True Myths

On meaning, love, and the truths that only exist from inside

This is, after all, a philosophy blog and myth is all that exists. I mean that literally, which will require me as a matter of good manners to explain what I mean by both “myth” and “literally,” and the explanation will — appropriately enough — consume the contents of this essay. Because the word “myth” has been ruined for most modern readers. It has come to mean a falsehood with good production values, a lie we have agreed to find charming, and the ruin is recent enough that we can still name the people who did it and watch them, in the act of doing it, misunderstand what human beings are.

Alan Watts spent much of his life trying to repair the word. In Myth and Ritual in Christianity he defined myth as “a complex of stories — some no doubt fact, and some fantasy — which, for various reasons, human beings regard as demonstrations of the inner meaning of the universe and of human life,” and he was explicit that the word “is not to be used here as meaning ‘untrue’ or ‘unhistorical.’” In his lectures he compressed the definition further: a myth is an image in terms of which we try to make sense of the world. The definition does something enormous with a straight face: it makes myth and meaning interchangeable terms. A myth is not a container that carries meaning the way a truck carries freight, with the cargo separable from the vehicle. The image is the sense-making. Subtract every myth from a human life — every story, every symbol, every image in terms of which the world coheres — and you do not get a residue of clean, unmythologized fact. You get noise that matters to no one.

The lie breathed through silver

The best-documented argument about this happened on a September night in 1931, on a tree-lined path behind Magdalen College, and we know how it went because the man who lost it recorded his surrender. C.S. Lewis, then a theist but not a Christian, held the respectable modern position: he loved the great myths and considered them beautiful falsehoods. J.R.R. Tolkien answered him, and while the exact dialogue that has come down to us is Humphrey Carpenter’s reconstruction rather than a transcript, we have Tolkien’s own contemporaneous record of what Lewis claimed that night, because Tolkien built it into the dedication of the poem he wrote in response. Mythopoeia is addressed “to one who said that myths were lies and therefore worthless, even though ‘breathed through silver.’” The poem’s answer to that position remains one of the most beautiful things ever written about perception: “He sees no stars who does not see them first / of living silver made that sudden burst / to flame like flowers beneath an ancient song.” There is no getting behind the song to the bare stars. The seeing and the singing arrive together.

A month later Lewis wrote to his oldest friend, Arthur Greeves, and, the argument having followed him home from the walk, signed the surrender in a phrase. The story of Christ, he had come to believe, is “simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened.” You do not have to follow Lewis into Christianity to see what he saw on that walk. What he saw is that “myth” and “true” were never opposites. A myth is true when it accurately demonstrates the inner meaning of things, True in the capital-T sense, true as an image of how the world matters, and that kind of truth neither waits for empirical confirmation nor falls to empirical refutation, because it was never a claim of that type. It is true from a certain point of view, and the phrase “from a certain point of view” concedes nothing: it names the only place truth has ever lived.

This is the argument I have been making from the other direction for years. When I wrote that philosophy needs mythology, the claim was that analysis without passion is bloodless and that myth is how a truth gets into the body, how it becomes something a person will act on rather than merely assent to. I now think that formulation was too modest. Myth is not philosophy’s delivery mechanism. Myth is what meaning is: the concrete image in which mattering presents itself. The abstractions of philosophy are the derivative form, the dried flowers pressed flat for cataloguing.

The scientists of the general strike

The ruin of the word has an authorship. The scientistic temperament — the conviction that the empirical register is the only register in which a sentence can be true — attacks mythic thinking as a cognitive failure, a superstition awaiting correction. And no tradition has prosecuted that attack with more institutional confidence than Marxism, which is what makes the Marxist case so clarifying. Engels announced the position in so many words: with Marx’s two great discoveries, “Socialism became a science.” Not a movement, not a hope, not a story about the dispossessed inheriting the earth. A science, contrasted explicitly with the “utopian” socialists whose visions were mere pictures. From there descends a century and a half of the same reflex: religion as error, myth as false consciousness, meaning as ideology to be dissolved by analysis.

The problem is that the most honest theorist the revolutionary tradition ever produced looked at his own movement and found it running on myth all the way down. Georges Sorel’s Reflections on Violence observed that people participating in a great social movement “always picture their coming action as a battle in which their cause is certain to triumph,” and he gave these pictures a name: “These constructions, knowledge of which is so important for historians, I propose to call myths; the syndicalist ‘general strike’ and Marx’s catastrophic revolution are such myths.” Marx’s revolution, named as a myth, by a man trying to make the revolution happen. And Sorel understood exactly what kind of truth-claim a myth makes, which is to say, none of the empirical kind: the myth “must be judged as a means of acting on the present; any attempt to discuss how far it can be taken literally as future history is devoid of sense.” In the Cambridge edition’s rendering of his letter to Daniel Halévy, myths are “not descriptions of things, but expressions of a determination to act.” The scientific socialists never forgave him for saying it, and they never refuted him either, because the refutation would have required exactly what they could not produce: a working-class movement motivated by regression tables.

