Heraclitus, prophet

on the Lógos in history

In all of your rambling, though you travel every path, you will never reach the boundaries of the soul, so great is its Lógos.

When Heraclitus issues the characteristically inspired dictum above, he lends his voice to the Lógos, which thereby announces itself on the breath of this pre-Socratic Ephesian. Heraclitus continues:

Although this Lógos is ultimate, yet men are unable to comprehend it—not only before hearing it, but even after they have heard it for the first time. That is to say, although all things come to pass in accordance with this Lógos, men seem to be quite without any experience of it…

Thus, Heraclitus becomes one of the heralds of the doctrine of the Lógos. The essence of this doctrine is that the human soul and the world share a common origin and essence; both participate and reveal the same Lógos “[in accordance to which] all things come to pass” and by which “all things were made…and without him was not any thing made that was made.”¹ To not be “quite without any experience of” the Lógos means to recognize that reality is neither an impenetrable mechanism wrought by a transcendent Watchmaker, nor a phenomenal representation of a transcendental “thing-in-itself” that forever abides on the yonder side of a metaphysical partition, nor a super-complicated amalgamation of virtual particles and probabilistic wave-equations. Instead, the human soul and the world are related essentially and from within—as intellect to intelligibility or potentia to act. As a text has the potential to mean, so the reader possesses the power to understand. These powers are reciprocally lending. As the sun creates the eye so that its own light itself may become visible, so intellect and world each achieve completion in the other; the world is enriched in knowledge and the intellect is exalted in knowing. A world that is unknown is poorer and an intellect without knowledge is an intellect in possibility alone. In this way, the World-Word is waiting for the human being to pronounce it.

The doctrine of the Lógos, first enunciated by Heraclitus, unfolded during the era of high philosophy in Greece. Fostered by Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, it achieved a grand synthesis with the Hebrew tradition in Christ, as enunciated through the admonitions of John the Baptist, and in the writings of John the Evangelist² (who, like Heraclitus, was also a resident of Ephesus). The fruits of this marriage of the Hellenic and Hebraic streams would soon emerge from the Catacombs of Rome and establish itself as what would later be called Christianity.³ Addressing the Roman Emperor Antonius Caesar in the 2nd century, Justin Martyr would declare:

We have been taught that Christ is the first-born of God, and we have declared above that He is the Word [Lógos] of whom every race of men were partakers; and those who lived reasonably [in accord with the Lógos] are Christians, even though they have been thought atheists; as, among the Greeks, Socrates and Heraclitus, and men like them...

The Lógos is eternal and therefore it remains undiminished today, even if several centuries of nominalistic contravention—often under the pretense of scientific method—have increasingly conditioned thinking minds to ignore it in favor of familiar abstractions. Even the term “knowledge” itself functions as no more than such an abstraction unless it is grasped ecologically and experientially. Knowledge is a wedding of soul and world in a ceremony over which the Lógos presides.⁴ Otherwise, “knowledge” threatens distinctly to preëmpt knowledge for the same reason that the surest prisoner of Plato’s Cave is the one who thoroughly believes himself to be free.

In essence, humanity has forfeit meaning for classification, experience for abstraction, and insight for calculation. The same trend expresses itself in diverse fields. We ought really to call biology “bionomy,” since the taxonomical system of Linnaeus is at its basis an elaborate system of nomenclature, which only seems to be more than that because it dazzles the onlooker with its magisterial Latinate register. The terminology of medical diagnoses casts similar spells on the impressionable mind. Astrology was long ago superseded by astronomy following the axiomatic postulate that there can be no significance to the starry cosmos beyond the brute physical facts of its existence. Psychology too would be more appropriately understood as “psychonomy” when one considers that most of its schools are content to codify various possible disorders and neuroses rather than to inquire into the lógos of the soul. A number of its schools even go so far as to set it up as an ideal to practice “psychology without a soul” (e.g. F. A. Lange, the Behaviourist movement, etc…).

