Aesthetic Form and the End
"The development of mythic thinking towards logical and abstract thinking, which is best seen in the Greeks, is at the same time a constant dying away, not of faith, but of imagination, of the freely creating power of imagination. To the extent that it dies off, abstract thought is able to detach itself and set itself free. Now it lifts its wings to the high and free flight in which it gains autonomy. It flies over Pindar's nomos basileus and establishes laws for itself. Now the free thinker, free thought, enters the scene, and by manifesting in itself, by acting, all knowledge becomes anthropology, becomes anthropological in the sense that the Greeks understood it. Free thought detaches itself from the basis on which it originated. It separates itself from it, yet remains bound to it to the end and even soars above it – for this separateness and this free hovering constitute the history of free thought. In the struggle which philosophy wages against myth, waged by the Ionia
