Logos Severed from Mythos: The

Consequences of Our Forgetting

WRITTEN BY JAMES MATTHEW WILSON   
 
This is an addendum-essay that further develops Professor Wilson's "Retelling the
Story of Reason" in ANAMNESIS, Volume 1, Number 1, 2011.
In my essay, “Retelling the Story of Reason,” I contended that modern thought
routinely sets logos, (reason) in opposition with mythos (story-telling), and
favorslogos.  This habit breeds an unhappy myth of its own: mankind was once
subject to the vague powers of myth, but has emerged triumphant from such
antiquated miasma into the knowing precisions of a rational age.  While such a myth
gained traction in the modern age, particularly during the Enlightenment, its basic
form dates back to Plato.  Or rather, it dates back to a certain reading of Plato.  My
essay called that reading into question, returning to some of Plato’s best-known
statements on the “ancient quarrel” between poetry and philosophy, in order to show
that, for Plato, stories serve as the condition of possibility for reasoning
and mythos naturally and properly interweaves with logos.  While Plato certainly
distinguishes between the two, his writing provides us ample reason to acknowledge
that distinction as subsisting within a natural unity.  If Plato is to be believed, the
philosopher must reason both instories and through them, so that sound reasoning
might itself be understood as a kind of story-telling.
I built upon this account of Plato to advance three arguments in favor of a modern
reunion of mythos  and logos.  Plato himself provides resources for such a reunion,
but so does the classicist and theorist of myth, Marcel Detienne.  In a loose reading of
Detienne, we might say that the modern separation between logos and mythos has
its origin in the methodologies of the classical Greek historians.  If we can get behind
this division, which Detienne critiques as an ideological contingency rather than a
conceptual necessity, we shall find that logos  and mythos  were once synonymous.  If
Detienne is correct, then pace  Herodotus and his descendants, we have good reason
to believe that story-telling is a kind of reasoning, reasoning is a kind of story-telling,
and that the prototype of this union is found in an oral culture, where the telling and
re-telling of stories serve as a dominant mode of oral reasoning, with its use of
interpretation, commentary, and argument.  Finally, I consider the Christian-Platonist
tradition’s understanding of man as an intellectual animal, whose intellect is by nature
ordered to the knowledge of being.  In its highest function, the intellect sees the form
of beings: as Plato and the Greeks understood, when the truth is fully present to us, it
no longer hides within a mere “image” or lingers as discursive definition, but
showsforth as its form.  If stories are incontestably “forms,” then to see the form of a
story must be a kind of rational vision: to see the form of a story may entail a vision
of the intellect that bypasses the plodding methods of discursive logic but is
nonetheless rational.
These ideas from Plato, Detienne, and classical epistemology argue for  a reunion
oflogos  and mythos, and culminate, in my essay, in four theses proposing some
positive consequences that might result from it.  First,
rejoining mythos and logoswould further the recognition that all reason is conditioned
by the narrative in which it takes place, and yet would not necessarily compromise
the integrity of reason that has led to a fashionable historicism among contemporary
thinkers.  Second, narrative should be admissible as a fundamental part of reasoning,
and so we must find a way to articulate that admission in terms other than that of the
mere gratuitous example.  Third, by admitting mythos and logos as distinct modes of
rational inquiry, we effectively relativize both.  This, in turn, may foreground the
ultimate terms of philosophy: the intellect that sees and the form of being seen.  How
is the reason arrives at the form of truth is a mere matter of method, but it is the
vision of truth made present in the soul that truly matters.  Fourth, the intellectual life
should itself be understood as a particularly excellent form of life-story.  Having
excised story-telling from philosophy, we have sacrificed on the altar of logical
method the philosopher as human being and philosophy as a way of life.
