Mr. Martle's extract certainly makes cities and crowd-life seem sinister!
The sixteenth of our twenty most influential books is Schelling's
Historico-Critical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology, published in 1856, two years after his death at Bad Ragaz. In it we find the first true advance in philosophy since Decartes's "I am because I think" (the works of Hume and Kant may be safely ignored). Here is a passage explaining the crux of the matter; note that the word "society" in all this is a translation of "
Volk" - as in "
ein Volk ein Führer" and all that sort of thing. Note also that the key concept of "process" was very effectively taken up by Whitehead in the twentieth century:
"The foundation of mythology is already laid in the first actual consciousness, and polytheism thus already came into existence in essence with the transition thereto. Therefore it follows that the act
through which the foundation for polytheism is laid is not itself within the actual consciousness, but lies outside this. The first actual consciousness
is found already with this affection, through which it is separated from its eternal and essential existence. It can no longer return to that, and it can as little go beyond this qualification as beyond itself. Hence this qualification has something incomprehensible for consciousness, it is the unwanted and unforeseen consequence of a movement which consciousness cannot reverse. The origin of the qualification lies in a region to which consciousness no longer has access once it has been separated from it. That which has intruded, that which is accidental, is transformed into something necessary and immediately assumes the form of something which can now never be eliminated.
"The alteration of consciousness consists in the absolutely-One god no longer dwelling in it, only the relatively-One. Yet this relative god is succeeded by the second not by chance, but in accordance with an objective necessity which we do indeed not yet understand, but are no less for that reason obliged to recognize as such (as objective) in advance. With that first qualification, thus, consciousness at the same time becomes subject to the necessary succession of representations by way of which genuine polytheism comes into existence. Once the first affection has been established, the movement of consciousness through these successive forms is one of a kind in which thought and will, reason and freedom, no longer play a part. Consciousness became caught up in this movement unawares, in a manner now no longer comprehensible to it itself. The movement behaves in respect to consciousness like its
fate, like its
doomed destiny, in the face of which it can do nothing. It is, for consciousness, a
real force, that is to say a force now no longer under its control, which has taken it over.
Prior to all thought, consciousness has already been captured by that principle, whose purely
natural consequence is multitheism and mythology.
"Therefore--admittedly not in the sense of a philosophy which has man beginning from animal obtuseness and meaninglessness, but certainly in the sense which the Greeks suggested in various very characteristic expressions like
theoplektos, theoblabes and the like, in the sense, thus, that consciousness is afflicted by the onesided-One and as it were struck down--at any rate, the most ancient man is found in a condition of bondage (of which we living under the law of an entirely different era can form for ourselves no direct concept), struck down by a kind of
stupor (
stupefacta quasi et attonita) and seized by an alien power, rendered
beside himself, that is to say out of his own control.
"The ideas through whose succession not only does formal polytheism arise directly, but also, indirectly, material (simultaneous) polytheism, are generated for consciousness
without its participation, indeed against its will, and--to state it in a definitive way, putting an end to all earlier explanations which assume
invention to be somehow involved in mythology, and in a way which is the first which really gives us that which is independent of all invention, indeed
opposed to all invention, and which we already had occasion to call for earlier--mythology comes into existence through
one NECESSARY (as seen by consciousness)
PROCESS, whose origin is lost in the suprahistorical and hidden from its own self, a process which consciousness, at odd moments, can perhaps resist, but which as a whole it cannot arrest, still less reverse.
