Myth and the Fate of Secularization

Abstract

Philosophical thought about the presence of myth in the contemporary world cannot be founded upon an essential or metaphysical definition of myth. This is due in part to the fact that the dream of philosophy as a rigorous science has been definitively ausgeträumt. More specifically, though, it is due to the fact that the theme of myth itself appears to us today in an uncertain light. No satisfactory theory of myth—one that would define its nature and its connection with other forms of relationship to the world—exists in contemporary philosophy. Nevertheless, the term and the concept of myth, even if not carefully defined, have wide currency in our culture today. At least since the appearance of Roland Barthes’s Mythologies, mass culture and its by­products generally have been analyzed in terms of mythology; and the presence and place of myth in political thought have generally been conceived in terms of the now distant but still important work of Georges Sorel, Réflexions sur la violence, in which myth appears as the sole agent capable of moving the masses to action. Even Claude Lévi-Strauss, who approaches myth from a specialized anthropological point of view, states in Anthropologie structurale that “nothing resembles mythic thought today more than political ideology. In contemporary society the latter has in a certain sense replaced the former.”[1] Although Lévi-Strauss cannot be accused of making only vague use of the term “myth,” a claim such as the one made here—that is, that political ideology has replaced mythic thought for us today—depends in the last analysis upon a rather stereotypical understanding of the term. Indeed, in the later Mythologica, when Lévi-Strauss applies a more precise and specific concept of myth to the question of its possible survival in the contemporary world, he makes reference instead to music and literature as the elements of experience in which myth—in no matter how faded a form—endures today. *This text originally appeared in RES: Anthropology and Aesthetic no. 9 (Spring 1985): 29–95. It is reprinted in California Italian Studies 13, no. 2 by permission of the University of Chicago Press. This is the revised and enlarged text of a paper presented at the Conference on “Myth in Contemporary Life” held at the New School for Social Research and Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, New York, October 11–13, 1984. [1] Claude Lévi-Strauss, Anthropologie structurale (Paris: Plon, 1958), 231.

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