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3 The Struggle between Myth and “Suspicion”
- Indiana University Press
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[ 3 ] The Struggle between Myth and “Suspicion” The romantic inventors of “myth,” theorists and poets alike, consciously construct it as a privileged site in the modern agon between belief and disbelief. And the history of the new concept remains during the nineteenth century largely the record of an intensifying struggle between what Schlegel called “enthusiasm” and “irony.” On one hand, the notion of “myth” as vehicle of access to transcendence becomes increasingly reified in middle-class culture, particularly in literary circles. On the other, this success generates the first major counterattacks, the critiques that culminate in Marx and Nietzsche. These latter introduce into the construction of the concept two of the three major kinds of theories that depart from its romantic glorification. The line of thought that proceeds from Hegel to Marx introduces the conception of myth as false consciousness, that is, as ideological, while Nietzsche registers, somewhat proleptically, that view of myth as pragmatically necessary fiction that I’ve termed on the strength of some of its later manifestations as constitutive. The third major departure from the romantic matrix, subsequently referred to as the folkloristic or anthropological also makes its definitive appearance at this time, most conspicuously in the work of the Brothers Grimm. This third strain does not, at first, fit the pattern of arising out of a dialectical quarrel with its romantic origins. In the longer run, however, this strain’s novel tack of taking “myth” seriously as an actual genre of storytelling combines with ethnological fieldwork to produce another, and perhaps the most thorough, of departures from 50 The Modern Construction of Myth transcendental pretensions. The chapter that follows juxtaposes accounts of the rise of these three new views of myth against evidence of the entrenchment, especially in literary and artistic circles, of the originary romantic premises. H E G E L’ S “ S T RU G G L E O F E N L I G H T E N M E N T W I T H S U P E R S T I T I O N ” It’s worth recalling that G. W. F. Hegel began his career in intense association with Schelling and Hölderlin, even collaborating with them on a small treatise on myth. Though his mature philosophy is ultimately a severe rationalism, he knew romanticism from the inside. In the section of Phenomenology of the Spirit (1807) titled “The Struggle of Enlightenment with Superstition,” he offers a remarkable account of the contestation, an account that could serve not merely as prolegomenon to his own contribution to the first major critique of romantic myth, the one that leads to Marx, but also to the pattern to be described in this chapter as a whole. As usual in the Phenomenology, the account manages to suggest simultaneously an epitome of the intellectual history of the preceding decades, an oblique confession of Hegel’s own mental growth, and the prophetic discovery of a spiral developmental pattern that promises repeated versions of the same struggle throughout the course of modernity. Basing himself upon Kant’s famous definition of Enlightenment, Hegel declares the essence of that historical phenomenon to be the universalizing of “pure insight,” which he defines as “the spirit that calls to every consciousness: be for yourselves what you are in yourselves—rational” (Hegel 1967, 588).1 “Insight” first finds “belief” to be a “tissue of superstitious prejudices and errors,” and then “sees the consciousness embracing this content organized into a realm of error, in which false insight is the general sphere of consciousness” (561). This characterization of “insight’s” discovery is a momentous one; it not only identifies for the first time what will commonly come to be called “false consciousness,” but it also equates that consciousness with a sum of social practices, thus opening the way for the Marxian conception of “ideology.” It’s very tempting to examine in detail the subsequent brilliant analysis of the struggle between the two contrary forms of “pure consciousness” (561), but we must skip to the conclusion where Hegel insists that belief has been reduced to “the same thing as enlightenment; . . . the difference is merely that one is enlightenment satisfied, while belief is enlightenment dissatisfied” (589). If this characterization of modern religious belief and/or of romanticism appears like neutrality forgone in favor of “enlightenment,” the reader has only to take in the stunning concession in Hegel’s continuation: “It will yet be seen whether enlightenment can continue in its state of satisfaction; that...