PLATO MADE MUCH of the connection between vitality and vividness that is at work in the Greek verb ζάω, as is evident by the variety and significance of phenomena explicated in the dialogues by means of an appeal to life [ζωή] and living beings [ζῷα] of various sorts: λόγος is characterized as a living being (Phaedrus 264c), the κόσμος as being alive (Timaeus 30b–c), and the πόλις as a living body (Republic 462c–d, 464b).1 Throughout the dialogues, flocks and swarms of animals are treated as revelatory of human political and intellectual life, and particular animals as illuminating conditions of souls, forms of life, and kinds of character, from the virtuous to the vicious. The lion and boar, for instance, are lauded for their courage (Laches 196e–197c), the bee and ant for their social natures (Phaedrus 82b), noble puppies for their melding of spirit and gentleness (Republic 375e), the swan for its loyal service (Phaedrus 84e), while the wolf is castigated for its wildness (Republic 566a, Sophist 231a, Laws 906d–e), the cow for its slavishness (Republic 586a–b), and the donkey for its gluttony (Phaedo 81e). Occasionally, in the context of telling a mythos about the afterlife, Socrates will speak about animals as animated by souls that had formerly resided in human bodies, treating animal embodiment as punishment for or, as in the myth of Er, liberation from a human life.2 In both metaphorical and mythical references, living beings are discursively useful because their lives are taken to be signifying entities; that is, they mean something beyond the fact of their existence. This is to say, animal life is treated less as an object of analysis than an event calling for interpretation (and thereby as useful for didactic purposes). What is, for Plato, philosophically significant about the lion or the wolf, for instance, is its illumination of the nature of courage or ferocity. That life as such tends toward signification is itself a noteworthy assertion, but it also invites the question: What do the lives of living beings signify?
In one sense, the Timaeus’s relevance to this question, and to a study of Plato’s thinking about animals, is obvious. The bulk of this dialogue, at once a cosmogony and a zoogony, is taken up by an account of the origin of the cosmos that characterizes the cosmos as a living being and includes an account of the origin of mortal animals. But there is a more subtle and troubling line of relevance. Timaeus’s answer to the question of how mortal animals come to be also purports to answer why they come to be; that is, the dialogue claims to discern the workings of mind not only in the behavior of certain animals but also in the diversity of animal life and in the processes of its generation. Thus, the Timaeus’s answer to the question of what life signifies is that, in the motions that engender it and actions that comprise it, life makes manifest to philosophic thought the workings of mind and mindlessness. But this vision of ζωή and ζῷα is accomplished only by granting a very peculiar generative capacity to human action and life. To be sure, such anthropocentrism is in part a function of the task that Timaeus accepts—to offer, as a prelude, an account of the origins of human beings in order to hand these beings to Critias, who will, in turn, display them in that action which, it is claimed, is most illuminating of the character of the city that nurtures them: war.3 But, I argue, it is precisely in its attempt to separate an account of human nature from an account of political life that the cosmogony fails with respect to the task Socrates has set out for Timaeus. More specifically, this cosmogony posits a masculine human prototype whose actions generate the need for sexually differentiated bodies, thereby enshrining masculinity as a fecund generative force in the cosmos. However, its attempt to offer an account of human nature divorced from an account of the city renders it incapable of engaging in the kind of analysis that would permit probing inquiry into the question of human generation. The result is a vision of human nature with which Socrates could have hardly been satisfied. This, in turn, invites exploration of just what Plato is doing with his construction of Timaeus’s cosmogony. Thus, an investigation into the emergence of sexual difference in the Timaeus not only provides insight into Plato’s thinking about animals but also allows us to explore the status of Timaeus’s cosmogony vis-à-vis philosophic thought.
In order to make good on these claims, it is necessary to give some consideration to what kind of investigation Timaeus undertakes and to sketch out the hermeneutic horizon within which his account of the origin of the cosmos unfolds. I will then turn to examine more closely Timaeus’s account of the origin of the human prototype and the generation of women and other mortal animals, concluding with a consideration of what possibilities for critique this play with cosmogony opens up.
