Love and Culture: Nous and Thumos

The teacher and the student; the life of the philosopher; how we become something; two types of motivation; to consume and to express desire and thumos; the search for one's self; Greek and Christian views of self-hood; three parts of the soul in Plato (Rep. IV, 435-43); Kant's morality; Hamlet's need for thumos and Platonic love; the "Nigger"; knowledge as recollection.

The student is the relief of the great suffering of the professor, Plato says in the Phaedrus (252b). This goes back to my musing, my soliloquy—the philosopher alone in front of 700 people, because he's practiced talking with other people so much and so assiduously that he is now able to talk to them just as he talks to himself. The way I talk to you for an hour every Monday, Wednesday and Friday is the way I talk to myself virtually all the time. For about 12 or 14 hours out of the day at least I'm holding with myself the same sort of monologue that I cut you in on three hours a week. I love it, but it also tears me apart. I need to be delivering myself constantly of formulations, to make room for more. That's why you are my "relief from suffering," as Plato says in the Phaedrus.

Why is that? Because we are organic beings, and beauty which streams in pushes toward returning to the environment, because when I have an interesting thought, I want to share it, and if I have two or fifty or 100, I'm crying out to share them. I defy anyone to be in possession of E = Mc² and keep it to himself. Without a captive audience, I can't get things off my chest, out of my system. There's no metabolism, then, and I become constipated, literally constipated. I sat for a year in London, as I worked up the background to this course, and at the end of that year I was most dreadfully constipated. I was trying to write my commentary, and in the course of a year I managed to write 26 pages—and that would have to be rewritten, because it sounded tight, it sounded constipated.

At that time I thought I was leaving the University once and for all. I was kicking over the third of the three great mothers. There is one's physical mother, and there was, for me, Holy Mother Church, and then my beloved university, the proverbial alma-mater. (Alas, poor Alma! When I was young, all the boys were in love with her. But now one finds her name written all over latrine walls. They say she is a kept woman, the concubine of a mysterious figure who gloats over Vietnam and is hell bent on destroying the environment. Scratched on the door of the elevator in Ellison is the graffito, "Violate your Alma Mater!") Those were the three women in my life and I kicked them over one by one, in a sense: my mother, the Church, and the University.

First, I threw over the Church, when I was 26 and returned to Toronto from my first period of study in Europe. It couldn't have happened any earlier. I had gone through the entire Church, you might say, from bottom to top, from Sacred Heart Grammar School, Redlands, to Loyola Jesuit High School at Los Angeles, to Jesuit University at Santa Clara, to the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies in Toronto, within a year of a Ph.D. in Mediaeval Philosophy, the pinnacle of Catholic scholarship—and there (like Faust) my faith broke. I went through the entire Church, you might say, and out the back door. But not until I had discovered a higher ideal, as I thought, to hitch my wagon to, the great Immanuel Kant, the man who, I now like to say, first brought me to life, first gave me the sunset—ten years later.

Then I "kicked over" my real mother, you might say, when I told her, two years later, that I was no longer in the Church, that I no longer believed what she had believed all her life, and brought me up to believe. I was a stern Kantian at that time, committed to honesty and principle at any price, and I thought I did Mother no honor by concealing the "truth" from her. The revelation broke her heart, and we both immediately pretended it wasn't true. When I was home, I continued going to Mass on Sunday morning as before.

Stephen Dedalus is greatly upset by the joking suggestion that he "killed his mother." I maintain that this is Joyce ruminating over the fact that he is not really a Joyce, or a Catholic, or an Irishman. He no longer feels immersed in these three great communities because he has given himself radically to another sort of project, and needs detachment (or independent perspective) to capture them all on his canvas. It isn't really that he's killed her, but he's allowed her to die in his heart, like Romeo Montague when he falls in love with a Capulet—that has got to be the death of poor Mama Montague. It's Ivan Karamazov's anxiety about being responsible for the old man's death. So when I told my Mother I was no longer a Catholic, it must have seemed to her that I was turning my back on everything she had been taught—as, in a sense, I was.

So, five years ago I left the University. I decided I no longer wanted to do what I thought I would want to do all my life. After a year away, I came back, by an interesting juxtaposition of circumstances. On the one hand, I was unsuccessful in my efforts to get a teaching position in high school. I found that I am not qualified to teach in high school. And at precisely this moment, the department (or Alex Sesonske) was kind enough to write and say, "We see that you're interested in teaching college." (On my dossier I had put down "high school or college," meaning J. C. "Well, we're college; come back here." I zoomed back, and it was very different from then on.

