In the Beginning
Plato’s Timaeus

Plato’s cosmology as depicted by Calcidius in his commentary to his fourth-century Latin translation of the Timaeus.

2,882 words

I am embarrassed by the world. I cannot believe that a watch exists and has no watchmaker. — Voltaire

Which of the patterns had the artificer in mind when he made the world? — Plato

Given the world we have created, or rather a world which has been created for us, whoever “we” are could do a lot worse than take advice from the Classical world. For the vast majority of us, our world is one we never made, and those who did are becoming intentionally isolated, remote from those whose lives they control, living as they do in a dry and ideological gated community. Some philosophy from the source might irrigate them a little. After all, philosophy runs through the British political class like the name of an English seaside town through a stick of rock. At least, it should.

A common rite of academic passage for the aspiring British politician is PPE, or Philosophy, Politics and Economics, generally at one of the Oxbridge universities. Note that this degree was given its title in an age when men cared about education enough to have some vestigial classicism about them and give a very definite and hierarchical order of importance to this triune. Philosophy comes before politics, and politics comes before economics. It is inconceivable that most British politicians will not have read Plato’s Republic, for example.

In fact, it is the Republic that is responsible for the Timaeus, as the company assembled for dinner at the house of Socrates during that discourse the previous evening are together again — almost — the next day. They are not hungover — this is not the Symposium — although like that gentle dialogue, Socrates is not the main speaker in the Timaeus. There is thus less of standard Platonism about the Timaeus, and it is more Pythagorean in tone. That said, it contains familiar and influential Platonic ideas, as well as an account of the difference between body and soul which sets in train much in Christian thought, and on which it is worth dwelling.

For many centuries, the Timaeus was almost exclusively the whole of the Platonic corpus available to the West, until Marsilio Ficino translated the rest for Cosimo de’ Medici, who wished to read Plato before he died. This solitariness may be the reason that some Plato scholars, in their ticklish obsession to arrange the Platonic dialogues into a system as well as a temporal order, have placed it at the center of the Platonic scheme. It may also be that these scholars are responding to their own religious impulse in placing Plato’s creation myth — for that is what the Timaeus is — in a position of centrality, and thus authority.

All cultures have their creation myths. Although Greek tradition is usually seen as Homeric, in terms of creation it is actually an amalgam of Homer, Hesiod, and Orphism, with Homer mentioning only the creation of the gods and Hesiod extending this to the creation of the world from Chaos before putting in place the gods and their part in this celestial origin familiar to readers of Greek myth. The Orphic version is very different, and revolves around the resurrection of the god Dionysus. Marta Fatica contrasts this mixture of myths with established Western religions:

In some cultures, the story of creation is concrete and well-recorded, such as in the Book of Genesis used by the Abrahamic faiths. However, in Ancient Greece, the creation myths, as with many other Greek myths, vary drastically between different traditions.

Preceded by what might be seen as either a refinement of Homeric myth or a conflicting lack of cultural consensus, the way is open for Plato to add to the cultural mélange which seeks to explain how this world came to be.

That the Timaeus opens with an unnamed missing member of the party invited by Socrates is irrelevant in textual terms. It does, however, serve to help convince the reader of the authenticity of the scene reported. It is as though Plato has used a subtle dramatic device to say to posterity: This really happened, and my friend Socrates was there. Socrates had invited his guests to reassemble the night before, and that dinner was the scene of the Republic, the main points of which are repeated and summarized by Socrates at the start of the Timaeus. This saves the reader new to Plato from necessarily having to read the Republic before reading the Timaeus.

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Socrates wishes to continue on the theme of the state, desiring to see it in action as though he were observing painted animals, or live animals at rest, and wants to see them in action. Let us see, he suggests, our invented state at war. After a passing swipe at the Sophists, which Socrates never could resist, Timaeus is proposed as honoring one part of the bargain made at Socrates’ dinner that, as he had entertained them, they should return the favor.

It is Critias who begins, however, telling the twin stories of the sinking of Atlantis, and his own grandfather’s account of Solon’s conversation with the Egyptian high priest of Salis during which the latter declares that the Greeks are “like children” in that they have no history and no written record of the past (a point which greatly interested Jacques Derrida). This both opens the Timaeus to the validity of myth, already demonstrable by the Homeric tradition of the ancient Greeks, and also that the discourse is free to hypothesize as far back in history as it is possible to go — that is, to the creation of the world itself.

