I loves me some rage

So, lately, I've been doing a lot of work on rage. It initially formed the core of one of my dissertation chapters, but now it's bloated to incorporate a few chapters. My current chapter** uses rage as a centerpiece. Here's a problem: I haven't found many good discussions of rage. I'm using a Straussian perspective, so of course Leo Strauss and Allan Bloom (who did the relevant translation of The Republic, where the thymos constitutes one of the three parts of the souls) are major influences, but these discussions haven't quite handled all my lingering questions. That's why my writing goes so slow: I think I understand a concept, then I start writing about it, and my detail-oriented constantly encounters subtleties of formulation that I never suspected before. Several other books that I looked which mention thymos give unsatisfactory definitions of it.

Anyway, thus it was with gratitude that I then encountered Angela Hobbes's Plato and the Hero. Here, in about a paragraph, is the single best description of thymos that I have yet see:
  • “I wish to claim that the essence of human thumos is the need to believe that one counts for something, and that central to this need will be a tendency to form an ideal image of oneself in accordance with one’s conception of the fine and noble.” Failure to live up to this results in anger, self-disgust, or shame. “This ideal of oneself also needs to be confirmed by social recognition: others must treat one in accordance with one’s self-image,” and obtaining this recognition not only requires self-assertion and maybe aggression, but “any offense committed to one’s self-image by others will prompt anger and a desire to retaliate” (30). Yet thumos is no mere driving force. It responds to reason and social expectations. It’s susceptible to a proper education. 

Saruman will have a warped thumos (i.e., his anger) that gets out of hand; otherwise, the above is a perfect description of Boromir, the most recognizably heroic (non-Christian) character in the book. Anyway, I feel like baking Dr. Hobbes a cake or something.



**Get this title, "Harken Not to Wild Beats: A Look at Rhetoric and Rage in Saruman and Thrasymachus." Ain't that fantastic? Makes you want to start reading immediately, don't it?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Genre Fantasy Bestsellers through 1990

Image
I've been studying Keith Justice's Bestseller Index , which compiles information from two separate bestseller lists -- New York Times Book Review and Publishers Weekly -- up through 1990, and the results are ridiculously fascinating. For instance, you wanna take a stab at which SFF author has the most individual books appear on a bestseller list? No, it ain't Heinlein, Clark, Herbert, or Asimov. It's not even Terry Brooks or David Eddings. No, the answer is Piers Anthony . And even if you somehow pulled that name out of thin air, I guarantee you'll never guess how truly dominate Anthony was. Up through 1990, Anthony had more than double than number of distinct bestsellers than the next most frequent bestseller, Anne McCaffrey. Whereas Anthony had an astounding  22 different books appear on a bestseller list, McCaffrey had "only" 9.** Now, caveats. These numbers need to be taken with one (or two) grains of salt. For instance, although Anthony had 22 two dis
Read more

Thoughts upon Reading Tolkien's New & Expanded LETTERS

So, I'm reading through the newly expanded version of Tolkien's Letters. One thing I hadn't properly realized is that these letters were part of Carpenter's original manuscript back in 1981, but Carpenter had to cut them due to cost. Turns out that Carpenter had a pretty keen eye on what could bear cutting -- most of this new stuff isn't terribly interesting, but I discovered a few nuggets. VINDICATED!! (Me, sorta) Naturally, whenever you read new primary material, your first instinct is to check to see if anything contradicts something you've said in print ... especially biographically. Well, I've made three big "biographical" claims, and here's my sigh of relief: Concerning my claim that, in 1954, Tolkien and colleagues contrived to create CS Lewis's academic chair at Cambridge in exchange for them nominating EM Forster for the Nobel Prize. Nothing in  Letters  supports or contradicts this. In my recent article for  Notes & Queries ,
Read more

Uncovering CS Lewis's First Religious Poem

 So, with my article's official acceptance by the journal English Text Construction , it's time to let the cat out of the bag. Using a combination of metrical analysis and biography, I've ascertained with near perfect certainty the first religious poem C. S. Lewis poem ever wrote .... a short poem, "Sweet Desire," that scholars have never previously paid any attention to. This poem is firmly datable to early 1930, probably January or February is my guess, and given the poem's subject matter, it's clearly talking about CSL's fears and intellectual trepidation about becoming a theist and abandoning atheism for good. It's basically Lewis's version of Caedmon's Hymn . The full metrical details will have to await my article, but one interesting caveat on my claims to firstness. In my peer reviewer's commentary, they recommended I contact a CSL scholar named  Charlie W. Starr, who's been working on Lewis's handwriting for quite a lon
Read more