So, if I stand before you a living marvel of life triumphant and a great University teacher, it was not always so—or it didn't seem so to me. Just five years ago I was flat on my ass! Now I'm making a big comeback, and I found in that year away how much I needed you, my captive audience, my beloved students. (Cf. Dylan Thomas, In My Craft or Sullen Art.)

I didn't need 700 of course; 20 would do—ten, five, a class, a responsibility, if you will, something I would have to get material up for three hours a week, something to press me to do what I really want to do, which is read Plato, Hegel, Nietzsche all the time, but wouldn't do as much as I want if it weren't for the fact that I have to get things up for you.

I find how important you are in my life. I would waste, or in some sense lose—lose the joy of, anyway—whole hours and days for you. I used to lose the joy of hours and days for you, walking around under a cloud looking for something to say, something new, something interesting—find it! What in the world are you going to say about this, that or the other? For a long time I thought I was going to lose the whole of my life that way, that I would always be walking around looking for interesting things to say to you—for you.

That's what Plato calls thumos, the second (or "middle") part of his soul. It is an immensely powerful thing and reminds us of how social we are, especially after having been brought up for 2,000 years in the school of Christianity, which severs the natural ties between men. It's the metaphysic of Christianity which I am attacking—that we are each an isolated, encapsuled, transcendent being, called "immortal souls" prior to 1636, then res cogitans for a century and a half, and finally reine Vernunft ("pure reason") after 1787, with the publication of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.

God, when my mind goes like this, I don't take cognizance of your weaknesses and limitations. I have never used that thing (projector) properly, for example. I suppose because I want this to be exactly like a graduate seminar: the Auditorium Maximum in Heidelburg, or the Salle Richelieu or Salle Descartes in the Sorbonne. There are no blackboards in the Sorbonne or in the Auditorium Maximum in Heidelburg. I want this to be an exalted thing in which my mind roams across the centuries, drawing things together.

We're showing Sir Kenneth Clarke's series, Civilization, on Tuesdays and Thursdays in three different places which are indicated on the blackboard up in the lounge (the philosophy lounge on the sixth floor of Ellison Hall), and I strongly recommend them. I've seen the first two and they're absolutely marvelous, saying the same thing from the point of view of art history that I'm saying in attempting to interpret the Symposium.

(Question from the audience.) How love relates to thumos and nous? Hmm, that's probably the thing Plato is driving at through the whole of the dialogue. We've seen thumos born of love (or vice versa) in Phaedrus' speech. It all begins with Phaedrus, with adolescence, with a dream and a desire to act up. That is where "Platonic love" begins, in Phaedrus' account: in the desire to act up for the sake of the beloved, in order to win admiration in the eyes of someone we love.

Now the beloved need not be a person, as Phaedrus might suggest in his speech. The "beloved" may be a class or nation. Lyndon B. Johnson's beloved is the United States of America. The key to Lyndon B. Johnson is that, for the first time in history, we have a demand for the requital of Christian love. Lyndon B. Johnson is a great Christian symbol, not because he introduces religion into American politics, (could never give a speech without quoting the Good Book, and pleading not for our criticism but our prayers) but because he is the first to demand for the requital of Christian love—not to love, but to be loved by every man, woman and child on the face of this earth (laughter). That's thumos too (laughter). And it is a very powerful force indeed. L. B. J. is Prince Andre Bolkonsky with no taste.

So all my ideas (like L. B. J.'s) initially came not for me but for someone else. All of the ideas which have popped out of my mind have come with people's names attached—from the very beginning, when I was 25 and first began having ideas, my own ideas—not exactly my own ideas, but things to say about other people's ideas. That was when I began to think, to have the first elements of a rudimentary culture, when I was 25. And from that time to this all of my ideas have come with names attached: ideas for other people—not abstract ideas for myself alone or for the world or for everyone and no one (Heidegger's das Man or Baudelaire's hypocrite lecteur) but magic ways of eliciting a response on other people's faces, people I knew and loved: my friends, my professors, my mother, and eventually my classes. Not just anybody, an absolutely indiscriminate, anonymous audience I desperately wanted to please—I call that the Lyndon B. Johnson syndrome (or sometimes the Hubert Humphrey or Richard Nixon syndrome)—but people I loved and respected, who taught me what a man ought to be. This is the point of Socrates' repartee with the triumphant orator, Agathon.