Timaeus’s cosmogony is the account of the origin of the cosmos that results from accepting three broad stipulations that are asserted and put to work but that are never argued for and that mark out the interpretive parameters of the dialogue.4 The first is the intertwining of necessity and mind that is achieved by mind’s persuasion of necessity: “For, in truth, this Cosmos in its origin was generated as a compound, from the combination of Necessity and Mind. And inasmuch as Mind was controlling Necessity by persuading her to conduct to the best end the most part of the things coming into existence, thus and thereby it came about, through Necessity yielding to intelligent [ἔμφρονος] persuasion, that this All of ours was being in this wise constructed at the beginning” (48a).5 The nature of this persuasion and its causes are not described; that is, how, exactly, mind persuades necessity is left underdetermined, save perhaps for the action of chōra, which shifts like to like, giving the demiurge elements with a sufficient tendency toward stability as to be used in the making of an ordered cosmos. Perhaps we are to read persuasion as inserting a gentleness into the development of the cosmos, that is, read it as persuasion instead of force, although force does indeed creep in with the creation of cosmic soul, for which the demiurge must use βία to conjoin the Same with the Other (35b). Nevertheless, when compared to the principles of creation in Hesiod’s Theogony, for example, Timaeus’s cosmogony is an anesthetized cosmogony. Whereas in Hesiod the cosmos is arrayed through the violent and bloody conflict between divine forces, here we find a demiurge who, out of ungrudging generosity, creates a cosmos that will resemble himself insofar is it is as good as is possible for such a created thing to be, a principle of creation that Timaeus calls most sovereign (29e). Absent from this account is the matricide, patricide, incest, and general erotic mingling of Hesiod’s tale. While the details of mind’s domestication of necessity remain obscure in the dialogue, this domestication nevertheless forms one of the bases of the entire cosmogony and is decisive for the accord, appropriateness, and proportion between soul and body that enable the motion of the cosmos. More specifically, it makes possible the elision of technical production and sexual reproduction that is figured by a demiurge called both poet and father. It also undergirds the claims that the diversity of living beings serves a rational purpose and that their generation answers to the call of mind as well as to the demands of necessity.
A second parameter of this cosmogony is its dual character as a hymn of praise and a performance of justice. Critias’s characterization of the purpose of his own contribution to their discussion—“as a payment of our debt of thanks to [Socrates] and also as a tribute of praise, chanted as it were duly and truly, in honor of the Goddess on this her day of Festival” (21a)—carries over to Timaeus, whose contribution opens up with the insistence that the cosmos is “the fairest of all that has come into existence, and [the demiurge] the best of all the causes” (29a). This assertion, which is clear, claims Timaeus, to everyone, demonstrates that it is not right (θέμις) to say that the cosmos was constructed by looking to what is generated rather than what is everlasting. Timaeus’s invocation of θέμις serves to remind us of the borders of this intellectual pursuit, that is, its commitment to remain within the bounds of duty (to a host) and piety (as an offering to the goddess).6
This discursive specification is connected to the claim that logos resembles that of which it is a logos (29b–c), and it gives Timaeus some anxiety about whether his praise is adequately beautiful, requiring the caveat that proves decisive for his account, namely, that because it is given by a human to humans it can only be a likeness of the truest account (29d).7 We might ask how Timaeus’s account is like the cosmos he describes; that is, we might attempt to specify the motion of the account itself; if we did so we would have to observe that this is an account of perpetual beginnings, one that steps out before itself and must circle around back on itself, one that finds itself several times in need of beginning again.8
Timaeus’s praise of the cosmos proceeds by appropriating those culturally specific terms of value and honorifics that convey superiority and nobility. Here, these are coded by age: the young should never rule the old (34c); gender/sex: the masculine is the most noble (42a); and domestication: the tame is superior to the wild (70e–71a).9 Thus the enactment of justice that we find here is a very traditional one: it is a matter of “giving back what is owed.” That is, Timaeus’s cosmogony finds itself answerable to demands other than those of critical inquiry, and it has an irreducibly conservative element at odds with the more radical modes of thought and account that can be found in other dialogues, an element that requires us to ask about the limits of the thinking that is at work in it. As we follow the many beginnings of the Timaeus, we will thus also have the opportunity to compare them with that other return to beginning described in the Republic as a return to the beginning of thought, namely, dialectic (Republic 511c–d, 533c–d).
Most immediately, Timaeus’s praise takes the form of calling attention to the beauty of the cosmos, an attribute that brings with it three specifications: 1. copies of eternal beings are more beautiful than copies of things that become (29a); 2. what has mind is more beautiful than what does not have mind (30b); 3. what is whole and complete is more beautiful than what is partial and incomplete (30c). Insofar as soul is the only entity through which mind comes to be present “in” anything (30b, 46d), and insofar as soul is that by merit of which any living thing comes to be alive, it follows that the cosmos must be a living being embracing all other living beings. Moreover, living beings provide a vehicle for the expression of mindfulness and its opposite. And, in most cases, mindfulness and its opposite are made visible in living beings by the movements that are appropriate to their bodies (e.g., the circling rotation of the heavenly bodies, the crawling of land-dwelling animals, etc.), save for plants, whose mindlessness is evinced precisely by their lack of motion (77b–c).
