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.

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Socrates calls this moment of choice “the greatest danger of all” because, here, each soul determines the whole fate of its next cycle of incarnation (618b). This is why, he says, it is so important to study philosophy in this life. By learning which kinds of life are better and worse for our souls, we will be in a position to avoid the common error of choosing an evil life on the basis of surface appearances. The philosopher “will be able, by considering the nature of the soul, to reason out which life is better and which worse and to choose accordingly, calling a life worse if it leads the soul to become more unjust, better if it leads the soul to become more just, and ignoring everything else” (618d–e).

This story has puzzled commentators because it at once seems to give us near-absolute freedom to choose everything about ourselves and simultaneously bind us to an iron fate once chosen.² By this account, the only freedom we have apparently lies outside the experience of this life. Although radical, it is a freedom that we cannot actually experience here and now.

I make no pretense here to give anything like an adequate interpretation of this passage within Plato’s whole philosophy. What matters for our purposes is simply the apparent conception of freedom that is present at the surface level of the text. The careful reader must, of course, account for the fact that the passage is a myth, found in a fictional dialogue, and couched in the hedgy terms of a narrative told by a friend of a friend. In fact, I think this is not the best representation of Plato’s considered views, and as Socrates himself says, there is a “longer way” of inquiry into the true nature of the soul that he does not undertake in the Republic (435c). Independent of the best interpretation of what Plato really meant, however, the indelible image of the myth remains in the minds of later generations and stands as one of the principal founts of inspiration for Western ideas of freedom.

Conceding that much of the imagery is stage-setting brought in to make a deeper point about the the radical responsibility we have for our lives, the nature of the choice itself is also a puzzling kind of freedom. All of the models are given. We are not told who makes them or where they come from. They are just there. Socrates does mention that the number of models is so large that even if someone is the last to choose, he will still be able to choose a good life, but the range of options is a finite, unalterable set nonetheless. The goodness or badness of these options is also objectively given. Some of the models are objectively the right choice (i.e., the “just” and the “mean”), and some of the models are objectively the wrong choice (i.e., the “unjust” and the “extreme”). The main point of the whole myth is that most souls will make the wrong choice because they choose quickly based on surface features and will later come to regret their choice. If there is any difference between the suitability of different lives to different souls, this is left unstated. Finally, choice is here construed as a mere act of selection. There is no sense that souls can interact with or modify the models, although the act of choice modifies the soul.

Leaving aside the text itself and the trappings of the myth, something like this image underlies much of our thinking about freedom. Versions of our future are “out there,” a set of determinate options, some objectively better and some objectively worse. We have the freedom to select from among the cards in the deck, but we can do nothing about the deck itself. Nothing about the cards comes from us, only the act of selection. This freedom-as-selection way of thinking may adequately characterize certain limited scenarios in our daily lives, such as ordering food from a menu or choosing to go to one college out of ten possibilities. It fails, however, to capture much about the way we experience the deeper moments of freedom, and it does not merit the near-universal prevalence that this way of thinking has among philosophical theories of freedom. This conceptual image leaves out any sense that the object of choice, the shape of my life, proceeds from me along with the act of choice.

In a future essay, I hope to develop more fully an alternative to freedom-as-selection, but for now, I will simply suggest that we think of free choice by analogy with artistic creation. A painter does not merely select a painting from a set of possible paintings. (Even if we construe that set as the infinite set of possible arrangements of pigments, picking the arrangement is simply not what the painter does.) Instead, the painting proceeds from within the painter’s own soul, although he must also account for and work with the objective limitations of canvas, oil, and pigment. He may have some conception within his mind before he begins, but as he proceeds, the concrete painting begins to take on a life of its own, and the painter’s internal conception perpetually shifts in conversation with the work that has already been done. The painter freely produced the end result, but he could not have known exactly what it would be before he began the process, and it certainly wasn’t a determinate “option” that he merely selected from a range of other options.

Imagine, therefore, an alternative to the Myth of Er. Imagine that the souls are not confronted with a number of models lying on the floor but instead presented with a block of wet clay. I believe this comes closer to the way we experience freedom and responsibility.

