Poetic Science in Plato’s “Timaeus”

What happens when one mixes science and poetry in the way that Timaeus does? What can we learn from this strange mix? My intention is to place before us some important themes that connect poetry and science.

She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker.
—Wallace Stevens, The Idea of Order at Key West

The Timaeus, one of Plato’s strangest and most enigmatic dialogues, is arguably the single most important work for anyone interested in bridging the gap between physical science and the humanities.¹ The dialogue engages in massive bridge building, as the fictional Timaeus brings together an astonishing array of sciences in the course of his long speech. These include arithmetic, plane and solid geometry, the theory of ratio (λόγος), astronomy, harmonics, physics, stoichiometry, physiology, pathology, and psychology. Last year, this dialogue played an important role in our discussion of mathematics, physics, and astronomy. This year, it comes to our aid once more, this time bridging the gap between cosmology or physics and biology. The Timaeus can do this because, within the context of its account of the visible whole, the cosmos is an animal – a living thing composed of body, soul, and intellect (30b-c).

Timaeus presents his grand scientific synthesis in what he calls a “likely story” or εἰκός μῦθος (29d). This is the most fascinating bridge the dialogue constructs for the reader – a bridge between science and poetry, λόγος and μῦθος. But in fact, it is far more perplexing than a bridge. A bridge takes you from one point to another: it bridges a gap between two points while keeping them distinct. But in the likely story, there is no gap. As a mysterious third kind of speech, the story blurs the distinction between science and myth, mathematics and poetry. Plato, here, has not so much built a bridge as he has concocted a magic potion that casts over the whole physical world the spell of mathematical enchantment and divine purpose.

Another way in which the likely story connects the sciences and the humanities is the bond the story forges between mathematics and ethics as the study of the human good. As we know from the prologue, Timaeus is not only a professional cosmologist; he is also a statesman from Locri, an Italian city famous for its strict adherence to law, and hales from one of the city’s best and wealthiest families (20a). Timaeus, as we discover, is an aristocrat in his cosmology as well. This shows itself in how often he uses the word καλόν, noble or beautiful. At one point, fairly late in his speech, Timaeus sums up his aristocratic physics in a motto: “All the good is beautiful, and the beautiful is not disproportionate” (87c).² Throughout the likely story, goodness is associated with the beautiful structures of mathematics and badness with the ugliness of disorder. The Timaean physicist is the champion of all that is decent, healthy, and beautifully constituted. These virtues are summed up in that resonant Greek word κόσμος, which means not order simply but beautiful order and adornment.³

Yet another way in which the likely story fits our current project of connecting science and the humanities is that humanity is the goal of the likely story. In the dramatic prologue, Critias, with much self-aggrandizing, promises to give a speech about the heroism of ancient Athens in her battle with the insolent kings of Atlantis (21a ff.).⁴ In this way, by identifying his own city with the best city we hear about in The Republic, Critias seeks to gratify Socrates’s desire for a speech about his best city engaged in the deeds and words of war (19b-c). Timaeus will provide, as it were, the cosmic background music for this speech. Critias tells Socrates, “It seemed good to us that, since Timaeus here is the most astronomical of us and has made it his special task to know about the nature of the all, he should speak first, beginning from the birth of the cosmos and ending in the nature of mankind” (27a). As we see in the story of Timaeus, man is the completer of the cosmos. The artful making of the world order starts with the highest things and goes down; it proceeds from better to worse. As Timaeus takes us on this downward journey, he always makes sure that the lower things we encounter are as beautifully ordered as possible. To borrow a saying from Aristotle’s story about Heraclitus in Parts of Animals, “there are gods even here.”⁵ Man is the most important step in this downward motion, since he alone, as the unstable unity of god and beast, contains all the animal possibilities within himself.

My goal in this essay is to say what the physical world looks like in light of Timaeus’s motto that connects the good, the beautiful, and the proportionate. What happens when one mixes science and poetry in the way that Timaeus does? What can we learn from this strange mix? My intention is to place before us some important themes that connect poetry and science. I begin by noting that the likely story is really three separate stories, which Timaeus never weaves together into a coherent whole – an odd fact, given the story’s concern with wholeness. This incoherence is one of the dialogue’s central themes and seems to point to what is no doubt an incoherence in the cosmos itself. It is part of Plato’s complex reflection on the problem we come up against when we try to depict the cosmos as though it came to be in successive steps with a clear-cut “before” and “after.” I shall call Timaeus’s three stories The Story of the Soul, The Story of the Body, and The Story of Human Nature.

Before proceeding to the first story, I must say a word about the speech that introduces the famous phrase “likely story.” Socrates calls this speech the “prelude” (προοίμιον) to Timaeus’s “song” (νόμος) (27c-29d).⁶ Timaeus gives two reasons why the song, or νόμος, he is about to perform is a likely story. The first is that the world is an image, or εἰκών, crafted in the likeness of a purely intelligible archetype by a good and noble god. If, in our theorizing, we are to respond fittingly to cosmos as image, we must employ a mode of speech that relies on images. But the likely story does not simply use images; it actively, and often elaborately, constructs them. For Timaeus, physics, most especially when allied with mathematics, is model building. It is a form of ποίησις, making, from which we get the word “poetry.” The artist-god is for this reason not merely a mythical character in the story; he is also the divine model for our human act of scientific poeticizing.

