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Thumos and rationality in Plato’ s

Republic
a
Christ ina Tarnopolsky
a
Social Science Division, Yale-NUS College, Singapore, Singapore
Published online: 26 Jan 2015.

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To cite this article: Christ ina Tarnopolsky (2015): Thumos and rat ionalit y in Plat o’ s Republic, Global
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 Global Discourse, 2015
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23269995.2014.980048

Thumos and rationality in Plato’s Republic

Christina Tarnopolsky*

Social Science Division, Yale-NUS College, Singapore, Singapore

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
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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.
Keywords: Plato; thumos; rationality; aesthetics; courage; war; mortality

Plato’s Republic famously opens with a tour de force of rational argumentation as

Socrates refutes the definitions of justice and then injustice of his various interlocutors:
the metic, Cephalus, his son, Polemarchus, and the foreign sophist, Thrasymachus.1 The
first book of the dialogue ends with Socrates refuting Thrasymachus’ defense of injustice
as the best way of life, and offering instead a defense of the just life. What is less often
noticed is that this first book of the Republic ends with a profession of dissatisfaction with
these rational arguments, put into the mouth of Socrates himself: ‘However, I have not had
a fine banquet, but it’s my own fault, not yours. For in my opinion, I am just like the
gluttons who grab at whatever is set before them to get a taste of it, before they have in
proper measure enjoyed what went before’ (Rep. 1.354b).2
This profession of dissatisfaction is then picked up by Glaucon and Adeimantus
(Plato’s brothers) at the beginning of Book 2, who become Socrates’ chief interlocutors
for the remaining nine books of the dialogue. They enter the dialogue complaining of
being perplexed and dissatisfied by the arguments for and against justice they have just
heard from Socrates and Thrasymachus, and also by the stories about justice and injustice
that have been recited to and memorized by them since they were young children. These
include all of the stories told by the authoritative poets and historians of ancient Athens:
Herodotus, Thucydides, Aeschylus, Simonides, Pindar, Homer, and Hesiod. Unaffected
by the successful but swift defense of justice that they have witnessed in Socrates’ rational
refutation of Thrasymachus, they revert to the stories that have swirled around them since
they were young children.
Their predicament is presaged by the exchange between Socrates and Cephalus that
opens the dialogue. Although Cephalus claims that his pleasures and desires for logoi
(arguments/speeches/accounts) have grown, now that old age has made the pleasures of

*Email: christina.tarnopolsky@yale-nus.edu.sg

© 2015 Taylor & Francis

 2 C. Tarnopolsky

his body wither away (Rep. 1.328d), he does not stay to hear Socrates’ all-night con-
versation but dashes off to make sacrifices to the gods. He does this right after he admits
that the tales of Hades and the afterlife, and especially the penalties for injustice, haunt
him now that he is on the threshold of death (Rep. 1.330d–e). As Allen (2013, 34) puts it,

When human beings begin to wonder whether stories about what happens at or after death are
true, their minds also turn to questions of justice and injustice. The question of life after death
raises the prospect of punishment after death … Cephalus clearly has only one resource to
help him contemplate what happens at death: poetry.

What these opening scenes dramatically illustrate is that the muthoi (stories/tales/myths)
told by the authoritative poets of Athens have had lasting effects on the psyche of
Socrates’ interlocutors, and they are not erased by his hasty rational refutations of their
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views of justice and injustice that occur in Book 1 (Lear 2006, 29). Also, part of the allure
of poetry is its ability to give people vivid pictures of that which cannot be seen, and this
includes not only what happens after death, but also invisible soul qualities like justice
and injustice (Allen 2013, 34–35).
If one also takes into account the dramatic setting and not just the opening drama of
the dialogue, then the theme of death comes up in a slightly different way. The Republic is
not set on a specific date, but references throughout the work suggest dates between
431and 404 BC, which is the duration of the Peloponnesian War (Nails 1998). In other
words, it is set when imperialistic Athens is on the threshold of its own death, brought
about by the pleonexia (greed/overreaching) and immoderation of the Athenians before
and during the Peloponnesian War. The significance of this war, and the issue of war more
generally, is emphasized by the fact that most of the characters in the dialogue have names
that connote war in some sense: Socrates = Sure Strength, Polemarchus = War Ruler,
Thrasymachus = Bold Fighter, Glaucon = Gleaming, and Adeimantus = Dauntless (Craig
2003, 4–5).
What is more, Socrates and the only other character of the dialogue who is said to
have turned to philosophy, Polemarchus, are on the threshold of their own deaths.
Socrates is put to death by the restored democracy in 399 BC and Polemarchus is put
to death by the pro-Spartan Thirty tyrants, who briefly ruled Athens in 404 BC (Nails
2002, 251). The fact that the dialogue opens with Socrates’ visit to the Piraeus to witness
the inaugural festival of Bendis is also significant because the festival is believed to have
been inaugurated in 429 BC, exactly during the time of the great plague of Athens, which
decimated a third of the Athenian population (Planeaux 2000–2001). In other words,
death and war and their long shadows over life permeate the drama and setting of the
Republic. Moreover, both themes are central to Homer’s depiction of the great warrior
hero of ancient and classical Athens, Achilles. His noble acceptance of his own death, his
desire for honor and fame, and his courageous and warlike valor in the face of death on
the battlefield made him the role model for Athenian youth, before, during, and long after
the Peloponnesian War. Thus, it is Achilles, more than any other poetic hero, whose
characteristics are debated and whose depictions are discussed and censored in Book 3 of
the Republic.
In this article, I want to explore the connections between these themes and Plato’s
discussion of the cultivation and education of thumos3 that happens in Books 2 through 4
of the Republic. I will argue that by exploring these connections, it is possible to under-
stand Plato’s ideas about the potentials and limits of Socratic rationality that worked
primarily by exposing the contradictions within a person’s deeply held beliefs. The fact
 Global Discourse 3

