Tyler van Opstal "Ship of Mytheus"

     The Ship of Theseus is a popular thought experiment concerning identity. It asks the thinker to imagine a ship called the Ship of Theseus. Over the years, all of the parts of the ship have been replaced with new ones, so that not a single part of the ship is original. Is it still the Ship of Theseus, or is it a different ship? A modifier to this problem I have heard occasionally begins the same way, but adds that a second ship is built, and it is entirely built from the original parts of the Ship of Theseus, that had been replaced on the first ship overtime. Which of the two ships, if either, is the Ship of Theseus?

    This issue of identity is hardly limited to ships, and the Greeks were not the only people to notice this paradox. In a Buddhist sutra, the Mahāprajñāpāramitopadeśa, there is a parable concerning it, which I have taken the liberty of quoting a section here as it is likely unfamiliar to most readers:

"[The second demon] grasped the man by the hand, ripped one arm from his body and threw it on the ground. The first demon then took an arm from the corpse and immediately attached it to the man by slapping it on. In this way both of his arms, both feet, his head, two sides, and in the end his whole body was replaced. The two demons then devoured together the body that had been replaced, wiped their mouths and departed. This man thought: 'I’ve seen my body born of my mother has been eaten up by the two demons. Now this body of mine consists completely of the flesh of another person. Do I truly have a body now? Or do I have no body?'" (Translation by Jing Huang and Jonardon Ganeri, 2021)

While I believe the Buddhist tale of the body is closer than the Greek's tale of the ships, what I am concerned with for this blog is myth. In all of a myth's retellings it changes, sometimes by little at a time such as between oral sharing, sometimes in large intentional parts like in Lewis' Til We Have Faces or Winterson's Weight. At what point is a myth no longer the same myth? In Pausanias' second century AD version of Narcissus, the cursed hero falls in love not with his reflection but with his twin sister. Is that still the tale of Narcissus, or is it a different and new myth? In the Buddhist parable, the passage concludes with "One cannot say that there is an I on grounds of the distinction between other and I" as a message of Buddhist non-self, that there was no "I" to begin with. Perhaps we should apply the same energy to Mythos- there is no "Myth of Narcissus" but only mythos and its infinite expressions of the same messages. Does it matter whether Narcissus is in love with his reflection or his identical twin sister, so long as he turns into the flower as a consequence?

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