To bring sense under the control of reason; to find some way through the mist or labyrinth of appearances, either the highway of mathematics, or more devious paths suggested by the analogy of man with the world, and of the world with man; to see that all things have a cause and are tending towards an end—this is the spirit of the ancient physical philosopher.
He has no notion of trying an experiment and is hardly capable of observing the curiosities of nature which are 'tumbling out at his feet,' or of interpreting even the most obvious of them. He is driven back from the nearer to the more distant, from particulars to generalities, from the earth to the stars.
He lifts up his eyes to the heavens and seeks to guide by their motions his erring footsteps. But we neither appreciate the conditions of knowledge to which he was subjected, nor have the ideas which fastened upon his imagination the same hold upon us. For he is hanging between matter and mind; he is under the dominion at the same time both of sense and of abstractions; his impressions are taken almost at random from the outside of nature; he sees the light, but not the objects which are revealed by the light; and he brings into juxtaposition things which to us appear wide as the poles asunder, because he finds nothing between them.
He passes abruptly from persons to ideas and numbers, and from ideas and numbers to persons,—from the heavens to man, from astronomy to physiology; he confuses, or rather does not distinguish, subject and object, first and final causes, and is dreaming of geometrical figures lost in a flux of sense. He contrasts the perfect movements of the heavenly bodies with the imperfect representation of them Rep.
His mind lingers around the forms of mythology, which he uses as symbols or translates into figures of speech. He has no implements of observation, such as the telescope or microscope; the great science of chemistry is a blank to him. It is only by an effort that the modern thinker can breathe the atmosphere of the ancient philosopher, or understand how, under such unequal conditions, he seems in many instances, by a sort of inspiration, to have anticipated the truth.
The influence with the Timaeus has exercised upon posterity is due partly to a misunderstanding. In the supposed depths of this dialogue the Neo-Platonists found hidden meanings and connections with the Jewish and Christian Scriptures, and out of them they elicited doctrines quite at variance with the spirit of Plato.
Believing that he was inspired by the Holy Ghost, or had received his wisdom from Moses, they 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. All religions and philosophies met and mingled in the schools of Alexandria, and the Neo-Platonists had a method of interpretation which could elicit any meaning out of any words.
They were really incapable of distinguishing between the opinions of one philosopher and another— between Aristotle and Plato, or between the serious thoughts of Plato and his passing fancies. They were absorbed in his theology and were under the dominion of his name, while that which was truly great and truly characteristic in him, his effort to realize and connect abstractions, was not understood by them at all.
Yet the genius of Plato and Greek philosophy reacted upon the East, and a Greek element of thought and language overlaid and partly reduced to order the chaos of Orientalism. And kindred spirits, like St. Augustine, even though they were acquainted with his writings only through the medium of a Latin translation, were profoundly affected by them, seeming to find 'God and his word everywhere insinuated' in them August. There is no danger of the modern commentators on the Timaeus falling into the absurdities of the Neo-Platonists.
And these things are the responsibility of soul, but not of ire, and of the formula logos rather than the matter. We could even say that ire is responsible for the fact that the food is burned. Yet it is not ire as such that is responsible for the way in which the food is burnt, since ire would continue consuming the food as long as any was available. More particularly, on this analogy soul imposes a limit or proportion on the revolutions. We talk about right and let, back and front, and up and down in relation to ourselves as observers.
Again De an. However, in terms of nutrition, up is where the food enters, down where the waste exits. So, functionally speaking, for plants the roots are up. Aristotle distinguishes between a primary and a secondary heavenly motion. He takes the primary motion to be that of the outer heavens, the stars.
Inside the primary motion, there is also a secondary motion going from let to right and back again to which the planets are subject. For Aristotle, it is because the heavens have soul that we can diferen- tiate directionality by function. Aristotle takes the right, up, and front to be better than their opposites, let, down, and back. Enjoying as they do the best life, it is not surprising, therefore, that the outer heavens display the more honorable motions from right to let and from up to down, whilst the somewhat inferior planets are also subject to the inferior motion from let to right.
Beyond this it is hard to make clear compar- isons between the De caelo and the Timaeus, for example, on the relative speeds and courses of the heavenly bodies. Because the heavens have a soul, we can apply to them the functional notion of directionality that we use to explain animal motion. We might expect those planets that are closest to the outer heavens to move in a manner most similar to these; that is to say, with the fewest number of motions.
