One is almost tempted to say that the language itself is a mythology deprived of its vitality, a bloodless mythology so to speak, which has only preserved in a formal and abstract form what mythology contains in living and concrete form.
Interpretation
Language can be seen as a lifeless version of mythology, stripped of its vibrant essence.
Schelling suggests that language, while it serves as a vessel for mythological concepts, lacks the vitality and richness that original mythologies possess. In his view, language reduces the lively, dynamic nature of myth into a mere abstract representation, thereby losing the depth and experiential quality that makes mythology so powerful and engaging in its living form.
In practice
In a lecture on the importance of storytelling, one might use this quote to emphasize how language can fail to capture the essence of lived experiences.
The fear of speculation, the ostensible rush from the theoretical to the practical, brings about the same shallowness in action that it does in knowledge. It is by studying a strictly theoretical philosophy that we become most acquainted with Ideas, and only Ideas provide action with vigour and ethical meaning.
In the act of worship itself, the experience of liberation becomes a constituent of the community's being . . . It is the power of God's Spirit invading the lives of the people, "building them up where they are torn down and propping them up on every leaning side".
Racism is man's gravest threat to man - the maximum of hatred for a minimum of reason.
We know one another. This is the present. There is no past and no future. Here I am washing my hands, and the cracked mirror shows me to myself, suspended as it were, in time; this is me, this moment will not pass.
I do not agree with this century's fashion of running down the human species as a failed try, a doomed sport. At our worst, we may be going through the early stages of adolescence, and everyone remembers what that is like.
Are our lives truly filled with the presence of God? How many things take the place of God in my life each day?
You're just left with yourself all the time, whatever you do anyway. You've got to get down to your own God in your own temple. It's all down to you, mate.
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