Wednesday, October 04, 2006

The Mythologies Of Facts



“The very notion of truth
is a culturally given direction,
a part of the pervasive nostalgia
for an earlier certainty.
The very idea of a universal stability,
an eternal firmness of principle out there
that can be sought for through the world
as might an Arthurian knight for the Grail,
is, in the morphology of history,
a direct outgrowth of the search for lost gods
in the first two millennia after
the decline of the bicameral mind.
What was then an augury for direction of action
among the ruins of an archaic mentality
is now the search for an innocence of certainty
among the mythologies of facts.”


Julian Jaynes

in The Origin Of Consciousness
In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral









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