Manliness

Manliness — most pointedly rendered in Greek as andreia — occupies a contested and generative position across the depth-psychology corpus. The term carries two interlocking valences that authors variously affirm, critique, and attempt to sublate: manliness as a culturally constructed ideal tied to martial prowess, competitive honour, and gender differentiation; and manliness as a psychological telos — the achieved state of mature masculine selfhood that depth psychology contrasts with boyish inflation, mother-complex entanglement, and puer diffusion. Plato’s sustained re-examination of andreia, analysed in detail by Hobbs, reveals the classical roots of the tension: Homer’s warriors embody manliness as fighting efficiency and status assertion, while Socrates persistently redirects the concept toward a virtue of the soul, one not exclusively male and not paradigmatically martial. This Platonic critique resonates with Moore’s Jungian claim that modern men are blocked from genuine masculine maturity not by too much manliness but by too little access to the deep archetypes beneath its patriarchal caricature. Bly and von Franz contribute complementary diagnoses of the mother-bound male who cannot endure pain or assert self. Running through all positions is a shared structural anxiety: that manliness, unless psychologically grounded, collapses into either inflated heroism or passive acquiescence — neither of which constitutes the genuine article.

In the library 22 passages

Plato’s thinking on courage, manliness and heroism is both profound and central to his work… his developing critique of both the notions and embodiments of manliness prevalent in his culture (particularly those in Homer), and his attempt to redefine them in accordance with his own ethical, psychological and metaphysical principles.

This passage identifies Plato’s systematic critique and redefinition of manliness as central to his ethics, psychology, and metaphysics, framing the entire inquiry that connects andreia to questions of gender, virtue, and the good.

Hobbs, Angela, Plato and the Hero: Courage, Manliness and the Impersonal Good, 2000thesis

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andreia having an analytic connection with manliness… while it may require ‘manliness’ or courage to retain one’s convictions, this does not mean that those convictions necessarily involve ideals of manliness.

Cairns distinguishes the analytic link between andreia and manliness from a substantive one, arguing that thumos can attach to any ideal and that Plato’s concept of courage exceeds a narrowly masculine frame.

Douglas L. Cairns, Aidos: The Psychology and Ethics of Honour and Shame in Ancient Greek Literature, 1993thesis

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it can lead to the approval or even the active promotion of war as the essential condition for full manliness. Plato would seem to be well aware of this danger: at any rate, it is one of the signs of the degenerate timocratic state that it prefers war to peace.

Hobbs shows that Plato explicitly treats the equation of war with full manliness as a mark of political and psychic degeneration, separating genuine andreia from its martial caricature.

Hobbs, Angela, Plato and the Hero: Courage, Manliness and the Impersonal Good, 2000thesis

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Socrates is not necessarily denying that pursuits and techniques have a role in andreia; he could simply be suggesting that they are not the only requirements… notions of manliness and efficiency in battle drop out of the picture… we still need to ask how courage, manliness and efficiency in battle interrelate.

Hobbs reads Socrates as partially retaining martial manliness within andreia while insisting on its insufficiency, making the interrelation of courage, manliness, and battle-skill a central unresolved problem.

Hobbs, Angela, Plato and the Hero: Courage, Manliness and the Impersonal Good, 2000thesis

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the temperance, andreia and justice of a man are the virtues of a ruler, whereas these qualities in a woman are those of a servant… it is ‘not fitting’ for a poet to ascribe it (or cleverness) to a female character.

Hobbs surveys the Aristotelian and Sophoclean traditions in which manliness (andreia) is structurally gendered — virtuous in men as rulers, incongruous or transgressive in women.

Hobbs, Angela, Plato and the Hero: Courage, Manliness and the Impersonal Good, 2000supporting

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if they are to be Auxiliaries and go to war, they will have to possess the virtue of andreia. The only problem arises from the qualification that though women can perform the same tasks as men, men will usually perform them better.

Hobbs identifies the Republic’s tentative decoupling of manliness from male biology — women too must possess andreia — while noting the residual qualification of degree.

Hobbs, Angela, Plato and the Hero: Courage, Manliness and the Impersonal Good, 2000supporting

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‘he must avenge all things of this kind and be more of a man than his father’… Torn between his father’s values and the thumoeidic and appetitive values of the rest of society, he opts for the middle course.

Hobbs analyses Plato’s account of how social pressures to ‘be more of a man’ corrupt the developing soul, linking competitive manliness to thumoeidic excess without rational guidance.

Hobbs, Angela, Plato and the Hero: Courage, Manliness and the Impersonal Good, 2000supporting

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What they were missing was an adequate connection to the deep and instinctual masculine energies, the potentials of mature masculinity… blocked from connection to these potentials by patriarchy itself, and by the feminist critique upon what little masculinity they could still hold onto for themselves.

