Notes on λόγος

Human beings are magical. Bios and Logos. Words made flesh, muscle and bone animated by hope and desire, belief materialized in deeds, deeds which crystallize our actualities. . . . And the maps of spring always have to be redrawn again, in undared forms.

–_{Wynter, Sylvia. “The Pope must have been drunk, the King of Castile a madman: Culture as actuality, and the Caribbean rethinking modernity.” The reordering of culture: Latin America, the Caribbean and Canada in the hood (1995): 17-41.}

“In the beginning was the verb”, the logos, the creative and ordering word, which puts into motion and legislates. With these words, the purest Christian reason comes to grapple with Greek philosophic reason. The arrival on the earth of a creature who carried in his nature an extreme contradiction, unthinkable, of being at the same time divine and human, did not with its divine absurdity hold up the path of the Platonic-Aristotelean logos, did not break with the strength of reason, with its primacy. Despite the “mad wisdom” of the flagellant of San Pablo, reason as the ultimate root of the universe continued afoot. Nevertheless something new had appeared: reason, the creative logos, confronted with the abyss of nothingness; it was the word of one who could perform everything through speaking. And the logos remained situated beyond man and beyond nature, beyond both being and nothingness. It was the principle beyond the principled.

^{-María Zambrano, Filosofía y poesía (Philosophy and Poetry) (1940)}