Even Carl Jung, arguably that discipline’s most gnostic figure, remained nevertheless a devoted Kantian (at least in his public disclosure) through all of his inquiry and thus upheld a rigorous epistemological dualism between the phenomenal experience of archetypes and their unknowable metaphysical nature. The result is a somewhat paradoxical doctrine in which a thing is affirmed whose existence would pull the rug out from under the power of affirmation. Plainly stated, to conceive of an unconscious that is both the source and agent of the conscious self stands in fundamental opposition to the reality of the Lógos. To enlist the power of conception to conceive of a function that negates it is a strange contradiction, and no less curious is to define as unknowable the very ground which reason takes to be its own cause. A sound theory of the unconscious would posit it as a language one had not yet mastered, or a book one had not yet opened. One would relate to it, therefore, not as “the unconscious,” but as “the-not-yet-conscious, “the latently conscious,” “virtual consciousness,” or “consciousness in potentia,” thus implying that consciousness of it might subsequently become actual. But unconscious qua unconscious does not exist except as a pseudo-Kantian reification in the collective imaginary.

In light of the standpoints indicated above, and in spite of the truly astonishing advancement in breadth of knowledge that humanity has achieved over the last millennia (and especially in the centuries since the Scientific Revolution), such progress has come at the expense of depth in understanding. A number of thinkers have observed that the defining trend of modern intellectual development appears to be the coming to know more and more about less and less. This is a pithy expression of a general process that is the result of approaching all fields of knowledge through abstraction and analysis. I will elaborate on each of these terms below.

Abstraction, in this sense, is meant to designate the intellectual operation of isolating a single aspect of a given being or phenomenon from its broader context. This operation, in itself, characterizes the process of perception and cognition as such: if the intellect were incapable to abstract specific phenomena from the totality of being, neither knowledge nor self-consciousness would be possible. But a hallmark of post-scientific thought is to hypostasize its own characteristic set of abstractions into physical reality. To wit, conventional science proceeded by discarding the qualitative aspects of phenomena as “Secondary qualities” (Galileo Galilei and John Locke) or “subjective epiphenomena” (the majority of modern physicists, philosophers, and neuroscientists) for the sake of studying the quantitative ones. The latter are then projected back into nature as though they exist there in themselves to begin with. In other words, following the scientific process of isolating the measurable aspects of a given phenomenon, the remaining abstraction is then conceived as though it were the same as the integral and concrete original. Indeed, these chimerical pseudo-entities are often taken to be more real than the actual phenomena that were their source and without which the former could not have been derived in the first place. Thus, in a kind of idolatry of method—or methodolatry—only the quantitative aspects of reality are given epistemological credence. From this fact about method, then, is inferred a fact about ontology. Of course, this ontology is an ontology of spectres; a ghostly world which bears the convenient characteristic of being calculable but not the more fundamental one of actually existing. Instead, it is an imaginary territory that scientific models, equations, and statistics are continually mapping out and thereby serving to establish in the noösphere through a sort of implantation or inception. If it seems natural to our sensibility to defer to these abstract maps in our attempts to understand the real world, it is only because we have become so enamored with our theories that we imagine them to be facts. A model can never substitute for actual observations and the fact that disciplines such a climatology and epidemiology treat them as interchangeable does not call into question this basic fact but rather severely undermines the credibility of any conclusions set forth from within those disciplines. In sum: the organizing ideas through which we perceive the world become ideologies in the moment they are not experienced from their own side.

With the term analysis, in this context, one means to designate the tendency of modern thought, almost compulsively, to anatomise what is whole into its atomic constituents. The axiom, common to many scientists, that “understanding” is to be sought through an assay into the material constituents of entities—that wholes are to be grasped through an analysis of their parts—is sustained only be a sort of infinite deferment. It is akin to an interminable “kicking of the can” down the road of investigation because the results of any analysis, according to this logic, will in turn demand a new analysis to be understood, ad infinitum. The truth of the matter will always lie on the yonder side of another analysis…unless it is believed that a glass is the same thing as its fragments.⁵

As indicated above, knowledge, for modern consciousness, is only nominally so. “How did it come to this?” one may wonder. A number of etiologies have been proposed, but I will attempt to sketch out one salient current of influence below.⁶ In the same way that the fragment of Heraclitus above signaled a revelation of the Lógos in the evolution of human consciousness, so the words below from the year 1605 signal a nascent impulse that would soon set itself in definite opposition to it. In The Advancement of Learning, Lord Bacon of Verulam, father of the scientific method, pens the following ex cathedra proclamation:

Natural Science doth make inquiry, and take consideration of the same natures [as Philosophy]: but how? Only as to the Material and Efficient causes of them, and not as to the Forms.