“My dear Agathon,” Socrates said, “do you think I've forgotten the ease and dignity with which you took the stage the other day, along with the other competing actors, and looked that vast audience square in the face, coolly prepared to show them what you are made of? In comparison with that, am I to suppose that a handful of friends could put you out of countenance?”

“Oh, I should never have made the mistake,” Socrates assured him, “of ascribing to you of all people, my dear Agathon, the tastes of the multitude! I have no doubt that, when you find yourself in what you consider intellectual company, you value their opinion more than the mob's. Yet how are we different from the common run of men, since we too swelled that immense crowd the other day? Put it this way. If you were to do something beneath you, the audience wouldn't have to be us, or even men of intelligence, but anyone you respected for whatever reason, and you'd still feel uncomfortable. Am I right?” “Perfectly,” Agathon replied.

I never wanted my writing to be like a diary. My thinking was not like a soliloquy; it was meant for other people—my attempt to explain myself to other people. My love of them, my admiration of them, my desire to communicate with them, was the motive-force that brought my mind into activity. What else? I didn't know what it meant to “think,” but I was trying to think, trying to become a “thinker.” I am now what I would call a “thinker,” and I presume I was trying to become this from the time I first majored in philosophy at Santa Clara. (It is so marvelous to be able to speak this sort of language, which would have been impossible for me five years ago.)

What was I trying to become in my efforts to become a thinker? What was I trying to do in my efforts to think? I didn't know, of course. How could I? I wanted to appear a thinker. I wanted to be able to say intelligent, bright, interesting things that would make people think I was intelligent, interesting, bright. I never thought that I would think that about myself, of course. That’s the sharp distinction between the facade and what's behind the facade that I found in Phaedrus' speech—after I had been trained to find it by Jean-Paul Sartre, who takes the distinction very seriously, and writes primarily of what I call the adolescent position in life, where there is the sharpest possible distinction between the facade which you project to the outer world and the way you feel behind the facade, Macomber, the bright young student of 2A, 3A, 4C, and the dirty shorts I was afraid to put in the wash.

Ah, so there are two great complexes of motivation for Plato. One moves from the outer world in: we want to take in. This is natural, animal instinct, aiming at our survival, and this type of motivation is a constellation formed around consuming, possessing, accumulating—all these form one complex of motivation, for Plato, which he calls "desire," the 3rd part of the soul, common to all men, not distinctively Greek, like nous and thumos. Plato lumps all that aspect of our nature together and calls it "desire." It is desire relative to what I have been calling the "first order." To consume, possess and accumulate things are "first order" desires. That is the natural proliferation of first-order desires, and it leads men into conflict like Hobbes' bloody "state of nature," where we are all at one another's throats over our piece of the pie.

Then, as man becomes cultured—as a condition of his becoming cultured—we have the second or “middle” part of the soul: thumos, the stable, middle class upon which the welfare of every polity depends. The middle part of Plato's soul must certainly be the most important, if we take seriously his own metaphor of the individual and the state, because clearly in states, for the welfare of polities, it is the solid, responsible middle-class which is most important. So it is very important, this thumos I've been talking about all during the course. It is the basis of another type of desire, not to take in something from the outer world, but to bring something to the outer world: the desire not to consume or accumulate, but to display and express, to "show off." Riding along on a bicycle, and crying, "Look mom, no hands!" That's thumos. I hear it most in Mozart.

I was listening to Mozart last night, two piano concertos. What a show-off! (Laughter.) And he doesn't try to conceal it! He brings it off with marvelous style. Every time I hear him, I think: that's the way I want to live! Mozart is a show-off, just as much as the pianist is a show-off. One is parasitic on the other—just another trip. He goes off on a greater power-trip than I do, as I'm standing up here. Anyway, we have another type of motivation which does not want to take from the world, but to display to the world. And this is the kind of motivation which is important at the second order of experience, producing what we might call "second order'' desire. It's immensely important, you'll find it immensely helpful, this distinction between "first" and "second" orders. All philosophy, from Parmenides on ("The one is...") hinges on it. Or we might put it this way. First order desire is to produce an alteration in the physical, or so-called "real" world. Second-order desire (thumos) is to produce an alteration in another consciousness.

Now, when we go into the thumos game, when we want to be excellent or superior for some reason, the reason is bound to be "low-level" by definition; we don't, can't want to learn or grow or progress for the "right" reason. How could we conceivably want to learn for the right reason, when we don't even know what that is until we have already altered, changed, grown? So we start learning for the wrong reason, if you will: to please others, to be momma's boy, to get the grades (pandering to one's professors), to have learned letters after one's name. I feel in youth a real insurgent integrity, the integrity of youth—as well as the Christian spirit—which makes them feel they're compromising their principles if they reflect any influence from without, much less miming, submitting to something they don't (yet) understand.

