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Myth and Technique

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

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The least that could be said about myth is that it is something “which makes one think.” This is not by any means to say nothing. Spelled out it means “that the nature of myth requires that it be included in the context of contemporary philosophy, and that its urgency, which is noted everywhere, be founded on its essential nature.” There is such an urgency about myth—or more precisely, about a serious occupation with it—because quite apart from the philosophical context, myth now appears in a great many publications. These remarks are taken from a Catholic writer on the theory of myth, Gonsalv Mainberger. The following pages fit into this context by placing the determination of the nature of myth on the broadest possible foundations. The earlier investigations by André Jolles, the Germanic linguist, and by Walter F. Otto, a classical scholar, as well as by myself, in which I begin with an exact philological interpretation of the Greek word mythos, have all labored under initial self-imposed limitations which can now be removed without abandoning the earlier results.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © 1965 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

References

1 " Sein und Sitte im Mythus," in Walberger Studien I, 1963, p. 37 ff.

2 Einfache Formen, 2nd ed., 1958, p. 91 ff.

3 "Gesetz, Urbild und Mythos," 2nd ed., in Die Gestalt und das Sein, 1955, p. 66 ff.

4 " Werk und Mythos," in my Griechische Miniaturen, 1957, p. 139 ff.

5 A. Hillebrandt, Sitzungsbericht, Munich 1917, p. 5 f.