Mythos to Logos

The passage from mythos to logos — from Hesiodic theogony to Milesian cosmology and the pre-Socratic archē — has been the central problem of classical scholarship on the Greek intellectual tradition. Vernant’s closing essay in Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, “The Origins of Philosophy,” refuses the older version in which philosophy breaks cleanly from religion. “Philosophy takes over, in its way, from religious thought. It locates itself within the very framework established by religion when it posited the sacred powers that provide the foundation of this world beyond the world of nature and in an invisible realm” (Vernant 1983).

The Milesian invisible — the physis behind appearances, the archē of water, apeiron, or air — inherits the structure of the invisible the religious tradition had already established: a truer reality, secret and hidden, that grounds the visible world. The philosopher seeks the same invisible the priest sought; the method changes, the metaphysics does not. Geometric demonstration, Pythagorean number, and Eleatic being articulate in a new idiom what myth had held in narrative form.

For the Lineage, this recasting matters. It licenses reading pre-Socratic philosophy as psychological-religious material in disguise rather than as a rupture with it. carl-jung draws on this continuity whenever he reads Heraclitus’s fire-heraclitus or Plotinus’s the-one as psychological documents. What Vernant establishes at the level of the category, the Jungian tradition assumes at the level of the image.

Relationships

• logos
• nous
• fire-heraclitus
• discovery-of-depth

Primary sources

• vernant-myth-and-thought (Vernant 1983)