Walking with Thumos

It looks like a week of milestones: Helena took her first steady, solo steps today.  Just four or five steps from me to Rita and then Rita to me, never sturdy or secure, but she could repeat them, and she wasn't just using her feet to catch up with her body as she fell forward.  Perhaps the funniest thing, however, with a soccer-mad father in a futebol-mad country, is that as she walked, she also dribbled a ball with her feet, kicking it once or twice as she covered the yard and a half between her parents.  And I don't think this is coincidence: as she put her feet in front of her to kick the ball, she overcame the balance problem that had kept her from walking, the tendency to get her weight in front of her feet and then fall down.  The ball seemed to compensate for that.


The most exciting thing about her steps, through, was not the dribbling.  It was the look of extraordinary pride that she expressed on her face, the quick little screams of joy that stood in for "I did it, I did it!"  For the last hour, well after her achievements, she hasn't stopped smiling and calling out.  It seemed a good time to tell her about Peter Sloterdijk's valorization of thumos (pride, heart, honor) over eros (love, desire) in some of his most recent work.

Much of modern and post-modern philosophy is about desire: Hegel, Freud, Lacan, Zizek... lots of the people I write about in this blog.  Sloterdijk, however, as I told Helena, thinks that this emphasis avoids something that the Greeks considered to be a much less ambiguous value: thumos.  Pride and the love of honor, the desire for the respect of others, motivated the Greeks to do heroic things, and Sloterdijk sees it also behind George Soros or Bill Gates's immense charitable foundations.  But I didn't tell Helena about the supposed political benefits of pride.  I concentrated on the feeling she was expressing.

Thumos lies at the root of "enthusiasm" (to be filled with pride or honor), and it is something that I love to see in Helena.  She isn't ashamed of her pride, as many of us learn to be; when she does something well, it makes her happy, and she wants it to make others happy, as well.  The point isn't to inspire the envy of others (as is often true of too many of our motivations), but just to be excited and proud of herself.

And today, as she stumbled across the floor, dribbling a little ball, she deserved her thumos.  And she makes me enthusiastic along with her.