Myth And Meaning

In these five lectures originally prepared for the CBC, Claude Lévi-Strauss, one of the world's greatest living thinkers, offers the insights of a lifetime spent interpreting myths and trying to discover their significance for human understanding.

The anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss was one of the greatest intellectuals of the twentieth century. His work has had a profound impact not only within anthropology but also linguistics, sociology and philosophy. In this short book he examines the nature and role of myth in human history, distilling a lifetime of writing into a few sharp insights. It is a crystalline overview of many of the basic ideas underlying his work, including the theory of structuralism and the difference between 'primitive' and 'scientific' thought and shows why Levi-Strauss remains a hugely important intellectual figure. With a new foreword by Patrick Wilcken.

In addresses written for a wide general audience, one of the twentieth century's most prominent thinkers, Claude Lévi-Strauss, here offers the insights of a lifetime on the crucial questions of human existence. Responding to questions as varied as 'Can there be meaning in chaos?', 'What can science learn from myth?' and 'What is structuralism?', Lévi-Strauss presents, in clear, precise language, essential guidance for those who want to learn more about the potential of the human mind.

Aniela JeffÃ(c) explores the subjective world of inner experience. In so doing, she follows the path of the pioneering Swiss psychologist C.G. Jung, whose collaborator and friend she was through the final decades of his life. Frau JaffÃ(c) shows that any search of meaning ultimately leads to the inner mythical realm and must be understood as a limited subjective attempt to answer the unanswerable. Any conclusion drawn from such a quest is one's very own - its formulation is one's own myth.

Norman Austin has organized his analysis of classical Greek myths around Lacan's dichotomy between (ineffable) Being and the meanings imposed upon Being by culturally determined signifiers. The primary signifiers in myth (the gods), as projections of contradictory meanings, impel human consciousness in contradictory directions: toward heroic self-realization, on the one hand, and into the fear, guilt, and despair resulting from failure, on the other. The gods both reveal and occlude that which they signify--the signified; ultimately, Being itself. Austin includes one chapter on the father's ghost in Shakespeare's Hamlet, and another on Albert Camus's The Stranger, as examples of the power of mythical archetypes to reveal and occlude Being, even when the apparatus of gods has been excluded. Despite their pessimism, ancient myths also affirm that the paradoxes are not insoluble. Austin concludes by outlining the profile of the Universal Self intimated in myth, religion, and philosophy as the joint venture of the world realized in consciousness, consciousness realized in consciousness, and consciousness realized in the world.

Myth and Meaning in Early Daoism examines some of the earliest texts associated with the Daoist tradition (primarily the Daode jing, Zhuangzi, and Huainanzi) from the outlook of the comparative history of religions and finds a kind of thematic and soteriological unity rooted in the mythological symbolism of hundun, the primal chaos being and principle that is foundational for the philosophy and practice of the Dao as creatio continua in cosmic, social, and individual life. Dedicated to the proposition that ancient Chinese texts and traditions are often best understood from a broad interdisciplinary and interpretive perspective, this work when it was written challenged many prevailing conceptions of the Daode jing and Zhuangzi as primarily philosophical texts without any religious significance or affinity with the later sectarian traditions. While controversial and at times playfully provocative, the methodology and findings of this book are still important for the ongoing scholarship about Daoism in China and the world.