A myth is, of course, not a fairy story. It is the presentation of facts belonging to one category in the idioms appropriate to another. To explode a myth is accordingly not to deny the facts but to re-allocate them.
Interpretation
Myths are complex representations of reality and should not be confused with simple fairy tales.
Gilbert Ryle's quote emphasizes that myths are not mere fictional stories; they represent facts framed in a way that belongs to a different context. By 'exploding' a myth, one is not necessarily rejecting the underlying facts but rather recognizing that these facts belong to a different category and need to be understood through a different lens.
In practice
In a lecture about the role of myths in culture, this quote can illustrate the distinction between myth and reality.
Man need not be degraded to a machine by being denied to be a ghost in a machine. He might, after all, be a sort of animal, namely, a higher mammal. There has yet to be ventured the hazardous leap to the hypothesis that perhaps he is a man.
Man need not be degraded to a machine by being denied to be a ghost in a machine.
The dogma of the Ghost in the Machine ... maintains that there exist both bodies and minds; that there occur physical processes and mental processes; that there are mechanical causes of corporeal movements and mental causes of corporeal movements.
There is nothing outside the text
War, like most other things, is a science to be acquired and perfected by diligence, by perserverance, by time, and by practice.
I don't know if there is a personal identity. We all imagine that we are absolute individuals. But when we begin to look for where this individuality resides, it's very difficult to find.
What pornographic literature does is precisely to drive a wedge between one's existence as a sexual being - while in ordinary life a healthy person is one who prevents such a gap from opening up
Imagination is a danger thus every totalitarian regime is frightened of the artist. It is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of imagination to keep on conjouring and proposing alternative futures to the single one the king wants to urge as the only thinkable one.
Fain would we remain barbarians, if our claim to civilization were to be based on the gruesome glory of war.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.