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I don’t want to embarrass anyone, but this has been most evident to me in many online posts by new reactionaries about aesthetics, about art and architecture especially. You’ll find one person boasting about his newly discovered appreciation for old things by dissing all things modern. Then you’ll find someone else declaring that beauty is objective while casting before your eyes some obviously hideous modern artwork to drive the point home. The contest is easily won when you’re working from an unexamined intuition. These are the days of dead arguments, statements propounded and repeated ad nauseam as substitutes for arguments. And yet I wonder how anyone can honestly, so unselfconsciously and unironically, affirm tradition against all things modern, even while they post their thoughts on such a blatantly non-traditional thing as social media. In this age of ironies, the performative contradiction doesn’t bother them. Perhaps this is because it has not occurred to them that it is really a performative contradiction.

Not so long ago, a post went viral in which a certain well-read and usually thoughtful individual offered his followers a kind of cheat sheet, a spreadsheet of sorts, to help them discern between good and bad art. The result was particularly cringeworthy as he reduced the so-called objectivity of aesthetic beauty to entirely subjective feelings. If you feel weird, sapped of your energy, and confused, as opposed to uplifted, energized, and clear-headed—this is what he proposed on his spreadsheet—then, apparently, you’re dealing with bad art. And yet the author of the cringe-post in question insisted that the measure is entirely subjective. With one simple application of a category error, he confused mere sentimentality about art with the power of beauty to make us think less about ourselves.

Perhaps no example of supposedly “bad art” is more egregious in the eyes of naive traditionalists than Duchamp’s famous 1917 work, Fountain, a urinal purchased at a plumbing outlet and signed with the pseudonym R. Mutt. One online comment I read recently said: “This is the worst piece of ‘art’ in human existence, and it’s unironically evil.” Another said, “Modern art destroys classical ideas of beauty because it CANNOT compete with them.”

Every now and then, someone will pipe up, in a similar manner, yelling into the digital void about the terrible blight on art that is Duchamp’s Fountain. Perhaps rightly, they identify it as the source of so many subsequent artistic catastrophes. And, to be very honest, often, especially when certain newer human creations are juxtaposed against older human creations, I feel intuitively compelled to agree by screaming my agreement like some demon-possessed sports fan at that app on my cell phone. But the more thoughtful part of myself, which tends to win out more often as I get older, knows that these credulous art critics are wrong. I’m on their side, in a way, but I don’t agree with them, at least not in the way you’d perhaps expect.

To be clear, Duchamp’s Fountain is not my favorite piece of art; not even close. I would much rather spend time contemplating Rembrandt’s Return of the Prodigal Son, as Henri Nouwen does in his book of the same title, or sitting for an hour or two, as I have been lucky to do, in front of John Constable’s beautiful Haywain. The last time I was in the Tate Modern in 2019, looking at a 1964 copy of Duchamp’s Fountain by Duchamp himself, I was more than aware of just how dull and uninspiring it was, standing on the side of one room on a white pedestal looking an awful lot like a display at a plumbing supplies store. And yet, even with this in mind, I still have a problem with the spreadsheet aesthete who thinks it’s possible to divide art into columns with neat categories of what’s great and what’s rubbish. Such spreadsheetism simplistically equates what’s old with what’s good and what’s new with what’s bad.

In opposition to this, I have in mind the Scrutonian idea that to be properly traditional—to be faithful, that is, to the many good things we have inherited from a bygone age—one has to be modern. We can interpret this idea in a number of ways, but one of them is this: to be properly appreciative, in theory, and in practice, of what is traditional, we have to have some clarity on our present place and condition and of the fact that we are looking at the past from this very place and our of a heavily conditioned consciousness. We’re not living in the past but in the present, in the so-called metamodern world with its largely nihilistic sensibilities. This means our view of what happened long ago is filtered through our enwired and enworlded existence. To be properly traditional, I would say, requires seeing tradition less as something that happened, evident by some process of efficient causality in the present, than as a telos. Tradition goes ahead of us and draws us into its world vision if we’re open to it, that is.

I will spare you complex arguments about aesthetics, but I nevertheless want to present something of a defense of Duchamp’s little artistic monstrosity. I am defending it even though it’s a bit stupid. I’m defending it because I’m glad it happened. I can appreciate it, in a way, even if I am not a fan.

We know that in 1917, that infamous artist put a urinal into an art exhibition, signed it with a name that didn’t belong to him, and gave it a poetic rather than a literal name. He didn’t call it Urinal but Fountain. The crudity of the work was not erased by this nominalist addition, but that doesn’t seem to have been Duchamp’s aim anyway. The artwork is a readymade, which means Duchamp didn’t even sculpt it. Duchamp then submitted that readymade for an exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists, to which he belonged, for the first annual exhibition by the Society, which was staged at The Grand Central Palace in New York. He did this anonymously since he was a member of the board.

