Originally published in Teaching Philosophy 1990
Many philosophy courses begin with a lecture or discussion entitled “What is philosophy?” in order to give students a schema for assimilating the first fragments that they learn. Borrowing ideas from Joseph Campbell, I have introduced philosophy by suggesting that a philosophical text is the story of the intellectual journey of a hero. The hero must face the unknown, and we as readers can derive from the text some wisdom for facing the unknowns in our own lives. Framing philosophy this way at the beginning of a course provides students with the excitement of a literary adventure each time they open a text as well as some motivation for identifying with a philosopher’s concerns. It may also provide students with a positive source of heroes at a time when educators worry about the role models presented on television and in movies. One version of such a presentation follows.
In the book The Power of Myth, Joseph Campbell explains the psychological functions of myth. An ordinary life is marked by important transitions: birth, walking, puberty, adolescence, adulthood, marriage, parenting, death. As we stand at the threshold of any of these changes, we stand at the threshold of the unknown. Cultural wisdom, in the form of myth, helps us at these junctures. A myth, says Campbell, is the interface between what can be known and what cannot be known. Because a literal account of the next stage in life would not make sense to us at our present stage, myth makes use of metaphors and symbols to inform us about transitions and new realities.
By way of example, Campbell talks about ancient Northern European dragon myths. In these stories, the dragon guards a cave in which he keeps gold and a woman (although he has no use for either). The human hero of the story must slay the dragon. The dragon is thousands of years old and has a hard crusty shell, with only one soft vulnerable spot on the belly. The hero is a young man, for whom slaying the dragon is part of the process of maturing and proving himself. The dragon, says Campbell, is a metaphor for the human ego stuck at a certain stage of psychological development. This ego, almost but not quite ready to move on, holds onto things that are useless to it, things that cannot foster its development nor be useful to it in its next, more mature, stage. The dragon (ego) must be slain if the person is to move on. The hero, young and fresh, capable of becoming himself only if he slays the dragon, represents the ego’s next stage. The new personality must crack the hardened shell of the old personality and to make full use of what life has to offer (the gold and the woman).
Campbell’s examples are myths from around the world, but his analysis could apply to the hero of any contemporary film or novel. Nearly every story has a main character, a hero of some kind. A story could be said to tell of a journey, physical or psychological, undertaken by its hero. This journey is sometimes undertaken deliberately and sometimes serendipitously. The hero’s journey is often a journey into some unknown which few people would choose to face. The journey brings new knowledge to the hero, and the account of the journey brings new knowledge to an audience. Campbell identifies certain motifs in the journeys of mythological heroes which seem to recur across cultures. These motifs include death and resurrection; temptation which is sometimes resisted and sometimes not resisted; water (representing the unconscious, according to Campbell) which is sometimes successfully negotiated and sometimes unsuccessfully negotiated.
I would like to suggest that the writings of our philosophical heroes, the great names who stand out from among the thousands of philosophers studying and writing in each generation, are stories of heroes’ journeys. Perhaps these philosophers are heroes at least partially because they have styled themselves as heroes. They present their ideas in the context of the story of an intellectual journey, using motifs typical of the hero’s journey. They are also heroes, in part, because their stories give us suggestions on how to deal with the unknown. Dealing with the unknown has long been a theme in philosophy. Traditionally, metaphysics provides stories about the unknown and the unknowable, including accounts of what is unknowable and why.