Thus, of the Four Causes delineated by il maestro di color che sanno, or “the master of those who know,”⁷ all but those which are sensible, accidental, and quantifiable are discarded with the advent of the Scientific Revolution. In other words, the new learning will concern itself only with external, quantitative, and mechanical relation and ignore all those relations that make the world-processes intelligible.

To briefly recapitulate Aristotle’s conception of the four modes of causality, one may imagine a bust of the Lord Chancellor. The material cause is precisely the matter out of which the statue is cast. This likeness happens to be made of bronze and thus “copper and tin” is the material cause. The efficient cause appears as the force that was brought to bear on the material cause to realize the final product. In this case, the heat of a forge and the sculptor’s brawn supplied the efficient cause. The formal cause is the design, or the intelligence that informed the application of the efficient cause. In this case, the formal cause was the idea of the Lord Chancellor as it stood the sculptor’s mind. Lastly, the final cause is same as the purpose of all art, which is ultimately ineffable as the Divine Name, but approximately: to make manifest the spiritual ideal in perishable matter, and reciprocally, to render matter transparent to the light of the idea.⁸ This brief excursus on Aristotle’s conception of causality casts light on the significance of Lord Bacon’s decree: the scientific method that Bacon sets forth intends to concern itself with the accidental causes at the exclusion of the essential ones. The bust of Bacon might have been wrought of marble, or of iron, or of clay. Hence neither the material nor the efficient method is essential to the thing that is being created out of them. Nevertheless, for the sake of “the advancement of learning,” the formal and final causes are forthwith to be ignored by scientific inquiry. It ought to be duly observed that while the material and efficient causes are those aspects of phenomena that render them calculable, the formal and final ones are those which render them intelligible and meaningful.

Not to be “without any experience of” the Lógos is to grasp that the multitudinous and infinite facts of the world, that manifest as matter and force, are letters in an original and ultimate Word. In essence, Lógos is the power to recognize that the world is intelligible and its meaning is not something abstract or separate from us. Instead, it is something we participate, and in which “we live and move and have our being.”⁹ As Heraclitus indicated in the epigraph to this essay, the Lógos of the soul has no boundaries, and neither does the Lógos of the world. Thus they are coincident.

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1. John 1:3.

2. Cf. John 1:1: “In the beginning was the Word [Lógos]”.

3. Cf. St. Augustine:

When I said [in De Vera Religione] ‘That is in our times the Christian religion, to know which, is the most secure and certain salvation,’ it was said in relation to the name, not in relation to the thing itself, of which it is the name. For the thing itself, which is now called the Christian religion, was there among the people of antiquity, and was not wanting from the beginning of the human race, down to the time when Christ came in the flesh; whereafter the true religion, which was always there, began to be called Christian...Therefore I said: ‘This is in our times the Christian religion,’ not because it was not there in earlier times, but because in later times it received this name.

From The Retractiones I.xiii.3, p. 87.

4. Cf. Matthew 22, “The Parable of the Wedding Feast.”

5. By the twentieth century, the anatomical approach appeared to lead researchers into a blind alley, as their particles had been analysed to such infinitesimal dimensions that any measurement of them invariably altered their status and one ended up measuring one’s own measurement.

6. I have elaborated on this topic extensively elsewhere, particularly in Parts I & II of The Redemption of Thinking (2020).

7. Some readers may grasp the allusion to Dante’s Divine Comedy, in which Aristotle is given this honorific title.

8. In short the ultimate final cause of art is the imitatione Elohim et Christi.

9. Acts 17:28