Logos

Logos, in its barest sense, means "word," but it has meant much more in the history of religion and philosophy by orders of magnitude. To most people, it refers not to the principal of reason behind the universe, a demiurge, or the son of God, but is a visual cue that reminds us of Apple, Nike, Microsoft, or McDonalds.  Every company strives to create a simple image that will take your brain right to them the moment you see it. This is nothing new. In Christianity, Jesus was/is in a very deep sense God's logo; the cross is Christianity's logo.

We despise the swastika, and there are many still alive for whom that logo creates dread and grief. It was the most powerful logo of the 20th century, and one of the most powerful of all time, along with the Dragon (Chinese imperial logo), the Star of David, the Roman legions' Eagle, the cross, and the Star and Crescent, the Union Jack (upon which, for a time, the sun never set) the Stars and Stripes, and the hammer and sickle. You can name many others.

Commercial logos have been employed almost as long as people have been selling things, but they are now ubiquitous. We can't avoid them short of escaping into the wilderness, which can only do us good. No commercial or political entity would consider going without a logo. They are forever thrust into our lines of vision. Another annoyance is companies and products with names/logos that have absolutely no meaning other than the connection they hope to create between them (and no one or anything else) and our brains: Viagra, Zynga, Zyvestra, Kodak, Xerox, etc. These words are forced upon us and into our vocabularies. It's a terrific strategy if it works, if they manage to create a major brand with an image that links directly into our memories and psyches. It can also be a joke when it fails: think Accenture, Xfinity, New Coke, the Arch Delux, Crystal Pepsi, etc. Even so, you probably connected to a few of those failed, or failing, brands.

John, in the eponymous Gospel, used the Greek word logos to refer to Jesus. "In the beginning was the logos, and the logos was with God, and the logos was God." He wrote in Greek, and used the term quite deliberately to associate Jesus divinity with several ideas that already existed in Greek philosophy, to appeal to the Greek mind. The word had several shades of significant meaning in Greek. For the Stoics, the logos was the principal of reason that energizes the universe, the agent of creation. Philo of Alexandria (a Jewish contemporary of Jesus) had an understanding of logos very close to the Christian one, only without Jesus. English translators of the Gospel have always translated logos as "word," an obviously inadequate English analog. Interestingly, when missionaries to China reached for a word to use for logos, they chose Dao (or Tao), the Tao of Taoism, "the way." It has vastly more in common with the idea of the logos than "word" does, and works beautifully in the Chinese cultural context, nearly exactly the way John intended logos to work for Greek culture.

Our culture has no single-word analog for logos, though the word and its history make a fascinating study--a virtual doorway into the history of philosophy. The next time your attention is arrested or intruded upon by a commercial logo, google Hericlitus, and take it from there. And think of the shear power of an image/idea to capture your imagination, however briefly, and how many of these images reach back into our earliest conscious memories: Coca-Cola, General Electric, the cross, the menorah . . . for me, it's Ken-l Ration. Some of my earliest memories have to do with that blue can of dog food, such that now I find any can of dog food somehow entrancing. Weird, I know, but I'll bet some similar kind of image is stuck in your hippocampus, too.