Derivative Images

In Plato's Allegory of The Chariot the ancient philosopher used to explain the tripartite nature of the soul or psyche. In the allegory, a chariot (representing the soul) is pulled by a rebellious dark horse (symbolizing man’s appetites) and a spirited white horse (symbolizing thumos). The charioteer, or Reason, is tasked with harnessing the energy of both horses, getting the disparate steeds into sync, and successfully piloting the chariot into the heavens where he can behold Truth and become like the gods.

While the other components of Plato’s vision of the soul have ready modern equivalents, there is no word in our language that truly corresponds to thumos. This is most telling. When a culture lacks the word for something, it is because they lack the concept of it.

The Greeks believed thumos was essential to andreia — manliness. It is mentioned over seven hundred times in the Iliad and the Odyssey. Philosopher Allan Bloom called it “the central natural passion in men’s souls.” If we have lost the ability to recognize, appreciate, cultivate, and utilize one of the three main components of our nature, we should not be surprised when negative consequences follow. When one hears of a lack of virility, fight, energy, and ambition in modern men, of a malaise of spirit that has settled over our sex, what is really being spoken of is a shortage of thumos. For millions of men, thumos lies dormant, an energy source left untapped. It is as if each of us had a potential Kentucky Derby-caliber thoroughbred waiting in the stable, ready and eager to run, but we kept him locked away, only trotting him out for pony rides at children’s birthday parties.

Recovering an understanding of thumos, and its role as the vital life and energy source of men’s souls, will be our task today.

What Is Thumos?

As we mentioned last time, Plato envisioned the three components of one’s soul as independent entities. Thumos was thought to be the most independent of the bunch. The Greeks believed it was found in animals, humans, and the gods. Thumos could act separately from you, or in cooperation with you — as an accompaniment, tool, or motivation behind some action. Because it was a distinct part of yourself, you could talk to it, tell it to endure, to be strong, or to be young (thumos was associated with the passion and power of youth, but older people could have it too). In the Iliad, Achilles speaks “to his great-hearted thumos” when anxious about the fate of Patroculus. He also delights his thumos by playing the lyre.

The Greek philosopher Empedocles called thumos the “seat of life.” If it left you entirely, you would faint, and permanent separation meant death.

Thumos likewise constitutes the “seat of energy that can fill a person,” and serves as the active agent within man. It is the stimulus, the drive, the juice to action — the thing that makes the blood surge in your veins. Philosopher Sam Keen got at the idea with his concept of “the fire in the belly.”

The Romans held a similar belief, equating energy with virtus, or manliness. “The whole glory of virtus,” Cicero declared, “resides in activity.”

What is the nature of this energy and where does it lead? The Greeks saw thumos as serving several distinct, yet interrelated functions. As with honor, it is a concept that was once so implicitly understood that it did not have to be explained, and attempting to describe it at a great remove makes what was once a natural, lived experienced seem much more complicated. The best we can do is illustrate it from its different angles, and hope that the pieces resonate and come together into a recognizable mosaic.

Note: In this post we use phrases like, “The Greeks believed…” This is not to imply that the ancient Greeks were monolithic in their philosophy – different ideas on manliness and thumos existed. What we have done here is distilled out the core threads of thumos on which there was a good amount of agreement, and woven them together along with our own interpretation.

Seat of Emotion

Thumos is both the source of emotion and the emotion itself. The agent and the function are fused. Thumos births and embodies things like joy, pain, fear, hope, and grief. Thumos is also tied up with love. The Greeks would say you could love someone “out of your thumos.”

Thumos is most closely associated, however, with anger. In Greek writings thumos “seethes,” “rages,” and “boils.” It is a special kind of anger – activated when a man’s honor is violated, when his reputation is on the line, when his family and property are threatened. It drives a man to stand up for himself, for his country, for his loved ones.

