The Noos–Thumos–Phrenes Trivalent Cognition

The Homeric self is not one mind with several faculties; it is several organs whose cooperation and whose occasional conflict is the inner life. The philological tradition — Snell, Sullivan, Padel, with Bremmer in the background — converges on a trivalent structure: noos as the organ of clear images and cognition, thumos as the organ of affect and impulse, phrenes as the locational container in which the others sit and act.

Snell fixes the axis: “thymos is the mental organ which causes (e)motion, while noos is the recipient of images” (Snell 1953, p. 12). Noos sees; thumos stirs; phrenes contain. Sullivan extends this: noos is singular, non-physical, never a container for others (Sullivan 1995, p. 19); phrenes are plural, embodied, and frequently the location of thumos, etor, ker, and even noos itself (Sullivan 1995, pp. 36–37). Padel confirms the somatic register of the whole set, noting that “poets and philosophers treat [nous] linguistically as they do the other innards” (Padel 1994, p. 33) — even the bodiless noos retains, in poetic treatment, the grammar of a bodily organ.

The cooperation is imperfect. Sullivan: “In humans the two psychic entities are always described as distinct with separate activities… . Usually a person acts in, by, or with phrenes … Noos more often acts within humans; it grasps truth and can effect well what it knows. But when noos does not act or when it hides, as it often does, people may have to rely on phrenes” (Sullivan 1995, p. 48). Xenophanes (B 25) suggests the ideal: phren subordinate to noos, acting in accord with it. In the divinity this is achieved; in the human it is the work of a life.

This trivalent structure is the classical substrate of what the Jungian tradition will later name the functions of consciousness — thinking, feeling, sensation, intuition — not as identity but as parallel: the Homeric anatomy shows consciousness already plural, already partly-divine, already contending with itself.

Sources

• bruno-snell: noos as recipient of images, thumos as organ of (e)motion; the distinction is primary though occasionally overlapping.
• shirley-sullivan: noos unitary and non-physical; phrenes plural and containing; the divine ideal in Xenophanes of phren subordinate to noos.
• ruth-padel: nous treated grammatically as an innard, partly-divine — “Nous is to us in each of us a god.”