that the first two books of the Republic dramatically illustrate an unsuccessful discussion
between characters affected by the various authoritative muthoi (myths/tales/stories) of
democratic Athens and Socrates’ own brand of logoi (reasons/speeches/accounts/argu-
ments) is a dramatic nod to what I take to be one of the central themes of the Republic.
This is Plato’s belief that the analytic and combative rationality of Socrates needs to be
supplemented with a more aesthetic view of rationality that can account for the paradigms,
outlooks, or worldviews that ground human beings’ political judgments and ways of
being in the world, and that operate according to a more imagistic logic.
While Ronald de Sousa (2001) has argued that Plato’s treatment of thumos in the
Republic is his attempt to understand the rationality of all emotions, I agree with Koziak
(2000) that Plato’s treatment of thumos is focused more specifically on the political
emotions (honor, anger, moral indignation, shame, guilt, and disgust) that are especially
heightened during times of war when individuals, and sometimes polities themselves,
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come face to face with their own demise. The interesting thing about these emotions is
that their intentional objects point simultaneously back to the self (individual or collective)
and what people are or want to be, as well as out to the world that affects or is affected by
the actions of this self. Plato reflects this bidirectionality of thumotic emotions when he
says, in Book 8 of the Republic, that thumos is characterized by its desire for victories and
honors (Rep. 8.548c), that is, by the desire to exert one’s self over others, and to have
one’s self-reflected back to and honored by these others. For Plato, this bidirectional logic
is vividly captured by those worldviews that simultaneously give us a picture of who we
are and of how who we are is embodied in various actions and ways of being in the world.
Part of the limitation of Socratic rationality, as it is illustrated in Book 1 of the Republic, is
that it punctures the propositions about justice and injustice of Socrates’ interlocutors,
without touching their more imagistic outlooks on the world, which also motivate their
actions.
Plato’s treatment of thumos is notoriously elusive and tricky, and scholars have long
disputed various parts of this teaching. What is the relationship between the most
prevalent characteristics of thumos: (1) its spiritedness or aggressiveness; (2) its ability
to respond to role models, and especially the models and images of noble heroes; (3) its
role as an ally of reason in suppressing the base appetites for money, sex, food, and drink;
(4) its responsiveness to rhythm, harmony, and beauty; and (5) its attachment to victory
and honor?4 To get an initial sense of what Plato is talking about with his notion of
thumos and how these diverse characteristics go together, think of those patriotic feelings
one gets as one puts down one’s pretzel and beer at a baseball game and stands to listen to
the national anthem, especially when this occurs right after a national tragedy or the
initiation of a war. That welling in the heart, aroused by the rhythms and harmonies of the
music, and its depictions of courage and valor, of victories and honors, is something that
can be experienced even by those who think that patriotism is the worst plague of the
nation-state. In the Republic, Plato is interested in interrogating and retraining the
affective and dispositional responses involved in being a patriotic citizen of a polity in
order to avoid their more problematic manifestations, both as they were exhibited by
Athens toward her external Spartan enemies during the Peloponnesian War and as they
were then redirected against internal ‘enemies’ like Socrates, who was put to death by the
restored democracy shortly after the end of the war in 399 BC.
One of the reasons Plato is so interesting for thinking about the rationality of the
emotions is precisely because his theory of the emotions is quite different from the one
that was inaugurated in early modernity by thinkers like David Hume and Adam Smith.
As Hall (2005) and Hirschman (1977) have argued, the doux commerce thesis of the
 4 C. Tarnopolsky

sentimentalist theorists involved a deliberate strategy of separating the warlike passions of

honor, shame, anger, and indignation (the thumotic emotions) from the more gentle and
rational sentiments involved in the love of money and commerce. They felt that polities
could be made more peaceful and that politics could be made more rational by keeping the
passions out of politics, and by allowing what they now called the sentiments or ‘interests’
for gain and well-being into political deliberations. However, if one thinks about the most
pressing problems now facing all polities in the world – growing material inequality and
the destruction of the environment brought about by capitalism and neo-liberalism – then
it might be high time to rethink this strategy. Both Plato and Aristotle thought that the
epithumetic (appetitive) desires for money were the most dangerous foundations upon
which to build more rational and peaceful polities, precisely because unlike thumos,
epithumia (appetite) was not open to reason at all and could only be forcefully held
down by an alliance between reason and thumos, or to be more exact a careful harmoniz-
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ing of these dual capacities of the human soul.

This harmonizing of reason and thumos is, however, not guaranteed by human nature,
as both Plato and Aristotle note (Rep. 4.440d, EN. 1149a25), and as the course of the
Peloponnesian War dramatically illustrated. Thucydides, Plato, and Aristotle all thought
that a debased thumos and its desires for honor and victory could come to work not as the
ally of wisdom, philosophy, or reason, but as the ally of the epithumetic (appetitive)
desires for riches. At the end of the Peloponnesian War, the honor-loving Alcibiades
persuaded the Athenians to undertake the Sicilian expedition in order to fill their store-
houses with more treasures, even though they were still in the midst of the war with
Sparta (Th. 6.15–18). As Thucydides himself puts it, Alcibiades ‘was held in such esteem
among the citizens that he indulged himself in expenditures beyond his actual resources,
both for horse-breeding and for other luxuries; and to a great extent it was this which
destroyed the Athenian city’ (Th. 6.15). Books 2–4 of the Republic contain Plato’s own
notions of how a very different way of (re)educating thumos might bring it into alignment
with logos (reason/rationality), philosophy and wisdom in order to avoid the dangerous
pleonexia (greed/overreaching) of Athens, which first prompted the Spartans to go to war
with her in 431 BC, and which, in great part, ensured that the Athenians brought about
their own defeat in this war by initiating the disastrous Sicilian expedition in 415 BC.
This last point leads me to the second argument that I will make in this article. While
Plato challenges and moves beyond what he sees as certain limitations of Socratic
rationality, he still accepts other elements of Socrates’ unique form of philosophy and
his rational comportment toward the world. For Plato, any motivating outlook or para-
digm must be founded upon a view of the world that does not orient itself away from
human mortality and vulnerability. Those that do are irrational on a foundational level.
While Nicias warned the Athenians that their desire for far-off adventures, honors, and
riches in Sicily were actually suicidal for their regime (Th. 6.12), the Athenians them-
selves, drunk on Alcibiades own infectious longings for the sights, experiences, and
luxuries of Sicily, embarked on the very adventure that would bring about their demise.
Once again, the dramatic setting of the Republic is important here. What Plato wants to
show in the Republic are the dangers of a patriotic comportment to the world that orients
itself around a fantastical desire for omnipotence and riches. Contra Strauss (1964),
Bloom (1968), and Hobbs (2000), the goal of the Republic is not to show that philosophy
and thumos, or reason’s love of the eternal forms and thumos’ patriotic love of one’s own,
are in ineradicable tension or conflict. Rather, its goal is to show that a particular patriotic
worldview is problematic precisely because it depends on a view of human beings or
polities as omnipotent entities motivated only by an insatiable desire to fill up and
 Global Discourse 5

aggrandize this ‘self’, and is thus oriented around a fundamentally irrational way of being
in the world.