Timaeus is chosen by the company to continue with the tale of the world’s creation, as he is the member of the party who is versed in astronomy, and an important epistemological proviso will show a side of the Timaeus which doesn’t necessarily explain to us how the world was created, as Genesis purports to do, but gives us an insight into the inquiring Greek mind in both its schematics and its epistemology. Plato’s version of creation may not tell us with certainty how the world was made, but it does tell us a lot about the workings of the Greek mind. And the first clear outline of this comes with Timaeus’ distinction between the familiar Platonic values of episteme and doxa, indubitable truth and passing opinion:

First then, in my judgment, we must make a distinction and ask, What is that which always is and has no becoming; and what is that which is always becoming and never is? That which is apprehended by intelligence and reason is always in the same state; but that which is conceived by opinion with the help of sensation and without reason, is always in a process of becoming and perishing and never really is.

This distinction is crucial throughout Plato’s work, and thus the decision outlined above is one between truth and opinion, and Timaeus is constrained to find episteme at the heart of creation, as God could not create something less than perfect, and immutable truth is closer to perfection that the shifting sands of opinion and mere temporal truths. This pre-formed choice is actually a stress fault which will run through religion to our own times. That is, theologians can never tolerate an imperfect God as causa prima, and so his immediate creation has to share in perfection, albeit as a copy from a pattern (a point Plato makes in the Timaeus). This accounts for the Pythagorean sections of the Timaeus, with the indubitability of number involved in the literal creation of the world-stuff. This comparison of perfection and imperfection, and its playing out as the province of the deity and man, respectively, is certainly present in the Timaeus, and it makes its way into Christianity via the delivery system of the neo-Platonism emergent in the third century AD with Plotinus and those who followed him. The central Platonic concept of ideality and copy, and its attendant hierarchization of two types of truth, is the blueprint for the Timaeus’ creation story. What pattern did the creator of the world use? asks Timaeus. That of intelligible, indubitable truth, answers the text named for him.

Benjamin Jowett, the great nineteenth-century translator and exegete of the Platonic dialogues (as well as the Aristotelean corpus), writes that the religious influence of Plato on the neo-Platonists is based on a misunderstanding:

Believing that [Plato] was inspired by the Holy Ghost, or had received his wisdom from Moses, [the neo-Platonists] seemed to find in his writings the Christian Trinity, the Word, the Church, the creation of the world in a Jewish sense, as they really found the personality of God or of mind, and the immortality of the soul.

The parallel between the denigration of the earthly — the body in particular — and the reification of the ideality of God in Christianity clearly begins in the Timaeus, and while its strange and interweaving story of God as a great mechanic building something as close to perfection – i.e., Himself — as is possible makes of this Platonic text both an entertaining cosmological folk tale and a kind of “wiring diagram” of the Platonic system of thought, one which would go on to fund the Church Fathers and Christian tradition as it passed down to the present day.

One tributary flowing from the Timaeus into both neo-Platonism and the Christian religion whose preparatory ground it was helping to prepare is the superiority of soul over body: the one immortal and free from sin, the other mortal and the vehicle of sin itself. It should be remembered that the fatal apple of knowledge eaten by Eve did not allow her and Adam to see one another’s souls, but the nakedness and shameful state of their bodies. The body is elsewhere called by Plato “a shadow which keeps us company,” and “a prison for the soul.” This denigration of the body will travel throughout the Christian faith.

By the time Christianity was at its zenith, the body has gone from being a second-order element in the makeup of man to a thing degraded, debased, and the repository of evil. This downgrading is foreshadowed in Plato’s creation tale, as the world is not created as a globe simply because that geometrical figure is the most perfect, but it attains that status precisely because it has none of the attributes of the human body:

[The created world] had no need of eyes when there was nothing remaining outside him to be seen . . . the Creator did not think to bestow upon [the world] hands: nor had he any need of feet, nor of the whole apparatus of walking.

Even the head is more nearly spherical than any other example of solid geometry, so privileged because it is the seat of reason.

So, whatever the world is, it is not allied to the body but to the soul, and thus takes its place in a hierarchical matrix of the superior episteme and the inferior doxa. The body perishes, the soul is immortal. In fact, Timaeus is alive to the narrative problem of beginning his account with the creation of the world in its physicality. Surely the more important soul was created before the body, and thus should be accounted for first. Timaeus’ narrative order is provisional, however, and must be seen as habitual, “a manner of speaking that we have.” The proper order of creation is stressed:

Now God did not make the soul after the body, although we are speaking of them in this order; for having brought them together he would never have allowed that the elder should be ruled by the younger.

