Ernst Cassirer on 'Myth and Religion'

 The question I ask as I attempt to plumb some philosopher is ‘what is his doctrine, what is the mainspring, the assumption, the very clearly indisputable central fact for his thought.  It might be something like evidence: how do I know what I know:  It might be: what am I immediately aware of?  This ‘pole star’ as it were, can be so powerful a true north that other ways of thinking languish, shunned as unpresentable.  Ernst Cassirer whose ‘Essay on Man’ I have been reading does not consider some very important thinkers in his section on ‘Myth and Religion’.  Who and why? Leaving the former aside for a later post (James, Otto, Bergson only to controvert him) the principle behind his exclusion, what Coleridge would have called ‘the understanding of his ignorance’ is to be discovered in his neo-Kantianism.  Writing in the first book of his trilogy on ‘Symbolic Form’:

“Every genuine, basic spiritual function has one decisive feature in common with cognition: it is inherent in an original-formative force and not merely an imitative force.  It does not express passively the mere fact that something is present but rather contains an independent energy of spirit through which the simple existence of the appearance assumes a determinate “signification”, a distinctive ideational content.  This is as valid for art as it is for cognition; it is as valid for myth as for religion.  They all live in distinctive image-worlds, which do not simply reflect an empirically given but which rather produce it in accordance with an independent principle.” (pg.7)

Confessions of a Shinagawa Monkey by Murakami (from 'First Person Singular' collection)

 

It’s like this.  You are in a strange place where you have never been before.  Everything  is odd, strange, removed and slightly uncanny.  The receptionist is hairless, the cat snores, the room is tiny but when you wander planless without booking ahead the ‘rugged shore’ (ariso) suite is what you get.  You are so to speak cast up on the lee shore of life.  Strangely the bath facility is excellent and there’s a surprise; the bath attendant is a talking monkey, a pleasant fellow but how, talking?  There is an explanation but the anomaly remains resistant.  Anyway he goes by the name of the Shinagawa monkey.

“How is the bath?” the monkey asked me.

“It’s very nice.  Thank you,” I said.  My voice reverbated densely, softly, in the steam.  My voice sounded almost mythological.  It didn’t sound like it came from me, but rather like an echo from the past returning from deep in the forest.  And that echo was.....hold on a second.  What was a monkey doing here?  And why was he speaking in a human language?

In Japanese mythology the monkey is a mediator between the gods and men.  He is, in this story of Murakami’s, a psychopomp,  a creature of the imaginal that liminal reality that we can pass into without being aware of it.  Only after the visionary episode are we aware of the discontinuity with our normal continuum.  We step in and then we step out.

What is the teaching or the instruction in the guise of the monkey’s revelation?  It is this: every transaction leaves a trace in the domain of emotional forensics.  Becoming obsessed with female women although physical union is out of the question the Shinagawa hominid reveals  that he has an occult power.

“So because of all this I had to find another method of ridding myself of these unfulfilled desires.”

“What do you mean by ‘another method’?”

The monkey frowned deeply.  His red face turned a bit darker.

“You may not believe me,” the monkey said, “You probably won’t believe me, I should say.  But I started stealing the names of women I fell for.”

You take and you move on.  The effect on the women is a subtle loss of identity, the erosion of their boundary, their shore.  The monkey can’t help it, it’s a dopamine thing but hey he’s given that name lifting up.

“After I came to this town, I made up my mind to stop that kind of misconduct.  Thanks to which, the soul of this wee little monkey has found a moment of peace.  I treasure the names of the seven women in my heart, and live a quiet, tranquil life.”

Is he telling the truth?  There’s a tail to this monkey tale with a twist.  Amusing and also profound.

Bilocation as 'no there there'.

I have been reading recently about bilocation chiefly from a mathematical point of view. It’s an interesting approach that carries within it the source of its own Bergsonian nullification. Treating time and motion as a series of point instants as though this were ultimate is the crux of the impossibility of motion paradox. That this treatment is extremely useful and a practical device does not make it ultimately true.

Here in this note I ask what evokes bilocation or what is its occasion. I am taking it to be a fact well attested in the annals of the saints and the sages and adepts of all traditions. Does it happen sportively as a frolic with perturbations of the continuum and run the hazard of paradoxoi for fun? My view is that it is chiefly the answer to the prayer of the devotee. A cry starts a sympathetic resonance in the mind of the saint who may go to the devotee in an apparent physical form even though that may be far away. How can this happen? To quote Gertrude Stein - ‘there’s no there there’. It is the sphere of the imaginal.

