Thumos

Les émotions constituent un défi dans l’éducation platonicienne. Elles sont des réactions aux valeurs du bien, du beau, du juste, et elles les véhiculent dans l’action. Que les affects et les émotions n’entravent pas la moralité de l’agent est une première étape dans l’éducation; mais qu’ils la soutiennent en est une seconde, et telle est la tâche du philosophe, du législateur et du pédagogue. La présente étude répond à la question de savoir ce qui dans l’âme individuelle et collective doit être éduqué et par quels moyens. Platon établit une psychologie morale et politique en prenant soin de cerner un intermédiaire, le thymos, entre les différents pôles de la vie psychique que sont la raison et le désir. Dans les dialogues, Platon fait du thymos et de ses équivalents fonctionnels autant de médiations où le moi se construit et se définit dans ses rapports avec sa raison et ses désirs, avec son corps, avec les autres citoyens.

My MA Thesis charts Homer’s Iliad as a song of thumoresistance. I mean the very intersection of thumos and stasis. Thumos means heart, spirit, rage, bravery and is understood to be the courageous part of the Ancient Greek psyche. Stasis implies civil strife—a radical rupture with the organization of political power—an event which needs to occur for structural changes to manifest. Stasis, as contestation and conflict is politics as such. I have deeper interests in producing a strong, albeit polemic, argument that affirms and extenuates Ancient forms of rage, dissent and courageous action.
It is in the points of resonance between Menis, Thumos and Stasis, that I locate brave, courageous and enraged modes that engage and produce political crises. I am examining liberatory, revolutionary acts of thumotic resistance/stasis (individual/heroic and collective rage), as essential parts of Ancient Greek life. Affirming menis, thumos and stasis, as I feel the need to do, will strengthen critique Plato for being anti-democratic, anti-collective decision-making, against the capacity for courageous and spited action, and against political rage and politics as such. The object of my analysis is Homer’s Iliad, the tradition of militant rage that persists in the Bronze Age that was carried though in song well throughout 4th Century Democratic Athens. Over the course of this paper I will come to see Achilles not only as a flat warrior-model, but as a thumo-resisting hero who creates a legitimate and ethical stasis against the rule of the tyrant Agamemnon, and also a parrhesiastes. In addressing the dense network of themes I just described, I will be making close readings of the Ancient Greeks, including Homer, Solon, Plato, Aristotle and their interpreters: Peter Sloterdijk, Kostas Kalimtzis, Gregory Nagy, Michel Foucault, Leonard Muellner, DL Cairns and Glen Most.

This study of Greek time before Aristotle’s philosophy starts with a commentary on his first text, the Protrepticus. We shall see two distinct forms of time emerge: one initiatory, circular and Platonic in inspiration, the other its diametrical opposite, advanced by Aristotle. We shall explore this dichotomy through a return to poetic conceptions. The Tragedians will give us an initial outline of the notion of time in the Greek world (Fate); we shall then turn to Homer in order to better grasp the complex relations between time and the religious sphere (the Hero); the work of the great theologian Hesiod will confirm this initiatory vision, later set out in remarkable fashion by Nietzsche (Myths); we shall then dive deep into Pythagoreanism to complete our account (Mysteries). Having understood this current of thought, powerfully influenced by the Iranian theogony, we shall be able to discern its clear differences from the so-called “Ionian” current, and thus to move away from Plato (Ideology). Lastly, we shall return to the early Ionian thinkers Thales and Anaximander to analyse whether this really was the vision of the world that Aristotle adopted in developing the first model of time (Science). In the second volume we shall see the return of the thought of the theologoi within the Aristotelian corpus itself, and will question our distinction between the being and existence of time.

Régis Laurent is a philosopher and member of the association Kairos Kai logos (Centre for the study of ancient philosophy). This book is the first part of his doctoral thesis in philosophy, undertaken under the aegis of three French universities (Grenoble, Clermont-Ferrand and Rennes). In addition to his philosophical training, the author is also qualified to Masters level in linguistics and in general psychology, and studied theology at the Thomist University in Paris (ULSH) and at the CEJ of the EHESS.
Trad Trista SELOUS of the book of Régis LAURENT : METAPHYSIQUE DU TEMPS CHEZ ARISTOTE - I - Recherches historiques sur les conceptions mythologiques
et astronomiques précédant la philosophie aristotélicienne, villegagnons-plaisance, 2009/04/16, Paris, www.editions-villegagnons.com