Indeed, the third parameter concerns the status of motion in the dialogue. The phenomenal world, as Timaeus describes it, cannot be understood without an account of the motions that define it. This is true not only for the passions and actions of particular beings but also for the thinking that permeates the cosmos and for time itself, all of which are presented as epiphenomena of a set of primeval movements described and documented in some detail.10 Throughout these descriptions, the way something moves is treated as essential to what it is. An investigation of certain beings, then, must include an investigation of movement; the dialogue’s ontology requires kinesiology, even if only as a way to mark the limits of its own inquiry into Being.11
As the cosmogony develops, its inquiry into the bodily and psychical aspects of living being takes the form of a phenomenology of motion, describing in detail the movements that belong to soul and to the elements.12 One way to gain access to the relationship between the living cosmos as a whole and the various other forms of animals it embraces is, thus, to look at the relationship between the movements that belong to the three kinds as they are instantiated in the cosmos: Being (approximated by the circular motion of the cosmos itself and, to a lesser extent, by the heavenly bodies), Becoming (manifest in the streaming inflow and outflow to which bodies are subject), and Chōra (whose shaking produces the conditions in which like adheres to like and provides the demiurge with rudimentary elements to array and to use in his creation of the cosmos). To follow the development of Timaeus’s description of these three cosmic motions would exceed the scope of a single essay. However, Timaeus’s account of the origins of the human animal, in whom these three motions converge and intermingle, offers us some insight into the circling, streaming, and shaking that populate the cosmos, as well as the motions that belong to the demiurge—his begetting, and the actions that go along with this, namely, modeling, mixing, pouring, infusing, interweaving, and veiling of the cosmos with psychē, all actions that are faintly echoed in the work of human beings.
As the first created mortal animal not guaranteed everlasting life (that is, whose living entails dying), the human prototype consists of a collision of circular and linear motions.13 The embrace within which the living sphere of the cosmos holds all other animals—the peri- labon, -echein, and -eilephein of this animal—is reiterated in the periodos and periphora of the heavenly bodies and echoed in the circuits of thought housed in the immortal soul. These circuits are handed over by the demiurge to his children for the purpose of creating other mortal animals, and it is these circuits that connect human life to the “thinkings and coursings of the all.”14 The created gods take this immortal soul and, borrowing portions of fire, water, earth, and air, shape these portions into bodies, adding to the peri- of the circuits of the soul the epi- and apo- of the flowings of the body: “and within bodies subject to inflow and outflow they bound the revolutions of the immortal soul [τὰς τῆς ἀθανάτου ψυχῆς περιόδους ἐνέδουν εἰς ἐπίρρυτον σῶμα καὶ ἀπόρρυτον]” (43a). Timaeus continues: “The souls, then, being thus bound within a mighty river neither mastered it nor were mastered, but with violence they rolled along and were rolled along themselves [βίᾳ δὲ ἐφέροντο καὶ ἔφερον], so that the whole of the living creature was moved, but in such a random way that its progress was disorderly and irrational [ἀλόγως]” (43b).15 The antidote for this streaming and irrational movement is to mimic the shaking motion of chōra itself (88d–e), accomplishing accord between soul and body by balancing their motions, thereby enabling human beings to regulate their chaotic internal streamings and return the circuits of the soul to the harmonious cyclical motion of thought. Thus, like the cosmos itself, the human animal is permeated and constituted by the interaction between circular, linear, and shaking motions.
Because it does not necessarily circle back around to itself, mortal life is capable of being estranged from itself, an estrangement that, eventually, comes to expression in human life by its capacities for pleasure and pain, decisive for the character of this life (64c–65b). But this estrangement is also expressed through the existential principles or “laws of destiny” that the demiurge reveals to the immortal souls destined for mortal bodies: “namely, how that the first birth should be one and the same ordained for all, in order that none might be slighted by him; and how it was needful that they, when sown each into his own proper organ of time, should grow into the most god-fearing of living creatures; and that, since human nature is twofold, the superior [part] is that which hereafter should be designated ‘man’ [ἀνήρ]” (42a).16
These three “laws”—common originary natality, separate growth toward a shared goal, and division into superior and inferior—inscribe equality, separation, and difference as fundamental features of human mortality. In so doing, they mark out three distinct dimensions of the estrangement to which human life is subject by reason of the linear motion by which it is, in part, constituted: the temporal estrangement by means of which the human is alienated from its original nature; the quantitative estrangement by means of which individual human souls are separated out from a common source; and the qualitative estrangement according to which human nature is double, consisting of superior and inferior kinds. They also determine a specific trajectory or tenor to the activities of human life. Because mortal life has a primordial equality granted by its shared original natality, birth takes on the character of an exile from the most amenable life, and successful completion of a human life will have the character of a return.17 Because mortal life includes separation but must tend toward the same end, the successful completion of a human life must also include the achievement of community. The specific basis of this community as it is given here is the shared striving toward and enactment of fear of the gods. That is, it is the shared task of a particular vision of piety that provides the basis for the community necessary for a complete human life. Because human nature is double, it will have better and worse accomplishments of itself.
Timaeus goes on to stipulate that justice is the mastering of these streamings, and injustice is the failure to master them. In order to describe the various reincarnations that result from this failure, Timaeus says the following:
And he that has lived his appointed time well shall return again to his abode in his native star, and shall gain a life that is blessed and congenial; but whoso has failed therein shall be changed into a woman’s nature at the second birth; and if, in that shape, he still refraineth not from wickedness he shall be changed every time, according to the nature of his wickedness, into some bestial form after the similitude of his own nature; nor in his changings shall he cease from woes until he yields himself to the revolution of the Same and Similar that is within him, and dominating by force of reason that burdensome mass which afterwards adhered to him of fire and water and earth and air, a mass tumultuous and irrational, returns again to the semblance of his first and best state. (42b–d)
Thus, while humans do not have the same kind of set orbit or circuit as their heavenly kin, they do have a path of life, one that is determined by the quality of their actions. Nevertheless, the “orbit” of the human life is not unwandering. The mortal animal for whom death is a reality has a course of life that could go well or poorly depending on how well its actions navigate the various streamings to which this life is subject.
