Making sense of myth consists of a series of four conversations with Luc Brisson, with an introduction and an afterword by the editor, Gerard Naddaf. The volume also includes copious notes, a list of cited works, and an extended index, all of them compiled by the editor. The first three conversations are between Louis-André Dorion and Luc Brisson. They took place in 1999 and were published in Louis-André Dorion, Rendre raison au mythe. Entretiens avec Luc Brisson (Montreal: Éditions Liber, 1999). In the present volume they appear in Naddaf’s translation, with some revisions and additions made in consultation with Brisson. The fourth conversation is between Brisson and Naddaf and took place in 2016-17; they revised it during correspondence in subsequent years. As Dorion put it over twenty-five years ago, at the beginning of their first conversation, Brisson is one of the “preeminent specialists of the work of Plato and of the Platonic tradition in antiquity”, and his “publications are acclaimed around the world” for “their scope, rigour, and depth” (17). The four conversations trace Brisson’s life and work, both connected with the main theme of the book: making sense of myth. Naddaf worked for over ten years to put together this dense, rich, readable book.
Brisson was born in 1946 in the village of Saint-Esprit, Québec. He lugged sacks of flour at his father’s bakery, celebrated Holy Week, learnt Latin and Greek at the Saint-Tharsicius Seminary in Terrebonne, and continued his studies at the Sainte-Thérèse Seminary and the Université de Montréal. He went to Paris as a graduate student, defended his doctoral dissertation on Plato’s Timaeus in 1971, and tried in vain to find a position at a North American university. He then went to Oxford as a postdoctoral student of Balliol College. His tutor at Balliol was Malcolm Schofield, and while at Oxford he attended lectures given by Peter Strawson, Richard Hare, Alfred J. Ayer, and took part in John Ackrill’s seminar on Aristotle’s Categories (along with, inter alios, Jonathan Barnes). At the time, however, Oxford students faced many hardships. “In the house my friends and I had rented, there was no central heating. We had to use electric bars that only worked once you inserted a coin that triggered a timer. That same year, because of the miners’ strike, electricity was cut eight out of twenty-four hours, from four in the morning until noon or from noon to eight in the evening depending on the neighbourhood and the day” (126). In 1972, he returned to Paris, where he met Pierre Hadot, Pierre Aubenque, and Édouard Jeauneau. The next year, he taught several courses at the Université de Montréal, and in 1974 he was appointed research fellow at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), Paris, where he remained until his retirement in 2012. In 1985, he defended his Doctorat d’État, based on his research publications.
My oral examination again took place at Nanterre. The day it was to occur coincided once again with another of those ‘wildcat’ strikes that shut down Parisian public transport, without notification and leaving only minimal service. Not only was the subway not running, but the streets were paralyzed with traffic. Getting to Nanterre required enormous patience and unrivalled imagination. The examination finally began even though certain members of the committee had not yet arrived. Such was the case with Pierre Vidal-Naquet, who arrived well after the start. His entrance was remarkable. He was infuriated with Hélène Ioannidi, my collaborator for the Platonic bibliography, who was present in the room, because she didn’t pick him up in the taxi! Out of all the interventions from the members of the jury, it was the comments from Vidal-Naquet that made, once again, the greatest impression on me. He made the harshest criticisms, but he was the one who gave my work the most sincere and heartfelt praise (92).
Brisson also talks about the places he visited—Leningrad, Moscow, Warsaw, Nepal, Bombay, Delhi, Benares, Cairo, Beirut.
Like my paternal grandfather,” says Brisson, “I am a kind of nomad. But, my nomadic feeling is tempered by a very strong sentiment of belonging to French culture and through it to this history that begins in India, which, after transiting in Europe by way of the cultures of ancient Greece and Rome, comes here to North America. This is why I have a tendency to go back in time toward the past, and to navigate in space toward the east. The piece of earth on which I breathe makes no difference to me. And, insofar as I’ve been successful in achieving results that I’m satisfied with in my life and work, I’m happy. I hope, moreover, that the people around me are mostly able to say the same thing (148).
The fourth conversation, with Naddaf, picks up from where the third ended, in 1999. Between 1999 and 2016 Brisson published “four single-authored books, eighteen co-authored books, over two hundred published articles, over three hundred and fifty talks, to say nothing of book reviews, prefaces, radio interviews, editorial boards, and the famous Platonic bibliography (fourteen volumes)” (Naddaf, 151).
