In recent decades, there has been a return of the myth, both as a renewed work on it and as a religious recovery. This return has surpassed demythologization, highlighting the power of mythical images and narratives. However, this entails risks, such as the return to dogmatisms and fundamentalisms. Today, there is therefore a tendency towards remythologization, which, after overcoming demythologization, delivers us to the power of images and narratives in a naive way. This phenomenon occurs in parallel with the failure of secularization and the return of religions to the world stage. Paradoxically, it is science and technological progress that become new myths, offering us a new narrative and nourishing our imagination. This essay offers a philosophical analysis of the contemporary myth of Artificial Intelligence.
The idea of demythologization seems obsolete today. Contrary to what seems to be an established fact, in this paper I aim to argue that what Bultmann called Entmythologisierung continues to point to a fruitful theoretical project. However, this implies two further theses: a) the possibility of fully valorizing demythologization as a conceptual resource requires that it be solidly situated on the Heideggerian ground from which, in a more or less direct way, it comes; b) the way Heidegger understands the relationship between philosophy and theology, centered on the idea of Korrektion, must itself be 'corrected' in some of its fundamental points.
Myth, even where it is not sought after nostalgically, enthusiastically or romantically-blindly and naively or dogmatically, in the spirit of reaction and counter-Enlightenment-offers in its essence and structure more of the same old, same old, prone as it is to indefinite repetition, a return of the irrepressible, of mimesis and mimicry. This may well be its enduring lesson. Myth, therefore, stands in need not only of scholarly inquiry-just as demythologizing philosophy and, no less crucially, theology or, indeed, politics, is an ongoing and, at moments, increasingly urgent task-it must also and, perhaps, far more deeply and widely be constantly probed, that is, tested and contested. As such, the ever-renewed "attempt at a mythology" forms rather than informs thought and human agency. Myth is the latter's timeless foil and perennial temptation, rather than its fundamental origin and ultimate telos.
This article aims to demonstrate that Bultmann's demythologisation efforts are not sparked by the historical context determined by science and technic, but rooted more deeply into a unique concept of truth-one which is at play in the Old Testament. Since this concept cannot be reduced to scientific objectivity or philosophical elucidation, the idea whereby demythologisation is a theological transposition of Heideggerian destruction is called into question.