Initially, the Society of Independent Artists met the work with disdain. They didn’t think it was worthy of being thought of as art either. But their rules dictated that anyone who submitted a piece for their exhibition and paid the entry fee could exhibit their work. A major component of their philosophy, which Duchamp wanted to openly mock, was their claim that America was at the forefront of artistic innovation. The rest, as they say, is history.

I have listened to art historians discuss Duchamp’s Fountain in terms of its sculptural qualities, in terms of the fact that he was taking something ordinary and viewing it as if it was art, in terms of the way he took artistic conventions and inverted them, in terms of its supposed revaluation of values, and so on. The typical suggestion even by certain art historians and art fundis, is that it is such art-like features in the object itself that make it art. There may be some value to such perspectives, but I want to focus on something else.

Do they not see that Duchamp was joking? Imagine the scene. You’re at an art exhibition, and right there, displayed as if it is a sculpture (when it clearly isn’t), is the very same object you, if you’re a guy that is, will urinate into later when you’ve had too many glasses of exhibition wine. Duchamp is taking the piss. His fake, crude artwork has been signed instead of urinated into as a way to mark territory (although anonymously, which deconstructs this very idea), and it’s displayed differently from how it is set up in a bathroom. But that’s all part of the quirk of the object. The right response is to laugh, although I don’t expect you to since I’ve now done the worst thing possible; I’ve explained the joke. Still, it’s funny that some cheeky little chess-loving Frenchman managed to get this nonsensical little so-called artwork displayed at an exhibition precisely because he played by the rules. He played by the rules to break the rules. Well done, Marcel! And, as I said, he was mocking the Americans who thought themselves to be artistically progressive when they were, at least in Duchamp’s mind, pretty stuck in their ways. 

It’s funnier still that instead of being a little temporal blip on the artistic radar, the joke stuck. Granted, it took a while for this to happen. At first, the critics regarded the urinal with as much respect as the naïve reactionary. It was thrown away. But Duchamp got people to talk about it. With the help of Alfred Stieglitz’s photograph of that vulgar readymade and some assistance from a Dada publication or two, the fame of Fountain grew. It was only in the 1960s that Duchamp was commissioned to make 17 replicas of the original artwork, and it was one of these I saw in the Tate Modern. The fame of his original had caught on, and it had to be objectified because that’s something that tends to need to happen with artwork. It was marketing ingenuity that made all the difference.

Jump ahead a few decades, almost a century after the Fountain was first displayed, and you find, in 2004, that a poll involving 500 art experts voted Duchamp’s Fountain the most influential modern artwork of the 20th century. That’s quite a promotion for a urinal! This has been taken too seriously by the art establishment, but it’s just Duchamp’s joke being retold in a different register and with a different accent, all while people fail to see it as a joke. The supposedly smart art critics have elevated something made by a plumbing supplies factory over every other artwork created by every talented artist of the 20th century.

It is here that we might learn to appreciate the brilliance of Duchamp’s little piece of toilet humor. By submitting the artistic equivalent of garbage to that exhibition and then later capitalizing on some marketing acumen, Duchamp alerted everyone to the fact that what gave any artwork legitimacy was not so much the object as the context. Put differently, what matters is not so much the picture as the frame. What gave the artwork its power was the framing provided by the art gallery, the art world, and the entire history of art. In his The Fragile Absolute, Slavoj Žižek puts it this way: “Perhaps the most succinct definition of the modernist break in art is thus that, through it, the tension between the (art) Object  and the Place it occupies is reflectively taken into account: what makes an object a work of art is not simply its direct material properties, but the place it occupies.” Žižek suggests that when the Place is hallowed and rendered sacred, the Object gains a special importance. 

Duchamp’s artwork functions less as a simple extension of the usual expectations than as an event. It challenged the frame and therefore (at least potentially) made people aware of it but also, by existing in reference to that frame, affirmed its own place within it. It was a joke but with a serious point. The point was taken particularly seriously by the Canadian media guru Marshall McLuhan who came to see more clearly than many around him, and many around us still today, that the content of a medium is always less significant than its form when it comes to thinking about the effects of media. To use an analogy, it is the fact of reading itself that shapes consciousness more than the content of the things we are reading. And when a new medium arrives on the scene, it transforms the ground; it creates an entirely new environment. Add a new invention, and you don’t just get a new invention; you get a new world. Well, that is precisely what Duchamp did. He changed the entire art scene by installing something he didn’t make, signed with a name that wasn’t his, and which, by any standard logic, really should not have been considered art.