Outlooks, role models, and the problem of omnipotence

This problematic worldview is made clear in the opening exchange between Socrates,
Glaucon, and Adeimantus. When Glaucon enters the discussion at the beginning of Book
2, he proceeds to give a vivid description of the life led by the just and unjust man and
asks Socrates to defend justice within these parameters. He uses the story of the ring of
Gyges, borrowed (and altered) from Herodotus’ History, to describe the life of injustice as
involving the activities of regicide, adultery, and theft (Rep. 2.360a–c). His next story
about the just man similarly reveals a desire for a certain godlike existence amongst
humans. Glaucon asks Socrates to defend the life of justice even when the just man is
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mistaken for an unjust man and then whipped, racked, bound, has his eyes burned out, is
made to suffer every kind of evil, and is finally crucified (Rep. 2.361e–362a). It is
Socrates and not Glaucon who realizes that such an example makes it impossible to
defend justice (Rep. 2.362d8). Torture and crucifixion impede achieving any kind of
human happiness. Glaucon thus desires a type of justice that will make its possessor
completely invulnerable to the evils of the body and to others around him so that he can
live like a ‘god among humans’. Glaucon’s desire for this kind of god-like omnipotence
makes his worldview irrational on a foundational level as it exceeds the parameters for
living a strictly human life.
When Glaucon’s brother, Adeimantus, enters the discussion, he worries that the stories
poets tell about justice and injustice actually teach people that they should spend their
lives committing acts of injustice and then use their ‘unjust acquisitions’ to make
sacrifices to the gods so that they can escape punishment in the afterlife (Rep. 2.366a).
Although Adeimantus claims he does not want to follow this way of life, he is the
interlocutor who later accuses Socrates of not making the guardians happy because he
deprives them of gold, silver, and wages (Rep. 4.419a–b). Adeimantus then is still
attracted to the very things that Alcibiades so coveted. What is more, his worries about
using one’s unjust acquisitions to bribe the gods are no doubt warranted, given that
Cephalus’ vast wealth and ability to make lavish sacrifices (Rep. 1.331b) were made
possible by his ownership of a successful shield factory during the Peloponnesian War. In
contrast to such stories, Adeimantus renews Glaucon’s desire to hear justice praised by
itself, that is, when it is not noticed by gods or men (Rep. 2.366e). Both ask Socrates to
defend the life of justice without its wages, consequences, or reputation (Rep 2.358b,
2.367d).
It is important to notice that although Glaucon and Adeimantus claim to be unable to
fully believe and thus act upon the views of justice and injustice presented by the poets,
they do believe that these are the only possibilities for how to live the good life. Unlike
Cephalus, they do not blindly act out the stories told by the poets about bribing the gods
with sacrifices. However, the pictures of justice and injustice they paint for Socrates
depend on an already existing background that configures human existence in terms of
these sorts of possibilities. They do not want to give up their desire for omnipotence and
self-sufficiency; they just want Socrates to show them how they can have these things
while leading the completely just life. Simply arguing with them, as Socrates did with his
interlocutors in Book 1, would come too late because the outlook that orients their lives
already ‘predisposes them to recognize good and bad arguments in terms of that outlook’
(Lear 2006, 25).
 6 C. Tarnopolsky

The Republic, then, is a dialogue about how outlooks are formed and changed and
what constitutes a good outlook, which itself simultaneously illustrates the very activity of
changing outlooks (Lear 2006, 25). The way that Plato thinks one does this is not, as it
was for Socrates in Book 1, to refute a person’s views using logical arguments and the
principle of non-contradiction. While the talk therapy of Socrates in Book 1 involved
countering muthoi with logoi, the new Platonic Socrates of Books 2 through 10 claims to
be a Socrates who is greedy for images (Rep. 6.488a) and who offers some of the most
famous myths, stories, and images ‘of our entire philosophical tradition’ (Craig
2003, 270).
The connection between this imaginative new education in muthoi and Plato’s under-
standing of thumos is easier to see in the Greek language: the word enthumeomai literally
means ‘to have in one’s thumos’, but it also means ‘to ponder’ or ‘lay to heart’ and the
word enthumema can mean thought, reasoning, device, or invention (Liddell and Scott
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1996, 567). For Plato, thumos is that part of the soul by which human beings take to heart
those vivid stories, inventions, and worldviews that then ground and limit their possibi-
lities for rationally strategic action.
It is also important to note that the dialogue is about what constitutes a good outlook.
Although the Republic is a dialogue about outlook formation and re-formation, it does not
contain the anti-foundational message that all outlooks are equally good because ration-
ality itself arises always from within an orienting paradigm; or that human life amounts to
a tragic choice between the life of the warrior citizen and the life of the philosopher. For
Plato, some foundations are better than others, and the robustly rational as opposed to the
minimally rational life is the life of philosophy because it does not orient itself away from
human mortality and vulnerability. Glaucon and Adeimantus have absorbed a general
outlook on life, inherited from the authoritative poets, and then revivified by the actions
and outlook of their own imperialistic Athenian polity and its Achilles-loving general,
Alcibiades, during the Peloponnesian War. It is this outlook that prompts them to respond
to human finitude by trying to unilaterally assert omnipotence and self-sufficiency in their
fantasy images of justice and injustice. These choices are minimally rational in the sense
that they are the only ‘logical’ possibilities offered by their entire education. But, they are
irrational on the foundational level because of their denial of the very conditions of human
existence.