Having established the possible benefits of a reintegration of mythos and logos in the
reflections that follow, I would like to outline some consequences of our forgetting
their interrelation.  As I note, “Retelling,” explored mythos  and logos  as
representative of the foundation and manifestation of reason in Plato.  Following
Detienne, I proposed that they are two terms nearly synonymous, differing chiefly in
the oral or written context of reasoning they suggest Finally, I contended that if the
reason’s search for the knowledge of reality cuminates in the vision of truth in the
soul, then,, in seeking the truth, the intellect sees the form of all things, including the
forms of human lives composed as stories; for this, I argued with the aid of the works
of Jacques Maritain and St. Augustine.
I turn now to the consequences of this forgetting of logos and mythos’ near identity,
and begin by observing the rather “literary” revenge mythos has taken on logos.  As
soon as modern philosophy excluded story-telling from its methodological city, that
very human practice reasserted itself precisely as an irrational or illogical form of
knowing.  While there are historical instances of this reassertion of story-telling (or
poetry’s) claim to truth dating back to the age of Plato, in the poets of the Italian
renaissance, in Shakespeare,Pascal, and elsewhere, we see it most forcefully in the
romanticism inaugurated by Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in
France(1790).  There, in a trope typical to his century, abstract “metaphysics” gets
unfavorably contrasted with the concrete, morally-binding realities Burke believed we
could know only by means of the lived drama of social life.  What Russell Kirk would
theorize as the “moral imagination,” Burke understood as a refusal of abstract
ratiocination and as an emersion of the humane  sentiments in the dramatic forms of
human events, which are informed with meaning through the weight of ancestry and
posterity.  While Burke himself does not reduce moral knowledge to the feelings, his
vocabulary lends itself to just such an anti-intellectualist position.1  As such, truth
becomes dramatic to the exclusion of abstract discourse.  Truth comes to reside in
the ghetto of the heart, while rationality carries the field by becoming a bloody yet
bloodless automaton.2  Such a literary revenge of story-telling seems destined to
occupy Burke’s historical position : that of the prophetic cry of a sensibility largely
ignored by the mechanics of a confident modern rationalism.  Mythos claims to have
comprehension of a kind of truth to which reason has no access, but, to the extent
such claims are entertained, they are kept to the margins, sometimes lamented, more
frequently ignored.
Thirty years ago, Alasdair MacIntyre made clear a related consequence of the divorce
of logos  and mythos, in After Virtue (1981).  MacIntyre contended that all ethical
arguments become interminable and incommensurable unless they can occur in the
context of a community’s reflections on the nature of the human telos, that is, on the
form of the achieved good life for man.  To draw speculative pictures of what a good
human life looks like requires being able to talk in terms of stories; and, indeed, the
“raw data” prerequisite to such speculation about possible good lives consists not of
the atomized events of a human life or of abstract propositions about moral right, but
rather of formed accounts of entire lives.  We need the capacity to interpret human
life as a story in order to ask meaningfully how we ought to live.  And while we retain
this capacity ineluctably in virtue of human life’s finite story form, MacIntyre rightly
notes that modern ethics since Hume has refused the admissibility of narrative to
rational argument.3  The criteria we actually follow in determining how to live has
perversely been excluded from the formal philosophical discipline dedicated to living
well.  Because of this, a modern person may be moral, but he cannot think ethically.
This ethical impasse relates directly to an intellectual one—another consequence.  In
the ancient world, philosophy was a way of life, just as the religious life has been in
the Christian era.4  It was natural that so much of philosophy should be concerned
with, and should appear in the form of, stories in order to represent what the life of a
philosopher properly looks like.  Because man was seen to be a rational animal, his
true happiness could only be experienced by those with the capacity to dedicate
themselves to the cultivation of the intellect.  The life of the philosopher was that of a
man drawn by his own love toward the lasting intellectual fulfillment that, sustained,
alone constitutes human happiness.  The quest to come to a vision of the good, and
the life of contemplation made possible thereafter, was not measurable in terms of its
hard, exacting method but only in terms of the kind of joy it made possible.  To
advert once more to Plato, we may say that while it is easy to distinguish the
philosophy of Socrates from the character of Socrates, one misunderstands the nature
of the dialogues in doing so.  They are bound together as idea and manifestation, or,
rather, premise and demonstration.
