My dissertation mentor turned me on to your site, and it is great to find you and your work. I’m going to put you on my blogroll. Check out my blog for my own work in searching for a new synthesis between mythos and logos! Glenn Berger

Randy–I addressed this somewhat over at MythSoc, but Barfield does use both techniques. He analyzes the development of language and thought, leaning heavily on Ancient Greek, and actually goes through not only the history of the evolution of consciousness, but where he thinks it’s going (and where he thinks it ought to go). He comes out of the tradition of Rudolph Steiner, so there’s a bit of anthroposophy involved.

So, instead of a separate, individual identity, these people had a constructed identity, one that was inseparable from social context. The whole notion of an individual identity (along with “objectivity” and all such logos-related phenomena) that we take for granted is something that actually has evolved in the history of culture, in the history of language – a change that has take place by means of the technology of literacy and of writing, and the disembodiment that writing makes possible, the disembedding of words from their social context.

I’m curious to know more about what Barfield has to say here; I really do need to check out Saving the Appearances. Is his book primarily historical, describing how this division occurred? Or does he provide some analysis, indicating that this is a bad division and we need to somehow overcome it? Most of the material I have read on mythical thinking / logical thinking comes at it from the first perspective, though (from what little I know of Barfield) I would guess that he (at least in some way) reflects the second perspective.

Excellent article!

One of the fundamental oppositions that has helped me see things in new ways is the split between orality and literacy (Walter Ong’s book Orality and Literacy is a great introduction to that topic). It’s a chicken-and-egg question: did the Greek develop the technology of written language because their logos efforts needed to be able to write things down, or is it that the logos effort itself in some sense driven by the invention of writing…? Whichever way you think it started, it’s pretty clear that the inventions of writing and philosophy fed on one another in classical Greece, with all kinds of consequences for us today, in the hyperliterate world in which we live.

To this day, I can still remember picking up – entirely by chance – a book in the library, The Muse Learns to Write by Eric Havelock, and feeling it cause a mental earthquake for me. He is more famous for Preface to Plato (also a great book), but it was that little volume The Muse Learns to Write which really rocked my world and set me off on a whole new way of thinking about human culture. It was the book which launched me into reading Ong and McLuhan et al.

Another great book that pushes at the idea of literacy and orality as a kind of generalizing principle, a lens through which we can observe all kinds of cultural phenomena in new ways, is The Alphabet versus the Goddess, by Leonard Shlain. He is a wonderful writer and a great speaker… and I had the odd experience of hearing him give a talk at the University of Oklahoma, and realizing that while his ideas and thoughts were of HUGE importance to me, elucidating in all kinds of ways how I think about the world, they really did not strike a chord with other people in the audience. Which is something very interesting in and of itself: why is it that one kind of message reaches (DEEPLY reaches) some people in an audience, while that same message just bounces off the minds of others in that audience…? It was a kind of disconcerting experience – I had thought to myself, “Well, after people at the university hear Leonard Shlain speak, they will realize at last that we need to totally overhaul the way we have organized our approach to learning and education…” – but no such luck. Still, it was a great talk and that book (Alphabet versus the Goddess) is a treasure trove of fascinating stuff to think about.

Thanks for this article here, which helped me think about the mythos/logos distinction you draw hear echoes so strongly with some of the ways I see the back-and-forth of our ways of being in the world! :-)