by alecto » June 13th, 2008, 1:58 pm
Joseph Campbell believes in a hierarchy of symbols. So do most people, but Campbell believes the hierarchy goes farther "up" than most people are used to considering. The symbol "L" is a sign for a sound. Going up one step in the hierarchy, "L" and other symbols (letters) are used to construct words, like "Lamb". "Lamb" is not an object, but it is a symbol for a class of objects. These symbols are used to construct sentences, like "the lion shall lie down with the lamb." This is not an object either, but it is the symbol for a proposition or a physical situation. Most people stop here, but Campbell went on to consider that whole stories might be symbols for things, and not just the collection of sentences that are used to represent them. Thus, the "truth value" of a story could be false (we say, "the story is fiction") but the truth value of some propositions it represents could be true.
Some parts of this should be familiar. Simple metaphors, for example, are sentences with dual meaning. They represent two propositions one of which is false and the other of which are true. We are also familiar with the idea of taking a truth, called a moral, out of a fictional story (sometimes called a "fable").
In reality, there are always two or more levels in language. "Lamb" stands for two things: a sequence of sounds that corresponds to the word we use in speech, and the object to which it refers, a kind of animal. The further we go up the hierarchy, the more referents there are. A fable is a collection of sounds representing speech AND a collection of propositions AND a story AND (possibly) a message.
I would say that Campbell (or his interpreters) is an extremist in saying that truth values of sentences or stories is unimportant. I think history is very important. I don't actually think the man thought history was completely unimportant, though. His focus, however, is on the metaphorical meaning of stories. To him, a story like The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe has a definite meaning and expresses propositions the truth values of which are true, even though the story never occurred in fact.
What irritates many people about Campbell is that he allowed the possibility that the story of Jesus was on exactly the same footing as the story of Aslan, that neither were history but that they expressed some of the same true propositions.
Jung was one of the early 20th Century anti- Tabula Rasa psychologists. Tabula Rasa ("blank slate") is the name of the belief that human beings inherit no behavior, so everyone has exactly the same power to learn anything, and nothing exists innately that can be un-learned. B. F. Skinner was the 20th Century's great Tabula Rasa psychologist. Today, we use the word "nurture" in the phrase "nature v. nurture" to describe this position. In the 19th century, nearly everyone believed Tabula Rasa. Freud's and Jung's principle contribution to philosophy was to attack the Tabula Rasa position and they did so from two directions. Freud concentrated on what were then believed to be general axioms of biology that came out as tendencies toward behavior. Jung concentrated on specific instincts and how they manifested as ideas. In particular, Jung believed that commonalities of myths in various cultures were the manifestation of these instincts. They were different because each culture used objects in its particular language, history, and environment to express the innate drives, but they had commonalities because humans have a common set of instincts. Back when Jung did his thing, the word "type" could still mean an example early in a story that is referred to or recapitulated later in a story (e.g. ("David the Christ is a type for Jesus the Christ".) Since Jung believed his mythical types were ancient inherent a priori knowledge, he called them "archetypes", which means "original examples".
Campbell actually did some of Jung's homework, in that he surveyed hundreds of myths to see if the commonalities were really there. The answer to that question is indeed yes. I don't think that enough data had been amassed to show that commonalities in myths are instincts, however. I don't think that what Jung meant is that just because we are hungry from time to time (an aspect of an instinct) characters in myths are sometimes hungry. He meant that more complex constructions of myths, such as that they often involve heroes (e.g. Luke Skywalker) whose fathers are missing represent instincts. In other words, there would be a behavior encoded on our genes that corresponds to a stimulus as complex and specific as the father being missing.
Sentio ergo est.