How myth made philosophy possible

In Book XI of the Odyssey, Odysseus descends to the underworld.

He crosses the river of the dead, pours libations, and waits. One by one, the shades come to drink — his mother, his fallen comrades, the great heroes of the Trojan War. 

He speaks with Achilles, who tells him he would rather be a slave among the living than a king among the dead. He sees Tantalus, eternally reaching for water that recedes; Sisyphus, eternally rolling his boulder; Minos, judging the dead.

This is the literature and the cultural phenomena that preceded philosophy and made it possible. Odysseus is already asking what philosophy will spend centuries trying to answer: What is the soul? What survives death? What lies beyond the visible structure of the cosmos? 

Homer does not answer with arguments. He answers with images — vivid, haunting, impossible to forget. But the questions are the same ones.

Myths against Philosophy

The standard history of philosophy tends to begin with Thales of Miletus, around 600 BC, and the declaration that everything is water. 

The gesture is presented as a rupture: the Greeks put away myth, picked up reason, and philosophy began. Logos displaced mythos.

The rupture is real. But the displacement was never complete — and understanding why requires going back to what myth actually was in the world that philosophy emerged from.

As Giovanni Reale argues in History of Ancient Philosophy, the culture of archaic Greece was built around what he calls “mimetic-poetic orality”. 

What this means is that Homer and Hesiod were not simply poets. They were the repository of everything a community knew — its values, its cosmology, its understanding of the gods, the dead, the structure of the world. 

Their verses were memorized and recited across generations. The listener absorbed its content by identification, by emotionally inhabiting the characters and events being recited. The word for this is mimesis — imitation or embodiment.

Philosophy did not replace this world. It grew inside it, and then broke it open.

The correlation between mythological and philosophical accounts

Hesiod's Theogony — written before any philosopher we know of — is a poem about the origin of the gods. It begins with Chaos, from which Gaia is born, from which the sky and the mountains and the sea emerge. 

This is already an account of how everything came to be. When Thales asks what the arché — the first principle of all things — is, he is inhabiting the same question Hesiod inhabited. 

The answers, however, diverge radically: one speaks in narrative, the other in propositions.

Aristotle saw this. "The lover of myths," he writes in the Metaphysics, "is in a sense a lover of wisdom, for myth is composed of wonders." Thaumazein — wonder — is what Aristotle identifies as the origin of philosophy. And wonder is precisely what myth cultivates. 

The mythophilos and the philosophos, in a sense, are not opposites separated by a clean historical break. They are neighbors, separated by method, united by the questions that keep them awake.

Plato's ambivalence

Plato expels the poets from his ideal city. He accuses Homer and the tragedians of producing imitations of imitations, of corrupting the young by showing gods and heroes behaving badly, of offering illusion in place of truth. 

And then Plato writes myths.

The Phaedo ends with a vision of the afterlife. The Republic ends with the Myth of Er — a soldier who dies in battle, ascends to the realm of the dead, watches souls choose their next lives, and returns to tell what he saw. The Gorgias ends with a myth of judgment after death. The Phaedrus contains the myth of the winged soul, climbing toward the realm of the Forms. 

At the most important moments of his arguments — precisely when the argument reaches its limit and something more is needed — Plato turns to mythos.

Plato understood, as the scholar Luc Brisson has argued, that myth "is an instrument of persuasion whose effectiveness is all the greater because its audience is universal." 

The philosophical argument reaches only those capable of following it. Myth reaches everyone, because it works not on the intellect alone but on imagination, memory, and affect. It does not merely explain. It marks the soul. The Greek word Plato uses is typos — a stamp, an impression, a form left behind in someone who may not even know it is there.

This is why myth preceded philosophy. And why philosophy, at its most serious, never entirely left it behind.

Next week

In the next newsletter, we will look at the figure who stands at the center of this transition: Socrates — who wrote nothing, taught through conversation, and whose life became, in Plato's hands, something almost indistinguishable from myth itself.