The imaginative construction of the city in speech

Why Socrates constructs an image of the just and unjust city before constructing an image
of the just and unjust man (as Glaucon and Adeimantus had requested) is, of course, one
of the central puzzles of the Republic. But one reason why Socrates discusses the city first
must be seen in connection with Glaucon and Adeimantus’ problematic desire for
omnipotence. Just after constructing their model of the city of necessity, one of the first
things that Socrates asks Adeimantus is where he thinks justice and injustice will be found
in this city, and Adeimantus replies: ‘I can’t think, Socrates, unless it’s somewhere in
some need these men have of one another’ (Rep. 2.372a1–2). Now Adeimantus does not
come to this realization on his own, but instead his answer recalls something that Socrates
himself had asserted earlier in the discussion. As Socrates suggests to Adeimantus, ‘each
of us isn’t self-sufficient but is in need of much … this is the beginning to the founding of
a city’ (Rep. 2.369b–c). Ironically, the founding or ruling principle of the Platonic city in
speech is that no human being is self-founding or self-ruling. Exploring the genesis of the
city underscores the needy and vulnerable character of human beings in a way in which
 Global Discourse 7

exploring them individually does not. And Adeimantus’ utterance that perhaps justice and
injustice are to be found in some need that men have for one another illustrates that he is
coming to an awareness of this fact.
Here it is also important to note that immediately after Glaucon interrupts their
exposition to demand that the members of their city be feasted on relishes and other
luxurious items, Socrates describes this original city of necessity as the true or healthy
city, and he describes the one they are about to construct in accordance with Glaucon’s
wishes as the luxurious city or feverish city (Rep. 2.372e). It is only with the luxurious
city that poets and imitators, warriors and guardians become necessary (Rep. 2.373b2–
374c8). But if the city of necessity is, according to Socrates, the truthful and healthy city,
then why does he agree to go on to consider the luxurious or feverish city and its war-like
desires? As Allan Bloom puts it, ‘One would think that they would do this only as a study
in pathology, keeping the healthy model constantly before their eyes. Actually, the healthy
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city is forgotten and the good city is constituted by a reform of the feverish city rather than
a return to the healthy one’ (Bloom 1968, 348). The more Platonic Socrates agrees to
consider this luxurious or feverish city precisely because it corresponds to the democratic
and imperialistic Athenian worldview that grounds Glaucon’s conception of what a city is
or ought to be like. From within Glaucon’s current paradigm, Socrates’ ‘true city’ looks
like a ‘city of sows’ (Rep. 2.372d) because it lacks the luxuries of imperial Athens.
Socrates’ own philosophic worldview is in some sense so foreign or alien to Glaucon that
he cannot place it within his conception of what a human city is at this point in the
discussion.
As Blondell (2002, 106) has argued, the move from the more agonistic or combative
Socrates, dramatized in Book 1 of the Republic, to the more cooperative Socrates,
dramatized in Books 2 through 10, shows that Plato himself is responding to some of
the dissatisfactions that Socrates and his interlocutors had voiced about this overly
combative and analytical style. That Socrates agrees to begin with Glaucon’s city and
not his own ‘true city’ is evidence of the fact that he is now engaging in a more
cooperative kind of pedagogy. To use the famous image of the Theaetetus, this Socrates
is acting more like a midwife than an adversary to his interlocutors. According to Blondell
(2002, 102) instead of coming across as an atopic (strange) person who stands completely
outside of his interlocutors’ worldviews, this new Socrates engages in a form of mimetic
pedagogy that ‘implies an awareness of the salient differences, as well as the similarities
between original and copy’. Many commentators have seen the less argumentative
character of Glaucon and Adeimantus in Books 2 through 10 of the Republic as either a
sign of a defect in their characters, or a sign that Plato himself is moving away from
depicting a historically accurate and democratic Socrates in Book 1 (and in his early
Socratic dialogues) to a more Platonic and authoritarian Socrates in the later books of the
dialogue (and in all of the dialogues of Plato’s middle and late period). However, this
interpretation overlooks the fact that the new, more Platonic Socrates of Books 2 through
10 of the Republic engages in a new type of pedagogy with Glaucon and Adeimantus.
Instead of simply pointing out the contradictions in their worldviews or diagnosing their
errors, Socrates enters into their worldviews and helps them develop the full implications
of these views, while also getting them to gradually discover alternative ways of acting in,
and understanding, the world.
If Glaucon and Adeimantus are both, as Wittgenstein would put it, captured by a
picture, then Socrates must first step into their picture or outlook and slowly unsettle and
revise it from within. As de Sousa (2001, 258) puts it,
 8 C. Tarnopolsky

the real seducer, the successful emotional persuader, will not simply be content with pointing
to features of her own scenario that seem salient to her. Instead, she will point to features that
have already captured the imagination of the ‘mark’. The vulgar lovers’ argument says,
‘Come into my play: let me audition you for this part’. But the real seducer says, ‘I come to
you from your own play. Look: here is your part’.

The part that Socrates gets Glaucon and Adeimantus to play is to be cofounders of a city
in speech that will serve as the new paradigm for their approach to political life. In the
process, he doesn’t just provide arguments for why justice is better than injustice; he also
gives them a new set of images, stories, and symbols that encapsulate the foundational
principles of this city in speech (Allen 2000, 246). He also tries to get them to become
more reflective about the similarities and differences between the new paradigms of
behavior they collectively construct and imbibe with Socrates, and the overly militaristic
and pleonectic (greedy/overreaching) exemplars of behavior that haunted them when they
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first entered the discussion.

