In my recent post Counterparts to logos, I wrestled with the characteristics of logos and mythos-pathos: empiricism and logical proof vs. intuition, feelings, and experience. It occurs to me that the logos/mythos axis might align with the objective/subjective binary.
Logos : mythos :: objective : subjective?
Thinking about these characteristics, logos/mythos aligns pretty well with objective/subjective. Logos is a third-person description of the world, and mythos is first-person (either in the sense that it’s the feelings of transcendence that one experiences, or that it’s a story about the agents which experience passions). That is: the view from nowhere vs. the view from someone.
With a nod to Nietzsche, one could align Apollo with order and objectivity, and Dionysus with chaos and subjectivity. Even here, though, the categories aren’t crisp: Apollo is the god of music and dance not just of reason, and Dionysus is the god of fertility, not just of entropy and ritual madness. It’s hard, if not impossible, to draw the line between objectivity and subjectivity in works of art: Bach’s music is both the expression of a deep religious faith and meticulously constructed; and the number symbolism many people see in his work is both rational and occult.
Obviously, dichotomies are suspect. One way to undermine them is to introduce third terms; for objective/subjective, I like narrative. Stories encompass both objective and subjective depictions. Life writing, for example, ranges from biography, to autobiography, to memoir. Narratives aren’t necessarily subjective: even a mathematical proof is an arc from premises to an unexpected conclusion, and some disciplines, e.g. those with N=1 like cosmology and evolution, are unavoidably narrative (cf. Norris et al, A theoretical framework for narrative explanation in science). Still, even science told as a human interest story has an underlying sense that what’s being described is a universal that doesn’t presuppose people (pace STS), whereas fiction is usually about feelings and motives.
Another way to undermine a dichotomy is with another binary that only partially aligns with it. I’ve just started reading Joanne Harris’s The Gospel of Loki, and she sets up an opposition between Order (the Asgardians) and Chaos (the fire gods, ruled by Surtur). Loki is depicted as defecting from Chaos – being tricked over by Odin, in fact – and living an uneasy life on the edges of Asgard. Loki, and tricksters generally, certainly undermine Order; but until reading Harris’s account I hadn’t thought of them as opposing Chaos, too.
The objectivity/subjectivity distinction also gives one a handle on operationalizing logos/mythos. Objectivity/subjectivity aligns with Jung’s thinking/feeling axis of psychological functions, and from there it’s just one step to Myers-Briggs dichotomies and their quantification.
Back to morality
To close, a link between morality and subjectivity. In a recent American Interest podcast interview about his new book, The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World, Barry Gewen had this to say (time codes in angle brackets):
<25:53> If we want to think about foreign policy, [Kissinger, Morgenthau, Niebuhr, Kennan, Arendt] are the people that students should be studying – not just develop charts and graphs and mathematical formulas. . . . <26:12> And what I think they would get from that is a sense that foreign policy, and history in general, has a strong subjective element – and if you want, you can call that a moral element. And morality becomes a very tricky question for these thinkers. But moral in the sense that the individual is responsible for his own ideas and his own policies.
And so we get back to Helen Thompson’s thoughts that I mentioned in the earlier post: Gewen also seems to believe that the analytical mode (logos, objectivity) is inadequate for getting to grips with moral issues. For what it's worth, I don’t think it’s either-or: one needs both logos and mythos (and pathos?) to build a strong moral foundation.
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