Timaeus as a Political Allegory

Plato is notorious for having banned the artists and poets in the Republic. But Plato was himself an artist and poet. Plato’s animosity toward poetry was not toward the poetic in of itself, it was the falsity which poetry ascribed to the gods and the universe. Plato’s poetic-philosophical creativity, by contrast, was the antidote to the sublime and false poetry which he excoriated.

The Timaeus is one of Plato’s most famous dialogues and most well-received down through history. The positive reception of the Timaeus comes from two post-Platonic currents of Western thought. The first is Christianity. The Timaeus, more than any other Platonic dialogue, was the most frequently referenced by the Latin Church Fathers—St. Augustine most prominent among them. The second is Neoplatonism. The Neoplatonists, led by Plotinus and his disciples, began a long revision of the Timaeus bequeathing a tradition of esoteric metaphysics, cosmology, and spirituality that was then resuscitated during the Renaissance.

At face value it is easy to be seduced by the cosmology and metaphysics offered in the dialogue. Prior to Plato, the Greek cosmos was believed preexistent and filled with many gods who engaged in nefarious activities with each other which eventually led to the rise of the Titans, Olympians, and other divine entities fully permeating the human world. The cosmos of Greek literature from Hesiod and Homer down to Plato was pathological in nature; the cosmos that is suddenly born in Plato’s mind is rational and, while not created ex nihilo, is formed by logos and ordered labor unlike the chaotic pathological strife in Hesiod’s Theogony and broader Greek mytho-poetic literature. The rational and ordered construct of the Demiurge, as Plato famously says through Timaeus, gives a rational telos to the cosmos that supersedes the government of pathos with the government of logos.

Yet when the dialogue begins Socrates is referring back to a political discussion that he was having with Timaeus and other guests at a party, “I suppose the most important of the issues I raised yesterday was a political one, when I explained my views on what the best kind of constitution might be and what kind of citizens should make up such a state” (17c). Timaeus responds, “Yes, Socrates, and the political system you described met with our wholehearted approval” (Ibid). For a dialogue supposedly about cosmology, that it begins with a political discussion is deeply revealing and important for us to recognize.

This, now, returns us to the reality of Plato as an artist. Before becoming a philosopher, and the most famous philosopher of all time, Plato dreamt of being a dramatist. This is so clearly preserved for us in the fact that Plato writes dialogues and that his works have a certain poetic character to them. He could have written in prose or Pythagorean verse as the pre-Socratic philosophers did or as Aristotle and the philosophers after Plato did. But he did not. The surviving fragments of the pre-Socratic philosophers seem deeply practical and straightforward, like Pythagoras saying, “First worship the Immortal Gods, as they are established and ordained by Law.” By contrast Plato often provides exquisite analogies, allegories, and myths to make his point. Plato wasn’t just a philosopher, he was a philosopher-artist; perhaps, we might say, a philosopher-poet like his own Demiurge creating from the existing chaotic matter of Greek drama and poetry to forge a new cosmos to stand the test of time.

This, I would argue, is what is going on beneath the surface of the Timaeus. Though, I think, Plato makes this reality very explicit at various points over the dialogue. For one, as mentioned, it begins with explicit discussion on political matters. And then toward the end of the dialogue we return to politicized analogies reflecting back onto the elaborate and incredible speech given by Timaeus.

Since the world of Plato, quite literally in his own lifetime and before him in the repository of Greek literature, was one in which chaos reigned supreme, Plato took it upon himself to ascertain how once mighty civilizations fall into decadence, degradation, and tyranny. In Plato’s inquiry into why the greatest civilization the ancient world had ever seen had fallen on such hard times, Plato concluded that the chaotic and conflictual principles of the poets, sophists, and other Greek intellectuals and leaders were to blame. This helps to explain Plato’s animosity toward the poets and the sophists who were held up by Athenian society as the shining lights of wisdom in their time. (We will notice how Plato also subtly critiques these gentlemen in the dialogue.) Plato saw no such light emanating from them, however majestic, sublime, and awe-inspiring some of the works may have been. False light is still false. Thus we can begin to understand Plato’s discovery of physis, logos, and telos as the counterweight to relativistic chaos and conflict.

