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Single Idea 7420

[filed under theme 2. Reason / A. Nature of Reason / 2. Logos ]

Full Idea

Plutarch says if you have mastered principles then logos will silence your desires like a master silencing a dog - in which case the logos functions without intervention on your part - you have become the logos, or the logos has become you.

Clarification

'Logos' is the broad Greek concept of human reasoning

Gist of Idea

When logos controls our desires, we have actually become the logos

Source

Michel Foucault (Ethics of the Concern for Self as Freedom [1984], p.286)

Book Ref

Foucault,Michel: 'Essential Works 1954-1984 I: Ethics', ed/tr. Rabinow,Paul [Penguin 1994], p.286

A Reaction

If you believe that logos is pure reason, you might be quite happy with this, but if you thought it was a cultural construct, you might feel that you had been cunningly enslaved. If I ask 'what is 7+6?', logos interrupts me to give the answer.

The 20 ideas with the same theme [broad Greek concept of understanding or giving reasons]:

414 Logos is common to all, but most people live as if they have a private understanding [Heraclitus]
24047 An account is either a definition or a demonstration [Aristotle]
1570 Human beings, alone of the animals, have logos [Aristotle]
1575 For Aristotle logos is essentially the ability to talk rationally about questions of value [Roochnik on Aristotle]
21810 The Stoics distinguished spoken logos from logos within the mind [Stoic school, by Plotinus]
20775 Stoics study canons, criteria and definitions, in order to find the truth [Stoic school, by Diog. Laertius]
21393 Stoics believed that rational capacity in man (logos) is embodied in the universe [Stoic school, by Long]
6294 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the word was God [John]
1569 Descartes impoverished the classical idea of logos, and it no longer covered human experience [Roochnik on Descartes]
15574 'Logos' really means 'making something manifest' [Heidegger, by Polt]
9197 The logos represents a demand for universal rationality [Hadot]
7420 When logos controls our desires, we have actually become the logos [Foucault]
17950 The logos enables us to track one particular among a network of objects [Nehamas]
17951 A logos may be short, but it contains reference to the whole domain of the object [Nehamas]
1571 'Logos' ranges from thought/reasoning, to words, to rational structures outside thought [Roochnik]
1572 In the seventeenth century the only acceptable form of logos was technical knowledge [Roochnik]
1573 The hallmark of a person with logos is that they give reasons why one opinion is superior to another [Roochnik]
1592 Logos cannot refute the relativist, and so must admit that it too is a matter of desire (for truth and agreement) [Roochnik]
1593 Human desire has an ordered structure, with logos at the pinnacle [Roochnik]
1603 Logos is not unconditionally good, but good if there is another person willing to engage with it [Roochnik]