Historical Consciousness and Mythologization Paper presented at the 65th North West Annual Philosophy Conference. October, 5th. 2013. Pacific University, Forest Grove, Oregon.

The thesis of this lecture is that any historical reflection is an interpretative construction of the experience of the passage of time which is ontoepistemologically conditioned by the determinations of human material existence. Such a construction is an endomorphic process of representation of experience, a metaphorical rendering of the world in familiar terms, a mythologization. This process is not unique to traditional myths and history, but also to science and philosophy, in fact, philosophy of history is a mythologizing action.

Let me construct an argument for this thesis.

When we think about history from our present-day perspective, we do not proceed only, as Thucydides or Ssu-Ma-Chien did, based on the occurrences of some specific facts in time, but instead, our concept includes, unnoticed, a full historiographic and philosophical tradition which has reflected upon the general occurrences of human societies. Besides, by history we are not only referring to reflections whose object are social actions, but to natural history as well, and place social action, with more or less intellectual fortune, in relation to the doings of nature. We do not consider our past as Herodotus or Hegel did, but the notions of historical consciousness or historical memory are used in social philosophy and political praxis as if they express well defined and homogeneous social facts in the past of humanity, and not merely concepts of philosophical interpretation.

The philosophical notion of historical consciousness partly emerged from the reflections made by philosophy in the 18^th Century concerning historiography, but most of all by a general reflection in relation to the question of man’s origins. In this sense, historical consciousness is a philosophy of history, a particular reflective interpretation, from some given ontoepistemological point of view, of the memories which constitute the heritage of a social group as a whole. We find different philosophies of history in the Hegelian system, or in Shelling’s meta-historical doctrine, or Marx’s, or Dilthey’s in which memory is adjusted inside different ontological schemas of the human being and the universe with certain given properties, whether idealistic or materialistic. To Dilthey, for instance, the origin of historical consciousness is linked to the end of cyclical forms of thinking, a phenomenon that can be traced down to the confluence of the philosophical tendencies of Hellenistic Judaism, Gnosticism, Neoplatonism, and the first Christian philosophy.^[1] Nevertheless, we have to distinguish between the philosophical use of the notion of historical consciousness as has been done from the XVIII century on, and a more general sense of historicity which is not even restricted by cyclical forms of thinking.

Although the sense of historicity did not start with the phenomenon of writing, it was drastically changed by it. Writing expanded the horizon of the past and focused its contents. Historical writing is a particular form of record, a symbolic marking which objectifies action into language through a self-conscious process of narrative construction. This is what we find in ancient Egyptian, Babylonian, or Assyrian^[2] texts, whether in the form of military chronicles, treatises, lists of king’s names, temple’s dedications to divinities, legal codes, oracles, prophecies, spells, or narratives about the gods. With these writings, the group’s identity is shaped in ever more complex degrees. Such narratives state a conscious understanding of the process of social order and its changes, and show a wide representation of political life and an acute sense of psychological self-awareness. Historical thought does not exclusively arise in Christian mythology, as Dilthey suggested. The historicity of Christianism is the result of some millennia of historical thinking with the addition of the Greek historiographic reflection, impregnated, as it was, with the epistemological demands for making fact based discourses.

Historicity as the intuition of the course of time and the conditioning of the past over the present is independent of the degree of rigor with which the historian or chronicler might process their information, as it is also independent of the fact that a cosmogony may be cyclical or not. If we are to select thoroughness as the determination for historical thought, we could not give the concept an existence of more than a hundred years. From our perspective of scientific dating methods and digital information, archaic historiography is imprecise at best, although we accept its vagueness not only for the record provided, but as a token of old ways of interpretation, extracting valuable information even from its disinformation.[3] Despite Dithey’s proposal, we find historicity amidst cyclical metaphysics. One good example is found in the writings of the Artha-Shastra by Kautilyia.[4] In the book, Chandragupta Maurya’s counselor gives direct and well founded references to five historical schools concerning the art of government,[5] an historicity without which should be impossible to write a political-economical treatise. In fact, linearity was never altogether absent from cyclical systems of thought. In Jainism, or Hinduism, in which souls reincarnate unceasingly, the guiding thread of those lives is the concept of karma, strictly linear, which produces the intuition of the irreversibility of the Jiva,[6] even if it is outside of life. On the other hand, we could not discard this kind of metaphysical historicity on the grounds of being simply mythological narratives, for it would imply at the same time the rejection of all the historical systems whose roots reach beyond experience as well. The disqualification of the historicity content of idealistic systems would only give us a handicapped view of our past and would contribute to the false impression that materialistic systems are exempt of metaphysical assumptions.

