Ariadne's cord

Started a lecture series, The Great Ideas of Philosophy (2nd edition) with Professor Daniel N. Robinson.  The prof starts the series with the tale of Ariadne.  I had not thought of this story very deeply, but coming fresh from a day as a hospital chaplain, found myself engrossed in the use of it as an expression of life review.  Stated simply, we find our meaning by retracing our steps.  

Ariadne was so in love with Theseus that she defied her father to give him a golden cord that would guide him back through the labyrinth.  (She also gave him the blade that was used to slay the Minotaur at the center of the labyrinth aka a slaying that will yield freedom from primal desires.)

To find ourselves, to grow and evolve, we need to take the time to make sense - to review what we have done and to see who we are.

So what or who is the love that gives us the cord?  What is it we slay?

As a chaplain it seems an apt metaphor for the opportunity the emerges to help someone in life review.  What is slain is the hardened idea of I (see post on  Uchiyama).  In the recounting there is broadening to where it seems we all walk this wide path together - myriad individual actions dissolving into a more universal truth.

At least that is my current experience of this myth!

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In the same intro lecture Robinson calls myth a tool for civic coherence - helping us to relate to each other and to our past.  Philosophy, by contrast, more destabilizing, seeking not to enshrine a POV but to seek out truth.

Claiming that mythology and philosophy do, however, set out to answer similar questions, Robinson notes three overarching areas of questioning:

1. knowledge (how do we know anything)
2. conduct (how do we live, assuming we can know our options reliably - and the assumptions made here determine our ethics), 
3. governance - how shall we live together (what are the political realities available to us so we can resolve conflicts at the level of conduct)

Robinson contends that responding to these questions was first handled heroically, i.e., via myth embodied by persons and communities as in the Upanishads and the Illiad and the Odyssey.  Philosophical consideration was a later development.

All I could think: Is this why I have so loved myths and the art of storytelling?

Should be a fun lecture series!