Philosophy as De-Mythology

Hey everybody, welcome to the Firestone Files. I am Dr. Chris Firestone. Today we have part two of our short series on what is philosophy? Looking at philosophy as myth and this time in part two as demythalization. That's coming at you today on the Firestone Files. All right, everybody. Well, welcome back to the files. Uh, good to have you here. This is a mini uh two-part series on philosophy as myth. Uh, part two here I'm calling philosophy as demythalization. the process of using the great stories, the archetypal stories, the myths to draw out the metaphysical truths that we live by and life is lived by.

I think in previous lectures I talked about metaphysics as kind of the apex of philosophy, the top of the tree of philosophy where all the big questions are asked. And if we're going to have answers to the big questions, we need to have access to the meaningfulness, the enchantment of the world, the world that is beyond just the physical, the one that endures when all else fades away. And that's what we meant by metaphysics. But myth is something a little closer to meta narrative. These are stories that are so significant, archetypal stories, stories that have that are told in all cultures that give meaning to the particulars of our experience.

That's what we're talking about today. Uh and and in this short series on philosophy is myth. So in the first um in the first part the last episode we talked about uh various types of myths and how philosophy looks at meta narrative in this broader sense and we talked about some German words uh gashikta and hiles gashikta I think you might recall that this holy kind of deeper meaningful story from which other stories uh of gith their meaning and at the in the py great pyramid if you will of stories that we tell that are meaningful. These are the ones near the top.

And in uh biblical studies, for example, in the Bible, we see the great stories of Genesis being those archetypal stories from which the logos in John talks about Jesus Christ. In the beginning was the word, the word was with God and the word was God. And so in the scriptures even we see the mythological origin story and the story of the flood and uh the the story of Israel and Egypt uh you know in in the Exodus. All of that creates this sort of uh a narrative background for the emergence from the line of David of the person of Jesus Christ the logos made flesh.

And something similar is you say analogous going on in philosophy as myth. The great stories that we tell now again we're not looking at this as theologians per se but from the point of view of philosophy. The great stories that we tell kinds of things you might find in the book of virtue uh that I talked about before the uh the Bennett book.

The great stories inside those stories we find nuggets of eternal wisdom and truth. And when we tell those stories, there's something that uh uh uh quickens within us the realization that there's more to this world than meets the eye. And that's what philosophers are after. They're after the truth, the truth that won't fade away. They're after goodness, the kind of goodness that Plato talks about that gives rise in the universal realm of forms to everything that we experience in this world. and the uh and the kind of beauty that uh brings it all together into our harmonious highest good.

And so when the logos philosophically speaking has those three components, it is um it is you know we're on the pathway for getting at the meaning of life. Okay. Well, that was philosophy as myth. And I zeroed in at the end of the last episode on the work of Joseph Campbell. Joseph Campbell wrote the book A Hero with a Hero with a Thousand Faces. And that's where movies like Star Wars and George Lucas um got his inspiration was from Joseph Campbell.

This whole notion of the various stages of the hero's journey and this is a journey I would argue that is archetypal for every human being who has developed well you start in your ordinary world every kid I don't care if you're Donald Trump or if you're um you know Aaron Judge or if you're you know Lionel Messi I you can tell I got sports on my mind but anyway um I don't care who you are you began probably in a humble circumstance and in that ordinary world you experienced some kind of call to transcend it.

It is a kind of um par paradise really in your youth unless you had a poor upbringing and so forth that's a different story but generally speaking there's there's a characteristic about the call stage stage one within the hero's journey that's just ordinary and somewhere in there it's time to leave all good things must come to an end and you're called to the next adventure and that's and that's we zeroed as being stage one. And then the person who's been experiencing the call doesn't want to leave their comfort zone. They refuse. But there's something about the mentor or the parent or the guardian or the youth pastor or somebody is pushing them in a sense, gently steering them to leave their comfort zone so that they might grow grow into something um that they were meant to be.