The second reason for a likely story is our human nature. Here is how Timaeus puts it, as he addresses this part of his speech directly to Socrates:

So then, Socrates, if, in saying many things on many topics

concerning gods and the birth of the all, we prove to be incapable

of rendering speeches that are always and in all respects in

agreement with themselves and drawn with precision, don’t be

surprised. But if we provide likelihoods inferior to none, we should be

well pleased with them, remembering that I who speak as well as

you my judges have a human nature, so that it is fitting for us

to be receptive to the likely story about these things and not to search

further for anything beyond it. (29c-d)⁷

The judges to whom Timaeus refers are the men who judge the contests in the performances of music and poetry that took place during Athenian religious festivals. The greatest of these festivals is being celebrated at the time of the dialogue – the Great Panathenaea, the feast in honor of Athena (21a). The topical reference to poetry contests fits with the opening of the dialogue, Critias, where Socrates refers to Timaeus as “the former poet” (108b).

In spite of his god-like intelligence, the cosmologist must acknowledge that he has a human nature, that he is a man and not a god. This reminder of our humanity, and of the need to be moderate, is the first indication that Timaeus’s poetic science does not have a purely theoretical end. As a form of ethical, quasi-political music that aims above all at moderation, the song of Timaeus will not just explain the cosmos but praise it and, through a kind of intellectual music, establish the right relation between man and cosmos. Here, we see the other meaning of νόμος coming into play – νόμος as law, as well as song. To judge the likely story correctly, we, like Socrates, must accept it in the right spirit and not confuse it with dialectic as the study of what is, acknowledging that whatever peculiar power the story has will be released only if we respect the limits to which human judge and human poet are subject. If we put this together with the first reason for a likely story, we get an important result: for Timaeus, cosmology rightly understood – as noble image making or model building – is a proper expression of our human nature, limits, and sound- mindedness. As a song in honor of the god Kosmos, the likely story is also an act of piety. Timaeus’s poetic science is intellectual piety toward the divine whole, which is not only our theoretical object but also our inescapable and divine fatherland.⁸

PART ONE. THE STORY OF THE SOUL

The song of Timaeus begins with the divine craftsman, or demiurge, whose existence is postulated rather than proved. This is Timaeus’s way of deifying τέχνη, or art, which the divine craftsman personifies. The god gazes upon a perfectly stable and utterly intelligible archetype, or παράδειγμα: the idea of the world. This archetype, which contains the forms of all the animals that will eventually populate the world, simply is and has no becoming. It is that being which the cosmos imitates in the guise of regular periodic motions and the laws that govern these motions. As the not-yet-actual structure of a moving and living world, the archetype, which Timaeus calls the “noetic animal,” provides the cosmic blueprint and divine plan that guides the construction of the cosmos (39e ff.). According to this plan, the various forms of motion, power, and life find their prophecy and their fate.

By consulting the archetype, the god tries to make the shifting realm of becoming as beautiful, orderly, and stable as possible – as being-like as possible. Like the modern philosopher Leibniz, Timaeus will try to depict the cosmos as the “best of possible worlds.” Before the act of ordering, becoming is in a state of disorder. In Timaeus’s formulation, the pre-existing chaos moved “unmusically,” πλημμελῶς (30a).⁹ In order to regulate and tune the primordial discord, the god consults both the archetype and his own goodness of intellect. The god, we are told, is non-envious or ungrudging (29e) – a trait that distinguishes him sharply from the jealous gods of Homer, Hesiod, and Herodotus. Our new, improved god is not stingy with his divinity but desires that the world imitate him as much as possible. To this end, he constructs intelligence “within” soul and soul “within” body (30b). The cosmos at this crucial point becomes a living thing – an animal that resembles us, in that it both lives and thinks.

The cosmic soul is one of the most exquisite pieces of architecture in the likely story. A stunning display of τέχνη, the account of the soul is based on a remarkable premise: that a soul can be built. The construction of the divine soul, the soul of the cosmos as a whole, takes place in three stages. In the first stage, the god mixes together the forms of Same, Other, and Being. He does so with the aid of βία, force (35b), whose presence in the structure of the soul tells us that there is something not entirely rational about even this most beautiful of begotten things. In the second and most fascinating stage, the god shapes this mixture into a band and proceeds to mark off segments that correspond to a string tuned to several octaves of the Pythagorean scale.¹⁰ Finally, in the third stage, the god slices and bends this spine-like band into the circuits of Same and Other. These are the circles that we find in Ptolemy’s Almagest and Dante’s Paradiso. The circle of the Same represents the circular, daily rotation of the entire cosmos around its axis; the contrarily moving circle of the Other represents the motion of the sun in the plane of the ecliptic. In Ptolemaic astronomy, this motion is the sun’s annual orbit around the earth.

The circuits that we see in the heavens constitute the moving image of the eternal that we call time (37d-e). For Timaeus, time is not the ravager and eater-up of mortal things but the fixed order of the moving heavens. Time is good by virtue of its close connection with circularity, intellect, and measure. It is because of time that the motions of the physical whole imitate the utterly unmoving realm of being. Time is to the cosmos what rhythm is to a piece of music. Thanks to the beautiful ordering of the cosmic soul, which allows λόγος as ratio to permeate the whole, the world becomes steeped in the noble enchantment I spoke of earlier – the spell of mathematical intelligibility. The world has a bond with being because it is musical – that is, because its intelligible structure is tuned like a musical scale and because, in its temporal structure, all its motions are rhythmic. Unlike being, the world moves. But as the image of being, it moves in always- stable, reliably periodic ways. At one point, Timaeus compares this periodic motion to the choric dances of Greek tragedy (40c).

