Logos

“The words she spoke were living things, and to speak them was to create.” – C.S. Lewis, Perelandra (1943)

“Chaos is dull; it is order that is interesting, because order is the signature of a mind” -G.K. Chesterton The Man Who Was Thursday (1908)

 

 

Mark Twain famously said, “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” Let’s leave that here and come back to it in a bit.

In this week’s Main Project article, The Doer Alone Learneth, I ended by tying the themes of the article together and suggested they all fall under the heading of logos (Gr. λόγος). Logos is, at one and the same time, one of the most important and trickiest words to define. If there was one word to sum up the last three thousand years of western philosophical, theological, sociological, cultural, artistic and psychological thought it would be logos. Let’s take a look at what it means.

We can begin by what logos means literally in the Greek language. It is a word that carries a heavy burden. First and foremost, it is simply the word for “word” in Greek. It is also the word for “speech” as in words that have the suffix -ology. For instance, Biology is bios– (Gr. βίος) which means life and logos (Gr. λόγος) which is speech. So Biology is “to speak of life.”

But there is much more to logos than just word and speech. It also means “discourse” as well as  “ordered reasoning” (as is seen in the word logic). More than that, logos can be used as “utterance” and “principle” as well as “message.” Even now, however, we are only starting to scratch the surface.

Logos first took on a deeper philosophical importance in the 5th Century BC with Heraclitus of Ephesus. Heraclitus is attributed with the philosophical notion of pantha rhei (Gr. πάντα ῥεῖ ‘), meaning everything flows. He is most famous for saying that no man steps in a river twice. Heraclitus saw the world not as static, but as constant becoming. He believes that the archē (Gr. ἀρχή) is fire in all its perceived unity through constant ek-static motion. The image of fire is the image of the Heraclitean cosmogony, a constantly consuming dynamic grouping of opposites (fire’s contradictory nature as best friend and worst enemy of man coupled with the flickering of multiple flames forming a single fire) which are held together by a unifying rational principle — the logos.

So for Heraclitus the universe is in constant flux, underpinned by fire and held together by an intelligible fundamental rational principle — the logos. Heraclitus believes that the logos is common for all people, but that

individual perspectival reality leaves untrained minds to think it is a private understanding. The logos is that spirit which unites all opposites interdependent with one another. The logos is the intelligible rationality which holds the world together and which makes the chaotic primordial soup of existence into a sensible rational order which is habitable and fundamentally understandable.

Heraclitus believes that all things, the entire cosmos, exist according to the universal logos. In essence, while it is a somewhat incomplete understanding of it, you can think of the logos as the force in Star Wars. That the holistic concept of cosmic order is “the word” is an idea that will transcend even Heraclitus’ intensely complex understanding of it and become the critical philosophical concept for the rest of time.

Back, for a quick moment, to Mark Twain.  From a Heraclitean point of view, Twain is right when he suggests history rhymes but he doesn’t go nearly far enough. For Heraclitus, all of reality rhymes owing to the fact that the only reason it is reality in the first place rather than undifferentiated chaos is because it is being held together by and is aligned with the logos.

Swiss psychologist Carl Jung understands the logos as the principle of rational thought and structure. Like with most of Jung’s ideas, his notion of the logos demands our close attention. He does not think of the logos as rational thought and structure, but as the principle of rational thought and structure, that principle which is a precondition for the existence of the particulars.

Looking back to Heraclitus, it is so extraordinarily difficult to pick apart what is going on here. The qualities of the logos outlined by Heraclitus require serious thought. We know he claims that it is the (not a) universal law that structures reality but it is also important to notice, and I cannot stress enough how crucial this is, the logos is both immanent (that is to say, within the world) as well as transcendent (beyond human comprehension). That twofold nature will remain important in western thought for the rest of time.

What are we to make of this immanent yet transcendent universal law of structure and reality that we can never know completely (the phenomenologists, some two thousand years later, will say we can never know all sides of it)? What we do is align with it. The way man aligns with the logos is through interacting with it using the faculties of rational analysis though, for Heraclitus, most will fail. This alignment will eventually take on a new form, one which will radically change the world — but more on that in the essays to come.

