The issue that he is addressing is the fact that our society has become too obsessed with particulars, including language, and less attentive of the big picture. We differentiate in simplified categories like fact or fiction, right or wrong, good or bad, and fail to realise that our society depends on a certain amount of ambiguity in important areas, especially with regard to wealth responsibility. Equally, we have the issue with linear thinking that believes that cause and effect are easy to identify, whereas most eastern thinker have described it as unproductive and self-defeating, because if we do not understand the “unified whole”, entire patterns or configurations, not merely individual components, we haven’t understood causation at all.It could be said that the trouble with Western philosophy began with Plato’s foregrounding of logos. In the Greek world, as in most pre-modern cultures, there had always existed more than one way of acquiring an understanding of the world. The Greeks, let it not be forgotten, also gave birth to many of the most enduring myths by which we understand our relationship to the world, such as those of Œdipus, of Prometheus, of the gods of the Iliad and of the Odyssey. There was, and is, no conflict here. Indeed they distinguished two types of truth, mythos and logos; each was considered essential in its own proper field, and the two were not to be confused. So Karen Armstrong writes:Logos (‘reason’) was the pragmatic mode of thought that enabled people to function effectively in the world. It had, therefore, to correspond accurately to external reality. People have always needed logos to make an efficient weapon, organize their societies, or plan an expedition. Logos was forward-looking, continually on the lookout for new ways of controlling the environment … Logos was essential to the survival of our species.
But logos had its limitations. Good at manipulating the world and making us powerful, it did not contribute to any broader understanding of the meaning of our lives – for that people turned to mythos. Armstrong continues:Myths may have told stories about the gods, but they were really focused on the more elusive, puzzling, and tragic aspects of the human predicament that lay outside the remit of logos … When a myth described heroes threading their way through labyrinths, descending into the underworld, or fighting monsters, these were not understood as primarily factual stories. They were designed to help people negotiate the obscure regions of the psyche, which are difficult to access but which profoundly influence our thought and behaviour … When Freud andJung began to chart their scientific search for the soul, they instinctively turned to these ancient myths. A myth was never intended as an accurate account of a historical event; it was something that had in some sense happened once but that also happens all the time.
In other words, myths were archetypal, not incidental, truths, reflecting eternal patterns that we could recognise, but which could not, without diminishment, be translated into the everyday terms of logos. And, as Armstrong goes on to emphasise, myths were not primarily propositional, but grounded in action. The truth of a myth was not verified by data, but in the playing out of one’s life:The only way to assess the value and truth of any myth was to act upon it. The myth of the hero, for example, which takes the same form in nearly all cultural traditions … showed us how to live more richly and intensely, how to cope with our mortality, and how creatively to endure the suffering that flesh is heir to. But if we failed to apply it to our situation, a myth would remain abstract and incredible.
However, things were slightly more complex than this suggests, since logos and mythos went through a number of transformations. At one stage, indeed, according to the historian of ideas Bruce Lincoln, it was logos that was thought of as unreliable, feminine and seductive:the most ancient texts consistently use the term logos to mark a speech of women, the weak, the young, and the shrewd, a speech that tends to be soft, delightful, charming, and alluring, but one that can also deceive and mislead. (Lincoln 1999).
‘Words, words, words …’ This would certainly fit with Mercier and Sperber’s view that logic was invented in order to win arguments, not to take us closer to the truth.
Mythoi by contrast were the ideals of men of action, weighty, performative, supportive of the truth: alēthea mythēsasthai (‘to speak the truth’) occurs as a formula five times in Homer, Hesiod and the Homeric Hymns (all prior to the end of the seventh century BC). Mythoi can at times be corrupt, but when they are, the effect is shocking and implies shame, such as if a lawyer were to lie; whereas the corruption of logos, at this stage, was taken for granted: ‘the lying logos is deceptive, disingenuous and slyly delivered, hard to detect, the more to be guarded against’.
It’s worth noting that mythos is inclusive of logos, whereas logos is exclusive of mythos. Mythos ‘denotes the whole package, the logos plus the speaker and the context; when mythos is in play, something is at stake’. It is thus dependent to an extent on trust in the authority of the speaker: as soon as people routinely question the authority of heroic figures, it loses power. Thus it is that with Plato one sees a reversal of the fortunes of mythoi. He cites them generally unfavourably in respect of their truth in numerous places, though he concedes there is ‘some truth’ in them. In reality, he is himself the inventor of several of the best-known myths of ancient philosophy: the myths of Atlantis, of Er’s journey into the afterlife, of the ring of Gyges, of the chariot of Phæthon, not to mention the myth of the Cave. Plato was complex. However, his legacy has been one-sided; and from this point onwards, truth is no longer thought of as that which comes from the experience of living, but as what can be argued towards without reference to context. Such a view is a necessary counterpoise, and can be productive: but as always, there needs to be a balance.
McGilchrist, Iain. The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World (pp. 964-967). Perspectiva Press. Kindle Edition.
The same applies for any reading of religious scripture, and probably where we have lost our way.