AN EXAMINATION OF THUMOS IN THE REPUBLIC
Master’s Thesis
Philosophy
Erick Nelson
For Charles Young
ClaremontGraduateSchool
November, 1985
(Text re-entered 2007)
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
- Thesis
- Notes on topic selection
THUMOS AS ADMIRATION OF AN IDEAL TYPE
- Three-part soul
- Renderings
- Examples
- Manliness
- Doxa
PARTS OF SOUL
- Appetites and reason
- Two-part soul
- Virtues
JUSTICE AND COMMON MORALITY
- Sachs fallacy
- Thrasymachus
- Glaucon’s demand
- Ambiguity in “justice”
- Wj entails Ij
- Ij entails Wj
- Thumos and common morality
Notes
References
INTRODUCTION
1. Thesis
In Plato’s theory of the soul in the Republic, thumos can best be understood as admiration of an ideal type of manliness, and is of central importance in explaining the relation of Platonic justice and common morality.
(1.1) The third part of the soul, thumos, represents an unusual and interesting distinction within Plato’s theory of motivation. There is some feeling among commentators that it reveals a sloppy and inconsistent philosophy by confusing the neat reason/desire distinction and having a vague and disordered range of defining characteristics. In the view of some scholars, thumos is an unfortunate appendage to Plato’s considered theory which is not carefully thought out or established by argument.
A second point of criticism and sustained debate is concerned with the strategy employed in the main argument of the Republic, which contends that it pays to consider the rights of others. It looks as though Plato has taken full advantage of the fact that the state is called “just” when its members are just, and that he presses the conflation of these two distinct concepts by way of his analogy of the state and the soul. Trading on this equivocation, Plato is able to substitute one thing which obviously benefits the agent (mental health) for another thing which prima facie does not (common justice).
(1.2) I propose to argue, against these two views, that thumos is a coherent and identifiable part of the soul, that it provides for a richer theory of motivation, and that it fills an important explanatory role in connecting Plato’s theory of psychic harmony with common morality.
I will defend five points which, taken together, form my thesis:
- Thumos has a unified account which goes beyond the usual descriptions.
- This account is in terms of admiration of an ideal type of manliness.
- In the Republic, Plato’s considered view of the soul in the realm of motivation is tripartite, not bipartite.
- Plato has good reason to think that the psychically integrated man will also be just in the ordinary sense.
- The just man in the realm of common morality will be psychically integrated, parasitic upon external sources of reason, and so will be Platonically just.
I think that this thesis is both important and fruitful. It centers on points of scholarly controversy and so, if true, is certainly not trivial. It helps to clarify a part of the Republic which appears to be a continuing source of confusion to students of Plato, by way of unifying his account of motivation. It supplies an interesting connection between his epistemology and ethics. And it opens up a new line of defense for Plato’s doctrine of justice as harmony of the soul.
2. Notes on Topic Selection
I first selected the area of thumos for investigation because I had been confused by the concept when working on a paper dealing with the Republic, and was somewhat bothered by the lack of clarity I had achieved. I had some notion of thumos as generally emotive, involving some reference to self and ideals, but thought of it as a sort of hybrid between reason and desire, a needless and confusing combination of the two parts. I suggested in that paper that a neat two-part view of soul, separated into cognitive (reason in Hume’s sense) and motivational components, would be more appropriate. Gosling’s chapter on manliness brought my vague concept of thumos into sharper focus. I found that thinking of thumos as admiration for an ideal type was true to Plato’s depiction of it and shed light on various problems encountered in the Republic.
At the same time, I had been impressed with Sachs’ claim that Plato trades on two different senses of justice, with the conclusion that a fallacy lies at the heart of the argument of the Republic. As I reconsidered this view in light of my new concepts, I found that I was able to open up a line of defense for Plato against Sachs’ charges. In particular, I think that my method of defending the view that common morality and psychic harmony are mutually entailing is at least one that is plausible and fruitful.
THUMOS AS ADMIRATION OF AN IDEAL TYPE
1. Three Part Soul
Plato uses what may be called the “Principle of Competing Impulses” to argue that there are three parts of the soul, each having its own motivation and constituting a faculty or power of the soul.
Clearly one and the same thing cannot act or be affected in opposite ways at the same time in the same part of it and in relation to the same object; so if we find these contradictions, we shall know we are dealing with more than one faculty. (436b) (The Desmond Lee translation of the Republic is used throughout this paper.)
(1.1) The first part of the soul is called the “reasoning” part, which has two functions, to calculate and to rule the soul. There is some conflict over the precise domain and function of this part, but it seems clear that it contains both an ability to perform certain actions, and a desire, or motivating force, toward certain goals. It is able to logically calculate; its desire is to know the truth, to bring about the good of the whole person, and to realize the Good overall. It seeks the proper ends, and is able to select and implement means to those ends, for the soul’s well-being, and hence is the proper ruler of the soul.
