THE MYTH AND THE POWERHOUSE
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what is still open is the possibility of manipulating ideas of myth. And
that is precisely the point of my objection. For myth is not what its
ideologues claim it to be. Though the common matrix of both, it is
neither art nor metaphysics. In fact, both art and metaphysics are
among those superior forces which culture brought to bear in its
effort to surmount the primitivism of myth. Dialectical freedom is
unknown to myth, which permits no distinction between realities and
symbols. The proposition that "the world of human culture . . .
could not
arise
until the darkness of myth was fought and overcome"g
is no doubt historically valid. Witness the struggle against it in Greek
philosophy, as for instance in the animadversions on mythic tales in
the
Phaedrus.
Socrates, walking with his companion by the banks of
the llissus, calls those tales "irrelevant things," declining to put his
mind to them by reason of their uselessness in his search for self–
knowledge. Even if instructive in some things, the one thing they
cannot impart is ethical enlightenment: the question of good and evil
is beyond myth and becomes crucial only with the emergence of the
individual, to whom alone is given the capacity at once to assent to
the gift of self-knowledge and to undergo its ordeal.
Individuality is in truth foreign to myth, which objectifies col–
lective rather than personal experience. Its splendor is that of the
original totality, the pristine unity of thought and action, word and
deed. The sundering of that unity is one of the tragic contradictions
of historical development, which is never an harmonious forward
movement but "a cruel repugnant labor against itself," as Hegel de–
scribed it with unequaled insight. It is the paradox of progress that
humanity has proven itself unable to assimilate reality except by means
of "the alienation of human forces." In order to recover the potency
of myth civilized man would first have to undo the whole of his
history; and when some literary intellectuals dream of this recovery
they are manifestly reacting against the effects of self-alienation at
the same time that they exemplify these effects with appalling sim–
plicity. What Marx once called "the idiocy of the division of labor"
must have gone very far indeed if people can so drastically separate
their theories of life from their concrete living of it! (The "idiocy"
results from the fragmentation of vital human functions, since, as
Marx said, "together with the division of labor is given the possibility,
nay, the actuality, that spiritual activity and material activity, pleasure
