Hey Bug!  Nice to see you.

Yeah, laughter lightens and seems to bring clarity with it… my working hypothesis here is that being ready to laugh at ourselves implies a willingness to recognize the limitations of what we thought we knew — the recognition that we thought we understood things firmly when we didn’t… and that comes out of Plato’s Cave, for me… the idea that comedy calls attention to the fact that the shadows we’re watching (and often taking for reality) are really just shadows.

“Lighten up” plays a big roll in Tom Robbin’s Jitterbug Perfume and, in what is my FAVORITE joke of Hegel’s (yes, his books are filled with subtle puns and word plays, believe it or not :),  Hegel notes that the opposite of gravity is …. drumroll …

Levity!

More and more I’m thinking about certitude as a kind of drug that makes us feel secure.  This certainty (as absolute certainty I mean) is a delusion… but wonderment shakes us loose from it.  And then we laugh — or cry sometimes. :^)

Thanks Stephen so much!  Nice to be back again.

So many ideas crowd in at once!  :^)

I particularly like your observation that Hermes hides inside ambiguity.  He’s the trickster: the kind of tricks that make you laugh when they happen to someone else and make you groan or cry (!) when they happen to you.

I’m always drawn back to Campbell’s observations that mythology puts us into the mode of the comical – the surprise realization that we weren’t as smart as we thought we were or that we didn’t see things as clearly as we thought we did.   So maybe that’s at play here.

People always say things like, “say what you mean.” but I think we all know you can never say or write exactly what it is you mean. The words themselves never contain everything we need them to convey and we can never assume that the person reading those words understands those words in the same way.

I think puns remind us of this fact and we’re left to chuckle or groan depending on the degree to which we had forgotten it. 🙂

If I can go back to Plato’s Cave Allegory for just a second, the people casting the shadows (the shadows everyone else takes to be reality) are the political and economic elite, the shadowcasters in every political order.  As has always been the case, it is the function of comedy, the court jester of our culture, is to call attention to the fact that the shadows are merely that, shadows.

As a rule we forget that the shadows we’re exposed to, in media, in popular culture, and even in the masks we wear in public, these are all just shadows of underlying, deeper truths. Comedy punctures this assumption and that’s why it hurts. We discover we’ve taken shadows more seriously than they deserve.

I’m looking forward to a lot of dangerous puns in here over the next week!

Hi Stephen,

Great to be with you again here in COHO and looking forward to hearing from our conversational colleagues!

Wow, right?  Plato’s Symposium weaves together ideas about love, the nature of the erotic, our relationships with each other and, as you suggest here, our relationship to work we love.

I think I’d like to say more about the nature of the erotic and how it ties in to the work we love, but first, you’ve triggered another tangent. :^) This idea of doing the “work we love,” our task as a human being, the work we could characterize as the work that belongs to us almost as a foundation of our lives, is the Greek word ergon. When we think about work we love, it feels as if we are fulfilling our own deepest function as a human being, and when we do our work properly, when we fulfill our function properly, this pops up another critical term in Greek philosophy, arete.  Arete is typically translated as “virtue.”

If I turn all of this back into English, Plato would say that we can live virtuously, like a virtuoso, when we fulfill our best function — do that work most appropriate to us.   And how do we do we become virtuosos of our own lives?

We look for what’s been missing in our approach to life, and in ourselves.

That’s a real Cook’s Tour, but you can see how this loops back into our discussion of symbols.

I think it’s worthwhile having a look at how the erotic ties into this question.

The definition of “erotic” has been diminished into mere sexual experience, but that’s not what it is.  At some point in anyone’s life, after a sufficient amount of sexual experience, you come to realize that some sexual experiences are erotic but that some are not. So what’s the erotic component here?  I think the best way to describe the erotic is the edginess, that sublime anxiety, that comes from intimacy. I like thinking about this as edginess because the primary symptom of the erotic is the feeling of being dragged out to the edge of who we think we are. Anyone who’s been truly in love has had the experience of thinking to themselves – and brace yourself for the cliché – “I never knew I could be like this.”

It is terrifically windy, and anxiety producing, to be dragged out to the edge of who you think you are. The first thing you discover is that there is a lot more to you than you thought there was – a universe you have been missing.

Plenty of perfectly sensible people will immediately retreat from this experience back into the comfort of their own, less anxious and more mundane, lives but — if we’re lucky — we discover that this razor’s edge is exhilarating and satisfies a need deeper than we knew we had.  It becomes a hunt, an adventure, to find those pieces of ourselves out there beyond who we think we are now.  And so, in a serious way, our understanding of ourselves and our lives, to satisfy Plato’s understanding of virtue, must always be symbolic – in the sense that we recognize our own incompleteness, look for what’s missing, and endure the sublime anxiety required.

This wondering about things, committing ourselves to follow the things we love, out there beyond what we know, can easily lead us astray — but I think the greater danger lies in never leaving the house. :^)

That should get us started!  I’m looking forward to hearing from everyone.

