Philosophy as Myth

Hey everybody, welcome to the Firestone Files. I am Dr. Chris Firestone. Today we will talk about a way of doing philosophy called philosophy as myth. All right. Well, welcome back to the files, everyone. If you've been following along, you know that I have kind of dropped into philosophy proper the last couple of months here. And this podcast is going to be no different. We've peppered that with a few other things like interviews with my kids so we can continue to get to know them. Uh, and they'll come back in the subsequent years, I'm sure, as the Firestone Files continue. But right now, we're going back to philosophy proper.

I've already taken three different sort of podcasts, episodes to define what is philosophy. I'm going to begin by talking about that question, sort of summarizing the ground we've made in that uh in that discussion and then we're going to be turning in a couple of weeks here over to dream interpretation. But I thought it would be good between the definition of philosophy and that turn toward dream interpretation if we could look at philosophy as myth.

philosophy as a myth comes out of the sort of interface of philosophy and psychology and so we'll be looking at you know Carl Jung when we get certainly to dream interpretation but prior to that we're going to be talking about how myth was the centerpiece really of philosophy in the ancient world and it was sort of capitalized on by a well-known sort of philosopher, psychologist, philosopher of religion, Joseph Campbell in the middle part of the 20th century. And so that's what I want to talk about today. And then next week we're going to be talking about philosophy as demethylization. That is the process of going from mere story, mere accounts of meaningfulness in the human experience to philosophy proper.

How do you get the truth, the logos, if you will, out of the myth? And so that's going to be coming next week. But this week, I wanted to focus really in on philosophy as myth. Now, if you've been following along, I did uh a lecture, series of lectures um over the uh Christmas holidays on the philosophy of Renee Deart. I would call that philosophy as doubt where you have that extreme cartisian sort of concern that the foundations of philosophy be true and so true that even an evil demon couldn't fool me of them.

And so you could call that philosophy as doubt or sometimes I call it philosophy is certainty where you really don't even want to begin the philosophical task unless you're building upon foundations that are kind of indubable, unquestionable, firm and then you can use arguments, syllogisms, inferences and so forth to build a philosophical worldview on top of those things. Um we're going to be talking at the end of the year as uh about philosophy as critique in the sense of Emanuel Kant. Both of those are kind of bookending the modern period of philosophy and we're going to be talking about those as we go along.

But I thought since I'm going to be turning towards dream interpretation shortly that we should go back to the Greeks and go back to philosophy. It's not just the Greeks. There's a lot of philosophers who use myth as the sort of groundwork, the soil, the the the the meaningful uh h substratum of philosophical discussion. And that culminates and we're going to be talking about his well-known book hero with a thousand faces in Joseph Campbell's work in the middle part of the 20th century.

So, instead of just continuing to barrel on in modern philosophy, I'm going to take a step back because I think this is going to prepare us when we get to that six-part um series that I'm working on on dream interpretation primarily because a number of the dream interpreters and psychologists of the uh you know, the 20th century were concerned with the what they call collective unconscious if you will and the archetypal stories that uh we all share with one another. So that's kind of what I want to talk about here a little bit in this episode. Okay. Well, philosophy you guys will recall I define in a particular sort of way.

Now typically if you ask somebody what they you know what is philosophy? It's hey it's the discipline that you can't make any money by studying. Okay. Well, you know, if there's a uh how do you know you have a philosopher at your front door? You pay him for the pizza. You've heard all these jokes before. I mean, I don't know. You know, there I've got a bunch of them. I've heard them over the years teaching philosophy. But typically, they think of it as the field with many questions where there's a lot of hair splitting, a lot of deep thinking, really not going anywhere. And what I tried to do in those lectures, what is philosophy? tried to show that all of those things are misnomers. They're all poor characterizations of philosophy.

Yes, it asks the difficult questions. But the very definition of philosophy according to William James is that is that uh is that field is he calls it uh let's see if I can get an exact quote. He calls it's a collective name for questions that have not been answered to the satisfaction of all by whom they have been asked. In other words, if we take William James's definition, philosophy by its very nature is asking questions that haven't been answered. And so in that sense, it can be frustrating. It can be difficult. Um, but that isn't, you know, that isn't the endall, if you will, for philosophy.

