{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/2804",
    "note": "Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright in each message remains with the person who wrote it.  Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact.",
    "addresses": "obscured as 'user at host'"
  },
  "archive": "urth",
  "thread": {
    "id": 2804,
    "subject": "(no subject)",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "2001-08-24T09:55:16+00:00",
    "last": "2001-08-24T09:55:16+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<urth-v0030-0667@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "Dan",
        "address": "meliza at ocf.berkeley.edu"
      },
      "date": "2001-08-24T09:55:16+00:00",
      "subject": "(urth)",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "Dan'l wrote (among much else worthy of quoting):"
        },
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "In fact, I hold to the stronger form, but I think the weaker form\nmay be more appropriate as a basis for discussion in an audience\nwhich doesn't generally hold the antecedent of the stronger form\nto be true or even possibly true."
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "You're quite right, and to be even-handed I should at least have\nmentioned Jung (whom you alluded to) and Joseph Campbell both of whom\nmake all sorts of conclusions based on the recurrence of symbolism in\nmyth without believing in a divine principle.\n\nI'm hacking my way through Joseph Campbell right now and wish that I had\npicked up Frazer instead.  I keep thinking - more stories, less\nspeculation - but his main thrust seems to be that mythology reflects a\nnumber of pronounced changes in religion, so that we have older, maternal,\ncthonic [sp] deities overlayed with the paternal, sunny Olympian gods\noverlayed with omnipotent, abstract(ed) Jehovahs and Allahs, and as each\nof the modes of thought these gods embody came into power they demonized\nthe gods of the previous age and enlisted a variety of stories to explain\nwhy Jove triumphed over the Titans and so on.  Myths to Campbell seem to\nbe primarily religio-political works; they appeal to us \"universally\"\nbecause and as long as we maintain our allegiance to the ideas that\nspawned them."
        },
        {
          "kind": "quote",
          "depth": 1,
          "text": "Shhh! Don't tell Aristotle. He thought it was the raison d'etre\nof (classical) philosophy."
        },
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "Ooh now this gets interesting.  How, if the ancients were so sold on\nreason, did they manage to be so ridiculously wrong about the way the\nworld was put together?  And how did the moderns manage to get\neverything (we hope) so right?  The standard answer (and I'm inclined,\npersonally, to think that the ancients weren't so ridiculously wrong\nand the moderns not necessarily spot on) is that modern science is\nexperimental and ancient science \"merely\" observational.  Aristotle sat\nin his garden and watched the bees; Galileo climbed up to the top of\nthe tower of Pisa and dropped weights.  And I guess Plato sat in his\ngarden and thought about bees.\n\nIn other words Modern Reason expects a certain dirty hands-on\ninteraction with the world that probably seemed unecessarily messy to\nthe ancients.  And this is why I think the detective story is a\nstrictly modern fairy-tale: the detective has to contend with a real\ncriminal.  For all that Dupin prefers to solve crimes without leaving\nhis smoke-filled room he still has to put the solution to the test.\nMore often than not the poor detective has to risk his neck: hardly an\nabstract puzzle.\n\n\nThanks, Rostrum, for the pointer to Umberto Eco.  My own example of\npostmodern detective lit was going to be film noir but I don't really\nknow the genre well enough to give examples.\n\n\nDan"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}