And that stage I called the refusal stage that's overcome by meeting with a mentor. Uh if you go to the next stage, stage three, we talked about the departure. That's where you cross the threshold. There's kind of like no going back. You've packed up all your stuff, put it in storage. Now you've taken the essentials with you on the journey that uh that God has you on or that the call has you on, per se. And once you arrive in this new world, you've got to figure out who your friends and enemies are and you're tested and your your your your skills are tested as you try to situate yourself within that new world.

That's stage three. I called that the departure. I guess you could call it the arrival. The departure and the arrival. Um the next stage is the right of initiation stage. This is stage four. And that's where you go through various orals. This new world doesn't come as easy as the old world did. Maybe you were provided for. Maybe there was a kind of comfort zone in the world, the ordinary world that you left. But this new world is going to require some ordering on your behalf and putting things together.

You're going to experience obstacles and uh you may survive some near-death experiences or at least that's the way they feel. And uh you overcome those things. and you begin to journey back to your old, you know, your old home complete with a whole new set of expanded experiences. And that's stage four. Stage five is like is something, you know, it's it's called the return. And in the return, you have to you have to come back with some medals, right? You have to come back with some accomplishments. You have to come back, as it were, having done something. And everybody feels the weight of that.

You go off to college, you might want to come back with a degree or you might want to come back with a job or you might want to come back with a lead uh opportunity for graduate school, something along those lines. But in order to get there, to get the job, to get into graduate school, and to get the victory that you were hoping for, you're going to need to face some kind of final test.

Maybe it's the GRE for graduate school or maybe it's um you know passing those final exams and getting graduate sumakum laad or you know with an honors certificate or whatever it is there's going to be some kind of battle there and that's called the resurrection hero where all your skills are brought to bear and you know in the right of passage or the right of initiation that is the college life you typically will go to graduation having met the graduation requirements. Throw your hat in the air and so forth and you return home. It's called the return with the elixir. The hero brings his knowledge or the elixir back to the ordinary world where he helps those who remain there to traverse their own analogous or parallel journeys of growth and opportunity.

That is an amazing story. Hopefully philosophy as myth meant something to you. Maybe you know one of the exercises I do in introduction to philosophy is I will oftentimes have students tell about their journeys in light of the hero's journey and uh the archetypal hero and it's amazing how well this maps on even to their early journey. Now remember this is cyclical. Once you've accomplished the college degree, let's say that is not by any means the end of your story. In fact, it's just the beginning. Um you're now ready to take on bigger and better things. You're moving out of the academy proper probably into some other culture sphere.

And it's there that you have your second your your your new ordinary needs to be left for some new challenge. And you can see how toled up you got your medals, you got your CV, you got your experiences, now you're ready to go on a new journey. And for philosophy myth that those kinds of stories are are examples of how meaning infuses and enchants our life. And that's a pretty pretty big deal. Now, there's a flip side to philosophy as a myth, and it's really what I want to talk about here in this uh episode, and that is the process of growth out of the myth all the way to a more, let's say, scientific understanding of your world.

More precision. Myth is story. It's general. We see eb and flow. We might be able to outline our chapters, but we can't get into the minutia of experience and really look at the details and the nuance of life just living in the myth. We have to in a sense demythologize the myth. That is to find the hidden logos that's buried within the myth. Now that is a process that is not unlike philosophia's dialogue.

You know, you can see a parallel here with in the ancient Greek world where we have all the myths of Homer in a sense being told and then uh uh uh uh so he he sort of consolidates those myths and the philosopher tries to pull out of it the nuggets of go the golden nuggets as it were of truth and of goodness and of beauty that animate the myth. And in order to do that, we saw philosophy as dialogue as is as a key way of demythologizing the myth. That is philosophers started to ask questions. And we saw Socrates using the Socratic method. And what's basically happening is is with this questioning process, you separate fact from fable and the logos begins to emerge out of it. It's not that the logos is per se fact.

