What is the secret cause?

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bubblesort
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What is the secret cause?

Post by bubblesort »

I'm reading The Hero With A Thousand Faces for the first time, and in Chapter 2 (pg 19, paragraph 2) Campbell quotes Joyce's "Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man":
Pity is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the human sufferer. Terror is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the secret cause.
I'm completely lost on the phrase 'secret cause'. I understand the references to dismemberment and the cult of Dionysus and all of that context around it, but what is this secret cause referenced here?

I searched around a bit and reviewed Aristotle's ideas and read the context around the Joyce quote in Portrait of the Artist, but I still don't know what the secret cause is. Here is what I'm thinking so far:

Pity would be if we watched a Guantanamo Bay detainee get tortured and focused on the pain of the detainee as a human being, without connecting it to a context. To experience terror we must consider context, which is called the secret cause.

The secret cause can be the secret cause of the specific suffering we are watching. For example, the secret cause for a Guantanamo Bay detainee's torture would be the jailer's desire to exert authority, perhaps due to some personal history or something. To be more specific, the secret cause might be that the detainee gave the jailer a dirty look. The secret cause could also be the cause of suffering in general, which would cause the suffering we are watching but in doing so be referencing some greater Satan or shade figure. In this case, the secret cause for a Guantanamo Bay detainee to be tortured would be the power hungry, possibly once virtuous tyrants in DC, who were put there by voters who don't care if we torture people or not. Society is torturing this human being, not the jailer. Perhaps terror is the revelation of evil in general?

I'm just throwing wild conjectures here. What do you think the secret cause is?

Care to let me in on the secret?

Cindy B.
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Post by Cindy B. »

Hi, bubblesort, and welcome!

Your question interests me, too, but so far I'm having trouble finding The Hero text that you referenced. Do consider the source, though. :wink: So would you please provide the chapter heading and subheading for me? In the meantime, I'll take another look through my copy when I have time.

My initial thought was that "the secret cause" likely refers to the underlying archetypal situation, but I want to check this assumption against the text.

:)
If the path before you is clear, you’re probably on someone else’s. --Jung

bubblesort
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Post by bubblesort »

Cindy B. wrote:Hi, bubblesort, and welcome!

Your question interests me, too, but so far I'm having trouble finding The Hero text that you referenced. Do consider the source, though. :wink: So would you please provide the chapter heading and subheading for me? In the meantime, I'll take another look through my copy when I have time.

My initial thought was that "the secret cause" likely refers to the underlying archetypal situation, but I want to check this assumption against the text.

:)
The quote from page 19, which is two paragraphs in to chapter 2, section 1 of the collected works edition, 2008.

The Guantanamo Bay example is not from a story, it's just me trying to present a scene and asking whether this scene could be a tragedy or not. You could think of it as a scene from Zero Dark Thirty or Corey Doctorow's Little Brother if that makes it easier. I'm sure some people might disagree that what I'm describing is even bad, although I personally think it's bad. I decided to grab a situation out of nowhere and describe that rather than something like Oedipus Rex, because everybody since Aristotle agrees that Oedipus Rex is a tragedy. I was thinking it might help to describe something that may or may not be tragedy and pick apart how it could go one way or the other. That's all wild conjecture, though.

After I wrote the post above I found a book about tragedy on Google Books titled The Secret Cause and read the first couple of chapters. I think I understand it now, maybe. In Oedipus Rex the secret cause is that the gods are inscrutable. We don't know why bad things happen. That mystery, the uncertainty that asking the question of why bad things happen without answering it, that is what creates terror. It's Jesus asking God why he has been forsaken, it's the last lines of the book of Job where God won't explain why he did horrible things to a virtuous man, and in Oedipus Rex it's in the line, "What has god done to me?" The suffering itself creates pity. The uncertainty of the cause of the suffering is what creates terror.

That's great for mythology with lots of gods, but what does that mean for more godless tragedies? I mean, if we look at the videogame To The Moon, it might have a kind of a bitter sweet ending but I consider it a tragedy. There are no gods in that game, just science fiction travel through the memories of a dying man to reveal the chemical basis for his ignorance, which causes all his problems (I don't want to spoil it for you if you haven't played it, because To The Moon is a great work of literature). For those of you who don't play videogames like that, look at Shakespeare's Titus or, say, the red wedding scene in Game of Thrones. Those pieces are tragic, but they don't involve god like Oedipus Rex does. How can they create terror without using god, if the secret cause is god?

I'm thinking god is a red herring and I need to think more mythologically about this. The secret cause isn't a god, it's existential uncertainty. Terror is created from our own ignorance. Does that mean that politicians who defund education are terrorists? :wink:

Aside from all of that, I think I'll have to bookmark this chapter on tragedy and comedy (pages 19-22) and come back to it, because at the moment I have a huge problem with Campbell assuming that we always dismiss happy endings. I don't think people are that pessimistic. Critics are, but people in general? I don't think so. I'll have to finish the book and reevaluate this chapter later.

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Post by Andreas »

"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way". With these fateful words, Count Leo Tolstoy opened the novel of spiritual dismemberment of his modern heroine, Anna Karenina. (The Hero with a Thousand Faces, p.25)
I think, that the secret cause is different in every tragedy. It is secret because we are not aware of it. In the case of Oedipus, one tries to change his destiny only to realize that he is creating it. So the secret cause and what creates suffering/terror is personal and subjective in every tragedy, seems to me anyway.
The quote from page 19, which is two paragraphs in to chapter 2, section 1 of the collected works edition, 2008. - bubblesort
In the Hero with a Thousand Faces not the CW edition, the quote you are referring to bubblesort is at page 26. Maybe that will help Cindy locate it. :)

Cindy B.
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Post by Cindy B. »

Hey again, guys.


You're right, Andreas, in that my edition of The Hero is old, so the page numbers didn't match up.


Anyway, bubblesort, I decided to google "Joseph Campbell on 'the secret cause'" and discovered lots to check out if you're up for the same.

For example, go here (iTunes), and you can listen to Campbell speak on the topic.

Along the way I discovered that this Campbell quote is popular on the web. It comes from the Introduction in The Power of Myth: “The secret cause of all suffering is mortality itself which is the prime condition of life. It cannot be denied if life is to be affirmed.”

This excerpt comes from Campbell's Thou Art That (I think...): "[The] secret cause of your death is your destiny. Every life has limitations, and in challenging the limit you are bringing the limit closer to you, and the heroes are the ones who initiate their actions no matter what destiny may result...Here is revealed the secret cause: your own life course is the secret cause of your death...The accident that you die this way instead of in a different time and a different place is a fulfillment of your destiny...What must be manifested through the event is the majesty of the life that has been lived and of which it is a part...Death is understood as a fulfillment of our life's direction and purpose."

I also found this web page interesting regarding Joyce and Campbell.

I wish that I could be of more help, bubblesort, but I've not studied Joyce nor Campbell on Joyce. My take, though, is that the existential issue at hand is the cycle of life and death, and that what makes it "secretive," so to speak, is its transcendence, or the archetypal nature of this human experience, that is beyond rational understanding. While Jung, my first mentor, suggested that the discovery of personal meaning is the way to consciously participate in this cycle, Campbell suggested that pursuing "the experience of being alive" is the way; it seems to me that it's a bit of both.

Please let us know what you come away with should you decide to pursue this further. Hopefully others, too, will have more to contribute in this thread.


:)
If the path before you is clear, you’re probably on someone else’s. --Jung

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