Week 4 – 'Hume, Shelley and the Evolution of Myth'

Pablo San Martín Varela, University of Edinburgh

This week sees the second part of our Edinburgh double-header, as Pablo San Martín speaks on the shift from an Enlightenment to a Romantic definition of 'myth'.

Abstract:

This paper explores the history of the modern conception of ‘myth’ as it emerged during the Enlightenment, and how it was then reshaped during the Romantic period, centring on the works of David Hume and Percy Shelley. In An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding and The Natural History of Religion Hume developed the basic enlightened conception of myth as ‘fable,’ ‘invention,’ ‘fiction,’ or ‘illusion’, which according to the philosopher of religion Mircea Eliade later prevailed during the nineteenth century and is still present today’s use of the word ‘myth’. In the aforementioned works, Hume assessed myths in terms of an empiricist criterion of truth, and regarded them as corrupted historical records which had lost all relation to the original facts they were supposed to refer to. Shelley inherits this enlightened conception of myth from Hume, and deploys it in his early critique of religion (letters, prose and poems), levelling the narrations contained in the Bible with pagan mythology. In his later poetical practice, however, (especially in Prometheus Unboud and Hellas, and their prefaces) Shelley advanced a different and more positive conception of myth (which we could call ‘Romantic’) as  ‘true story’, ‘sacred tradition’, ‘primordial revelation’, and ‘exemplary model’, together with a more idealistic criterion of truth.

All welcome as always!