Soul as Logos — Heraclitus to Giegerich

Giegerich’s thesis that the soul’s life is logical life has a classical antecedent in Heraclitus. The fragment Giegerich himself takes up in a 1998 Spring essay — “Is the Soul ‘Deep’? Entering and Following the Logical Movement of Heraclitus’ ‘Fragment 45’” (cited in Hillman’s bibliographic apparatus) — turns on Heraclitus B 45: one will not find the limits of the soul, going every way, so deep is its logos. Giegerich reads the depth of soul as notional, not spatial — the soul’s depth is the depth of its own self-relation, its logical life.

Shirley Darcus Sullivan’s philological reading of the Heraclitean fragments supplies the anchor. Logos, in Heraclitus, is “a thought-process that manifests itself in a series of opposites, each balancing the other. When the divine principle, logos, expresses itself and speaks, it forms ‘all things’ as these opposites” (Sullivan 1995, p. 30). The grammar is already dialectical. Heraclitus’ psychē is similarly in motion: “Heraclitus assumes change in psyche… it varies from fiery to watery”; and the struggle within the person is itself framed as a struggle between thumos and psychē — “it is difficult to fight thumos, for what it wishes it buys at the expense of psyche” (Heraclitus B 85, at Sullivan 1995, p. 116).

David Claus, tracing psychē before Plato, reads the Heraclitean material as a systematic play on “the unity of life and death” — psychē and thanatos as reciprocal changes of state (Claus 1981, p. 133). The logic is already there: the soul as that which lives by passing through its opposite, that which is alive precisely in its negation. Giegerich’s sublatedness — the soul as “nothing else but [the] sublatedness” of emotion, image, symptom — is the late-modern, Hegelian register of a movement Heraclitus had already named.

Sources

• heraclitus (via Sullivan): logos as dialectical principle forming “all things” as balanced opposites (Sullivan 1995, p. 30)
• heraclitus (via Claus): the Heraclitean unity of life and death in the psychē fragments (Claus 1981, p. 133)
• wolfgang-giegerich: soul as logical life, sublation as the operation by which image becomes Notion (Giegerich 2020, pp. 49, 134)