When we speak today either about historical consciousness or historical thought, we include the reflections provided by the practice of more than two hundred years of philosophy of history. In their theoretical multiplicity, philosophical systems have shown that there is not a unique way for thinking these questions. In fact, the theme is so problematic that has led to discrepancies even in the definition of the thinking subject and the object of study. Thus, for instance, Marx sustained that the abstract idea of man, separated from the context of class, does not make any sense,[7] and that neither the concept of history, nor that of historical consciousness could be independent of class consciousness. According to Marxism, human consciousness, in the sense of ideas and conceptions about life, is incomprehensible without the determinations which lead to changes in human material existence, id est, the notion that all changes in consciousness arise from those in material conditions.[8] But not even from the point of view of materialist philosophy, which takes into account economic determinations, can we postulate fully intelligible units of historical study. Not only the idea of an abstract human being is a reification, inheritor of old mythological tales, but social institutions are neither objects which have an homogeneous definition throughout time, therefore, is not so clear which social agent could be postulated in a diachronic analysis. We have an example in the five societies that Arnold Toynbee characterized as objects of study for contemporary history,[9] five social agglomerations derived from twenty one civilizations of the past. Although defining some spatial relationships among diverse civilizations, these analytical units are conditioned by a very specific imperial dialectic which, per se, is part of an historically conditioned ideology, a fact that would hamper our understanding of those social objects which are not in conformity with its postulates.

Historical reflection is thus an interpretative construction of some social life concept, whether it be this a part of the group’s life, or the life of the group taken as a whole, or another wider social unit. It involves a process of interpretative reflection over the group’s memories, a mythical valuation which is not independent from the material conditions for the keeping and retrieving of the records. The invention of writing or computer technology are both good examples.

The reflective process of historicity, the relationship between myth and vital experience is more complex than the one which distinguishes between history as the sphere of the real and myth as the sphere of the imaginary. It is obvious that fabulous beings like the ones appearing in ancient mythologies do not belong to daily life experience, and can be catalogued as imaginary beings or events. Depending on their mythological frame of reference, these beings will either have an exomorphic or an endomorphic representation. Exomorphic representations are literal or final concepts of a group that cannot be expressed in terms of anything else, historical boundaries for thinking that a specific society cannot surpass. On the other hand, endomorphic representations are concepts and composition of concepts that can be expressed in other terms, concepts that can be translated to others, metaphors expressing the full workings of a culture. But the exomorphical representations of mythological fabulous beings are not so different from other limiting concepts that social and empirical sciences handle, such as human rights, universal order, unified theory of forces, big bang, Plank’s era, matter, the continuum, etc. In fact, the difference between the concepts of real and imaginary is, to say the least, problematic, if not an operator which does not have sense any longer for our understanding of the world. As Heraclitus had understood, and Quine repeated in his ontological analyses, physical objects are postulated entities that simplify the flux of our experience which we call world, and the theories in which these appear can be called myths.^[10] Thus, for example, the theoretical model that contemporary physics entertains presents a world as paradoxical and contrary to ordinary experience as any of the classical myths which constituted the mockery of the scientific community of the past. We are told of Kaluza spaces, which contain both extended and curved dimensions, which even though are not isomorphic with our experience, they are so with the supposed structure of the cosmos, spaces which have emerged from sheer logical speculation, without any link to experience.  We are also told, in complex theoretical schemes, that the universe is an indivisible whole in which the parts appear as abstractions or approximations that only have validity within the limits of classical physics’ stipulations. This indivisible whole, or the Kaluza space, is an imaginary being, like Zeus or the Cyclops, nothing but entia rationis to which no objects from our ordinary experience correspond.

There is not any particular philosophy of history whose point of view and narratives are not mythologizations. The fact that we explain necessity and contingency as different degrees of sensitivity to the initial conditions of the historical process,[11] following the principles of chaos theory, or that we adhere to fatalism, or to historical materialism, or to deconstructionism, simply shows our particular ontoepistemological reference frame. All these provide mechanisms of mythologization by which experience is endomorphized in the Lebenswelt of a social group, and have proven to be effective tools for the manipulation and control of ideology when they are consciously used in that direction. The intuition of the passage of time and its reflective recording does not seem to need anything else than a minimal ordering of memories, whichever it may be, to elaborate the social identity.

It is interesting to notice that while our present-day philosophy of history struggles with its theoretical issues, suffocated by its own contradictions, the fragmented historiographic narrative of the social institutions and media industry proceed with their traditional strong historical discourse. Such a narrative, founded over the presumed solidity of its object, covers with its authoritative voice the economic and psychological functions for the mythical generation of identity. Societies need solid narratives for the valuation of experience: their Kings, Presidents, scientists and poets cannot speak with faltering voice.