(1.2) The clearest cases of the “appetitive” part are simple desires, such as the bodily urges of hunger and thirst. They are independent of “reason”, which means that they have no concern for the overall good and have in themselves no rational (i.e. calculative) component. [1] More difficult cases arise when complex desires are presented as examples of the appetitive part, e.g. Leontius’ conflict between anger/disgust and desire to see the corpses. It is only the latter which counts as appetitive; it involves emotion, imagination, and some calculation, and so seems to break away from the “pure urge” view of appetite.
(1.3) The remaining part of the soul is less clearly defined. It is called in the Greek thumos, which literally means “anger”, and is usually rendered as “the spirited part.” Plato’s principle, in his view, requires that there be a part of the soul in addition to the two we have just outlined, a part which can be opposed and criticized by reason (and so is distinct from reason), and yet can itself oppose and criticize appetite (and so is distinct from appetite). We will be concerned in this paper to give an account of thumos.
(1.4) At various points in the Republic, Plato connects each part of soul with its characteristic object of desire, and in a figure likens each part to a particular symbolic animal which represents it. By way of his analogy with the state, he can also relate each part to a class within the state and to a type of government. In chart form, these comparisons fall together as follows:
Reason / Wisdom / Man / Rulers / Aristocracy
Appetite / Gain / Beast / Workers / Olig, Dem, Tyr
Thumos / Honor / Lion / Soldiers / Timocracy
2. Renderings
The student of Plato is easily confused in his attempt to understand what is meant by the “spirited” part of the soul. The attempts by commentators to give an account of thumos are hindered by the fact that no one English word seems to be an adequate translation. And so, three lines of approach to this problem, all inadequate, are typically found.
(2.1) The first is to remain content with “spirit”, or “temper”, or even (the literal) “anger”, and simply fail to provide more of an account. Two examples of this (and there are many), are the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which only says, “The name of the in-between element, thumos, is sometimes unsatisfactorily rendered by ‘anger’, sometimes by ‘spirit’ (in the sense in which a horse may be spirited)”, [2] and Hare, who designates thumos as “the seat of anger, which is the natural ally of reason against desire.” [3]
(2.2) Another line is to provide a list of terms which is intended to suggest the required concept without actually providing a definition. A good example of this is Lee’s list: anger, reputation and good name, pugnacity, enterprise, ambition, indignation, mettle, spirit, guts, vitality, self-regarding, self-assertive, self-preserving. [4]
(2.3) A more comprehensive approach is to conceive thumos primarily as a faculty of emotion. Two examples of this are Grube, who says “I have therefore called it feelings, which in that sense are quite distinct from passions, as when we talk of saving a person’s feelings. Perhaps ‘sentiments’”, [5] and Taylor, “a part made up of the higher and nobler emotions, chief among which Plato reckons the emotions of righteous indignation and scorn of what is base; hence the general name for this element is with him the ‘spirited’ part.” [6]
(2.4) As we will see in providing our own account, thumos is a much richer concept, and plays a more powerful explanatory role in Plato’s philosophy, than is allowed by mere “spirit” or “anger”, without a great deal of further explanation. To expand this by providing a list of expressions serves to suggest a unifying concept, but still leaves the reader to his own devices in figuring out just what that is. To characterize thumos as the emotive faculty while explicitly providing a unifying concept appears to be inaccurate. Emotion is both too broad and too narrow to be identified with thumos: too broad, because the appetitive part can also be emotional, and (bound up with this) thumos is a particular type of emotional stance; too narrow, because thumos has a sense of ideals which entail a sense of direction crucial to thumos. Gosling points out that a more accurate account needs to be given:
It is not at all obvious what Plato is trying to isolate with the term “thymos”, and the problem has not been helped by a tendency to concentrate on a few prominent passages interesting largely for other reasons. The result is to suggest that he is trying to distinguish emotions from, say, intellect and desire, or to distinguish the will from intellect and affective parts of the personality. [7]
The effect of this deficiency in presenting thumos is that the reader is left with a vague sense of aggressive and competitive emotions which serve no clear purpose, and which seem to undermine the neat two-part soul of reason/desire with which Plato works in the Phaedo and Book 10 of the Republic. This has led some commentators to say that there is in fact no unity at all in the notion of thumos, and that it cannot be captured by any single idea or range of ideas: it is incoherent. [8] As Gosling adds, either Plato is very confused, or else thumos is used technically to isolate a concept which demands clarification. [9]
3. Examples
What makes it difficult to develop a systematic explanation is Plato’s habit of giving striking examples without an account of their connection. He seems to court problems by changing the characteristics of thumos as we follow the discussion. He presents examples of thumos which range from the watch dog to the financier. What is it that they could possibly have in common?
