including Anthropic’s latest unreleased AI model–Claude Mythos Preview.

Odysseus has traditionally been viewed as Achilles' antithesis in the Iliad:[35] while Achilles' anger is all-consuming and of a self-destructive nature, Odysseus is frequently viewed as a man of the mean, a voice of reason, renowned for his self-restraint and diplomatic skills.

November 2023 First Friday Lecture: From Mythos to Logos

Prometheus is the creative and rebellious spirit which, rejected by God, angrily defies him and asserts itself; Ganymede is the boyish self which is adored and seduced by God. One is the lone defiant, the other the yielding acolyte. As the humanist poet, Goethe presents both identities as aspects or forms of the human condition.

Beginning in the 18th century, the relation of mythos and logos flipped into reverse. Not entirely: variants of traditional allegory persist all the way to the present. But among some thinkers – Vico, Herder, and Christian Gottlob Heyne – a different, historicist approach emerged. There were two key shifts. First, these writers claim that mythos has its own philosophical content, without being translated into logos. Second, the philosophical content of myth isn’t a universally valid, timeless logos, but is specific to the era when the myth was formulated. That is, these thinkers insisted on “the pluralization of forms of Logos” (40).

The use of use mythos to critique logos “became one of the central traditions of German philosophy since the nineteenth century.”

Throughout the centuries, the distinction always tilted in favor of logos. Reason could question myths; myths couldn’t challenge reason. Allegory was one of the main devices for rationalizing the irrational, but allegorists “never looked for traces of Mythos in their Logos, but only for traces of their Logos in the Mythos” (32). Allegorists assumed that myth-makers already grasped logos, and “cloaked the Logos in Mythos in order to protect it from the ignorant masses, or to guarantee that only a few elect would have access to it” (32). For advocates of logos, myth was merely accommodated logos. No truth can be told only in mythic terms. Truth is in reason, not in narrative. Allegorists had a problem: “even if the content of the Mythos always reveals itself in the allegorist’s hands to be nothing other than the Logos, none the less the conversion mechanisms which transform that Mythos into his Logos remain resolutely arbitrary and cannot themselves ever be successfully subsumed into the Logos” (33).

Chillingly, Nestle, writing in Stuttgart in 1940 and though no Nazi, argues that the great maturation from mythos to logos “seems to have been reserved from the Aryan peoples” (quoted p. 30).

William Nestle’s Vom Mythos zum Logos (1940) is the classical statement of this reading. On the opening page, Nestle claims mythos and logos are “the two poles between which man’s mental life oscillates. Mythic imagination and logical thought are opposites,” the former being “imagistic and involuntary,” rooted in the unconscious, while the latter is “conceptual and intentional, and analyzes and synthesizes by means of consciousness” (quoted in Glenn Most, “From Logos to Mythos,” in From Myth to Reason?, 27).

Many have summarized the intellectual history of Greece as an evolution from the mythos to logos.

From Myth to Reason

His main works, which appeared late in 1940 and 1944, are the aforementioned Vom Mythos zum Logos, die Selbstentfaltung des griechischen Denkens von Homer bis auf die Sophistik und Sokrates and Griechische Geistesgeschichte von Homer bis Lukian in ihrer Entfaltung vom mythischen zum rationalen Denken dargestellt, are the result of his Greek studies conducted over several decades.

Vom Mythos zum Logos. Die des griechischen Denkens Selbstentfaltung von Homer bis auf die Sophistik und Sokrates. (From Mythos to Logos: The Self-development of Greek Thought from Homer to the Sophistics and Socrates.) 1940. 2nd edition. 1942. Reprint. 1975, 1986.