It's everywhere. And one of the things we talked about in the previous uh three episodes on what is philosophy is that it um you know all the fields of human inquiry or most of them anyway culminate in a PhD a doctor of philosophy. That's because these scientific studies that have and disciplines that have emerged over the last couple of hundred years are like branches in the tree of philosophy. Once we have a sufficient sort of set of guidelines that have or truths or answers to questions, they form books, authoritative texts in physics for example or in biology or in chemistry and it becomes a science unto itself.

You still get a PhD in those areas because technically they're coming out of the field of philosophy, but they have such a complexity and nuance and uh body of literature all their own. They are in fact their own sciences. And that's instructive in and of itself because philosophy eventually gives way to other branches, other areas of human inquiry. And so when I landed a definition very early on in the lectures, what is philosophy? I called it the perspective of the self based on reason and freedom. That is, you know, you're doing philosophy when you're raising questions and attempting to answer them from where you sit.

Now, if from where you sit, you aren't able to do uh integral calculus, you might have to get some books, you might have to get a degree in mathematics or take a calculus course or something like that. And there you would probably read authoritative texts, things of areas where humans have made significant strides in our understanding of the world. Um, and that of course becomes a discipline all itself. mathematics or physics or chemistry and so forth. So, philosophy is always about the perspective of the self based on reason and freedom. But at some point, you're giving yourself over as it were or you're adopting information, perspectives, wisdom from other sources.

And that is in fact what I would call good philosophy is knowing when to do that and questioning those sources if and see if they seem incoherent or maybe there's one source that disagrees with the others and you're able to parse that out. You're doing philosophy. You're showing how the perspective of the self gathers information, gathers wisdom, gathers perspective and embodies it in the quest to understand. So philosophy is the perspective of the self based on reason and freedom. But it doesn't end there. Good philosophy is making wise choices about who to trust. And really that should be the apex of education.

good choices made by administrators or people in authority in the commun community that gives us the textbooks, the great books if you will of the western intellectual tradition to study so that we too might become wise. We might adopt perspectives and insights and information that we couldn't have gathered on our own. But we know truth, beauty, and goodness when we see it. And that's what I would say is a more robust understanding of what philosophy is. Now when we are um looking at the various ways of doing philosophy like I said I you could break this out into there may be you know a hundred or more categories of philosophy but I'm I'm zeroing in on five or six of them.

And um we've talked in the past, like I said, about philosophy is doubt or we're going to be talking about philosophy as critique. I did talk about Plato and Aristotle somewhat earlier in the Firestone Files. Philosophy is dialogue and then philosophy is science. We're going to be kind of going back to that in the next lecture a little bit, but today I'd like to zero in on philosophy as myth. Now, if you think of myth, you know, as a contemporary person might, you might think of myth as a false story. Maybe something that's so hyperbolic that it's trying to teach us something. Let's say the boy who cried wolf, yet it's teaching us a lesson about being truth tellers.

um and and and and being, you know, to loving our neighbor by sharing with them truths and not calling upon them uh repeatedly when they're when it's not really necessary. Something along those lines. That might be a mythological story with a with a moral to it. But um typically when I think of myth in terms of philosophy, when I think of philosophy as myth, there's a word in contemporary philosophy that I think comes close to it's called a meta narrative. And a meta narrative is a comprehensive account of reality that gives meaning to the particulars of reality. You might think of a you remember metaphysics means beyond the physical and that's what I put at the top of the tree of philosophy.

those big questions in life that require that we dig beyond just things as they appear to things as they really are. And the same is true of meta narrative. There are many stories that we tell, but there are some stories that are in a sense governing stories. There's stories beyond common everyday stories. And that's what we mean by meta narrative. Now in post-modern philosophy uh I I think leotard said it's you know postmodern philosophy is incredul toward meta narratives. In other words postmoderns are a little concerned that these governing meta narratives are just that problems for philosophical inquiry rather than solutions. That's not the way we're going to be looking at philosophy as myth.