(3.1) Even before Plato sets up an argument for the parts of the soul, he describes the attributes essential to the soldier class of the republic. They must be like watch dogs: keen of perception, with speed and strength, vigor and energy. They must have the requisite fighting qualities and courage to face adversaries: they must be fearless and indomitable in the face of dangers (375a-b). Thumos seems to be an aggressive, and in general violent, tendency.
(3.2) When he introduces his argument for the distinction of thumos from appetite, he recalls the story of Leontius, desiring to look at corpses, and at the same time being disgusted with himself for this unworthy “appetite.” (439e - 440c) He is filled with self-scorn, because he has given in to his passions. The element in thumos which is highlighted here is that of indignation and shame.
(3.3) On the other hand, thumos is distinguished from reason by the example of Odysseus “calling his heart to order” (441a-b), in which the faculty of reason criticizes and opposes his “heart.” Here, it seems to indicate more of an emotive tendency which can experience fear or confidence. [10]
(3.4) Although Plato doesn’t elaborate, he gives the example of children and animals, in whom thumos appears to be primarily an aggressive trait, perhaps amounting to assertiveness in pursuit of one’s aims. (441a-b)
(3.5) The soldier class is the part of the state which exemplifies thumos. The soldiers have politike courage, which is described as knowing what to fear and what not to fear, according to law (429c – 430b), not based on a reasoned account, but imposed by upbringing. It is a kind of “safe-keeping”, because the bearer will hold to his convictions in the face of pains and fears, and pleasures and desires. Here thumos seems to be the ability to stick to one’s duty despite adverse circumstances.
4. Manliness
(4.1) Scholars who have attempted to give a unified account of thumos have largely agreed that one of the ways in which it is distinguished from appetite is that it involves some notion of value.
It has a component of self-reference: it is concerned with self-esteem and with recognition from others. [13] While reason is entirely good-dependent, that is, concerned with overall good, and appetite is good-independent, thumos is thought of as partially good dependent. It is concerned with beliefs about some kinds of good, but not about overall good. [14] The developed notion of anger amounts to indignation, that is, anger at a wrong or injustice, which results in a lower esteem of others (contempt) or of self (shame). [15] All of this points to an ideal which thumos strives to realize and to defend.
(4.2) Thumos can be found in its rough state, or it may be trained and molded:
“It is the energy and initiative in their nature that may make them uncivilized”, I said; “if you treat it properly it should make them brave, but if you overstrain it turns them tough and uncouth, as you would expect.” … “The philosophic temperament, on the other hand, is gentle; too much relaxation may produce an excessive soft-ness, but if it is treated properly the result should be humane and civilized. … And will proper adjustment produce a character that is self-controlled and brave?” “Certainly.”
“And maladjustment one that is cowardly and crude?” “Very much so.” (410a – 411a)
Thumos has a force. It can be greater or less, strong or weak, relative to the other two parts. Its degree of force will determine its position in terms of dominance. (For example, if strong in relation to reason, it will ignore the overall values of reason and pursue its own aims.) In addition to this, even within an established hierarchy its degree of force will have an effect on the soul. For instance if it has been neglected in favor of reason, and therefore underdeveloped, it will cause the person to be soft and effeminate.
It also has a direction. It seeks its fulfillment in the right direction insofar as it is guided by reason. Without direction, cultivation, and training, it will appear harsh and crude. [16]
(4.3) The timocratic character is the one which exemplifies the thumos-controlled man. Plato’s account of the makings of the timocrat should provide an insight into the type of values that are naturally found within the domain of thumos.
When he hears his mother complaining that her husband isn’t one of the bosses, and that she is slighted by other women because of it; she … says that the boy’s father isn’t a real man and is far too easygoing, and drones on with all the usual complaints women make in the circumstances … [the servants] tell the son that when he grows up he must have his rights and be more of a man than his father. (549e-d) (emphasis mine)
The young timocrat is brought up to admire an ideal type of manliness, to aspire to become a real man, to feel shame at his own shortcomings and contempt for those of others.
(4.4) The word “thumos” itself had for Plato a rich and significant background in the Homeric stories. It appears to have conveyed something very close to our concept of manliness, including notions of strength, prowess, vigorous action, and heroic overcoming.
But in Homer, where it appears very frequently, the word has a broader usage: it names the part of themselves to which Homeric heroes speak, or which speaks to them, when they are aroused for action, and into which they, or some tutelary deity, pour might and strength when their prowess is about to be put to the test. It is thus the immediate source of action, especially vigorous action, and the seat of emotion, especially those emotions (anger, for example, but also on occasion sexual passion as well) that motivate vigorous and bold action. [17]
(4.5) The virtue of “courage”, which is closely connected with thumos in Plato’s view, in the Greek is andreia. Andreia is something beyond bravery and endurance, and almost literally “manly.” Gosling explains: