The literature on myth has long defined myth in terms of its resistance to fact and rational argument. Although scholars working in this tradition have accordingly acknowledged the need to re-think the criteria by which we evaluate and critique myths, few have really endeavored to meet this task. This paper seeks to develop such a critical framework by taking up the case of David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything (2021), and their explicit identification of prehistory as a myth that demands critique. Drawing inspiration from mythic interpretations of Rousseau’s conjectural history, we argue that myth demands a distinct form of critique that must begin from a position of acknowledging the opacity of its subjects and, as a consequence, requires an aesthetic form. To mitigate the pitfalls of aesthetic modes of critique, however, we contend that it must also cultivate an attendant ethic of learned ignorance – an approach that we conceptualize by drawing from Karl Jaspers, Hans Blumenberg, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Finally, we turn to Nastassja Martin’s autobiographical essay In the Eye of the Wild (2021), whose own unconventional approach to the critique of myths can be productively brought in comparison with more rationalist proposals.

Carmen Lea Dege is assistant professor of Ethics and Political Philosophy at Radboud University Nijmegen. Her research is situated at the intersection of critical theory, phenomenology and environmental philosophy. Her work probes the role of knowledge, power, and myth in individual and collective responses to uncertainty with a specific focus on the climate crisis, science denialism, and post-truth politics. Before coming to the Netherlands, she was a visiting scholar at the Remarque Institute at NYU and the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University as well as a postdoctoral fellow at the Polonsky Academy at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. In 2019, she received a PhD in Political Theory from Yale University with a dissertation on Karl Jaspers.