In Greek literature tyrants were often characterized by their attachment to power, anger, and excessive violence. 1 Stories of murders, collective punishments and outbursts against enemies, friends and relatives alike were often littered with comparisons between tyrants and savage beasts. This trope signaled the tyrant's distinctive tendency-owing to the fragility of his power-to trap himself in an endless spiral of violence and, moreover, morbidly to enjoy this bloodshed. However, in his diagnosis of the tyrannical man and re-elaboration of previous sources on the topic, Plato privileges another traditional trope-that of the tyrant's licentiousness and unlimited desires-by including the tyrannical soul among those ruled by the appetitive part. Hitherto, analyses of Plato's depiction of the tyrannical man's psyche have tended to focus on the role played by eros and its relation both to the tyrant's appetitive soul and to madness. While noting his violent and bloodthirsty aspect and its possible connection to spirit, they have not offered a detailed discussion of the condition of the tyrant's thumoeidic part in light of Plato's theory of the soul's tripartition. 2 My aim is to provide such an analysis, both for the sake of better understanding the tyrannical man's psychology and to throw some light on the nature of the soul's spirited part as presented in the Republic. 3

A great gap in Tolkien scholarship has been to miss how deeply Saruman answers the age-old antagonism between rhetoric and philosophy. Like John Milton, Tolkien cannot bring himself to trust rhetoric. It threatens the unitary truth of a divinely-revealed moral order and, ironically, Tolkien applies great rhetorical skill to convince his reader of rhetoric’s illusionary nature. In this matter Tolkien has been largely successful, since few readers (if any) question the de-privileging of Saruman’s perspective. In the process, though, I suggest that Tolkien has developed in his master rhetorician a new relationship between rhetoric (eloquence) and rage (thymos). The “wild beast” (LOTR III.10 563) in Saruman’s nature eventually overwhelms the Art of his Voice. Yet by examining Saruman in light of another “wild beast,” Plato’s Thrasymachus (Republic 336b), we begin to see how Tolkien has subverted the hierarchy first established by Plato between art and anger. Thrasymachus subordinates his rage to his rhetorical skills, but Saruman allows his skills to wane as his anger waxes. The example of Sauron, who needs no rhetoric, drives home to Saruman the (mistaken) lesson that rhetoric is superfluous. It belongs to the weak. Saruman thereby allows his anger freer rein. Following his defeat at the Battle of Isengard, Saruman’s rage overwhelms him completely, and that rage quickly turns to resentment (ressentiment). After Saruman escapes Treebeard’s watchful eye, a “new” Saruman emerges. Following Peter Sloterdijk’s Rage and Time, I then expand my argument to suggest that Sharkey’s Shire exemplifies the forces of rage and resentment in modern politics. Defeating Sharkey, though, comes at a high price for the hobbits of the Shire. Since the meek do not inherit the earth, rage and eloquence must be marshalled together to defeat their oppressor—a situation tragic to Tolkien because it finds no easy reconciliation with his Christian beliefs.

What is Aristotle’s conception of thumos? This question can be broken down into two separate but related questions: (a) what is the object of desire for thumos, and (b) in which faculty of the soul is thumos grounded? The latter question is the focus of this paper. In this paper, “grounded in” is to be taken physiologically; the second question can be rephrased as “Which faculty of the soul is thumos a function of?” As a general rule Aristotle employs both a colloquial and a technical sense of thumos throughout the corpus. When I ask “What is thumos?,” I am interested in the technical sense that appears primarily in On the Soul and in the Nicomachean Ethics, where thumos is defined as a category of desire (a subset of orexis). The main argument of this paper is that Aristotle’s thumos is grounded in the faculty of phantasia – specifically, a sub-faculty called definite phantasia.

In the Phaedrus, Plato describes the control of the epithumia by the reason as being extremely violent. The epithumia-black horse is brutalized and it becomes obedient by this brutality. The aim of this paper is to prove that this violence is not an image, but a psychological reality. Plato defends this point of view in the Timaeus, where he describes the psychophysiological process which occurs when the logos attacks the epithumia. But the Timaeus also shows that the thumos plays an important role in the realization of the rational violence.

This paper challenges Jacques Rancière's characterization of Plato's Republic as being hostile to democratic politics, mimetic activities, and sensory experiences.  Instead, through a complex analysis of the importance of thumos in the Republic, it shows precisely why Plato was the first theorist to conceive of a democratic politics that involved distributing and disrupting sense, both in Rancière's terms of what makes sense and what can be sensed.

This article examines Plato’s critique of, and revisions to, Socratic rationality via a close examination of Socrates’ teaching about the early education of the guardians in the Republic. I argue that Plato’s move to a new more Platonic Socrates in Books 2 through 10 of the Republic reflects his revisions to the particular style of rationality exhibited in the arguments of his teacher, Socrates, in Book 1. Plato’s discussion of thumos, the middle part of the soul, shows that he moves to an imagistic and aesthetic notion of rationality to correct the problems with the combative and analytical style practiced by Socrates. At the same time, Plato retains the key elements of his teacher’s philosophy, and this includes their shared notion that any outlook on life that orients itself away from the fact of human mortality is irrational on a foundational level.

