Returning to Greece, in the work “The Invention of Mythology,” Marcel Detienne describes the exclusion strategy of archaic and tribal culture based on orality by the new written knowledge: “the truth of the effective discourse of ‘useful’ history is a written truth. But it is also a new memory, purified from the falsifications of hear-say, saved from the temptations of the pleasure of listening and setting out to tell.” The Greeks, Detienne says, have “two heads”: one mythical and one philosophical. “Their astonishing culture offers the spectacle of a mythical thought that, overcoming itself from within, accedes to a logic of forms, from which the Greek, armed with the concept, begins to become the interpreter of his own mythology.” In Greece, alphabetic technology invests different spheres of knowledge: “It is a few small groups, the intellectual circles-philosophers, physicians, logographers, all practitioners of prose-who put the critical virtues of writing to good use.”
The philosophical revolution is an intellectual extension, yet it also registers a loss: “When the living word of a people or nation, finds its fullness and unity in the mythological verb, to impose the mark of writing on it is to mutilate it. Spelling alters the word’s lofty splendor, deforms the voice of myth, distorts mythological revelation.” But the transition is sharp, and irreversible:” Between the lived word of myth and the written tradition there is a distance that cannot be bridged.”
A new intelligence, enabled by writing, makes its way in and removes the previous mentality of myth, accused of superstition, archaism, and dementia.
Italiano