What are we to make of what amounts to the assertion of an originary masculinity of the human kind, and the emergence of sexual difference as a secondary expression of the moral status of an individual soul? Here we can see a tension emerging from what appears to be the polymorphosity of the immortal soul that will be placed into human bodies: the prototype human is masculine, yet his soul must be capable of being born into a woman as well as into other forms of mortal animal, all the while retaining some semblance of its original masculine nature.18 Contending with this question will take us to the heart of Timaeus’s account of the origin of nonhuman animals, an origin that, because of the curious potency granted to human action, must be located within Timaeus’s account of the task of human life.
From the perspective of the human, the successful completion of the human life consists in returning the circuits of the immortal soul to a condition of accord with the celestial orbits to which they are akin, using perception as a resource for aligning the circuits of thought with those of the cosmic bodies, “thereby making the part that thinks like unto the object of its thought, in accordance with its original nature” (90c–d).19 Timaeus observes that doing so achieves the goal of life set before humans by the gods (90d). However, the failure of this task has its own generative possibilities; that is, as we have seen, it is from prototypes who have been unsuccessful during the course of their lives that women and then eventually the other mortal animals arise.20 An exploration of the strangeness of this generative role, its usurping of sexual reproduction and privileging of masculinity within the realm of mortal life, will occupy much of this section. For now, I note that the human prototype disrupts the categorization of mortal animals into winged, water-dwelling, and land-dwelling; humans are footed but also the cause of the footed, dwell on land but are also the source of land-dwellers (as well as the winged and the water-dwellers). I suspect that we are to think of the human prototype not as a land-dweller but as a city-dweller; nevertheless, in his possession of feet and his founding of cities on land that he will be willing to fight to defend, the human prototype stands both inside and outside the categorization of mortal animals, muddying the clarity of the system and unsettling the ease with which these living beings are allocated into kinds.
Human residence in cities also marks a limit to the task to which Timaeus’s cosmology responds; it is not Timaeus but Critias who is to describe the best city and its citizens. Timaeus’s speech does gesture toward the city, however, drawing in outline the work of the city and its role in the production of other mortal animals: it is in the absence of a good regime, upbringing, and education that human viciousness, figured at one point as a form of disease (86e–87b), flourishes (44b–c). Humans must compensate for this absence by fleeing from the city’s deleterious elements and seeking the best upbringing, pursuits, and studies. Timaeus breaks off from any discussion of what these best practices might be, observing that such considerations belong to a different mode of speech [τρόπος ἄλλος λόγων] (87b). Thus, as we pursue what it is that human life is to accomplish and what the results of its failure are, we will also encounter a limit to Timaeus’s tale, one that will return our attention to the interpretive parameters we outlined at the start of this essay.
The generative character of human action is connected to the third “law of destiny” we discussed above, that is, the double nature of the human, a nature that introduces difference as a fundamental aspect of human being and, more than this, specifies it as the difference that pertains to men and women. But how are we to take this difference? While Timaeus makes clear that the human prototype is a man (ἀνήρ), sexual difference, in the sense of biological difference, emerges only with the failure of the prototype to live a just and courageous life (90e). When Timaeus specifies that the more noble human kind will be called “man,” we are to think of this as indicating that the prototype is masculine, using masculine in the culturally coded sense of noble, rather than thinking that it indicates anything about it being male (in the sense in which we indicate a kind of sexed body). That is, in more contemporary terms, he is speaking of gender, not sex, and in this case gendered difference precedes sexual difference, since it is the actions of the human prototype, animated by a masculine soul, that produce the need for sexed bodies.21 The bodies of women and other animals serve as signs and symptoms of the souls that animate them, offering yet another expression of the “appropriateness” between body and soul that is presented as being of the utmost importance to the health of human beings (87d) and that is a function of mind’s persuasion of necessity.
While Timaeus’s cosmogony claims masculinity as an aspect of the nobility of mortal animals, we must ask whether this is the case for all living things. Specifically, what about that living thing that is the cosmos itself? Timaeus does not seem to give it a gender, and in perpetually sustaining itself, perpetually producing itself, it does not need to reproduce itself. Perhaps we are to take this as suggesting that being gendered and sexed enter into the cosmos with the human animal and that this subsequently characterizes those other animals that emerge from human failings (as distinct from the cosmos itself, which is a one, complete and without remainder). Will the successful completion of human life, as Timaeus conceives it, include the overcoming of both gendered and sexual difference?22 There is some reason to think so. First, the return offered to those who have lived well is a return to a condition before the emergence of sexual difference. Second, we should note the differing of difference here: equality and separation (the first two “laws of destiny”) are originary, as, it would seem, is the double nature of the human. But that this double nature will be a difference of gender is a function of naming—the “superior” human will come to be called [κεκλήσοιτο] “man” (42a). That is, gendered difference emerges under the auspices of logos and the labile social construction of identity it makes possible.