The Greek approach, the Platonic approach, as Jeff Mason puts it, is that all learning begins in mime. I went around for years miming intelligent, thoughtful, insightful, clever men. And after I'd mimed that, practiced it for a long time, lo and behold, I began to become it—which doesn't mean I threw off the role, as Jean-Paul Sartre envisages the "impossible project" of human life, but simply that I became comfortable in the role. The role no longer seemed to me simply a "facade" which I was projecting to the outer world. The thoughts I had initially gotten to please others—and really only to please others—began to come home to roost, and please me more than I had ever dreamt of being able to please others. At that point I was moving from thumos, the second part of the soul, to nous, the highest—the highest reach, the acme and pinnacle of the soul in Plato.

The way nous and thumos belong together, as I see it, is this: thumos pulls together a lot of conduct, behavior, activity—ideally the whole of one's life—into a unified, structured, impressive pattern for the outer world. Then nous can come along and look for the key to that pattern. We can ''find ourselves" (that curious desire or curious expression) in the unity of the life we unify initially in order to project to other people.

This, I think, is a much more phenomenological and aesthetic way of putting the point which Kant makes in his moral philosophy, in his second great critique, The Critique of Practical Reason. What is the "good" action? The good action, Kant says, is the moral action. And what action is moral? The rational action. And what action is rational? The action from principle and policy. Why is such action "good?" Because it unifies a life, structures it—gives it, if you will, identity. Personal identity is born in moral commitment, which pulls a life together, so that it doesn't play out fortuitously day-by-day, week-by-week, year-by-year. That is the fate of the average man, the man Plato identifies chiefly with the first part of the soul, desire. His life happens to him. He makes some key decisions—what job he will take, what woman he will marry (that, basically)—but his life still seems to happen to him, in the final analysis. He can't believe that he does it, that he makes it that way—as Sartre thunders at him, unfairly.

When you move up to the thumos level, as I put it, when you make an attempt to be a superior or illustrious man, in whatever way, you begin to pull your life together into a pattern to project to other people, and then you have a "self," in the significant sense, to discover: a special self, a self which is somehow the result of your own efforts, which results from a kind of tennis game between you and the outer world). The Socratic maxim is: Know thyself. In Greek, gnothi seautan. (With gnothi it's nice to put a straight line over the o, because that's the Greek long o the omega, and is, therefore, written o, with a little stripe above it.

Gnothi seautan: Know thyself! The Christian world would give us to believe that each one of us is born into the world, from a transcendent domain called "heaven" with a self already constituted, or at least already underway, with a particular role or destiny to fulfill, which it is possible for us to miss. Missing one's destiny, I presume, is "going to hell," losing one's immortal soul, a "soul" you are presumed to have been born with. The individual soul, the significant soul, for Plato—the individual cultured soul (thumos)—emerges in life, at the time of adolescence. We are not born with it. We have learned to think that a slave in ancient Rome and T. S. Eliot are both able to pursue the ideal of life in the same way or the same degree, that they are in the same game. This is what Christianity would have us believe. All men are in the same game, and, as Alan Watts puts it, "It's no game" the stakes are too crucial.

The stakes are now crucial indeed, literally life and death. In the last ten or twenty years, we have begun to see this. The thought first entered literature, so far as I know, in the early 30's, when Professor Martin Heidegger wrote: It is possible that we may destroy ourselves. That is the first time that thought occurred in world literature. Mankind may bring it all down! Whew! Stop it! Fifty years ago, that was all simply high, cerebral, Teutonic, existentialist theory. Now, we're witnessing existentialism come to the campus. "I saw Zeitgeist on horseback," Hegal once said. He'd seen Napoleon, and his heart was lifted up by the thought of a man with such charisma that he might unify Europe. Three years ago I wanted to say, "I saw Zeitgeist in the ruins of the Bank of America." That's existentialism come to the campus, with a wave of nihilism which might at any time erupt into violence, and destroy our bank, our administration building, or God knows what. And on the other hand, apparently, we might destroy the environment, (as it's said we've already destroyed Lake Eire) and bring the world to an end "not with a bang, but a whimper."