It is the deeper meaning that we're beginning to understand with more clarity. And that process of moving from the myth itself to the logos to the deeper understanding of things that are you know metaphysical things like justice.

We see that in the uh book one of the republic for example in Plato where Socrates is asking what is justice and he's working his way through some of the people in Athens some of the sophists that he knows asking this question what is justice we see it in Uthifer for example with justice as well where Socrates is asking young about his concept of justice and out of that we begin to distill something really precious the logos that's emerging out of the stories that we tell and the stories that we live. And so that is the sort of basic idea. Now this according to philosophers of demethylization, this happens really in two ways.

One is in the macro sense of the development of a culture and it also happens in the micro sense in the development of the human person. That's really what I want to talk about here uh a little bit with you is how this plays out. So in the macro scale um you could look and according to you know philosophers like Messiah Eliata and others uh and we're going to get a a little bit to talk a little bit here about Jordan Peterson here but hopefully by the end of this episode um that these stories that we tell unfold and the logos emerges in a definitive pattern.

And if you look at the Greek culture, which is often times the one that we're trained in in the west, at least if you go through the good homeschool or classical training, still in some high schools, some good high schools, I think they use a similar kind of logic, even though they might not name it this. And that is um the myth stage in Greek culture really is around 1,200 BC to about 900 BC. That's when the Trojan war is uh happens. That's when we get these oral traditions that develop in the Greek world that defined what it means to be Athenian, what it means to be Greek.

And uh of course, you know, the the Trojan War is a is a classic. And you know, up until relatively recently, they weren't even sure that Troy existed. Um, and so we have this period of what you might call of the Trojan War. That's an oral tradition, great stories that are told and they define the self-standing of the uh the Greek nation. It's not until around 900 BC where a poet, the blind poet Homer, comes along and he takes, as it were, the best of the best stories and puts them into an transferable written format. And this, of course, is a book are those books that we oftent time read in high school, sometimes in college as well, called the Iliad and the Odyssey.

In those great epic tales, we find stories that are crystallized and brought together by Homer so that they might that the logos might be transferable in a sort of corporate format. This sort of irrudition concept of being able to share these stories and it's not just this fireplace here in Greece and this fireplace here and the stories differ a bit. Now we have the poet Homer consolidating the stories into the greatest hits, the best of the best stories. And in those stories we learn about the human condition. We learn about uh courage. We learn about uh the the the flaws that our great heroes sometimes have.

And all of these things happen in Homer. So that the myth moves to this poetic stage where it turns into a transferable written form, the form of poetry that we see in the home epics. 300 years later around the time of the first philosopher oftentimes called as Thales around 600 BC we see philosophers the philosophical age emerge in the Greek world where they're they all know the stories they all been trained in the the great stories of Homer and others but they begin to say hold on let's pull the logos further out it doesn't have to stay buried in these classic stories. We can in fact talk about it.

We can use questions and answers. We can use reason to begin to unpack the hidden meaning of the myths and of the great poetic stories that we grew up hearing about. And so we have this philosophical age in ancient Greece from Thales all the way through to Aristotle 600 BC to about 300 BC where the philosophers really start asking the big questions and they start zeroing in on the nature of the logos the nature of the truth and of the goodness of the and of the beauty that they feel and they sense and they experience in the great stories.

Now by the time we get to the end of the philosophical period we get to Aristotle and Aristotle around 300 BC leads us to what is sometimes called the scientific stage where the logos has been pulled out of the myth by the philosophers. We now have a better grasp on what we mean by justice, what we mean by love and friendship and all the great virtues, you know. And so if we look at Aristotle, we see I guess for the first time a pretty systematic account of all of the wisdom that the philosophers were able to extract from the great stories of Homer and others.

And you can see how this process works. So instead of just philosophy as myth where we dwell in the myth and we see archetypal stories that mirror our own stories in philosophy as demythalization we are actually extracting the logos the hidden meaning as it were pulling it out and analyzing it as philosophers and then archiving it as scientists might and so that's why whenever you go to Aristotle you'll see Aristotle has got all of his paragraphs numbered out very systematically the ancient ient world um is indebted really to Aristotle because he kind of boils it all down.

