I can get "stuck in Freudian ways of thinking that are outdated", sexist, and encouraging of cliches - but how is he racist or viciously baby-eating?
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Even if he was, it has nothing to do with the Monomyth, which was his most enduring work. People are remarkably quick to bring up character flaws, thinking it invalidates the speaker's position.
I've had people explain the "racist" part by him asserting that all human mythological structures are basically variations on what one finds in the standard Western corpus of literature.
That's not exactly what he is saying, but it is easy for some people to see either the old "everyone else is just primitive Europeans" argument or "geez, 'universalist' principles sure look like European norms" philosophy.
His thing was much more to do with Carl Jung. As far as I'm concerned the Jungian aspects of his work are the weakest. Trying to tie the monomyth framework he developed into Jung's universal subconcious neglected far more interesting ideas, the physiological bases of which were not available until after he died.
IMO: The Monomyth has been used as a hammer. I see it as a scaffold, but I'm posting this under the auspices of my tutor, Dr. Funk.
Graeme
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I can get "stuck in Freudian ways of thinking that are outdated", sexist, and encouraging of cliches - but how is he racist or viciously baby-eating?
Unknown. Well, at least it seems clear to those who take a negative viewpoint on his philosophies. Me, I don't claim to be an expert by any stretch. But I do enjoy those teachings of his that I've heard and get a lot out of them. But Campbell can be flame bait here on a level damned near that of the sasquatch wars
Campbell's big problem is that he had one Big Idea that he focused all of his studies around and like a lot of academics, he attempted to make everything fit into his one big idea whether it did or not. This lead to him getting alot of stuff wrong paticularly it seem when he tried to work Eastern Myth and religion into his theory. I've never heard that he was paticularly racist, but I have heard some people accuse him of being an anti-Semite. However this seem to be more from the fact that he had a distast for Abrhamic monotheism in genral rather than any avowed hatred for jews. There could be somthing I am missing thought sice he is not someone I have studied in depth.
Why is Joseph Campbell evil?
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