other hand, they do not have a word for "language." They have, of course, the word γλῶσσα, tongue. But they never think the word on the basis of the "tongue" by which the word is spoken. Thus their determination of the essence of man is not ἄνθρωπος ζῷον γλῶσσαν ἔχον—the living being that has the tongue. Cows and mules also have a "tongue." If, however, it is the essential feature of man to have the word and to appropriate it, and if the Greeks experience and understand the human being in this way, then is it not necessary that they, when they distinguish themselves and their humanity versus others, take as a point of reference for the distinction precisely this essential feature?
The Greeks distinguish themselves from other peoples and call them βάρβαροι, ones who have a strange sort of speech which is not μῦθος, not λόγος, not ἔπος. For the Greeks, the opposite to "barbarism" is not "culture"; it is dwelling within μῦθος and λόγος. There has been "culture" only since the beginning of the modern period; it began the moment veritas became certitudo, when man posited himself for himself and made himself, by his own "cultivation," cultura, and by his own "creative work" a creator, i.e., a genius. The Greeks are not familiar with the likes of either "culture" or "genius." So it is curious that even today the best classical philologists ramble on about the "cultural genius" of the Greeks. From the standpoint of the Greeks, what is called "culture" in the modern period is an organization of the "spiritual world" produced by the willful power of man. "Culture" is the same in essence as modern technology; both are in a strict Greek sense unmythical. Thought in the Greek way, "culture" and "technology" are forms of barbarism, no less than is "nature" in Rousseau.
Μῦθος, ἔπος, and λόγος belong together essentially. "Myth" and "logos" appear in an erroneously much-discussed opposition only because they are the same in Greek poetry and thought. In the ambiguous and confusing title "mythology," the words μῦθος and λόγος are connected in such a way that both forfeit their primordial essence. To try to understand μῦθος with the help of "mythology" is a procedure equivalent to drawing water with the aid of a sieve. When we use the expression "mythical," we shall think it in the sense just delimited the "mythical"—the μῦθος-ical—is the disclosure and concealment contained in the disclosing-concealing word, which is the primordial appearance of the fundamental essence of Being itself. The terms death, night, day, the earth, and the span of the sky name essential modes of disclosure and concealment.