So when I uh started to write my book on friendship with Alex Pierce uh which hopefully we're going to talk about on an uh on an upcoming episode, I haven't actually interviewed him yet, but I'd like to do that. Um, you're going to see that my portion of I wrote the kind of more philosophical side and Alex wrote the more theological side of the book and then we sort of integrated our word.

It's so much fun to put that book project together with him. But, uh, what you'll see is I immediately said, "Okay, let me go to Aristotle, write a book on friendship. Let's go to Nickian ethics, look up friendship, and now we can find all the wisdom on, you know, of the ancient world." Really? Of course, it has an Aristotilian bent to it, but still he's the first scientist. He's the guy who archived it, put it together, laid out all that we know about the issue of friendship, and it really is a rich discussion. So, I highly recommend that book to you. Of course, uh I wrote it, so I I I guess I would recommend it.

But anyway, um my point is is that Aristotle is a great place to start if you're looking for wisdom on any philosophical matter from the ancient Greeks because he's the guy who scientifically collected all that wisdom and brought it all together. He's kind of the watershed of the Greco period of philosophy. So that's the macro. Now according to scholars of demethylization that that process is happening in every culture they start with oral traditions. This could be in Africa. This can be in China. This can be in South America.

Doesn't really matter. We we're using the Greek one because this is the western intellectual tradition. We're living in America. And that's really kind of the trajectory we've been on here. But it could theoretically have been any culture. You're going to find oral stories that gave rise to poetic transferable written documents. And then those transferable written documents are studied by the quote unquote philosophers. And then the key nuggets of wisdom are consolidated into um a scientific treatise, an organized book, something that's authoritative uh about the wisdom that's been gathered in the given culture. Now, interestingly, the Greek world doesn't have world dominance. You know, by the time the Romans come along, Romans take over sort of world dominance and Rome takes over.

Rome has its own stories. Now, they're very much indebted to the Greeks, and you'll see parallels between the Greek gods and the Roman gods and so forth. But you get a new mythos that emerges really out of Aristotle and this cycle begins again. And if philosophers of demilization are right, there's this big ongoing cyclical process. You might look at the age of, you know, the the end of the 20th century as being the scientific age of explosive advancement right on here through the through the AI revolution and so forth. But that too, if philosophers of demilization are right, will create its own myths.

And those in the next culture that's impacted as it were by this great scientific revolution that we've been experiencing, they will have to go through the very same process of consolidating it, writing it down, letting the philosophers dig out the the the the lessons in the in the the logos that we have learned through that advancement and then scientifically lay that out in some future age. So that's really kind of fascinating. So we've looked at kind of like two sides to one coin here. Doing philosophy as myth or on its flip side, philosophy as demythalization. Now, if you're not totally convinced by that narrative, now you know there I think there's some really helpful stuff in there.

And I tell you from the point of view of raising kids, you can't go wrong reading the great stories, talking about them, generating your own stories, consolidating stories into a written format, breaking them down and then an analyzing whether or not we're in the truth, we're in the good, we're in the beautiful, or do we need to make some changes. You really can't go wrong with that. You probably if you saw um my birthday surprise uh episode um with my kids, they talk about the stories and the and the experiences that we had. My goal back then was just to create a mythological ethos of great stories that really get at eternal truths that matter.

And you know, as they grow up, they uh they they they begin to still out those things that really matter from those great stories. And then they learn to tell their own stories to their kids. And so this process just keeps going. So there's a lot of good stuff here. I guess what I'm trying to suggest to you is that there's no one way to do philosophy, but there are a number of really sort of good perspectives or ways of doing good philosophy. And I would say philosophy is myth and demilization is one you know are two good ways uh of doing of doing philosophy particularly when it involves story and it involves development of young people into mature adults.

