Question on Thumos/Thymos?

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What does Thymos mean

Greek thought evolved an intriguing division of mental life into two souls, the Thymos (pron: "theemos") and the Psyche.

The Thymos pertains to the active soul, what we today refer to thought, consciousness, awareness, etc.

It was associated with breath, heart and liver. Breath was identified with soul, as in most ancient systems of philosophy (the Hindu "atman" comes from the word for "breathing") and with language (breath is what you need to utter sounds). Liver was reputed to be the origin of emotions (there must have been painful liver diseases at the time :-). The heart was considered the seat of desires and intentions.

The Psyche is the immanent soul, independent from the body, a precursor of the eternal soul of Christianity that survives the body in the other world.

It appears that this was a very ancient belief, predating civilizations, as the same distinction can be found in most ancient cultures: in Egypt there were the ba and ka, in China the p'o and hun, in Judaism the nephesh and the ruach, in Buddhism the kama-manas and the buddhi-manas, in Zoroastrianism the daena and the urvan. Countless esoteric beliefs, all derived from ancient theosophies, distinguish between an active entity (alaya-vijnana, karana-sarira) and a passive entity (manas, suksma-sarira). Interestingly, the concept was abolished by Christianity but resurfaced in Islam (the ruh and the nafs).

In ancient Greece the Thymos became the active, rational and mortal part of the person (the part that has control over the body), while the Psyche became the quiescent and immortal part of the person.

The Thymos became a core concept of Socrates' philosophy. In Socrates' theology the doctrine of Thymos is a meditation on the history of philosophy from Homer to Socrates himself, by which Socrates hails the passage from unconscious philosophizing to rational self-consciousness. Interestingly, Socrates warned against the dangers of self-awareness. He warned that consciousness would cost us greatly, both in terms of desire to live and in terms of our harmony with nature. In Plato's late dialogues this contradiction has a happy ending, as Socrates finds in conscious thought the meaning of life itself.

Platonic philosophy elevated the Thymos above the Psyche. The Psyche is viewed as a sort of lower mind that can connect with either a higher mind (nous), that a Christian may perhaps interpret as God, or with the Thymos, that a Christian cannot interpret because it has no correspondent. Thymos is the cause of anger and passion. In a sense, it is opposite of meditation.

A book by professor Mary Hesse, has a wonderful chapter on ‘The Primitive Analogies’ that deals with early thought and I came across this passage, centred on the meaning of thymos. Hesse mentions Onians: his book The Origins of European Thought is actually mostly a study of Greek thought in Homeric times, well before the Ionian philosophers such as Parmenides.

Some important illustrations of this lack of distinction between mental and physical are to be found in the etymology of words denoting mental functions. In most languages words denoting the higher human faculties, such as ' mind ', ' soul', ' spirit', have a multiplicity of meanings and very complex etymologies, which no doubt reflect, if we can learn to read the signs correctly, the development of man's ideas about himself and whatever suprahuman powers there may be, and also about matter and its natural forces. Consider, for example, the Greek ' thymos ', ' psyche ', and ' pneuma '. Thymos and psyche occur in Homer, the earliest surviving Greek literature, and already show considerable complexities of meaning. Thymos is usually interpreted as ' blood-soul', since its root seems to be theon and this can mean ' to offer sacrifice', or ' to rage, seethe', like the rushing up of blood in a sacrifice. On the other hand, in Homer it is also clearly associated with ' breath', for when consciousness is lost as in fainting or death, the thymos is said to be ' breathed forth', presumably as material breath. It also stands for life and consciousness, especially in the aspects of strong emotion, desire and courage, as with the English ' heart'. Now it is meaningless to ask whether the primary connotation of the word is material or mental or spiritual. It is clearly all three. As Cornford puts it:

' It is an easy fallacy (encouraged by dictionaries) to suppose that a word has at first a single sense—the sense that happens to be uppermost at its first occurrence in written records—and later accumulates other meanings. It is nearer the truth to say that the original meaning is a complex in which nearly all the later senses are inextricably confused.'

This view evidently lies behind the suggestion of Professor Onians regarding the meaning of thymos. Its various contexts are all associated with the functions of the human chest: the material breath and the process of breathing, the blood and the beating heart. The motions of breathing and of the heart are those most affected under the stress of strong emotion, and are therefore naturally associated with the more robust aspects of life and consciousness. Thymos is not mere breath, nor mere blood, nor even the ' blood-soul' as opposed to the ' breath-soul', but a complex of all these, located in the region of the chest and manifesting itself in the various physical events which seem to take place there.

Hey! Your cheating no fair, your under Mr. Rex Rola and the deadline is tomorrow! [PHILO104/MWF/5:50-6:50]