| Summary: | This is a brief survey and interpretation of the text of the only two Heraclitean fragments that connect explicitly psyche and logos, B45 and B115. Introductory pages deal with the traditional significance of the word psyche, and the meaning and philosophical importance of the complex term of logos, which appears in several other genuine texts. Part I is concerned with B45: “If you go to the soul’s limits, you wouldn’t find them, even if you traveled every path: so deep is its logos”. It is mainly an exploration of its many different resonances and its paradoxical rationality. The focal points of attention are the ideas of “limits” and “searching”, which are then linked to mortality. The second section includes a brief discussion on B36 and concludes that its relevance to the interpretation of B45 is questionable and unclear. The third section tries to recover the general outlines of Heraclitus conception of the [human] soul as the home of knowledge and speech (as a quick glimpse of B107 reveals [“Eyes and ears are bad witnesses for those who have barbarous souls”]), which strongly suggests the idea of self-knowledge as the background of B45. The last section deals with the more difficult B115 (“It belongs to the soul a logos that increases itself”), recognizing first the problem of authenticity, and especially the objection of inconsistency between the idea of a logos that “increases itself” and Heraclitus’ theory of “measures”, venturing a conjectural interpretation that draws attention to the main, common point of both fragments: the inner character of logos, its immanence in psyche, and its most suggestive implication, an idea of self-consciousness, a fundamental philosophical notion that could be thus much more ancient than what is usually thought.
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