Now, if the macro side of philosophy is demethylization uh interested you or you think there's something there, then the micro side's going to sort of seal the deal. Because on the micro side, scholars of demythalization want to say that every human life goes through the exact same process. You go through a mythical phase of development. Some people call this the birth stage between let's say zero and two or three years old stories are told and you know young you know babies really um really young kids they believe any story you tell them.

Uh so it's important when kids are really young that you're giving them quality stories where the logos is you know is the story is pregnant with the logos as it were that it is that it is robustly plain what what it means to be courageous or just or living a life of faith or being charitable or um you know whatever it is that the stories centered upon. You want to tell stories that have a rich underbelly really of of the logos of the hidden meaning the enchantment of the world. That's the birth stage. Somewhere along the way, let's go 3 years old or so.

You know, I I don't know about you, but I when I talk about the birth stage or the mythological stage, it's usually a stage that you don't remember, which is kind of interesting. If you go back and look at your earliest memories, try that, you know, hit the pause here and just try to think back what your earliest memory is. Now, when you're my age, it's even harder. I tried this probably, I don't know, maybe 10, 20 years ago. I tried this and I'm and I was able to go back to like 5 years old, maybe four years old remembering, you know, glimmers and fragments of of uh of times past.

You can remember particular events and they must have been four or five years old because of where you were living or whatever. Maybe it was a traumatic event. Sometimes those things are easier to remember. But you can see there's a point at which you can no longer remember. That's the mythic stage. just the birth stage of human development.

The stories aren't written down. You forget them. They're still there, but they're not there in a way that's transferable, as it were, even in your own mind. The next stage, the youth stage, is where you do start remembering stuff. That's where you're conscious of events as they're unfolding. I'm going to put that ages 3 to 17. These are arbitrary ages. human beings are very different in how they developed. Um but in ages 3 to 17 I you know one one way that you can think about the next stage is um is in the area of communication. I oftentimes ask do babies communicate and everybody wants to say yes they communicate.

um even if they're not going to be conscious of their memories down the road, they're still able to communicate. And most often, not always, but most often people will point out that babies communicate by crying. And they're not audible words, but they are emotions, feelings, audible utterances that mean something. And um it could, you know, if you you could list these out, right? Maybe the baby's tired. Maybe the baby's hungry. Maybe the baby's, you know, soiled as they say in Scotland or the has a dirty diaper or maybe they've got some kind of issue. Um I remember uh my daughter Hannah who was who who had collic actually.

She cried all the time, but there was a time one weekend when we were living in Scotland where she just cried and cried and cried like at a higher pitch than normal. And um we were trying to took we were thinking of taking her to the emergency room. They only had one doctor on duty in Scotland on the weekend in Edinburgh, I should say. I'm sure there were more on duty throughout the the country, but in Edinburgh, they had one person on duty. And uh that person was wise enough to tell us to take the baby's clothes off. And when we did, we took this onesie, zippered it down, and pulled it off. And as we were pulling it off, we noticed that her big toe was tied up with a uh with a with a string, you know, inside the onesie. And every time she bent her leg, it strangled that toe.

So she was able, even though she was a crier, she was still able to use crying to communicate something more to us. And that communication happens. But there's something that happens, I don't know, somewhere between one year and two years, maybe babies verbalize. And um and it's a verbalizing that helps them I think in some kind of way to remember their experiences. So parallel to the poetic stage of cultural development where the poets write down in a transferable written way the oral traditions that they've been ex you know experiencing in the youth stage of human development. Young people learn to verbalize and to put into words how they're feeling, what they're thinking to the point where really it's almost too much, right?

Anybody, it's one of the reasons I'd much rather teach college than than than uh junior high school cuz once they start talking, you know, let's say age three all the way up to age 17, I really don't stop talking. And so, um, that verbalization stage goes on for quite a while. That's where they're that's what that's the poetic stage of human development. Now, when they get to age 18 and you're beginning to send them off to college, and this is why that 18 to 22 year old phase is so important, from 18 all the way up to age 65, again, arbitrary number in America here, that's typically what we think of as the age of retirement. Um, it's not just talking to hear yourself talk, but now you're in the philosophical stage of development. Sometimes you might think of this as the mature stage. When you're 18, you can go to war. In some states, you can drink, other states you can't drink, or you can get married. Uh, this kind of stuff.

