‘The Presence of Myth’: Why We Need Illusions

A review of ‘The Presence of Myth’, by Leszek Kołakowski; University of Chicago Press, 2001.

Riddle me this, dear reader: if scientific truth is the only truth that exists, then how is science true? After all, it rests on assumptions: the existence of objective reality, the reality of causality, the reliability of our senses and tools. It cannot prove these by scientific experiment. They are beliefs, accepted because they work in practice. Science, then, depends on myth, and isn’t myth — well, made up?

In The Presence of Myth, Leszek Kołakowski, one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century, mounts an argument for the necessity of myth even, or perhaps especially, in a rationalist and ‘scientistic’ age. Myth is irreplaceable in that it gives meaning to life, helping us to make sense of suffering, death, and the purpose of existence. When we discard myths, we find ourselves unmoored, and emptiness and nihilism sets in. Rationalism cannot meet all of our needs. Without a narrative bedrock, we are lost.

If scientific truth is the only truth that exists, then how is science true?

But we are getting ahead of ourselves. So let us take a step back. What exactly is ‘myth’? Not just a story, says Kołakowski, but a means of explaining our existence. We generate myths to answer such troubling questions as ‘Who are we?’, ‘Why are we here?’ and ‘What is the nature of good and evil?’ Few among us recognise how much we depend on myth, and even that at the bottom of our most cherished assumptions is something we cannot justify. We may think we have outgrown myth, that it belongs, in the words of Christopher Hitchens, to ‘the bawling infancy of our species’; but we have only transformed it. The rejection of myth is itself a myth, notes Kołakowski. The notion that science and technology can explain everything, that progress exists and is inevitable—this is the mythology by which we, (or at any rate, some of us), live today.

Scorn this idea if you want, dear reader; many will no doubt say (so submerged are they in the mythology of their time), that this is hogwash. One can forgive such a person, for she is like the fish who is suddenly made aware of the existence of water. The fish knows nothing else. And yet historically speaking, it is atheism, the absence of belief, that is the anomaly. And what is sometimes called the ‘crisis of meaning’ of the West is surely rooted in the fact that scientific naturalism does not, because it cannot, endow us with purpose, meaning or morality. To the question, ‘Why are we here? What is the point of me? Why not hurl myself off the nearest tall building?’, science shrugs. Man’s metaphysical situation, his need to find order in the chaos of Being, to have values and a sense of continuity, cannot be resolved by science, says Kołakowski.

Scientific naturalism does not, because it cannot, endow us with purpose, meaning or morality.

Permit me a small digression. It seems to me that the human being must operate in two separate realms: the empirical and the transcendent or, if you prefer, the phenomenal and the mythical. The former is the world of things and facts, the realm of science. The latter is the world of meanings, the realm of religion and philosophy. (Iain McGilchrist has persuasively argued that each hemisphere of the brain corresponds to one of these two ‘worlds’.) We are animals, primates governed by the laws of cause and effect, at the mercy of our biology and conditioning whose behaviour is explicable, thanks to causality, by reference to the Big Bang. But we are also persons, human beings endowed with free will, responsibility and a sense of right and wrong, who give reasons, not causes, for our actions. This is a paradox, of course; but paradox often points to reality by casting light on the limitations of our thinking.

Kołakowski is concerned with this latter. Science tells us what is, he points out, but myth tells us what it means. Culturally, we seem to have succumbed to a category error. We think that science has abolished the need for myth. But it hasn’t. They both aim at meaning-making, but meaning-making of different kinds. Now, this is not to say that myths are always benign, and here, the history of fascism is instructive. Before Mussolini, there was the poet Gabriele D’Annunzio, called by Michael Arthur Ledeen, the ‘John the Baptist’ of the movement. D’Annunzio understood that a truly potent new politics had to rest on a mythical substructure. He made fashionable the blackshirted follower, the balcony address, the Roman salute, the cries of ‘Eia, eia, eia! Alala!’ (taken from Achilles’ cry in the Iliad), the use of religious symbols, the dramatic dialogue between leader and crowd. One might also mention here the intellectual Dietrich Eckart, original publisher of the Nazi newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter. Myth, suggests Kołakowski, can both console and control.

D’Annunzio understood that a truly potent new politics had to rest on a mythical substructure.

It is rather charming that in his preface, Kołakowski apologises for the quality of his prose. He explains that at the time of writing he relied heavily on the German and French phenomenological and existential idiom, and found that translating the book into English (from Polish) was ‘arduous’, and that despite the help of his friend Adam Czerniawski, ‘some clumsiness could not avoided’. There is certainly a stylistic heaviness to the book, which does not help his case. Already he ranges over culture, politics, religion and personal identity, approaching his subject from various angles. I have an awful feeling that some readers may find the thing next to impenetrable. If that is you, persevere. This book rewards close reading.

The question at the heart of the book, and the one that Kołakowski cannot answer is, Can we bring ourselves to believe in something if we view it as a necessary illusion? As he puts it: ‘Is a consciousness possible which acknowledges [the] genealogy of myth and at the same time is capable of participating in myth?’ That is to say: is it possible simultaneously to believe that Christ, having been crucified and buried, descended into Hell and rose again on the third day, and also to believe that this did not happen literally, and that it is a story that provides us with meaning? It is interesting to note that Kołakowski, although by no means an orthodox religious thinker, returned to the Catholic faith into which he was born from Marxist atheism. If nothing else, in The Presence of Myth, Kołakowski reminds us that myth is beautiful, dangerous, necessary and fragile, but also that we are creatures of belief and imagination, and we ignore that at our peril.