I have a little more sympathy uh for storytelling. Anybody who's a father like I am, father of five, they're now I guess I'm an empty neester now. My wife and I are empty nesters. But um you know the power of story. Storytelling is one of the great ways in which you teach and you build community and you build virtue and uh you know meta narratives. These bigger stories, these grander stories really matter because they give deep roots to young people in terms of their disposition and their virtues and their their their sense that the world is enchanted and meaningful.

And so um when I think of a meta narrative, I think of a story that is so bigger than life that there is something that resonates in our innermost being with truth. and telling the story is a way of teasing that out or making it part of our disposition or or or or our character. Um if you look back at the history of ideas, uh there's a Romanian philosopher of religion named Marsiah Eliata and uh he he argued that a myth is the truest of all true stories. And so what he meant by that is stories you might think of it as a pyramid and we a lot of our everyday stories we tell you know are at the bottom of the pyramid.

There's so many of them and they're you know they have various degrees of meaning and they all form a web of our understanding of the world and there's other stories that maybe are a little bit more significant maybe if you you know your family is tell story at the dinner table. I know that with my uh with my dad when he tells stories, you can kind of tell what story is going to come next sometimes just by the way he leads into it. Such a significant story to the family history that he tells it over and over again. Um those would be now but but right at the apex of this pyramid for for um Eliata is the truest of all true stories.

That is the the apex story at the top of the pyramid. And that one kind of gives meaning to many of the other stories. They they're all in the context of that truest of all true stories. There's another scholar uh uh a uh friend of mine who I studied with many years ago named Steven Palmquist who argues in his book the tree of philosophy that the a myth is not the truest of all true stories but it's in fact a story that's beyond question. That is if you if you think of it as a pyramid of stories that we tell the top one is actually separated. It's like it's hovering. There's a gap between it and all the other stories. Um, logic and validity and the whole notion of truth doesn't really apply to the myth thinks Palmquist in many of the most primitive societies.

It is a story that is beyond question. So if you were to ask people let's say in a in a uh developing world a country let's say aboriges or something about some of the stories that they tell uh at the around the fireplace about the gods or about the ancients about the ancestors and how those give the community meaning. You ask them is it true? They don't say it's the truest of all true stories. They say what do you mean? What do you mean? It's kind of beyond the question of truth. It is the story of our people.

And so, um, Stephen Palmquist wants to say it's not so much the truest of all true stories, but it's in fact a story that is beyond all stories. It is a metaphysical story. It is a meta narrative. It is beyond common storytelling. It's that significant for those who sort of are living in the myth. Uh the Germans have some language that could be helpful to us here. They they have three words I think that are helpful. History, gashikta and hyg ordinary factual stories. History. The gashikta are stories that tell things that you just you can't really see. They're kind of deeper um stories that you the difference might be um stories about who owns a piece of property or you know a um maybe it's a grocery list or maybe it's a a contract.

That would be a you know an artifact of history. A gashika might be something um having to do with somebody's mental state or politically why they did one thing and not another thing. It's a deeper more more meaningful story you might say. And then this third level which you might call the hiles gashika hyle of course meaning holy like hyle Hitler the holy holy one. the one that's set apart that's beyond the story that is not just gashik or deep and meaningful but it is set apart wholly uh something sort of beyond common story uh telling and I think those words you know can help us to understand as well.

So I I lay this out because in the stories that we tell um in the accounts that we give some things kind of fall into that category. I know I had a I'll give you a brief illustration of this just came to my mind. Um, when I was in college, we had a football team, uh, a flag football team and, uh, you know, it was at the University of Illinois. There, I don't know, 20, 30, 40, 50 teams. I lost count. And we weren't really that good. In fact, we were, I guess, overall pretty bad. Uh, I don't think we had won a game, but then there was a particular game where we were close.

And um I guess depends on who's tells the story, but what happened was we were down to our last play. We had about 50 yards to go and uh we were down just by less than a touchdown. And we were a little frustrated. We had so much to go. We hadn't been making any progress. We had one last play before the game was over. And I asked the quarterback, uh, a guy whose name is Rob, I said, "Can I go ahead and throw this last ball?" And he said, "Yeah, of course." You know, if you want to, great. And so I tell everybody, just head downfield, you know.

