Being Rational

The underlying theme of the class has been based around Professor Sexson's essay, "Myth: the way we were or the way we are?" Professor Sexson has made it clear from the beginning and in his essay that myth is the shadow that we cannot elude. To him, storytelling is how we thought, currently see, and will see the world from our earliest memories to our gasping breaths before death.

I, foolish as it may be, believe the opposite. The more I read about talking snakes, the more I am unable to willfully suspend disbelief. I have have surrounded myself in a perceived reality and I have shunned "myth". I know, I know- there are probably things that I believe that are no more real than Cyrinx and Pan, but many have labeled me as a rationalist. In Mireca Eliade's Myth and Reality, the author talks much about how myth IS reality and not as much about how it is NOT reality. In chapter 8, Eliade discusses myth and rationalists:

If we are to believe Herodotus, Solon already said that "the deity is full of envy and instability." In any case, the Milesian philosophers refused to see the Figure of the true divinity in Homer's descriptions. When Thales affirmed that "every thing is full of gods", he was revolting against the Homeric idea that Gods inhabited only certain regions of the Cosmos. Anaximander attempts to present a total conception of the universe, without gods and without myths. (Eliade, 152).

There was a lot of name-dropping in that passage, but the one philosopher I chose was Anaximander. His bio is here. He was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher who stated that physical forces, rather than supernatural ones created order in the universe. Rationalists like Anaximander pointed out how arbitrary the Greek Gods were. Why wasn't there a God of Yogurt? (There is a Greek of The Gods Yogurt which is delicious, but that's besides the point.)

I know I'm discrediting the value of myth in a mythology class, but hear me out. If mythology is a discourse in the way we are, is it only because we believe in it? Could we just as easily believe in chaos instead? The only reason we are aware of these stories is because cultures carry them down from generation to generation. Maybe rationalists like myself could destroy the imagination over a series of demythified explanations such as Anaximander.

This is a weak argument that I will continue to refine in the coming classes. I am not fully convinced that myth is the the way we are and yet I know the shadow of myth follows me everywhere I go. It will haunt me in my dreams tonight.