"With this, accordingly, there would be put forward, as the general concept of the way it comes into existence, the concept of the
process, which takes mythology, and with it our investigation, right out of the sphere within which all of the explanations hitherto have remained. With this concept is resolved the question of how the mythological ideas were intended to be understood as they came into existence. The question about
how the mythological ideas were intended to be understood, points to the difficulty or impossibility, in which we find ourselves, of accepting that they were intended to be understood as truth. Therefore what is then first attempted is to interpret them extrinsically, that is to say, to assume a truth in them, but a truth different from that which they directly express--what is attempted secondly is to see an original truth in them, but one which has been
corrupted. But according to the result now reached the question can be raised, rather, of whether the mythological ideas were
intended to be understood at all, whether, that is, they were the object of an expression of what is understood, the object, that is to say, of a free act of holding something to be true. Here too, therefore, the question was put wrongly, it was put subject to a presupposition which was itself incorrect. The mythological ideas are neither invented nor freely assumed.--Products of a process independent of thought and will, they possessed, for the consciousness subject to that process, unambiguous and irrefutable reality. Societies, like individuals, are only instruments of this process, of which they have no overall view, which they serve without understanding it. It is not in the power of societies to escape these ideas, to accept them or not to accept them; for they do not
come to societies from outside, they
exist in societies without the societies being conscious of how; for they come from the inner nature of consciousness itself, to which they display themselves with a necessity which permits no doubt about their truth.
"Once the idea of its coming into existence in such a way has been arrived at, then it is entirely understandable that mythology regarded in a merely material way seemed so enigmatic, while it is a known fact that other things too that are based on a spiritual process, on a characteristic inner experience, seem strange and incomprehensible to him who lacks this experience, whereas for him from whom the inner process is not concealed they have a wholly understandable and rational meaning. The main question in respect to mythology is the question of its meaning. But the meaning of
mythology can only be the meaning of the
process through which it comes into existence.
"Were the personalities and events, which form the content of mythology, of such a kind that we could take them to be, in accordance with accepted concepts, possible objects of an immediate experience, were gods beings who could become manifest, then no one would ever have considered taking them in any sense other than the
literal one. The belief in the truth and objectivity of these representations, a belief which we would certainly have to ascribe to heathenism, lest it became itself a fable for us, would have been explained quite simply by an
actual experience of that earlier humanity; it would have simply been assumed that these personalities, these events, had for it indeed existed and appeared in that way, thus had also been true for that humanity when understood entirely literally, in just the same way as the analogous appearances and encounters which are related of the Israelites, and which for us in the circumstances of today are equally impossible, were true for them. But now, precisely this, which was earlier unthinkable, has been made possible by the explanation now established; this explanation is the first which has an answer to the question of how it was possible for the societies of antiquity not only to give credence to those religious ideas, which seem to us thoroughly absurd and irrational, but also to offer up to them the most solemn, and in some cases cruel, sacrifices.
"Because mythology is something which did not come into existence artificially, but naturally, indeed, subject to the precondition stated, with necessity, then in it
content and
form,
substance and
expression, may not be distinguished from each other. The ideas are not first present in another form, but come into being only in and thus also at the same time as this form. Such an organic development was called for by us earlier in these lectures, but the principle of the only process by which it could be explained had not been found.
"Because consciousness chooses or invents neither the ideas themselves nor their expression, mythology, then, comes into being at once
as such, and in no sense other than the one in which it is expressed. In consequence of the necessity with which the
content of the ideas is generated, mythology has, right from the beginning,
real and thus also
doctrinal meaning; in consequence of the necessity with which the form, too, comes into existence, mythology is wholly literal, that is to say everything in it should be understood just as it is stated, not as if one thing were thought, and another said. Mythology is not allegorical, it is tautegorical.* The gods, for it, are beings actually existing, who do not exist as one thing, and mean another, but mean only that which they are. Earlier, literality and doctrinal meaning were set up in opposition to each other. But the two (literality and doctrinal meaning) may not, according to our explanation, be separated, and instead of relinquishing the literality for the sake of some doctrinal sense, or, like the poetical viewpoint, saving the literality, but at the cost of the doctrinal meaning, we are, on the contrary, in fact obliged by our explanation to maintain the all-encompassing unity and indivisibility of the meaning.
* I am borrowing this expression from the renowned Coleridge, the first of his countrymen who has understood, and used in a meaningful way, German poetry, science, and especially philosophy."