Well, this is where you begin to systematize your words. You're not just talking to hear yourself talk. You're not just playing a language game. You're actually seeking after the truth. You're seeking after a system of understanding your world that makes sense of your world that brings order to the chaos of your own life and to the home that you inhabit. And this is happening in that philosophical stage of human development. this age from 18 to 65. Now once you hit the gray hair stage, this sometimes would be called the old age stage. It's parallel to the scientific stage of Aristotle in the macro sense. Um you're no longer systematized.

You've already done that. You become the person who you who you who you are. And it's in that stage, the old age stage, where you bring knowledge to bear, you bring wisdom to bear. This is why gay-haired people matter in cultures because people go through cycles in life of euphoria and depression, right? The challenges and the successes and failures. And it's the people with the gray hair who are able to provide perspective to the community. Um they're able to explain. They don't they're not dogmatic. If they've matured properly, they're not landing in a in in a in a position of dogmatism. They're landing in a position of giving wise perspective for the community.

And it's in that position of wise perspective for the community that the gray-haired person really matters. Um I had a uh in a really unfortunate incident happened um in my first semester of teaching. One of my students um loved this student was a he was a philosophy major actually.

um his brother uh committed suicide and you talk about you you know that hero's journey where you know I finally got a job I went off to this new environment here I am trying to be the the uh the great you know young college uh philosophy professor and wham smacked in the face where one of my best students friend of mine really has a brother uh took his own life and um I walked with him through that journey while he remained in school. He ended up dropping out of school and going in his own direction. But for a while there I had to I went I went to the funeral.

I went to the wake and uh I'm only telling this story because I think it's it's it's it's a good example of what it means to mature well. Old age uh went to the wake and it was a chaotic wake. The family was there. People were in tears. They were broken up. Nobody could understand why this thing had to happen. And um and uh I sat in the front row next to the student and with some of his family. And I was just sitting there praying, "Lord, help me to I don't know what to do. I'm just going to be here for this student." And um it was right before the funeral was going to start.

We were in a back room. I don't know. I'm guessing there's 30, 40, 50 people in there. family, primary family mainly. And uh it just was chaotic. Wasn't going well. And there was this like hush that came over the group as we all were pro because they had people coming to the front telling their stories and giving their words and of counsel and and and feelings. But still, it was it was uh it was heart-wrenching and uh ungrounded, you might say. And when it got real quiet and we were just about ready to make our way into the funeral, uh, it's proper, an old man in the back row got up and he shuffled his way to the front to the microphone.

And it was really um illustrated for me how a man or a person can develop and mature and in a sense grow out of pure systematization where you have all the answers. You have perspective. You have you can fix stuff to just explaining to just sharing from the heart. And I I I won't be able to do it justice here, but he said something to the effect of uh I don't understand why this happened. It doesn't make any sense. The young man had life in his fingertips and he had everything to live for.

And uh I trust that God's going to sort this out at the end of the day. But we're going to make it through this together. and um we're going to be just fine. So, let's uh let's trust in God. Let's pull ourselves together. Let's celebrate the life of this young man and we can go into the funeral and we can let go. I mean, it was something to that effect. And that was just I mean, you could the air was taken out of the room. I mean the the sort of tension was taken out of the room. I I I it was just like everybody could breathe again and we all walked into the funeral from there.

That's what I mean by explanation. So you have these same four stages. The birth stage mirroring the myth stage, the youth stage mirroring the poetic stage, the maturity stage, the 18 to 65 year old stage, the philosophical stage, and then the scientific stage. the place of knowledge and perspective and that is 65 and over. Again, generic ages because everybody matures differently. Some people, frankly, don't mature. They get to 65 and they're belligerent, you know, eclectic, don't really have a lot to offer the community because they're they're still caught in the youth stage of development or something like that.

