Heraclitus says the following (B 112): 'to think well (sophronein) is the greatest arefi and wisdom (sophia) is to speak and to perform the true, recognising it according to nature'. 52 What is this 'thinking well' that Heraclitus refers to?53 In two other fragments he mentions phronein alone. In B 1 7 he remarks that 'most people do not think (phronein) things in the way that ~hey encounter them nor, learning them, do they understand them, )but they imagine that they do'. As we have discussed above in chapters 2 and 3, Heraclitus believed that the universe was a divine expression, a logos, ever revealing itself as a unity in balanced diversity. Most human beings, however, fail to perceive the unity underlying all things and perceive them instead as separate and often incompatible entities. 54 In another fragment Heraclitus refers to this tendency of humans (B 2): 'although the logos is common, the many live as though they had a private way of thinking (phronesis)'. The logos that on a divine level expresses and forms the universe exists also in human beings as their capacity for thought and speech. Human beings need to study how logos works and come especially to realise that it is a shared capacity. Thus in B 113 he says: 'thinking (phronein) is common for all people'. The ability to think, therefore, like logos, belongs to all human beings. In it is the key to understanding the nature of all things. In B 116 also Heraclitus refers to 'thinking', this time using the verb sophroneo: 'for all human beings it is possible to know themselves and to think well'. In this echo of the saying inscribed at Delphi, 'know yourself, Heraclitus suggests that the key to truth is found within each individual.
— Shirley Darcus Sullivan
Heraclitus is doing something seductive here, and worth watching carefully. The logos he describes — shared, universal, the divine grammar of the cosmos available to anyone willing to attend — is genuinely compelling. It is also already the beginning of a long detour away from the mess that precedes him. Homer's interior was plural, argumentative, somatic: *thūmos* that could defy a man, *phrenes* that could fail him, organs that received dread from the outside and moved on their own recognizance. Heraclitean *phronein* offers a way out of that plurality: align yourself with the shared logos, stop imagining you have a private way of thinking, and the cosmos opens. The prescription is elegant. It is also the first draft of what will become a persistent instruction to the soul — that clarity, universality, and right-thinking are the cure for the human condition.
Sullivan catches him at the Delphi echo: *know yourself*, and you will think well. But notice what drops out when self-knowledge means aligning with the universal. The *private* phronesis Heraclitus dismisses — the soul's stubborn idiosyncrasy, its refusal to be gathered into the common — is precisely where individuation, centuries later, will have to begin looking. The shared logos does not need you specifically. The particular suffering does.
Shirley Darcus Sullivan·Psychological and Ethical Ideas What Early Greeks Say·1995