Nature, rational order, and first principles are all what the Timaeus deals with. The exoteric reading of Timaeus confirms this easily enough. The gods, in the Timaeus, are not the capricious, vengeful, and lustful entities they are in Hesiod, Homer, or Euripides. They are, as Timaeus says to Socrates and his friends, lights for us to imitate because they reflect the orderly composition of the orderly cosmos we ourselves exist in, “The gods he [the Demiurge] formed mostly out of fire, to make them as visible and as beautiful as they could be; he made them spherical, after the fashion of the universe as whole” (40a). Rather than the birth of the gods in chaos and strife as in Hesiod, Plato presents the gods as rational, orderly, and worthy of imitation.

Reason and necessity, two of the great themes of the dialogue, are not juxtaposed dialectically against each other as in pre-Socratic philosophy. Reason, Logos, is the ordering principle and force of the universe. Necessity, however, was often the impenetrable domain of chaos. Necessity, in Plato’s world, meant chaos or chance and not necessary order or calculative movement as in our post-Newtonian world. That Plato integrates reason and necessity as a unitive force in the Timaeus is his attempt to resolve the dilemma of the zero-sum game mentality pervasive in Greece at the time that pit reason and necessity against each other. As Timaeus so eloquently and shockingly says, “Reason prevailed over necessity by persuading it to steer the majority of created things to perfection, and this was how the universe was originally created, as a result of the defeat of necessity by the persuasive power of intelligence” (48a).

In the Theogony, the great cosmic poem most familiar to the educated elite in Plato’s time, the cosmos was formed through the chaotic conflicts of the primordial deities, the birth of the Olympians through sexual violence, and the overthrow of the Titans by forced usurpation led by Zeus. Force—the necessary manifestation of chaos—in the Hesiodic world, is what crafts and brings order. Force is the lynchpin of movement and order in the sublime cosmogony of Hesiod. Not so in Plato. Reason, we are told, changed the very course of cosmic movement and history through persuasion. Rational dialogue, intelligence, and a dialectic of logical conversation instead of brute force reminiscent of Uranus, Kronos, or Zeus (or even Thrasymachus) is what brings life into being according to Plato.

Thus Plato achieves a unity in his cosmic vision. All the universe, down to the smallest particles to the mightiest and largest lights of the cosmos (the gods), is tied together through reason and necessity in a governing motion to perfection (heavenly ascent). In imitating the great and beautiful lights of the universe, the “gods,” we ourselves become more perfect because we follow the law of reason to perfection just as necessity did and does. The cosmos described by Plato in the Timaeus, as astute readers come to realize, is at once hierarchal and concentric. (This too helps us to understand the hierarchal and concentric cosmos of Plotinus.)

This orderly, rational, and perfecting cosmos which Timaeus describes to Socrates and others over the course of the dialogue contrasts sharply with the chaotic, disorderly, and violent cosmos of the Greek poets before Plato and contrasts entirely with the chaotic, disorderly, and violent world the sophists say must be wrestled into submission by force of will. The art of conversation, dialectic, and persuasion supersede the more primordial spirits not altogether dissimilar from the mythology of supersession presented by Aeschylus at the end of the Oresteia in the Eumenides when Athena calms the passionate rage of the Furies but also invites them into the just and rational order that she represents. And it is safe to say that Aeschylus, among all the dramatists, most significantly influenced Plato.

To serve God, Timaeus suggests, is to serve perfection and the good, “To serve him in his work, he made use of causes and their necessary effects, but he took personal responsibility for fashioning the goodness in all created things. And that is why we should distinguish two kinds of cause, the necessary and the divine, and should search in everything for the divine cause, if we are to attain as blessed a life as our nature permits.” To seek out the divine, paradoxically for Plato, is to seek out the law of persuasive perfection that brought form and order to disorderly and chaotic matter (physis, nature) and infused into it a governing core attracted to order and perfection. To seek the purely necessary, as is implied here, is to seek the chaotic. Yet the “divine,” as equally implied here, is not the original pre-ordered matter but the very law of rational persuasion which moves all things to perfection. In a brilliant movement Plato ties physis and nomos (law) together as a unitive entity just as he has been doing all throughout the dialogue. And, in doing so, nature and law also have a telos ascribed in them giving them lasting permanence and purpose.

By the end of Timaeus’ dazzling discourse we see why Plato thought it necessary to have a long but hopefully persuasive speech on the rational necessity of there being an orderly and perfecting principle to the cosmos. If there is no such orderly and perfecting principle there can be no such thing as reason in the classical sense. Reason, to Plato, is tied to teleology and the good, true, and beautiful as the Timaeus makes clear. Reason allows us to know the good, true, and beautiful and imitate it to grow to perfection just like the whole of the universe and all created things therein. Reason, as defined by Plato and understood by the philosophers and theologians prior to the sixteenth century, is irrevocably tied to a moral and perfecting order which calls us to divinization. This is far different than the base “reason” of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Baruch Spinoza who assert that reason is the practical and material manifestation of achieving what one bodily desires in the most efficient and harmless manner possible.