Those inevitable founding voices of modern philosophy, Descartes and Hume,
expressly sought a philosophic method that cut it off from daily life.  Philosophy’s
method required a self-seclusion of the reason from everyday assumptions and
experience.  For Descartes, the ambition was to establish a position of certainty
regarding pure ideas; for Hume, philosophy served merely to explain and methodize
the proceedings of customary behavior in civil society: it described what one already
did in any case—changing nothing and certainly not qualifying in itself as a kind
ofliving.  The philosopher’s life was no longer understood, therefore, a particularly
excellent type of human life, but rather became that of an abstracted commentator
spinning logos apart from his own or others’ lives.5
If love and longing have always been associated with poetry, they were always
associated with the life of philosophy as well; indeed, Socrates grasped both better
than did Aristophanes.  To the extent that this association has been lost, we are no
longer capable of sensing or even understanding why the ordering of the mind to
being and the ordering of the reason to the true, good, and beautiful should be
thetelos of a well-lived human life.  As such, universities have withered to mere
husks, whose ivied and rocky piles have ceased to be intelligible to their occupants. 
Their cloisters were not constructed to set up a parallel realm of abstract
methodology in which no one can breathe, but to make possible a kind of life
elevated above necessity.  If few can imagine this now, fewer still experience it.
We arrive, then, at a further consequence: the shape of higher education has felt the
impact of this hollowing out.  Our administrators, faculty, and students see that the
intellectual “function” seems to have as its object an exacting and abstract method
removed from the happiness proper to human life.  Disenchanted with this species of
reason, recognizing its vacuity but unable to see an alternative, ,  since the middle of
the last century, many of us have been complicit in efforts to make educational
institutions—if not the intellectual life—“relevant.”  Rather than critiquing abstract
rationalism in terms of the drama of intellect and the joy of contemplation known in
the past, those in positions of authority set up the facile dualism of abstraction and
concretion; they seek to remodel the life of the university on concrete action to the
exclusion of what they now view as the fearful loneliness of thought.6
Increasingly, we see students called to “social awareness,” exhorted to “effect social
change” by engaging in charitable service as part of or as the total content of their
course work.  We no longer tolerate a place where these activities might be
acknowledged as important, but secondary, elements of a good life; an imperative to
ease the material human estate blots out the possibility of an end beyond it and
superior to it.  We fear to offend the “less mentally-abled” by proposing that the life
of contemplation might be superior to the practical life, since it is the point of contact
between the human soul and the divine.  Instead of thought, we have information
sessions: course work in the humanities becomes a positivist form of history and
sociology intended to excite indignation and lead to “service,” the raising of funds in a
charitable campaign, or, at least, the hand-wringing of “white guilt.”7
At most contemporary American Catholic universities, the Catholic “mission” of the
university is most in evidence just at those points on which liberal society in general
has already reached a consensus: the distribution of recycling bins, the use of the
buzzwords “green” and “sustainability,” hospitality to the disabled, and corporal works
of mercy for the poor.  In their proper place, I would strongly approve of nearly all
these initiatives.  If they serve, however, as a substitute for the intellectual tradition
to which Catholic universities are scions, then they have at their root a set of ideas
that we willfully keep ourselves too busy and diverted to contemplate.  This relentless
hum of good will serves to distract us from the fact that we no longer believe in the
capacities of human reason to know the truth; we no longer believe the truth could
regard anything greater than the crude, intractable matter we seek to control in the
name of bodily comfort; we begin to suspect, as it were, that if silence should fall
upon our mind and our hearts for a moment, we might awaken to discover the world
and ourselves are alike empty of meaning.8  One seldom hears, against this restless
and evasive nihilism, an authoritative voice raised to echo Aquinas that the ultimate
end of human life is our contemplative knowledge of and intellectual assimilation to
God.9
I am aware that the world is not dying from an excess of charitable works, though
many of those works may themselves be dead to the real spirit of caritas.10  In the
West, at least, we see our intellectual and spiritual emptiness compensated for less by
self-giving than by consumption.11  In particular, we fixate upon the creation and
commoditization of new technologies for, I think, a very curious reason.  The
narrative of “unstoppable” material progress, of technological advancements that will
relieve us of the burdens of mortality, the labors of survival, the contingent
determinism of nature regarding our weight, sex, and the shape of our noses—this
seems to be the one story still permitted public recognition as rational.  The story of
technology receives such deference because we confuse the power it provides with
reason; it must be good, it must be a testimony to some kind of human greatness.  It
provides a meaningful narrative to a society otherwise lacking, and it makes us think
we are rational gods when in fact we are superstitious slaves.  Why else would it
happen that the mere suggestion that computers are not an unmixed good can excite
wrath in the breasts of otherwise complacent and amiable, if sterile, persons?12
Here, contemporary higher education comes in for one more bit of opprobrium.  Most
humanities and social science courses preach this narrative of technological progress
in such a way that it would seem the summons to charitable service amounts to little
more than helping those in poorer countries access the garden of technological
delights in which we freely romp.  Having said that, many other courses couch
themselves as critical of western consumption and power; they generally do so
exclusively in the form of criticism—that is, in the attempt to undermine the
assumptions of our experience by exposing their manipulative ideological structures. 
