look down at vs. look down on

Question

Are look down on and look down at synonymous? They are when referring to dictionaries, but I'd like to know the subtle difference between them.

The ancient Greeks used to describe two very different ways of thinking — logos and mythos. Logos roughly referred to the world of the logical, the empirical, the scientific. Mythos referred to the world of dreams, storytelling and symbols. Like many rationalists today, some philosophers of Greece prized logos and looked down at mythos. Logic and reason, they concluded, make us modern; storytelling and mythmaking are primitive. But lots of scholars then and now — including many anthropologists, sociologists and philosophers today — see a more complicated picture, where mythos and logos are intertwined and interdependent. Science itself, according to this view, relies on stories. The frames and metaphors we use to understand the world shape the scientific discoveries we make; they even shape what we see. When our frames and metaphors change, the world itself is transformed. The Copernican Revolution involved more than just scientific calculation; it involved a new story about the place of Earth in the universe.

Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain

Answer 1

As with so many questions like these, the answer is "it depends." If you are standing on a hill, you can look down on or look down at a village in the valley. This ngram viewer shows that both look down at the scene and look down on the scene are used, although look down on is more common.

But in a figurative rather than a literal sense, if you look down on someone, you are thinking less of that person than of yourself. To use look down at someone to mean this is very rare at best; if you look down at someone, you're generally doing it in the literal sense of, say, looking down the stairs at someone standing in the hall.

The example you give is the only time I've ever seen at used in this way. An ngram viewer of look down at/on the idea has no examples using at, and quite a few examples using on. This gives me the idea that as an editor, I would correct the passage from at to on.

Now, there's an idiomatic expression look down one's nose at something, which has a similar meaning to look down on. Maybe that's where this comes from.

Doing some more research, I see your excerpt comes from a book authored by one Shankar Vedantam. Perhaps this is a peculiarity of Indian English speakers, but it is not otherwise standard.

Answer 2

To 'look down at' can mean, literally, to observe or see from a higher place, e.g. from the top floor of my house, I can look down at the tops of cars in the street below. It doesn't really have a figurative meaning.

To 'look down on' can mean, literally, the same thing, but it also has a figurative meaning: 'despise' or 'regard with a feeling of superiority'.

It is clear from the context you gave that the authors intended the second, figurative meaning (some philosophers of Greece prized logos and regarded mythos with a feeling of superiority).

There are certain signs in the text that it was possibly poorly edited prior to publication, and maybe prepared by non-native or unskilled English speakers. I find 'philosophers of Greece' awkward when 'Greek philosophers' is so obviously more appropriate.