Sullivan on the Thumos-Psyche Agonism in Heraclitus

Sullivan documents the continuation of plural-faculty psychology into the first Greek philosophy. In Heraclitus B 85 — “it is difficult to fight thumos, for what it wishes it buys at the expense of psychē” — the two faculties are still distinct agents, and they are in combat. “Thumos functions in this fragment as a psychological agent that opposes psychē. What it wants, it acquires by decreasing psychē. It is psychē that provides the ‘money’ for thumos and this ‘money’ is a portion of itself” (Sullivan 1995, p. 68). “Once thumos gets the upper hand and psychē has been lessened, it is hard for the person to resist this thumos” (Sullivan 1995).

The significance is structural: the Homeric plural does not disappear when philosophy begins. It migrates. Psychē begins to absorb the chest-faculties only in the fifth century, and the agonism that earlier appeared between faculties begins to appear within a unifying psychē — the tripartite soul of the Republic is the formalization of this long interior debate. But in Heraclitus the debate is still staged between distinct inner persons. Bremmer dates the consolidation: “It is only in fifth-century Athens that we start to find the idea that the citizen can determine his own, independent course of action… By the end of that century psychē became the centre of consciousness” (Bremmer 1983). The Homeric plural is therefore not an Archaic curiosity superseded by classical thought; it is the material on which the classical self is constructed, and the philosophical language about the soul inherits its structure of conflict from it.

Sources

• shirley-sullivan: thumos diminishes psychē at Heraclitus B 85
• heraclitus: the first philosophical formulation of inner agonism
• jan-n-bremmer: psychē as centre of consciousness is a fifth-century development