Sullivan on the Logos of Psyche

Shirley Darcus Sullivan’s chapter on psyche in Psychological and Ethical Ideas: What Early Greeks Say (1995) supplies the most explicit modern reading of the logos-psyche configuration in Heraclitus, distinct from her parallel treatment of the thumos-psyche conflict in B 85 (recorded in sullivan-heraclitean-thumos-psyche). The present thread isolates her reading of the two charter fragments, B 45 and B 115.

Sullivan’s central move is to refuse the single-rendering of logos in these fragments. “In these passages logos is often interpreted as having a meaning different from that discussed above. It is interpreted as ‘measure’… [yet] 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” (Sullivan 1995, p. 117). Heraclitus, on her reading, allows logos to hold measure, speech reflecting thought, and the common divine account concurrently — and stations all three within the psyche.

The consequence Sullivan draws is direct: “If Heraclitus locates the capacity for logos in psyche, we can see how important psyche has become. With this speech / thought, human beings organise their world just as the divine principle forms the universe as a whole” (Sullivan 1995, p. 118). The psyche ceases to be merely the breath-soul that survives in Hades; it becomes the bearer of the common logos that B 2 names — xynos — “even though the logos is common, the many live as though they possessed an individual method of thinking” (Sullivan 1995, p. 30). The depth of the psyche (B 45) is the depth of its participation in the common logos, and the self-augmentation of the psyche’s logos (B 115) is the dynamic in which that participation is lived.

Sources

• shirley-sullivan: logos in B 45 and B 115 holds measure, speech, and divine principle concurrently (Sullivan 1995, pp. 117–118).
• heraclitus: B 45, B 115, B 2, B 50, B 114 — the xynos logos fragments stationed within psyche.
• bruno-snell: B 45 inaugurates the non-spatial dimension of psychic depth (Snell 1953, p. 16); the philological complement to Sullivan’s reading.