We need the concept of soul to explain the relative complexity of the various heavenly motions. Each living being seeks by its actions to achieve its proper good. However, diferent kinds of living being pursue this aim in diferent ways. Higher animals typically display more complex actions than lower animals, with the exception of the very highest life- form, which enjoys the good with no efort, like a man who enjoys good health without need of exercise.
For Aristotle, then, we need to say that the heavenly bodies have a soul and not just a body to explain several things about how they move. To explain how they move round in the proper teleological way, that is to say, in the way that shows why these motions are the best, we need to think of the heavenly bodies as beings with a soul, which because of their souls live diferent kinds of lives.
In the Timaeus, meanwhile, the soul is created separately from the body, inserted into the body from without, and moves it in a way that seems not to express any inherent potentiality of body. Rather, the heavenly bodies, or at least their majority, as Timaeus puts it, are made out of ire,25 whose natural motion is rectilinear,26 not circular.
But Plato does not present the circular motions as natural to the matter of the heavenly bodies. Aristotle therefore infers that the circular motion must be unnatural to the heavenly bodies. Soul can then only move the heavenly bodies round by forcing them to do so, an efort that is inconsistent with its enjoying a happy and quiet life. And Timaeus is talking here about the body of the universe as a whole rather than that of the heavenly bodies, which is a rather diferent matter.
To my mind the rejection is unqualiied and unambiguous, and it should not be argued that Aristotle merely protests against a soul working by ananke.
Rather what he appears to say is that soul, if credited with such a function, would have to operate by ananke. To be sure, Aristotle does not otherwise know of entities that are alive but have no soul, yet we may safely leave the responsibility for this contradiction to himself. I think we are better advised, if possible, not to ascribe the contradiction to Aristotle. For more on the distinction see below. Conclusion I have argued in this chapter that, despite an emphasis on the bodily constituents of the universe in the De caelo, a heavenly soul emerges in the De caelo at crucial points where Aristotle wants to ofer a certain kind of teleological explanation of the directions and courses taken by the heavenly motions.
For Timaeus, we recall, the heavenly motions of the world soul were the prime examples of good order in the universe. It is conspicuous that Aristotle brings in the soul precisely in those contexts where he wants to show that the heavens move in the ways they do because these are the best ways. If vice comes from bad physical and social factors, then, it would seem, virtue comes from good physical and social factors.
And good physical and social factors are just as much beyond our control as bad ones are. One can no more choose to be born into good social conditions than one can choose to be born into bad ones. A major challenge for understanding the argument for AT in the Timaeus , then, is to understand why Timaeus would not think that this parallel argument for thinking that virtue is involuntary is sound.
Another problem arises from considering the idea that bad social and physical factors are beyond our control. It certainly is true that some social and physical factors are beyond our example that she is responsible for.
Holding responsible, by contrast, implies more than that. Hence, I might judge that my dog is the one responsible for breaking my favorite vase, but that need not imply that I hold my dog responsible for breaking the vase.
For discussion, see Smith, ibid. Because of the emphasis that Timaeus places on the ways in which our own efforts can affect our psychic and physical health, Richard Stalley18 has suggested that by linking vice with disease, Timaeus does not mean to limit the sphere of human responsibility but rather to enlarge it: vice is a disease, but like other diseases, it is something for which we are responsible.
Hence, A. Let me begin by considering the textual evidence for the deterministic reading. But to assume this is to beg the question whether Timaeus is appealing to some form of determinism in this passage.
On this conception, a subject that undergoes a certain motion, for example, would do so involuntarily if and only if that motion is contrary to the natural tendency of the subject at issue.
In favor of this picture, I begin by calling attention to a use of the language of involuntariness in the Timaeus that is only plausibly understood along 23 Hence, Meyer ibid. It is not causality but contrariety that he evokes with that term. Outside of the discussion of disease of the soul, we only find one passage in which the language of involuntariness occurs. However, I think that passage is quite important. Heavy and light can be most clearly explained if we examine them in conjunction with what we call above and below.
The question that is relevant for us is why Timaeus characterizes the movement of a natural body with mass when it is moved upwards as involuntary.
The answer can be surmised from what he goes on to say. It is worth noting, though, that at least in the Eudemian Ethics , Aristotle takes the idea that the forced and the involuntary are the same quite seriously, although he ultimately rejects it. Consider, for example, the following passage from EE 2. Well then, what is forced and compelled, and force and compulsion are thought to be opposed in the realm of action to the voluntary and to persuasion. We say, for example, that the rock moves upwards and the fire moves downwards by force and compulsion, whereas what moves in accordance with its nature and its own intrinsic impulse is not said to do so by force, nor yet voluntarily.
