What does Veeky Forums think of Joseph Campbell?

Thank you

yeah I agree Golden Bough is fluffy af

what about the Golden Bough?

this
I'd honestly skip through entire sections of unnecessary anecdotes

just read the Belgariad instead lol

Golden Bough is OK for bits and pieces, but it's more anthropology than strict psychoanalytically-derived comp myth (Jung, Campbell, etc.)

From the anthropologists I work with, I'm told it was very poorly done work and just isn't taken seriously in the anthropology of religion and mythology anymore.

I got halfway through The Hero With A Thousand Faces before dropping it for being vaugue and am currently reading Oriental Mythology. My main problem with him is that he never really tries to prove very much and just expects you to make enormous leaps of faith for no good reason. In Oriental Mythology his evidence that India and Egypt share the same proto-religion is a single bit of early Egyptian writing that doesn't even explicitly profess what he says he does (he has to jump through a hell of a lot of semiotic hoops to get it there) and he acts as if this single stone is representative every single early Egyptian's religious belief when that cannot be known and should be considered highly dubious for a non-orthodox religion. It's not rigorous at all and I'm not surprised that he is lukewarmly received in academia at best and is mostly only known to normal people because of a tv show.

So much this. I would recommend starting with Campbell, then reading Frazer, then Eliade, Jung, Robert Graves (for the lulz)

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Let me also just recommend Maps of Meaning by our newly dear Jordan "Feminazi Cunt Destroyer" Peterson.

I bought the book a week ago and it's great. He incorporates all the up to date psychology and neuroscience(at least at that point in time), with psychoanalysis and Jung's theory of archetypes.

Yep, totally forgot about Peterson, tack him on to the end of that list

Same.

It helped me get out of the whole 'edgy atheist' phase by getting me interested in understanding spirituality more.

My biggest issue with campbell is that he tries to fit the entirety of his knowledge into his one reductive thesis of the monomyth. A good example of this from Hero with a Thousand Faces is his definitions of Tragedy and Comedy, something he clearly tried to adapt from Nietzsche. Instead of adapting the terms to his own thoughts on myth, however, he literally just takes the words themselves, strips them of all comprehensive understanding developed over hundreds of years, and literally just grafts his own stupid hippy definitions onto them. Really disingenuous for a thinker to do

I love the idea of mythic archetypes, but the philosophy is hobbled by the state of anthropology, psychology, and the other social sciences which are all so lacking in scientific rigor, that they are basically psuedo-sciences.

I had to read that in AP lit, fucking worst book of all time.

why is that?

Comparison is always reductive because it is bringing things together instead of separating them with differences of which can be legion

probably because he didn't "get" it. I know a few people like that, friends in fact, that just cannot into comparative mythology, they can only see the differences.

but from my understanding of the spirit of dionysian thought that I've gotten from Plato, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Deleuze, etc. there is a common thread of intelligibility and commentary on the nature of tragedy, pity, terror, etc. that are all pretty similar with caveats added by each thinker to slightly augment the terms to fit their own philosophies. Campbell doesn't do this because it's obvious he has only read Nietzsche and maybe Plato, and so he takes the terms, jettisons centuries of commentary within continental philosophy, and just gives them definitions that suit him without giving dignity to their philosophical definitions throughout history. It's the equivalent of namedropping one of Nietzsche's concepts like eternal recurrence, but not accepting any of the content that comes with it and readopting the term to serve your own disingenuous ends. Read the book to better understand what I'm saying, it's right at the beginning

I didn't get that feeling. I know for a fact that Campbell has read the Greeks, Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of different myths from the Indian/Buddhist myths, to the Greeks, the Native Americans, African tribes, Arthurian Myth, just to name a few. He was also influenced and good friends, and a student of the likes of Heinrich Zimmerman and Jung.

I would describe Joseph Campbell as reaching out with his knowledge to the average intelligent person where-as say Mircea Eliade would be reaching out to the academic.