Logos

For Heraclitus, logos is the structured thought-process that is at once the divine principle of the cosmos and the human faculty by which that principle is recognized. Sullivan’s reconstruction: logos names “a thought-process having a structured form. On the cosmic level this exists as the divine principle but is present as well in human beings” (Sullivan 1995, p. 29). The cosmos is not made by logos; the cosmos is logos speaking itself. “This cosmos, the same for all, no god or human being made, but it always was, is, and shall be, an everliving fire, kindling in measure and going out in measure” (B30).

The Heraclitean logos has two decisive features. First, it is common (xynon). “Even though logos is common, the many live as though they had an individual way of thinking” (B2, Sullivan 1995, p. 113). Human thought, properly conducted, is not private invention but participation in what is already the case. This is the first Western formulation of what the depth tradition will later call the collective ground of psyche. Second, logos expresses itself in opposites: “there is a back-stretched connection (harmoniē) as in the bow and the lyre” (B51). The measure of the cosmos is the balanced tension of contraries, not their resolution.

Logos is thus the hinge on which the tradition turns from myth to philosophical psychology without abandoning the sacred. It carries forward into Plato‘s use, into the Johannine en archē ēn ho logos, into the Stoic logos spermatikos, into alchemical doctrine, and into Jung’s insistence that the psyche is objective — that it is something encountered, not merely authored.

Relationships

• fire-heraclitus
• unity-of-opposites
• psyche
• collective-unconscious

Primary sources

• fragments-heraclitus (Heraclitus, c. 500 BCE)
• Sullivan, Psychological and Ethical Ideas (1995)