The four conversations offer the reader a view of Quebec society (including its relations with the Roman Catholic Church), and of Paris and its philosophical milieu. The topic of myth, however, is what unites them. Myth was highly important for Greek philosophers, and for Plato in particular. “Plato appeals to myth and even fabricates myths of his own. As a philosopher, he has to use this type of discourse to speak of the soul. And as a political reformer, he must rely on myth, to which everyone is accustomed from an early age, to persuade the majority, the crowd, which is not receptive to philosophical discourse, which is the preserve of the few. [That is why] myth finds its place in the Republic and the Laws” (101). For Aristotle and his school, myth seems to have lost its importance. After Plato, however, “philosophers wanted to make a place for myth by using allegory: a method that seems a bit surprising to us, but which was commonly practiced in the Greek and Roman world and that had a significant influence up until the end of the Renaissance, including in philosophy, literature, various sciences, and the fine arts. From the time of the Stoics (or before them, in Aristotle), myths were reinterpreted with the aim of readapting them. Traditional materials were put to new purposes by being inserted into both philosophical and scientific discourse. In other words, allegory enabled myth to be translated into rational terms” (102). Reason “cannot affirm itself except in opposition to myth. But, very quickly, philosophers realized that if they stayed exclusively on the rational level, they couldn’t speak of certain very important things. This is why it is necessary to find a place for myth alongside reason” (102). Rousseau’s social contract, for instance, is a “secular myth” (176). With F. Walter Meyerstein Brisson co-authored a book titled Inventing the Universe: Plato’s Timaeus, The Big Bang, and the Problem of Scientific Knowledge (New York: State University of New York Press, 1995).[1] In this book, says Brisson, “we wanted to show that the Timaeus and the standard model of the Big Bang are founded on very similar axioms, and that only experimental verification would enable one to make a distinction between various cosmological models. But when you examine the issue more closely, one sees that the standard Big Bang model is bolstered by three, and only three, experimental verifications [… and] it is subject to very serious difficulties that allow its close connection to myth to shine through” (114).
In his substantial afterword on the history and role of myth in our lives, Naddaf offers a clear description of what myth is for Brisson: “For Brisson, our sense of personal identity is built out of the autobiographical memories we consider significant. But this reconstitution can only be at best approximative. More important, because of our sentiments, such a reconstruction would include a number of biases or prejudices. From this perspective, our personal identity is thus, once again, a myth even if a certain number of its elements are real. They are real but tainted by all kinds of influences or prejudices. For Brisson, the collective memory is as biased as the personal memory. He feels that the Quebec collective identity is still tainted by the bias toward the defeat by the British on the Plains of Abraham. He’d argue, however, that all peoples have some collective bias. In the US, the defeat of the South by the North in the Civil War still figures prominently in the collective psyche of many southerners despite enormous demographic changes. Myths both personal and collective are hard to erase, and even when they are, they are always replaced by new ones, which is one of the tenets of Brisson’s philosophy of myth” (210-11).
In many of Plato’s dialogues philosophy combines not only with myths, whether traditional or invented, but also with non-mythical fiction. To take just one example: the Republic. The Republic is a dialogue that Socrates recounts to an unnamed listener. The dialogue took place the day before, in the Piraeus, and on the face of it, the Republic sounds like the report of a real dialogue, recounted by someone who really existed, Socrates. But the dialogue was Plato’s own invention and the real Socrates never said what Plato made him say in the Republic. So why did he combine philosophy, whose aim is to discover reality, with a story that is not real and does not imply, as a myth does, that there is some truth in it? Was it only to make his philosophy more appealing? And why do the philosophers of today seem to have banned fiction, whether mythical or not, from their writings? The conversations with Luc Brisson do not tackle these questions, but rather, obliquely, they invite the reader to reflect on them.
One may or may not agree with Brisson’s views, but they are coherent and well argued. Naddaf’s introduction and afterword contextualize the conversations by discussing Brisson’s and Plato’s understanding of the origin and meaning of myth, elaborating on the role of myth in anthropogeny, in the creation of selfhood, and in multiculturalism. In his notes, Naddaf helps the reader to understand the cultural, religious, political, and philosophical references made in the conversations. There are not many books of this kind, in which narrative and philosophy are so intertwined. Making Sense of Myth will be of interest to scholars, students, and instructors across the disciplines, from Greek philosophy, mythology and religion to anthropology and history, as well as to the general reader with an interest in the humanities.
Since there are so many personal stories in this book, I will take the liberty of closing my review with one of my own. In the mid-1980s, in Ceauşescu’s Romania, my professor of Greek suggested that we—he and I—read and translate the first part of Plato’s Timaeus, which had not been translated into Romanian at the time. We had a copy of the Belles Lettres edition of the Timaeus, but could not find any commentary or interpretation of it. Until one day, that is, when one of my professor’s friends, just back from Paris, gave him a book he had bought there. It was Luc Brisson’s Le Même et l’Autre dans la structure ontologique du Timée de Platon (Paris: Éditions Klincksieck, 1974).
Notes
[1] This is the English edition. The book was first published in French under the title Inventer l’univers. Le Problème de la connaissance et les modèles cosmologiques (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1991).