That the soul is superior to the body is reinforced by the fact that “[t]he body of heaven is visible, but the soul is invisible,” and the opposition of visibility and invisibility will run its course throughout the whole of philosophy in the West, even when philosophy bifurcates after the Enlightenment, broadly speaking, into science and metaphysics. The metaphors of eyesight and vision which dominate Western philosophy have as a part of their meaning the visible and the invisible, with the invisible being undisprovable. Think of these invisibles and the role they have played in the intellectual vision of the West: the Kantian noumenon, the Lockean primary quality, the Freudian unconscious, the cosmologist’s dark matter — all these “things” cannot be seen, although they are taken to exist because the range of their effects can. Plato’s metaphor is every bit as influential with regard to the tradition it set in motion as anything Socrates said in the market square on the subjects of virtue, courage, or knowledge. Metaphor is essential to philosophy — Derrida’s great insight — and much metaphor relies on eyesight, on the play of visibility and the invisible world. Without this metaphorical representation, as Plato notes, philosophy itself would not be possible: “To attempt to tell of all this without a visible representation of the heavenly system would be labour in vain.”

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The visible representation is not the system itself. It is the system transposed, moved into the realm of the visible, carried over from ideality to the sensible. The word “metaphor” is a conjunction of meta (one of the meanings of which is “after”) and phorein, meaning “to carry.” A metaphor carries meaning with it.

In an aside on ethics, the Timaeus also reiterates the Platonic maxim that “no man is voluntarily bad,” a contentious belief we may wish to examine today, when it is difficult to believe that men’s more monstrous actions have been performed in ignorance of their evil nature, but rather on the even more monstrous excuse that ends justify means. Is it possible that Stalin, Lenin, Mao, and Pol Pot thought that their slaughter of tens of millions of their own people was somehow immune to considerations of right and wrong? A long argument, and one for another time.

If you have read Plato but are unfamiliar with the Timaeus, approach with caution if you are expecting more of the same placid and reasoned discourse and dialectical progress typical of most dialogues. If you are entirely new to Plato, the Timaeus is not the place to start, and I would recommend the mellow Symposium. The Timaeus sets out as a request by Socrates to animate an invented state and see it in action, but takes a great swerve back to literally the dawn of time. It ducks and dives between the nature of the soul and the body, and a flurry of Pythagorean ratios and differentials, a curious interlude in which a type of substance is created which is then “folded into” the world as though creation were a vast work of origami.

Plato is examining topics which, of course, the Greeks were ill-equipped to understand, although a lack of science (which we have only recently learned to mistrust again) behind creation myths has never stopped those myths being the foundation of worldwide religions. But whereas as philosophers we can visit the classical world and, as it were, bring something of worth back with us from an age two millennia before our own, a hematologist is unlikely to consult the lines in the Timaeus which explain the blood and its circulation for anything more than pleasure. But this lack of scientific knowledge and method only serve to refine the creation myths of our own era, and even then the vast majority of us have to take science on trust the same way the Greeks took Homer and Hesiod on trust. The Big Bang theory is a creation myth to those — like me — unlettered in modern science.

Anyone expecting an antique version of the relatively placid Christian account of the creation might enjoy the Timaeus as a type of classical, proto-science fiction, if that’s not too irreverent a term for The Master. There are some strong and strange elements in this text: number as the indubitable stuff of which the world is made, an early appearance of the four humors, the motion of the planets, solid geometry as the basic stuff of matter (with fire being hot because the triangles which compose it are sharpest of all). It even tells the history of Atlantis. There is the human body as mechanics, described as wheels and levers just as complex as anything the Greek artisans had produced, and which would resurface in the seventeenth century with Descartes and La Mettrie, before accelerating on to artificial intelligence. The nature of time and its creation as “a moving image of eternity” is at the dawn of temporal philosophy. The Timaeus is not just a cosmological tall tale prompted over dinner. It’s a hothouse of conceptual seedlings which will grow into some of the major branches of later philosophy and science.

It has always been the Platonic dialogue I have enjoyed the most, partly for these wilder conceptual excursions, and partly because it is the Platonic inception of so many later philosophical projects. Bertrand Russell’s friend and associate Alfred North Whitehead — they co-wrote the Principia Mathematica — was of the opinion that “all philosophy is merely footnotes to Plato.” Perhaps he was a Pythagorean at heart, and was prompted to pay this this compliment by the Timaeus’ creation tale.