The Myth of State
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Myth is viewed in modern scholarship as rational philosophy versus irrational shamanism; a mere mistaken use of language and metaphor from a surfeit of synonyms. Cassirer says it is much more: fuller, richer. Myth was not about grouping the objects of potential mythological thought, but a symbolic way for man to order and make sense of what he feared and was in awe of while losing his individuality in a whole and reuniting him with gods and nature.
Greek dialectic between Sophist and Socratic thought proved a potent assault on myth—physiological and theological victories of rational thought in altering the interpretations of Nature and Religion (the gods). The Sophists delved into such on the periphery, rationalizing mythic forms; whereas Socrates sought to know the self, probe Man, and accepted (ie, dismissed) myths as irrelevant in relation to self-knowledge.
Ernst Cassirer was one of the major figures in the development of philosophical idealism in the first half of the twentieth century, a German Jewish philosopher. Coming out of the Marburg tradition of neo-Kantianism, he developed a philosophy of culture as a theory of symbols founded in a phenomenology of knowledge.
Greek dialectic between Sophist and Socratic thought proved a potent assault on myth—physiological and theological victories of rational thought in altering the interpretations of Nature and Religion (the gods). The Sophists delved into such on the periphery, rationalizing mythic forms; whereas Socrates sought to know the self, probe Man, and accepted (ie, dismissed) myths as irrelevant in relation to self-knowledge.
Ernst Cassirer was one of the major figures in the development of philosophical idealism in the first half of the twentieth century, a German Jewish philosopher. Coming out of the Marburg tradition of neo-Kantianism, he developed a philosophy of culture as a theory of symbols founded in a phenomenology of knowledge.