From false consciousness to the shifting reality of myth

Abstract

In everyday usage, the word ‘myth’—when not referring to Greek myths—is used to dismiss something as a misconception, something characteristic of irrationality, obscurantism or ignorance itself. This judgement stems from a modern perspective, a view that regards myths as a primitive form of thought, a tendency believed to belong to the past and to have no place in this rational world. The existence of myths today is thus seen as a setback to any possible progress in both science and humanity. Like the concept of myth, ideology carries a contradictory assessment, caught in a tension between ideology and a set of a priori knowledge linked to ideology as a distinction between true and false knowledge. Thus, predominantly in political discourse and in the colloquial use of words, the classical sense of ideology, as false consciousness, seems to have shifted towards the definition of myth, whilst ideology is more frequently used in its neutral sense, distinct from the characteristics of myth; this is what we propose to analyse in the present paper.