We should note that the circuits of Same and Other, although most manifest and purely themselves in the motion of the heavens, are not confined to this realm. This is another instance of “there are gods even here.” The soul, Timaeus tells us, is “woven” throughout the body of the cosmos from center to extremity (36e). The entire world, therefore, is filled with the soul’s perennial music of mathematical order. The heavenly circles are present, for example, in what we now call simple harmonic motion. This sort of motion is present in a pendulum, a vibrating string, a vibrating column of air, and anything else that exhibits the motion of a wave, including light and the electron in quantum mechanics. Add to these the various circulations we find in living nature – notably in the circulation of the blood, first described by William Harvey – and the periodic picture of nature is complete. All these phenomena exhibit the back-again experience that we enjoy in music: in the recurring, circular pattern of the musical scale, and the recurring pulse of underlying rhythms.¹¹

Timaeus’s account of the soul is a potent mythic transformation of ordinary experience. This transformative power, which is characteristic of myth, derives from the identification of the astronomical circles of Same and Other with the inner revolutions of thought. As the world turns, it thinks, and it thinks unceasingly about everything in the realms of being and becoming (37a-c). The mythic account invites us to see the physical world through the eyes of the imagination and, in that sense, to see it anew. Normally, we distinguish sharply between the inner and the outer, the non-extended and the extended, mind and body. This is our Cartesian heritage, our habit of thinking in terms of strict oppositions. But in the counter-Cartesian enchantment of Timaeus’s myth, the soul’s act of thinking and the world’s act of turning in circles mirror one another and, in a sense, are one another. This mythic speech renders literal our metaphoric way of talking about the act of thinking. Thinking, we say, is reflection, a bending back. To think is to turn inward, to be a living circle.

Timaeus’s mythic transformation of the external world gives the likely story a power that more sober, scientifically objective accounts lack. The likely story, unlikely as it often seems, saves the phenomenon of the cosmologist himself. If one starts with the assumption that nature is nothing but matter in motion, chance and necessity, then, when it comes to explaining intelligence, one must either reduce it to matter in motion or assert, as Descartes does, that thinking substance has nothing to do with physical nature, that the physicist qua physicist is a complete alien in the external world he seeks to know: his autonomy as res cogitans is the necessary condition for his clear and distinct knowledge of res extensa. In the likely story, intelligence is posited as constitutive of the physical world right from the start: the world has a soul, and the act of this soul is to move and think. By engaging in physics intermittently, the human cosmologist taps into the divine thinking that goes on eternally and silently. The cosmologist, in this worldview, gives human utterance to the world’s silent self-reflection, its act of perpetual thought. He is a singer of sorts, because his various λόγοι do not merely account for the world in appropriately likely fashion but also celebrate it.

Later in the likely story, we hear that the circuits of sound judgment, or φρόνησις, the circuits of Same and Other, are housed in our heads (44d). This intelligent circuitry is the true, original self of each of us. Our divine intelligence is planted in a star before being submerged in the violent flux of becoming (42d). As we gaze out and into the heavens on a starry night, we are in fact beholding our original celestial home, which is an image of our most intimate, reflective selves. A star looks perfectly precise and always brilliant. Unwavering in its motions and constant in its shining form, it has every appearance of being deathless and divine. Timaeus would tell us that it is no wonder that stargazing fills us (or, at least some of us) with admiration and longing. In this act, we experience a wistful recollection: we are remembering, from within the turmoil and woe of mortal life, what it was like in our “glory days” to be healthy, perfectly formed, brilliant, and musical. By studying astronomy, thereby activating our capacity for ordered reflection about the most orderly things in the visible world, we bend our natures back to what Timaeus calls “the form of our first and best condition” (42d). In the likely story, astronomy in this way becomes the true homecoming of the human soul.

PART TWO. THE STORY OF THE BODY

In Timaeus’s first story of origins, time plays a crucial role. Time is a moving likeness of eternity (37d-38b). In the second story, we encounter that other necessary dimension of a world – χώρα, space or room (52a-c). In the likely story, space is far more perplexing, far more difficult to speak about and define than time. Indeed, the inherent and necessary indeterminateness of space precludes such definition. Timaeus also calls space the receptacle and the mother of becoming (51a). It is the fluid, ever-elusive, and all-receptive medium of change, appearance, and cosmic birth.¹² In connecting the receptacle with birth and maternity, Timaeus signals the fact that, in turning from the first to the second story of origins, we are moving from the celestial, nonorganic life of intelligence to the organic life of mortal creatures.

In Timaeus’s first account of body, the craftsman took the four elements of body – water, air, earth, and fire – as the uncuttable or atomic simples out of which the cosmic body was composed. He arranged these elements in a geometric proportion (ἀναλογία) with two mean terms.¹³ The elemental “extremes” of the world’s being visible and touchable – fire and earth, respectively – were mediated by the “means” of air and water (31b-32b). In the second major part of his speech, in which Timaeus makes a “new beginning” (48a-b), Timaeus corrects this simple view of the elements. In the region below the heavens, the elements are observed not to remain steadfast in their integrity but to change into one another. Fire acts on water to beget steam, a form of air. Water evaporates, steam condenses, and fire goes out, leaving its descendants, earth and smoke. In order to save the perplexing phenomenon of constantly shifting elements, Timaeus builds beautiful models of the four elements out of four of the five regular platonic solids: the pyramid or tetrahedron for fire, the octahedron for air, the icosahedron for water, and the cube for earth (53e ff.). Once again, the Timaean physicist is enacting his role as musician; he is building models that are designed not so much to explain the phenomena as to harmonize with them.¹⁴ The goal is not to give a λόγος or account in the strict sense but to compose a set of beautiful geometric poems.

