Myth and Imagination - Friedrich Georg Junger

"Our thinking is not mythical thinking, but thinking about the myth. We do not think as the Greeks thought, but we think about what they thought. The question is what coincidence Greek thinking has for our own. The reader may find an answer to this question in this account. We are so familiar with the historical view of the world that we are hardly able to perceive the one-sided and also absurdity it contains. The material of the world does not seem representable to us if it is not dissolved, in movement of concepts, thought as development. The mythologist, who makes special history, is confronted with a thinking that knows nothing about the historicization of consciousness, with which he can therefore only unite in so far as he is able to subject it to historical methods. Hence all the research on the influences, on the origin of myths, on the wanderings that the gods, or rather the ideas about them, have taken, in short, the ethnographic, geographical, physical, chronological. These methods are not genuine to the myth.  

Something else will come along. By engaging with the myth, we are often forced to take it more spiritually and less sensually than it is. This is not an advantage, but a lack of imagination that characterizes our abstract thinking. This, whether it has powers or images in front of it, immediately sets about extracting from them what meaning is contained in it - that is, it brings all knowledge to terms. Only that which can be separated and isolated conceptually has meaning. By doing this, an interpretation becomes possible. Meaning comprises an addition, as is visible in the Platonic theory of ideas. Being is not only in it, no, in addition and beyond that, it also means something. But by meaning something, it is less; the more meaning it has, the less it is. The meaning is not only an addition to being, it is also a deprivation of being. It is a term in the language of concepts that abstract thinking forms. With it, meaning gains space.

The myth-forming spirit, of course, does not drive scientific mythology, that is, it does not place itself in the scheme of a historical process. Such an undertaking would be the dissolution of its own reality by moving into the place of view principles of development, abstract formulas and principles that would turn this view into a means of representation. This is the way in which the historical consciousness tries to come to terms with the myth. Science is such an endeavour, for what should replace it? But the artist, the man of the arts, will always defend himself against it. Nor does the myth give him any cause for symbolic-allegorical treatment. This, too, as a finer, more concealed euhemerism, dissolves the world of forms. Symbolism, which is based on presenting the myth only as clothing, only as the garment of ideas or so-called higher truths, must lead to falsifications. Thus it becomes what it is not, a secret doctrine, in which the hidden meaning becomes the actual, the visible and expressed, but an improper thing. But we are not dealing here with a tremendous allegory consisting of a web of tropes and metaphors that could be dissolved by a higher philosophical and historical knowledge. As inevitable as the analytical treatment of the myth is, it produces very little. The question of what remains after such a course, what is gained and lost in the process, is not difficult to answer. There is something vague and murky about all such attempts. They produce an artificial, diffuse light in which those who have once tasted a stronger sun do not like to linger. The impression of having received thin copper instead of gold is created wherever we are offered meagre comments for a rich text. A beautiful poem that falls into the hands of a philologist often has to suffer a great deal, even though it is intended for the true lover. The flip side of the historical process, namely the fact that it is a dissolving process of the greatest extent, comes to the consciousness of few, never to those who are completely caught up in it, because they lose the point at which they could gain an overview, for what they call history is nothing other than the history of their consciousness."

- Friedrich Georg Junger