The introduction of thumos

Thumos is first discussed when Socrates and Glaucon turn to the nature of the guardians
of the city (Rep. 2.374e). Importantly, the Greek noun and verb used to describe the nature
of this guardianship (phulassein and phulax, respectively) cover instances of guarding
against others, but also protecting, observing, and cherishing others, and even acting like a
sentinel (Liddell and Scott 1996, 1960–1961). When they act like guards, the rulers will
try to make their own personal and political boundaries impermeable to the other in much
the same way that Glaucon and Adeimantus hope that the just person will be self-
sufficient and invulnerable to the contingencies of human life. When they act like
guardians, they will recognize the mutual interplay and interactions across the ever-
shifting boundary between the self and multiple ‘others’. As will be seen below, these
two different connotations of phulax, guard or guardian, actually end up corresponding to
the two different kinds of courage that thumos can make possible. What Socrates calls
‘political courage’ (Rep. 4.430c) involves the ‘preserving of the opinion produced by law
through education about what – and what sort of thing – is terrible (deinos)’ (Rep.
4.429d). In contrast, the finer form of courage involves two things: persevering in one’s
studies even when these go against the law-inculcated opinions and having the courage to
change one’s law-inculcated opinions when they are shown to be false after a lengthy
discussion. Plato never specifically defines philosophic courage in these two ways but
instead dramatizes them in the entire play of the dialogue.
The perseverance required by philosophy is in fact dramatized in the next part of their
discussion about the guardians. Socrates now tells Glaucon that although it will not be an
easy task to discover the natures that will be suited to the task of guardianship, ‘we
mustn’t be cowardly, at least as far as its in our power’ (Rep. 2.374e). So, before
suggesting that thumos is important for courage and cowardliness (which doesn’t happen
until Book 4), Plato illustrates one of the varieties of courage that thumos will make
possible. Philosophic courage is important in providing the perseverance the philosopher
needs to discover the truth about human nature (Craig 2003, 20). This first dramatization
of philosophic courage is important for two reasons. First it illustrates an instance where
thumos is the ally of reason long before Socrates presents this as one of its roles in Book 4
of the Republic. Second, it does so not by suggesting that one group of individuals simply
preserves and enforces the law-inculcated opinions provided by philosophic rulers, but
 Global Discourse 9

rather as an instance where the philosopher, Socrates, and his companions in a philosophic
discussion, all need a certain kind of perseverance in order to purse their mutual search for
the truth about human nature.
In other words, the more Platonic Socrates of Books 2 through 10 shows an interest in
the affective dimensions of rationality and the life of philosophy, which includes both a
more imagistic and not just propositional logic, and a more robust theory of the affective
and dispositional underpinnings of the search for knowledge. While Plato obviously did
not have the benefit of contemporary neuroscientific findings about the emotional under-
pinnings of rationality, his first description of thumos – ‘Haven't you noticed how
irresistible and unbeatable spirit (thumos) is, so that its presence makes every soul fearless
(aphobos) and invincible in the face of everything’ (Rep. 2.375b) – shows some striking
similarities to the notion of enthusiasm characteristic of the disposition system that
contemporary neuroscientists now think supports learned habitual behaviors. According
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to George Marcus (Marcus 2002, 72), the main purpose of the disposition system is to
provide ‘feedback on the success or failure of the current ongoing action’. The way this is
signaled is through the emotive marker of enthusiasm:

Success and the learned behavior that produced it are marked by elevated levels of mood that
we experience as enthusiasm (or elation, joy, or happiness). When things are not going well,
when failure is evident, then we experience very low levels of this mood marker, the absence
of enthusiasm we call depression (or being down, gloomy, or blue) (Marcus 2002, 73).

In contemporary psychiatry, one form of bipolar disorder is now known as cyclothymia,

which comes from a combination of kuklos (circle) and thumos, and literally means
‘circular thumos’ (Brieger and Marneros 1997). It is characterized by the poles of
despondency and manic elation, or in the Greek: dusthumia or athumia (despondency)
and prothumia (eagerness/zeal). In fact, the term prothumia (eagerness/zeal) is used five
times in the Republic, usually in reference to Socrates and never in reference to either
Glaucon or Adeimantus. Part of the dramatic movement of the Republic involves
Socrates’ spirited attempt to get Glaucon and Adeimantus reengaged in politics by
infecting them with his own philosophic and thumotic enthusiasm for the search for
truth, and by overcoming their despondency about justice and injustice through the
imaginative, philosophic play involved in getting them to join him as cofounders of the
city in speech. It is this new type of philosophic activity that works to progressively
revitalize their dispirited and discontented souls over the course of the nightlong
conversation.

Thumos, logos, and their vicissitudes

The other important dimension of Socrates’ early discussion of thumos is that it illustrates
what will be true of Plato’s treatment of it throughout Books 2 and 3, and in contrast to his
treatment of it in Book 4. In these initial books, Plato treats the nature of his guardians as
one that combines two opposed or contrary natures: savageness and gentleness. He
assigns savageness to the spirited nature of the guardians and gentleness to their philo-
sophic nature (Rep. 2.375b–c). The musical and gymnastic education outlined in Book 3
is said to be necessary to harmonize these natures with one another so that they are ‘tuned
to the proper degree of tension and relaxation’, and it is the man whose soul is the most
perfectly musical and well harmonized’ who should be the ‘overseer in the city’ (Rep.
3.412a).
 10 C. Tarnopolsky

