Page 127 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

104 Communication and Evolution of Society

deductive explanations from first principles (the originary ac-
tions of myth having been transformed into “‘beginnings’’ of
argumentation, beyond which one cannot go); modern science,
finally, permits nomological explanations and practical justifica-
tions, with the help of revisable theories and constructions that
are monitored against experience. When these various types of
explanation (and justification) are analyzed formally, we find
developmental-logical correlations with ontogenesis. In the pres-
ent connection, however, we are less interested in the structural
analogies between world views and cognitive (in the narrower
sense) development than in those between world views and the
system of ego demarcations.
Apparently the magical-animistic representational world of
paleolithic societies was very particularistic and not very coherent.
The ordering representations of mythology first made possible
the construction of a complex of analogies in which all natural
and social phenomena were interwoven and could be transformed
into one another. In the egocentric world conception of the child
at the preoperational level of thought, these phenomena are
made relative to the center of the child’s ego; similarly, in so-
ciomorphic world views they are made relative to the center of
the tribal group. This does not mean that the members of the
group have formed a distinct consciousness of the normative
reality of a society standing apart from objectivated nature—these
two regions have not yet been clearly separated. Only with the
transition to societies organized around a state do mythological
world views also take on the legitimation of structures of domina-
tion (which already presuppose the conventional stage of moral-
ized law). Thus the naive attitude to myth must have changed
by that time. Within a more strongly differentiated temporal
horizon, myth is distantiated to a tradition that stands out from
the normative reality of society and from a partially objectivated
nature. With persisting sociomorphic traits, these developed
myths establish a unity in the manifold of appearances; in
formal respects, this unity resembles the sociocentric-objectivistic
world conception of the child at the stage of concrete operations.
The further transition from archaic to developed civilizations
is marked by a break with mythological thought. There arise