Now, in 2006, Professor Mansfield
published the thought-provoking book Manliness. Had he published a book
with the one-word title Courage, it
would probably would have gone largely unnoticed. But Mansfield's book Manliness caused a stir, largely because
feminists in their antimasculist rage have tried to expunge the title word from
polite discussion, as he notes. For an account of the controversy, see the
Wikipedia entry about Mansfield: Click Here
Of course, Mansfield is playing on
the Greek word that is transliterated as andreia,
which can be translated as courage or manliness. But feminists want to hear
nothing further about manliness, which they associate with so-called patriarchy.
Feminists want to overthrow patriarchy and everything it stands for in their
estimate, including manliness. Odd as it may sound, Mansfield sees feminist rage against certain
practices in the past regarding women as being powered by manliness, as he uses
this term. He is not being ironic. Indeed, he is correctly characterizing the
feminist rage as involving political courage of the sort that the ancient
Greeks usually associated with manliness.
Mansfield could have made his point
about feminist manliness in more neutral terminology by saying that feminist
rage against certain practices in the past regarding women was powered by their
cultivation of the part of their psyches known to Homer, Plato, and Aristotle
as thumos (or thymos), the part of the human psyche known for its spiritedness
(or the spirited part, for short). Indeed, Mansfield intimates as much. In his
discussion of manliness Mansfield
alludes to Achilles in the Homeric epic the Iliad,
and Mansfield
does discuss Plato's and Aristotle's use of the term thumos. Plato and
Aristotle understood that this part of the psyche could be under-developed or
over-developed, so they understood that this part of the psyche needed to be
developed and tempered carefully through the cultivation of the virtue of
courage, which they defined as the mean between the extremes of under-doing or
over-doing the courage thing. From the time of the ancient Greeks down to the
present time in Western culture, boys and men have probably tended to
over-develop the courage thing, so that they need to cultivate the virtue of
courage as the way in which to temper their over-development of this part of
their psyches. By contrast, most girls and women in Western culture have
probably tended to under-develop this part of their psyches. But there is a catch
in trying to cultivate the virtue of courage as the mean between the extremes
of over-doing or under-doing the courage thing. When we are not firmly locked
into one extreme, we usually tend to go from one extreme to the other, rather
than firmly lock into the mean between the extremes. Thus, we can miss the mean
represented by the virtue of courage by tending to one extreme or the other, or
by swinging wildly from one extreme to the other. Mansfield advises people to be careful not to
provoke a man who is pumping the thumos part of his psyche extremely strongly.
I would endorse his advice. But I would add that people should also be careful
not to provoke women who are pumping the thumos part of their psyches extremely
strongly, as most feminists today are. Unfortunately for Lawrence Summers,
Harvard's first Jewish president, he learned this the hard way. I will discuss
his case below.
In addition to thematizing thumos
in his book, Mansfield has devoted his 2007 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities
to exploring thumos further. I discuss Mansifeld's 2007 Jefferson Lecture in
the Humanities in my "Afterword" in the revised and expanded second edition of
my book Walter Ong's Contributions to Cultural Studies: The Phenomenology of
the Word and I-Thou Communication (Hampton Press, 2015, pp. 197-205; first
ed., 2000).
In my estimate, thumos is a topic
that deserves to be discussed far more extensively than it has been by
Mansfield in his 2006 book and in his 2007 Jefferson Lecture if the Humanities
and by Angela Hobbs in Plato and the
Hero: Courage, Manliness and the Impersonal Good (Cambridge University
Press, 2000) and by Barbara Koziak in Retrieving
Political Emotion: Thumos, Aristotle, and Gender (Pennsylvania State
University Press, 2000). (Unfortunately, Mansfield does not mention either of
these recent studies of thumos in his 2006 book.)
Bearing these general observations
in mind, I want to turn now to my critique of Mansfield's Manliness. He could have strengthened his overall argument by drawing
on the work of the American Jesuit Renaissance specialist and cultural historian
Walter J. Ong (1912-2003; Ph.D. in English, Harvard University, 1955). To be sure,
Ong does not happen to advert explicitly to manliness or thumos, both of which Mansfield thematizes. Even
so, Ong attends carefully to the phenomenology of male agonism in the Western intellectual
tradition. In his most sustained discussion of male agonism, he sees it as the
dynamism by which men establish a distinctively masculine identity, which is
related to what Mansfield
refers to as manliness.
In the preface to his book, Mansfield concludes that
in his book Manliness he has set
forth a "[m]odest defense" of manliness (x), but he hopes that "educated women"
will read his modest defense (ix). In short, he sees himself as elucidating
matters regarding men not just to help men better understand themselves, but
also to help women better understand men. In Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality [Gender], and Consciousness
(Cornell University Press, 1981), the published version of his 1979 Messenger
Lectures at Cornell University, Ong also seems to be elucidating matters
regarding men not just to help men better understand themselves, but also to
help women better understand men. But Mansfield
goes so far as to write of the contemporary feminist movement as involving
manly courage. In the reviews and other discussions of his book that I have
seen, no one has contested this specific claim about the women's movement.
However, when we allow that there is a thumotic dimension to the women's
movement, then we are implying that not just men have the part of the psyche
known as thumos - but so do women. But does this make any difference? Would it
help women and men understand the women's movement better if they acknowledged
the thumotic dimension of the movement? Would it help women better understand
themselves if they were to advert to this part of the psyche in themselves?
More specifically, would it help Martha C. Nussbaum better understand the upheavals
she writes about in Upheavals of Thought:
The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge University Press, 2001) if she were
able to see some of them as related to thumos? In a similar way, would it help
Richard B. Felson better understand the various cases of violence that he
studies in Violence & Gender
Reexamined (American Psychological Association, 2002) if he were to see the
impulses toward such violence as arising from thumos? In all honesty, I do not
know the answers to these questions. However, the questions do presuppose that women
are similar to men in having the part of the psyche known as thumos. As we will
have occasion to note below, Ong identifies the male hormone testosterone as
playing a significant part in male agonism. Testosterone may condition the
functioning of thumos in boys and men. Nevertheless, Ong's studies of male agonism
may enable us to understand female agonism more fully when we see both male
agonism and female agonism as functions of thumos, even though testosterone may
influence male agonism.
Ong's Work
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