Historiography per se, deprived of the philosophy of history, would be a practical acritical knowledge of sequences of social actions, a chronology. But there are no chronologies which in their most simple acts of choice do not imply a philosophy of history, for all human social actions entail a valuation according to a particular mythical system. Nevertheless, the narrower the span and the criteria for choice, the more acritical the narrative produced, and therefore, the more the chronology will have the social function of the old myths.

Not only the historical narrative fulfills the functions of myth, but philosophy of history itself is a mythologizing action, by way of generating proposals about the whole of historical thought, and by undertaking an investigation on the origins. And so is science. That any of these narratives of philosophy of history, Schelling’s, Marx’s, Toynbee’s, or any other, may be considered a myth or not, is more a question of notation, a secondary determination concerning the fact that all of them have produced social identity. Some have even been generators of structures of social order which have conditioned economic actions and ways of life, in an analogous manner to the conditionings of traditional myth.   

Let me finish giving some examples for my theses.

In the 19^th Century, with the upsurge of European Nationalisms, history covered, to a great extent, the gap left by Christian mythology after its collapse due to the changes in the way of life brought about by positive science and the triumph of the Industrial Revolution. The revitalization of the great national poems and the writing of new ones, which took place along the 19^th Century in most of Europe, show how new national identities were invented. Through a political-artistic process of linguistic fusion of elements of pre-Christian mythology with philosophy of history[12] and with general historiography, new European nations appeared on the political arena, like Germany or Finland.

The mythologization of history and the historyzation of myth is not, however, a new process of 19^th Century nationalisms. Since the beginnings of theatre in Athens, drama had worked as a ritual in which the identity of the city was mythologized and recreated, in a more or less critical manner, with the help of stories from a distant past.^[13] Shakespearian theatre also mythologized in its time the story of the kings of England inventing the Elizabethan identity, as the theatre of Lope and Calderon worked in the formation of the identity of Spain.

And something similar happened fifty years ago with the theatrical model plays of the Maoist China, where the revolutionary dramas defined, in a mythical-ritual fashion, the identities of the social personae of the new nation, reinventing the past.^[14]

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[1] Cf. Wilhelm Dilthey, Introduction to the Human Sciences. Wayne State University Press. Detroit 1988. p. 229-230.

[2] See the wide list translated in The Ancient Near East: A New Anthology of Texts and Pictures. Vol. I and II. Ed. Cit.

[3] Thus, for instance, the General Estoria, or the Primera Crónica General of Alfonso X of Castile, whose documental value is not found in the thoroughness of the information which provides. Example: In this city of Athens, King Jupiter was born, and there he studied and learned so much, that he knew very well the trivium and all the cuadrivium… (General Estoria. Book VII. Chapter XXXV. In Antología de Alfonso X el Sabio. Ed. Antonio G. Solalinde. Espasa-Calpe. Madrid. 1984. p.109.)

[4] Who was a Jaina brahmin.

[5] See the commentary of Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan and Charles Moore in A Sourcebook in Indian Philosophy. Ed. Cit. p.193. School of Usanas, Brihaspati, Samkhya, Yoga, Lokayata.

[6] Basic metaphysical substrate that reincarnates in multiple lives.

[7] Cf. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto. (English Edition. 1888). III.1. Reactionary Socialism. Amazon Kindle. p.25.

[8] Ibid. p. 19.

[9] The five societies he considers are: Western, Christian-Orthodox, Iranian-Syrian-Arabian, Indic and Sinic. See Arnold Toynbee. A Study of History. Abridgement of Volumes I-X. Oxford University Press. New York and Oxford. 1987. p.p. 11-34.

[10] See in particular the comments on the mythic content of physics and mathematics in On What There Is. In From a Logical Point of View. Harvard University Press. Cambridge(Mass.) 1980. p.18.

[11] Cf. Yemina Ben-Menahem. Historical Contingency. p.102. Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1997. Oxford UK and Malden, (MA) USA. Ratio (new series) X 2 September, 1997. Volume 10. Issue 2. p.p. 99-107. p.102. Web. This notion of sensitivity to the initial conditions of a dynamic system could be understood as the digression of the relations of the elements of a system as time passes by. There is a more detailed definition in Edward Lorenz, The Essence of Chaos. University of Washington Press. Seattle. 1995.

[12] Hegelian, Schellingian, etc.

[13] In particular, Euripides develops a critic of Athens through the tragedies of Trojan topic, composed in a time when the city was in an imperial expansion.

[14]The Red Lantern, is one of the most notable examples of a model opera, where the ethical patterns to adopt by the citizens are represented and a new identity is redefined. The plot and characters which appeared in the traditional Chinese opera were changed. In The Red Lantern, a railway worker who joins in the decade of the 30s the underground communist movement, is recruited to fight in the war against Japan.