Thumos as Neutral Bearer of Emotion

Caswell’s most surgical finding in her survey of the emotion context is that thumos does not belong to any single affect. It appears with joy and grief, with eagerness and despair, with rage and with restraint. “Thumos is used with such a wide range of verbs and nouns denoting different emotions that it itself clearly has to be considered as without affiliations to any specific emotions” (Caswell 1990, p. 62). In her summary: “The fact that thumos is the constant factor in passages describing a large number of emotions suggests that it itself is the neutral bearer of emotion” (Caswell 1990, p. 50).

This is a critical distinction for the Seba lineage. Thumos is not anger; it is the organ within which anger, as within which all feeling, occurs. The faculty is prior to the affect. The proper English analogy is not a single emotion but the feeling function itself — the psyche’s generalized capacity for affective valuation.

Caswell notes one drift: “in the context of emotions, thumos seems to be in the process of becoming no longer the neutral bearer of emotions but emotion itself” (Caswell 1990, p. 62). Already within the epic diction the narrowing begins that will culminate in the Presocratic contraction and Plato’s thumoeides. But in Homer, in its pure state, thumos is the neutral chamber — the place where affect happens, not an affect among others.

This grounding is what makes thumos translatable into Jung’s feeling-function without distortion. Feeling in Jung is not a single emotion but the rational faculty of valuation; thumos in Homer is not a single emotion but the chamber within which all valuation registers.

Relationships

• thumos
• feeling-function
• feeling-versus-affect

Primary sources

• caswell-study-thumos-early (Caswell 1990, pp. 50, 62)