Socrates is our most obvious philosophical hero. We characterize his entire life as a journey into the unknown in search of knowledge. When the oracle at Delphi announces that Socrates is the wisest man in Athens, Socrates’ quest to understand the oracle’s pronouncement begins. Socrates questions knowledgeable men about their specialties and finds that each lacks basic knowledge about the nature of their work. Euthyphro who charges his father with impiety cannot define piety; Nicias the general cannot define courage. Socrates learns that that his own wisdom is his awareness of how little he knows. The powerful wise men whom Socrates exposes as ignorant are offended by Socrates, and remove him by sentencing him to death. In prison, Socrates is urged by his friend Crito to escape and avoid death. But Socrates claims that he is not afraid of the unknown, and that he expects to find answers to his questions in the next world. Thus, Socrates’ death is part of his quest for knowledge, in two senses: his quest leads to his death and his death is but another step in his quest. This Socrates of whom we speak is a mythologized Socrates, but the mythological Socrates is more important to philosophers than the historical Socrates. The real Socrates was a political activist, with definite anti-democratic connections and commitments, who was executed by Athens’ democratic regime for war crimes committed during the Peloponnesian War. The mythologized account of Socrates’ journey also bring insights about knowledge to its audience. What we value most in life is difficult to define. True wisdom is recognizing how little we know about our central concerns. Nonetheless, we must try to find out as much as we can, for “the unexamined life is not worth living.”
In order to give some examples of the range of hero motifs in philosophy, I present Descartes and Hume as philosophical heroes. Both Hume and Descartes undertake journeys; face the unknown; resist temptation to give up the quest; overcome beasts; and report on knowledge gained. I rely here on Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy and Hume’s An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding.
Descartes’ intellectual journey in the Meditations is undertaken consciously. Descartes has reached a point in his intellectual life where he is no longer satisfied with his intellectual roots. His old beliefs are no longer a solid foundation for his life, so he sets out to find some beliefs which will be unshakable enough to serve as a foundation for his life’s way. The story of Descartes’ doubt is a story of intellectual death and resurrection. In his attempt to doubt everything he has ever known, Descartes dies an almost complete intellectual death. At times, he is sorely tempted to give up his journey. He notes how difficult it is to sustain his doubt. In order to sustain it, he has to create a mythological monster to overcome: the evil deceiver, whose only goal is to make sure that Descartes is wrong about everything. Just before his big breakthrough in the second Meditation, Descartes makes use of the mythological motif of negotiating a body of water when he says he has fallen into a whirlpool. He can neither swim up to the top, which would mean finding a way out of his doubt, nor can he get sucked down to the bottom, which would mean succumbing completely to doubt and to intellectual annihilation. Later in the Meditation, Descartes triumphs over the deceiver using a common technique of heroes. Descartes find that, in a sense, he can trick the deceiver. Even if the deceiver is deceiving him, his perception that he exists must be true, or else he could not be deceived. Triumphantly, he says, “Let him deceive me as much as he will, he can never cause me to be nothing so long as I think that I am something.” Once Descartes has established self-knowledge as a foundation, he goes on to affirm belief in God. Once he has those two foundations, he reasons that his appropriate use of the faculties God gave him will result in reasonably reliable knowledge. His journey is now complete. He can now return home with a confidence he did not have when he left.
Hume is not on an introspective journey to gather knowledge. At the beginning of his story, he has already returned from that journey. Now he begins a crusade to spread the knowledge he has gained. On his journey, Hume has learned that the twin dragons of unreason and blind religious faith are conspiring to cloud people’s ability to see the truth. Hume’s task is now to unsheath his sword and slay the twin dragons. His sword is experience. His message is that if people attend to their experience – impressions and ideas – and to how that experience is processed – cause and effect reasoning—they will be able to slay these dragons within themselves and within society. Hume is reminiscent of Rambo, slaying everything that smacks of his enemies, unreason and religion. He invites people to join him on his crusade, and his rallying cry is “Attend to your experince!” In his A Treatise of Human Nature, Hume does admit to being tempted by the “vulgar” tendency to take beliefs at face value, but his hesitations have been exorcised by the time he publishes the Inquiry.
