Read on Twitter
Okay, so I’m a thread account now. I’ll thread about something different than phil o’ phys. How about Joe Campbell?
The Hero With 1000 Faces is about archetypes. It’s a positive account of both what archetypes are and what archetypes are for.
Archetypes are *not* stereotypes. The Mad Scientist’s Beautiful Daughter is not an archetype, as LeGuin pointed out.
An archetype is a *structure*. Mentor and Tiresias are similar stereotypes (the wise old “man” who has transcended gender) but embody different archetypes because they come into different locations in The Osyssey.
These structures, Campbell argues following a large literature he points to extensively, supposedly lie in the neural deep structure of humans. Ultimately, like all psychological hangups, they are rooted in the uncomfortably long childhood of a human being.
The positive result is that these structures are found all over. In every “healthy” society myths inform the neural deep structure of people to adapt to the next phase in life via the precarious medium of language.
Campbell was a conservative. He believed our society - post-industrial America - was unhealthy due to its lack of instructive myths. People are going into middle and old age with the mentality of teenagers. This is highly questionable.
Further, Campbell’s proposed meta-archetypal “healthy” structure for a narrative is questionable on two grounds.
One: it is clear that some myths - The Aenied for instance - were consciously built on a similar pattern. Monsters at the beginning (childhood), Politics at the end (adulthood). But there are also plenty of societies where the monsters last the whole book in every book.
The other, more interesting ground is that Campbell’s worldview is limited. He is interested in The Epic View Of Life, the view where people - with much help - achieve. Obviously such a worldview is amenable to psychiatry.
But as a result in his book, other points of view - such as the Comic Point Of View or the Tragic Point Of View - are slighted.
As Orwell pointed out, the Tragic View is one of the most difficult problems the philosopher and psychologist. Why do we watch Lear rend himself with rapt attention? It is not schadenfreude, we are not laughing at him.
The Epic tradition from Aristotle to Campbell argues that we can enjoy Tragedy because we are Epic Heroes: we enjoy as a learning experience. Like the spirits in Thomas Aquinas’s heaven, we smile at those in hell. This is not obviously true
But what survives of Campbell’s archetypal vision if we take the problem of tragedy seriously? I don’t know. Anyway I’ve rambled enough. End of thread.
