” It comes to a climax in Nietzsche, who exposed the mythic foundations of Greek rationality and the Enlightenment. Beyond critique, Nietzsche “reinvented polemically the Greek gods Dionysus and Apollo to counter the Socratic scientific rationality that had come to dominate the world after the fifth century.” Like the German Romantics, Nietzsche insisted “only a culture bounded by myths could achieve unity and identity” and concluded “modern culture could be redeemed only if a new mythology could arise” (40-1).

William Nestle’s Vom Mythos zum Logos (1940) is the classical statement of this reading. On the opening page, Nestle claims mythos and logos are “the two poles between which man’s mental life oscillates. Mythic imagination and logical thought are opposites,” the former being “imagistic and involuntary,” rooted in the unconscious, while the latter is “conceptual and intentional, and analyzes and synthesizes by means of consciousness” (quoted in Glenn Most, “From Logos to Mythos,” in From Myth to Reason?, 27).