And uh, so the ball was hiked to me. I stepped back and I had in my mind that I needed to wait, you know, I had to wait at least like 3 4 seconds, maybe longer before I launched this thing because if we don't score a touchdown, we lose no matter what anyway. So, it doesn't matter. I got to get the ball all the way down there and that's about as far as I can throw. So I stepped back in the pocket. Guys are rushing in and right before somebody grabs my flag. I mean, they were literally on me. I launched. I just leaned back and threw it as hard as I could.

And you know how it is in I mean, if you've played any football before, especially if you're not a seasoned quarterback. You never know if you're going to get a good spiral or not. But I happened to throw a tight spiral as well. It's just a beauty. And he went all the way down the field. And a buddy of mine named Tony Jones was streaking down the right hand side and kind of veering in front of somebody and lo and behold, he reached his hands out, caught it in front of this line of defenders and ran in for the touchdown and uh we marched off the uh we marched off the field.

Now that was a euphorious moment for us. Big victory. I mean, I still to this day remember it. Um it it it uh it was quite the story. I retold that story on Facebook probably 5 years ago and again that' been it had been like 20 or 25 years since it happened and the players on the team some of my old buddies from University of Illinois they started chiming in and believe it or not some of them had different stories and I was like no that's not right I know exactly what happened it's so crystal clear in my mind.

And yet, uh, they were saying, "Oh, you didn't throw that. Uh, somebody else threw that." I said, "No, I definitely threw it." And I wouldn't forget that. Anyway, um, I think it was finally put to rest when Tony Jones chimed in and saying, "Yeah, I caught that ball and Firestone threw it." I was so happy about that. But what it taught me about storytelling is how important it is to us. My college experience, I didn't have a lot of like sports victories. I was studying mathematics and philosophy in college and I felt like I was kind of an athlete, but I I really wasn't on a college team of any kind.

I just loved playing basketball primarily and a little bit of flag football. And but that was a big one for me because it was one of those moments where I was like, "Yeah, I can do this. and uh was part of my sort of story, but apparently it was a part of another guy's story. And so we we both had our both our hero accounts of this and it really I guess irked me in a in a way that somebody would challenge my myth because certain aspects of my self-standing were tied to the fact that that actually happened and I was there and I threw the ball and we won a game.

It was the only flag football game we ever won as far as I can remember. But it goes to show you just how important myths are. Stories. I may have embellished it. Maybe it was 30 yards. Maybe it was 80 yards. Well, I know if it's an embellishment, I would think 50 or 60 is probably about as far as I could have thrown it anyway, even as a young person.

But the point is is that that deeper meaning that shika can rise to the level the kind of set apart story in some way that gives meaning to other stories because I I leveraged that in my own disposition for years afterwards as I attempted to do other things in life remembering how I had once won this football game with the throw of a lifetime.

Anyway, well that brings me really to this whole notion of myths as meta narratives. But really if you think about these myths according to people like Eliata, they group themselves in a kind of in certain categories. Um some psychologists call them archetypes for that reason. They're types of myth that are apex myths. They are so meaningful when they happen and when they're told that they give meanings to the other stories in our lives. And so if you do some study in types of myths, you're going to see things like myths of origin. You're going to find those in almost every culture that somehow the people got started or the species got started.

you know, the epic of Gilgamesh or um you know, uh um you know, some some people even look at the Old Testament scriptures, particularly Genesis chapters 1 to 11, uh are sometimes thought of as a kind of origin myth. And in this sense, the word myth isn't pjorative. it isn't a problem because you're looking at those stories as apex stories from which all other stories begin to get their meaning. And that is really I mean when you look at Genesis you you can't help but notice how crucial Genesis 1 2 and 3 are for christologology for you know the IMO day God creating the first Adam so that we might have a second Adam who might give us hope. All of that is rooted in the fact that we have quote unquote a myth of origin.

That doesn't mean it's false. It's important to know here we don't mean fable here. We don't mean false story. What we mean is an apex story, a meta narrative, a hyoska that is in a sense giving everything else its meaning. And that is clearly what's happening uh at least in part in the Genesis account. Genesis is so important to the rest of the Bible that you can look at it as the governing myth as it were. Okay. Well, there are other myths as well that are archetypal. The myths of paradise. Um, this would could be either be the garden of Eden or on the other end it could be heaven.

