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Logos Self-Augmenting

Logos Self-Augmenting

Heraclitus B 115: “the logos of psyche is one increasing itself” (Sullivan 1995, p. 117) — ψυχῆς ἐστι λόγος ἑωυτὸν αὔξων. The participle auxon — increasing, augmenting — is in the active middle: the soul’s logos augments itself. This is the second leg of the Heraclitean charter for logoi psyches, paired with B 45’s claim of unsearchable depth.

Sullivan reads the self-augmentation across several registers at once. Logos here is measure — the proportion in which the elements of psyche turn into one another, fire into water and back — and it is also speech reflecting thought, the human capacity to name the world. “Always human beings can understand more, name more, speak more. They experience no limit in the ability of learning new words and expressions. Even foreign languages are accessible to them and consequently the experience that these languages embody” (Sullivan 1995, p. 117). The logos augments itself because the inner field it accounts for is not bounded; each new naming opens the next.

The fragment grounds the post-Jungian claim that the soul has its own movement — Hillman’s “psyche, when it bases itself in the image, must at the same time recognize that imagination is not merely a human faculty but an activity of soul to which the human imagination bears witness. It is not we who imagine, but we who are imagined” (Hillman 1983). The self-augmenting logos of B 115 is the classical warrant for treating the soul’s productions as autonomous rather than as outputs of a containing subject.

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