But by and large, if we have grown appropriately, if we've been on our own journey from myth to poetry to philosophy to science, we will by the time we hit those ages, the gray hair stage, have um something in in effect to share with one another. Now, if you're looking at the dominant sort of components within each stage, you might look at the birth stage having imagination aimed at belief. Again, when you storytelling to young people, you can activate their imagination and they'll believe and they'll react and they'll have a great time storytelling.

Um, in the youth stage, they're more passionate. they're they're they're more concerned with how they look, the beauty component of life. Um, and so you need to be careful with young people that that doesn't get overactivated. I had I remember uh one time with uh I was in I was in the UK at the time and I was listening to the BBC and they had a story about a young man who had a pension for spraying himself um with right guard. Anyway, his mom would make him breakfast and he'd get himself ready upstairs, you know, take a shower, whatever in the morning, get himself all ready for the day, and he would spray himself.

It got so bad she could smell it coming down the hallways. Well, apparently, I don't know how true this is. I don't know if this is urban legend or not, but I remember the story on the BBC like it was yesterday. He had sprayed himself so many times with so much quantity of right guard that he odied on it and unfortunately passed away again. Passion aimed at beauty in the youth stage can run a muk. Passion can take over. Our concern with how we appear or how we're received can can can get the best of us. But it also is that fertile area where we develop and we begin to put verbalize our stories and we get begin to put the pieces together.

So it's parallel to the poetic stage. In the uh in the systematization stage, it's understanding aimed at truth. And then um I mean that one's pretty self-evident. When you're 18, you're going off to college, you're asking lots of questions. I don't know about you, but I went to the University of Illinois. Sent spent many late nights hanging out with classmates trying to understand answers to the big questions, getting at the truth and so forth. That's a common thing and um I think a really important stage of human development. And then in the sort of knowledge stage, the uh the the old age stage, it's judgment, making sound judgments. That's why you take it to the elders as it were at least in a church context or in a you know communal context take it to the elders so that they can determine what the best pathway forward is focusing on the things they know to be true.

All right. Well, hopefully you found that philosophy as demilization on the macro cultural scale to be informative, huristic, helps us understand how we develop as human beings, but it's mirrored in the micro stage of human development. This what I'm call, you know, the the the the stage that we're all in. So, here I am. I Yes, you guys probably know I had my 60th birthday party not that long ago. And uh I'm approaching the end of my systematization period and moving into the uh the explanation period, the old age page as it were of life, but uh not quite there yet. So hang with me.

Got another five years of trying to put all the pieces together with you here on the Firestone Files. but really kind of an interesting understanding of how the logos works itself out in our own lives and in the lives of our societies. And that I think is pretty cool. Now, I want to close by zeroing in. I talked about Joseph Campbell last time. I'm just going to briefly talk about Jordan Peterson here.

He's kind of a contemporary analog like 50 years later after Joseph Campbell talked about the hero's journey and um gave us that that uh template if you will that became Star Wars that became really the uh the the backbone of a lot of Hollywood films but it als it's it's it became so important because many of us see it in our own lives.

Jordan Peterson came along in his book Maps of Meaning and he also was very interested in the hero's journey but not just as a um uh an example of the collective unconscious that human beings participate in but in a kind of morally prescriptive way. in a way that we can actually become self authenticating beings or self- authoring beings if you will. Life is full of meaning and for Jordan Peterson I think this this notion of the ordinary world giving way to different worlds is something we should embrace. We should look for we should look to bring order in our ordinary world. He used to in I think I think uh he talks about getting your own house in order.

How are you going to speak to the big issues of our time if you can't even make your own bed or keep your own room in order. So he's all about saying look life is challenging. It's chaotic. There's a lot of unknowns, particularly when you're young, but even when you get older, there are unknowns. There are new spheres of influence that you walk into. Here I am advanced in years beyond probably most of my audience. And I'm still encountering worlds that I have very little familiarity with. I have analoges and I have analogies in my own life that help me to navigate those worlds, but I'm still encountering these unknowns. But for um for Peterson um these archetypal stories are kind of compressed versions if you will of wisdom about how to act properly in the face of the unknown.

