Rhythm of Mythical Thinking: Kantianism without Transcendental Subject

In order to follow the spontaneous movement of mythical thinking, it had to bow to its demands and submit to its rhythm. Thus, a speech about myths itself becomes a myth. The unity appears only in the background of the text. In the best case, it will be created in the mind of the reader.

The structural analysis of myths leads along the paths of psychology, logic, and philosophy. Starting from the ethnological experiences, we are still to create a mental index of barriers, to trace back apparently arbitrary facts to order, to reach a level where a necessity is revealed, which is inherent in the illusions of of freedom, to surrender to creative spontaneity of myth. But even in that case, it seems to be arbitrary to recognize laws of presupposition that operate on a deeper level, so the conclusion would become unavoidable that the mind, at the mercy of self-confrontation and deprived of the duty to operate with the objects, sees itself in some way confined to imitating itself as an object, and that, since the laws of these operations are not then fundamentally different from those which it makes known in the other function, it thus reveals its thing-nature among things. Without carrying the conclusion so far to push it, it is enough for us to have gained the conviction that the human mind if it appears to be determined down to its myths, must a fortiori be so everywhere (“if there is a law, there must everywhere”).

By being guided by the study of mental constraints, our problematic approach is that of Kantianism, although we follow other paths that do not lead to the same conclusions. The ethnologist does not feel compelled, as the philosopher does, to make the conditions of activity of his own thinking to the principle of reflection, in order to be able to extend his local statements to a knowledge whose universality can only be hypothetical and virtual. The hypothesis of universal cognition prefers the empirical observation of collective cognitions whose features, consolidated as it were, are revealed to him by innumerable concrete systems of conception. This aspect of our attempt is recognized in Paul Ricceur when he speaks about “Kantianism without transcendental subject”. Since we have set out to find the conditions in which the truth systems can become mutually reversible and consequently leadingly acceptable to several subjects at the same time, the totality of these conditions acquires the object character, endowed with its own reality and independent of any subject.

To illustrate this objective thinking and to show its reality empirically, nothing is so well as mythology. It is the same with myths as with language: the subject, who would consciously apply the phonological and grammatical laws during its speech, would almost immediately lose the thread of its thoughts. Likewise, the fact and the use of mythical thought, that its properties remain hidden. The analysis of myths does not and cannot have the aim of showing how people think. And if by means of the myths we can identify certain archaic or figurative expressions of our own folk language, the same observation is made statement, since we, for our part, are retroactively becoming aware from the outside and under the constraint of a foreign mythology. So, one does not claim to be able to show how people think in myths, but how myths, in people think without their knowledge. Thus the Ojibwa Indians hold the myths for “beings that have consciousness, can think and act”. And perhaps one would have to go further, abstracting from any subject, to recognize that the myths think of each other in a certain way. The point here is not so much, what is in the myths, but rather to uncover the system of axioms and postulates that define the the best possible code, which is suitable to give a common meaning to unconscious creations, creations which meaning to unconscious creations, creations that are events of the mind, of a society and of a culture, selected among those that are the most distant from each other. As the myths themselves are based on codes of the second order (the codes of the first order being those in which the language is the language), there would also be the design of a third-order code, which is destined to ensure the mutual translatability of several myths. But just as little as the other codes this third one is invented or demanded from the outside.

It is immanent in the mythology itself, in which we only in which we only discover it. Every narrator, or almost everyone, tells the stories in his own way. Even in important details, there is an extraordinarily wide margin of variation. So, the myths will be told by several authors and will appear in different lighting. And yet these variations refer to one and the same country, to the same epoch, to the same events, whose reality is dispersed on all levels of a flaking structure. The criterion of validity therefore does not hang on the historical elements. Pursued in isolation, each would turn out to be intangible. But at least some of them take shape, due to the fact that they can be integrated into a series. The mythical schemes show to a high degree the character of absolute objects, which, if they were not subject to external influences, would neither lose nor acquire parts. It follows that, if the scheme undergoes a change, this also affects all its aspects.

Thus, if one aspect of a particular myth appears incomprehensible, it is a legitimate method of making it in a hypothetical and provisional way as a change in the homologous aspect of another myth assigned to the same group for the sake of the matter, which is more amenable to interpretation, which is more accessible. The method merely implies that each myth, taken by itself, exists as the limited application of a schema, which is the reciprocal intelligibility relations that are to be recognized between several myths, gradually helping to uncover them.

Importantly, the human mind, without prejudice to the identity of its occasional messengers, in this structure becomes more and more comprehensible as the doubly reflected course of the two mutually interacting ways of thinking, one of which can be the spark of convergence here, the other there. spark of rapprochement from which their common enlightenment will flare up. And when this then reveals a treasure, there will be no need for an arbiter to distribute it since one has begun to realize that the inheritance must remain inalienable and undivided.