Moore argues that contemporary men suffer not from excess manliness but from a deficit of authentic masculine depth, blocked by both patriarchy and its critique.

Moore, Robert, King Warrior Magician Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine, 1990supporting

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he astutely selects the exact types of ‘unmanly’ pleasure from which he knows Callicles will recoil… surely Callicles will not avoid a frank answer, since he is so andreios.

Hobbs shows Socrates exploiting Callicles’ investment in manliness as a rhetorical lever, revealing how the thumoeidic ideal of andreia structures even ostensibly hedonist positions.

Hobbs, Angela, Plato and the Hero: Courage, Manliness and the Impersonal Good, 2000supporting

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The traditional view, voiced throughout Homer and the generally conservative choruses of Greek tragedy, is that some virtues are specifically ‘male’ and others ‘female’, and that a virtuous man will necessarily display different characteristics from those displayed by a virtuous woman.

Hobbs establishes the culturally entrenched gender-differentiation of virtue as the baseline against which Plato’s reformulation of manliness must be measured.

Hobbs, Angela, Plato and the Hero: Courage, Manliness and the Impersonal Good, 2000supporting

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andreia can be displayed in non-martial contexts… courage can be manifest not only in relation to fear, but also in relation to present pain, and even to desires and pleasures.

Hobbs demonstrates Socrates’ expansion of manliness beyond the battlefield to include mastery over pain and pleasure, reorienting andreia toward a psychology of self-governance.

Hobbs, Angela, Plato and the Hero: Courage, Manliness and the Impersonal Good, 2000supporting

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ours is a world that needs the masculine energies in their maturity more urgently than ever before in human history… the ritual processes for turning boys into men have all but disappeared from the planet.

Moore frames the contemporary crisis of manliness as a civilisational problem rooted in the collapse of initiatory ritual, calling for a return to archetypal masculine maturity.

Moore, Robert, King Warrior Magician Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine, 1990supporting

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it is the quite simple, but widespread, trouble of a man who has fallen too far into the mother: he cannot endure physical pain. Generally, that is where the mother who intends to devour her son begins.

Von Franz identifies the inability to endure pain as the signature failure of the mother-bound male, implicitly defining manliness through its psychodynamic obstruction.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Puer Aeternus: A Psychological Study of the Adult Struggle with the Paradise of Childhood, 1970supporting

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it is the quite simple, but widespread, trouble of a man who has fallen too far into the mother: he cannot endure physical pain.

This parallel passage reinforces von Franz’s diagnosis that puer psychology manifests as a specific incapacity — intolerance of pain — that marks failure to achieve genuine manliness.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, The Problem of the Puer Aeternus, 1970supporting

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The boy must leave home psychologically to grow up… overthrow the seductive tyranny of his mother complex and seek the activation of his true nature at a deeper level.

Hollis frames masculine maturation as requiring psychological separation from the mother complex, positioning manliness as the achieved outcome of wounding and initiatory journey.

Hollis, James, Under Saturns Shadow: The Wounding and Healing of Men, 1994supporting

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If we access the Hero energy appropriately, we will push ourselves up against our limitations… from there, if we can make the transition, we will be prepared for our initiation into manhood.

Moore distinguishes heroic inflation from genuine initiation into manhood, mapping manliness onto a developmental threshold requiring more than the Hero archetype alone.

Moore, Robert, King Warrior Magician Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine, 1990supporting

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All these are representatives of the masculine spirit and the world of men, and they communicate themselves with or without violence to the neophyte on his expulsion from the maternal world.

Neumann situates manliness within the initiatory transmission of the masculine pneuma principle, linking it to the structural opposition between paternal heaven and maternal earth.

Neumann, Erich, The Origins and History of Consciousness (Princeton, 2019supporting

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This, however, is my third manly prudence: I do not let your timorousness spoil my pleasure at the sight of the wicked.

Nietzsche’s invocation of ‘manly prudence’ aligns manliness with the capacity to face the darker aspects of existence without flinching — a psychological-ethical posture rather than a social convention.

Nietzsche, Friedrich, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 1883aside

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We see more and more passivity in men, but also more and more naïveté. The naïve man feels a pride in being attacked.

Bly diagnoses a contemporary inversion in which passive self-abnegation is mistaken for virtue, implicitly counterposing a genuine manliness grounded in self-respect and the capacity to resist.

Bly, Robert, Iron John: A Book About Men, 1990aside

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the programme for primary education ‘tones down and soothes the spirited element by mode (harmonia) and rhythm’… representations stimulate imitative behaviour in both the players and the audience.

Hobbs shows how Plato’s educational programme shapes the thumos — the psychological substrate of manliness — through musical training, making courage a cultivated rather than innate disposition.

Hobbs, Angela, Plato and the Hero: Courage, Manliness and the Impersonal Good, 2000aside

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