B 45 says: 'you would never discover the limits of PVJche, even though you travelled along every road: so deep a logos does it have'. 54 B 115 says: 'the logos of PVJche is one increasing itself'. In these passages wgos is often interpreted as having a meaning different from that discussed above. 55 It is interpreted as 'measure'.56 The reference then is to the 'measure' that PVJche possesses, one that is boundless and ever increasing. These statements are significant in that they suggest that PVJche has a capacity without limit. In the context of Heraclitus' philosophy we may assume that he defines this capacity in particular as one for wisdom, for understanding how the universe functions. This would be particularly true of PVJche as a 'gleam of light' (B 118). Heraclitus used language in a rich and varied way, appropriately so for the interpretation of reality that he presented. Since this is the case, it is possible that the references to logos in B 45 and B 115 relate also to it as 'speech reflecting thought', that is, to the capacity in humans that he considered a share in the divine principle. We have heard in earlier authors that PVJche as shade in the underworld could utter sounds. Xenophanes jokingly gives it this function in a living animal (B 7). Heraclitus too might be· assigning the function of speech within the human being to PVJche. The way he then refers to it is significant: the human capacity for thought and speech 'grows' and is 'deep'.57 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. The 'deep' logos that PVJche possesses, then, may be a share in the divine nature. It too appears to be 'deep'. One description Heraclitus gives of the divine law governing the universe is that 'it has as much power as it wishes and suffices for all and is still left over' (B 114). 54 This translation is based on that of T. M. Robinson, p. 32. 'Travelled every road' can also be translated as 'travelled the whole way'. Both translations suggest the extensive nature of psyche. 55 See, e. g., Kahn, Art and Thought, pp. 129~30, 237, Marcovich, p. 367, T. M. Robinson, pp. 110, 157. See also Darcus (note 41) RSA, 1979, vol. 9, notes 8 and 17. 56 This same meaning of logos occurs also in B 31. 57 C£ the reference to B I 7 of Empedocles to 'learning (mathe) increasing phrenes' (discussed above in chapter 2). Psyche too may be 'expanded' by its capacity for logos.
— Shirley Darcus Sullivan
Heraclitus is doing something unusual here: he is attributing to psyche not a fixed measure but a self-increasing one. The logos of psyche grows. And because it grows, you cannot locate its boundary — every road you travel reveals that another road begins. Sullivan is careful to hold two meanings of logos in tension: measure and speech-reflecting-thought. These are not competing readings so much as two aspects of a single claim. The soul's measure is constituted by its capacity to name, and naming is not a fixed repertoire. Foreign languages open; new words accumulate; the experience those words carry becomes accessible. What the soul can comprehend expands with what it can say.
This cuts quietly against the assumption that depth is a fixed quantity to be excavated. Heraclitus is not telling us to dig down to a pre-existing bottom — he is telling us there is no bottom because psyche participates in something structurally analogous to the divine law he describes elsewhere: power sufficient for all things and still left over. The depth is not archaeological. It is more like a spring than a mine: not waiting to be reached, but producing. Sullivan's reading presses us to stay with that image rather than domesticate it into a theory of the unconscious. Psyche here is not hidden content but unbounded capacity — and capacity, unlike content, cannot be exhausted by any method of retrieval.
Shirley Darcus Sullivan·Psychological and Ethical Ideas What Early Greeks Say·1995