Hi Jamesn,

Phaeton, right?  Yeah… the applicability of metaphor and myth continues to amaze me… and I’m struck by the fact that this is not part of our daily lives both personally but, especially, socially.  I’ll leave that to the Jungians among you to unpack the underlying causes but it does seem that people will avoid becoming conscious of themselves (them Selves) at any cost.  This is a theme in existential philosophy but goes back to Athena here, and the sting of Medusa’s snakes.

All of that emotional turmoil we see everywhere today continues to strike me as the result of people looking for explanations and assuming that these are enough for a meaningful life — when we also need to find a way to put ourselves into relation with these explanatory accounts… to put ourselves into relationship with the world, not merely understand it.

But now I’m repeating myself from earlier MythBlasts. :^)

Shaheda wrote:

 My sense, maybe subjective, that interacting with Athena, I am able to skip Medusa when the subject is not entirely personal. It’s the personal element that has the capacity to stonewall one.

It’s a fascinating thought to consider the degree to which our personal attachments condition our pursuit of wisdom. my immediate reaction is to remember that differential equations were totally impersonal to me and yet they froze me to the bone. 🙂

Maybe it was my reaction to my inability to grasp the concepts, rather than the concepts themselves, that froze me?

Hello Jamesn,

Winnie the Pooh may be the true beginning of wisdom, if we work the metaphor differently.  And no snakes!

I’m reminded now of a line my brothers and I were terrifically fond of… from the expedition to the North Pole maybe?  we used to go camping a lot and, inevitably, would get lost. There is a wonderful line where, I think it’s Pooh who says, “I recognize this, it looks exactly like it did the last time we got lost.”  I think I’m remembering that right. 🙂

I kept it fairly simple in the newsletter, but as you notice this idea of refusing to acknowledge parts of ourselves about which we are ignorant gets deep very very quickly. There is a Jungian shadow lurking in this idea and I also keep going back to Campbell’s discussion in Hero about infantile cathexes and what’s required to get over them. Phaeton crashes the solar chariot precisely because he thought he knew what he was doing. If he had just taken a deep breath and reflected on his situation, he might’ve been okay.

Hi Stephen!  It’s a pleasure to join the conversation!

I guess I was introduced to Campbell’s work by my instructor in kundalini yoga when I was about 18.  So, starting around 1975 I began hacking my way through Hero and then all four volumes of Masks of God.  I have to confess that it took YEARS to really get through the Masks of God.  I guess I’m still reading it.  ;^)

Hilariously, all of this was well before the famous Bill Moyer’s interviews, which I caught by accident.  I had never seen or heard Campbell before so when I tuned in, late, to Moyer’s interview, here was this guy with a New Yorkish accent talking to Moyers about mythology.

“Huh,” I thought to myself, “this guy sounds exactly like Joseph Campbell… I wonder who he is?”

I had always loved mythology and was, by the time I discovered Campbell, already deeply interested in exploring religious symbolism.  No other writing, at that time, had really done the work Campbell did to begin constellating these ideas into a coherent structure.  Mircea Eliade and maybe Maria Gimbutas come to mind — but I was still years away from being exposed to their work.   So, technically, a happy accident?

I imagine nearly everyone has a story about how they “stumbled” into Campbell’s work.

Philosophy and play?  Grin, this has gotten me in a lot of trouble over the years, but here goes:

Philosophy tends to be a deadly serious business and, most of the time these days, is focused largely on the logical structure of arguments.  This sort of attention to rigor and clarity is, of course, critically important when you want to unpack difficult ideas…. but…. it can also be deathly dull unless properly leavened with a bit of play.  It’s easy to get stuck on logic in pretty much the same way Campbell warns us not to get stuck on metaphors.  The logical structures of argument are the skeletons that scaffold and support our understanding but, think about it, fetishizing the skeleton over the body it supports kind of misses the point of living.

There’s a wonderful line at the end of Plato’s Republic where he says that enforced learning never stays in the mind and that education should be conducted more like play than work.  My wonderful mentor in Philosophy, Robert Perkins, made a big deal out of this idea.  Playfulness produces the kind of wonder about the world that helps us remember the most important thing: that we might not really know everything we think we know — that we might be more ignorant than we think we are.

Remembering our own ignorance might not sound like a lot of fun, but it’s actually liberating.

I mentioned it in the Mythblast but let me flesh it out here: wisdom, for Plato, meant recognizing your own ignorance.  It takes a bit of chew-time to see how that works, but it’s a brilliant insight.  Philosophy then, literally means learning to love this ongoing recognition of your own ignorance, of the limits of your knowledge.  If you think about it, failing to recognize your own ignorance about — shoot, anything! — usually lands you in hot water, and so learning to keep an eye on that, and to enjoy keeping an eye on that summarizes my way of understanding philosophy.

If I really geeked out (Greeked out?) about this I’d mention Aristotle’s famous observation that all philosophy begins with wonder and I’d argue that it’s playfulness what gets us there.

One more Greek reference then, to bait the hook for our COHO:

Socrates defined philosophy as “conversation with your friends.”   And that’s what we’re doing here!

hiho
Mark