However, the difference between men and women is not only a matter that is “explained” in Timaeus’s cosmology. It also supplies terms to aid in the evaluation of differing forms of soul, since it is the image of differing domiciles for men and women that provides illustration of the differing locations of two forms of mortal soul (70a). Even if we are to think of thought and immortal soul as sexless and genderless in the sense that their actions are not circumscribed by or reducible to the actions of male or female and masculine or feminine, the overall description and celebration of soul and its actions keeps to the traditional allocation of the male and masculine as superior to the female and feminine—its praise is conservative, making use of the value terms of the time and place of its composition.23 At the least, this assertion of the double nature of human life that marks a qualitative distinction (between superior and inferior) and that will come to be demarcated by names that signify gendered difference requires us to ask how the parameters of the dialogue, especially its character as a form of praise, shape this discussion. In addition, while the cosmos itself may not act according to sexual difference, the work of the demiurge and the character of chōra are explicitly figured along sexual lines—he is the begetter (34b) and father (37c), she is the mother (50d, 51a) and wet-nurse (49b).24 Sexual difference is thus both an effect of the human prototype and yet also treated as an indispensable figure of the creative potency of the demiurge. It is both form and function, both product and process.
Moreover, it is necessary to keep in mind that, regardless of the status of the possibility of a sexless and genderless cosmos, human failure, that is, the unsuccessful completion of human life, not only is woven into the fabric of the cosmos but is required by it, since without this failure the cosmos would be incomplete. This is the case because human failing (or, at least, the failing of the human prototype) is generative of the other forms of animal life the cosmos must embrace in order to be complete. Thus, humans will mirror the generative activities of the demiurge, and will do so in more than one way. There is, first, the ethical zoogony productive of animal life by the quality of the actions committed and the life lived by the human prototype. In this mode of creation, an unsuccessful human life (Timaeus specifies this as a life that was cowardly and unjust, 90e) results first in the rebirth of the soul of that human prototype into a woman and, from there, if further degradation occurs, into birds, land-dwellers, and in the most depraved of cases, sea-dwellers (91d–92c).25 This generation of animal life according to the character of the human prototypes’ actions precedes and competes with the generative power of sexual reproduction.26 Timaeus’s description of a mortal-life-generating process prior to that of sexual reproduction may be required by the relationship between Mind and Necessity that Timaeus imagines. But it also makes of sexual reproduction a third generative kind (the first two being divine creation and the creation of animals via vicious human action), thereby establishing a connection between it and that other third kind, chōra.27
Timaeus’s description of this third kind of generation is conspicuous for many reasons. Not the least of these is his description of human sexual organs as animals themselves that are productive of other animals housed within the human (91b–d). Thus, both in its possession of animal organs and in its housing and cultivation of animals like itself, in its being an animal that embraces within itself other animals, the human again echoes the cosmos.28 Moreover, the description of the creation of the human prototype uses animal imagery to aid the evaluative, praise-giving dimension of the account (with the primary distinction being between wild animal and tame). This dual valence of the animal, as object to be described and as instrument of the description, runs parallel to the duplication of the division of the sexes we observed above, whereby sexual difference is both an object to be explained and an image used in the explaining, in this case the bodily domains of the different aspects of mortal soul (70a).
In its treatment of the “race of women” as somehow distinct from that of men, its assumption that the male is the more quintessentially human, and its alignment of the female with other animals, Timaeus’s cosmogony invites the same critique Froma Zeitlin develops of Hesiod’s Pandora tale (and of the broader misogynist vein in archaic and classical Greek literature she catalogues).29 Its unquestioning employment and conservation of the evaluations of its time makes of this cosmogony something quite less than a revaluation of all values. But we do not need to leave the realm of ancient Greek thought and go as far, historically speaking, as Nietzsche to see its failings of inquiry. As scholars have noted, it fails to offer an account of human nature that includes the possibility of women who are capable of being, to follow Socrates’s description at the dialogue’s start, harmoniously tuned and similar to men (18c).30 In its unquestioning reliance on an established tradition of praise and blame, it makes use of “hypotheses” that are themselves never questioned; it is not, then, a dialectical cosmogony, if such a thing is even possible. In this sense it fails to be a fully philosophic investigation, under the terms for such a course of inquiry asserted in Plato’s Republic (a standard that the Republic itself also quite self-consciously fails to attain). It may be inappropriate to ascribe to Plato a lively interest in defending the integrity of women, but it is not inappropriate to ascribe to Plato a vision of philosophy as unflinching inquiry. And yet here Plato’s Timaeus flinches.
