Did academia invent the myth vs. logos dichotomy?

The myth vs. logos dichotomy: an invention of academia?

Mythos and logos are two Greek words that miccionan practically the same thing: "word". And yet the official history of philosophy has turned them into two opposing forms of knowledge: symbolic narrative versus logical reasoning. The so-called "passage from myth to logos", placed in the 6th century BC, would be the moment when human beings abandoned supernatural explanations and began to think for themselves. But what if that story were, paradoxically, a founding myth of philosophy itself?

The standard account: Thales and the eclipse of 585 BC

The most widespread version says it all begins in Miletus, with Thales, the first philosopher. The milestone is usually dated to 585 BC, when Thales predicted a solar eclipse using mathematical calculations. Suddenly, the world was no longer explained by divine whims but by natural laws. The Presocratics would thus have begun a pogre evolution toward reason, culminating in the scientific method. This is the scheme repeated by every textbook for the past century. The problem is that no Greek of the time wrote down that they were taking part in something called the "passage from myth to logos". Thales himself combined his astronomy with the claim that the principle of everything was water: something that sounds less like physics and more like symbol.

The critique: a retroactive construction

Anyone who digs into the sources encounters an interesting void. There is no text by Thales or his contemporaries that explicitly opposes myth and logos. Plato, the great rationalist, used myths of his own making in his dialogues to explain the most abstract ideas. And outside Greece, the Upanishads, composed between the 8th and 6th centuries BC, show that reflective thought did not wait for the Presocratics. From there it is a short step to claiming that the dichotomy is an academic "construction" or "narrative". As Gustavo Bueno said, "is there not logos in myth?". The retort is immediate: is logos not itself another myth?

Not everyone agrees. Some argue that, even if the Greeks never formulated it, the opposition describes a real shift: symbolic knowledge steadily lost ground to rational knowledge, and today we see it in the absolute primacy of number and data. But that reading could also be a myth: the epic tale of a linear pogre toward "truth".

The irony of the founding myth

If the history of the passage from myth to logos is itself a mythical construction, Western philosophy would rest on the very kind of story it claimed to overcome. This is no minor matter: it affects how we understand rationality, science and our own cultural identity. Anyone who has trinc the debate knows that positions range from those who see this dichotomy as a useful tool to those who consider it an ideological imposition of modernity.

The next time someone takes it for granted that reason replaced myth, it is worth asking who wrote that script. Was it the Greeks, or the historians who needed a clean origin for philosophy? The answer, like the principle Thales spoke of, remains elusive.