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Agent–Function Ambiguity

Agent–Function Ambiguity

A structural feature of the pre-Platonic Greek psychological vocabulary: the same term names both the agent that performs a psychic act and the act itself. Thumos is the one who is angry and the anger; phrēn is the one who considers and the consideration; psychē, in its later lyric usage, is the one who desires and the desire. The philological witness to this ambiguity is most precisely shirley-sullivan, who in reading Heraclitus B 85 — thumos “buys what it wishes at the expense of psychē” — refuses to resolve whether thumos names the emotion or the agent who has it: “in B 85, therefore, thumos could be both an agent of emotion and emotion itself. Consequently, to interpret thumos only as emotion may be too narrow an approach” (Sullivan 1995, ch. 2).

The ambiguity is not a philological defect. It is a grammatical feature of a stage of the language in which subject and predicate of psychological activity have not yet separated. richard-onians had seen the physiological version of it: the phrenes are both the chest-organs and the thinking that goes on there. bruno-snell had seen the typological version: the Homeric person has no collective term under which its psychic activities are gathered. Sullivan supplies the lexical detail at each occurrence.

The ambiguity is what the depth tradition recovers. Jung’s complex is a modern name for a psychic center that is both the agent of an affect and the affect itself; feeling-toned-complex preserves the fusion explicitly. james-hillman‘s polytheistic psychology takes the fusion as first principle: the gods are agents of pattern and the pattern itself. The middle-voice, as Rutger Allan analyzes it, is the grammatical encoding of precisely this condition — a mode of speech in which one is not the self-standing author of one’s own experience but a site where the experience works itself out.

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