Mythology and the Tension of Cosmos and Chaos

Pop anthropology over the past 150 years in the modern West has developed a paradigm whereby mythology is understood to be a technique—poetic, metaphorical, analogical—for

1) expressing and exploring truths that cannot be otherwise expressed or explored,

and/or

2) expressing and exploring truths from a different angle or perspective.

Of course, this paradigm did not just drop from the sky to the modern West: it has developed as part of a larger process which includes the complex reconfiguration of the dominant synthesis of Christendom.

Secondly, this paradigm is not without flaws. The most glaring flaw that comes to mind: It is often based upon, and in turn undergirds, a PC multiculturalist relativism that masks an underlying Gnostic antipathy to the West.

However, the paradigm is not essentially contiguous with the Gnostic enterprise. The work of Eric Voegelin, Mircea Eliade, Ernest Becker, Hugo Rahner, Simone Pétrement, Thorkild Jacobsen and Henri Frankfort reveals a healthy current in this paradigmatic constellation.

In its healthy form, this paradigm is not merely expressive of an appreciation of ‘alternative’ truths. The assumption of this paradigm runs deeper and reveals an epistemology that some might find startling when put boldly: All expressions of meaning are inextricable from mythology.

If we accept this startling epistemology, we are not out of the woods yet: the disenchanted modern Western quasi-Gnostic Leftist will merely retort: “So what? There is no truth anyway, so you are just agreeing with me by saying everything is myth.”

Of course, what we are saying is that

1) there is truth,

2) mythologization is part of illuminating truth,

and

3) no method of illuminating truth can be pursued apart from mythologization on some level.

Any piece of information or knowledge about anything we can consider is embedded in a complex web of threads that reveal a complex web of connections and interrelationships. We may paraphrase a famous saying: No thing is an island. I.e., any given thing—‘thing’ defined most generally as whatever is under consideration (and consideration defined most generally as any degree of knowledge, from merely noticing, to assessing, to analyzing, to interpreting, to truth-knowing)—is inextricably connected to a million other things on a variety of levels. This connection—or more accurately, this complexity of interconnections—extends not only spatially outward from any given thing, but also temporally backward, revealing a historical dimension to any given thing.

Of course, we must not dilute this awareness of spatial and temporal complexity into a generalized mush, without meaningful distinctions and degrees. On one level—and one level only—, it is true that “everything is everything”: this is the level on which is known the mysterious and paradoxical truth of Chaos. But Chaos is not all of reality: reality also possesses order, and so reality is a paradox of Chaos and Cosmos. On the chaotic level of reality, all things merge together; on the cosmic level, all things crystallize apart into variably discrete things. Without the chaotic level, the things would have no common ground and we would be confronted with an inability to synthesize the infinite monads, each a universe by itself, and none of them contextualizable into any embracing canopy of meaning. Without the cosmic level, we would have no differentiation at all, only an infinite plenum of monolithic mush.

Within the purview of the two levels of chaotic and cosmic, there are the levels of micro and macro. When we consider any thing on the micro level, we do not need mythology—or, more accurately speaking, in order to understand a thing for our purposes, we usually do not need to factor in the mythological matrix in which that thing we are considering is embedded. Even though we are not factoring in the mythological matrix on a conscious level, we are nevertheless availing ourselves of a limited scope thereof—but the mythological matrix only becomes ‘activated’, so to speak, or relevant, when we widen our view out to the macro level.

An analogy that comes to mind would be the following: imagine a person who is a fervent anarchist who believes that all sociopolitical systems are evil. Imagine this anarchist person finding a nice home to live in temporarily, donated by a friend. While this anarchist lives in this home—availing himself of the food in the cupboards, the running water, the heat, etc.—, he continues to work on his anarchism by writing books and pamphlets and organizing meetings, etc. If this anarchist does not realize that everything about this housing situation that is helping his anarchist work is connected to the wider sociopolitical infrastructure that he hates, then he is being foolishly myopic. Similarly, when we deal with the limited focuses of our lives, we can sustain the myopia that our spheres of knowledge are not mythological, but merely factual. If we were to widen our focus out to the macro level, however, we would see that every epistemological thread—out of the specific area of texture embedded in the overall complexity on which any part of our knowledge depends—if traced far enough will lead to the overarching mythological level.

On the micro level, a person may continue to fool himself into thinking that reality and its meaningful articulations are based on mere facts. As long as he keeps his focus restricted, the indefinite connections to which the ‘mere’ facts lead need never be revealed. For the ordinary person who does not meditate philosophically, he can remain indefinitely suspended in the medium of the micro level. When that person is no longer formed by a religious culture, as so many are not in the modern West, that person can remain indefinitely suspended in the belief that there is no macro level (or can passively leave the macro level up to the pop physicists like Stephen J. Hawking). The function of a religious culture for the majority of people under its penumbra has always been to provide a passive, yet existentially meaningful, macro level for the ordinary person who is likely not going to philosophically meditate from the limited focus of the here and now to its indefinite connections that lead, via mythological symbolisms (mostly language symbolisms), to transcendence.