You should tool yourself up, get yourself in order, pull yourself together, get your CV ready, then go out and conquer the world, thinks Peterson. And that really I think is uh part of his secret sauce especially with young men is that Jordan Peterson recognizes in his book Maps of Meaning and then of course his many many talks after that that young people are looking for mentors who understand that life is an adventure. It's a venture where you you're kind of like a settler. You're going into the unknown and you're settling. But you don't just settle and stay. You continue to expand. You could continue to uh um uh take the chaotic world of the unknown and bring order to the chaos.

And in order to do that, you've got to utilize all the skills, all the abilities, all the things that you have developed through your life. And so there's a parallel sense with Joseph Campbell here that I think he capitalizes on that young persons particularly, but all persons because remember this is a cyclical thing that we're talking about need to organize themselves, organize their world, tool up, bring their aptitudes to bear, but then don't settle there, but go and take on the next challenge.

And it's there in that next challenge that you begin to find yourself. And so, um, these these sort of, uh, these sort of, uh, narrative-driven elements of our lives are not optional extras for the development of a human person. If you want to go retrograde, if you want to be depressed, if you want to uh feel sorry for yourself, if you want to be a victim, if you want to uh um you know, find comfort and just live in comfort, go for it. But you're never going to become what you were meant to be. You're never going to find the hidden meaning of the myth that gave rise to your life in the first place.

And that I think is the secret sauce of Jordan Peters, at least one of them anyway, is to bring order to the to the to the little things in your life and then step out of that world once you have conquered it as it were. Once you have pulled yourself together, you're a put together person. But you don't stay there. If you stay there, you do end up getting depressed, self-centered, you know, inwardlooking. You want to be if you're not moving forward, you're moving backward. And I think Jordan Peterson really captures some of that uh um uh in his work.

And so we have this parallel now between Joseph Campbell which gave us the archetypal picture of what human beings tend to go through who are developing well and according to the common story of humanity as it were.

And then Jordan Peterson kind of puts it on steroids and says look you need to to sort of uh uh I won't say weaponize but bring it what would be the right word to tool up and to take this as a moral prescription for your life to go out and do things accomplish things you know I if I look if I just if I try to bring sort of a Petersonesque understanding to my own journey you know once I'd finished some of my publications and I went through that trial of trying to save my former institution and then I had to find a new job and I had to go off to a new state and uh it wasn't something you know I wanted to do per se but boy has it been good to me got me out of my comfort zone led me as it were even to this podcast I Who would have thought that I would have done something like this very podcast?

It's a new adventure. It's a new attempt. I'm learning as I go and um it's really been quite a fascinating journey to be on and man a new horizon for me as I try to bring order to the chaos of uh what it takes to do this. Well, okay. Well, that's it for now. Thank you so much for listening. I'm really having a lot of fun talking about philosophy, getting into in this case, philosophy is myth and philosophy as demethylization and how important this perspective is for understanding the human condition and making sense out of our own lives. Well, that's it for now. Hope you enjoyed this two-part series.

Looking forward to seeing what comes next in the future. Blessings. See you next time. Thanks for stopping by to spend some time with me here on the Firestone Files. I hope today's reflections offered you some new insights and perspective on life. If you enjoyed the episode or found it valuable, I'd appreciate it if you'd take a moment to like, subscribe, and share it with someone you care about. I'd also love to hear your thoughts. What resonated with you? What challenged you? Or what would you like to hear more about in future episodes? Drop a comment below or send in your suggestions to the email in the description. Your input helps shape where we go next. This has been Dr. Chris Firestone. Until next time, keep asking the big questions. And remember, the kingdom journey is always best with your friends. Further up and further in. Bye for now.

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