This chapter examines "the Petite Fable," the eschatological myth concluding Leibniz’s Theodicy, written within and against the height of the Enlightenment movement to liberate reason from the shadow of unreason.  Leibniz’s myth can be read as part of an early and self-conscious diagnosis of the intellectual trends of his time, and an attempt to identify what is lost in philosophy when reason is purified into only its critical function.  The myth is not, therefore, the product of a naive faith in an arch-rational metaphysics, but that of a critical insight concerning the boundaries of reason.  Second, it also owes its content, form and themes to a tradition of myth-writing closely entwined with the pre-modern reception of Plato, of which the most notable example is the Dream of Scipio concluding Cicero’s own Republic.  Both eschatological myths are homages to Plato’s Myth of Er, and both explore the themes of political duty in the temporal world against the eternal and infinite, and the consolation that only a mythic philosophy can provide to bridge that gap.

presentations:

• X. Internationaler Leibniz-Kongress - Hannover, July 2016
• Center for European Studies Dissertation Workshop - Harvard University, November 2015
• Graduate Workshop in Political Theory - Harvard University Department of Government, February 2015

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The three major myths of the Republic share a parallel plot structure and a common concern regarding the effects of the city’s educational curriculum on the nature of its citizens. As such, the ‘mythic project’ sustained across the myths coincides with the central political-philosophical project of Plato’s foremost work of political philosophy. I argue that this common inquiry on the effects of education provides a particularly compelling framework for understanding the Myth of Er, which has often struck readers as an inscrutable, if not disappointing, conclusion to the Republic. Furthermore, the mutual entwinement of the Republic’s mythic and philosophical projects cannot be read, as is often said of Plato’s myths, as merely two articulations in different modes, of the same philosophical principles. Rather, the myths of the Republic demonstrate how myth can create spaces for taking certain concepts for granted in ways that are critical to Plato’s conception of what it means to be a philosopher.

presentations:

• Northeastern Political Science Association Annual Meeting - Boston, November 2014
• Graduate Workshop, Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics - Harvard University, December 2013*
• Graduate Workshop in Political Theory - Harvard University Department of Government, October 2013

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Against the tendency to consider the German Idealists and their writings on mythology alternately as an anti-philosophical political movement, or as an antipolitical aesthetic movement, I argue that their conception of the new mythology emerges as a solution to a novel political problem, and marks, in turn, the emergence of new problems – such as freedom and equality – in ongoing considerations on the political-philosophical potential of myth. The proponents of the new mythology identified a gap in politics that amounted to a choice between the cohesion of a community and the spiritual freedom of its individual members, which they in turn mapped onto a choice between an ethic founded on rationality and an ethic of poetry. Through the lens of their Platonism, the German Idealists believed that the choice between rationality and poetry could be resolved in mythology. They felt similarly about politics: through a new mythology, they proposed, politics need not sacrifice community or individualism to the other – and the possibility of their reconciliation is what gives the new mythology its novelty.

presentations:

• 'Ways of Knowing' Graduate Conference on Religion - Harvard Divinity School, October 2013*
• 4th Annual European Philosophy Workshop - Harvard University, December 2012*
• Graduate Workshop in Political Theory - Harvard University Department of Government, February 2013

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Why does Cassirer end The Myth of the State, a narrative celebrating philosophy’s battle against myth, by retelling a Babylonian myth? Are all myths anti-philosophical and conducive to undesirable political outcomes? What kind of myth would prove to be the exception, such that a retelling of a myth comes to be an appropriate conclusion to a book that condemns myth generally?  My paper approaches this puzzle through Cassirer's Platonism. The twentieth century saw philosophers divided on the status of myth and its place in philosophy, and just as divisive was the question of where Plato stood on the issue. Whereas Plato often represented – as he did for Karl Popper – the beginning of totalitarian myth-making, Cassirer saw Plato’s work as the beginning of philosophy’s independence from myth.  I argue that Cassirer also found in Plato's writings the possibility of philosophical myths worth emulating, even in modernity.

presentations:

• Graduate Workshop, Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics - Harvard University, March 2014
• Graduate Workshop in Political Theory - Harvard University Department of Government, March 2012

... Read more about Cassirer and the Enuma Elish

Each of the societies represented in the Republic, Utopia, and Bacon’s New Atlantis maintain some version of a myth told in relation to its founding. These founding myths capture what is fundamentally utopian about the enterprises of the kallipolis, Utopia and Bensalem: the desire for a single, coherent beginning of a society in which all its governing principles are laid down at once, and which guarantee its perpetual survival. They articulate a dream for an artificial founding, as opposed to an organic evolution toward the utopian state.

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