Noos

Noos (later nous) is the perceptive-intellective faculty of the Homeric psychological vocabulary. Sullivan describes its broad spectrum: it “functions as a seat of a person’s deepest thought,” it can “ponder, contrive, rejoice or beguile”; joined with counsel (boulē), it can “consider, make gifts, or escape from danger” (Sullivan 1995). Its movement is swift: it “can envision different places and dart from one to another.”

Noos is the inward seat of true perception — what one really sees, intends, or means. Theognis asks Cyrnus to hold his “noos and phrenes in another direction,” and to keep noos “trustworthy” and “pure” so that words reflect it (Sullivan 1995). Where phrenes can deceive by concealing what noos perceives, noos itself is the deeper truth of the person. It is also vulnerable: Aphrodite’s beguilement “steals away the noos even of one thinking wisely” (Iliad 14.217). When noos is “confused” — as in Priam in distress — the person stands bewildered.

The relationship of noos to thumos is one of the recurring axes of the early vocabulary. Theognis describes the two as functioning equally in some situations, but at line 631 he suggests noos should be “stronger than thumos” or else a person will be “in deceptions (atai) and helplessness (amēchaniai).” The hierarchy that Plato will formalize as reason over the spirited part begins as a poet’s recommendation.

In the Presocratics noos moves toward the cosmic — Anaxagoras’s Nous as the ordering principle of the world — opening the path that runs through Plotinus’s Nous to the negative theology of Christian and Islamic philosophy. Sullivan’s catalogue captures the term at its earliest, before the philosophical elevation.

Relationships

• phrenes
• thumos
• psyche
• homeric-pluralism

Primary sources

• sullivan-psychological-ethical-ideas (Sullivan 1995)