The Timaeus shares with other dialogues the attempt to cast generation as an activity of mind. It offers us some sense for why Plato would feel compelled to construct, in the voice of Timaeus, a cosmogony that is also a zoogony. Animality is treated as that mode of becoming in which mindfulness and mindlessness are made manifest by means of motion. Living being is philosophically indispensable because its motion provides a means through which mind and the lack thereof can be made available to observation and thought; it is this capacity that recommends and governs many of the appeals to animal life throughout the dialogues. Thus, while the spectacle of both mindfulness and mindlessness provided by animal motion accounts for the ambivalence infusing Plato’s discussions of animal life, this is a fecund ambivalence, as life provides the basis by means of which mind presents itself to thought.
But the cost of this endeavor is high, and Timaeus’s cosmogony lacks the depth of inquiry such an effort requires. In the Republic, for instance, this approach to generation was attempted only by means of a sustained meditation on politically relevant differences with respect to nature, a complex refiguration of the relationship between physis and technē, a radical legislative agenda in which elaborate conventions were designed in order to curb and channel erōs, and a clear sense of the inevitable failure of this agenda. The Timaeus includes none of these considerations, and instead simply displaces sexual reproduction, first by eliding it with technical production and second by attributing the existence of women and nonhuman mortal animals to the actions of a masculine human prototype. In this absence of thinking, Timaeus’s cosmogony produces a vision of human nature whose impoverishment is made apparent by the terms of the very task with which Timaeus had been charged. This, in turn, invites some consideration of whether a philosophical cosmogony is possible, or whether Plato is experimenting with the limits of its inquiry into origins and exploring the point at which it must give way to dialectic.
At the very least, his construction of Timaeus’s cosmogony invites a critical eye. The model of human flourishing Timaeus offers—the regulation of bodily appetites and the contemplation of motion—proves to be an impoverished vision when compared with other presentations of human excellence in the dialogues. Where in this is the exercise of dialectic, the serious play of dialogue, the critical gaze upon the city? Where, in other words, in this portrait of human nature, is there room for the uncanny, critical, gadfly Socrates, neither fully at home in the city nor able to live without it?31 And where is the well-educated philosophic ruler, compelled to give up contemplation of the Forms for a time in order to govern the city, looking off toward both the eternal Forms and “what is in human nature” (Republic 501b)?
From this broader perspective, Timaeus’s account of the origin of the cosmos suffers from the absence of political analysis and from Timaeus’s reticence to address the city other than obliquely. It also suffers from Timaeus’s unwillingness to posit any kind of positive political or legislative agenda beyond advocating flight from deleterious political elements (87b). But this reticence is in part a function of the allocation of tasks and ordering of speeches by Socrates’s interlocutors, whereby Timaeus, the statesman philosopher, the most astronomical, the one who has most busied himself with matters of the all (27a), is to give an account of the origin of the cosmos terminating in the nature of the human, while Critias is to give an account of how those humans who have received the kind of education Socrates outlined the previous day wage war. Timaeus’s cosmogony opens up, then, a critique of the very attempt to offer an anthropogony without an account of the city and to align the emergence of the human with an account that represents itself as cosmological rather than political.32 Thus, it is a critique not only of the cosmos as it is envisioned by Timaeus but also of the cosmos that is the Timaeus.
1. See Pierre Chantraine’s entry on zōō on the connection between zōion and zōgraphos, that is, between living being and image. This connection is specifically at work in the Timaeus, as Remi Brague notes. “The Body of Speech: A New Hypothesis in the Compositional Structure of Timaeus’ Monologue,” in Platonic Investigations, ed. Dominic O’Meara (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University Press, 1985), 54.
2. See the eschatological myths in the Phaedo 113d–114c, Phaedrus 245c–249d, and Republic 614b–621d.
3. As Carlos Steel puts it, the Timaeus is an attempt “to understand the universe in the context of the ethical finality of human life” (“The Moral Purpose of the Human Body: A Reading of Timaeus 69–72,” Phronesis 46, no. 2 [2001]: 107). Timaeus himself specifically notes the borders of his contribution to the day’s discussion in a manner that gestures toward the “coming” political analysis in very revealing ways (44b–c, 87a–b).
4. On the peculiar features of the Timaeus in the context of other Greek cosmogonies, see J. B. Skemp, The Theory of Motion in Plato’s Later Dialogues (Las Palmas, Spain: Adolf M. Hakkert, 1967); Andrew Gregory, Ancient Greek Cosmogony (London: Duckworth Press, 2007); Gordon Campbell, “Zoogony and Evolution in Plato’s Timaeus,” in Reason and Necessity: Essays on Plato’s Timaeus, ed. M. R. Wright (London: Duckworth Press, 2000), 145–180; and Charles Kahn, “The Place of Cosmology in Plato’s Later Dialogues,” in One Book, the Whole Universe: Plato’s Timaeus Today, ed. Richard Mohr and Barbara Sattler (Las Vegas: Parmenides Publishing, 2010).
5. All citations are drawn from Bury’s Loeb translation, although I have consistently translated nous as “mind,” removed many of the honorific capitalizations, and replaced Bury’s translation of to pan as “Universe” with “the All.” All Greek citations are taken from Burnet’s OCT edition.
