Mikhail Lifshits’ logomythy: “the art of discrimination”

Abstract

The article reconstructs an original concept of myth developed by Mikhail Lifshits. He invented the term “logomythia”, as the “art of discrimination”, to show the ambivalent nature of creative work, where archaic myth dies as a historical nonsense and resurrects as a human meaning. Logomythia demonstrates the overcoming of the irrational element in the life of societies by linking it to the rational or meaningful content of artistic images. And, on the other hand, the concept contains more than a hint of the crisis of rationalism in the twentieth century which destroyed the harmony of man with nature.