Dignity and Indignation, Ancient and Modern: Plato’s Thumos and Rousseau’s Amour-propre

Abstract

This dissertation is a study of a forgotten part of the human psyche, a part at the core of our political nature. Thumos was originally conceived by Plato as a third principle of the mind distinct from reason and desire, a principle responsible for the attachment to justice and courage. This principle was later reconceived and subjected to probing criticism by Jean-Jacques Rousseau under the name of amour-propre. Most simply, thumos and amour-propre are responsible for three related concerns: the desire to be honored or esteemed by others, the pride that reflects our own esteem for our comparative worth or dignity, and the indignation or anger that defends such dignity. These passions and their education pose fundamental problems for any political regime: for Rousseau, amour-propre was responsible for “what is best and worst among men,” for the “virtues” that make us political beings and for the most pathological of our “vices.” The project has two aims. The first is to recover an understanding of this psychic principle through two thinkers who examined it in greatest depth and to offer an account of why it is widely neglected in contemporary political science. The second is to explain why Rousseau turned to Plato in his critique of the 18th-century Enlightenment: why is Plato the philosopher Rousseau cites the most throughout his writings? I argue that Rousseau recovered and repurposed the thought of Plato in his effort to understand what was pathological about the amour-propre of the “bourgeois,” the human type promoted by the modern Enlightenment. Rousseau drew from Plato a conception of the natural human being as an ideal or standard from which to judge political life and its pathologies. This standard for both thinkers was characterized by the undivided unity or wholeness of the human psyche. Rousseau criticized Enlightenment efforts to ground morality on a form of public esteem that placed individuals in contradiction with themselves, preventing the unity of the mind. The project is focused on Rousseau’s Emile, or On Education (1762) and its response to Plato’s Republic. I situate these in a broader study of each thinker’s other political writings and their contexts, from the treatment of thumos in the poetry of Homer to the critique of amour-propre in the 17th-century French Augustinians who first adopted the term. On the whole, Plato proves to be a greater critic of thumos, and Rousseau a greater optimist about amour-propre, than they are widely taken to be. Plato’s apparent promotion of thumos as a motive for civic virtue is in fact accompanied by a critique of its tendency to divide the mind: thumos gives rise to contradictory opinions on morality that are only fully resolved in the Socratic vision of the philosophic life, the rare perfection or end of human nature. Conversely, Rousseau’s influential critique of bourgeois amour-propre is in fact accompanied by a characteristically Enlightenment optimism about the possibility of reshaping the passion, on the basis not of any highest end but of its simplest and most elemental roots, toward a form of morality that would avoid setting ordinary minds in contradiction with themselves. For Rousseau this unity of mind was the precondition for genuine self-rule in any individual. Rousseau’s optimism about the educable character of amour-propre is thus a neglected theoretical foundation for the democratic political theory that he took to a new height in the Enlightenment in spite of his return to the ancient Greeks.