The anger of thumos can not only be directed at others and external enemies, but also towards oneself. Thumos makes you angry at yourself when you fail to live up to your principles and code of honor. Plato uses the example of a man who sees a pile of corpses, looks away, and keeps on walking, but then returns to gaze upon it again. He is angry with himself for giving into a base inclination. Thumos can make you indignant of your own desires, if those desires compel you to do something contrary to the dictates of Reason.

Drive to Fight

Thumos not only produces anger, but then channels that anger into the impulse to fight. When Nestor, King of Pylos, recalls his past exploits, he says, “My hard-enduring heart [thumos] in its daring drove me to fight.” Thumos motivates warriors before and during combat. The Greeks said courageous soldiers had a “valiant thumos” during war. In Seven Against Thebes, it is said that before battle the soldiers’ “iron-lunged thumos, blazing with valor, breathed out as if from lions glaring with the war-god’s might.” Valor here is translated from andreia – manliness. The warriors’ thumos blazes with manliness in anticipation of the fight.

A man of thumos glories in a fight – whether against others, the elements of nature, or his baser desires — as a way to test his mettle and prove himself.

Courage, Steadfastness, Indomitability

Once a man is in a fight, thumos spurs him on, motivating him to stay in the arena and continue fearlessly striving for victory. This “gameness” is a quality of thumos man shares with the beasts. In Sam Sheridan’s exploration of The Fighter’s Heart, he observes the centrality of gameness in dogfighting. “We almost don’t care how good the dog fights,” he notes, “the fight is just an elaborate test to check his gameness.” Adds a dog trainer Sheridan speaks with: “Give me a game dog any day, a dog that bites as tissue paper but keeps coming back and I’ll take him.”

Fearless indomitability is central to the success of the human warrior as well, who must not lose heart as the heat of battle intensifies, and his morale flags. To encourage their respective armies to fight harder in the midst of combat, Ajax and Hector “stirred up the thumos and strength” of each of their men.

Plato did not see human gameness as being of the same kind demonstrated by animals, however. Rather, he argued that man’s thumos, at least when properly trained, is born of a rational type of courage — that man is andreios (manly) when his thumos “holds fast to the orders of reason about what he ought or ought not to fear, in spite of pleasure and pain.” In other words, when engaged in a worthy fight, you neither recklessly underestimate real threats that should be feared, nor overestimate threats that shouldn’t be feared, and are not swayed from your course by either the satisfaction of pursuing blind revenge nor the fear of being hurt and the love of comfort and luxury. Plato argued that andreia meant conquering fear and pain of any sort – being the kind of man “who confronts misfortune in all cases with steadfast endurance.”

Evaluation, Discernment, Decision-Making

So thumos keeps you in a fight that your Reason has decided is indeed a worthy one. But how do you make that determination?

Plato believed, as Angela Hobbs put it, that “courage involves both emotional commitment and evaluative belief, an intellectual and emotional appreciation of what things are worth taking risks for and in what circumstances.”

Thumos plays a role in both the emotional and evaluative parts of that equation. As we mentioned last time, the task of Reason as the “charioteer” is to take stock of his own desires, and those of his two horses, and then to choose to satisfy only his best and truest ones – those that lead to virtue and arête, or excellence. Reason’s ally in this task is his white horse, or thumos, which can be trained to help make this kind of judgment.

Shirley Sullivan offers examples of this function of thumos in Greek literature:

“Thumos is mentioned in connection with several intellectual activities. These include pondering, thinking, knowing, deliberation, planning and perceiving. Often too a person puts things into thumos for consideration. Odysseus ‘ponders evils in his thumos’ for the suitors. Zeus ‘thinks about events’ in his thumos as he watches the battle of Troy…Hermes ‘deliberates in thumos’ how to take Priam safely from Achilles’ camp. Circe tells Odysseus ‘to plan in his thumos’ the course he will take after passing the Sirens. Telemachus tells Penelope that now that he has grown up, ‘he perceives and knows in his thumos’ good and evil. It is in thumos that Hesiod tells Perses to ‘consider’ the value of the competitive spirit.”