The thing is, though, that the basic Duchampian logic is evident everywhere. Things and people acquire an aura often because of the way they are framed. A normal human being is framed by the cinema or the media, and so becomes a celebrity or star. As Apple, in particular, has taught us, you can frame a smartphone in a particular way, through various kinds of advertising, to render it somehow more than just a smartphone. It can become an object of envy and desire. Somehow, even the most banal new feature can seem like a life-altering event. Wow, a rose gold phone! Woah, a pressure-sensitive screen! None of this novelty is inherently amazing. Framing is a powerful thing.

A band is framed by a stage, and “VIP” passes and so achieves a kind of aura of sacredness. The crown jewels, a bunch of rocks put together nicely but still a bunch of rocks, are framed by all the pomp and ceremony and royalty and, yes, the Tower of London itself and its security,  and so it becomes something tourists will queue for hours to see. A sports event is framed by the stadium and the expense of the ticket and so becomes all the more “special”. It’s even possible to create an aura around a CEO or boss of the company when he or she is “framed” by the secretary that you have to call to make an appointment. Arguably, even the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil would have seemed more special to Eve and Adam in the Genesis story because it was framed by the serpent as such.

I could go on, but instead, I want to go backward. Duchamp’s Fountain is significant, at least partly, because it has a demythologizing function. It takes the invisible mythical structure of the art world and exposes it. In a way, what I’m doing here is similar to what Duchamp did, only I’m demythologizing Duchamp’s demythologizing. What happened in and beyond Duchamp was something similar, given that the art world started to follow his lead. However, it did so by latching on, I would say mistakenly, to the sheer novelty of the event. They mistook the joke for a paradigm. What was great about Duchamp’s work, many subsequent artists thought, was not so much the way it called attention to the frame as its newness. Modernity has always had a novelty fixation, and this was the epitome of that.

But to my mind, fixating on the novelty at the expense of the evental character of Duchamp’s exposure of the picture-frame relation, or the medium-message relation (to think in a McLuhanite manner), is a mistake. Is there no way to adopt Duchamp’s Fountain less as a model of subversion and demythologization than as a reminder of our need to appreciate things? Is there not a way, I mean, to think of it as a lens through which we can better appreciate what art has been and can be? This is what a modern traditionalist might do to avoid the naivety often confused with traditionalism. One way to do this is to adopt the work less as a deconstruction of tradition than as evidence of a deep appreciation of tradition.

Without tradition, after all, Duchamp is nothing. You cannot see Duchamp’s work clearly without having a sense of the history of art. Its humorousness—I almost said humorosity, and perhaps I should have—is invisible without its being in tension with the tradition. This is precisely what struck me, in fact, when I saw Duchamp’s Fountain in the Tate Modern when I visited it in London back in 2019. There is no tension and no contrast there. The urinal is on display, quite separate from other artworks. It looks uninspired. But why? Well, because there it is juxtaposed with so many things that have simply followed its lead. It is juxtaposed with everything that is just more of the same.

Instead of recognizing the hermeneutical brilliance of throwing context into sharp relief, many artists have taken Duchamp’s work in the shallowest possible way. They have rendered it a formula: find something standard and subvert it, and there, where standardization is subverted, your artwork will be! Novelty-obsessed progressives are, in this, an echo of naïve reactionaries. They fail to notice that the only way to move properly forward is to know what you’re leaving behind. It’s to know that you can never really leave the tradition. You are bound to it, just as you are bound to the contingencies of your own time. Duchamp’s work was created as art precisely because it was tied to tradition, precisely because of how aware Duchamp was of the entire context within which all meaning is encountered. 

Yes, it looks pathetic where it is now, and by now, it should be clear that I am in no way defending how so many modern artists used this work as a technique and formula to live by. But even the sad look of that Fountain now is only evident because we have taken it out of its historical frame. The honest traditionalist, who is by no means not modern and who is by all means desirous of interpretive subtlety, is the person who will put it back where it belongs and accord it a sense of proportion that isn’t overly overblown. The mature traditionalist will not ask stupid questions about whether it is art or evil or not, but will ask, in hermeneutical fashion: What does it mean that Duchamp did what he did, and what could it mean for us now?

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