Timaeus’s geometric poetry about body is the second most exquisite construction in the likely story, the first being the musical construction of the soul. It accomplishes two things. First, it reveals the so-called elements as having parts – the various faces of the regular solids. These parts can be rearranged and recombined to form other elements. Timaeus’s ingenious model building in this way accounts for how the elements can have individual identities while at the same being able to suffer transmutation. The second thing the construction does is to account for body, which would otherwise seem irrational and meaningless, in terms of principles that are beautiful and good. The regular solids are chosen as models precisely for this reason: they are, according to Timaeus, “the most beautiful bodies” (53d-e). If you have ever seen or held physical models of these figures, you know what Timaeus is talking about. Timaeus here puts to work once more the motto I quoted earlier: All the good is beautiful, and the beautiful is not disproportionate. The mathematical poetry of Timaeus will attempt to make the study of mortal body almost as ennobling as the study of the heavens. There are gods even here.

But more important to our purposes is what Timaeus in this section has to say about cause (αἰτία). The second attempt to account for the world’s beginning unveils a new cause at work in the world. The first account had presented the good causality of intelligent purpose. This is what Timaeus sometimes calls πρόνοια, or providence (30c, 44c). The second agency he calls necessity, or “the form of the wandering cause” (48a). Fire does not act on water purposefully; it does not “look ahead” to an end. Fire burns because it has to, and water evaporates because it must. No intelligent purpose is at work here. As Timaeus thus revises his account of causality and makes a new beginning, the world acquires a double origin, a double parentage: it is the work not of the good alone but of the good and the necessary working together. The good is identical with intelligence – more precisely, with the ordering power and stability of intelligence. Using one of those mystifying metaphors with which the likely story abounds, Timaeus says that the world had its origins in the persuasion of necessity by intelligence – that is, in some sort of cosmic rhetoric (48a).¹⁵ The implication is that god is not a tyrant. Divine intelligence did not force itself on the mother of becoming but instead appealed to her receptivity to beautiful adornment. Beauty functions as the bridge between the two great causes: the good as (paternal) intelligence and the necessary as material (maternal) efficiency.

Necessity, for Timaeus, is the realm of power, δύναμις. The need for power is evident in the construction of our bodily organs. Indeed, it is here that the gods discover their need for necessary causes. When the gods make our eyes, for example, they do so for reasons that are beautiful and good: we have eyes so that we may learn the mathematical rhythm of the heavens and return to our divine origins. But unless our eyes have the actual power of seeing, no good can come of them (45b ff.). To bring about the good of the eyes, the gods must enlist, harness, and guide all the material powers that inhere in the realm of bodily necessity. They must work, in particular, with the natural power of fire, for fire is the element and root of all that is visible. To grasp the totality of our world and to reach our noble ends, we must become students of the necessary as well as the good. Timaeus at one point connects the two causes with human wisdom:

For this very reason, one should mark off two forms of cause – the necessary and the divine – and seek the divine in all things for the sake of gaining a happy life, to the extent that our nature allows, and the necessary for the sake of those divine things, reasoning that without the necessary it isn’t possible to discern on their own those things we seriously pursue, nor again to apprehend them, nor to partake of them in any other way whatsoever. (68e-69a)

PART THREE. THE STORY OF HUMAN NATURE

As we saw earlier, human nature is the goal of the likely story (27a). In the construction of human nature, Timaeus presents his view of all organic life, since all the lower animals are derived, mythically, from the “descent of man.” Timaeus’s path is Darwin’s in reverse: for Timaeus, it is not evolution but devolution. Here, in the construction of the human animal, the likely story deals directly with the biological work of our current seminars.

In what I have called the first story, the story of soul, the offspring of the demiurge begin to make human nature. Here is how it happened. After making time and the circuits of the whole, the demiurge constructed beings that were like him – noble, healthy minded, and brilliant – that is, the stars. These star-god sons were enjoined by their father-craftsman to make man, the being below them (41a-d). You recall that the craftsman god or demiurge was gazing at the purely intelligible archetype that embodied what I called the prophecy and fate of the beings within becoming. This idea of the world contains all the forms of animality. The animals are divided according to the four elements. The star-gods are made of fire. Then, lower in the hierarchy, there is organic life, which has three basic forms: animals that live in the air, animals that live on the earth, and animals that live in water (39e-40a).

Humankind, we must note, is not one of the basic classes. Man, since he is not simply celestial or simply mundane, does not fit into the fourfold scheme of animality. Man is not a separate, distinct kind but a hybrid – the most complex and unstable of all creatures. This very instability, this tendency to degenerate and devolve, turns out to be a useful and necessary means by which the cosmos comes to be perfect and whole, as Timaeus reminds us at the very end of his speech (92c).

The story of human nature begins just before the gods confront the problem of the necessary cause, the cause of power. The star-gods put us together piece by piece, organ by organ. We witness all this and, in following the story, playfully take part in our own construction. Once again, we find ourselves building models, biological ones, but this time they are not so noble. Throughout this part of his speech, Timaeus seems bent on showing us that human nature is neither whole, nor natural, nor especially attractive. Man is something of a monster. From the cosmic perspective, he is a creature of alarming vulnerability and multifarious needs. It is to this, our extreme vulnerability and neediness, that the likely story is addressed.

Our neediness is summed up in the simple fact that we are not shaped like spheres.¹⁶ When Timaeus first described the body of the cosmos, he rubbed our noses in the fact that the cosmic body, in its smooth sphericity, was invulnerable and non-needy, that it was not us. He tells us that “of eyes it had no need at all, since nothing to be seen was left over on the outside; nor of hearing, since there was nothing to be heard; nor was there any atmosphere surrounding it that needed breathing; nor again was there need of any organ by which it might take food into itself or send it back out after it was digested” (33c). The cosmos has no hands, or feet, or anything it needs to stand on. And although Timaeus demurs to say so, the cosmos also lacks organs of generation. It also suffers neither disease nor old age, although Timaeus does not go so far as to say that it cannot die. It doesn’t need any friends, because, we are told, it is its own friend (34b). The cosmos is self-sufficient and therefore happy – happy because it lacks all the human organs that express vulnerability, need, and dependency.

