To understand myth and Logos as opposites is to follow a narrative that is itself mythical in origin. The familiar account runs like this: first came myth, then came reason and replaced it. This story of succession sounds logical, yet it conceals an insight older than the distinction itself — every concept, even the most seemingly rational, carries a paradigmatic image within it that shapes its premises from within.
What Heraclitus Meant by Logos
The earliest documented use of the word Logos as a philosophical term comes from Heraclitus (c. 520—460 BCE). For him, Logos referred neither to a set of rules for thinking nor to the capacity for argumentation. He meant the living order that pervades the cosmos, an order in which human thought participates when it is sufficiently awake. Fragment B50 captures the point: Listening not to me but to the Logos, it is wise to agree that all things are one (Heraclitus, DK 22 B50). Here, the Logos is no human achievement and no tool applied to the world. It is a cosmic structure that thinking discovers when it opens itself to the whole.
This conception stands in stark contrast to what later centuries made of the word. Formal logic, as taught since Aristotle (Aristotle, c. 350 BCE), examines the validity of inferences. It asks whether a conclusion has been correctly derived from its premises. That is legitimate in itself. But it does not ask what image is embedded in those premises. Heraclitus’s Logos, by contrast, was the order itself in which thinking and reality participate equally.
The Myth Inside Every Concept
Here lies the decisive thought, one that reaches far beyond a historical footnote: every concept carries a paradigmatic myth within it. This is not a metaphor. It describes a structure.
The German word Aufklärung (Enlightenment) follows the pattern of Plato’s allegory of the cave (Plato, c. 375 BCE). Someone is imprisoned; another frees him; he is led into the light. The structure presupposes a jailer — an authority that keeps people in darkness. It tells a story of liberation by a knower from outside. The Asian counterpart, awakening, follows a fundamentally different pattern: the dream is lucid, no one caused it, and no one can shake another person awake. The same phenomenon — gaining clarity — is grasped through two different myths that transport two different worldviews. To speak of Enlightenment is implicitly to presuppose a demiurge who must be overcome. To speak of awakening is to presuppose a consciousness that is already awake but does not yet recognize itself as such.
This difference becomes visible only when one uncovers the myth behind the concept. As long as one reads only the argumentative surface, both words appear as synonyms for knowledge. Only the investigation of the paradigmatic image reveals that they contain different cosmologies.
Schelling and the Philosophy of Mythology
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775—1854) was the first to develop a systematic philosophy of mythology. For him, myth was neither a preliminary stage nor a degenerate form of thought, but an independent mode of access to reality. In his Munich lectures on the Philosophy of Mythology (1837—1842), he argued that the mythic narratives of peoples were not inventions but expressions of a real process in which consciousness relates to reality (Schelling, 1842).
In this, Schelling contradicted the demythologization that had been regarded as progress since the eighteenth century. The Enlightenment had dismissed myth as superstition, to be replaced by rational explanation. Schelling showed that this dismissal itself rests on an unexamined assumption: the belief that rational thinking stands outside any mythic structure (Schelling, 1842).
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844—1900) continued this thought by a different route. In The Birth of Tragedy (1872), he described the interplay of the Apollonian and the Dionysian as two forces that need each other (Nietzsche, 1872). The Apollonian — the world of the clear image and formed shape — corresponds to Logos. The Dionysian — the world of intoxication and the dissolution of boundaries — corresponds to myth. Nietzsche’s insight was that a culture which suppresses the Dionysian does not become clearer but poorer: it loses access to an entire dimension of experience.
The Mythic as Present Reality
Jochen Kirchhoff (1944—2025) formulated a position in his work that draws both lines together. The mythic, according to his core thesis, is always present, always accessible — but it demands grounding (Kirchhoff, 2007). One cannot encounter myth in abstraction. One encounters it in concrete experience, in the body, in the perception of an order larger than one’s own thinking.
This position differs from a mere rehabilitation of myth. The point is not to play mythic thinking against rational thinking or the reverse. The question is different: can you recognize which myth is at work in your own thinking, even where you consider yourself purely rational? When you speak of freedom, for instance, you carry a particular image within you that determines the concept. Philosophical work begins where this image becomes visible.
The narrative of demythologization — the claim that humanity has left myth behind — turns out on closer examination to be a particularly effective form of myth: the story of no longer needing stories. Whoever believes they think in purely rational terms has merely forgotten the myth that carries their thinking.
Two Modes, One Reality
Myth and Logos are not successive epochs that replace each other. They are two modes in which human beings relate to reality. Logos orders, distinguishes, examines. Myth seizes, connects, locates the individual within the whole. A natural philosophy that grasps the cosmos as living requires both: the precision of conceptual distinction and the capacity to be touched by an image that contains more than its analysis.
Contextual disclosure as a philosophical tool operates precisely at this juncture: it asks which unspoken images and narratives determine a thought from within. The question of myth and Logos is therefore not a historical one but a diagnostic one. It concerns every concept we use, every order we follow, and every image we take for granted.
Sources
- Aristotle (c. 350 BCE). Organon. Transmitted in: Bekker, I. (ed.), Aristotelis Opera. Berlin: Reimer, 1831.
- Diels, H. and Kranz, W. (1951). Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker. 6th edn. Berlin: Weidmann. [DK 22 B50]
- Kirchhoff, J. (2007). Räume, Dimensionen, Weltmodelle. Drachen Verlag.
- Nietzsche, F. (1872). Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik. Leipzig: Fritzsch.
- Plato (c. 375 BCE). Republic (Book VII). Transmitted in: Stephanus, H. (ed.), Platonis Opera. Geneva, 1578.
- Schelling, F. W. J. (1842). Philosophie der Mythologie. Stuttgart: Cotta.
Related entries: Logic, Natural Philosophy, Contextual Disclosure, Wisdom