It is easy to see why, on this account, Christianity and the esoteric Late Platonists came to dominate the reception of the Timaeus. The cosmology of Plato is not Christian, but Christians can see the traces of the truth in Plato’s writings. Likewise, the mysterious esoteric elements within the Timaeus leant itself nicely to the new revisionist interpretations of the Platonic mystics who were inspired by the text and subsequently revived by monastic mystics during the Renaissance.

But at the end of the lengthy cosmic discourse Plato reveals his hand to us when we immediately return to political discussion. As Timaeus states, “In addition, when men who are constitutionally unsound as I’ve been describing, live in cities with pernicious political systems and hear correspondingly pernicious speeches at home and in public, and when, moreover, what they learn from childhood onwards does nothing at all to remedy all this, these two factors, which have nothing whatsoever to do with one’s own choice, are responsible for the badness of those of us who become bad” (87b). Once finished with his discourse on the body and its relationship to health, Timaeus immediately ties his entire speech into the realm of the political. The critique of the sophists and poets is also established when Timaeus says, “We should always blame the sowers rather than the seed, and the teachers rather than the taught.” Who are those sowers and teachers but not the poets and sophists whom we know Plato had an animus against?

In recognizing that the Timaeus begins as a dialogue on politics and ends as a dialogue on politics the Timaeus is opened to us in the way that Plato intended: a political analogy and allegory. The city, polis, is itself the crafted and ordered cosmos. The Demiurge is the Law and Lawgiver. The many stars and other material things that compose the cosmos in its hierarchal and concentric composition are the many persons who comprise the city-state.

And we also see the profundity and revolutionary dimension and consequence of Plato’s work. The Timaeus, more than the Republic which is a deconstruction of tyranny as I’ve written here, is the blueprint of the perfect political order. Yet Plato is very vague, as he usually is, about what that perfect order is. What we see, however, is that such a perfect order needs a rational, orderly, metaphysic to govern it and guide all persons to it in a harmonious dance to perfection. Without the principle of reason, order, and creation there is only chaos and the “necessity” of conflictual clashing out of which force reigns supreme and the dog-eat-dog world of Thrasymachus consummates itself.

Unhealthy and animalized men, in their rejection of logos, metaphysics, and persuasion bring an unhealthy and animalized spirit to the very cities they live in. Unhealthy cities, as Timaeus says, quickly become tyrannical cities (“bad” cities) where the rule of brute force is the only prevailing and governing reality which we must miserably submit to. But if such a disorderly and tyrannical world is unhealthy then it is the opposite of the healthy. What, then, is the healthy body and city? It is the city with its citizenry who best reflect the principles of cosmic politics laid out in the Timaeus.

Plato uses the Demiurge and the elaborate cosmology which Timaeus speaks of as an analogy and allegory for the political. The Timaeus is at once a metaphysical and cosmological treatise against the reductive materialists, sophists, and Hesiodic poets who celebrate chaos, force, and violence as the governing spirits of the world as it is an elaborate political treatise informing us on the necessity of reason, law, and teleology in political life. A people and a city which hands itself over to such bad and unhealthy men will invariably become bad and unhealthy themselves. Plato, perhaps ironically, realizes the necessity of there being a nature tied to teleological law to avoid the tyranny of chaos and disorder. Law, however, is equally useless unless it is directed to the good, true, and the beautiful which teleology permits.

Therefore Timaeus, not Socrates, gives the eloquent and persuasive speech in this dialogue. Socrates nowhere ties law, nature, and telos together in one harmonious movement to the good and the perfect. Even Socrates, here, is insufficient in providing a stable and orderly basis for the political. A world of guardians and soldiers and all that was said in the Republic and alluded to in the Timaeus may superficially sound good, but without that rational and teleological law infused into nature it will inevitably decay into chaos and tyranny.

The future of politics, the future of liberty, and the future of the good life—all things that Plato was primarily concerned with at a far more substantive level than mere cosmology and metaphysics—hinges on this unitive integration of physis, nomos, and telos. Thus Plato leaves us with the law of rational persuasion as the barrier against “bad,” “unhealthy,” tyrannical politics. We ought to recover that wisdom in the Timaeus instead of remaining blind to it.

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