It becomes obvious that this part of the likely story, the part that is about man, has a very different tone from what has preceded. As we make our way down to man, and even farther down to the beasts that are derived from man, we descend from the dignified tone with which Timaeus spoke of the heavens. The gravitas of heavenly discourse gives way to a long series of philosophic jokes. These jokes, at times reminiscent of Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium, have their dark side, as we are made to confront, often in grotesque detail, the complexity and even absurdity of our mortal life in our various bodily organs.

We have already seen that the construction of the eyes obliged the gods to make use of causes that are necessary in order to accomplish their noble end of completing the whole. The high purpose of seeing is impossible without the material mechanism of seeing. This “drama of the two causes” – the necessary and the good – will be enacted in all the constructions that follow.

The first story to which I draw our attention is the story of the head. It makes sense to start here because that’s where the gods started (44d). Recall that making, for Timaeus, is always a descent. In making human nature, the gods start with what is spatially the highest part of us – our heads – and work their way down. Timaeus’s stories make us self- conscious about our bodies. Through this self-consciousness, we perhaps reach deeper self-knowledge regarding the precise way in which we are, necessarily, children of the cosmos and victims of our fall from the divine.

Why are our heads shaped like spheres? We may never have thought of asking this question, but it is precisely what the likely story compels us to ask. Our head is shaped like a sphere because it houses our brain, which holds within it the globular circle-complex of Same and Other, the circuits of intelligence. Shape, for Timaeus, always accommodates itself to the nature of the thing shaped, and so a perfect nature ought to have a perfect physical shape. This is another way of saying that, in the world of likely stories, physical things are what they look like. Some years ago, a student once said to me after class, “Mr. Kalkavage, I think I know why you like the Timaeus so much; it’s because you have such a round head.” This personal remark showed that the student had grasped the causality of shape in the likely story: inward nature is mirrored in outward look. She furthermore grasped that Timaeus’s cosmology of man combines the perception of likenesses with wit.

The story of the head is very witty, indeed – and far-reaching. As a sphere, the head represents the healthiest part of human nature, the part that is, as we say, well rounded. The head is our sacred vessel, and the rest of the body as a whole is a kind of chariot that carries the head where the head wants to go. From Timaeus’s darkly comic perspective, the demigod in our head keeps lifting us up toward the celestial gods, to whom the demigod in our head is akin and longs to return. But the elongated and grosser part of us, our torso, along with everything it contains, keeps dragging us back down to the earth. This explains why we have upright posture. So long as we cultivate our intelligence, the upward vector gets the better of the downward vector, and we remain vertical, suspended between the goodness of intelligence and the necessary aspects of our bodily being. Our uprightness, however, is still a compromise, a sign that we are not fully divine and are still drawn earthward.

At one point, Timaeus calls us a “heavenly plant,” a φυτὸν οὐράνιον (90a). He does so because our roots are in the heavens. Just as a plant grows and draws its nourishment from the earth, so a human being grows and draws his nourishment from the sky, or οὐρανός. We are an upside-down plant. Education is the means by which we water the human plant and cultivate our bond with heaven – our attraction to, and kinship with, higher things. As we hear early on in the likely story and again at the end, when man neglects his education, his human culture, and yields to ignorance and beastliness, he degenerates in his next birth into the form of beast he made himself resemble (42b-d, 90e ff.). He yields to the downward-pointing vector in his nature, loses his upright posture, and grows ever closer to the earth. In the most extreme cases of educational neglect or what Timaeus calls “unmusicality” (πλημμέλεια, 92b), man loses the privilege of breathing pure air and is transformed into a shellfish. In one sense, degenerate man deserves blame: he failed to fulfill his divine destiny, failed to water and prune the heavenly plant. But in another sense, he is beyond blame: if man did not degenerate, the cosmos would not have gotten its full range of animals and would be incomplete and imperfect. This is the final paradox with which Timaeus ends his long speech.

Timaeus’s stories of the human body draw on Socrates’s account of the soul in The Republic. In that dialogue, we hear that the soul has three parts, vertically arranged like notes in a musical scale (4.443d). The highest part calculates and reasons and is therefore by nature fit to rule. The lowest part is full of mindless, bodily desires. The middle part, called “spirited,” can make an alliance with either the rational part or the bodily desires. If it does the former, the result is moderation and orderliness; if the latter, then the result is ultimately tyranny.

Having taken up the threefold nature of the human soul, the gods must now confront the following aporia: how to put these parts together and house them in one body in the best possible way, the way that is most conducive to the well-being of the whole animal. The solution of this problem is another instance of cosmological wit. In order to join together the best parts of us with the worst, the gods invent – the neck. The neck is ingenious, and we should all be grateful we have one. It is an isthmus, as Timaeus calls it, that joins the head to the torso while keeping them apart (69d-e). Thanks to the ingenious neck, the divine circuits of intelligence can be connected with our spiritedness and bodily desires in such a way that the lower parts of our souls will be minimally disruptive to the life of the mind.

The invention of the neck is a good example of what Timaeus means by providence. The neck is providential because the gods knew beforehand what would happen when the head was in any way attached to the rest of the body. Timaeus’s gods possess what Henry Jamescalled the “imagination of disaster,” and it is precisely this imaginative anticipation of falls and catastrophes that gives Timaeus’s teleology its peculiar stamp.

