World Soul – Anima Mundi

On the Origins and Fortunes of a Fundamental Idea

Christoph Helmig

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783110628463
• eBook ISBN:
  9783110628968
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Philosophie ancienne et classique

Diese Reihe bietet ein Forum für Studien, welche die Texte, Themen und Argumente antiker Philosophen aufgreifen und diskutieren. Sie zeigen, dass philosophische Geschichtsschreibung nicht nur die Theorien antiker Autoren nachzeichnet, sondern deren Argumente auch rekonstruieren, mit aktuellen philosophischen Diskussionen verbinden und damit heutige Diskurse entscheidend bereichern kann.

Part I: Prehistory of the concept

Is the Logos a kind of World Soul?On the relationship between cosmology and psychology in Heraclitus

Christian Vassallo

University of Calabria, Cosenza

The word λόγος no doubt represents one of the most prominent topics of ancient thought. Indeed, the term involves the entirety of Greek literature, from Homer to the Neoplatonists.¹ Obviously, even if one takes a dispassionate view of early Greek philosophers and their sources, the question is more complicated because of the philological difficulties entailed by this task. As far as the relationship of the λόγος to the concept of World Soul is concerned, there are three further complications. First of all, although the World Soul appears as a widespread idea in the history of ancient philosophy,² directly referring to it in the context of the fragments of a pre-Socratic author can expose even the most careful scholar to the risk of anachronisms. It would be easy, for example, to ascribe to the Heraclitean Logos the same properties as the Deus sive natura of Baruch Spinoza or the features of the world as a ‘living Being’ discussed in Friedrich W.J. von Schelling’s Romantic philosophy. Secondly, the expression World Soul does not appear in the testimonia belonging to Heraclitus’ corpus. This pre-Socratic thinker uses both words of this expression (ψυχή and κόσμος), but separately and within contexts that raise several interpretive difficulties. As a final point, one should take into account the real meaning of the noun λόγος, which remains thus far an unsolved problem among scholars.³

In this paper, I will tackle the subject of the Heraclitean Logos, arguing for the possibility of considering it as a kind of Anima mundi. But in answering this touchy question, I intend not to start directly with the meaning of the word λόγος. I will instead begin by considering the features of ψυχή, paying particular attention to fragment B 45, which seemingly gives the soul its own λόγος. After looking at fragment B 1, I will discuss the possibility of comparing the nature of the Universe in Heraclitus with a ‘living soul’, taking the most authoritative interpretations of B 36 as a starting point. Then, in the final section, I will try to demonstrate that a probable solution of the World Soul-question in Heraclitus’ thought lies in the cosmological relationship between One and Whole. In this respect, fragment B 50 can be taken as the intermediate element between B 1 and B 36 and as the textual proof of a World Soul considered as a synthesis of κόσμος and λόγος.

1 The features of Heraclitus’ soul and its relationship to the Logos

In the first few pages of On the Soul, Aristotle outlines a kind of ‘archaeology’ of the concept of the soul and critically relates the ideas of the pre-Socratic thinkers to Platonic philosophy with respect to this subject. More specifically, in the middle of the sections devoted to Diogenes of Apollonia and to Alcmaeon respectively, he describes the position of Heraclitus regarding this matter as follows:

Heraclitus also calls the first principle soul [τὴν ἀρχὴν εἶναί ϕησι ψυχήν], as the emanation [ἀναθυμίασιν] from which he constructs all other things; it is most incorporeal and in ceaseless flux [καὶ ἀσωματώτατον δὴ καὶ ῥέον ἀεί]: he, like many others, supposed that a thing moving can only be known by something which moves, and that all that exists is in motion.⁴

Towards the end of the 19th century, Erwin Rohde, who was obviously influenced by this disputed piece of evidence, equated the concept of ψυχή with that of πῦρ in Heraclitus’ philosophy. In particular, he considered this latter element (Fire) as the physical principle of the Universe: ‘Feuer und Psyche sind Wechselbegriffe. Und so ist auch die Psyche des Menschen Feuer, ein Theil der allgemeinen feurigen Lebensfülle, die sie umfangen hält.’⁵ According to Rohde, this fact implies a total dependence of the individual soul on cosmic Fire and further suggests Heraclitus’ complete indifference towards events concerning the Einzelseele.⁶ Consequently, the life and death of individual souls were nothing but offshoots from Fire, which was considered the living power of the original Being (‘die lebendige Kraft des Urwesens’).⁷ Rohde founded his thesis on a careful reading of B 50. Moreover, he knew this important fragment through the ancient collection of Ingram Bywater, who notoriously placed it in the beginning of Heraclitus’ On Nature.

I shall come back to B 50 at the end of the paper (§ 4). At the moment, I would like to dwell only upon the passages that allow us to describe a theory of the Heraclitean soul most easily and, subsequently, to check the soundness of Rohde’s authoritative thesis. In fact, two preliminary observations seem to clash with this opinion. To begin, as far as I know, the corpus of the fragments does not make any explicit equivalence between ψυχή and πῦρ. Secondly, Heraclitus nearly always seems to focus on the life of the individual soul. I will deal later with the psychological and cosmological themes of B 36 (§ 3). At this point I would like to argue that, in each of the other Heraclitean testimonia where it is quoted, the word ψυχή shows a three-part semantic significance. As a matter of fact, along with a prevailing physiological character, it is possible to detect in the fragments both ethical and proper epistemological shades of meaning in the word ‘soul’.

The Heraclitean physiology of the individual soul is repeatedly related to the evaporation process. This conflation of images also occurs when Heraclitus resorts to his famous metaphors, such as that of the river. It is so, for instance, in fragment B 12 (= fr. 40 Marcovich), where Zeno of Citium is said to agree with Heraclitus in considering the soul as αἰσθητικὴ ἀναθυμίασις. According to this testimonium, the evaporation of moisture (ἀπὸ τῶν ὑγρῶν) makes the souls ever younger; therefore, Heraclitus compared them to the river’s water, perpetually different for men walking there.⁸ Furthermore, Numenius and Stobaeus confirm that both the ‘moral’ (pleasure/pain or wisdom/foolishness) and the ‘ontological’ (birth/death) states of ψυχή directly depend on the soul’s moisture ratio.⁹

As for the individual souls, a proper ethical description of them appears instead in the well-known fragment B 85 (= fr. 70 Marcovich), where Heraclitus affirms the nature of ψυχή as being an entity wholly involved in human emotion.

It is hard to fight with the heart’s desire [θυμῷ];

for whatever it wishes it buys at the price of soul [ψυχῆς].¹⁰

Miroslav Marcovich supposes that in this passage, Heraclitus is using two popular adages. But the question is how he adapted them to his thoug...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgment
• The World Soul in Antiquity and beyond
• Part I: Prehistory of the concept
• Part II: Plato’s Timaeus and Pseudo-Aristotle’s De Mundo
• Part III: Old Academy, Stoicism, and Middle Platonism
• Part IV: Neoplatonism
• Part V: Nachleben
• Index of Names
• Index of Ancient Citations
• Index of Subjects