Thymos

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Thymos ( ancient Greek θυμός thymos , German 'life force' ) is an expression for the mood of a person.

Origin of the term

Thymos is a philosophical concept introduced by Plato as one of the three basic human motivations. In ancient times, the (mortal) thymos was distinguished from the (immortal) psyche ( ψυχή ) and the nous ( νοῦς ).

The ancient medicine suspected the seat of the mind in the diaphragm .

Anthropological hypotheses

From the use of different words for parts of the human person and personality in the Homeric epics, Bruno Snell drew the conclusion that people in this epoch had not yet possessed a self- awareness in the sense of an awareness of independent freedom of action and responsibility, but rather were either from their thymos or theirs Nous , but seen controlled by the gods in case of doubt . Snell's thesis was later developed by ER Dodds and Christopher Gill .

Conceptual derivations

From Thymos the name derives thymus from, a formerly "Growth gland" mentioned, located behind the breastbone glandular structure in the anatomy of children and adolescents, which is after the maturity regresses.

Thymopsyche

In psychology the term thymopsyche ("mind soul") was sometimes used, which was supposed to denote the part of the mind in the soul life.

Alexithymia

The term alexithymia was coined by American psychiatrists in the 1970s to describe the phenomenon of congenital or acquired emotional blindness.

Megalothymia and Isothymia

Thymos can be interpreted in the sense of the political and ethical philosophy of Hegel as the striving of people for recognition of their achievement by others. By transforming this human striving for validity into a rational form, according to Hegel, sterile power and competitive struggles can be overcome in the liberal social order based on the principle of equality . Thymos does not remain unchanged, but is not completely denied either, but is integrated into the Hegelian system as the driving force for the progress of history . While isothymia describes the need to be recognized as an individual of equal value, megalothymia is the desire to be recognized as superior by others. Francis Fukuyama , who developed this pair of terms, believed that man's thymotic striving is ultimately always aimed at being recognized as superior to other people and at putting this desire into practice, so that the postulate of the equality of all members of society never completely satisfies him. According to Fukuyama, those forms of identity politics that have led to the rise of anti-liberal, right-wing populist and nationalist movements worldwide since the mid- 2000s are "rooted in the thymos".

literature

Individual evidence

  1. a b c Ursula Hermann: Knaur's dictionary of origin. Lexicographical Institute, Munich 1982, p. 479.
  2. Thymus, the. In: Duden online , according to DWDS, listed in GWDS 1999; Accessed in April 2019.
  3. Markus Antonius Wirtz (ed.): Dorsch - Lexicon of Psychology. 18th edition. Hogrefe, Göttingen 2017 ( online keyword ).
  4. Jens Uehlecke: No feeling, nowhere. In: time knowledge . 02/2006 (published online in Zeit Online , November 6, 2009, accessed October 11, 2018).
  5. Henk de Berg: The end of history and the civil constitutional state. Hegel - Kojève - Fukuyama. Francke, Tübingen 2007, ISBN 978-3-7720-8205-4 , pp. 27-30 and ö.
  6. ^ John O'Neill : Economy, Equality and Recognition. In: Larry Ray, Andrew Sayer (Eds.): Culture and Economy after the Cultural Turn. Sage , London a. a. 1999, ISBN 0-7619-5816-9 , pp. 76-91 (here: pp. 79-81).
  7. ^ Francis Fukuyama: Identity. How the loss of dignity endangers our democracy. Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 2019, ISBN 978-3-455-00528-8 , p. 42.