Seba.Health

Concept · Seba Knowledge Graph

The Indissoluble Bond of Intellect and Feeling

The Indissoluble Bond of Intellect and Feeling

Caswell‘s most philosophically radical structural finding: in the cognitive context, “the apparent synonymity among θυμός, νόος, and φρήν/φρένες is rather an indissoluble connection between the two functions of thinking and feeling” (Caswell 1990, p. 3, emphasis added). The Homeric language does not divide cognition from affect. Where it appears to use θυμός and νόος as synonyms, it is in fact registering the participation of feeling in thought and of thought in feeling.

The lexical ground is precise. θυμός occurs with the verbs of cognition — οἶδα, γιγνώσκω, φρονέω, νοέω, φράζω — and the cognitive faculty θυμός contains is the one that has been “breathed into” the phrenes by the act of breathing itself: “the act of breathing brings the θυμός back into the φρήν, a functional synonym particularly in this context” (Caswell 1990, p. 22). Hektor at Iliad VI.447 prophesies the fall of Troy “in my φρήν and in my θυμός” — κατὰ φρένα καὶ κατὰ θυμόν — and the formula appears fourteen times with the verb ὁρμαίνω alone (Caswell 1990, p. 45). To know, in Homer, is to know with the breath; to feel is to feel through an organ that also thinks.

The structural condition of right cognition is containment: “for the intellect to function rightly, these two psychic entities [θυμός and φρένες] must be in the proper relationship to each other” (Caswell 1990, p. 52). When the θυμός escapes its container, the intellect is impaired and the emotions become uncontrollable — the same failure, named once. There is no thinking that is not also feeling and no feeling that is not also a kind of knowing.

This is the philological seat of what the depth tradition will name the feeling-toned-complex and the somatic intelligence of the Jungian feeling function (see body-seated-feeling-function; thumos-and-the-feeling-function). It is also the point at which the anthropological-fallacy is most tempting: Homer is not a worse psychologist for not separating cognition from affect. He is a different one. The separation is the modern accomplishment, and it is not a pure gain.

Relationships

Primary sources