Purposiveness throughout the likely story is providential; it represents the gods’ intelligent care for the world and their guardianship. Such care requires three things: the tendency toward the best (the most intelligently ordered), the anticipation of future evil, and the means to make that evil into something either less bad or even good. This is not the teleology we find in Aristotle, for whom nature proceeds to its ends without the will of a god. Finality, for him, is not providence. In Aristotle’s view of nature, although there is an argument for a first mover, on which the heavenly motions depend, there is no argument from design, an argument from the order of nature to a god who intended that order. The simple reason for this is that god did not make the world and therefore has no designs. Natural ends are not intended; they simply happen spontaneously if nothing impedes them. And in the ethical sphere, man strives to be virtuous, not through any divine intent but simply because it is his nature to be so, because virtue is a condition for his happiness.

The neck as the work of providence shows us that, in his glorification of divine art, Timaeus constructs a cosmos that is governed by divine intention, the will of god. This way of speaking has the rhetorical effect of making human virtue ultimately an act of obedience to divinely established νόμος. The cosmos is like a city or regime, and the artist-god is like a lawgiver. Plato in his Timaeus is more worried about potential disorder than Aristotle is in his writings: he has the imagination of disaster. That is why art as the making of order is so important to the cosmology we find here, why nature for Timaeus is the divine art of staving off chaos. Also, unlike Aristotle, he wants piety – a revised, enlightened form of piety – to be a virtue. This is perhaps why Timaeus reminds Socrates that we humans must accept the likely story and not seek for anything else beyond it. We must know our place and not question the laws of our cosmic fatherland.

Another telling example of witty providential making is our hair. Once again, the gods must confront and solve a head-related problem (76b-d). In this case, they must guard the life of the mind against the ravages and risks of bodily becoming. If the gods leave our heads unprotected, the circles of intelligence inside would be vulnerable to blows and weather. But if they protected our heads with a thick blanket of flesh, they would have rendered us safe but stupid, or rather insensate (76d). Hair is the ingenious compromise between the conflicting demands of self-preservation and intelligence, toughness and sensitivity. Like the neck, the hair on our head reminds us of how vulnerable we are, how complicated our life is, and how our nature is defined as a conflict between the good and the necessary.

Many of Timaeus’s stories are about how the gods prevented the body and bodily desire from being the destroyer of intelligence. Indeed, the wit and outrageous humor of the likely story derive from precisely this attempt to assert the final cause of intelligence within the realm of organic life. This turns out to be a tall order. One of the funniest stories in this respect has to do with the intestines. Why do we have intestines? Timaeus does not even consider the possibility that it might have something to do with digesting food in order to stay alive. On the contrary, the purpose of the intestines is to slow down the passage of food and drink through the body, thereby staving off desire and allowing man some leisure for philosophy (72e-73). In moments like this, it seems that Timaeus’s sole interest in his mythic physiology is to give the body an exclusively intellectual purpose.

Then there is the story of the mouth (75d-e). This organ fits nicely into Timaeus’s agenda and gives him the chance to combine the good and the necessary in an especially elegant and intimate way. The mouth is defined in terms of two streams: the stream of nourishment that flows in, and the stream of intelligent speech that flows out. The first is the stream of necessity, the second the stream of goodness. The fact that the two streams flow in opposite directions, coupled with the fact that we cannot really eat and speak at the same time, offers a telling example of how our nature is defined by contrariety and conflict. Artful construction, in the likely story, does not do away with conflict: it only tunes and beautifies it.

No catalogue of philosophic jokes in the Timaeus would be complete without mention of the liver. This is one of the most elaborate body-stories we hear. The liver is situated where it is and is made of a dense and shiny stuff because it is the movie screen for the lower part of the soul (71a ff.). When the intellect wants to soothe or terrify the desirous, childish part of us, it knows that arguments won’t work. Instead it uses the power of images. The liver is the seat of both imagination and prophecy (71d-72d). It is invented for the purpose of ministering to the irrational part of the soul in order to make this part as good as possible – to give it some anchor in the divine. The spleen is where it is, close to the liver, so that it can serve as a sort of napkin that cleans the liver when it becomes full of impurities (72c). This whole cosmic comedy of liver and spleen has its serious purpose: to give an account of the body that allows soul and body to have an intimate interaction and that puts the necessary causes of the body in the service of the higher good of the soul.

I now reach the end of my journey through the likely story with the topic with which Timaeus ends his – the invention of sex (90e-91d). This is the most perplexing part of the likely story and the most outrageous. In the biblical account of creation, sexual reproduction is good. God tells all living things, “Be fruitful and multiply!” Timaeus gives no such blessing to procreation. But he does give his own version of a fall. For Timaeus, sexuality and the distinction of the two sexes come about because the first race of men, who in some bizarre way are male without being sexual, “fell” from their originally virtuous condition. Those who were cowardly and unjust, we are told, were, in their second birth, transformed into women (42b-c, 90e-91a). This outrageous derivation of the female, the view of the female as a degenerate male, is opposed to the account Socrates gives in The Republic, where it is asserted that men and women have pretty much the same natures and are therefore capable of engaging in the same activities, including that of ruling the city (5.454d ff.).¹⁷

Timaeus’s dark view of the female nature, and his corresponding preference for de-sexualized masculinity, points out one of the recurring themes in the likely story: the critique of erotic love. Timaeus repeatedly connects this form of love with tyranny. In speaking of all the “passions terrible and necessary” that the gods had to pour into our souls, he calls this love “all-venturing” (69d), implying that erotic love stops at nothing, respects no boundaries, in striving for what it wants. There seems to be a natural antipathy between the cosmic and the erotic. To recall the Greek meaning of the word, what is cosmic is decent, fitting, orderly, discrete, respectful of boundaries. But eros is lustful, defiant, insolent, and disorderly – everything that is associated with profound disorder. In Hesiod’s Theogony, the world came about through sexual passion and begetting. Timaeus seeks to correct this traditional, violent story of divine origins. He does so by grounding the world in the nonsexual, dispassionate productivity of art.

