Category theory, with its focus on abstraction and relationships between mathematical structures, presents a promising framework for formally expressing mythologisation. This mathematical branch could potentially model the complex, symbolic narratives of myths, translating them into a system of objects and morphisms that reflect the underlying patterns and connections inherent in mythological themes. A key question arises: Can category theory effectively capture the depth and nuance of mythological narratives, preserving their rich symbolic content while providing a formal representation? Additionally, how might such a formalisation impact our understanding of myths and their role in conveying universal truths and cultural values?
The question you address seems interesting to me : which is the relationship between "logical" structures and wisdom expressed in form of myths. Stated as this the topic is very old and it would be useful to have a look at the dialogues of Plato to be reminded of how this relationship was understood at early times. I would not expect a logical formalism like category theory to be able of rendering what myths express, for the reason that formalization has a very limited set of principles whereas human wisdom makes use of a far broader panel of dialectical methods. To take a fairly central example which is biblical wisdom (since the encyclical letter Divino afflante Spiritu) biblical exegesis has recognized the existence of different literary genres.
Other cultural environments, by the fact that they do not use our western rationality have a fairly different approach (think of Yin and Yang duality which is quite foreign in my opinion to a formalization by categorical means).
Even if the question has not been stated in terms of category theory it is very likely that in modern philosophical literature (in Edmund Husserl's work for instance) you will find references to this interaction between logic and human perception. A categorical analysis could enrich or sharpen, I don't expect to be plausible that myths fit well in a categorical environment.
Thomas Krantz Thank you for your reply. Some time ago I was working on, among other things, abstracting symbolic structures from myths, in particular I was working on abstracting the symbolic time structure from the biblical description of the resurrection.
I went back to Plato's dialogues, in particular Timaeus, some time ago, as well as to Hermeticism.
In the question, I write specifically about category theory due to the fact that it is one of the more abstract branches of mathematics. I wonder if we can represent myths symbolically enough so that one of the obvious interpretations is the narrative realm from which these symbols have been abstracted. Although it is possible that this is a task comparable to trying to reconstruct the contents of a letter based on the arrangement of the ashes after it was burned.
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