A short observation on STARMAKER by Stapledon

[johncwright]

Part of an ongoing conversation. A reader known only by the mysterious initials whswhs has this remark about myths:

"I take a myth to be a story about beings who can act on a cosmic scale; who, rather than being part of nature, are the shapers of nature, with powers that transcend nature, and whose actions in the past made nature what it is and may have

Comments

Re: nature and super-nature

[whswhs]

I think that's really pushing the conceptual point further than it's meant to go. When the Norse myths were developing, "nature" or "the world" was simply the world of visible things that people lived in and observed around themselves. The proposition "the Aesir made the world" had much the same import for them that "God made the world" has to a Christian. The fact that they conceived of that making in terms of doing work with tools, and not of simply commanding, is more a choice of metaphor or myth than anything else; the act of building the sun and physically placing it in the heavens transcended human powers, even imagined human powers, not one whit less than the act of commanding the sun to appear

Re: nature and super-nature

[m_francis]

Christian creation was not all ex nihilo. Wasn't Adam made from clay, and Eve from Adam?

You are confusing transformation with creation. The human body was formed of clay -- that is, was made of matter -- but that was not the act of creation. Creation is the "combining" of an essence with an act of existence; and the essence of the human being is the ability to exercise reason.

Re: nature and super-nature

[whswhs]

Technically, no. That's not the essence; that's the differentia. The essence is "rational animal." To speak of "creating" rationality seems nonsensical to me: rationality is not an entity but an attribute. Talking about creating an entity (or a substance, to be Aristotelian) is literal; talking about creating an attribute, state, action, mode, or relation is metaphorical . . . what is literally being done is changing some aspect of one or more entities that already existed.

Re: nature and super-nature

[m_francis]

By coincidence, I was watching a History Channel show this morning about the "Clash of the Cavemen" or some such title. It regarded H. neand. and H. sap. Apparently, at one time an ancestral species known as H. heidel. or H. rhod. depending on where you were, split in two, with the Heidelberg Man becoming Neanderthal Man and Rhodesian Man becoming Modern Humans.

At first, and for a very long time, both Neanders and Humans used the same toolkit (pretty much the same as Heidelberg/Rhodesian Man). Anatomically modern humans were around for over 100,000 years, they said.

Then, about 40,000 ybp the anatomically-modern humans suddenly got smart. They started making artwork on cave walls, developing new (and continually changing) toolkits, making musical instruments. Nothing similar happened to the Neanders, and the rest, like they say, was history. Or prehistory, actually.

A clearer example of the "man of clay" and the "man of reason" is hard to imagine.

Re: nature and super-nature

[whswhs]

Fair enough. But it's not creation ex nihilo. If you suppose that Homo sapiens sapiens was brought into existence through purposeful action, it was "made from an already existent closely related species or subspecies." The only way you can get to ex nihilo is to reify the rational faculty as a subsistent entity that was somehow implanted in or linked to the animal bodies. And I'm not a Platonist or any sort of dualist; I don't buy a model in which reason, the mind, consciousness, the ego, or the soul is an entity in its own right. Of course, I also don't take Genesis seriously either

Re: nature and super-nature

[deiseach]

"I don't buy a model in which reason, the mind, consciousness, the ego, or the soul is an entity in its own right."

Ah, then we've got a problem (maybe?) because God is regarded as creating each individual human soul directly, whereas the human body is a secondary creation according to nature (we are made by our parents, who were made by their parents, and so on).

The difference between the Norse and Egyptian pantheons, and the Judaeo-Christian mythos, is that in the first, out of chaos arises the primordial egg or earth mound or worlds of fire and ice and then the various deities are generated, whereas in Genesis the creative spirit of God brings forth all that is; God does not arise out of chaos or the primordial sea or the cosmic egg.

Re: nature and super-nature

[whswhs]

Sure. But once the heavens and the earth are created, God sets to work on the heavens and the earth, transforming their raw material into new forms; and his actions in doing so are quite comparable to the actions of the Norse gods in shaping the fallen Ymir into Midgard, or those of the Hindu gods in making the world from Purusa. Indeed, as I've noted, the Jewish legend of Adam Kadmon has God doing almost exactly the same with the body of Adam. So there are many parts of Christian myth in which God functions like the gods of other mythologies; and that functioning is equally beyond human powers in both cases, and equally responsible for the shape of the natural world as we know it and inhabit it

Re: nature and super-nature

[mrmandias]

And I don't think the historical account bears out either that it was the ex nihilo possibilities of Christianity than won out over the pagans.

