The following fragment of Heraclitus illustrates that his journey began, like Socrates’ journey, not with a declaration of truth, but a declaration of ignorance: Heraclitus started with himself and like concentric circles, moved out from there. Finally, we see the order of the cosmos above. Then we see Heraclitus in relation to the cosmos. We start first with the man Heraclitus alone with his thoughts. If you look at the image at the beginning of this post as well as those in post 32 and post 33, you will notice progression. “This great Logos has a wisdom, or rather it is the Wise Thing, and this Wise Thing has a maxim, or rather it is the practical principle which guides everything through everything, relates all things to all things, which says One:Everything.” 5 In her book, The Logos of Heraclitus, Eva Brann gives an excellent definition of Heraclitus’ logos that is difficult to improve upon: 4 So too, Heraclitus took a simple word like logos and greatly expanded its use. George Washington Carver took a simple item – the peanut – and found 300 uses for it. Heraclitus is like the George Washington Carver of vocabulary. Without this order, everything would just be non-sense, as if we were taking an adventure like Alice in Wonderland. When we look at the world around us, the logos is what gives us that comfortable feeling that things make sense. It made one out of many and not just one, but a one that was organized, ordered, and made sense. In fact, the Greek verb form of logos comes from a root word that means “to gather or collect.” It can also mean “to call or to name.” 3 Logos as OrderĮventually, for the Greeks, the meaning of logos came to be “the order of the cosmos.” 2 Cosmos was the Greek word for “universe.” The logos was that which ordered and gathered everything into one. The meaning of logos could be described in many ways, including the order of the cosmos, as wisdom or universal consciousness, a logos of nature, and something boundless within the soul to be found by oneself. From logos we also get words like logical, logistics, eulogy, prologue, and catalog. It is where we get the suffix -logy where we get words like biology, anthropology, and zoology. And from there, it blossomed like a tree to take on a whole host of meanings. 1 In fact, after Heraclitus, ancient philosophers (and more recent ones, too) would fill pages and pages with discussion on the meaning of logos.įrom its original meaning, it evolved into what speech represented – rationality or reason. Heraclitus took a common word, logos, which originally meant “word” or “speech,” and revolutionized the philosophical world. Please read post 32 and post 33 as background to this post if you haven’t already. If any of you feel that I have left out something important or have a question on what I’ve discussed so far, leave it in the comment section below. Truth be told, I could probably write at least a dozen more posts on Heraclitus. In fact, I don’t think three posts are enough, but we will see. It is the hypothetical source of/evidence for its existence is provided by: Greek legein "to say, tell, speak, declare to count," originally, in Homer, "to pick out, select, collect, enumerate " lexis "speech, diction " logos "word, speech, thought, account " Latin legere "to gather, choose, pluck read," lignum "wood, firewood," literally "that which is gathered," legare "to depute, commission, charge," lex "law" (perhaps "collection of rules") Albanian mb-ledh "to collect, harvest " Gothic lisan "to collect, harvest," Lithuanian lesti "to pick, eat picking " Hittite less-zi "to pick, gather.In post 32, I said that I would cover Heraclitus in two posts, but I could not do it. It forms all or part of: alexia analects analogous analogue analogy anthology apologetic apologue apology catalogue coil colleague collect college collegial Decalogue delegate dialect dialogue diligence doxology dyslexia eclectic eclogue elect election epilogue hapax legomenon homologous horology ideologue idiolect intelligence lectern lectio difficilior lection lector lecture leech (n.2) "physician " legacy legal legate legend legible legion legislator legitimate lesson lexicon ligneous ligni- logarithm logic logistic logo- logogriph logopoeia Logos -logue -logy loyal monologue neglect neologism philology privilege prolegomenon prologue relegate sacrilege select syllogism tautology trilogy. Proto-Indo-European root meaning "to collect, gather," with derivatives meaning "to speak" on the notion of "to gather words, to pick out words."
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