It is important to note here that this presentation of thumos is very different from the
presentation of it in Book 4. However, the Book 4 treatment is the one that most
commentators focus on, and leads, I believe, to the overly antagonistic view of the
relationship between thumos, reason, and philosophy that is articulated by Strauss
(1964), Bloom (1968), and Hobbs (2000). Instead of a harmonized soul, in Book 4
Socrates uses various examples of a disharmonized or conflicted soul to distinguish
between its three parts.
This later presentation differs from the earlier one in a number of significant ways.
First, the parts of the soul are distinguished as separate, using the famous Principle of
Opposites: ‘It’s plain that the same thing won’t be willing at the same time to do or suffer
opposites with respect to the same part and in relation to the same thing’ (Rep. 4.436b).
As Allan Bloom (Bloom 1968, 457n. 25) points out, ‘This is the earliest-known explicit
statement of the principle of contradiction – the premise of philosophy and the foundation
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of rational discourse’. Second, Plato here treats the different elements of the soul primarily
as parts that can conflict, rather than as capacities that can harmonize and act in unison.
As Angela Hobbs notes, Plato’s diction is ‘varied to say the least’, but ‘the normal Greek
term for ‘part’, meros', is used ‘relatively late in the Book 4 argument’ (Hobbs, 2000, 34).
Third, throughout most of this discussion of the parts of the soul in Book 4, Plato uses the
terms, logismos or logistikon, and not logos. He also describes a conflict between the
thumos and the logistikon, but not between thumos and the philosophon of Books 2–3
(Wilberding 2012, 142). While logos is the more capacious term that can mean reason,
speech, account, or story, logismos and logistikon connote the more restricted notion of
calculation, reckoning, argument, and the computation of numbers (Liddell and Scott
1996, 1056). Finally, what is not noticed by commentators on these passages is that the
Platonic Socrates himself wonders whether the Principle of Opposites might not hold in
all cases, but he agrees to overlook this problem: ‘so we won’t be compelled to go
through all such objections and spend a long time assuring ourselves they’re not true, let’s
assume that this is so and go ahead, agreed that if it should ever appear otherwise, all our
conclusions based on it will be undone’ [my italics] (Rep. 4.437a).
I would argue that it has already appeared otherwise to the careful reader, where
Books 2 and 3 present the thumotic and philosophic natures as opposite but harmonized
tendencies, capacities, or natures, whose musical and gymnastic education and attunement
is required in order to make the proper judgments necessary to be truly philosophic
overseers of the city. In fact, in Book 4, when Socrates quotes a passage from Homer’s
Odyssey – ‘He smote his breast and reproached his heart with word’ – to show that
logistikon (calculation) and thumos are separate parts of the soul, he characterizes
Odysseus not as spirited but as ‘irrationally spirited’ (alogistos thumoumeno) or, literally,
as someone whose spirit is ‘without reason’ (Rep. 441b–c). It is certainly true that spirit
can conflict with and get angry with reason, but it is not inherent in its nature that it do
this, as is shown in the earlier example of the individual whose spirit allies itself with what
seems just and which becomes gentle when it is called in by logos (reason in its more
capacious sense), like a ‘dog by a herdsman’ (Rep. 4.440c). (This is one of the rare
instances in this Book 4 discussion where Socrates uses logos instead of logistikon.)
What Book 4 can also tell us is why Socrates’ style of philosophic comportment
toward his interlocutors in Book 1 was so ineffective and frustrating. There he did seem to
embody the narrower analytic notion of philosophy, operating according to the principle
of non-contradiction, because his refutations simply revealed the logical contradictions in
his interlocutor’s views about justice. Instead of giving them a new outlook or paradigm
of the life of justice and philosophy that could motivate them to start living in accordance
 Global Discourse 11

with it, he merely contradicted all of their deepest held beliefs about justice by pointing
out their inconsistencies. This is especially problematic if images and symbols don’t
‘merely represent one idea, but [can] contain a whole bundle of principles, even ones that
would be mutually contradictory if reduced to their purely ideational equivalents’
(Edmund Burke, as quoted by Allen 2000, 245). The hero that all thumotic Athenian
youth would have grown up admiring, Achilles, is certainly not averse to holding different
and even contrary views about death. In the Iliad, Achilles is persistently shown to choose
a noble death over a long life. But in the Odyssey (Ody. XI, 489–491, cited at Rep.
3.386c), it is Achilles’ who delivers one of the most haunting condemnations of death:

I would rather be on the soil, a serf to another,

To a man without lot whose means of life are not great,
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Than rule over all the dead who have perished.

It is in fact this ability of images, symbols, or role models to embody contrary principles
that allows Socrates to overcome a temporary impasse in the discussion of the guardians
that occurs early in Book 2. After telling Glaucon that they must be courageous if they are
to discover the truth about the guardians’ nature, Socrates introduces a playful analogy
between a noble puppy and a noble lad in order to help them think about the invisible
qualities of their guardians’ souls. Here he argues that these guardians will have to be
‘gentle to their own and cruel to enemies’ if they are to become good guardians (Rep.
2.375c). Yet he immediately claims that they have reached an impasse: ‘if a man lacks
either of them he can’t become a good guardian. But these conditions resemble impos-
sibilities, and so it follows that a good guardian is impossible’ (Rep. 2.375c). Again, if one
simply has the notion of reason as operating according to the principle of non-contra-
diction or the Principle of Opposites (outlined in Book 4 and displayed in Book 1), then it
does indeed seem that gentleness and harshness are opposites that cannot coexist.
However, Socrates now claims that the reason they are at a loss is because they abandoned
the image they had set before themselves to consider this problem: the image of noble
dogs whose disposition is to be ‘as gentle as can be with their familiars and people they
know and the opposite with those they don’t know’ (Rep. 2.375d). Considering the
problem without the help of an image had in fact led them to an impasse, whereas
considering it with the help of an image lets them see the co-presence of contraries (as
only an image can do). The new, more Platonic, Socrates attempts to educate his
companions by the use of vivid images, and in these passages Socrates slyly moves
from the image of the noble guard dog, to the image of the guard, to the philosophic
guardian, all three of which embody different forms of thumos and courage.
To return to the image: Socrates states that the dog and the noble lad will need to be
andreios (brave/manly/courageous) if they are to fight well (Rep. 2.375a). Socrates’ use of
the Greek adjective, andreios, to describe both the dog and the human being is slightly
ironic. In the Laches, andreia (courage) is denied to beasts because they cannot possess
knowledge of the grounds of hope and fear (Lach. 196d). But andreios in the Greek can
also mean not just courage or manliness but also stubbornness, and this can be common to
beasts and human beings. This is later confirmed in the discussion of political courage,
which as I mentioned earlier, involves the ‘preservation, through everything, of the right
and lawful opinion about what is terrible (deinos) and what not’ (Rep. 4.430b). In this
discussion, Glaucon distinguishes this courage from the courage of beasts and slaves by
saying that what the latter possess is not lawful (nomimon) and is therefore something
 12 C. Tarnopolsky

