Philosophical vs. Mythical Conceptions of Reality
The two tell a journey from a world of appearances, where things are not what they seem, to a world of realities, where things really are what they seem. They suggest that real life is much more valuable than a life built on lies. The problem is only known with certainty once one has experienced “real life”. In both stories, it is shown that men and women do not want to live in deception and prefer truth, love, and understanding; in this measure, all are proponents of truth.
Mythical Philosophical Knowledge
Philosophy was born 2600 years ago in the Greek colonies in the Mediterranean. The philosophy arose with the intention of replacing existing knowledge: legendary knowledge.
Mythical Conception of Reality
A conception of reality includes a way of conceiving reality, a way of understanding that reality, and a way to behave. For the ancient Greeks, reality was divided into a natural setting and a divine setting. Nature was presented as the strength and power responsible for the production and destruction of things in the natural world. It was fairly chaotic because the processes of production and destruction succeeded without apparent order and without regard for the needs of men. The power of nature is given in all the natural forces, each governed by its ruling that is driven by its whim: force as sacred.
Myths are anonymous stories that crystallize the collective memory of a culture; therefore, they are ethnocentric, telling the stories of gods, demigods, or heroes. Fundamental features of myths:
- Irrational: What the myth narrates is not capable of discussion; one either believes or does not believe. The myth is usually codified by tradition, so understanding a myth is not reinterpreting it according to everyone’s vision but revealing the meaning that tradition maintains and assigns.
- Regulatory: It establishes the set of values and norms that should govern the community and that tend to be timeless. In societies, the mythical weight of tradition is very important.
- The myth legitimizes or delegitimizes the social order as valid if it respects the guidelines of this myth or not.
Mythical knowledge explains man’s position in the cosmos and provides a sense of human existence. The myth tells us that we owe justice to men and piety to the gods through religious rituals.
The Philosophical Conception of Reality
In general, Greek philosophy continues to recognize the existence of a field of divine nature and another, but it tends to conceive them as independent, self-contained areas that influence one another. Nature is still the power that produces things in the natural world and the place to which, upon completion of their life cycle, all things return. But this power is not handled by the gods or their whim, so it is orderly rather than chaotic. For an ancient Greek, something is sorted because there is something above or below its changes that always remains.
Nature as a whole is eternal because it survives the slow disappearance of natural things thanks to the emergence of new ones. The law that governs the process of production and destruction of things in nature produces and destroys certain types of things that keep immutable traits in time. The individual remains through his transformation, which continues to be very rare.
The conception of reality that had been presented as ancient knowledge has the following features in Philosophy:
- Rational: Everything can be discussed, provided the relevant reasons are given. So philosophy is historical knowledge because the reasons may challenge the future of the past. The argument must be logically consistent.
- Universal: It reflects on the whole of reality, trying to understand it from arguments valid for all.
- Radical and Ultimate: Philosophy offers an explanation beyond which we cannot go because it is explaining things from their roots.
- Secular: It approaches reality to understand it rationally and not with a desire for devotion.
- Regulatory: It explains how we should live, both individually and collectively.