Myth as a Foundational Concept

Formulation of the claim

Myth is a foundational concept for understanding collective consciousness.

Explanation

Arkoun treats myth as a structural element in the formation of the collective imaginary, not merely as an inherited tale or a marginal narrative form. It enters into the constitution of the meaning that a group gives to itself and to its world.

From this perspective, myth is not read apart from its effect in shaping perception, representation, and memory. It therefore becomes a key to understanding how meaning is produced within human groups, not outside them.

Its place in the book’s argument

This atom falls within Arkoun’s effort to expand the tools used to understand religious and cultural phenomena, by paying attention to the structures that shape collective consciousness before any normative judgment about them. It is connected to the book’s work of dismantling closed patterns in the reading of Islam and religious history.

It also supports his broader thesis that understanding religion and society requires attention to the symbolic, imaginary, and historical levels together, not to direct textual interpretation alone.

Limits of the claim

This atom does not mean equating myth with revelation or reducing religion to myth, nor does it mean turning it into the sole explanation for all forms of religiosity. What is intended is its epistemic position in analyzing collective consciousness.

Brief evidence passage

True. By the metaphorical here we mean that it is linked to the capacity for imaging, embellishment, and the creation of images and representations that ignite the imagination and nourish it, and that ultimately lead to the formation of the individual and collective imagination. It shapes it and gives it all the importance to the point of reducing reason to nothing more than the obedient subordinate and performing a servile function, namely a mentality of the deviations and excesses of the imagination by regulating them and limiting them; and here its task ends, meaning that reason is an obedient servant of theology. It is well known that metaphor works and exerts its effect in cooperation with similarity and analogy. It uses real, actual things directly perceived by the senses as a palpable point of reference. It uses all this in order to form meaning, or traces of meaning, in a richer, more suggestive, and more dynamic way

Related links

• Fundamentalist Thought and the Impossibility of Rootedness
• Readings in the Qur’an
• Toward a Comparative History of Monotheistic Religions