But place where you know there's a a utopia of sorts the ideal state even in Plato's republic we have the ideal republic that is organized around the guardians and and the uh you know the auxiliaries and and the producers. This notion of a myth of paradise is I think archetypal among many cultures. We have the myth of the trickster, the myths of the mentor, the myths of the quest, the myth of powerful women. It kind of goes on and on. You can do a whole study here on these categories of myths that uh human beings tell in various cultures.

Now, the one I want to zero in on here because it's going to ultimately tie back to our life and it's it's um going to prepare the way, if you will, for our discussion of dream interpretation uh coming up in a few weeks. And that is Joseph Campbell's well-known book uh Hero with a Thousand Faces because he talks about the hero myth and uh the hero myth can be told. I you know when I first read that book I think I came up with like 12 different stages for the hero's myth. Um I've seen it described as in as little as three stages.

I typically break it down into about five, but depending on how you sort of parse them out, you'll get a different number of how many stages there are to the heroes myth. But this one is I I want to mention this one talk a little bit about it. We're going to in the next episode we're going to talk about philosophy as demythalization and I'll be looking a little bit more at Jordan Peterson's work and maps of meaning um and and and and in a different way of approaching the whole way of using myth in philosophy. But in this case, you're looking at archetypal stories from which we develop meaningful lives.

And you really can't find a better example of this than the heroes myth described in Joseph Campbell's book uh Hero with a Thousand Faces. My uh shout out to my brother-in-law Tim Cuni who first gave me that book for my birthday many years ago and uh many many years ago. It might be 20 years ago now. But uh you know it sat on my shelf for a while until I finally got around to reading it. And uh yeah, it was revolutionary for me. Let's just look here at these what I'm going to call five stages very briefly. And I believe by looking at these you'll see what I mean by how significant they are for the meaningfulness of our own lives.

Everybody is the hero to their own story. And the hero myth is an account of how the hero's journey typically unfolds. And that is an extraordinary template for understanding the meaningfulness of our own lives. Okay. Well, in stage one of these five, I guess I'll hold my hand up because we'll talk about these five stages. I call stage one the call. Typically, it be begins with ordinary life. You, you know, I grew up on the south side of Chicago. We played in the backyard. We played with cars in the dirt a lot. I rode bicycles a lot and um the ordinary world is kind of sloppy. It's kind of normal. Um you have this sort of everyday life story and that's where the adventure begins. Somewhere in that ordinary life, a spark goes off and the call is made.

Sometimes this is called the call to adventure where the hero is faced with something that makes him begin his adventure. This might be a problem. It might be a challenge. might be, you know, in the case of young people today, what typically happens is they'll make it onto a sports team or they'll make it into a school or they'll go out of their ordinaries, let's say grade school, and now they're going into high school or maybe it's going into college. Sometimes these hero journeys, they don't really begin at the same time.

Some people start them more, you know, earlier in their life and other people and in, you know, if you think of America, the typical hero journey begins when you graduate high school and you're got entry into your favorite college or you got a scholarship or something like that. And then that's where we would say the hero is called out of their ordinary world. So that's uh that's what I would call stage one. Stage two I'm going to call the refusal. And in this the young person or the hero is apprehensive. I don't really want to go that far away from home. I'm not sure that's the right major for me. I understand that the school has laid out the red carpet for me, but you know what? I'd rather just work here at the local hardware store.

Uh those kinds of things. The hero attempts to refuse the adventure because of some mitigating reason. He's maybe he's comfortable or she's comfortable where she's at or maybe she's just afraid of something new. Whatever it is, there's apprehension, there's resistance. That's when the hero meets with their mentor. So, the refusal stage has this apprehension and then it you go to a trusted advisor who helps you to process and work this out. Notice how each of these stages has an important role in their personal development. The call to adventure is a call out of ordinary life, stage one. Stage two is the resistance in the meeting with the mentor.

