A Brief History of Thymos

What is "spiritedness" and what does it have to do with testosterone?

In my latest book, The Last Men: Liberalism and the Death of Masculinity, I equate the Ancient Greek notion of thymos, often translated as “spiritedness,” with testosterone, the master male hormone. This equation is central to my argument about liberalism as a distinctive hormonal environment; indeed, I think all societies and political systems have unique hormonal characteristics and we can see them manifested in various ways, like in fertility rates. Liberal-democratic capitalism, by its very nature, is hostile to testosterone and the expression of certain behaviours associated with testosterone—and that’s even before we get on to the wide range of lifestyle and environmental factors, including toxic chemicals, that are wreaking havoc with our hormones today.

My point in equating thymos and testosterone wasn’t to make a metaphysical or ontological argument. I’m not trying to suggest that when, say, Homer or Plato used the word thymos, what they really meant was testosterone. The Greeks weren’t misdescribing or attempting to grasp at the concept of a messenger molecule in the blood with certain effects, useful or harmful (testosterone wasn’t actually discovered until the early 20^th century). Nor am I trying to explore, in any depth, all the various meanings of thymos in Greek texts and how they changed and developed over time, as they did. Plato’s use of the term—as part of his famous “tripartite” division of the soul—is different from Homer’s. I’m not a classicist as such; although I was a very capable Latinist.

I’m simply making the observation that the kinds of behaviours and emotional states associated with thymos—things like desire to compete and political attitudes like patriotism and hostility to outsiders, but more fundamentally just the ability to be a man—are also associated with testosterone. And so one might usefully be seen as a proxy for the other, even if they aren’t the same or coterminous.

This allows me to do some interesting things with Francis Fukuyama’s account of the development of political systems, as laid out in his most famous book, The End of History and the Last Man. Fukuyama frames the progression towards liberal-democratic capitalism as one of thymotic struggle, leading to an end state in which certain aspects or types of thymos prevail at the expense of others; this leaves man in a precarious state, with potentially explosive consequences, because his drives and desires simply cannot be fulfilled.

Fukuyama glosses thymos as “the desire for recognition,” a part of the soul that strives for recognition of worth and dignity. Characteristic emotions are pride, anger and shame. Following Plato, Fukuyama sees thymos as separate from basic desires and appetites, and from reason.

“Thymos is... the seat of judgements of worth... the propensity to invest the self with a certain value, and to demand recognition for that value... Today we would call [it] ‘self-esteem’... It is like an innate human sense of justice. People believe that they have a certain worth, and when other people treat them as though they are worth less than that, they experience the emotion of anger.”

Central to Fukuyama’s account are two distinct types of thymos: isothymia and megalothymia. Isothymia is the desire for equal recognition, to be seen as equal with one’s peers. Megalothymia, by contrast, is the desire to be recognised as better.

It’s the desire for recognition that drives history, says Fukuyama. Liberal democracy—the End of History—is the first political system that grants universal recognition of equal dignity for all men; but what then for megalothymia? Can we still be better? Fukyama says no, not really, and predicts this could lead to rebellion against the prevailing order and what he calls “immense wars of the spirit,” as men seek to assert their superiority in the oldest way possible.

Fukuyama’s assessment of the triumph of liberal-democratic capitalism is actually far more pessimistic than most people think: They remember The End of History but they forget the second half of the book’s title, which is an explicit reference to Nietzsche and his Last Man, a shadow of man in his fullest self who arrives with the death of God.

But if, as I contend, there is a deeper, biological, element to the appearance of the Last Man, that makes the problem described by Fukuyama even thornier still. Not least of all, because it suggests thymos is not simply a fixed quantity that men possess. Thymos can be diminished, and with it the possibility of masculine endeavour at all…

Since I’m writing about thymos, here are some further references if you want to do more reading.

On thymos as a general concept, here’s Douglas Cairns in the Oxford Classical Dictionary.

“Thymos... is one of a number of terms in Greek which associate psychological activity with air and breath. In the Homeric poems, thymos is one of a family of terms associated with internal psychological processes of thought, emotion, volition, and motivation... No post-Homeric author can rival that range, but something of the richness... re-emerges in Plato’s conception of the tripartite soul in the Republic and the Phaedrus. Plato’s thymos represents a pared-down model of human agency typified by one central desire or aim in life [honor/victory] but also exhibiting whatever further capacities... are necessary to enable it to pursue that aim...”

Recent scholarship has produced some interesting accounts of thymos, especially in the work of Plato, that I think bolster my argument about its relationship with testosterone.

Josh Wilburn, in The Political Soil: Plato on Thumos, Spirited Motivation, and the City (2021), argues that thymos, for Plato, is the “distinctively social or political part of the human soul.” Thymos is what allows cooperation, cultural production, political behaviour and patriotism, including the defence of the city (polis). Wilburn also emphasises the biological foundation of thymos in Plato’s works (located in the chest, close to the heart); although, of course, this does not mean hormones.

Chad Jorgenson, in The Embodied Soil in Plato’s Later Thought (2018), claims that a focus on honour or self-esteem misses what is truly distinctive about thymos: the drive to excel and to exceed. Thymos requires a rational orientation, but it is, at base, a primitive and irrational series of desires.

A very good doctoral dissertation by Nathan Rothschild, supervised by Martha Nussbaum, argues that thymos, as spiritedness, really means defending what is “one’s own” and “motivates action aimed at defending what it takes to be one’s own from alien threats.”