The logos: divine reason, cosmic law, the discourse itself, or all four senses together?

Heraclitus, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

The logos of which I speak is one. It is the account I set forth — the words and works (epea kai erga) of my book — and it is the structure of language itself, and it is the depth of the soul (you will not find its limits, peirata, so deep is its logos), and it is the universal principle in accordance with which all things come to pass.

To choose among these senses is to miss the doctrine. The logos is not the divine reason of the Stoics imported back into archaic speech, though the Stoics were closer to me than the modern philologists suppose. It is not the bare semantic account of the analytic tradition, which would be a thinness the texts do not bear. It is not even quite what Kahn calls "the structural principle uniting discourse and cosmos," though the structural reading is the truest of the modern ones.

The logos is what is common (to xynon) — common to language, to soul, to city, to nature — and most men live as though their thinking were private, failing to hear it even when they have heard. Listen not to me but to the logos; agree that all things are one.12

Sources

  1. HERACLITUS [22 DK] D From Near the Beginning of Heraclitus' Book (D1-D2) D1 (B1) Sext. Emp. Adv. Math. 7.132 (et al.) ἐναρχόμενος γοῦν TÓV Περὶ φύσεως ö προειρημένος ἀνήρ [... of. R59] φησί: τοῦ 82! Aóyov 7008" ἐόντος del?
    Early Greek Philosophy Vol III, Heraclitus chapter, 1407b16–1407b14
  2. D38 (B86) Plutarch, Coriolanus Because of disbelief, it escapes being known. D39 (B22) Clement of Alexandria, Stromata Those who search for gold dig up much earth and find little.
    Early Greek Philosophy Vol III, Heraclitus chapter, pp. 44–47

Where the argument is made

  • Fragment I (D.1): 'although this logos holds forever, men ever fail to comprehend, both before hearing it and once they have heard. For although all things come to pass in accordance with this logos, men are like the untried when they try such words and works as I set forth, distinguishing each thing according to its nature.' Fragment II (D.2): 'therefore one must follow what is common (xynon)
  • but although the logos is common, most men live as though their thinking were private.' Fragment XXXVI (D.50): 'listening not to me but to the logos, it is wise to agree that all things are one.' Fragment XXXV (D.45): 'you would not find the limits of soul, though you traveled every way, so deep is its logos.' Fragment CXIV (D.114): on the city living by the law, and the law being nourished by 'the one divine.'

How the argument was received

The semantic question is the single most contested interpretive question about the fragments; what one makes of the logos determines what one can make of the rest. The Stoic reading (logos as divine cosmic reason) dominated antiquity and through Cleanthes' Hymn to Zeus and the Stoa shaped both Christian theology and the entire later philosophical vocabulary of "reason." The modern philological turn (Burnet, Diels) read logos as discourse or account, downplaying the divine connotations. Kahn in 1979 argued that logos operates simultaneously across discourse, soul, and cosmos and that the unity of these senses is itself the doctrine; Long, Hussey, and Vlastos have developed compatible readings. M. L. West proposed Iranian influences. No consensus has formed. The text resists translation into any single modern idiom.