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What the tradition did instead, having refused to answer him, is the most clarifying episode of all. In 1934 the Soviet state convened the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers and made a single aesthetic doctrine mandatory for every writer in the country. Andrei Zhdanov, delivering the party’s instructions from the platform, defined the method: the writer must depict life “neither ‘scholastically’ nor lifelessly, nor simply as ‘objective reality’, but rather as reality in its revolutionary development.” Not reality as it is. Reality as the revolution requires it to be becoming. “Soviet literature must be able to portray our heroes and to see our tomorrow,” he continued, and then, in the tradition’s oldest nervous tic, denied the obvious: “This will not be utopian since our tomorrow is being prepared by planned and conscious work today.” That is Sorel to the letter — the picture of the coming battle in which the cause is certain to triumph, now issued as state policy with penalties for noncompliance — and the tradition that could not admit myth existed named the doctrine realism. Even the job title was scientistic: Zhdanov’s speech is organized around Stalin’s phrase for writers, “engineers of the human soul,” the mythmaker rebadged in the vocabulary of the polytechnic. When your epistemology permits only one register of truth, you do not stop producing myths. You lose the ability to call them anything but descriptions.

So when the scientistic critic — and especially the Marxist one — attacks mythic thinking, he is attacking the wall his own house stands on. The arc of history bending toward the classless society is a Sorelian myth with the label scratched off. But the deeper irony sits in the founding text itself, in the passage everyone quotes and almost no one quotes in full. Marx called religion the opium of the people; the sentence before the famous one reads, “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.” That is not a description of a cognitive error. Marx is conceding, in prose he could not stop from turning mythic under his own hands, that religion does real work: that it expresses real suffering and protests against it, that it answers to something in human beings that is actually there. His objection was to its political effect, the narcotic pacification of people who ought to revolt. The objection may even be right. But it concedes the whole question at issue: myth is how things matter to us, how they compel us to action or reconcile us to what we cannot change, and the man who understood this best in 1844 founded the tradition that spent the next century calling it a delusion.

The mistake, repeated from Engels to the last debate-me rationalist on your timeline, is a misunderstanding of the manner in which things matter. Things matter in the way they make us feel, and a person trying to communicate how something matters must communicate in images, in stories that everyone involved understands are not empirical claims and that everyone involved understands are not therefore false. The scientistic thinker hears this and believes he is being asked to give up precision, to accept a degraded, subjective substitute for the objective description of reality. His entire error is in the last four words. There has never been a view from nowhere for such a description to issue from. He is not being asked to give up a precision he has. He is being asked to notice that he never had it.

No view from nowhere

That claim sounds like a provocation, but it sits close to the central working problem of both modern philosophy and modern physics, and it has a name in each. Thomas Nagel opened The View from Nowhere by stating it as philosophy’s single problem: “how to combine the perspective of a particular person inside the world with an objective view of that same world, the person and his viewpoint included.” The way a picture on a wall or a bird in a tree appears to you — composed, colored, near or far, mattering or not — is not how the universe had to arrange your consciousness. The neuroscientist Anil Seth calls perception a “controlled hallucination,” the brain’s prediction reined in by the senses, and closes the thought with a sentence Watts would have grinned at: “when we agree about our hallucinations, we call that reality.” Every description you will ever produce is downstream of a presentation the universe was under no obligation to render in that form. The bird in the tree is already an image in terms of which you are making sense of the world. Perception is the first myth.

Physics, which was supposed to be the escape from this condition, turned out to be compatible with it at minimum, and on some of its most serious interpretations an instance of it. Whether quantum mechanics permits a description with the observer deleted is exactly what its rival interpretations are still fighting over; Carlo Rovelli’s relational interpretation locates the entire measurement problem in one bad habit, “the notion of observer-independent state of a system,” and dissolves the paradoxes by dropping the notion. John Wheeler put the same point in a sentence he spent decades defending: “No elementary phenomenon is a phenomenon until it is a registered (observed) phenomenon,” and he drew the conclusion in a word, crossing out “observer” and writing “participator,” a coinage his colleagues have spent fifty years politely declining to think about. Relativity had already indexed every measurement of length and duration to a frame; quantum mechanics indexed every outcome to a measurement context; and the experiments I wrote about in The Eternal Now is a Laboratory Result suggest that time itself is what one part of a correlated system reads off another part from inside. The pattern across all of it is one fact wearing three costumes: every description is made from inside what it describes. Physicists Adam Frank and Marcelo Gleiser and the philosopher Evan Thompson call the forgetting of this fact the Blind Spot — “in the Blind Spot sits experience: the sheer presence and immediacy of lived perception” — and they say the quiet part in print: “There’s no way to render ‘reality’ apart from experience, because the two are always intertwined.”

A lazy version of this argument collapses here into the relativism it should be demolishing. Nothing above licenses “anything goes.” Objectivity is real and precious; it is also, as I argued in The Moon Does Not Prove Physicalism, a disciplined construction that observers build together — instruments, mathematics, replication, criticism — and not a view from nowhere, because there is no one nowhere to have it. The reductionist believes that in translating the felt world into the mathematical one he is trading appearance for reality, giving up warmth to gain precision. He is doing something more interesting: trading one perspectival rendering for another that is stricter, more shareable, more predictive, and vastly narrower, a rendering purchased by deleting from the description everything about the world that makes it matter. The deletion is a fine methodological bargain and a catastrophic metaphysics. The felt world is not the low-resolution preview of the equations. The felt world is the only place the equations have ever been checked.