Henry Corbin writes:


What is it like to enter into Nakoja-abad (the country of not-where). It is precisely the crossing of this limit, where the pilgrim no longer finds himself in the place, but is himself the place. To leave it (to pass beyond the Ninth Sphere) is to no longer be in the world, but to henceforth have the world in oneself, to be oneself the place where the world is. This is the imaginal space, the space where the active imagination freely manifests its visions and its epics.

(from: The Theme of the Voyage and the Messenger)

This world has also affinities with the world of formation of Kabbalah. It is next door to the world of 'action', the normal empirical domain. Introducing a passage from the Talmudists Adam Steinsaltz's 'The Thirteen Petalled Rose' Harold Bloom (Omens of Millenium) remarks: “Steinsaltz charmingly emphasizes, as does Corbin in his account of the Sufi imaginal world, that our perception of angels can be quite as ordinary as if such messengers dwelt entirely in the world of action”:

(Steinsaltz) "Similarly, the angel who is sent to us from another world does not always have a significance or impact beyond the normal laws of physical nature. Indeed, it often happens that the angel precisely reveals itself in nature, in the ordinary common-sense world of causality, and only a prophetic insight or divination can show when, and to what extent, it is the work of higher forces. For man by his very nature is bound to the system of higher worlds, even though ordinarily this system is not revealed and known to him. As a result, this system of higher worlds seems to him to be natural, just as the whole of his two-sided existence, including both matter and spirit, seems self-evident to him. Man does not wonder at all about those passages he goes through all the time in the world of action, from the realm of material existence to the realm of spiritual existence. What is more, the rest of the other worlds that also penetrate our world may appear to us as part of something quite natural."

As an archetypal world it is presented to us with the forms and usages of our own tradition. Those mansions are many and various and are not in time and space though they may appear to be so to the devotee. The cosmic mind of the siddha knows consciousness as instantaneous and omnilocated but the devotee experiences that immediacy as a bustle of dramatic business.

Wittgenstein Vs Whately

from Wittgenstein Lectures on Religious Belief:

Although, there is a great temptation to think we do. Because we do talk of evidence, and do talk of evidence by experience. We could even talk of historic events. It has been said that Christianity rests on an historic basis.
It has been said a thousand times by intelligent people that indubitability is
not enough in this case. Even if there is as much evidence as for Napoleon. Because the indubitability wouldn’t be enough to make me change my whole life. It doesn’t rest on an historic basis in the sense that the ordinary belief in
historic facts could serve as a foundation. Here we have a belief in historic facts different from a belief in ordinary historic facts. Even, they are not treated as historical, empirical, propositions. Those people who had faith didn‟t apply the doubt which would ordinarily apply to any historical propositions. Especially propositions of a time long past, etc. What is the criterion of reliability, dependability? Suppose you give a general description as to when you say a proposition has a reasonable weight of probability. When you call it reasonable, is this only to say that for it you have such and such evidence, and for others you haven’t? For instance, we don‟t trust the account given of an event by a. drunk man.

Ludwig I know you don’t do footnotes but if you had referenced Whately’s Historic Doubts concerning Napoleon Buonaparte then that would have added to the texture of the argument in that one could look at the solution that is offered there which is essentially the one that you struggle with. The seeker must put on ‘the mind of Christ’, be ‘of Christ and of the truth, be in Whateley’s usage ‘candid’. He is pointing towards the archaic:

free from bias; impartial.
3: Free from malice; favourably disposed, kindly - 1800
4: Frank, ingenuous, sincere in what one says 1675. (S.O.D.)

Ludwig: Yes, yes, yes, But. I can’t argue with that. It escapes me. It’s a country I’ve heard of but have no way of getting to. I don’t believe its imaginary. Don’t come at me with your imaginal, that’s altogether too big of a serving. Don’t you see, there’s no there there.

Moi: Don’t bring her into it or we’ll never get out of here.

The Imaginal

Here again it would be fitting to illustrate the function of the active Imagination, for this is a science which eludes rational demonstrations and dogmatic theorems alike. Nor should it be condemned as a mere theoretical view. It is not theory; it is an initiation to vision. Is it possible to see without being in the place where one sees? Theophanic visions, mental visions, ecstatic visions in a state of dream or of waking are in themselves penetrations into the world they see.

(from Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi by Henry Corbin pg.93)