I’m reminded of a passage on ‘teaching information versus arguing claims’ in Paul Veyne’s “Did the Greeks Believe Their Myths?”:
Myth is information. There are informed people who have alighted, not on a revelation, but simply on some vague information they have chanced upon. If they are poets, it will be the Muses, their appointed informants, who will tell them what is known and said. For all that, myth is not a revelation from above, nor is it arcane knowledge. The Muse only repeats to them what is known—which, like a natural resource, is available to all who seek it.
Myth is not a specific mode of thought. It is nothing more than knowledge obtained through information, which is applied to realms that for us would pertain to argument or experiment. As Oswald Ducrot writes in Dire et ne pas dire, information is an illocution that can be completed only if the receiver recognizes the speaker’s competence and honesty beforehand, so that, from the very outset, a piece of information is situated beyond the alternative between truth and falsehood. To see this mode of knowledge function, we need only read the admirable Father Huc’s account of how he converted the Tibetans a century and a half ago:
“We had adopted a completely historical mode of instruction, taking care to exclude anything that suggested argument and the split of contention; proper names and very precise dates made much more of an impression on them than the most logical reasoning. When they knew the names Jesus, Jerusalem, and Pontius Pilate and the date 4000 years after Creation, they no longer doubted the mystery of the Redemption and the preaching of the Gospel. Furthermore, we never noticed that mysteries or miracles gave them the slightest difficulty. We are convinced that it is through teaching and not the method of argument that one can work efficaciously toward the conversion of the infidel.”
Similarly, in Greece there existed a domain, the supernatural, where everything was to be learned from people who knew. It was composed of events, not abstract truths against which the listener could oppose his own reason. The facts were specific: heroes’ names and patronyms were always indicated, and the location of the action was equally precise (Pelion, Cithaeron, Titaresius . . . place names have a music in Greek mythology). This state of affairs may have lasted more than a thousand years. It did not change because the Greeks discovered reason or invented democracy but because the map of the field of knowledge was turned upside down by the creation of new powers of affirmation (historical investigation and speculative physics) that competed with myth and, unlike it, expressly offered the alternative between true and false.
I’m reminded of a passage on ‘teaching information versus arguing claims’ in Paul Veyne’s “Did the Greeks Believe Their Myths?”: