Abstract
According to Plato, thymòs—a notion denoting the human need for recognition—triggers off the most powerful and overwhelming human passions. Indeed, any action originated and nurtured by thymòtic passions places its own raison d’être in itself. The acts motivated by thymòs can either improve or (even) worsen someone’s wellness: they do not entail any pay-off in the present or future, and their nature is not influenced nor mitigated by monetary incentives. Moreover, it follows that since identity is based on the others’ recognition (both individuals and social groups), then indulging with thymòtic passions and building up someone’s own identity are exactly the same process. Indeed, thymòtic passions are identitarian passions. This paper argues the relevance of the thymòtic approach. We do propose a conceptual framework that we reckon is useful and innovative in order to study and interpret these peculiar forms of human action. We also point out the social and “environmental” conditions that stimulate their appearance.
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Notes
The notion of thymòs—namely, the identitarian need for recognition that human beings feel in order to place themselves within society—goes back to Plato, who in the IV book of his The Republic described the soul as composed by three different elements: the first component is rational (loghistikón) and lies in the head; the second part, to be found in the internal organs, is featured with concupiscence (epithymeticón); the third and last element resides in the heart and is depicted as spirited and irascible (thymoidés). According to Plato, the main part of the human behaviour can be explained by referring to the combination of the first two elements described above: the epithymeticón and the loghistikón—the organs and the head. The former leads human beings to temptation: therefore, they act in order to get what they desire. The latter works as a rational guide, in order to facilitate the research of what human beings desire as a consequence of their concupiscence. However, human beings are also and mostly busy in seeking the identification and recognition of their personal and social value, along with that of people, things, ideas and principle to which they assign importance (See Galimberti 1999: 592–593). In other words, thymòs is the expression of the short-tempered soul. Its etymology derives from the verb thyo—to fumigate, a word that shares the same root with the latin word fumus—expressing a lack of recognition and identification (See Bodei 2010: 9 and 115). Thymòs is further characterised by two crucial facets: someone’s search for distinction from the others as well as for his/her primacy over the others. This paper does not concentrate on these two particular aspects. Nevertheless, we will bring to the reader’s attention one of the most debated and criticised books of the last two decades—Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man (1992)—who owes very much to this philosophic background.
The inverted commas are here used in order to stress the still very much important and relevant legacy of Edward Said’s Orientalism (Said 1978; See also Chakrabarty 2004:65). In our perspective, “The West” is a metaphor with a proper and complex historical genealogy (not a “natural” category), only useful to describe and link societies and nation states to a particular kind of political economy and self-representation strategies, who are not marked, however, by geographic homogeneity. Therefore, under the category “West” one may find European states, the USA, Canada, Japan and Australia, and some others.
The notion of social drama drives us to the domain of social anthropology, and in particular to Victor Turner’s studies (1982, 1986). In a nutshell, social drama refers to a unit of disharmonic social process produced by dynamics of social conflicts, namely social crisis. Social drama is a process made of four constant phases, which the Author calls breach, crisis, redress and schism. The notion is intimately connected to that of ritual (and in particular to the rites of passage, with their structural and anti-structural, or liminal, stages), and serves as one of the main basis for the theory of performance elaborated by Richard Schechner (1985, 2004) Indeed, we can observe from the very beginning that “social drama” clearly represents a metaphor that the Author takes from the world of theatre. In fact, Turner recognises that he took cue from the Greek drama, where “one witnesses the helplessness of the human individual before the Fates”. In this case, he is saying that the Fates is the social process, and that conflicts in society are rarely only personal affairs, but that they almost always involve social relationships.
In the contemporary literature, the word “passion” is often replaced by the word “emotion”, as our readers can also notice by looking at some of the quotations in the text. Both “passion” and “emotion” refer to the concept of “affective status”. However, we reckon it is important to underline the relevant discrepancy between the two terms: while the notion of “emotion” stands for a passing, transient feeling, “passion” represents a violent, persistent state, which sometimes cannot even totally been controlled or dominated. Passion is chronic, powerful, complex, longstanding, capable of polarizing someone’s attention towards a unique objective (See Cattarinussi 2006: 17). Therefore, we invite the reader to consider the term “emotion”, when it comes across in the text, as just a synonymous of “passion” as conceptualised here.
We are clearly making use of the language of the game theory. In particular, the strategic games are normally represented through the construction of charts containing all the choices one can consider in a given situation. These options, or choices, are called matrices of the payoffs associated to any combination of the possible strategies available to the actors involved.
What happens between Odysseus and the sailors may be interpreted as a self-confirming equilibrium, in the way explained by Fudenberg and Levine (1993). In it, the players, differently from what happens in the equilibrium described by Nash, do not have a complete comprehension of the game they are playing, and can have wrong beliefs regarding the strategies followed by other players. The theoretical point is that mistakes are coherent with one’s experience; in particular, with the observation of one’s choices. The sailors observe several of Odysseus rational choices, while Odysseus observes several choices of obedience by the sailors. But what matters is that it’s created between them a stable equilibrium, corroborated by reciprocal experience. Until this is proven valid, the sailors will believe that Odysseus choice in front of the Sirens is rational, while Odysseus is led to believe the sailors will obey him. Because of this balance, Odysseus will hear the Sirens, and everyone will survive.
We do not use the concept of “performance” without specific purpose. Odysseus behaviour is theatrical, indeed. Performance recalls the notion of social drama, which itself recalls the concept of rite of passage. The latter is characterised by three stages, the second of which is called liminal, or anti-structural, since all normal, daily social rules are interrupted, broken, suspended. Therefore, by this performance—his being fastened as if he was not the Captain—Odysseus is experiencing a rite of passage, a dramatic moment that will change his fate.
This also recalls the topic of the uncertainty of the value, a question that we will address in Sect. 5.
We reckon unnecessary to produce an exhaustive catalogue of what is to be considered as “thymotic passion”. However, a hypothetical list should absolutely include three couples, at least: amor fou and hate; respect and shame; pride and outrage.
This definition includes elaborations such as that of psychological games, or games with belief-dependent motivations, in which the players’ utilities “may also directly depend on the beliefs (about choices, beliefs, or information) they hold” (Attanasi and Nagel 2008, p. 205).
Similar reactions are hardly understood, if considered outside the logic of recognition need from the counterpart. Our only purpose is underlining that an adequate attention to similar reactions can drive to an innovative analysis about how markets and organizations function.
As underlined by Hirshleifer (1993, p. 186), the loss of control is a feature of passions we cannot abstract from. This means “hot” passions (like thymós) are morally intractable phenomena, because usually their potential (which is constructive as well as disruptive) does not bear limits nor does it respect proportions; a codification of the legitimate reasons and of the means allowed to morally practice, let’s assume, anger, Eros, fear or imagination, would be a wishful thinking. Moral rationality is thus extraneous to our argument.
In the scientific literature of psychology and neuroscience, the use by decision-makers of heuristics instead of optimization is a widespread idea that goes back at least to Newell and Simon (1976). Nevertheless, authors like Kahneman and Gigerenzer, mentioned in the text, express very different opinions regarding the nature and role of heuristics. In a nutshell, while Kahneman reckons they never approach the optimal strategy, but rather they weakly replace it when it absconds, Gigerenzer thinks many of them are tools of the ecologic rationality’s satisfacing operation.
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Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Angelo Antoci, Simone Bertoli, Gianluca Bonaiuti, Luigino Bruni, Luca Corazzini, Vittorioemanuele Ferrante, Pierluigi Sacco and Roberto Ricciuti for their comments and suggestions. Any imperfection is ours.
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Bellanca, N., Pichillo, G. Identitarian passions: the overwhelming power of the human recognition need. Int Rev Econ 61, 13–38 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12232-014-0194-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12232-014-0194-8