[MD] Reading & Comprehension

[david buchanan]

Krimel said:
... the Mythos is just discarded Logos. Any explanation expressed in symbolic fashion is an intellectual pattern. Claiming that God created the universe in seven days for example is an intellectual pattern. At one time it was Logos. The fact that it gets replace by "better" ideas that assume the mantle of Logos does not mean that the pattern is any less an intellectual pattern. 


dmb says:

That's what the Victorian scholars thought. That's what Freud thought but mythological symbols will be very badly misunderstood if they're taken as bad ideas. As Joseph Campbell says, religion is a misreading of mythology. And that's exactly the error, reading them as expressing ideas. By analogy, your claim is like saying that dreaming is just being awake badly. I think this analogy is most apt, because myths and dreams "speak" the same kind of language. Myths and dreams are both very far away from the skilled manipulation of abstractions. 



Krimel said:
Both Mythos and Logos are part of the collection of intellectual patterns. You are confusing the function of intellectual patterns on the one hand and the quality of the patterns on the other. If levels are sets of patterns, then the level has to include all of the patterns. 

dmb says:

Well, no. The distinction is partly based on the fact that they function differently. When you read myths as myths rather than bad ideas, they are just as true as any true idea. To say myths are just bad ideas is like saying organisms are just bad myths. If you try to understand one in terms of the other, you'll fail to understand it for what it is. That's the problem with reductionism, see? It is a kind of category error. 


Imagine if I described the music of a string quartet in terms of vibrations per second. Imagine that I report the frequencies with absolutely perfect precision and emphatically insist that there could be no music without those vibrations. All of that would be undeniably true. But if you objected because all this is irrelevant to music AS music, you'd be right. If you objected because I'd reduced music to a quantification of the physical facts, you'd be right. And that's what I'm saying about biological explanations of culture and language. I don't deny the biological facts any more than you'd deny the fact that strings vibrate.


My dictionary doesn't have a picture of you along with this entry, but it could.... 


reductionism |riˈdək sh əˌnizəm|noun often derogatorythe practice of analyzing and describing a complex phenomenon, esp. a mental, social, or biological phenomenon, in terms of phenomena that are held to represent a simpler or more fundamental level, esp. when this is said to provide a sufficient explanation.



 		 	   		  
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