Dan-with-no-discernable-last-name (and my apologies to both him and Dan Parmenter for misattributing) wrote among the usual Other Good Stuff:
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I'm hacking my way through Joseph Campbell right now and wish
that I had picked up Frazer instead.
I've been stalled in the middle of Volume 2 of "The Masks of God" for about three years. I wish I knew how he managed to make such interesting stuff so dull while still writing pretty well!
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I keep thinking - more stories, less speculation -
... well, that's a big part of it, of course ...
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Myths to Campbell seem to be primarily religio-political works; they appeal to us "universally" because and as long as we maintain our allegiance to the ideas that spawned them.
H'mmm. I wonder why the Norse myths appeal to me so much more strongly than the Greco-Roman myths, then, with the Egyptian myths somewhere in between? I can't help wondering what "ideas" I'm showing my allegiance to here.
Frankly, I think it's more because I was over-exposed to the classical myths as a kid (and especially as a student), but had to seek the Norse ones out for myself. Again, the Egyptian myths fall in between: I was introduced to them in junior high, but didn't have to deal with years of English teachers pointing out grotesquely obvious "allusions" and references on the assumption that most of the students wouldn't recognize them otherwise. I have trouble reading any Greek myth without annoying memories of pastoral poetry (for which I have not taste whatsoever -- I wish all those nymphs would just strangle all those importunate shepherds!) coming to my mind.
But, but ... I have to admit the main reason I like the Norse myths so much is the worldview. I don't know if it's anything as simple as "ideas;" it's the whole way of looking at life as a losing battle that you have to fight anyway, that chaos
will win in the end, but somehow the struggle against it is not quite senseless. There's nothing in either the Egyptian or the Greek way of looking at things that moves me quite the way that does. (The world as French Foreign Legion...?)
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How, if the ancients were so sold on reason, did they
manage to be so ridiculously wrong about the way the
world was put together? And how did the moderns manage
to get everything (we hope) so right? The standard answer
(and I'm inclined, personally, to think that the ancients
weren't so ridiculously wrong and the moderns not
necessarily spot on) ...
... I'm inclined to agree; and further to observe that a lot
of the stuff the ancients are popularly supposed to be wrong
about, they weren't. We all know the Greeks knew the world
was round and calculated its diameter pretty accurately. Not
as many people are aware that the standard geocentric model
of the earth was actually pretty right in its sense of the
scale of the universe -- that is, the idea that the Earth
could, for all practical purposes, be considered a geometric
point wrt the larger unvierse.
Yes, I believe that if we go point-for-point against the ancients, where we disagree, we are (in general) the more likely to be right. But I think we'd disagree on far less than most people assume.
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... is that modern science is experimental and ancient
science "merely" observational.
Or, to put it even more simply: Reason does not equal
empiricism.
The entire project of modern science is based on empiricism,
which (a) really didn't appear as a useful model until, what,
about the time of Francis Bacon, and (b) is itself based on
a set of unproven and unprovable assumptions about how the
world works (which I think could best be summed up as the
idea that nature plays fair) -- assumptions that seem to be
valid only within a few orders of magnitude of our own scale
of things, but break down very small (say, around where
Heisenberg and Plank get involved) and very large (say,
around where Schwarzchild and Chandrasekar get involved).
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In other words Modern Reason expects a certain dirty
hands-on interaction with the world that probably seemed
unecessarily messy to the ancients. And this is why I
think the detective story is a strictly modern fairy-tale:
Heh. Chandler's classic line, "down these mean streets a
man must go," came bouncing into my head right here.
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the detective has to contend with a real criminal. For
all that Dupin prefers to solve crimes without leaving
his smoke-filled room he still has to put the solution
to the test.
Or, more Lupine: Nero Wolfe has to arrange his "capers" to
prove what he already knows, to the satisfaction of the
police and/or his client.
--Dan'l