6. See also 17b where justice requires a return of speeches; at 19d Socrates speaks of the need for proper praise of “our” men and city (see also 20b–c and 26d–e). On the persistence of the standard of the beautiful, see 53b–54b.
7. For a probing study of the nuances of this phrase, see Miles Burnyeat, “Eikos Mythos,” Rizai 2, no. 2 (2005): 143–165; Gabor Betegh, “What Makes a Muthos Eikos?” in One Book, the Whole Universe: Plato’s Timaeus Today, ed. Richard Mohr and Barbara Sattler (Las Vegas: Parmenides Publishing, 2010), 213–224; and, in the same volume, Alexander Mourelatos, “The Epistemological Section (29b–d) of the Proem in Timaeus’ Speech: M. F. Burnyeat on eikôs Mythos, and Comparison with Xenophanes B34 and B35,” 225–248.
8. I am indebted to John Sallis for his thorough study of the trope of beginning in the Timaeus (Chorology: On Beginning in Plato’s Timaeus [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999]).
9. This conservatism marks a difference between Timaeus’s performance of justice and other accounts in the dialogues characterized as giving back what is due, as, for instance, that found in Republic Book 10.
10. Hence Timaeus’s emphasis on shape as the most vivid bodily expression of motion; for example, the head is said to be round in imitation of the circuits of the heavens (44d). The special status of motion in the dialogue is hinted at early on, in Socrates’s desire to see the city in motion (19b–c). Further intimation of the primacy of motion for Timaeus’s cosmogony can be found in his description of the creation of the cosmic soul, where the paths the celestial bodies are to travel, their orbits, are created before the bodies that will travel them (36b–d, 38c–d), and in his description of earth, which aligns its immobility with its malleability (55e).
11. In his introduction to the creation of time, Timaeus also marks a limit of motion: Being is unmoving, while “was” and “will be” imply motion (37e).
12. Fire ignites and melts, water liquefies, earth and air receive these motions (see especially 58d–61c); thought is a function of the circuits of the soul (90c–d); passion and perception are streams to which mortal soul is subject (43b–c), following the inflowing and outflowing that is characteristic of mortal life.
13. The linear motion that so powerfully determines human life is first intimated by Timaeus’s description of the created heavenly animals. Unlike the animal that is the cosmos itself, which has one motion, the heavenly animals are allotted two: uniform motion in the same place, and forward motion. The linear motion of which these gods are capable is made harmonious with their self-same cosmic motion by their being placed in orbits, traveling a forward path that also circles back upon itself. The association asserted here between linearity and mortality is obscured somewhat by the fact that the demiurge grants to these created gods everlasting life; however, their linear motion introduces other possibilities for movement, possibilities that are realized in the “products” of the work with which these gods are charged.
14. 90d, my translation; see also 47b–c: the orbits of thinking in us are akin to the circuits of intellect in the heavens. That Timaeus treats thinking as a motion of a particular kind is perhaps most clearly seen in his description of plants: as living things, plants must possess soul, but their passivity and lack of self-motion indicate that they have only the lowest form of mortal soul and are bereft of “opinion and reasoning and mind [ᾧ δόξης μὲν λογισμοῦ τε καὶ νου]” (77b). See also J. B. Skemp, “Plants in Plato’s Timaeus,” Classical Quarterly 41, no. 1 (1947): 53–60.
15. This is followed by a passage that marks out the soul’s confusion and what must happen in order to return to a state of giving correct accounts: the stream of increase and nutriment must abate, the circuits return to their calm, and their orbits reclaim their proper path; this requires a good upbringing and education (see 44b–d). On possible Parmenidean resonances in Timaeus’s treatment of circular and linear motion, see Lynne Ballew, “Straight and Circular in Parmenides and the Timaeus,” Phronesis 19, no. 3 (1974): 189–209.
16. My emendation to Bury’s “superior sex,” which muddies the distinction at stake here. The Greek text is τὸ κρεῖττον τοιοῦτον εἴη ὅ καὶ ἔπειτα κεκλήσοιτο ἀνήρ.
17. Timaeus makes this explicit when he observes that, if successful, human life will be lived attempting to return to its “first and best state” (42d). On the character of human striving as a striving to return, see also 42a–c and 44b–c. For a study of this dimension of nostalgia in multiple dialogues, including the Timaeus, see Jill Gordon, Plato’s Erotic World: From Cosmic Origins to Human Death (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
18. For further examples of this conception of masculinity as an enduring quality of psychē and/or personhood, see Brooke Holmes, Gender: Antiquity and Its Legacy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
19. On perception as an aid to thought, see 47a–e.
20. 42c–d; 90e begins as a description of “how women and the whole female sex have come into existence [γυναῖκες μὲν οὖν καὶ τὸ θῆλυ πᾶν οὕτω γέγονεν]” (91d). Comparison with Hesiod on Pandora and the birth of the “race” of women is invited.
