Abstract

This study maintains that to understand myth, philosophy must recreate myth rather than reduce it to a conceptual model. It uses the philosophies of myth of Giambattista Vico and Ernst Cassirer as its prime examples to show this. Mythic thought is imaginative and grounded in mimetic acts which are charged with emotion. Discursive thought is reflective and constituted by indicative acts which lead to concept formation. Vico and Cassirer hold that these two types of thought are irreducible. These two types of thought are present at the origin of thought and co-exist throughout the development of human consciousness. ;Cassirer claims that the symbolic forms must be understood developmentally in both their objective and subjective aspects. Understanding the objective structure of myth discursively is necessary to prevent philosophy from collapsing into irrationalism and historicism. But myth itself can only be understood by supplying the emotion of myth and placing it into this structure. Emotion must be supplied through acts of imaginative recreation. This is the central thesis of this study. ;Vico presents his mythology in a series of imaginative universals based on the Roman Pantheon. Vico presents them in seemingly discordant and incoherent ways. On one level, these imaginative universals are historical institutions generated from the class struggle between those who thought primarily mythically and those who thought primarily discursively. When the reader supplies the original emotion which creates the imaginative universal to Vico's account, the poetic richness of the imaginative universal reveals itself. This need for emotional and imaginative input from the reader is often missed because Vico does not clearly express the need for it in a discursive method. ;Vico and Cassirer both believe the philosopher can understand the whole of human consciousness only if this understanding is built on the origins of human consciousness in myth. This allows them to avoid the temptations of pan-logicism or irrationalism