In which I remain perverse for the sake of it

[deiseach]

Yeah, but ha-Shem is different from the pantheons we're instancing in that the Norse, Egyptian and Greek deities (the Romans, not so much, but how much influence the Etruscans had there is another fascinating question) are all later generations coming along and succeeding/overthrowing the primordial deities, which they then inherit their functions and build upon them.

Apollo does not create the sun, nor is Zeus the maker of the sky and earth (though father of gods and men, yes). Odin comes across the ask and elm logs which the three use to make man and woman, he does not create the trees. Tiamat's corpse is chopped up for world-building.

The Jewish and Christian God, on the other hand, has no forebears nor descendants, nor does He use the overthrown deities to create the world out of (nearest we get to the Tiamat-Anu confrontation is when the Ark of the Covenant is brought into the temple of Dagon and the statue of Dagon is found cast down in the morning).

But yes, that's a higher level than we need to function at, you're correct

Re: nature and super-nature

[m_francis]

Well, Augustine always regarded the "six day" narrative as a tale. It is clearly a late-written poem in honor of the Sabbath and not an historico-narrative account. According to Augustine, creation was instantaneous, but elements of the created realized over time.
It is therefore, causally that Scripture has said that earth brought forth the crops and trees, in the sense that it received the power of bringing them forth. In the earth from the beginning, in what I might call "the roots of time," God created what was to be in times to come.
-- On the literal meanings of Genesis, Book V Ch. 4:11

Creation is also looked at as occurring right now, and not at some remote time in the past. That is, anything that exists is sustained in existence at every moment. Creation ought not be looked at from the perspective of a workshop in which a designer makes clever items, but in the manner that thought is creative

Re: nature and super-nature

[whswhs]

I find that separation far too analytically neat to describe my actual experience of creating things. Whether I'm running a roleplaying game, or devising a new dish in the kitchen, or writing a book or an lj comment, I don't first conceive and then execute. Rather, I partially conceive, partially execute, think about what the product looks or tastes like, alter my concept and/or make it more precise, execute, and so on. The full blown concept is not there from the start; it emerges through my engagement with the medium. I will stipulate that some human creators may do things otherwise, and that an omniscient and omnipotent god could do otherwise. On the other hand, the narrative of Genesis does sound as if God were mucking about and seeing what happened, whether he needed to or simply liked doing it that way.

And yes, I do know that technical meaning of "creation." But I am talking precisely about myth, not about technical philosophy. If Augustine believed that the six days were a story, then it is that story I refer to what I talk

Re: nature and super-nature

[m_francis]

That the act of creation and the act of execution are distinct does not require that one must follow the other. Obviously, for imperfect, compound beings, there is incompleteness and a sort of trial and error. Matters are different for perfect, simple beings, I suppose. For a being of pure act, the act of conception is the act of execution, since pure act is Existence Itself.

By "full blown" concept, you seem to mean the concept plus the specific details. But the details are altered and corrected precisely because they do not match yet the concept in the mind.
+ + +
Regarding myth, Jan Vansina's Oral Tradition as History is very informative. In one interesting passage, he describes the passage from history to myth of a Navajo ambush of a party of Hopis near Fort Defiance that was recorded on two occasions. One can see the progressive mythologizing of the event

Re: nature and super-nature

[suburbanbanshee]

There's a Fort Defiance in Arizona?????

Man, that was confusing. I was sure you were talking about Hopis traveling all the way to Ohio, back in the French and Indian War days.

How myth originates

[m_francis]

Yes. Arizona. The events happened ca. 1853/1856. The accounts were recorded in 1892 of two survivors of the ambush, and then in 1936 after it had passed from living memory into the oral tradition.

Re: nature and super-nature

[marycatelli]

Ah, whswhs, about your experience of creating things -- I realize this is a shock, but:

You aren't God.

Re: nature and super-nature

[whswhs]

Perhaps you skipped over the sentences that said

I will stipulate that some human creators may do things otherwise, and that an omniscient and omnipotent god could do otherwise. On the other hand, the narrative of Genesis does sound as if God were mucking about and seeing what happened, whether he needed to or simply liked doing it that way.