And this is why the scientistic attack on myth fails at the root. The attacker believes the mythmaker has produced a defective empirical description, when the mythmaker has produced a rendering in the register where mattering lives — the register every human being, including the attacker, actually inhabits. His own certainty that the universe is a meaningless mechanism awaiting disenchantment is not a finding. No instrument reads it out. It is an image in terms of which he makes sense of the world. It is, by Watts’s definition, his myth, and the only thing that distinguishes him from the people he condemns is that they know what they are doing and he does not.

The fall is the epistemology

Now measure our beliefs about love in the empirical register, since we have been invited to measure everything there. The lover believes the beloved is unrepeatable, that this particular person, of the billions available, is the one; the certainty of “forever” outruns every actuarial table; the felt inevitability of the meeting is survivorship bias telling itself a story. Judged as descriptions, our beliefs around love are almost always completely delusional. The scientistic critic can stop here, satisfied, having explained love the way his predecessors explained religion. But we already have the tools to see what he is missing: there is no observer-independent description of what the beloved is worth, and asking for one is not rigor. It is a category error: the demand that a truth which exists only from inside be certified from a nowhere that does not exist.

William James caught the mechanics of this in 1896, in The Will to Believe, and his argument has never been answered, only ignored. Some decisions, he observed, are genuine options: living, momentous, and forced, in the sense that refusing to decide is itself a decision. And within that class sits a stranger category, the truths that depend on our faith in them for their existence. His example is the exact one before us: “Do you like me or not?... The previous faith on my part in your liking’s existence is in such cases what makes your liking come.” Wait for sufficient evidence before trusting, and the trust never becomes warranted, because the other person, met with your withheld and auditing posture, reasonably withholds too. The evidence-first policy does not protect you from error here. It locks you out of the fact. Which is why James rendered his verdict on that policy in a sentence that should be carved over the door of every rationalist institution: “a rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth if those kinds of truth were really there, would be an irrational rule.”

This is why we fall in love, and do not move or climb into it. The language is exact and everyone has always known it. Climbing is the epistemology of verified holds: test the next grip, confirm it bears weight, advance, retreat is always available. You cannot climb into love because the thing at the top does not exist for climbers; it comes into being only downstream of the commitment, like the liking in James’s example, like the trust that creates its own verification. So the lover steps off the ledge not knowing whether the ground will give out beneath them, not knowing whether there will be time to catch themselves — and that beautiful release, the consent to fall without the audit, is not a bug in human attachment awaiting a firmware update from the rationalists. It is the only posture in which certain truths can exist at all. I have written before that Adam’s choice in the garden may have been the first act of love precisely because it risked everything for relationship, and that love is the willingness to preserve otherness rather than absorb it. The fall in Genesis and the fall in falling in love are the same fall. Both are what choosing looks like when the choice is real.

And that is the last connection, the one that closes the circle back to myth. The fall is a permanent condition of having free will. A being who could verify every ground before every step would not be freer than we are; it would have nothing left to choose, because choice under guaranteed outcomes is not choice, and love without exposure is not love but acquisition. The freedom and the falling are the same condition under different descriptions. So of course the truths that govern a free life — that this person is worth everything, that this cause is worth the risk, that meaning is worth constructing in a universe that did not construct it for us — arrive as myths: as images, not inventories; as expressions of a determination to act, not descriptions of things; as commitments that make themselves true from inside and are, from outside, unverifiable forever. That is not their weakness. That is their entire function. The empiricist who waits on the ledge for the data is not being careful. He is declining, politely and with excellent methodology, to be free.

Readers arriving from the political essays, which have spent this summer prosecuting mythmakers for selling prophecy as measurement, are owed an answer to an obvious question: has this essay just written those men their license? It has written the second count of their indictment, because the register-crime runs both ways. The scientistic critic reads myth as failed description. The con artist and the cultist commit the mirror error: they defend descriptions as if they were myths, holding empirical claims — the stolen election, the rigged machines, the guaranteed returns — with the audit-proof interior certainty that belongs by right only to commitments like love. The lover’s myth makes no empirical claims, and so no evidence can refute it; she does not deny the actuarial tables, she declines to be governed by them. The loop denies the court records, and court records live in the register where evidence rules and the audit is legitimate. A true myth cannot be broken by evidence because it never entered evidence’s jurisdiction. A loop is a stack of refuted empirical claims wearing myth’s immunity. The distinction welds this argument to the political ones: the crime was never believing an image; the crime is laundering the registers, passing myth off as measurement on the way up and granting measurement the immunity of myth when the audit comes back.

Myth is all that exists, not because nothing lies outside the images but because nothing arrives except through them: whatever there is reaches every knower as an image seen from inside by someone who chose to trust it. The stars were never bare. He sees no stars who does not see them first of living silver made.

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Go Deeper into the Circus

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