Later, in the 3rd Century BC, Plato would posit a realm of forms or ideas. The concept, most roughly construed, is that particular physical instantiations in the world (chairs, trees, triangles, etc.) participate in a perfect and eternal form (Chairness, Treeness, Triangleness, etc.)

For Plato, the material world is a mimetic copy of these ideas. So, for Plato, there is an idea that is universal, transcendent and perfect of what, for instance, a triangle is. We call this the Form of Triangle. That form is the conception of three sided polygon with three angles and three vertices of which the sum of the interior angles will always be 180 degrees. An object in the material world is a triangle insofar as it conforms to and aligns with the eternal Form of Triangle (as humans, for Heraclitus, are ‘awake’ insofar as they are aligned with the logos). For all things in the world there is a form which, for Plato, necessarily preexist and are preconditions for the worldly representation. Further, each form is subordinate to and participates in the Form of Good which stands at the apex of the hierarchy of forms. So a triangle is a triangle in so far as it is aligned with the form of the triangle and as such, since all forms participate in the form of the good, the triangle is good. The ancient Hebrews had an idea similar to this, independently achieved, in the beginning of Genesis with God’s insistence on his creation being good.

That Plato links the realm of the forms to the logos is clear though there are some debates as to how. The most common understanding is that the Form of Good, the highest order of all forms — what, later in history, Augustine would understand as God — is the logos as it binds all of the other forms and subordinates them. There is much to say about this reading and there is a multiple millennia long history of excellent scholarship dedicated to this idea. That said, I believe it is helpful to consider the logos for Plato not as the Form of Good, but rather as the underlying principle of the realm of forms as such.

Aristotle, Plato’s most famous student, disagreed with Plato. For instance, he did not see the forms as preexisting the objects, but as intellectual abstractions from them. Aristotle understood that unlike pathos (Gr. πάθος) which is a rhetorical device intended to make its point on the back of emotion, or like ethos(Gr. ἔθος) which seeks to ground its validity in its own credibility, logos is the rhetorical device upon which we may prove validity through reason. It is for this that Aristotle sees the logos as the formal cause of the rational structure of being qua being.

The notion of the logos, since the 5th century BC when Heraclitus imbued it with more than its dictionary definition, is one of a deep philosophical tapestry that continues to be at the heart of all western philosophical thought. For the purposes of this essay, I will leave us here in the 3rd Century BC but rest assured we will be picking up the logos again shortly and it will be lurking behind everything on this site in the future.

In the meantime, I think the Chesterton quote that we began with is a perfect place to end as well. Chesterton says, “Chaos is dull; it is order that is interesting, because order is the signature of a mind.” Chesterton, one of the great philosophers and Catholic theologians of the modern age, knows full well that he is talking about the logos. With this quote in mind, I will give you an example that I find most helpful.

Consider the game of chess. You have your pieces, king, queen, bishops, knights, rooks and pawns. They sit on a board that is an 8×8 grid and each has rules which govern (restrict) their movements. One might think “oh, how great is freedom,” but with freedom you have the board, the pieces and no governing laws or restrictions. All of a sudden it is no longer a chess game — it’s chaos. You go first? What do I do? I don’t know, whatever you want.

The game almost immediately becomes meaningless and it is of crucial importance to remember that prior to the 17th century scientific revolution, the discovery of meaning was at the forefront of ideas. David Hume, in his 1740

book A Treatise of Human Nature (book III part I section I), famously says that you “cannot derive an ought from an is.” This is to say that the scientific mode of thinking may be able to give you all of the physical details of the world, but it cannot suggest what it is we should do. Likewise, in our chess game, when the meaning has been stripped the board and the pieces no longer matter.

It is the governing principles of the game that, even more than the particular board or pieces (which can and have been made of statues, shot glasses, buildings, etc.), make a chess game. You can have a full chess set and a chess board, but without the rational structure, without the logos, what you have is a world that is void and without form with darkness over the face of the deep — so to speak. The addition of the governing mode of being through articulation into the chaotic swamp that preexists it with just the board and pieces laying around, make it go from nothing to a game of chess. Now just extrapolate this idea to the entire cosmos and you get an idea of what the logos is for Heraclitus in the 5th Century BC and, indeed, for the rest of the world in the millennia to come.