Myth

Tudor Balinisteanu

pp. 165-183

in: Barry Stocker, Michael Mack (eds), The Palgrave handbook of philosophy and literature, Berlin, Springer, 2018

Abstract

This chapter provides a discussion of myth as poetic literary style, based on the distinction between mythos and logos introduced through an analysis of understandings of the terms in archaic Greece. The archaic associations of mythos with truth, and of logos with beguilement and deception, are discussed in relation to Romantic and modernist poetics and philosophies in the context of civic liberalism, utopias, patriarchal values, myth as means of human cognition, and myth as constitutive pragmatically necessary fiction, among others. This leads to the argument, centrally based on Bracha Ettinger's work on matrixial borderspace, that myth is a literary style engendering faith and belief experienced somatically, because what is experienced is a memory of co-emergence with another (the [M]other) which cannot be expressed symbolically.