Human action recognition is still a challenging problem and researchers are focusing to investigate this problem using different techniques. We propose a robust approach for human action recognition. This is achieved by extracting stable spatio-temporal features in terms of pairwise local binary pattern (P-LBP) and scale invariant feature transform (SIFT). These features are used to train an MLP neural network during the training stage, and the action classes are inferred from the test videos during the testing stage. The proposed features well match the motion of individuals and their consistency, and accuracy is higher using a challenging dataset. The experimental evaluation is conducted on a benchmark dataset commonly used for human action recognition. In addition, we show that our approach outperforms individual features i.e. considering only spatial and only temporal feature.

The end of the Cold War is conventionally understood to have inaugurated a new era in international relations. The most well-known such attempt to provide a new grand theory is Francis Fukuyama's adaptation of the end of history thesis. More recently, Richard Ned Lebow has provided his own attempt at a new grand theory of IR by attempting to bridge theoretical understandings of the individual and the international. In both cases, the theoretical touchstone is a renewed understanding of the ancient Greek concept of thumos. Thumos, understood as political spirit, honour, or esteem, becomes for Fukuyama the source of the human desire to seek recognition in political life, while it becomes for Lebow the source of one's desire to seek political progress and change for the better. In both cases, individual psychology and international order are used to shed light on the other, while maintaining that this connection is fundamentally important for a full understanding of political life, and therefore to necessitate new theoretical interventions for this new political reality. This paper will draw out the shared themes in Lebow and Fukuyama's theories, in the hopes of making clear the enduring problem that "thumos" poses to international theory and politics.

Research has shown that the knowledge worker, the decisive driver of the knowledge economy, works increasingly longer hours. In fact, it would appear that instead of working to live, they live to work. There appears to be three reasons for this living-to-work development. First, the knowledge worker ‘has to’ on account of the pressure to become ever more efficient. Such pressure translates into internalized coercion in the case of the self-responsible knowledge worker. Secondly, working is constant, because the Internet and smart technologies and mobile devices have made it ‘possible’. It gives the worker the capacity and management omnipotent control. In the final instance, the neoliberal knowledge worker works all the time because s/he paradoxically ‘wants to’. It is a curious phenomenon, because this compulsive working is concomitant with a rise of a host of physical, emotional, and psychological disorders as well as the erosion of social bonds. The paradox is exacerbated by the fact that the knowledge worker does not derive any of the usual utilities or satisfactions associated with hard work. Elsewhere I have ascribed this apparent contradiction at the heart of the living-to-work phenomenon to the invisible thumotic satisfaction generated by knowledge work. In the present article, I argue that neoliberal governmentality has found a way to tether thumos directly to the profit incentive. I draw on Foucault’s 1978-1979 Collége de France lecture course in which he analysed neoliberal governmentality with specific emphasis on the work of the neoliberal theorist of human capital, Gary Becker.

In this paper I attempt to come to a critical understanding of an intriguing phe nomenon at the heart of a broader question, i.e. what are we today-as knowledge workers-in relation to our present understood as the globalising neoliberal govern mentality in which life is reduced to constant work under conditions of comprehensive control? Previous attempts to interrogate the nature of knowledge work and the knowl edge worker have led me to conclude that these workers do not work to live, but live to work. An important reason seems to be that the neoliberal knowledge worker works all the times because s/he paradoxically wants to. This presents a paradox since the over investment in knowledge work does not appear to generate proportionate gains for the working subject. In my attempt to arrive at some kind of explication for this phe nomenon of compulsive work, I critically interrogate Fukuyama's contention that work has a thumotic origin. To this end I briefly discuss Plato's conceptualisation of thumos and Hegel's understanding of the significance of labour.

In Plato, the Internet Journal of the International Plato Society, International Plato Society, 2006, 6, 〈https://digitalis.uc.pt/en/artigo/le_role_de_la_partie_intermediaire_thumos_dans_la_tripartition_de_lame〉. 〈dx.doi.org/10.14195/2183-4105_6_1〉

Dans la République, Socrate décrit une âme en proie à une « dissension » (stasis) qui révèle sa structure tripartite. Plusieurs commentateurs ont examiné la consistance psychologique de ce qui pourrait apparaître comme une doctrine platonicienne. Cependant, parce que la tripartition de l’âme est corrélative de la partition sociale en vertu de l’analogie entre l’âme et la cité, on ne peut isoler une analyse psychologique des actions et des affections de l’âme de sa fonction éthique et politique ; la tripartition de l’âme aurait pour vocation d’offrir un modèle structurel permettant de forger les caractères des citoyens, voire de les faire parvenir à la vertu. La solidarité des dimensions psychologique d’une part et politique et éthique d’autre part est clairement affirmée selon nous à travers la découverte de la partie intermédiaire de l’âme, la partie « ardente » (thumós).