Because this always remains a strictly anti-western or anti-capitalist position that
refuses to offer a more robust or dignified account of human life than that offered on
every airwave and video screen, even the most savage criticisms of western
technocratic and ideological drives to domination wind up merely liberating their
students from what little sense of ethical obligation or intellectual calling they are
likely to have acquired within this generally amoral order.  In a word, the greatest ally
of a society entirely organized in terms of exchange between corporations, state
social services, and private consumers is the western Marxist tradition of culture
critique; in claiming to expose the lines of power to criticism, it merely prompts
students to see no purpose to their lives beyond seeking a power of their own. 
This de facto alliance has overcome its de jure antagonism and become most
comically evident in such things as the rise to institutional respectability of media and
cultural studies.  In the study of cartoons and soap operas, our students learn the
most banal of lessons: the bottom line to all the claptrap regarding the true, the
good, and the beautiful is the cliché that the “customer is always right.”  Sometimes,
it just so happens, he does not always know the reason he is right, and that is why
the professors of media studies must scribble their monographs.
This singular public narrative of technological progress, power, and pleasure gives rise
to the proliferation of private narratives deprived of any ethical or rational status.  To
wit, the tales of the talking cure, unfolded on the psychologist’s couch.  The triumph
of the therapeutic reveals at once the vanquishing and the vindication of human life
as a story and human reason’s dependence on story-telling.  The therapeutic
narrative, to be sure, is rife with unfortunate elements.  It presumes the total
isolation of the feelings of the interior, subjective state from the objective conditions
of nature and ethical discourse, so that psychological therapy becomes a stoic
exercise in interior adjustment to inalterable external conditions.  So, too, it despairs
of such confessions having any purchase on reason, or reason any purchase on
them.  The patient’s task is simply to state the raw feeling of experience, upon which
reason operates only to make a diagnosis.  This last, private refuge of storytelling not
only robs it of ethical or rational force, but it has the effect of narrowing the kinds  of
stories we are capable of telling about ourselves.  As has been noted for decades, we
find our popular narratives conform to the stock fixtures of therapy: trauma,
mourning, revenge (or “acting out”), and interior-adjustment.  And yet, the very fact
that human beings feel compelled to tell these stories indicates not how traumatized
we all actually are, but our need for the more varied conventions of story-telling that
become available when story-telling itself is readmitted to the public realm as a
source and basis of wisdom.  This re-admittance, and not an increase in the number
of psychologists, or the already-under-way switching of method from the “talking
cure” to the prescription of psychotropic drugs, is the solution to the conditions
modern psychology generally misdiagnoses.
The causes of the aforementioned phenomena are, no doubt, multiple and complex. 
