Harry Marks wrote:
Making the unconscious conscious is a less promising path, in my view, because, like Tillich's "broken myth" it presupposes some internal perspective which is outside the perspective which finds meaning in the old connections.
Theorising a new perspective is exactly what occurs with a paradigm shift, and does always involve bringing material to consciousness which previously was unknown and therefore unconscious. New thinking is the only promising path for intellectual progress. Where the ‘old connections’ as you put it are entirely unreal and mythical, such as for example the virgin birth, or Jesus sitting at the right hand of God in heaven, bringing the underlying meaning of these myths to conscious awareness is a highly promising path for better explanation.
Paul Tillich’s concept you raise of the ‘broken myth’ presents a superb analysis of the problem of what happens when the unconscious becomes conscious. Tillich introduced this idea in his classic book
The Dynamics of Faith, defining broken myth as “A myth which is understood as a myth, but not removed or replaced.”
The wonderful thing in Tillich includes his recognition that we can hold the dignity of symbols even while demythologising them. He also anticipates some mythicist ideas, which I will return to later. I would like to talk more about Tillich and will come back to this excellent book which it seems to me presents an unrivalled philosophical analysis of the role of myth in faith. For now a couple of great introductory links are at
http://www.angelfire.com/md2/timewarp/tillich.html and
http://people.uwec.edu/beachea/tillich.html
I don’t know what you meant by ‘internal’ in your phrase an “internal perspective”, unless just the tautology that perspective is always internal to a head. Otherwise you seem to be arguing that we should respect blatantly false assertions on relativist grounds. Traffic rules are not like virgin birth.
Harry Marks wrote:
If you are going to include finding more facts as "making the unconscious conscious" then it is a somewhat shapeless category that tells us little.
Emotional commitments have unconscious drivers which are triggered by symbolic terms that resonate psychologically even though people don’t understand why. Making the unconscious conscious is far more than ‘finding more facts’. More pertinently, analytical psychology discovers that things people used to hold as factual are wrong and can be better explained by things of which they were unaware.
For example, the extent to which Jesus Christ functions like a solar myth is a fact that many Christians are not aware of, even though it subconsciously structures their faith.
Harry Marks wrote:
forces at work in myth are not necessarily unconscious in the sense of Freud's libido or Jung's anima and animus. Yes, if there is a connection to be made between seeing the world a certain way and doing the right thing, there are likely to be some unconscious processes that make it work or there would be no unpacking to do. But a very large share of those connections work consciously. Much of the raw material of religion is "sayings" (such as in the book of Proverbs). These work like Aesop's fables: capturing some useful truth about the world in a simple and memorable package.
Proverbs involve conscious ethical forces at work in religion, but proverbs and fables are not myths, in the sense of stories that are believed to be true. There is obviously conscious intent by the bard who recrafts the mythic content in an old song, but the reasons why his audience find a specific mythical story resonates with them are largely unconscious.
Myth becomes durable and popular when it speaks to the emotional needs of a society. For example Superman and Lex Luthor are mythical symbols that supported the American war against Germany, in ways that may have been deliberately constructed as propaganda but were not understood as such by the mass audience. Generally the power of myth relies on the ability to enter a fantasy world where disbelief is suspended, but its memetic power rests on unconscious factors.
Harry Marks wrote:
And when we are not able to see "the mechanism," as it were, it may not be because of anything unconscious, but is apparent if you simply ask the question. Why did the Church latch onto the Virgin Birth? I doubt if it was an unconscious purity need - I think the urge to claim purity was as plain in that case as in the RCC "immaculate conception of Mary."
But the mythical content in virgin birth dogma is not the purity need, it is the representation of that need in the paradox of the virgin mother as feminine icon, and the belief that the dignity and holiness of the messiah would be diminished by association with the corruption of sexuality. The immaculate conception is a truly bizarre example of unconscious need, which in this case includes social factors such as the patriarchal need for femininity to be controlled by masculinity and the need to have a feminine image of divinity, forcing their way into belief as an impossible gendered myth. As ever, BVM myths endure because their popularity shows they meet a social need.
Harry Marks wrote:
Recognizing psychological motivations needn't have anything to do with mysteries or over-arching invisible structures of archetype.
In the case you raised of the Blessed Virgin Mary that separation from mystery is obviously untrue. A purity motive is necessary for the BVM myth, but it is far from sufficient, since archetypal symbols enter so strongly into the social resonance of the idea that not only Jesus but Mary also was born of a virgin.
Harry Marks wrote:
Yours is the first time I have seen an application claiming that scientific truths were present in the unconscious before being recognized
Unconscious phenomena include repressed feelings, automatic skills, subliminal perceptions, thoughts, habits, automatic reactions, complexes, hidden phobias and desires (
wiki). That gives plenty of scope for the action of unrecognised scientific truth. For example sleep is governed by an unconscious daily cycle which involves factors that can be measured in the blood, rather like the study of why we breathe without thinking about it.
Harry Marks wrote:
Robert Tulip wrote:This recognition of cultural trauma appears to be a good explanation of the high value that the modern theory of liberal tolerance places on cultural relativism, the idea that no single truth can reconcile or measure conflicting perceptions of truth.
Oh, my, now here I think you are seriously off track. Cultural relativism is a fact: driving on the right side of the road is criminal in the U.K. and required in the U.S.
Sorry Harry, but it is you who is wrong here. (And this point actually remains relevant to Harrison's point that gave rise to this thread, regarding analysis of psychological drivers of bias.)
Your driving example would only be relevant to cultural relativism if someone said one or the other side were better, which never happens (except for practical reasons like in Samoa). A more relevant example to understand relativism is the claim that Islam is just as modern and sensible as Western values. You might like to be more careful that you actually have a point to make when you use rhetorical phrases like ‘oh, my’ which try to draw the reader to your point as if your perspective were obviously true.
Harry Marks wrote:
Whether it applies to the wide range of things claimed to be a matter of relative values is a more difficult question, but it does to at least some.
Cultural relativism is purely about values. It is defined in anthropology as the doctrine that “an individual human's beliefs and activities should be understood by others in terms of that individual's own culture.” (wiki) Acceptance of cultural relativism implies we have no universal standards to judge morality. It is a hotly debated topic in the politics of multiculturalism.
Harry Marks wrote:
This is a general phenomenon about values - two contradictory values can both be correct. Driving on the left is the correct side - in one context. Driving on the left is the wrong side - in a different context.
You are confusing a value (something that is perceived as good) with a rule or convention. Road rules are not moral values.
An example of moral variance in road rules is the Russian belief that seat belts are only for sissies. Relativism would insist there is no independent measure of this value system.
Harry Marks wrote:
You may hold out hope that we can someday spell out a complete system of when different values rankings are appropriate, but in the meantime tolerance and relativism are far from absurd. They are necessary! (In a world in which all contingencies are known with certainty, tolerance may be second-best to a system of exact specification of when to use particular values, but in a world in which these are not known, then tolerance is first-best. See how that works? "It depends" is a really useful phrase.)
My own Christian faith sees tolerance as a high value, and I agree that relativism is often necessary as a matter of practical respect and humility. But the ethics of tolerance become difficult when we are asked to tolerate unacceptable practices on relativist grounds.
Harry Marks wrote:
I think relativism is frequently claimed to be absolute truth, which is not only self-contradictory but overdoes a good thing. But it is rather important that we all recognize that truth about values does not work the same way as truth about facts and causal relations.
Some diversity in values is a good thing, for example with a healthy tension between conflicting values of cooperation and competition. But it would be wrong to insist on principle that values are not amenable to analysis by evidence.