Privileging logos: The myth of the Western worldview

As the ecological, political, and cultural crises of the world become increasingly dire, basic assumptions that have effected such consequences must be questioned. The Western view of the world is far from the only one, but its characteristic drive to domination and assertion of hegemony bespeak an archetypal impulse within it. This dissertation argues that the rational logos---the West's predominant mode of reading and storying the world---carries this archetypal attitude that so significantly informs the framing of the Western worldview.;The historical emergence and spread of the rational logos was concurrent with the rise of the archaic Greek polis, serving and being served by its novel forms of political and economic expression. This logos also found expression intellectually, when beliefs contained within the traditional mythic corpus were challenged by a new analytical attitude. This progression is typically heralded as the move from mythos to logos, as the light of heroic reason triumphant over the darkness of superstition and myth.;However, the oppositionalism of logos to mythos is not only a false antimony but one manufactured by the Greeks, especially the philosophers. The privileging of logos as the legitimate mode of truthful discourse was a move made to subvert and replace the authority of traditional cultural narrative, a move made in complicity with alphabetic literacy with its biases toward literalism and singleness of meaning. The logos abets this either/or reductionism and institutionalizes a prejudice of privileging and subordination, a divide et impera methodology that promotes exclusion over inclusion, competition over cooperation.;As an intellectual tool, the rational logos has bestowed many boons to Western and other cultures. This study aims to expose the baleful side of a one-sided worldview that archetypally prefers distance over intimacy, detachment over connection. Through the methods of phenomenological description and archetypal psychologizing, I elicit convergent evidence of the ethos, mythos, and telos---that is, the character, narrative presentation, and aim---of the rational logos. For all its claims as the legitimate arbiter of "reality," the logos remains a species of myth, a privileged myth, the myth we are largely living though.