Mythical
World-Views and the Structuralist Myth
...In the first chapter
of Volume One (of TCA), Habermas attempts to come to terms with the
concept
of rationality in a number of ways, including extended sections on myth
and action. He turns to "mythical world-views" because they
represent,
in his view, an antithesis to the modern understanding of the world,
and
thereby provide a mirror of otherness through which we can reflect upon
the modern world. Habermas claims that this way of proceeding has
the advantage of forcing him to turn from conceptual to empirical
analysis,
by which he means that, as he puts it, "for the sake of simplicity," he
confines himself to the results of two structuralists, Claude
Lévi-Strauss
and Maurice Godelier. He uses these two exemplars of
twentieth-century
French rationalism as the sole representatives of mythic thought, and
assiduously
avoids any concrete discussion of a single myth in his "empirical"
review.
At least Lévi-Strauss, the "cerebral savage" as Clifford Geertz
termed him, spent time studying specific myths, even if he did then
divest
them of their specific qualities in attempting to reveal an abstract
universal
structure of binary logic. But here and throughout TCA Habermas
never
engages in specific analyses of ethnographic, historical, or empirical
data and never goes back to the source materials used by
Lévi-Strauss,
Piaget, Weber, or others that he draws on.
Habermas relies in
particular
on Maurice Godelier, a structuralist Marxist who appropriates the side
of Marxism in which determining conditions of social life are
"invisible,"
not consciously known in experience. As a structuralist, Godelier
must deny what is essential to Marx: that there can be meaning in
praxis. Structuralism denies meaning to "surface" phenomena, such
as parole or speech, because it views meaning as a "faculty" of langue
or deep structure not susceptible to modification through
experience.
From a structuralist perspective, myth is only interesting as a
manifestation
of the underlying logic of the system, not as a voicing and bodying
forth
of the inner life of humanity, of its achievements and tragedies, of
recurrent
experiences with wondrous and terrifying forces and movements of
nature,
and least of all, of the drama inherent in human communication.
Structuralism denies
meaning
to praxis, and hence it is rather odd, to say the least, for someone
like
Habermas concerned with a broad-based theory of "communicative action"
as means to a free social life, to limit himself "for the sake of
simplicity"
to structuralist technicians who deny meaning at the level of action
and
who represent perhaps the most intellectualistic and abstracted
approach
to myth within the much broader spectrum of schools of thought.
Strange
also is his reliance on what I will call a totalitarian way of
thinking:
structuralism denies that flesh and blood human beings embody and body
forth meaning and can criticize and revise the "code" of meaning,
because
it holds meaning and structure to be purely "skeletal," merely the
property
of a single underlying universal and unchanging code of binary
opposition,
to be found in all human endeavor regardless of time, place, or
circumstance.
There is a myth to be found here, but it is the myth of
twentieth-century
binary thinking, itself the legacy of cultural nominalism.
Structuralism reproduces
the nominalist tendency to begin with a false dichotomy requiring
synthesis.
It projects this view on to the world as an "objective" theory:
nature
and culture are clear and distinct categories, surface phenomena and
deep
structure are clear and distinct categories, individual versus social
are
clear and distinct categories, logic is a rational, binary system.
One gets the impression
in Habermas's discussion of myth that those who live within mythic
belief
are extremely limited by our standards, that myth is a fuzzy and
backward
form of thought. Habermas uses the dichotomous premisses of
modern
thought as found in structuralism and semantics to criticize myth as
merely
vague, as having "a deficient differentiation between language and
world."
That the primary purpose
of myths might be precisely to express intensely felt relationships to
the world--meaning "felt relationship" as that quality that literally
lives
in the transaction between person and world and not in system or logic
or brain--escapes Habermas's single-visioned view. The entire
discussion
of myth can be read as an example of how rationalism denigrates those
"divine
deep waters," as the Babylonians said, in which living myth swims:
modalities
of intelligence not reducible to the thin filmy surface of rationality.
Habermas's two primary criticisms of mythical worldviews are that they
are marked by: "insufficient differentiation among fundamental
attitudes
to the objective, social, and subjective worlds; and the lack of
reflexivity
in worldviews that cannot be identified as worldviews, as cultural
traditions.
Mythical worldviews are not understood by members as interpretive
systems
that are attached to cultural traditions, constituted by internal
interrelations
of meaning, symbolically related to reality, and connected with
validity
claims--and thus exposed to criticism and open to revision."
Both of these criticisms
reveal a shallow ethnocentrism which disallows the voice of mythical
worldviews
as dialogical "other" in communicative debate. But even if one
were
to concede Habermas's criticisms, they still reveal the superiority of
mythic to rational "communicative" thought. Mythic "thought"
indeed
does not view objective, social, and subjective worlds as autonomous in
Habermas's sense, but rather as fluid and continuous. And there
is
no reason why mythic thought should radically differentiate these three
spheres, because these spheres, as I will argue later, have their
existence
within the cultural nominalism of modernity, and are mere distortions,
mentally skewed forms of communicative action rather than constituent
features
of it or the world.
Habermas's second criticism
is that mythical understanding acts as a form of reification, and one
not
subject to criticism: How can one criticize the myth one believes
in when one believes in it as reality itself? Although the
possibility
of critical perspective and of criticism itself is undeniably an
important
consideration in modern society, Habermas neglects the ways in which
even
a single mythic world-view allows for critical conflict and ambiguity
of
interpretation, as almost any of the Greek myths attest and as a close
look at traditional village life will reveal. More fundamentally,
he neglects the facts that belief comes first and doubt comes after
belief,
and that myth and ritual involve more than just belief.
We should remember that
myth and ritual are living forms which transformed us into humans, a
fundamental
fact which never penetrates Habermas's rationalistic armor. In
Habermas's
evolutionary perspective, earlier embodiments of human communication
are
absolutely "aufgehoben," that is, overcome or superseded by a seemingly
ever-expanding rationality. Ritually-based societies did and do
place
severe limitations on personal autonomy, but ritual, contra Habermas,
was
perhaps the original means of "reflexivity." This was not the
dispassionate
reflexivity of rational communicators who know what their validity
claims
are about, but the humble reflexivity of humans confronted with a
baffling
world and a deeply-felt need to give it voice. By their very
restricted
and repetitive natures ritual action and myth gradually peeled emergent
humankind from pure participation and impelled us toward belief, toward
the good and bad aspects of human belief. This process brought about
the
enlargement of imagination, but also the encasing of human perception
within
new webs constructed by these imaginings.
If emerging humankind
had only possessed Habermas's communicative action instead of ritual
and
mythic action, it could never have coped with the enormous anxieties
produced
by its surplus brain energy, it could never have unself-consciously
formed
the artistic expressions of the human psyche, the utterances of speech,
the structures of language: it could never have become
human.
Rather than characterizing mythic-bound cultures as having "deficient
differentiation,"
Habermas should have considered how they could have been so
extraordinarily
efficient, creating vital societies that often endured for millenia,
creating
art and language in paleolithic culture, developing the basis of
virtually
all modern grains in the neolithic age, inventing mathematics and
astronomy
in Babylonian civilization, giving birth to philosophy in ancient
Greece.
The real question Habermas never asks is whether and in what ways myth
might enhance rather than hinder communicative reason.
Habermas does not allow
the possibility of a non-critical yet perceptive and self-illuminating
narrative...