My argument is not so crude as to suggest that the exile of mythos from logos, or
rather, the abstraction of logos from the condition of its possibility, has alone been
their progenitor.  Other factors have helped misshape the modern university and sent
untold millions in search of therapy.  But surely there is a causal relation.  I have tried
primarily to make the case that our age misunderstands the nature of stories and of
reason alike; that this misunderstanding has its roots in Plato, but that Plato himself
gives us salient reasons to reject it.  Further, I have tried to suggest that human
experience outside the precincts of classical philosophy detects instinctively the
reliance of logos on mythos.  Our predicament is that we have failed to take stories
seriously enough for them to merit the serious attention of anyone besides our
therapist.  Plato’s pedagogical theory of poetry has, in this regard, one further lesson
to teach us.  If we have formed our own pre-rational sensibilities on the irrelevance of
stories to rational thought, and on the irrelevance of reasoning to the narrative form
of human life, then we risk making ourselves unwittingly insensible to a reality on
which our happiness fundamentally depends.  Nothing could be more irrational than
that.
 
Works Cited:
1. See, Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (J.C.D. Clark, Ed. 
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 241-244.  Cf. Russell Kirk, Redeeming the
Time  (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 1999), 69-73.  Burke’s rhetoric on this point derives
most obviously from Swift (see, Burke 301) and should be taken as conclusive
regarding his thoughts on the capacities of human reason.  However, it is precisely
his rhetoric that furnishes a position that emerges in romanticism and after as an anti-
intellectual fideism that idolizes tradition, instinct, or emotion.
2. Cf.  Pascal, 78; Sec. 277.
3. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: Third Edition (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre
Dame Press, 2007).  See 56-58 on Hume and the problem of modern ethics.  See 124
on the story-form of human life..  MacIntyre’s virtue theory may reject Hume’s
skeptical epistemology, but it also seeks to meet that epistemology on its own terms,
so that MacIntyre, from a certain perspective, stands within the ethical tradition
Hume initiated and corrects its deficiencies.  From another perspective, of course,
MacIntyre tells us that the Enlightenment project to which Hume belonged failed, and
its failure opens up room for a renewal of the Aristotelian and Thomist tradition to
which MacIntyre explicitly claims to belong (MacIntyre, x).
4. Cf. Pierre Hadot, What Is Ancient Philosophy?  (Michael Chase, Trans. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).
5. Thus, Hume could contend that philosophical beliefs “are entirely indifferent to the
peace of society and security of government” (Hume, 93).
6. I attempted to describe this drama in “The Dead-end of Disinterestedness” in First
Principles  (www.firstprinciplesjournal.com), September 2008.
7. See, Paul Gottfried, Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt: Toward a Secular
Theocracy (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2002).
8. Pascal is the great psychologist on this point.  See, Pascal, 39-42, Sec. 139.
9. “Since all creatures, even those devoid of understanding, are ordered to God as to
an ultimate end, all achieve this end to the extent that they participate somewhat in
His likeness.  Intellectual creatures attain it in a more special way, that is, through
their proper operation of understanding Him.  Hence, this must be the end of the
intellectual creature, namely, to understand God” (Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra
Gentiles (Vernon J. Bourke, Trans.  Garden City, NY: Image Books, 1956) III.25).
10. See, Benedict XVI, God is Love (Washington, D.C.: United States Conference of
Catholic Bishops, 2006), §19-21, 28; he notes that “It is time to reaffirm the
importance of prayer in the face of the activism and growing secularism of many
Christians engaged in charitable work” (§37).  Cf. Benedict XVI, Caritas in
Veritate(San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2009): “I am aware of the ways in which
charity has been and continues to be misconstrued and emptied of meaning, with the
consequent risk of being misinterpreted, detached from ethical living, and, in any
event, undervalued” (§2).
11. In The Conservative Mind: Seventh Revised Edition (Washington, D.C.: Regnery
Publishing, 2001),  Russell Kirk speaks of the contemporary West as a “consumption-
society” (11) while we are all familiar with the term “consumer society” and the
demotic redefinition of persons and citizens as “consumers” and “customers.”
12. E.g. Wendell Berry, What Are People For? (San Francisco: North Point Press,
1990), 170-196.