Narrative, Rhetoric, and the Origins of Logic

Abstract

In Vom Mythos zum Logos (1940), a book that became emblematic of a now rather passe, idealized view of ancient Greek culture, Wilhelm Nestle proposed that the greatest achievement of the Greeks was the abandonment of the mythological interpretation of the world in favor of a rationalist model, developed with the tools of analytic thinking. Nestle’s account has since been supplanted by newer approaches, which found a lot more than myth in mythos and a lot less than pure reason in logos. However, if we restrict the meaning of his two terms and read mythos simply as “story” and logos as “logic,” Nestle’s catchphrase takes us back to a seminal event in cultural history, an event that has not been examined with the attention it deserves. More specifi cally, this essay argues that what we call, for short, “the birth of logic” can best be understood not as the abandonment of the narrative mode