Maps of Meaning

 Many of you may already be aware of Jordan Peterson due to his runaway best seller 12 Rules for Life. However, Peterson wrote an earlier book entitled Maps of Meaning which is as brilliant as it is difficult to get through. Nonetheless, I wanted to offer a quote from that book which ties in nicely with this developing thread. 

"The world can be validly construed as a forum for action, as well as a place for things. We describe the world as a place of things, using the formal methods of science. The techniques of narrative, however - myth, literature and drama - portray the world as a forum for action. The two forms of representation have been unnecessarily at odds, because we have not yet formed a clear picture of their respective domains. The domain of the former is the objective world - what is, from the perspective of intersubjective perception. The domain of the later is the world of value - what is and what should be, from the perspective of emotion and action." [Maps of Meaning, pg. xxi]

Let's unpack this a bit. The most obvious point being made here is that we understand the world through two different lenses. One asks the question - what is out there? This mode of understanding is what has become known as science. The other mode asks - what does it mean and what should we do? This mode of understanding is what has become known as literature. We can simplify this with a succinct sound byte: Mythos vs. Logos. Mythos is stories and Logos is logical reasoning. I did not coin this dichotomy. You can Google "Mythos vs Logos" and find out a lot more about it.

The World of Logos is the world of science, although technically speaking it is quite a bit more. Science focuses on empirical observations and a method for discovering properties of the material world. Mathematics, on the other hand, is rational rather than empirical but is a big part of the World of Logos. So is logic and critical thinking. So, science is really one of several components of the World of Logos. But, for the sake of simplicity, we tend to group all the components together and call them science. There is much more to be said about this, but I will spare you the details.

The World of Mythos is the world of stories, although technically speaking again, it is quite a bit more as well. As Peterson points out it includes "myth, literature, and drama". But it includes jokes, persuasion, propaganda, and  culture as well. We don't have a single word to describe it as we do in the previous case. So, again, for the sake of simplicity we will group it all together and refer to it as the World of Mythos.

Notice the similarity between this idea and previous posts. The September post discussed two schools of thought on writing. We can think, generally, of the Technical/Teleological School as the Logos School and the Expressive/Inspirational School as the Mythos School. This dichotomy is not perfect for reasons I will explain shortly. But, it does help us to simplify things in order to understand them better.

The October post was on Narrative vs Logical Reasoning and is fairly obvious in how it fits the dichotomy. 

The November post (actually dated October 31) asserts two independent consciousnesses, the consciousness of the Neo-cortex and the consciousness of the limbic system. We can think of the Neo-cortex as the Logos brain and the limbic system as the Mythos brain. 

As I said earlier, this dichotomy is not perfect as the two brains work together "somewhat" but not perfectly. I can explain this best with some examples. 

There are endless stories in science which reveal how we use mythos to justify logos. For example, we have the story of Copernicus bravely using science to fight back ignorance. We have a similar story for Galileo. August Kekulé who discovered the ring structure of benzene tells a story about a dream he had in which a snake was swallowing its own tail. This story is particularly interesting because the snake swallowing its own tail is a symbol in ancient mythology representing renewal, among other things. It is the Ouroboros and is one of the most fundamental ideas in the World of Mythos. Stories inform scientific exploration by providing motivation to go into the unknown. We have stories about scientists who were ridiculed for years until their crackpot ideas turned out to be true. Two examples that come to mind are the theory of tectonic plates and the theory of dinosaur extinction 65 million years ago. These are both fascinating stories along with many others which are, unfortunately, way beyond the scope of this post. So, the World of Mythos plays a role in the World of Logos. But, does it work the other way?

Does the World of Logos have a role in the World of Mythos? Is there a science of story telling? Wait! That sounds familiar. Isn't that what the January 2020 post was about. Yes, indeed it was! And I pointed out that a lot of recent research has been done in this area. But, the work that led up to that goes back way further. In order to explain this I need to make a distinction between scholarship and research. The nature of this dichotomy is not universally agreed upon. So, I will take some liberty here. Scholarship tends to be critical and interpretive. So, when one studies documents or books, it tends to be scholarship. When one gathers empirical data about the material world, organizes it and tests it to advance our understanding of the material world it tends to be research. 

So, scholarly study of the World of Mythos begins in the early 20th century with the rise of a field of critical studies called Narratology. As our understanding of brain function advanced, some of that work moved into what we now call the Science of Storytelling. An intermediate stage in this evolution can be seen the December 2020 post on The 7 Plots. It is an exciting time to be interested in storytelling as our knowledge of it will continue to grow faster and faster as we integrate Mythos and Logos in our understanding of stories.