The Political Soul: Plato on Thumos, Spirited Motivation, and the City by Josh Wilburn (review)

Reviewed by: The Political Soul: Plato on Thumos, Spirited Motivation, and the City by Josh Wilburn Kevin M. Kambo The Political Soul: Plato on Thumos, Spirited Motivation, and the City by Josh Wilburn ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), xxvi + 340 pp. This text is a welcome addition to the literature on thumos in Plato, particularly in how the author recasts spirited motivation and applies his vision to reading Plato's political theory. Josh Wilburn advances three theses, one minor and two major. The minor is that Plato is deeply committed to psychological tripartition—the division of the embodied soul into rational, spirited, and appetitive elements—with "each of the three parts of the soul … understood as a distinct source of psychological states and activities, including especially the ones that constitute motivations" (xxii; emphasis original). This straightforward reading of tripartition becomes the foundation for the two major theses, where Wilburn explicates the nature and effects of thumos in personal and political life. The first major thesis is a conception of spiritedness that is atypical. In the traditional understanding, spiritedness is grounded in love for honor and victory, and usually manifested through traits of aggression, competition, and ambition. On Wilburn's reading, however, Plato "also recognizes a second, cooperative or gentle side of spirit that is responsible for feelings of familial affection, friendship, and political fellowship" (xxii). Thumos therefore has a dual aspect, which duality leads to Wilburn's second major thesis: "That spirit is the distinctively social or political part of the soul. … It is what makes us capable of cooperating together in united social and political groups and protecting those groups against outsiders" (xxii; emphases original). Wilburn makes his case in four parts over ten chapters. Part I dedicates a chapter to each of his three theses. Chapter 1 defends reading Platonic tripartition to mean that the embodied soul has three discrete (15) or distinct (16) sources or subjects of psychological states and activities, with emphasis on motivation. Chapter 2 argues that thumos has a dual orientation, based on the philosophical dogs of Republic 2, who exhibit "savageness and aggression toward the foreign or allotrion, … and gentleness and affection toward the familiar or oikeion" (54). Supplementing this reading, Wilburn offers a table of some thirty-five aggressive/competitive and twenty gentle/cooperative traits that are manifestations of thumos (55–56). In the former category we find psychological conditions such as anger (orgē), envy (phthonos), and courage (andreia), and in the latter we see softness (malakia), friendship (philia), and moderation (sōphrosunē). Chapter 3 develops the duality of spiritedness into an argument that spirited motivations are what make possible social and political life; that socio-political education occurs through the formation of thumos, especially through teaching what is praiseworthy and End Page 690 blameworthy; and that the civic strife and faction that threaten political unity are produced by spiritedness that is captive to appetitive or "pleonectic" purposes (61, 91). Parts II–IV are the application of the schema of part I to three different eras in the Platonic corpus (xxiii), reading the dialogues through a moderate developmentalism. Part II tackles spiritedness and precursors to explicit tripartition in the so-called early dialogues. Wilburn focuses on the Great Speech in Protagoras (chapter 4) and also treks through Symposium, Gorgias, Menexenus, Meno, Apology, and Crito (chapter 5). Part III deals with two dialogues where tripartition is plain to see: Republic (chapters 6 and 7) and Timaeus (chapter 8). Wilburn argues that the musical and gymnastic regimens in the Republic are ordered to forming thumos, and that developing dual-facing spiritedness in the context of tripartition means making spirit allied and auxiliary to reason but aggressive and opposed to appetite (165, 189). His treatment of the Timaeus takes up the problem of how the discrete and distinct parts of the tripartite soul communicate and offers a creative solution employing psycho-somatic activities of perception, memory, and imagination (211–21). Finally, Part IV works out the importance of spirited motivation in latter-day Plato, arguing that the weaving together of the dispositions of andreia and sōphrosunē in the Statesman is profitably understood as integrating the two sides of spirit (chapter 9) and that the...