The tyrannical nature of erotic love is colorfully depicted in Timaeus’s account of the sexual organs, the last bodily parts to be grafted onto human nature. I say grafted because these organs do not seem to sprout naturally from our human nature. Instead, they are separate animals, wild animals, which are attached to our bodies to accommodate our fall from god to beast. The male organ is said to be “unpersuadable and autocratic, like an animal that won’t listen to reason and attempts to master all things through its stinging desires” (91b-c). The reproductive organ of the female, the matrix or womb, is “an indwelling animal desirous of childbearing; and whenever this comes to be fruitless long beyond its due season, it grows difficult and irritable” (91c).

It is worth noting here that, although women for Timaeus are depicted as degenerate men, men come off much worse once the sexual distinction is present. Women, in Timaeus’s account, are hysterical – that is, they are victims of their ὑστέρα, or womb, which, for Timaeus, wanders through their body like the necessary cause (91c-d). Men, by contrast, are dangerous in their sexual impulse. The tyranny of erotic love, the lust for mastery and domination, is concentrated in the sexual male. In Timaeus’s view of the sexes, women want children, men want power. In the dramatic prologue, we hear that it was this lust for power – ἔρως in its political guise – that caused the ancient war between Athens and Atlantis (25b).¹⁸

In his description of the cosmic body, Timaeus praised the cosmos for its autonomy or self-sufficiency. The cosmos is not a creature of need. How different we are from the cosmos is most clearly seen in the tragic-comic account of sexuality and erotic love. Nevertheless, in our very degenerateness, we are part of the cosmos – indeed, a necessary part. If it were not for the fall of man, the lower animals would not have been born and the cosmos would be incomplete. And if it were not for sexual reproduction, the cosmos would not be constantly replenished with a store of animals and would again be incomplete. As I mentioned earlier, this is the paradox with which Timaeus ends the likely story. From the cosmological perspective, moral evil makes sense within the cosmos because it is interpreted, not as an abomination, but as a temporary mismatch of soul and body, an asymmetry. Through the transmigration of souls, this asymmetry is corrected, as the souls of men who made themselves into beasts are transplanted into the bodies of those very beasts. Such reshuffling is what Timaeus calls justice or retribution (92c). In the end, Timaeus’s attempt to harmonize the moral order and the physical order justifies evil by making evil a necessary, structural feature of the whole – the wellspring of subhuman life.

As I pointed out earlier, as the likely story goes on, it suffers an erosion of tone: it descends from gravitas to Aristophanic humor. Plato has crafted the tale in such a way that this erosion imitates the descent in the being and worth of the object under discussion: tone mirrors nature. But at the very end, Timaeus recovers, abruptly, his noble tone in describing the cosmos that has been perfected through the gradated fall of man:

For by having acquired animals, mortal as well as immortal, and having been all filled up, this cosmos has thus come to be – a visible animal embracing visible animals, a likeness of the intelligible, a sensed god; greatest and best, most beautiful and most perfect – this one heaven, alone of its kind that it is. (92c)

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

The poetic science of Timaeus may be best characterized as Plato’s poetic effort to dramatize, through the fictional and highly impressive Timaeus, a grand rehabilitation and ἀπολογία or defense of becoming in light of the critique of becoming in The Republic. In that dialogue, Socrates speaks of the need for some art that will turn the soul from becoming to being (7.518d) – from the dark confines of our cave-life, most especially our absorption in politics, to the purely intelligible region of forms that is illuminated by the Good (6.508e). The conversionary arts that Socrates describes occur in the likely story. They are arithmetic, plane and solid geometry, mathematical astronomy, and harmonics (the study of intervals as ratios of whole numbers). But whereas for Socrates the mathematical studies point “up” to being and the forms and are part of our effort to transcend our mere humanness, they are, for Timaeus, part of the “downward” path by which the sound-minded cosmologist beautifies, adorns, and, in a sense, justifies the realm of becoming. Through an utterly ingenious form of intellectual poetry, Timaeus presents and celebrates the world as the cosmic status quo – the “regime,” to whose laws all other things within becoming are subject. The craftsman god, who resembles a lawgiver and political founder, gives the world order a divine origin and divine authority. It is an order not to be disobeyed. This rigorous cosmic conservatism finds its parallel in Timaeus’s political origin: he comes from and has held high offices in a city known for its strict observance of law.

In the course of this essay, I have emphasized the poetic, transformative character of Timaean science and the close bond between mathematical studies and the pursuit of virtue and happiness. It is very difficult to say what Plato wants us to conclude from the likely story. My guess is that he wants us to be entertained and amused by it, as I am sure Socrates is, and also to take seriously the possibility that in the structures and motions of the physical world there is a divine hand, or something analogous to it, that crafts all things for the best and aims at goodness and beauty – that the physical world exhibits purposeful design.