That's where somebody helps you to say something like, "You've got this. You can do this. You were meant for this. You really should go off to college. They made you a great offer. I know there's unknowns there. I know you might not be comfortable there, but maybe you should go anyway. And you've got all the tools you need to do it. You may have not exercised them all, but you will. You'll be just you'll be just fine. So, that's stage two. Stage three, I would call the departure.

This is where there's some moment where the hero, the young person crosses the threshold. They leave the ordinary world. Maybe this is uh the first time. Yeah, I know with Sam Wise Gami for example in the Lord of the Rings says, "I've gone I' if I take one more step, I'll go farther than I've ever gone away from the Shire." And that's the kind of feeling that you get in stage three, what I'm calling the departure. The hero leaves the ordinary world for the first time and crosses the threshold into adventure. In a sense, there's no going back. You got on the bus, you got on the airplane, you got into the car, or you've arrived.

And that is it's a big deal. Um, it's also a very important maturation point. And again, the beauty of these these insights by Joseph Campbell are that they are pivotal moments in the growth of every human person. And so this is why it's an archetypal story. You're always the hero of your own story as you continue to develop. It's only when you go retrograde where you become a villain. You're not a hero. You're an antagonist. We're talking about the protagonist, the one who's growing into what they were meant to be. They've crossed the threshold now. They've gotten called towards something that's meaningful. They've taken the step with the help and of an advisor, a mentor, a a counselor of some kind.

Could be a parent, could be a youth worker, it could be, you know, a pastor, uh could be any one of these people, but they now have taken that step. They've gotten the moral courage. They've gotten the moral fortitude and they have moved forward in life and and crossed the threshold. Now immediately when you cross the threshold you run into a new world and the new world you encounter has different rules. Might call it your first cross-cultural experience. Anybody I've lived overseas both in Asia and in Europe and in every case, you know, after you get over that honeymoon period, you've got to learn the culture and you got to know and figure out who are your friends and who are your enemies. And this is where the hero has to make use discernment. They have to begin using the skills they've developed in their ordinary world to transform this extraordinary world, this new world that they're now in into something that they can navigate.

And that's where the uh where you know the hero kind of figures out who their friends are, what are the the the the things they need to overcome if they're going to college, for example. If I continue on with that uh example, they might have to figure out where do I get my books, where's the cafeteria, if uh you know uh you know where where do I pick up my mail, you know what hours are things open? um among my friends on this floor who kind of sees the world the way I do and jives with me and who might be a problem for me.

All of that stuff is being determined there after crossing the threshold into that new world. Some of them are going to be your friends and in your friend group my daughter used to call it her squad. Others are going to be neutral and others are going to be in your way. Now, they may not be in your way for malicious reasons. It might just be general competition. But whatever it is, you're going to assess that new world, and you're going to have tests. And these are tests of will. These are going to be you're going to be face to face with your foes. I know in the college classroom at the University of Illinois when I was there.

I don't know if it's still this way, but everything was graded on a curve. In a sense, everybody's your friend and enemy for that reason. If they can help you understand material better, great. If they can't, they're you're in your way because if they get a higher score than you, they're going to get a higher grade than you. Uh kind of the way it should be, kind of merit-based. But um regardless, when you've crossed the threshold, you've gone into this new world, you've assessed who your friends and enemies are, you're going to encounter tests, and that will test those friendships. Those will that'll those will test your own fortitude and your own capabilities, and you can't do anything but grow. All right. Well, that's stage three. Hopefully, this is sounding somewhat iconic. Maybe it's not college for you. Maybe it's something else. Maybe it's called to a new job. We go through, if Joseph Campbell is right, the hero's journey is cyclical.

The stories that we tell from our parents in our early life grow and they find their way into bigger and newer environments. And uh these new worlds as you begin to map out if your world becomes in a sense bigger and your map becomes map of life experience becomes bigger you're able to navigate these worlds more seamlessly and you know not everyone's your friend. Um so you have to choose your friends wisely and you have to learn to navigate the terrain and to understand where your contribution in this world is going to be. Okay. Well that's stage three. Now as we move on, I call stage four the right of initiation.

