The Absence of Myth

4. The Negation of Myth

CHAPTER 4 The Negation of Myth God may be dead, and his traces may lead to little more than a dead, mirroring end—but this doesn’t mean that God has fully disappeared . What I am referring to is the idea of “God” that still manages to serve as a placeholder for the telos of human consciousness, even in a demythologized world. Though this God can be referred to using other terms, such as presence, wholeness, Source, Spirit, Being, the point is, to steal a phrase from Heidegger, “Something other reigns” (qtd. in Knowles: 294). This reigning “other” has propelled numerous discourses, distinct in their methodology and content , but bound by the attempt to root out some purpose to human—though non-ego centered—existence and find cause for faith. Setting myth aside momentarily, I would like briefly to cite a few examples from recent Western thought. GOD AFTER “THE DEATH OF GOD” Existential Theology Paul Tillich exhorts the modern mind to think of the “God above God.”1 That is, modern humanity must think through the emptiness and anxiety attributed to the death of God as well as the concept of God that dies and leaves nothing behind in order to reach that level of being that transcends theism and the duality of I/thou or subject/object. Without transcending the God of theism, God is seen as “a being, not being-itself. As such he is bound to the subject-object structure of reality, he is an object for us as subjects. 163 At the same time we are objects for him as a subject” (184–85). This, Tillich argues, deprives individuals of their complete subjectivity , incites an unsuccessful revolt against the tyranny of an objectified , all-knowing God, promotes anxiety and the pervasive sense of meaninglessness, and ultimately prohibits an authentic encounter between God [being] and man. But when one summons the “courage to be” (apprehends the God above God) from within the meaninglessness, for as Tillich says, “Even in the state of despair one has enough being to make despair possible,” then one meets God in absolute faith (177). “The decisive absence of faith is resolute faith,” wrote Georges Bataille (Absence 48). The “God above God,” the God who invokes little faith, is the God who has not been codified into definitive belief laden with undue expectations and therefore clears the way (a via negativa of sorts) for a state of being that can fully affirm life as it is. Existential Philosophy Martin Heidegger’s notion of Being similarly strives to reach, or more precisely, to think that state of being preceding all existence, a groundless ground that exists beyond the constricting subject-object bifurcation and presents (unconceals) a mysterious whole always already present. “[W]e should [. . .] equip ourselves and make ready for one thing only: to experience in Nothing the vastness of that which gives every being the warrant to be” (Existence 353). This Nothing is not to be confused with the nihilistic anxiety and despair Tillich perceived to be infecting humankind’s spiritual life. Rather, it is a “fundamentum concussum, a bottomless abyss—a Nothing that contains Everything” (Knowles 325). Though any confident foundation for truth may have been wrested from human apprehension, truth as aletheia (unconcealment or unhiddenness) is secured nonetheless. The relationship between Being and Nothing carves the way for other, hidden truths to present themselves: the unsaid, unseen, and unrealized—the formless that precedes every form. Depth Psychology C. G. Jung’s psychology project, with his notions of wholeness, individuation , Self, Transcendental Function, Mysterium Coniunctionis, 164 ��� THE ABSENCE OF MYTH Unus Mundus, and synchronicity, to name a few examples, is also intended to attain a level of unity or totality of self and world that engenders a being-in-the-world not limited by dualistic and egobiased thinking and experiencing. Jung’s usage of the term psychoid corresponds to the formless or Nothing as it “cannot be directly perceived or ‘represented,’ in contrast to the perceptible psychic phenomena” (“Synchronicity,” CW 8, sec. 840). This level of the psychoid or objective psyche cannot be circumscribed by any boundary, yet it permeates all of psychic life. It “refers to a postulated level of unity prior to the differentiation of what we experience separately as matter and spirit. The psychoid contains a level of the archetype in its unknowable ‘suchness’” (Corbett 113). Though Jung spoke less of God and more of the...