In the preceding paragraph, we spoke of the person who “may continue to fool himself into thinking that reality and its meaningful articulations are based on mere facts.” Mere facts always need a medium in which they can suspend. Without an extra-factual or trans-factual medium, mere facts would simply collapse into a meaningless heap or centrifugally lose meaning, either way reverting back into the chaotic level. On the most basic level, facts require a suspension medium we may call interpretation. Because the medium of interpretation is so close to the level of mere facts, and because its influence can be so closely limited to the facts in question, people routinely make the mistake of confusing interpretations of facts, with the facts themselves.

Interpretations, in turn, require a suspension medium. We may call this larger suspension medium an interpretative system. What we are leading to is an epistemological reality that is like an onion, with ever wider containers or suspension mediums holding the previous smaller ones in integral place. I have not yet worked out the terms for all the suspension mediums that surround the initial fact and which lead, ultimately, out to the limit beyond which is transcendence. For now, tentatively, I would adumbrate it in the following way, and ask the reader to realize there might be gaps in this adumbration which I may be able to fill in at a later date:

Fact

Interpretation

Interpretative System

Theory

Paradigm

Mythology

Cosmos

Transcendence.

As we move away from the level of Fact, we are moving into a wider area of focus, where there are more connections and interrelationships. As we move outward and upward from step to step, we are moving into increased meaning, by which previous levels are organized out of the chaotic level they would normally have if they were not organized. At the same time, however, we are moving away from the sense of concreteness that we had when we were dealing with immediately experienced data at hand, the facts.

This is the paradoxical balance in which knowledge in general must operate: increased meaning and order means increased abstraction, while increased concretion means decreased meaning and order. This is paradoxical to common sense, because we tend to think of the immediate concrete fact as being closer to truth, when in fact it is only closer to the truth of raw data which constitutes chaos. Chaos is ‘more real’ in the sense that it is what Eric Voegelin (following Aristotle) called the apeirontic ground of being, reaching up from the abyss and constituting the material reality of being; and insofar as it reaches us from below through the depths of materiality right up to the surface of the immediacy of materiality, its knowledge contacts us via the medium of our bodies which participate in that apeirontic depth by being founded by it. At the other end of the spectrum of reality, the noetic light that illuminates, orders and gives meaning to reality as it rises up out of the apeirontic depth is experienced as removed from us, more mental, more spiritual, oftentimes as ‘other’ than us, emanating from beyond, or from transcendence. What is therefore intuited spiritually or noetically as being ‘more real’, because it endows more meaning to reality, also is intuited as being more removed from the ‘basic’ reality of the materiality and immediacy of the concrete. As long as we keep in mind the idea that the level of the concrete facts and our experience of them is a level that would have no meaning and no order apart from the noetic height of increasing abstraction (interpretation, interpretative system, theory, paradigm, mythology, cosmos, transcendence), we can maintain the paradox. Whenever we slip into the all-too-common feeling that the concrete fact contains its own meaning, we begin to botch the paradox. This feeling is ‘cheating’, because it is ignoring the level of interpretation, or it is treating interpretation of facts as though it were another fact—and, at the same time, this feeling treats the facts themselves as though they were interpretations. By confusing facts and interpretations, it paves the way to confusing all the levels of higher abstraction with the lowest most immediate level of the concrete fact. This simplistic way of dealing with reality treats the complex, sensitively paradoxical whole of reality in which we navigate with our curiosity and knowledge as though it were a compact mush or block of self-evident meanings all nicely dovetailed together. This way of dealing with reality is not necessarily all that bad: it allows for people to get on with their basic material needs as well as the additional emotional and spiritual needs they are bound to have in such a way that none of these complicate or disturb the person too much. Problems for such a simplex outlook will arise when crises happen, since crises are intrusions from outside this simplex block of pragmatically useful meanings that has been constructed (either passively or passively-actively) without the larger reality being factored in—since the more our focus of reality is widened, the less do our smaller worlds cohere—since any given subworld is dependent upon the wider level of meaning outside it, leading ultimately to transcendence beyond all worlds.

Each one of these levels may have multiple instances: i.e., at the level of paradigm, for example, we can have a field of many paradigms, often competing among themselves, or in various ways dovetailing cooperatively. This field of multiple paradigms, then, is organized and embraced by the wider level of mythology; but this higher field itself may have multiple mythologies.

This multiplicity extends up into the level of cosmos. However, insofar as cosmos is transparent for transcendence which is the logical endpoint of any hierarchical organization of reality, the logical unification of transcendence exerts a reverse force, so to speak, back down upon the cosmic level insofar as we achieve the epiphany (or cosmophany) of a Heraclitus who realized there is only one common Cosmos to all—even though Mankind obviously is deluded into a competition or refraction of multiple cosmoses. Insofar as the Heraclitian cosmophany is a matter of faith, not fact, it must itself succumb to the problem of refraction it sought to heal. The simplex unity of transcendence, therefore, is paradoxical, ever-poised on the edge of being the vector that would unify and organize all the reality below it, and succumbing to the centrifugal logic of reality insofar as reality, by its own paradoxical logic, is alternately larger than transcendence: which brings us full circle to the paradox of Cosmos and Chaos. We must neither allow the paradoxical structure to imbue itself with a chaotic nature, nor must we imagine that the presence of the cosmic nature conquers chaos. It is a paradox that continually and essentially frustrates logic—but would not cause frustration were it not at the same time intimately tied to logic.