21. As Stella Sandford puts it: “The categories of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ are conceptually distinct from those of ‘male’ and ‘female’ in Timaeus’ discussion of human beings” (Plato and Sex [London: Polity Press, 2010], 151). While male and female are categories that roughly correspond to differing functions in sexual reproduction, “the difference between man and women, on the other hand, is not sexual but moral” (152). I accept Sandford’s argument about the difference between differences here; I only diverge from her reading insofar as what she sees as a function of Timaeus’s use of myth I see as a function of the character of the cosmology as an act of praise.
22. On the question of whether Plato sees sexual difference as a sign of human failing and thus as something to be overcome, see Marguerite DesLauries, “Plato on Sexual Difference and Sexual Reproduction,” in Platonic Inspirations, ed. J. Opsomer and M. Beck (Leuven, Belgium: Leuven University Press, 2013); Sara Brill, “Plato’s Critical Theory,” Epoché 17, no. 2 (2013): 233–248; and Sandford, Plato and Sex. On the difficulties of mapping a sex/gender distinction onto ancient Greek cultural attitudes toward male and female, see Holmes, Gender: Antiquity and Its Legacy.
23. As Mitchell Miller rather generously puts it, the zoogony reveals this cosmology’s “provincialism” (“The Timaeus and the ‘Longer Way’: ‘God-given’ Method and the Constitution of Elements and Animals,” in Plato’s Timaeus as Cultural Icon, ed. Gretchen Reydam-Schills [South Bend, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003]). Morag Buchan argues that Plato does indeed conceive of the immortal soul as essentially masculine (see Women in Plato’s Political Theory [New York: Palgrave, 1998]); I am more interested in the polymorphosity that the Timaeus attributes to soul.
24. On the language of procreation in Timaeus’s description of the demiurge’s work, see Stella Sandford (Plato and Sex, 154–155). For an overview of the engagements with the Timaean chōra in contemporary feminist thought, see Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. G. C. Gill (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985); Julia Kristeva, “Revolution in Poetic Language,” in The Portable Kristeva, ed. K. Oliver (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002); Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993); Elizabeth Grosz, Space, Time and Perversion (New York: Routledge, 1995); and Emanuela Bianchi, “Receptacle/Chora: Figuring the Errant Feminine in Plato’s Timaeus,” Hypatia 24, no. 4 (2006): 124–146. On Plato’s appropriation of the language of sexual reproduction in his depictions of Socrates and his accounts of philosophy, see Paige du Boise’s “The Platonic Appropriation of Reproduction,” in Feminist Interpretations of Plato, ed. Nancy Tuana (State College: Penn State Press University Press, 1994), 139–156; and Kristin Sampson’s “Identity and Gender in Plato,” in Feminist Reflections on the History of Philosophy, ed. Charlotte Witt and Lilli Alanen (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2006), 17–32.
25. The kinship between women and these other animals is expressed grammatically as well as substantively: the clause in which Timaeus speaks of the birth of “women and the whole female sex” is a “men . . . de” clause whose “de” is the “tribe of birds” (91d).
26. The attempt to deny female agency in the act of reproduction has a long history; see Hesiod on Pandora and Zeitlin’s commentary on this myth.
27. Sarah Broadie, in Nature and Divinity in Plato’s Timaeus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), reads erōs as the third kind here and views it as intimating Aristotle’s radical refiguring of nutrition and the nutritive soul.
28. This imagery of animals within the animal occurred earlier in the description of the domain of the lowest form of mortal soul (70e–71a).
29. See J-P. Vernant, “The Myth of Prometheus in Hesiod,” in Myth and Society in Ancient Greece, trans. Janet Lloyd (New York: Zone Books, 1990), 183–202, and Froma Zeitlin, “Signifying Difference: The Case of Hesiod’s Pandora,” in Playing the Other: Gender and Society in Classical Greek Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 53–86.
30. See David Krell’s “Female Parts in Timaeus,” in Arion 2, no. 3 (1975): 400–421; Catherine Zuckert’s Plato’s Philosophers: The Coherence of the Dialogues (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); and Cynthia Freeland’s “Schemes and Scene of Reading the Timaeus,” in Feminist Reflections on the History of Philosophy, ed. Charlotte Witt and Lilli Alanen (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2004), 33–50.
31. At the very least, Timaean piety is not the same as Socratic piety. For an extended analysis of the divergence between Timaeus’s philosophizing and Socrates’s philosophic practice, see Catherine Zuckert’s Plato’s Philosophers, Part 2. For Zuckert, this difference is fundamentally a matter of two different approaches to erōs and desire. See also H. G. Gadamer’s “Idea and Reality in Plato’s Timaeus,” in Dialogue and Dialectic: Eight Hermeneutical Studies on Plato, trans. P. Christopher Smith (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1983), 156–193.
32. See Timaeus’s explicit separation of his discourse from one that would address the way that humans are to live in the city and what character the city is to have (87b). Here we can mark another difference between Timaeus and Hesiod, as the latter treats cosmology as politics writ large. Nevertheless, for all of Timaeus’s efforts to avoid discussion of the city, he cannot keep political language from infecting his account of the cosmos, as for instance, in his characterization of the interaction between elements as a kind of polemos (57a–c).