The Presence of Myth PDF
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THE PRESENCE OF M Y T H THE PRESENCE OF M Y T H Leszek Kolakowski Translated by Adam Czerniawski The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London LESZEK KOLAKOWSKI is professor in the Committee on Social Thought and the Department of Philosophy at the University of Chicago and a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford University. The author of some twenty-five books, he is perhaps best known for his monumental three-volume Mainstreams of Marxism. Among his many honors, Professor Kolakowski was the 1986 Jefferson Lecturer, the highest honor conferred by the U. S. government for outstanding achievement in the humanities. First published in France in 1972 as Obecnosc mitu (Issue 224 in the Biblioteka Kultury) by the Institut Litteraire, Paris. © 1972 by Leszek Kolakowski. A German translation w as published in 1973: © R. Piper & Co. Verlag, Miinchen 1973. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 1989 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 1989 Printed in the United States of America 98 97 96 95 94 93 92 91 90 89 54321 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kolakowski, Leszek. [Obecnosc mitu. English] The presence of myth / Leszek Kolakowski: translated by Adam Czemiaw'ski. p. cm. “First published in France in 1972 as Obecnosc mitu (Issue 224 in the Biblioteka Kultury) by the Institut Litteraire, Paris”—T.p. verso. Includes index. ISBN 0-226-45041-4 1. Myth. 2. Culture. 3. Man. I. Title. B4691. K586303413 1989 128—del 9 88-37054 CIP fe) The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Libraiy Materials, ANSI Z39.48 1984. CONTENTS Preface to the English Edition vii Preface ix 1 Preliminary Distinctions 1 2 Myth within the Epistemological Inquiry 9 3 Myth in the Realm of Values 19 4 Myth in Logic 34 5 The Mythical Sense of Love 44 6 Myth, Existence, Freedom 51 7 Myth and the Contingency of Nature 61 8 The Phenomenon of the World’s Indifference 69 9 Myth in the Culture of Analgesics 83 10 The Permanence and Fragility of Myth 110 11 Conclusion 130 Index of Names 137 PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION This is a very, very old book. It was written in Polish in 1966; but the censoring authorities, despite the lengthy efforts of the pub lishing house, forbade its publication in Poland. It was eventually published in Polish in France in 1972 by Institut Litteraire, and in German translation by Piper Verlag. When I was reading it after so many years, it struck me how strongly my philosophical language was then dependent on German and French (mainly German) phenomenological and existential idiom, and to what extent this influence contributed to a stylistic heaviness which was probably avoidable. This was the reason why it could be trans lated relatively smoothly into German (according to my experi ence Polish and German are virtually the same language if we leave aside vocabulary, grammar, syntax, and phonetics); whereas to render it in English turned out to be an extremely arduous task in which, in spite of the hard and skillful work of my friend Adam Czerniawski, some clumsiness could not be avoided. If I had been compelled to write it in English, I would have probably expressed the same idea in another text. Too late. Chicago, 20 July 1988 PREFACE This little book is a concise summary of a nonexistent treatise, which its potential readers will in all probability be spared. I wanted it to be brief and, therefore, as far as possible, devoid of examples, historical anecdotes, footnotes, names, quotations, ex tensive classifications, digressions, reservations, and polemics. The price of the virtue of brevity are the vices of a certain dryness, monotony, and inadequate documentation. Nor is it a learned treatise (particularly in the realms of religious studies, mythogra- phy, sociology, or the psychology of myth), but an attempt to present a certain point of view with regard to a sensitive problem constantly present in the philosophy of culture. This problem concerns the localization in culture of mythopoeic production in relation to the structural characteristics of human consciousness. The term “myth,” whose precise definition I do not attempt and whose meaning, so I assume, emerges from the discourse as a whole, requires a certain initial stipulation. Its range overlaps the range demarcated by the study of religion. It covers a group— essential, it is true, but numerically insignificant—of religious myths, that is, the myths of Beginning. It also includes certain constructions, present (be they hidden or explicit) in our intellec tual and affective life, namely, those which conditioned and mutable elements of experience allow us to bind teleologically by appeal to unconditioned realities (such as “being,” “truth,” and “value”). I attempt to justify this identification through a basic identity of functions which these various products of human spiritual life perform. I also attempt to explain how the inev itability of these functions in cultural life can be explained, and also in what sense they are not capable of coexistence with its technological and scientific efforts. The mythological character of these derivative constructs constitutes the guiding notion of this discourse. Their parity with myth in the primary sense of the word comes about as a result of one particularly significant function. I do not therefore take into account those qualities of myth—especially their narrative qualities— which validate a search for their extensions in works of artistic imagination. Such a generalized employment of a word which already has its rules of application more or less fixed may be open to criticism. But I could find no other which would better designate the realm I am concerned with. Relying on the authority of A. N. White- head, I may add that the whole of philosophical endeavor depends on attempts at constructing concepts which are more and more general, for whose designation the existing vocabulary is never sufficiently rich. If one prefers to avoid arbitrary coinage, one has therefore to make use of words which lie closest to the projected realm and to give them an extended meaning. In philo sophical reflection inherited words usually appear incompetent through excessive usage, while rashly constructed neologisms quickly turn into insufferable oddities, as numerous examples demonstrate. It is therefore safer to try out the possibilities em bedded in existing terminology, taking care not to be carried away without resistance by its inertia and maintaining an alert ness to meanings which are smuggled even subconsciously into the classification of the world in colloquial speech. All attempts at exposing hidden implications of language may be useful. I attempt to employ the generalized concept of myth as a net to catch a permanendy constitutive element of culture, and thus to create a somewhat different principle of classifying phenomena than is most often accepted in the philosophy of culture. I am convinced that the crucial boundary between the mythological layer of culture and its technological and scientific layer runs differently from what might be judged on the basis of most gener ally known functional interpretations of man's mythological creativity. The “differently” is not, however, simply the outcome of a different meaning arbitrarily assigned to the term “myth." On the contrary, that altered sense arises from the conviction that religious mythologies are a certain variant or a historical particu larization of a phenomenon which mav be grasped in a more fundamental characterization; and that the essential functional bond links these mythologies with products found in all human intercourse (and in our civilization as well); in intellectual ac
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