Is Mythos Myth, and Logos Reason? : The Rise and Fall of Mytho-Logos in the 20th Century

Abstract

In my previous article, “Is Mythos Myth, and Logos Reason: Etymological and Philological Reflections”(2020), I observed the foundation of ancient Greek philosophy in its relationship with the notions of mythos and logos. I argued that the history of Western philosophy in its initiatory phase took the format of progress “from mythos to logos,” and that this framework holds Homeros and Hesiodos totally different from Socrates and Plato, giving rise to the bifurcation of mythos and logos, and further accounting for the concomitant conceptual differentiation between myth and reason/rationality which has gone around until recently without enough critical assessment. In this article, I seek to argue continuously that misunderstandings come to light when one reaches the conclusion that in the ancient Greek society the words mythos and logos referred respectively to established authoritative speech and emergent reasonable discourse or theory — that neither of them really had anything to do with the fictional properties, or the degree of fictionality, of the messages under consideration. The English translation of mythos into myth — or for that matter, into its later 19th-century Japanese rendering, “神話,” — may well be held responsible for the prevalent false notion of mythos. In our age when Reason no more seems to be reason, and Enlightenment no more enlightenment, everything strikes us as a myth, posing questions as to the real nature, or even the adequacy, of the mythos-logos dichotomy. Horkheimer and Adorno did this kind of job while questioning and emphasizing the need of both in the fascist Germany where logos-reason proved to be nothing but a madness.