizontally along an infinite horizon of potentiality?  On the plane of infinite potentiality there is no lack of space and so no need to build vertically, which historically has only served to obscure the vision and humanity of those who come to believe that they dwell in the heavens among the gods and so beyond their fellow human beings.  In the land of potential infinitude we would have the potential to be mythical, to create without such terrifying and limiting notions as God, Truth, or Morality.  Yet, would it be possible for we who have all been offered a mythical glimpse of an actual other world, of an actual infinitude, of the Divine, to simply live in the land of potential infinitude?  Beneath such a horizon, wouldn’t potential infinitude itself be limiting?  Would we not want to one day walk through the gates of actual infinitude?  In light of all this, do we even have the potential to recover our mythical potentiality beneath a horizon of temporality?  If we in fact do have such a potential, what would then happen to our suffering, our oscillatory trauma and its wound; do we dare think that it would simply disappear, that it would simply heal?

 

 

O my soul, do not aspire to immortal life, but exhaust the limits of the possible.

                                                                                    - Pindar, Pythian III.61-2 -

~ by Babak on October 26, 2008.