The Logos of Heraclitus

by Eva Brann

“In this extraordinary meditation, Eva Brann takes us to the fierce core of Heraclitus's vision and shows us the music of his language. The thought and beautiful prose in The Logos of Heraclitus are a delight.”—Barry Mazur, Harvard University

“An engaged solitary, an inward-turned observer of the world, inventor of the first of philosophical genres, the thought-compacted aphorism,” “teasingly obscure in reputation, but hard-hittingly clear in fact,” “now tersely mordant, now generously humane.”

Thus Eva Brann introduces Heraclitus—in her view, the West’s first philosopher.

The collected work of Heraclitus comprises 131 passages. Eva Brann sets out to understand Heraclitus as he is found in these passages and particularly in his key word, Logos, the order that is the cosmos.

“Whoever is captivated by the revelatory riddlings and brilliant obscurities of what remains of Heraclitus has to begin anew—accepting help, to be sure, from previous readings—in a spirit of receptivity and reserve. But essentially everyone must pester the supposed obscurantist until he opens up. Heraclitus is no less and no more pregnantly dark than an oracle…The upshot is that no interpretation has prevailed; every question is wide open.”

Eva Brann is a member of the senior faculty at St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland, where she has taught for fifty-seven years. She is a recipient of the National Humanities Medal. Her other books include Then and Now, Un-Willing, Feeling Our Feelings, Homage to Americans, Open Secrets / Inward Prospects, The Music of the Republic, and Homeric Moments (all published by Paul Dry Books).

Genres: Philosophy, Classics, Nonfiction

169 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 2011

About the author

Eva T. H. Brann was an American scholar, classicist, and the longest-serving tutor at St. John’s College in Annapolis. Born in Berlin in 1929 and later immigrating to the U.S., she earned degrees from Brooklyn College and Yale University. Brann devoted over six decades to teaching and writing, becoming a key figure in the Great Books tradition and serving as dean of St. John’s College.
Her wide-ranging works include Paradoxes of Education in a Republic, What, Then, Is Time?, and The Music of the Republic. She also co-translated several Platonic dialogues and received the National Humanities Medal in 2005. Brann passed away in 2024 at the age of 95, leaving behind a lasting legacy of intellectual rigor and philosophical inquiry.

Reviews

[Dan Snyder · Rating 5 out of 5]

Definitions, far from being the point of consensus catalogued in dictionaries, are really the jumping off point for decisions. The concern for an actual ape, for example Harambe, argumentatively ‘murdered’ or ‘destroyed’ following the endangerment of an actual human, comes from the argument that always follows upon the unnoticed act of definition. If humans are naked apes, then killing a hairy human is… Wisdom consists in recognizing what ‘is’, and following that with decisions in accordance with reality that should lead to productive actions. When understanding man, which must be the first principle in educating him, the resulting direction of action will have far reaching consequences. This can be seen in the results read in the histories of cultures, or in the loss of culture. Nihilism being the descent into materialism, we could understand a definition of man standing at the head of this career. After all, what is ‘cultivated’ is that curious biped, man.

Man is the logologic being. This is a tough stance against Aristotle's take on Heraclitus in this book, but I think a correct one.

[Regan · Rating 3 out of 5]

There is much to be commended in this short book--Brann offers helpful interpretations and reinterpretations of Heraclitean fragments, as well as correctly identifies Heraclitus' Logos as a fundamentally agonistic relation (hence "War is the Father of all things"), that both creates, maintains, and requires tension & strife. She correctly attributes features of Socrates' dialectic to core Heraclitean insights, and acknowledges that Hegel must have recognized (and utilized) the power of his ontological paradoxes.

She goes wrong when she counter-intuitively argues that Heraclitus is incorrectly read as a "flux" philosopher, and would be better paired with his contemporary Parmenides, who famously claimed that "All is one." While I wouldn't disagree that Heraclitus stands in relation (per the Logos) to Parmenides' declaration, I do not think the One of Parmenides is the same One that Heraclitus speaks of. Instead of denying the flux (change, agonism, strife) that is at the core of Heraclitus' fragments, she could have pushed Hegel's conclusions further, and found Heraclitus' true descendant in Adorno and his Negative Dialectics, which does not seek to reconcile opposites into an untrue unity.

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

A deceptively small volume that rewards a patient, thoughtful read.

By focusing strictly on the concept of LOGOS, Ms. Brann is able to navigate the maze of Heraclitus' fragments without the historical and metaphysical speculations that mar so many popular books on Heraclitus.

Her careful drawing out of Heraclitus' original vision of LOGOS is both a critique of later, more familiar uses of the term, and a re-discovery of Heraclitus' insight in surprising places.

Poetry, philosophy and mathematics blend in a radical understanding of LOGOS that even the ancients found disconcerting.

[Christopher McCaffery · Rating 4 out of 5]

An intensely exciting read. Everyone should read it so we can talk about it together.

[Keelan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A vitalizing work on Heraclitus, no doubt. Its only real shortfall is that Brann’s repeated interpretation of “hen panta einai” as “one:everything”, has little substance to it.

[Graham Cammock · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant! This book was truly awe-inspiring. I learned everything I need to know about Heraclitus' Logos, the Logos-fire and it's Wise Design throughout the cosmos. Logos is about "One is Everything" and it means Word or the Word of God in a Christian context, but in more originally Greek context, Logos means collecting, counting, accounting, recounting, tale-telling, ratio, relation, reason, calculating, conversing, thinking etc. I now know where the "logy" suffix in our English language comes from, as in biology, "legein" is also related to the word "dialectic".