In Two Dogmas of Philosophy, Dennis Rohatyn identifies the erroneous belief that philosophy is a branch of knowledge consisting of a body of substantive information. He presents what he believes to be a more accurate view. The word “philosophy,” broken down into its Attic Greek roots, means “love of wisdom.” Wisdom is the skill of acting well in the absence of knowledge. Philosophy, then, tells us how to act and think in the absence of knowledge. Understood from this point of view, Descartes’ philosophy lets us know that there will be periods in our life when we will doubt, when the knowledge that we have will be inappropriate for the sorts of thinking we are called upon to do. When our knowledge fails us, we can rely on certain guideposts according to Descartes: our thinking selves and a nondeceiving God. If we rely on these guideposts, we will find our way. But the way is not easy, and no magic formula exists to dispel human doubts. If we understand Descartes’ mode of presentation as part of his philosophy, or in other words, if we understand the myth of Descartes’ journey as part of his symbolic communications, Descartes’ philosophy suggests to us a way of approaching the unknown. Hume’s approach to the unknown is less patient. Hume explains what we can know and what we cannot know. We can know what we have experienced, and we can make limited predictions about events similar to those which we have experienced. But more than this the human mind simply cannot do. When faced with what appears to be unknown, we must first decide whether or not it falls within the realm of our experience. If it does, we gather information and clarify our beliefs about it. If it does not, we must recognize that we cannot know anything about it and stop worrying about it.
The dramatic contrast between Descartes and Hume, which makes them such a popular pair of readings for introductory classes, thus goes beyond the contrast between rationalism and empiricism. As hero figures (not necessarily as real people), Descartes and Hume have radically different personalities. Descartes undertakes an individual journey; Hume crusades for all human beings. Descartes is cautious and mature, and wants to rebuild what he perceives as a shaky order. Hume is young and bold, and wants to destroy a corruptive order. Descartes approaches life-transitions with the gentle confidence of one who has been through many. Hume has not been through many, but confidently asserts that he is ready to assimilate any experience within his existing framework. I have found that older readers often prefer Descartes and younger readers often prefer Hume. In the absence of experience, Hume’s wisdom is the sort of wisdom that teenagers can understand. Perhaps it is also wisdom that they can use. Older readers recognize that Hume’s posture is one which they have assumed many times, only to be shocked each time by a major life change. They find Descartes wiser, more realistic, and more interesting.
While I cannot showcase here the journeys of other philosophers, I would like to point out that theories of ethics can also be understood as wisdom which guides us in the absence of knowledge. For example, Kant’s ethical theory is based on the premise that ethical wisdom belongs to the noumenal realm. We cannot know for sure the moral status of human beings or of possible actions. Therefore, we must make certain assumptions about what constitutes right action. These assumptions are formulated by Kant as the “categorical imperative.” Aristotle assures us that through life experience, we will come to know the appropriate mean in all spheres of action. In case we are skeptical of that claim, being older and still uncertain, Aristotle assures us that the “man of practical wisdom” has the answer.
“The Philosopher as Hero” took shape as the closing unit for a lower-division course entitled “Theory of Knowledge,” which is essentially an introduction to philosophy with an emphasis on epistemological issues. This closing unit took about three hours, or a week of class time. The unit began with a discussion of representative myths from a variety of cultures. Students had thought about and were able to talk about the social functions of myths, so discussion of that topic served as a bridge to my introduction of the psychological functions of myth. The class watched a videotape of the first hour of Joseph Campbell’s televised conversations with Bill Moyers, entitled “The Hero’s Adventure.” After the video, I asked the class to list the motifs which Campbell identifies as hero-story motifs. I named the philosophers we studied one by one, and asked the students to identify hero motifs in the readings. I reminded the class of Campbell’s assertion that myths are a interface between the known and the unknown, and gave students the opportunity to explain what each philosopher suggests we do in the face of the unknown. Students recognized that such a set of suggestions can be understood as a “philosophy” of life, and spontaneously began evaluating the philosophies. The unit and the course ended with me making a pitch for the significance of philosophy, explaining that although students may find philosophers’ ideas to be literally false or ridiculously extreme or blatantly inconsistent, they can understand these ideas “mythologically” and look for the wisdom that each philosopher offers. Students reported that this closing unit improved their evaluation of the worth of philosophy, or at least, their evaluation of the worth of taking a philosophy course.
References
Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyers. The Power of Myth. New York: Doubleday, 1988.
I.F. Stone. The Trial of Socrates. New York: Doubleday, 1988.
Dennis A. Rohatyn. Two Dogmas of Philosophy and Other Essays in the Philosophy of Philosophy. London: Associated University Presses, 1977.
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