Categories
- Art (356)
- Other (3,632)
- Philosophy (2,814)
- Psychology (4,018)
- Society (1,010)
Recent Questions
- Why did everyone start to hate the Russians if the U.S. did the same thing in Afghanistan, Iraq?
- What needs to be corrected in the management of Russia first?
- Why did Blaise Pascal become a religious man at the end of his life?
- How do I know if a guy likes you?
- When they say "one generation", how many do they mean?
First you need to understand the definitions.A myth is a narrative that conveys people's ideas about the world, man's place in it, and the origin of everything that exists, mainly expressed in stories about gods and heroes.Myths are characterized by naive humanization of the whole nature (universal personification).Since the gods represent ideal communities-certain areas of human activity with their own laws.Example:hunting-Artemis (goddess of hunting) or war-Ares (god of war). Hence the peculiarity of mythological consciousness – the establishment of imaginary connections between various phenomena. Simply put, connections were established on the basis of associations of belonging to a particular type of activity or natural process.�
Philosophy is a special form of human consciousness and mental activity aimed at a comprehensive rational understanding of the world and human existence in it. The main tool of operating in philosophy is the concept.A concept is a form of thinking that reflects the essential properties, connections,and relationships of objects and phenomena. The main function of the concept is to highlight the general, which is achieved by distracting from all the features of individual subjects of this class. Roughly speaking, if in the mythological worldview phenomena were distinguished mainly by means of associations, then in philosophy based on the rational principle. Answer the question, philosophy begins where rational concepts appear. The first signposted swallow of a concept that approximated the modern meaning of the word was Logos (judgment, essence), coined by Heraclitus in the fifth century BC. And from that time on, “myth” was contrasted with “logos”, where it acquired a negative connotation, as an unfounded judgment devoid of logic.�
However, the myth is also present in modern realities, not as a form of knowledge, but as a behavioral prescription. Gods and heroes are replaced with writers and scientists, and hunting is the act of research/writing. The influence of the myth is particularly noticeable in sexual role-playing games, such as “at the doctor's appointment”, but this is a completely different topic…
Mythology dissolved into philosophy during the so-called pre-Socratic period of ancient philosophy, when its representatives tried to critically analyze the mythological heritage and formed their views on the structure of the world (cosmogony). Parmenides, for example, argued for the priority of rational thinking over ordinary thinking. The gradual rejection of the mythological perception of the world can be traced through the development of two categories – “beginning” and”fate”. If in ancient mythology the beginning was the totem, in the mythology of developed matriarchy (the separation of man from nature) – the image of Mother Earth, during the epic mythology of patriarchy (the separation of the individual from the genus) – an impersonal beginning like the Homeric Ocean, then ancient natural philosophy introduced the substantial beginning of the cosmos (from water, fire, earth, etc. depending on the philosopher).
Now to fate. First it was mana (a supernatural force that permeates the world and can be manipulated by magic), then under the matriarchy it was transformed into the blind force “moira” – an absolutely alien to man, a blind force. Under the patriarchy, fate has become an internal law of the world. Ancient philosophy introduced regularity as an attribute of the cosmos and the basis of its harmony.
In the case of the development of the category of “fate”, the development of society itself and social relations played a major role. In the matriarchy, the distribution of property was carried out by lot (cf.with “moira”). In the future, the Greeks began to determine the rights to use pastures through customs (“nomos” as a reasonable fate).
And already under Socrates and after him, philosophers turned their attention to man.
(see the article “Ancient Philosophy” in the World Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Gritsanova)
Philosophy begins when we try to apply to our lives the great truths set forth in the form of myths. As long as we perceive all these stories – whether fairy-tale or real-as something that has nothing to do with us, they will remain myths. But if we look in them for clues to the events of our lives, to the inner meaning of everything that happens to us, we begin to truly understand the wisdom embedded in these stories. The boundary between myth and philosophy lies in our ability to look at our lives through the lens of sacred tradition and find the courage to see what we previously refused to see. As Pushkin said, ” a fairy tale is a lie, but there is a hint in it, a lesson for good fellows.”
I will answer with Hegel's help:”…. mythology must be excluded from our history of philosophy. The justification for this exception is the consideration that in philosophy we are not interested in philosophems in general, not in thoughts contained only implicitlyin a message, but in thoughts that have come to light, and only in so far as they have come to light, in so far as such a content of religion is realized in the form of thought; this is precisely the huge difference between the makings of the mind and what has actually been realized; the philosophems contained implicitlyin religion, therefore, do not concern us; they must act as thoughts in order to interest us, for only thought is the absolute form of an idea. “G. F. V. Hegel” Lectures on the History of Philosophy”, Book 1.
That is, in fact, according to Hegel, philosophy is distinguished from mythology where a thought, even if it is embedded in a purely mythological text, is perceived precisely as a thought, as something that needs to be understood, in the work of cognition, justification and development of itself, and not just a message (we would say information), illustration, history, etc. This interpretation seems convincing to me.