Abstract

The point od departure in the author´s argumentation is the perception and understanding of the world by the archaic humans, i. e. the metaphorical, archaic, mythical way of thinking. He sees the Greek and Chinese philosophy as deriving from mythical thinking, especially from the cosmogony and cosmology of archaic nations. Together with Yung and Eliade he calls these roots of philosophy archetypes discerned by archaic ontology. It is through these archetypes that the representations, metaphors and ideas in human consciousness originate. These "archetypal metaphors" as the external expressions of archetypes may differ in form, but their structure on archetypal level is the same.