other than courage, and Socrates agrees with him (Rep. 4.440b). Here it is important to
note that the Greek word for law, nomos, can also mean convention, tune, musical mode,
or song (Liddell and Scott 1996, 1180). And as I argued above, Plato thinks that the
guardians’ education requires the right kind of musical education in order to tune or
harmonize the soul to have the right balance of gentleness and harshness.
Indeed, as George Marcus (Marcus 2002, 71) argues, there is an important distinction
between the disposition system, with its emotive markers of enthusiasm and depression,
and the more ancient or primitive fight/flight system, with its emotive markers of rage
(fight) and terror (flight), which we have inherited from our animal ancestors. What sets
the disposition system apart from the fight/flight system is that its emotive markers of
enthusiasm and depression can be educated to have a specific shape and content based on
the particular social and political context of the actor (Marcus 2002, 71). So while guard
dogs are ‘courageous’ through a kind of brute mettle that can make them defend
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themselves and their own from dangers, this is not the political courage that requires
preserving the law-inculcated beliefs about what is and is not terrible (deinos). That Plato
is thinking about a distinction between the spirited rage of animals and the spirited
courage of human beings is suggested by the fact that he moves from characterizing the
noble dog and lad as aphobos (fearless) (Rep. 2.375b) to characterizing political courage
as preserving the law-inculcated opinion about what is and is not deinos (terrible/fearful)
(Rep. 4.429c, 4430b). While both phobos and deinos can connote fear, phobos also means
panic flight and terror (Liddell and Scott 1996, 1947), whereas deinos also means strange,
wondrous, marvelous, clever, illegal, arbitrary, and skillful (Liddell and Scott 1996, 374).
Deinos is the more human form of fear that can involve complicated evaluations about the
character of the object one is pondering.
The other important thing to note is that Plato thinks that the thumos of a human
being, as opposed to that of an animal, allows one to hold on to the laws, conventions,
musical modes, and opinions of one’s polity. But what happens if these laws and opinions
inculcate or legislate a desire for omnipotence and a denial of human vulnerability and
mortality? It would then be possible for the ‘courageous’ citizen to preserve laws and
opinions that deny the fundamental truth about human life. This is confirmed later in
Book 6, when Socrates argues that the true philosopher will be courageous because he
does not believe or suppose that death is terrible (deinos) (Rep. 6.486a–b). But what kind
of awareness of death is this? If the philosopher loves the truth, and the truth about human
nature is that we must all die and that we are all vulnerable to the intrusions or influences
of other selves and the natural world, he will not hate or fear this fact. He will not consider
it terrible or strange or marvelous or illegal or arbitrary. Socrates then goes on to say that a
cowardly and slavish nature will not participate in true philosophy (Rep. 6.486b). But this
would mean that a citizen whose thumos holds onto laws or customs that embody the
desire for omnipotence or invulnerability is in fact cowardly and slavish on a foundational
level. There can be a form of debased thumos that consists in the fact of treating death as
strange and hence foreign, arbitrary, illegal, and not part of human existence. Here the
citizen’s thumos would be rational in the minimal sense of being consistent with the facts
and norms of a polity as these are grounded in its particular authoritative outlooks, but it
would not be robustly rational because it fails to pick up on the central fact of human
existence.
But how does political courage differ from philosophic courage in those moments
when the rulers are performing their roles as guard or guardian of the boundaries between
inside and outside both the self and the polity? And how is this related to the question of
 Global Discourse 13

how we face our vulnerability and mortality? Plato goes on to answer these questions in
the next part of the discussion of thumos that Socrates has with Glaucon.
Socrates’ solution to the problem about how the same person can be both savage and
gentle is playful, ironic, and complex. He states that by nature the disposition of well-bred
dogs is to be ‘most gentle to their familiars and those whom they recognize, but the
contrary to those whom they do not know’ (Rep. 2.375d). And he then goes on to point
out something else about such dogs. This is, ‘that the sight of an unknown person angers
him before he has suffered any injury, but an acquaintance he will fawn upon though he
has never received any kindness from him’ (Rep. 2.376a). Socrates then argues that this
trait shows the dog to be a lover of wisdom, a philosopher, because like the dog, the
philosopher ‘distinguishes a friendly from a hostile aspect by nothing save his apprehen-
sion of the one and his failure to recognize the other’. How, then, ‘can the love of learning
be denied to a creature whose criterion of the friendly and the alien is intelligence and
ignorance’ (Rep. 2.376b)?5
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The trick here involves Socrates’ move from the dog who is angry/savage (chalepos)
at the sight of an unknown person (agnota) to someone who distinguishes friendly/loved
(philios) from hostile/enemy/hated (echthros) aspects (opsis) based on his apprehension of
the one and ignorance of the other, and then to someone who distinguishes the friendly/
akin/similar (oikeios) from the alien/strange/foreign/different (allotrios) based upon his
knowledge of the one and ignorance of the other. As Allan Bloom (1968, 350) points out,
there is a great deal of difference between a certain ‘dog-like affection for acquaintances’
and a philosophic love of the truth and, I would add, especially when the truth consists of
a full awareness of our mortality and vulnerability. However, Bloom’s statement of the
problem only picks up on the first and last steps of Socrates’ analogy between guard dogs
and philosophers, ignoring the equally important middle one. But the more important trick
comes in the transition between the second and third steps of Socrates’ elaboration of the
analogy. Here Socrates distinguishes between dividing aspects (of the world? the self? the
other?) into friendly/loved (philios) and enemy/hated (echthros) from dividing these into
friendly/akin/similar (oikeios) and alien/strange/different/foreign (allotrios). Moreover,
Socrates doesn’t describe the last two stages in his elaboration of the analogy as instances
of savageness (chalepos) at all. They are, I would argue, the two different forms of human
courage that can be exhibited by the guardians of the city in speech.
But dividing (diakrinein) the world into friends and enemies is a very different
awareness from one that divides it into what is similar/akin and what is different/foreign.
To recall what I said earlier about the guards and guardians, it would seem that when one
acts like a guard, one treats the ‘other’ (other people, other aspects of the world, or of
oneself) as that which might harm us and must be guarded against, that is as an echthros
(enemy/hated). This is certainly true of the reaction of the Athenians to Socrates shortly
after the end of the Peloponnesian War. Interestingly enough, when Plato does describe
thumos as a separate part of the soul in Book 4, with the image of Leontius getting
enraged at his own appetite to look at executed corpses, he seems to be describing an
instance of someone treating a part of himself – in this case, his eyes – as an enemy:
‘Look, you damned wretches, take your fill of the fair sight’ (Rep. 4.440a). Here Leontius
treats his eyes as the personification of his own appetite for gazing at corpses, and they
become the target or enemy of his enraged thumos. In her discussion of Aristotelian
thumos, Koziak (2000, 149) articulates this kind of guard-like stance: ‘We might be prone
to see the scene of encountering strangers in our daily lives as a dangerous moment when
we may miss similarity and fail to incorporate these strangers into the system of coopera-
tion supporting the development of the good life’.
 14 C. Tarnopolsky