I have a Hamlet interpretation, which, if I had more time, I would lay on you. Hamlet, the young prince, sick at the thought of society and the establishment and injustice and the contemptible nature of it all, sick of his whole society—"Something is rotten in the state of Denmark." The only way he knows how to think is by himself, in the fetal position, anguishing in the way existentialists recommend as the only real way to where it's at, where it's really at. Hamlet curls up in the fetal position, in what are called Soliloquies, the modern projection of Christian prayer, and the precursor of the psychiatric interview. I was "under therapy," as it's called, for two and a half years, and the two therapists I worked with always strove manfully to make themselves into pure fence-posts—that is not to say anything, no matter what. They were miming the Christian God. That's the Christian God who, in the face of our most ardent appeals, replies (as Camus says) with stony silence.

Poor Hamlet. Like so many kids nowadays, he thinks he's been born out of heaven instead of out of history. The ghost reminds him of his "immortal soul," but we no longer know whether it's a godly spirit or a fiend from hell. Of course, young Hamlet is torn apart, and must ultimately be swept up into violence, driven to bring it all down. He's consumed by hatred of Denmark, and he has nothing but Danish categories in which to think (if one wants to call what he does "thinking"). It's not so easy to get free of it, that great prostituted mater of which we're all the product. That's the myth of becoming lily-pure, "putting off the old Adam (history, society) and putting on the new," the nonsense—the Christian nonsense—of conversion, the ideal of revolution. What young Hamlet needs is a bit of thumos, and a Platonic relationship with Ophelia and Horatio. He needs some sex, or love, some communication.

So, thumos puts together a pattern which nous discovers. By striving to be something for others, we eventually have the opportunity of becoming that for ourselves, acquiring in this way a being of our own choice. If we have freedom and leisure and affluence, and can get beyond responsibilities and duties and so on, we become free to create ourselves, as I am now doing, and that is causa sui, Spinoza's name for God. So love has a great deal to do with bringing thumos and nous together, which was the question I was addressing myself to in the beginning. In fact, Platonic love is the movement from thumos to nous; it is passion in search of insight—hence the title of Gerhard Kruger’s commentary on the Symposium, Einsicht und Leidenschaft (Insight and Passion). Platonic love is really the movement from one to the other. We love other people, not for Christ's sake, or because we'll be punished if we don't (which only puts us in a double-bind), but as the way to our most significant growth, the way to ourselves. It's Platonic love I want to preach in a Christian world, the love of growth in a world concerned only with deficiencies and their rectification.

Now, I want to say one more thing and, although it is late, I want you to remain very still, and not to break up and assume that, because I have finished with the material, I'm through. I visited the Black group last night for the second time and found that I had insulted them rather seriously when I talked of the "Nigger," and of Blacks' being less intelligent than whites, up until this time. Let me clarify what I think about that. I use the word "Nigger" to refer to someone who has been denied rights which ought reasonably to be his, and has, therefore, been prevented from exploring anywhere near the full range of his powers or potentiality. That is what the word "Nigger" means in my mind, and it is a reproach, neither to the man who is said to be one nor, in the first instance, to the tasteless individual who uses it. It is not that, neither a reproach to the man who is said to be one nor to the man who uses the word, but to the society which gives rise to the word, the society which needs the word, or provides something for it to claim to describe. In using the word, I want gently to remind society that our great endeavor is not yet over. No matter what our present statesmen suggest, it is not time simply to defend the greatness of American culture in Vietnam or South America, or wherever else our zany leaders may take us in this time of crisis, in defense of values we have not succeeded in making credible either at home or abroad, asking our young men to die for a society which, at the present moment, is noteworthy primarily for having spawned boredom and violence on a scale unprecedented in history. That's my position on the word "Nigger."

Plato says knowledge is recollection.You have to keep recollecting, reminding people of things they keep forgetting. The natural condition of mankind is forgetfulness, lethe (with a little straight line over the initial e) and "truth" in Greek is aletheia, "unhiddenness." This is the theme of Martin Heidegger's philosophy and the subject of my doctoral dissertation and first book.

About your being—blacks; being "unintelligent." I have already said there is no such thing as I.Q., which we might measure, least of all quantitatively (like weight, heat or brightness. There's no "soul substratum" to a man's being, nothing to measure (and nothing which can be punished after death). David Hume has argued this as cogently, in my mind, as any case can be argued. There is only motivation, and you have been kept out of the motivation—or intelligence—game, so that you are only now going into jurisprudence and philosophy and logic and literary criticism and all those other things which I call part of the intelligence game. It is not that you are any less intelligent than any other man; it is that you have been kept in an environment which does not give scope to the development of your intelligence, and this is the outrage which must change now—and is changing now.