Thumos

Description

Matthew Crawford:

(Thumos in the context of the thinking of Thomas Hobbes)

"Platonic psychology offers a useful point of reference for grasping the transformation Hobbes aimed at. Thumos, often translated as spiritedness, is the part of the soul prone to taking offence, and to making claims for one’s own dignity. That is because, more broadly, thumos asserts the value of things, creating the field for moral choice. If all goes well, it does this in dialectic with logos, the reasoning part of the soul. Working together in a well-ordered soul, they don’t merely assert, they are alert to the value of things.

The idea that emotion should have any positive epistemic role to play in grasping reality is foreign to modern thought. Pride can only be a source of partiality; to be “judgmental” is to be prejudicial. The ancient perspective offers a critical challenge, answering that reason without spirited evaluation fails to apprehend things in their true colours, because the lifeworld of human beings is shot through with value and cannot be adequately described in “neutral” terms that are value-free.

If it is not to be mere wilful assertion, thumos must be trained into a schedule of the noble and base, the praiseworthy and shameful. The content of this will always be inflected by the character of the regime. It surely tilted differently in Spain under Ferdinand and Isabella from in the camp of Genghis Khan, yet both provided moral ecologies that were recognisably human, and mutually intelligible.

What happens when the regime is one in which this spirited, evaluative activity is short-circuited altogether, subordinating the (various) distinctions that make for (competing visions of) the good life to mere biological life, bare existence? That is, “health” as conceived by “public health”? This is aggression against our nature as evaluative beings. It would seem to be the consummation of a project that puts the flight from death, rather than attraction to the good, at the center of our political metaphysics.

Bereft of the possibility of a discoverable ethical reality to provide a transcendent anchor for its intuitions, thumos becomes frustrated and disordered. Indeed, it may manifest as political rage and interpersonal brittleness — the very tendencies that Hobbes meant to suppress, and seem to be once again prominent.

Or thumos simply dies. This would be one way to understand the explosion in clinical depression, especially impressive over the course of the pandemic. An older term used for melancholy in psychiatry is athumia – a failure of thumos. To be athumos is to be disheartened; lose heart; suffer a want of heart.

That seems to be where we are, collectively: rage and depression.

In his essay Men without Chests, CS Lewis found spiritlessness to be the consequence of an education that insists that all perception of moral worth is merely subjective. The philosopher Talbot Brewer says we all have an “evaluative outlook” on the world. If there is nothing real out there to look upon, our evaluative capacity makes no reference to anything located beyond the self. In that case, it is hard to see how one can make a distinction between evaluation and self-assertion: imposing one’s “values” on the world. As liberals, we are not supposed to do that. Hobbes’s metaphysics and his psychology are internally consistent, then. Within the horizon he constructed for us, the only possibilities are to be an asshole or be depressed.

The million-dollar question is this: would it be possible to reclaim the blessings of Lockean, political liberalism and back off from the aggressive metaphysical debunking of Hobbesian, anthropological liberalism? Or is it a package deal?"

(https://unherd.com/2022/05/covid-was-liberalisms-endgame/?)