Heraclitean Common Logos and the Collective Psyche

Heraclitus’s fragments preserve perhaps the earliest Greek formulation of a psychic order shared by all human beings. The logos by which the world is structured is “common” (xynos, koinos); fragment B 50 enjoins the listener “not to listen” to Heraclitus himself “but to logos.” Sullivan summarises: “Heraclitus saw that speech (reflecting thought) enabled humans to organise their world. He postulates that a divine principle exists that carries out on a cosmic level a similar activity. The divinity, by thinking and ‘speaking’ things, forms them” (Psychological and Ethical Ideas, ch. 3). The logos is at once the cosmic ordering principle and a capacity present in human beings, who participate in it without authoring it.

Heraclitus’s complementary fragment B 89 states that “the waking have one common world, but the sleeping turn aside each into a world of his own” (Diels-Kranz). The philosophical antithesis of common waking and private dreaming maps with striking precision onto Jung’s later distinction between the collective unconscious and the personal unconscious. The shared logos is, in archaic Greek formulation, what Jung will later call the objective psyche: an order that pre-exists and overflows the individual, into which one can either awaken or fall away.

Sources

• Heraclitus, fragments DK B 1, B 2, B 50, B 89, B 113, B 114.
• Sullivan, Psychological and Ethical Ideas: What Early Greeks Say, ch. 2-3.