Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/235821
The Art of Manliness Continued speaks with:"Give me a game dog any day, a dog that bites as tissue paper but keeps coming back and I'll take him." Fearless indomitability is central to the success of the human warrior as well, who must not lose heart as the heat of battle intensifies, and his morale flags. To encourage their respective armies to fight harder in the midst of combat, Ajax and Hector "stirred up the thumos and strength" of each of their men. Plato did not see human gameness as being of the same kind demonstrated by animals, however. Rather, he argued that man's thumos, at least when properly trained, is born of a rational type of courage — that man is andreios (manly) when his thumos "holds fast to the orders of reason about what he ought or ought not to fear, in spite of pleasure and pain." In other words, when engaged in a worthy fight, you neither recklessly underestimate real threats that should be feared, nor overestimate threats that shouldn't be feared, and are not swayed from your course by either the satisfaction of pursuing blind revenge nor the fear of being hurt and the love of comfort and luxury. Plato argued that andreia meant conquering fear and pain of any sort – being the kind of man "who confronts misfortune in all cases with steadfast endurance." Evaluation, Discernment, Decision-Making JOBS for TEAMS | So thumos keeps you in a fight that your Reason has decided is indeed a worthy one. But how do you make that determination? Plato believed, as Angela Hobbs put it, that "courage involves both emotional commitment and evaluative belief, an intellectual and emotional appreciation of what things are worth taking risks for and in what circumstances." 20 JobsForTeams0114_manliness.indd 3 Thumos plays a role in both the emotional and evaluative parts of that equation. As we mentioned last time, the task of Reason as the "charioteer" is to take stock of his own desires, and those of his two horses, and then to choose to satisfy only his best and truest ones – those that lead to virtue and arête, or excellence. Reason's ally in this task is his white horse, or thumos, which can be trained to help make this kind of judgment. Shirley Sullivan offers examples of this function of thumos in Greek literature: "Thumos is mentioned in connection with several intellectual activities.These includepondering, thinking, knowing, deliberation, planning and perceiving. Often too a person puts things into thumos for consideration. Odysseus 'ponders evils in his thumos' for the suitors. Zeus 'thinks about events' in his thumos as he watches the battle of Troy…Hermes 'deliberates in thumos' how to take Priam safely from Achilles' camp. Circe tells Odysseus 'to plan in his thumos' the course he will take after passing the Sirens.Telemachus tells Penelope that now that he has grown up,'he perceives and knows in his thumos' good and evil. It is in thumos that Hesiod tells Perses to 'consider' the value of the competitive spirit." Thumos is the place in which you ponder possibilities, and at the same time, it helps you know and understand which of those possibilities to choose. It's related to gut feelings and intuition — what Jeffrey Barnouw calls "visceral thinking" — and it also has a prophetic quality – giving you a sense of foreboding about where a decision may lead, or something bad to come. I personally believe you can know a decision is right when both your mind and heart agree – when your Reason and thumos align. When you feel that swelling of the heart, that course of excitewww.jobsforteams.com 12/4/13 11:38 AM