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philosophers’ trust in their own arguments and explanations, and the sense of their awakening from the sleep of Mythos . The boundaries between Mythos – stories told as religious myths or in works of art – and Logos – a reasoned account – will always be
contested, and their respective claims to truth likewise. After all, myths, too, are reasoned accounts of a kind: they make sense of making sense, and they use words. What’s more, reason itself operates on a
given experience of the world, established long before reason does its work. Hence the endless returns of Mythos .
Logos was central to Heraclitus’s philoso- phy. According to F.M. Cornford in From Religion to Philosophy (1912), Heraclitus
developed – “in flashes of mental lightning”
– the notion of Logos as being both the rational structure of the world and the source of that structure. Reason was present in all things. This was asserted against the materialism of the Ionian philosophers, for whom the world was just what was visible.
By contrast, Logos was an invisible, imma- nent reason – the general plan ensuring that the world was an ordered Cosmos rather than a disordered Chaos . It was the hidden har- mony behind the discords and antagonisms of existence; behind the eternal war between the elements that kept Being in motion, leaving nothing immune from change. This rational order of things did not itself make the world conscious or thoughtful. Rather, the world became conscious and thoughtful in the human Logos , whose most developed representative was the philosopher himself, in whom the human Logos was united with the Logos of the Cosmos . Making sense of the world was the result of a marriage between
microcosmic human Logos and the macro- cosmic Logos of the universe itself. Logos provided the link between rational discourse and the world’s rational structure.
The Subsequent Fate of Logos
We are more familiar with Plato and Aris- totle. For Plato, Logos was the rational activity of the world soul created by the demiurge. It could be revealed through Ideas accessed by an intelligence stimulated by the dialectic of philosophical discourse. For Plato, influenced by Parmenides, Logos was revealed in the kind of thought that
accessed unchanging self-same Being, real and true, not through sense experience, which is unstable and untrue. According to Aristotle, the Logos was the inherent for-
mula determining the nature, life and activ- ity of the body, as well as, more narrowly, ‘significant utterance’.
These ideas inspired the Stoics, for whom the Logos was a supreme directive
principle, the source of all the activity and rationality of an ordered world that was both intelligible and intelligent. It was the ‘seminal reason’ or underlying principle of the world, manifest in all the phenomena of nature. It acted as a kind of force, con- ferring inner unity on bodies and on the world as a whole, and at the same time
guaranteed the intelligibility of the world to humans, since the human soul partici- pated in the cosmic Logos . It is also because the one Logos is present in many human souls that we are able to communicate with each other: we all partake of ‘common sense’. The Stoics’ message was that
humans were truly happy only when they were living in a state of harmony in which the Logos of their own soul resonated with the universal Logos , the harmony of nature.
For Philo of Alexandria, a first century Jewish philosopher steeped in Greek
thought, the Logos was the model according to which the universe was created. It encompassed the creative principle, divine wisdom, the image of God, and man, the word of the eternal God. At the same time,
it was the archetype of human reason, that through which the supreme God made contact with His creation. Logos is the intermediary between God and the world, the creator and His creation.
Which brings us back to the Christian notion of Jesus Christ as Logos . The Logos was the means by which God let Himself
into a privileged part of His own creation – humanity. Philo’s connecting the ‘divine thought’ with ‘the image’ and ‘the first- born son of God’, ‘the archpriest’ and ‘the intercessor’, paved the way for the Chris- tian conception of the incarnate ‘word become flesh’, and so of the Trinity. The Word by which He made the world, His
law, and indeed Himself, known to man, was now identified with Christ. In the New Testament, the Logos is the Word, the wis-
dom of God, the reason in all things, and God Himself.
Secularists may smile at such responses to the extraordinary fact that we make sense of the world. But when we think of the alternatives – such as Kant’s claim in The Critique of Pure Reason that the experi- enced world makes sense because we fash- ion that world through our senses and understanding, or an evolutionary episte- mology that argues that the fit between mind and world is a Darwinian necessity – the smile may fade and wonder return. The endeavour to understand the sense-making animal has a long way to go.
© PROF. RAYMOND TALLIS 2016
Raymond Tallis’s latest book The Mystery of Being Human: God, Freedom and the NHS was published in September. His website is raymondtallis.com .
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Atum, Egyptian embodiment of reason A T U M © J E F F D A H L 2 0 0 7
54 PhilosophyNowDecember 2016/January 2017
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