The hero in this stage experiences a major obstacle. Could be a life ordeath crisis. Could be an event that was so scary or so challenging as to nearly being overwhelming. And you survived. you made it through. The hero gains his reward or accomplishes his goal. In athletics, that's easy to see because maybe it's a championship or maybe it's just winning one game when you knew you really shouldn't have been in the mix anyway, but you managed to win. Um, typically this right of initiation is a place where you kind of pull together some of your tools and you make you have some achievements. You have some things to put on your CV.

So, in the previous stage where we talked about the departure, you're getting your your your friends and enemies understood. You're you're beginning to have some tests, you know, let's call them quizzes. In the right of initiation, this is where the test and the final exam happens. You actually have to complete a project. You get that year-end re review. You you close a project, you write a book, you uh develop a program. It took all your skills and your your your your your aptitudes and your energy and your friendships to aligned to get there. And um and and that really is where I'm calling the right of initiation. You've actually done something.

And you know, when I look at young people in particular, they're looking at their resumes and they're looking for lines within their resume that show legitimate experiences, accomplishments. Um you're trying to show that your right of initiation was robust and that you know you have you have things under your belt um that demonstrate you know in the military it's quite clear they have medals or they have stripes or they have achievements that are uh on their uniforms and they make it very plain in the military what kind of orals and rewards have you gone through through this right of initiation. And that kind of sets you up, as you will, for the journey back home.

You've done this, you've done that, you've built that CV or resume, you've gotten those patches of those badges, you've gotten this the uh the accolades and the accomplishments that you set out to get. And now you're either, you know, you're ready to sort of come back into ordinary everyday life. This is sometimes called the road backstage. Um, I just call it the completion of the right of initiation. Once you've finished that, you're going to go home and tell your family and friends about it. Consolidate yourself. Maybe you go on vacation and go, "Woo, man, I'm so glad I graduated. Man, that was by the skin of my teeth."

Whatever it is, that's stage four. And in the final stage, and this is I think um if you've in fact, how do I put this? Developed well and you're um fully immersed in your calling, your vocation. You've had some scars, some battle wounds. You've had some successes. you you have your network of friends. You know what your who your enemies are and why you're trying to overcome them. When you've gotten that far in your story, in your personal story, as it were, in your hero's journey, there is usually what's called the final battle. Sometimes this stage, I think uh Joseph Campbell calls it the resurrection hero.

This is where the hero faces their final test, where everything is at stake and he must use everything he's learned in order to overcome this final obstacle. And I I would argue that if you are, you know, an achiever fully developing into whatever calling that you're in, you will after many tests and after you've gotten your accolades, you built your CV, that's where the fun's just beginning because you're going to encounter some ambition, some calling, something that you feel like you must do before you die.

That's going to take every like ounce of your energy, every skill set you've developed, every network that you've created to overcome. I had that distinct feeling in my own career when I a graduated with my PhD and b I published the book co-authored with um Dr. Nathan Jacobs. When we published that book and I published a subsequent one called content theology at the boundaries of reason, I had been on a 15-year journey to try to a get the PhD and b make a publishable contribution to the field that mattered. That is hard to do. There's a lot of people publishing today. Maybe they're using AI.

Maybe they're publishing with lower publishers. I I'm talking about refereeed publishers of the highest order with the top peers in your field. If you're trying to publish there, which is kind of where I believe you make the difference in the academy, is in the ivory towers, that is a battle that's going to take everything you've got and it's not going to be easy to do. And uh for me at least that in that point in my career, I felt like that was the final battle. It took me nine years. I'm going to tell this story on another episode sometime, but in my own life, that was the resurrection hero story for me.

And when I get to uh the dream interpretation episodes, I'm going to come back to that story toward the end of those episodes and talk about a dream I had that is an archetypal dream like the hero's journey. And so look for that in the in coming uh weeks and months. Um anyway, so in this stage five, I'm calling it the return. You have this final battle. And in this final test, everything is at stake. You have to use everything that you've learned uh to overcome the final um you know, test if you will. And then you come back and you bring your knowledge to the ordinary world to help those who remain there to travel along the same road.

