According to W. Tatarkiewicz, the etymology of the term logistics was already used by Heraclitus at the turn of the 6th and 5th centuries BC. However, scholars do not agree on whether the concept he used, treated as the art of rational thinking, and the synonym of logistics used as a synonym for mathematical logic were transferred directly to management sciences. For these reasons, it was considered a better solution to borrow the term logistics from military terminology. Nevertheless, it is worth getting to know the interpretation of some of Heraclitus’s sentences.
Heraclitus was born in the Ionian city of Ephesus. He lived approximately between 544 and 484 BC. He came from an aristocratic family, but he renounced his titles in favor of his brother and withdrew from public life. Full of aversion to people, he lived in the mountains, where he fed on plants. He fell ill with dropsy and, seeking help, returned to Ephesus. He asked the local doctors “if they knew how to turn a downpour into a drought”; unfortunately, they did not understand him, so he buried himself in dung, thinking that its heat would heal him. The treatment proved ineffective – Heraclitus died.
The original meaning of the word logos (λογος) is associated with a “distributive-rational” function. “All these activities are, after all, ‘rational’ because they take place according to a certain plan: for if someone adds one thing to another with the intention of gathering the entire collection in a specific place, and then reviews it, that is, counts and registers individual elements, trying in this way to distinguish, separate, and isolate one or several objects from others, that is, to make a motivated choice while omitting the remaining parts of the set – then this act of ‘distinction’ becomes justified due to the distributive value of the root λεγ-. Thus, both the ‘synthetic’ act of gathering elements and the ‘analytical’ procedure of their rational selection, consisting of distinguishing only a few parts from the entire set, contain the double value of the verb λέγειν, and thus also project onto the ambivalence of the word λογος derived from it”.
The unifying and distributive, or “dividing,” function of the logos appears in its full entirety in the philosophy of Heraclitus. Logos is the most important concept in it. This word appears in Heraclitus eleven times in various fragments of his work, namely:
1. People are never able to understand the Logos, which is, neither before they hear it, nor after they have heard it for the first time. And although all things happen according to this Logos, they resemble the inexperienced when they experience words and deeds such as those I explain, dividing each thing according to its nature and showing how it is. Before other people, what they do after waking up is hidden, just as they forget what they do in their sleep.
2. Although the Logos is common, many live as if they had their own understanding.
3. Transformations of fire: first the sea, and from the sea one half is earth, and half is scorching wind. <Earth> melts into the sea, to the measure of the same logos that was before it became earth.
4. In Priene was born Bias, son of Teutames, whose Logos is greater than others’.
5. Walking, you would not discover the boundaries of the soul, traversing every path: so deep is its Logos.
6. It is wise to agree, not by listening to me, but to the Logos, that one is all.
7. They argue with the Logos, with which they are constantly most connected, and the things they encounter every day seem strange to them.
8. A foolish man likes to be terrified of every Logos.
9. Of those whose logoi I have listened to, no one reaches the point of knowing that wisdom is separated from everything.
10. The soul has a Logos that increases itself.
The article comes from the magazine “Logistyka” 6/2009.