In contrast to Horton, American anthropologist Stewart Guthrie revives Tylor’s preoccupation with personalistic, or anthropomorphic, explanations in religion. For Guthrie, as for Tylor, anthropomorphism constitutes the heart of the religious, including mythic, explanation. But Guthrie breaks with Horton as well as with Tylor in finding anthropomorphism in science as well as in religion. Where for both Horton and Tylor anthropomorphism is an exclusively primitive way of explaining the world, for Guthrie it is a nearly universal one.
Karl Popper
Karl Popper (1902–94), the Viennese-born philosopher of science who eventually settled in England, breaks even more radically than Horton with Tylor. First, Tylor never explains how science ever emerged, for religion, including myth, provides a comprehensive and seemingly nonfalsifiable explanation of all events in the physical world. Second, science for Tylor does not build on myth but simply replaces it. For Popper, science emerges out of myth – not, however, out of the acceptance of myth but out of the criticism of it: ‘Thus, science must begin with myths, and with the criticism of myths’. By ‘criticism’ Popper means not rejection but assessment, which becomes scientific when it takes the form of subjection to attempts to falsify the truth claims made.
Going even further, Popper maintains that there are scientific as well as religious myths – this antithetically to Tylor, himself never cited by Popper. The difference between scientific and religious myths is not in their content but in the attitude towards them. Where religious myths are accepted dogmatically, scientific myths are questioned:
science and Myth
My thesis is that what we call ‘science’ is differentiated from the older myths not by being something distinct from a myth, but by being accompanied by a second-order tradition – that of critically discussing the myth. Before, there was only the first-order tradition.
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Myth
A definite story was handed on. Now there was still, of course, a story to be handed on, but with it went something like a silent accompanying text of a second-order character: ‘I hand it on to you, but tell me what you think of it. Think it over. Perhaps you can give us a different story.’ . . . We shall understand that, in a certain sense, science is myth-making just as religion is.
(Popper, Conjectures and Refutations, p. 127)
Popper even maintains that scientific theories remain myth-like, for theories, like myths, can never be proved, only disproved, and therefore ‘remain essentially uncertain or hypothetical’.
It is not clear what Popper would be able to say of the myth of Adonis. The myths that grab him are creation myths, for they make bold conjectures about the origin of the world and thereby start the process of scientific theorizing. For the proverbial record, the same Popper wrote a book entitled The Myth of the Framework and by ‘myth’ there means what William Rubinstein means in The Myth of Rescue: a staunchly held false conviction, one not to be further tested but to be abandoned!
Like Popper, the English classical philosopher F. M. Cornford (1874–1943) argued that Greek science grew out of myth and religion, but he limits himself to the content and considers not at all the attitude. For Cornford, science perpetuates, albeit in secular form, religious and mythical beliefs. Cornford contends that Greek science only subsequently severed its ties to religion and became empirical science. Cornford later argued that Greek science never severed its ties to religion and never became empirical science.
Tylor himself does contrast the testability of science to the untestability of myth, but he never specifies the nature of the test:
We are being trained to the facts of physical science, which we can test and test again, and we feel it a fall from this high level of proof when we turn our minds to the old records which elude such testing,
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and are even admitted on all hands to contain statements not to be
relied on.
(Tylor, Primitive Culture, vol. I, p. 280)
Yet Tylor must grant primitives some capacity for criticism, for how else to account for the eventual replacement of myth by science? Who save the last generation of primitives was present to create science, to substitute it for myth, and to forge modernity?
science and Myth
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Chapter 2
Myth and philosophy
The relationship between myth and science overlaps with the relationship between myth and philosophy, so that many of the theorists considered in the previous chapter could have been considered here instead. Yet there is an even greater array of positions held on the relationship between myth and philosophy: that myth is part of philosophy, that myth is philosophy,
that philosophy is myth, that myth grows out of philosophy, that philosophy grows out of myth, that myth and philosophy are independent of each other but serve the same function, and that myth and philosophy are independent of each other and serve different functions.
Paul Radin
Recall that where Tylor and Frazer alike subsumed both myth and science under philosophy, Lévy-Bruhl, in reaction, set myth against both science and philosophy. For him, primitive identification with the world, as evinced in myth, is the opposite of the detachment from the world demanded by science and philosophy.
In turn, the most abrupt reaction to Lévy-Bruhl came from the Polish-born anthropologist Paul Radin (1883–1959), who arrived in America as an infant. The title of his key book, Primitive Man as Philosopher, is self-explanatory. Though oddly Radin never
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mentions Tylor here, he in effect revives Tylor’s view, while at once qualifying and extending it. Radin grants that most primitives are far from philosophical but observes that so are most persons in any culture. He distinguishes between the average person, the ‘man of action’, and the exceptional person, the ‘thinker’:
The former [i.e. the man of action] is satisfied that the world exists and that things happen. Explanations are of secondary consequence. He is ready to accept the first one that comes to hand. At bottom it is a matter of utter indifference. He does, however, show a predilection for one type of explanation as opposed to another. He prefers an explanation in which the purely mechanical relation between a series of events is specifically stressed. His mental rhythm – if I may be permitted to use this term – is characterized by a demand for endless repetition of the same event or, at best, of events all of which are on the same general level. . . .
Now the rhythm of the thinker is quite different. The postulation of a mechanical relation between events does not suffice. He insists on a description couched either in terms of a gradual progress and evolution from one to many and from simple to complex, or on the postulation of a cause and effect relation.
(Radin, Primitive Man as Philosopher, pp. 232–3)
Both ‘types of temperament’ are to be found in all cultures, and in the same proportion. If Lévy-Bruhl is therefore wrong to deny that any primitives are thinkers, Tylor is equally wrong to assume that all are. But those primitives who are get credited by Radin with a philosophical prowess far keener than that granted even mythmakers by Tylor, who calls them ‘savage philosophers’. For Radin, primitive speculations, found most fully in myths, do more than account for events in the physical world, as, alas, the myth of Adonis could at most be said to do. Myths deal with metaphysical topics of all kinds, such as the ultimate components of reality. Contrary to Tylor, primitives, furthermore, are capable of rigorous criticism:
philosophy and Myth
it is manifestly unfair to contend that primitive people are deficient
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