The opposite condition has no name, though when something moves contrary to this we say it does so by force. Passage 2, however, strongly suggests that Timaeus has no such compunctions, perhaps because the latter is speaking in a more poetic idiom.
It is not obvious, however, how this relates to the argument that vice is involuntary. I think, though, that once we consider the theory of soul at work in the Timaeus , the connection between these two issues becomes clear. I turn there now. I shall argue, moreover, that there are certain kinds of motions that are natural to the soul.
Vice arises from a disruption of these motions. The human soul is meant to resemble the World Soul in certain respects. This is not, however, a reason to discount the reading I have suggested. This fact is used to explain why he created the World Soul. The term nous here, as quite commonly in Plato, is used to refer to a certain kind of virtue, associated with rationality and orderliness. The process by which he creates the World Soul is, in short, as follows. The latter is subdivided into seven smaller circles which revolve, at certain proportions and certain speeds, within the circle of the Same.
Timaeus makes clear that it is in these circular movements that nous manifests itself: For a detailed defense of this view, see Menn, Plato on God as Nous. This reading is confirmed by what Timaeus goes on to say a little further on, when he explains in somewhat more detail the motions of the parts of the World Soul and how they relate to the activities that it is responsible for: 4. Because the soul is a mixture of the Same, the Different and Being [ It then declares what exactly that thing is the same as, or what it is different from, and in what respect and in what manner, as well as when, it turns out that they are the same or different and are characterized as such.
This confirms that the World Soul manifests nous by virtue of undergoing certain circular motions. Timaeus seems to explain locomotion and rest in terms of Sameness and Difference respectively.
Indeed, later on, when describing how the lesser gods implanted the human soul in the human body, Timaeus endorses this very conclusion.
Whenever a soul is bound within a mortal body, it is at first without intelligence anous. They then correctly identify what is the same and what is different and render wise emphrona the person who possesses them.
That infants lack the intellectual capacities that adults have is explained by reference to differences between adult and infant bodies.
An infant's body is small and grows rapidly which requires a rapid influx of nutrition. This influx of nutrition issues in rectilinear motions which disrupt the circular motions of the soul.
This is made clear by what Timaeus goes on to say in the lines immediately following Passage 5. We also see the idea that the condition that someone suffers from as a result of those conditions not being met is a disease. Given the account of the soul and the way in which nous manifests itself or fails to do so in it, we are in a position to make good sense of this idea. The soul does not exhibit nous because it does not undergo the relevant circular motions, and the reason it does not undergo these motions is that it is disturbed by the rectilinear motions that come about as a result of being implanted in the body.
I begin by considering the lines with which Timaeus introduces the discussion of disease of the soul. First, part i is ambiguous between two construals, each of which has its defenders. On this construal Timaeus is saying that all diseases of the soul come about on account of a bad bodily condition. I think, however, that in light of what we have seen, we can answer both these questions with some confidence.
First, it makes good sense for Timaeus to identify disease of the soul in general with anoia in fact, he already came very close to doing this in Passage 6 above. Only when a soul is in its good condition does it manifest nous , hence when a soul is in a bad condition, it is in a condition in which it lacks nous or, equivalently, exhibits anoia.
The soul is by nature such as to exhibit at least roughly the same qualities as the World Soul. The reason that it does not always exhibit these qualities when it is embodied, as we saw from Passage 5, is because of the influence of the body. This picture finds further support from remarks about the soul that Timaeus makes at the beginning of this description of human physiology. The soul that the Demiurge created, and which is therefore immortal, is only one kind of soul present in the human being.
In addition, the human being is equipped with a mortal soul, which Timaeus describes as follows. Unlike the cosmos itself, which Timaeus calls the Living Animal, the human being needs nourishment and hence needs to navigate his environment to get it. Here a puzzle arises. Timaeus claimed when he discussed disease of the soul that the person who has vice, has vice involuntarily. This latter claim does not follow from the claim that vice belongs to the soul involuntarily.
In that case, vice would only be contrary to the natural tendency of one part of the agent. Aristotle makes a similar point in the discussion of force bia in Eudemian Ethics 2. He cautions against moving from the claim that there is something in the soul that is subject to force, to the claim that the whole soul is subject to force. So too, if the soul is only one part of the agent , it would be a mistake to infer from the premise that vice is contrary to a nature of the soul, to the conclusion that vice is contrary to the nature of the agent.
What, then, are we to make of the fact that Timaeus does clearly make this inference? Indeed, there is abundant evidence throughout the Platonic corpus for such an identification.
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