Quotation
Last reviewed:
“Myths are not lies. Nor are they detached stories. They are imaginative patterns…”
Mary Midgley · Moral philosophy · Modern · 2003
What does it mean?
The mainstream reading defends myth as a way a culture interprets the world, not as a false story told to children. Imaginative patterns and networks of symbols suggest ways of seeing. A competing reading hears a permission to believe whatever story one likes, since if myths are not lies then no myth can be criticised. She spends the book criticising particular myths, including myths of the selfish gene and of the isolated contract-making individual. Not lies means not mere errors. It does not mean not assessable. The sentence is the opening account in The Myths We Live By (2003). Beast and Man had already refused one-storey pictures of the human being. This book names the imaginative patterns that keep those pictures in place. The plumbing lecture is about concepts that leak. Myths, here, are the patterns that make a leak look like common sense.
Did Mary Midgley really say this?
The library’s label is Paraphrase or translation. Midgley's own English at the opening of The Myths We Live By. The card quotes three sentences and stops at “imaginative patterns”; the passage goes on. It is not the animals sentence from Beast and Man, and it is not the plumbing lecture.
Where it comes from
The Myths We Live By (2003), the opening account of myth
Approximate date: 2003.
How to use it
A policy paper that treats 'the taxpayer' as a single impatient person is using a myth in her sense, a pattern that interprets a complicated public as one character. The pattern is not a lie in the way a fake statistic is a lie. It can still be a bad pattern. Asking which symbol is doing the work is the use of the sentence. Replacing it with a different cartoon is not yet a criticism.
A mindset reading
Not a lie is not the same as true. The habit is to look for the pattern and then ask what it hides. She thinks that second question is still available, which is why the sentence is not a surrender to stories.
Understand the philosophy
The Myths We Live By opens with this account of myth. The key phrase is imaginative patterns, not falsehoods. Beast and Man is the earlier defence of a richer picture of human animals. 'Philosophical Plumbing' is the lecture about maintenance. The three cards are three decades of one concern: the pictures that make a thin account of a person look obvious. A further motto was not coined to stand in for the books.
- knowledge
- meaning
- society
FAQ
What does it mean?
The mainstream reading defends myth as a way a culture interprets the world, not as a false story told to children. Imaginative patterns and networks of symbols suggest ways of seeing. A competing reading hears a permission to believe whatever story one likes, since if myths are not lies then no myth can be criticised. She spends the book criticising particular myths, including myths of the selfish gene and of the isolated contract-making individual. Not lies means not mere errors. It does not mean not assessable. The sentence is the opening account in The Myths We Live By (2003). Beast and Man had already refused one-storey pictures of the human being. This book names the imaginative patterns that keep those pictures in place. The plumbing lecture is about concepts that leak. Myths, here, are the patterns that make a leak look like common sense.
Did Mary Midgley really say this?
Paraphrase or translation. Midgley's own English at the opening of The Myths We Live By. The card quotes three sentences and stops at “imaginative patterns”; the passage goes on. It is not the animals sentence from Beast and Man, and it is not the plumbing lecture.
Which work is it in?
The Myths We Live By (2003), the opening account of myth Approximate date: 2003.