Narrative, Rhetoric, and the Origins of Logic

In Vom Mythos zum Logos (1940), a book that became emblematic of a now rather passé, idealized view of ancient Greek culture, Wilhelm Nestle proposed that the greatest achievement of the Greeks was the abandonment of the mythological interpretation of the world in favor of a rationalist model, developed with the tools of analytic thinking. Nestle's account has since been supplanted by newer approaches, which found a lot more than myth in mythos and a lot less than pure reason in logos. However, if we restrict the meaning of his two terms and read mythos simply as "story" and logos as "logic," Nestle's catchphrase takes us back to a seminal event in cultural history, an event that has not been examined with the attention it deserves.

More specifically, this essay argues that what we call, for short, "the birth of logic" can best be understood not as the abandonment of the narrative mode of thought (story) for the rational (logic), but as a transformation of aspects of the former into the latter. This transformation occurred in the classical era (500-330 BCE) in certain Greek poleis, when the new democratic institutions allowed multiple narrative representations of reality to come into conflict, thus creating the need for choice among competing versions. The medium for these verbal battles was the newly invented prose genre of rhetoric.¹

The idea that judicial practice, more particularly, was a context for the early development of logic is not new (Lloyd 1990; Asper 2004). However, most investigations have a blind spot where the relations of rhetoric—and thus of logic—to narrative are concerned. Focusing precisely on this interface, I put forward a cognitively grounded account of classical forensic rhetoric as a tool for comparing narratives in contest. My argument, in a nutshell, is that the tools and methods of logic were not invented ex nihilo but—as is common in cultural evolution— adapted from an earlier, existing practice: they were borrowings that sometimes involved what biologists call exaptations, which involve the assignment to new uses of features originally developed for another purpose, in this case the craft of poetic storytelling.

The following section lays groundwork for my argument, briefly characterizing some of the cognitive properties of narrativity and the socially developed practice of storytelling. In the next I set the scene for Greek rhetoric, examining how narrativity is behind the generic format of the forensic speech, functioning as a macroscopic algorithm for creating texts. In the final section I turn to the microstructure of the forensic speech and the specific borrowings and exaptations of poetic storytelling patterns that are redeployed for purposes of demonstrative persuasion.

Ending in the early fourth century BCE, my account makes it possible to speak of the shift transition from story to logical proof in Greek culture—a process we can think of as beginning with Homer (eighth century BCE) and ending with Euclid (c. 300 BCE)—as a much more seamless transition than previous research would suggest.

On Narratives and Storytelling

For the purposes of my discussion, I distinguish between narrative and storytelling, defining the first as more general than the second. I make the distinction in order to separate narrativity, viewed as a basic human mental capacity, from the telling of stories, which is at least partly shaped through cultural practice.

Narrative

Narrative is a representation of action through a sequential symbolic system—here I consider only human language. The action represented need not be there in the real world: the events in Dostoyevsky's Brothers Karamazov did not actually happen, but it makes perfect sense to speak of them, when referring to the novel, as if they did. Note that there are two operative words here: action is at least as important in the study of narrative as its representation. In fact, despite poststructuralist and other theorists' preference for "the signifier over the signified," experimental research of the past decades brings to the foreground the oft-forgotten truth that "narratives are discourses that describe a set of actions" (Zacks, Tversky, and Iyer 2001: 5).

It is important to underscore the...