Demythologizing Philosophy

Abstract

Myth, even where it is not sought after nostalgically, enthusiastically or romantically—blindly and naively or dogmatically, in the spirit of reaction and counter-Enlightenment—offers in its essence and structure more of the same old, same old, prone as it is to indefinite repetition, a return of the irrepressible, of mimesis and mimicry. This may well be its enduring lesson. Myth, therefore, stands in need not only of scholarly inquiry—just as demythologizing philosophy and, no less crucially, theology or, indeed, politics, is an ongoing and, at moments, increasingly urgent task—it must also and, perhaps, far more deeply and widely be constantly probed, that is, tested and contested. As such, the ever-renewed “attempt at a mythology” forms rather than informs thought and human agency. Myth is the latter’s timeless foil and perennial temptation, rather than its fundamental origin and ultimate telos.