But humans can also play the role of guardians who recognize and watch over the
transactions across the boundaries between the self and the world, or between two selves,
or even between different capacities within the self. The move from political courage to
philosophic courage involves a dissolving of the rigidified boundaries both between the
self and the other (e.g., Glaucon and Socrates), but also within the self, wherein thumos
and logos are (re)educated to act in unison as capacities rather than as conflicting parts of
the soul. The fact that Plato moves from talking about unknown people to talking about
similar or different aspects (opsis) (of the world? of others? of ourselves?) suggests that he
is trying to express the general character of a kind of awareness or viewpoint on all of
these things: worlds, selves, others. Here it is important to note that the word Plato uses to
talk about the distinction being made between these various things is the verb form of
diakrisis which means separation, distinction, segregation, judicial decision, decision by
battle, and examination or revision of accounts (Liddell and Scott 1996, 399). Thus, it can
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be used to decide things by battle (as is the case with the guard mentality), but it can also
refer to examining and revising one’s accounts. If we think about the dramatic action of
the dialogue, we can see that Plato is describing the activity of revising one’s views in and
through conversation. To do this, one must simultaneously ponder how we are like and
unlike our old role models and the new ones that we are now developing, or how we are
like and unlike this strange philosopher, Socrates, who we are now philosophizing with all
night long.
To recall what I said earlier about mimetic pedagogy, the Republic dramatizes the way
in which one discerns likenesses and differences between oneself and others. In the
moment of learning something new, we are in-between both our old self and our new
self, as well as our self and our teacher(s) as the boundaries between these things all
become less rigid and more permeable. This activity thus involves the continual harmo-
nizing or attuning between ourselves and ‘others’, where the boundaries between these
two things become more permeable and less static, more open to recognizing the
strangeness of the familiar and the familiar in the strange or new. This in-between
perspective might well be the new, alien, or strange person we (the reader) are in the
process of becoming in our engagement with the Platonic dialogue, or the new more
philosophic person Glaucon and Adeimantus are becoming in their engagement with
Socrates, or the new philosopher Plato himself is becoming through writing a dialogue
about his own teacher, Socrates, that simultaneously recognizes his own kinship and
difference from him. The Republic is then a dialogue about how to engage in this kind of
outlook formation and re-formation by encountering others in the collective endeavor of
re-tuning, harmonizing, and simultaneously shifting and altering our outlooks upon what
is valuable and worthy of recognition in the world that we share.

Philosophic citizenship
My treatment of political and philosophic courage might still make it seem like this
position ultimately dovetails with the readings of the Republic offered by Strauss (1964)
and Bloom (1968). They both see its lesson as one where the golden-souled philosopher
rules indirectly through the silver-souled thumotic auxiliaries or gentlemen who are open
to philosophy, but who are capable only of preserving or executing what the philosopher
discovers. But I want to end this article with some observations that militate against such
a reading. (Here, like a guard, I will take my stance against this interpretation and try to
hold on to my own interpretation of the Republic as one that attempts to instill a more
philosophic awareness in the rulers of any polity, democratic, aristocratic, or otherwise.)
 Global Discourse 15

First, it is important to note that the musical education of Book 3, which is designed to
harmonize the thumotic and philosophic natures of all of the potential guardians of the
imaginary city in speech, contains two musical modes that Socrates thinks are necessary
for the rulers. Here, Socrates tells Glaucon that they must retain a mode (the Doric mode)
that appropriately imitates ‘the sounds and accents of a man who is courageous in warlike
deeds and every violent work’ (Rep. 3.399a). Alongside this mode, he tells Glaucon to
leave another mode (the Phrygian mode) ‘for a man who performs a peaceful deed, one
that is not violent but voluntary, either persuading someone of something and making a
request – whether a god by prayer or a human being by instruction and exhortation – or,
on the contrary, holding himself in check for someone who makes a request or instructs
him or persuades him to change’ (Rep. 3.399b).
That there is both violent and voluntary work to be done, upon the self and one’s
polity, is never denied by the Platonic Socrates of Books 2 through 10 of the Republic.
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Deciding when to preserve and persevere in one’s views and when to change them is
something that itself involves a delicate negotiation and re-negotiation between political
and philosophic courage. At the end of Book 3, when Socrates talks about the tests that
must be given to all of the youth who have experienced the musical education they have
outlined, he says here that it is precisely those youth who are hard to deceive and not
easily persuaded to change (Rep. 3.413b), and who are therefore good guardians of
themselves and the music they learned (Rep. 3.413e), who must be chosen as philosophic
rulers. To change one’s opinions too easily and to simply absorb everything that one
learns from Socrates is to be as cowardly and slavish as the one who stubbornly refuses to
change in the face of the truth. Once again, the final teaching of the Republic is not about
the subordination of political to philosophic courage but about harmonizing these two
forms so that the person is able to fight for their convictions and to change them whenever
there is sufficient evidence to the contrary. To read the Republic is then to join Socrates
(Book 1) and the Platonic Socrates (Books 2 through 10), as well as the other participants
in the dialogue, in a collective harmonizing and re-tuning of our own general paradigm of
philosophic citizenship.

Notes
1. Metics were foreigners in Athens with economic but not political rights. Cephalus was a
wealthy metic who made huge profits during the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BC) because
he was a shield manufacturer (Nails 2002, 84). I will return to the significance of this later in
the article.
2. Unless otherwise noted, all translations of the Republic are from Bloom (1968). All references
are to the Stephanus pages.
3. Thumos is usually translated as spiritedness and sometimes as anger, but for reasons that will
become clear as this article proceeds, I choose not to translate it.
4. Hobbs (2000) notes all of these different manifestations of thumos, while Wilberding (2012)
notes 2, 3, and 5.
5. All of the translations in this paragraph follow Shorey.

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