Timaeus

Overview

The Timaeus is about a hundred pages and it is barely a dialogue. After a dozen pages of conversation the Locrian Timaeus begins to speak and does not stop. Plato has abandoned his usual method deliberately: the subject is the origin of the universe, which nobody can be cross-examined about, so the form is a long exposition delivered by a Pythagorean astronomer while Socrates listens.

The frame is worth knowing. The company met the day before, when Socrates described a city that sounds very like the one in the Republic, and now he says he wants to see that city in motion rather than at rest. Critias offers to oblige with a true story he heard from his grandfather, who had it from Solon, who had it from Egyptian priests: nine thousand years ago Athens repelled an invasion by the empire of Atlantis, which afterwards sank in a day and a night. That is the first mention of Atlantis in any surviving text, and its invention here as a piece of scene-setting is worth remembering whenever anyone goes looking for it. Critias then defers to Timaeus, who is to start from the beginning of the world and work forward to human beings, after which Critias will take over. The dialogue Critias begins that job and breaks off in mid-sentence.

The writing is dense, technical in places, and full of musical ratios, geometry and physiology. It is also, in the passages on the craftsman’s goodness and on time, some of the most quoted prose in philosophy.

The argument

The distinction and the warning (27 to 29). Timaeus begins by separating what always is and never becomes, grasped by reason, from what always becomes and never is, grasped by opinion with sensation. Everything that becomes has a cause. The world is visible and tangible, so it became, so it has a maker. And the maker looked to the eternal model rather than to a changing one, since the world is beautiful and he is good. Then the methodological caution: accounts share the character of what they are about, so an account of the eternal can be stable and exact, and an account of what merely resembles it can only be likely. Timaeus asks for no more than that, and repeats the request several times.

The world’s body and soul (29 to 40). The craftsman is good and free from envy, so he wanted everything to be as like himself as possible, and took over what was moving discordantly and brought it into order. He made the cosmos a single living creature with intelligence in soul and soul in body. The body is made of all four elements, bound by continuous proportion, and it is a sphere, smooth and without organs because there is nothing outside it to eat or see. The soul is compounded of being, sameness and difference, divided according to a musical series, and bent into two crossing circles, the circle of the same carrying the fixed stars and the circle of the different divided into the planetary orbits. Time is created along with the heavens, as a moving image of eternity, counted out by the wanderings of the planets.

Living things and the lesser gods (40 to 47). The craftsman makes the divine living things, the stars, and then delegates. He cannot make mortal creatures himself, since anything he makes directly would be deathless, so he hands the younger gods the task of weaving mortal bodies around immortal souls. Souls are sown in the stars, given a law of destiny, and, if they live badly, returned in a lower form. Sight is described as the greatest gift, because from watching the revolutions of the heavens we learn number and the idea of time and can correct the disturbed circuits in our own heads.

The second beginning: necessity (47 to 69). Here the dialogue restarts. What has been described so far was the work of intellect, but the world also has a second cause, necessity, or the wandering cause, and the two must be combined. To do it Timaeus needs a third kind of thing besides model and copy: a receptacle, a nurse of all becoming, which takes on every character and has none of its own, like the neutral base of a perfume or gold that is continually reshaped. In that receptacle, before any ordering, traces of the elements shook and sorted themselves like grain in a winnowing basket.

Then the geometry. Every body is a solid bounded by surfaces, surfaces are built of triangles, and two triangles suffice: the half-square and the half-equilateral. From these Timaeus constructs four of the five regular solids and assigns them by fit: the sharp, light tetrahedron is fire, the octahedron air, the icosahedron water, and the stable cube earth. Because three of the four are made of the same triangle, they can dissolve and recombine into one another, which is a real explanatory payoff, and earth cannot, which is why it only ever melts and re-forms.

Human beings (69 to 92). The younger gods build the body. The immortal soul is housed in the head, spirit in the chest above the diaphragm where it can hear reason, appetite below, tethered like a beast at a manger, with the liver made smooth and reflective so that reason’s images can be shown to the unreasoning part and frighten it into order. Then marrow, bone, flesh, breathing, digestion, the causes of disease, and diseases of the soul, of which Timaeus says that no one is willingly bad; badness comes from a bad condition of the body and a bad upbringing. The closing pages describe the philosopher as a heavenly plant rooted upward, and explain the other kinds of animal as degenerations of the human.

How to read it

Read the Republic first, at least Books VI and VII. The Timaeus opens by summarising it and its cosmology is built for the same picture of what is really real.

Read 27 to 47 with care and then decide how far to go. Many courses stop before the triangles. The receptacle passage from 48 to 53 is the philosophically hardest and most rewarding part, and the physiology after 69 can be skimmed unless you are interested in ancient medicine.

Keep the likely story caveat in mind throughout. Timaeus tells you at the start that he is giving a probable account, and readers who forget it end up either crediting Plato with a physics textbook or convicting him of superstition.

Decide early what you think about the beginning. The Greek allows the making to be read as a real event or as an expository device, a way of exhibiting a world that has always existed by describing how it would be put together. Aristotle took it literally and objected; the Platonists after him mostly did not. The whole interpretation of the dialogue turns on it.

And treat Atlantis as what it is in the text: a frame story, told to set up a war, and dropped.

Questions it raises

• Did the world have a beginning, or is the craftsman a device for showing its structure? What in the text could settle it?
• The Demiurge works on material he did not make, and persuades necessity rather than commanding it. What does that account explain that creation from nothing does not?
• If the universe is good because its maker is good and free from envy, where do disease, decay and the wandering cause come from?
• Timaeus insists his account is only likely. Is that modesty, or a claim that no science of the physical world can be more than that?
• Bodies are built out of triangles. Is that a physical theory, a mathematical model, or a statement that the two are the same thing?
• Nobody is willingly bad, says Timaeus, because vice has bodily and educational causes. What happens to responsibility on that account?