Joseph Campbell

Wilber's View

Wilber's treatment of Campbell is the book's clearest single case study in the pre/trans fallacy — the confusion of prerational (childhood, mythic) states with transrational (mystical, post-rational) ones, simply because both are "nonrational." The chapter opens with real warmth: Campbell gets credit, alongside Mircea Eliade and Carl Jung, for championing the idea that mythological thought carries genuine spiritual and mystical significance, and Wilber is explicit that he has "drawn on his works time and again." But the warmth doesn't survive the argument. Wilber's method is to use Campbell's own premises against Campbell's own conclusion: Campbell explicitly accepts Piaget's developmental account of myth — that mythic motifs are produced by the preoperational and early concrete-operational structures of childhood cognition — and then, having granted that, goes on to treat myth taken "as if" true as itself a vehicle of transpersonal wisdom. Wilber's charge is that this move only works by collapsing two very different senses of "nonrational" into one: the prerational (child, myth, magic) and the transrational (mystic, post-formal-operational, contemplative) get lumped together as one undifferentiated "nonrational" category, letting Campbell elevate the first to the status of the second.

Wilber's own conclusion, drawn explicitly from Campbell's premises rather than against them, is that "beyond mythology is reason, and beyond both is Spirit" — myth is not itself the carrier of transpersonal insight, reason is the structure that frees whatever spiritual content is latent within myth by relating to it "as if" rather than literally. This isn't a dismissal of myth's value: Wilber is careful to say the "Jungian/Campbell/mythopoetic approach," divested of its elevationism, remains "a rich source of one's own being and one's own roots." What it can't be, on Wilber's account, is a stand-in for genuine contemplative or mystical attainment.

In Sex, Ecology, Spirituality

There is no greater friend of mythology than Joseph Campbell, and I mean that in a good sense… Campbell has done more than any other person, with the possible exceptions of Mircea Eliade and Carl Jung, to champion the position that mythological thought is the primary carrier of spiritual and mystical awareness. I and countless researchers have drawn on his works time and again.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 6

And yet his position, I believe, is finally untenable, and can be demonstrated to be so using his own assumptions and his own conclusions. For his position is, in the last analysis, a form of elevationism.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 6

To begin with, Campbell openly accepts the essentials of the Piagetian system. That is, he accepts the fact that the basic motifs of mythological thought are produced by the infantile and childhood structures of preop and early conop, and he explicitly says so using Piagetian terms.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 6

And here Campbell commits the classic pre/trans fallacy. Since the prerational realms are definitely mythological, then Campbell wants to call the transrational realms "mythological" as well, since they too are nonrational… So on the one side he lumps together all nonrational endeavors (from primitive mythology to highly developed contemplative encounters), and on the other side—the "bad" side—he dumps poor reason.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 6

Campbell's dual definitions actually undo each other, and point instead to the inexorable conclusion: beyond mythology is reason, and beyond both is Spirit.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 6

But even for those who have developed beyond a concrete mythological approach to the world, the mythological structures themselves… are now junior holons in the person's own compound individuality, and should be honored as a rich source of one's own being and one's own roots. And therein… lies the real value of the Jungian/Campbell/mythopoetic approach (divested of its elevationism).

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 6

In the cosmologies of archaic man, as in those of infancy, the main concern of the creator was in the weal and woe of man. Light was made so that we should see; night so that we might sleep; stars to foretell the weather; clouds to warn of rain. The child's view of the world is not only geocentric, but egocentric.

— Campbell, quoted in Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 6

See Also

• piaget — the developmental framework Campbell accepts but, on Wilber's reading, misapplies
• jung — the other major "myth carries spiritual wisdom" thinker Wilber groups with Campbell
• freud — sides with Piaget against Jung/Campbell on the function of mythic archetypes
• pre-trans-fallacy — the general diagnosis this page applies to Campbell specifically