Furthermore, there is something compelling about getting at nature in the way Timaeus does: through the building of models. A model or image does seem to capture something of the truth, if only in a series of happy correspondences or harmonies, like Ptolemy’s epicycles. And the building of models, as some of us may remember from our early youth, is an intensely pleasant and gratifying human experience. The desire to make images lies deep in our being and often comes to our aid when we seek knowledge of nature (say, in the molecular model of DNA). The building of beautiful models, the poetic science of becoming, saves becoming from degenerating – in our souls, in our imaginations, in our very lives – into a meaningless Lucretian hubbub of matter in motion, chance and necessity. Finally, as I mentioned earlier, the likely story re-creates the world in such a way that thinking is not alien to it.

But Plato surely wants us to be skeptical as well and to explore why the likely story, for all its inspired songs of structural beauty and its admirable concern with a genuine cosmos, is also at times incoherent, troubling, and inadequate. This is especially evident in Timaeus’s treatment of the sexes, the attack on erotic love, and the cosmic justification of evil – that is, the transformation of moral evil into a cosmic necessity. We can only wonder what the silent, receptive, and unusually well-behaved Socrates has made of this story, which, after all, is designed to be his feast of speech. Our wonder is made all the more acute since, in the cosmos of Timaeus, for whom mathematical astronomy is the highest and most important science, there is no place for Socrates, the philosopher, as dialectician and lover of what is.

Republished with gracious permission from Kronos (vol. VII, 2019).

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Notes:

¹ This essay is a revised version of a lecture presented at Notre Dame University in May 2004. The lecture was part of a three-year NEH grant to promote interdisciplinary teaching and learning at colleges and universities across the United States. The program’s title was “Bridging the Gap Between the Sciences and Humanities.” The focus of the third and final session, during which the lecture was given, was biology.

² The phrase in Greek has an especially musical sound: πᾶν δὴ τὸ ἀγαθὸν καλόν, τὸ δὲ καλὸν οὐκ ἄμετρον.

³ In keeping with the formality of the drama, Socrates has dressed up for the occasion. He is κεκοσμημένος (20c) and therefore suitably attired to hear Timaeus’s speech about the κόσμος.

⁴ The story recalls Athens’s glorious role in the Persian War and, ominously, her own insolence during the war with Sparta, when an imperialistic Athens sought to conquer Sicily and suffered miserable defeat.

⁵ I. 5. 645a19-23. Aristotle is warning his high-minded students not to be snobs when it comes to the inquiry into “low” living things and their parts. He tells the story of visitors who went to the home of Heraclitus and found him in the kitchen warming himself by the stove. Seeing the godlike man in such humble circumstances, they hesitated to enter. Heraclitus then urged them to take heart and come in, “for there are gods even here.”

⁶ Socrates uses this same language in The Republic, when he calls the mathematical art of turning the soul from becoming to being as the “prelude” to the “song itself that dialectic performs” (7. 531d-532a).

⁷ Translations are from my edition of the Timaeus for Hackett Publishing Company (2nd ed., 2016).

⁸ God, for Timaeus, is νοῦς, intellect, which, in the likely story, is presented as productive rather than contemplative. At 40d-e, Timaeus seems to dispense with the traditional gods of the city with a circular argument. Of course, we must believe that these gods, like the intellectual star-gods, had birth! After all, who can doubt the testimony of those who claimed to be their sons and offspring?

⁹ More precisely, it moved in a way that was not in step and in tune with a μέλος, or song.

¹⁰ For a description of the god’s construction of the cosmic scale, see Appendix A in my edition of the dialogue (ibid., 157-62).

¹¹ Even at the stage at which the world-soul is still a linear band, it exhibits, as all musical scales do, circularity in the phenomenon of the octave. As we move, step by step, away from a given tone in the scale, we are approaching that same tone an octave higher or lower. Musical “space” is inescapably circular.

¹² Space is a “third kind” (52a-b). The other two are the form, or εἶδος, which is purely intelligible and unchanging, and the sensed thing that has the same name as the form and is similar to it but is “always swept along, coming to be in some region and again perishing from there.” The crucial point, here, is that whereas time is constructed and artificial, space, χώρα, is primordial and eternal and predates the cosmic founding.

¹³ The construction of this proportion is another instance of Timaeus’s aristocratic concern with beauty: “But it’s not possible for two things alone, apart from some third, to be beautifully combined: some bond must get in the middle and bring them both together” (31b-c).

¹⁴ The dialogue’s preoccupation with ἁρμόττειν, making things fit, first comes on the scene with Critias, who boldly claims that the citizens of Socrates’s city in speech will be precisely those of ancient Athens, whose praises Critias intends to sing: “In all ways they will fit (or harmonize with) one another (ἁρμόσουσι), and we won’t be singing out of tune if we say that they’re the very ones who existed at that time” (26d).

¹⁵ We recall that in the initial, eidetic phase of soul building, the craftsman god had to use force to get the Other to mix with Same.

¹⁶ It is instructive to compare the sphere as the image of perfection in the Timaeus with our once-upon-a-time ancestors in Aristophanes’s myth in the Symposium (189c ff.). Originally, we were sphere shaped – like the heavenly bodies. When these sphere-shaped creatures, who were fast and ambitious, tried to assault the gods, Zeus punished them by cutting them in half, in this way destroying their circle-like perfection and inflicting on them erotic longing. The punishment for ὕβρις, in other words, is linearity.

¹⁷ Socrates reiterates this view in his summary at the beginning of the Timaeus, when he says that in the best city the natures of women are “tuned” to the men (18c).

¹⁸ Thucydides refers to the political ἔρως in his History, where the erotic and ambitious Alcibiades arouses the Athenians’ ἔρως for the Sicilian expedition: “And upon all alike there fell erotic longing (ἔρως) to set sail” (6.24).

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