508. Thymos

The notion of ‘thymos’ goes back to the classical Greeks: Homer, Aristotle and Plato. Its root meaning is ‘fume’ or ‘vapour’ (Cairns 2019). When one is in thymos, one is in one’s vapours. For Aristoteles it is mostly anger, for Plato it was a pivot between logic and desire. It is the urge, volition, the emotion-laden drive to action. The ‘guts’ to act, one might say. Logic, rationality, becomes active through thymos. The metaphor has been used of a visceral body carrying a head of reason (Mirhady 2007: 55).

Thymos can be positive, in love, commitment, care, pity, endeavour, adventure. I used it as a characteristic of entrepreneurship. I associate it with Nietzsche’s Dionysian excitement, ebullience, transgression, high spirit, and will to power, next to Apollonian harmony and balance. It can feed virtue. It can drive environmentalists, feminists and freedom fighters. It can also be negative, in hatred, resistance, aggression, rage, seething resentment. Geranesh (2020) talks of the ‘white thymos’. of Trump’s followers, in their resentment of losing white privilige and supremacy. Loss of privilege is felt and sold as inquality, offense. Hostility is dressed up as love, love for traditional America and Christian values, defending them against immigrants and liberals, in eruptions fed by the hotbeds and nuclear fusion of social media.

I connect thymos also to David Hume’s dictum that ‘rationality is the slave of the passions’, and his claim that benevolence is natural, automatic, instinctive, not based on reason. This connects with evolutionary epistemology and sociology, which claims that empathy emerged from the evolution of humanity in its history of hunter-gatherers, from some 300-400.000 years ago, where collaboration was required for hunting big game and for defense, which demanded the ability to imagine oneself in the perspective of the other, in empathy.(Tomasello 2016, Campbell 1974). Being buried deeply in our make-up, it is instinctive and non-rational, automatic, triggered by emotion.

Much of our choice and decision making is based on routines, automatic behaviour that we have developed to free attention to more urgent and new conditions, as in having a coversation while driving a car. In that sense, lack of rational attention is rational. Not to get caught in constraining routines where they fail, as when in driving an accident is about to occur, thymos is needed to catapult us out of them, to pay attention to new conditions and reflect on appropriate action. Thymos, in the form of fear, or lure, desire, or opportunity,  sets the agenda and purpose for reasoned deliberation.

Rules and institutions appeal to utility or deontology, duty, in rational evaluation, where one falls into the hands of self-interest, in free-riding or deceit. Emotion-laden instinct overrules that for costly solidarity and benevolence that rational self-interest would refuse. However, it can overshoot in fanaticism, fundamentalism, exclusion, as in white thymos, or religious or ethnic zeal.

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 Cairns, D. (2019), ‘Thymos’, The Oxford Classical Dictionary, Oxford: Oxford University Press, https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199381135.013.6180.

Tomasello, Michael (2016), A natural history of human morality, Cambride MA: Harvard University Press. 

Campbell, D. T. (1974), ‘Evolutionary epistemology’, in P. A. Schilpp (ed.), The philosophy of Karl R. Popper, Lasalle, IL: Open Court, 412– 63.

Geranesh, B.(2020), ‘Weaponising white thymos: Flows of rage in online audiences of the alt-right’, Cultural Studies, 892-924.