Himeros

Himeros — ἵμερος — names, in the classical anatomy of eros, “physical desire for the immediately present to be grasped in the heat of the moment” (Hillman, A Blue Fire, p. 286). It is the first of the three classically differentiated portions of Eros — himeros, anteros, pothos — and the most easily mistaken for eros simpliciter.

Within ratio-desiderii, himeros is the limiting case. When himeros is what is moving, the inserted interval that eros-as-metaxy would otherwise open collapses; impulse passes directly to action. The ratio on a himeros desire is therefore short — this is what is wanted, here, now — but it is not absent. To name a desire as himeros rather than pothos is itself an exercise of the ratio. The error to be avoided is the inverse: dressing a himeros impulse in pothos language and claiming to long for the eternal what one in fact wants in the next hour.

The Homeric body knows himeros as a strike. Padel notes: “Medea, seeing Jason, was ‘struck by desire in her thumos’” (Padel, In and Out of the Mind, p. 28). The seat of the strike is the thumos; the registration is somatic; the duration is local. The classical record does not deprecate himeros. It distinguishes it.

Relationships

• three-faces-of-eros
• eros
• pothos
• thumos
• ratio-desiderii

Primary sources

• hillman-blue-fire (Hillman 1989)
• padel-out-mind-greek (Padel 1994)