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From Myth to Logic — the Snellian Account

From Myth to Logic — the Snellian Account

In chapter nine of The Discovery of the Mind — “From Myth to Logic: The Role of the Comparison” — Snell offers his account of how a culture without abstract psychological vocabulary develops the conceptual apparatus that becomes Greek philosophy. The instrument is the Homeric simile. Homer’s hero who “endures like a tower” or rushes “like a lion” is not being decorated; the natural object co-constitutes the human action. The simile is a piece of cognitive technology.

Snell’s formulation is austere: “man must listen to an echo of himself before he may hear or know himself” (Snell 1953, p. 201). The rock in the surf is comprehended anthropomorphically — as enduring — only because the human posture of endurance is in turn comprehended petromorphically. This reciprocity is the engine. From it the lyric poets develop the simile that compares an inner state to a natural force (Eros as the wind on the oaks; wine like lightning; storm stirring the heart). The simile carries inwardness into language until the language can hold inwardness on its own — at which point the simile gives way to the concept, and the work of philosophical definition begins.

For the depth tradition this matters because it locates the mythos-to-logos transition not in a sudden philosophical break but in a centuries-long apprenticeship of the imagination through poetry. The image precedes the concept; the simile precedes the predicate. Hillman‘s claim that the soul thinks in images and that the image is psyche finds in Snell its philological underwriting.

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