Apr 25
This week, we reveal the answer to a question that many of you may have asked yourselves over the months that we have been posting the Practical Campbell column: Who the heck is Bodhi_Bliss? …Which leads us to the subject of Stephen’s latest contribution to the Practical Campbell column, “Benevolent Scoundrels.”
Original post by Joseph Campbell Foundation
In the latest addition to our Practical Campbell series , Bhodi_Bliss, our key contributor to this on-line periodical, explores the blurred lines between history and myth, parallelism, converging geographies and diffusion.
Original post by Joseph Campbell Foundation
There is a magnificent essay by Schopenhauer in which he asks, how is it that a human being can so participate in the peril or pain of another that without thought, spontaneously, he sacrifices his own life to the other? How can it happen that what we normally think of as the first law of nature and self-preservation is suddenly dissolved? Read more
It’s hard not to think of Joseph Campbell while watching the first film installment of The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien’s renowned fantasy trilogy, which has remained No. 1 at the box office since its opening in December. Underneath the movie’s sweeping spectacle and captivating characters, it’s your basic hero’s story.
After a short prologue establishing the peril Tolkien’s imaginary world, Middle Earth, faces as a result of the unearthing of the Dark Lord’s ring of power, the wizard Gandalf visits old friends at a village of hobbits, a diminutive home-loving race. Events take place quickly, and soon the young hobbit with hairy feet, Frodo Baggins, is charged with an overwhelming task: to journey to an evil land and cast the ring back into the fire of its origin.
One of the incidents that launched Joseph Campbell down the path of his life’s work was wandering into Shakespeare & Co. in Paris and picking up James Joyce’s newly published Ulysses. Now, just in time for the dual centennials of Campbell’s birth (March 26, 1904) and Bloomsday (June 16, 1904–the day in which most of Ulysses takes place), New World Library has reissued Mythic Worlds, Modern Words: Joseph Campbell on the Art of James Joyce, a wonderful examination of Joyce’s novels through Campbell’s mythic lens. In our downloadable media section, we have posted the “Introduction” from Mythic Worlds, which begins to look at Joyce’s work from mythological and psychological points of view.
Download the Introduction now and enjoy reading insights regarding one of the 20′th century’s greatest writers by one of its most esteemed teachers.
This is a very interesting topic and I find myself wondering exactly where Campbell’s ultimate passions were. The first image that is called to mind is Campbell’s rather amazing recounting of a story he read in a Hawaiian newspaper (source: Power of Myth). It was about a guy on a bridge about to commit suicide. I am sure most here know the details of the story.
Campbell called into play Schopenhauer’s metaphysics by recounting the German philosopher’s premise that the “other” was a part of ourselves … And further that all things are connected. Of all the videos I’ve seen, books I’ve read, and lectures I’ve listen to, I would say that this metaphysical assumption of Schopenhauer’s was one that Campbell took as a priori. I believe that this a priori assumption was vindicated time and time again throughout Campbell’s life by evidence collected throughout the world.
I’m not sure that you can really separate out metaphysics from religion and mythology, but if you could I would say that Campbell is a closet philosopher that was just too much of a pragmatist to allow his deep beliefs to stand on their own as Schopenhauer did. Campbell wanted evidence for his metaphysical assumptions and I believe he found it.
Campbell was a close follower of C.G. Jung and agreed in principle that these underlying (a priori) structures were archetypes. I think that Campbell had a much more practical approach to archetypes than Jung did, but he nevertheless embraced the idea. Again, though the idea of archetypes could, in principle, be proven as an empirical fact it nevertheless, stands a metaphysical belief that one either accepts or does not. Many of Campbell’s, and Jung’s, observations follow from this metaphysical assumption. Indeed, if Campbell and Jung had not begun with this position in mind much of their subsequent work would not have followed … They would have reached much different conclusions.
My conclusions is that Campbell was first and foremost an empiricist, but like Einstein, Heisenberg, Jung and many other brilliant intellectuals of the 20th century, they began with an intuition (or metaphysical presupposition) about that way the universe ought to be – the evidence followed from there. Einstein, as a child, imagined riding on a beam of light; Heisenberg came up with the uncertainty principle, not while doing mathematics at the chalkboard, but while sitting overlooking the mountains; Jung had almost no evidence for archetypes or the collective unconscious, yet his entire body of his work post 1918 stand upon this premise. These are people that held very strong convictions about the world and the natural order of things. They did not spend alot of time trying to substantiate their metaphysical assumptions. Nevertheless, they held them strongly and much of their passion was derived from exactly these metaphysical presupposition.
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