And that I think is a significant um a significant moment here. It's called the return. The hero brings his knowledge. Sometimes I think Joseph Campbell calls it the return with elixir. the magic potion, the secret sauce as it were. You've been there. You've handled the greatest of all battles in my world in the academy. Maybe it's getting the PhD or it's publishing the big book and the book, let's say it's wellreceived and now you're able to help others to write in a similar sort of way or you're bringing them along with you on this journey. For me that led to a couple of other books.

It led to things like uncontent theology, the boundaries of reason. It led to the persistence of the sacred and modern thought. It led to um books with Cambridge and my book on friendship and other things that came in the wake of that first resurrection hero final battle moment that I had getting through the PhD and publishing my first major manuscript. And so that can be in any field. By the way, I'm using the academic world because that's the one I'm familiar with, but it could be some major, you know, battle that you've had in your own field.

And once you've sort of figured it out, you've used all your skills to overcome it, you um you're able to come back to the community and share your wisdom with others. And that's where the hero's journey um culminates. if you will, you become the mentor and you take proteges with you.

One of the things I'm doing with the honors program at Champion Christian College or working with uh you know prep year and turning point or is is is really saying having been there and done that maybe I can take some of these young people on a on the early stages of their own journey and you know help them with the elixir as it were that I have uh brought back with me after many many tests and final battles. And again, you know, for those of if there's anybody out there who's, you know, like me, 60 years old or, you know, older than than just young people, because most of the people I I think I typically talk with are younger than myself. Um, this whole hero's journey is cyclical. I remember after writing um in defense of conser religion which was that book right after my PhD that I felt like was the one I was meant to write in this world. I felt like my my job was over like man I could be I could retire now.

It was such such a good final battle good moment for me. And yet, as God's graced me with more years and and and and presented with me with more battles, I realized there are bigger and bigger ones. And as long as he's given me life and breath, I need to go after them. I need to utilize the skills he's given me and uh not let not let the old man in, as it were. I don't know if you've heard that one before, but continue to see where God might use me for his kingdom work and continue that because that's the meta narrative under which a lot of my life has been constructed.

So anyway, this is the source work for philosophy as myth. Philosophy as myth is really recognizing that the stories we tell are vital to the sort of self-standing that we maintain and develop in our own lives. And this is just one of those myths, those common stories that we tell. But oh, how meaningful they are. In my own life with my kids, they can tell you. I have this book. I don't have it on me here uh because I'm actually at a different location. I'm in Branson, Missouri uh on holiday, but I I couldn't help but bring some of my equipment and and and do a few of my episodes here just because it helps me relax to talk about philosophy. So, here I am. But, uh one of the things I did was I had this book called The Book of Virtue. And I used to tell stories to the kids all the time. And these are great stories. And maybe that's where I can close today's episode and just say choose your stories wisely.

There are stories that are not edifying, that are not worthy of our attention because they're not virtuous. They're not true, beautiful, and good. They're not built on faith, hope, and love, but rather they are stories that celebrate something else in the human condition. Yes, I don't deny that those things exist and that we need to probe them as philosophers, as Christians, as people who are trying to learn about the world that we inhabit. Don't deny that. But I always lean right in the stories. In other words, I lean towards those stories which are edifying, that grow something significant in me, that are worth, you know, that are worth something, that lead me to godliness.

And I guess that's where faith-seeking understanding in that meta story that is, you know, the Bible in the the western intellectual tradition really matter most to me is because they pull me out of the slums. They pull me out of the despair and the difficulties in life and make me understand that there's more to this world than meets the eye. And that's really the beauty of philosophy is myth is the recognition that the stories the great stories that we tell have within them a truth a a a meaningfulness a logos a a a a center that helps me grow as a human being into what I was meant to be. We're going to talk more about this in the next episode where I'm going to talk about myth and the process of demythalization.

And that is a particular kind of strategy for unpacking the hidden meaning of the myth that we have in the stories that we tell. Right now we just looked at archetypes. We looked at the way in which story matters to how we get our intellectual bearings and our identity in this world and so forth. Next time we'll be talking about how to get the truth out of the myth. All right. Well, that's it for now. I hope that was helpful to you. We'll talk more about it in the next episode. Blessings to you and I'll see you next time on the Firestone Files. 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 Bible. 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.