"Having all these aspects in mind, I think the Logos of Heraclitus needs no translation, but should simply enter that most hospitable linguistic venue, English. Our language is, after all, already loaded with somewhat mangled compounds of logia-endings, the -logy terms from archaeology to zoology, and also of legein derivatives, of which “dialectic” is the philosophically most potent. Transcription will allow logos to retain in English its whole burden of activities: collecting, counting, accounting, recounting, tale-telling; then ratio, relation, through to reason and all the derivative words for calculating, conversing, thinking—Language in all its internal origins and in its external manifestations, its utterance, that is, its “outering.”

Brann, Eva. The Logos of Heraclitus (pp. 124-125). Paul Dry Books. Kindle Edition.

I also know the difference between Heraclitus and Parmenides which is the difference between logologist and ontologist (being).

"Can anyone deny that these two are about the same search, the search pursued of old and now and ever, even though the one—to return them to their proper order—thinks as a logologist (so to speak), the other as an ontologist? And that they set out for the future, for us, the two perennial, yet ever-evolving, terms of that inquiry: Logos and Being and its one paramount and never-resolved perplexity: One and/or Many?"

Brann, Eva. The Logos of Heraclitus (p. 106). Paul Dry Books. Kindle Edition.

It is not known for sure which is the first Western philosopher, Heraclitus or Parmenides, however, I believe the former is first. An essential read. It is amazing to read and gain the knowledge of the first philosopher. I earnestly and highly recommend this essential little book!

[Tamara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very interesting....
Heraclitus: 535 BC-475 BC
Western Philosophy
Notable ideas: Logos, Fire as the beginning of origins, Unity of opposites, Everything flows, and Becoming.

About Time: Time never appears in the fragments [that we understand like seconds, minutes, days, weeks, years, etc.]; appearance of Time is change---it is change that does it all. In fact, the only appearance of Time is AS change----a remarkable advanced demystification. (Pg. 89)

About the Soul: The human soul, Heraclitus's soul, is possessed of a specifically human way of being in the world; It is an early, maybe a first, instance of what will come to be called "intentionality," the remarkable capacity, peculiar to thinking, of "aboutness," of containing its object within itself, such that it is at once BEFORE the mind and OF the mind. That is, I imagine, how Heraclitus's own soul both held and beheld the cosmos, which spoke to it oracularly [the LOGOS]. (Pg. 135)

"It belongs to all men to know themselves and to be sound-minded (116)." (Pg. 25)

But the main theme of Heraclitus's philosophy can be summed up as:
"Out of everything one and out of one everything."
{A is to B as B is to A.}

Personally, I like the riddles and definitions in Heraclitus's Logos. I would have liked hanging out with the guy. He makes a good argument for Words Matter.
5 stars for arguing: "Thinking is common to all (113)."

[Sinclair von Sinclair · Rating 2 out of 5]

I struggle to understand who this book was intended for. Too theoretical for a general audience and too lackadaisical for anyone with a serious interest in the pre-Socratics. A set of bizarrely truncated musings on the Logos at the heart of the Heraclitus fragments. Admirable for its attempt at brevity but confounding in its failure to expand upon the spark of insights it throws up. It reads at times like a casual transcription of informal discussions rather than a composed argument or account. It read like a bad translation. The penultimate section tracing the influence of Heraclitus through Western thought is astonishingly shallow and uninspired. Bitterly disappointing.

[Michael Greer · Rating 5 out of 5]

A reader might do far worse than read Eva Brann. The author has spent her life in the Elysian Fields of good writing. That's doesn't quite capture the hold she has over her readers. Good writing is one thing, good writing of substance is something else all together. Eva Brann's readings of Homer, Plato, and others is unsurpassed. Probably that's an overstatement. Heidegger is a better 'reader.'

[Corey · Rating 4 out of 5]

So this was short but pretty dense. Probably not a good book unless you already are familiar with Heraclitus, which I was not. Even so by the end was was deeply fascinated by him. Brann argues persuasively that each generation has interpreted Heraclitus by twisting him to fit their mold.

[Billie Pritchett · Rating 3 out of 5]

Eva Brann's Logos of Heraclitus is kind of a weird book. It explains the preSocratic philosopher Heraclitus's worldview. I suspect her basic conclusion is true but many of the details are highly speculative and creative and would not be averred by historians or linguists. Nevertheless, the basic insight of the book is this. Heraclitus believes that forces in the world exist together but are always in tension, like a guitar string being plucked or two wrestlers who have one another in their group but aren't making headway. The book was generally fun to read, but I'd recommend careful treading with regard several of the assertions.

[Tasshin Fogleman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ms. Brann is a careful but courageous reader. She reads and interprets these fragments in a way that deviates from received opinion (while managing to criticize Aristotle for misinterpreting Heraclitus)—an audacious academic spectacle! Her prose is, as always, delightful; her mind, learning, and wisdom is supremely rare. We are lucky that she has written these books for us, although clearly, writing them is a reward in itself for her.

[Albert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brann illuminates and injects with many meanings the surviving fragments of Heraclitus. It took awhile to get into the linguistic circumscription philosophical technique being used, but in the end it does seem warranted. Whether Heraclitus actually meant for Logos to play the role of stable opposition and unifier of ratios or it is just Brann telling that story through his fragments is secondary to the fact that this is a deep meditative reading.

[B. Rule · Rating 5 out of 5]

A short but brilliant meditation on the meaning of Logos in Heraclitus. She provides a compelling account of Heraclitus as a philosopher of creative tension and also briefly traces Heraclitus' reception in later thinkers. You can read this in a couple hours, and I recommend you do!

[Winston Elliott III · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing beautiful writing by Eva Brann on the Logos of Heraclitus.