Fig. 8. Locating the Soul in Plato.
Plato, Timaeus
Part 2 (32c–37c and 57d–59d)
MCKEON: Our reason for beginning with the ancients, as I explained in the last discussion, is that they are at more pains to explain what their basic principles are. We are apt, when we read moderns, to mistake our prejudices for facts and, consequently, not to get into the philosophic problems at all. Last time we examined the first stages of the argument of Plato and tried to translate it into the terms that would be acceptable today. We got to 32c, and in the process we distinguished six stages of argument. Let me state them to you briefly. If you have any objection to any of them, let me know.
Our first stage would be the one in which we laid down our basic distinctions, namely, between things that are always existent and things that are always changing. The former are known by reason; the latter are known by sensation. We write equations for the first, we see the second; and it’s only with respect to the things that are always becoming that we can ask what the cause is. Therefore, our first question was, Did the universe have a beginning? Well, since it’s visible, it had to. Consequently, we asked another question, which had to do with the kind of cause it had. We decided that the universe had to have a model and that the model had to be an eternal model—or, in the simple language we set forth, we ought to be able to write an equation for the kind of change we perceived. This was the first stage.
The second stage had to do with the semantic question, namely, that the beginning which we’re going to look for is going to be a natural beginning. That is to say, we’re not going to make our basic truths tautologies depending on words; we’re going to make them explanations of the state of affairs. Our third stage had to do with the way in which we would seek the cause, and this gave us a sequence, a sequence in which an intelligence was put in a soul and a soul in a body. And the sense we made of this was, first, that obviously the body is what we see in motion; second, that the soul is the cause of the motion because if the body didn’t have a soul, it would not be self-moving; and third, that the intelligence is the equation of the motion. Therefore, any perceived motion of a whole world would be one both of body and of soul for which an equation could be written. The fourth stage of the argument had to do with what kind of a model this eternal model is going to be. We decided that since we’re making a universe which is a living creature, it would be an intelligent creature; that is to say, it would be that system of equations which would explain a self-moving universe.
The fifth stage: Is there one heaven or many? The answer is easy in the sense that we’re talking about a universe: since it’s a universe, it’s one. Even if there were more galaxies outside the known universe, they would still, if they were galaxies, have to fit within the one equation because it is the basis of our calling it one, a universe. Then came the sixth stage, and we jumped around to the other end. That is, we were dealing first with the ordering principle of the whole universe, namely, the equation, which gives you the self-movement which, in turn, gives you the moving body. Now we looked at what the body is, and we got to the body by the same device that we got to the universe: if it’s sensible, namely, if it is tangible and visible, then it’s corporeal. So we dealt, therefore, with a proportion of the four elements.
In the remaining part of our first selection from the Timaeus, as I suggested, there are five more arguments, that is, from 32c to 37c. But let me pause before we go into them to ask if you have any question about the intelligibility, the sequence of the argument or about the plausibility of my argument that this is what we read, since sometimes when I asked you, you didn’t say this is what you had read. . . .
Well, let’s go on then, since we want to proceed rapidly. The seventh part of the argument appears in the paragraph which starts in the middle of 32c. Mr. Davis? Will you undertake to tell us what’s going on in the arguments that are in this paragraph?
DAVIS: I think he says that the elements have to be put together as compounds so that they’re in one unit and in one whole.
MCKEON: Well, we’ve observed one unity already. What is it that we’ve got to decide now? . . . The order has to be “perfect.” What does that mean? . . . Mr. Wilcox?
WILCOX: Well, he wants to decide what the form of the animal should be.
MCKEON: The form begins at 33b. What’s he want to decide before he gets to the middle of the paragraph? What’s this business about the world as a whole using all of the elements and being perfect and not liable to old age and disease? Is that modern language? . . . Does he ever have a problem of entropy? . . . Don’t tell me that C. P. Snow is right!1 [L!] I have taken the position in opposition to Mr. Snow that at the University of Chicago people learn about entropy for their entrance examinations, and that it’s not true that humanists don’t know about it. Would you tell the class about entropy, Mr. Milstein?
MILSTEIN: Well, it’s among the fundamental laws of physics . . .
MCKEON: The Second Law of Thermodynamics.
MILSTEIN: The Second Law of Thermodynamics, which can be stated in physical terms, I think, as the universe tends to disorganization, it tends to run itself down.
MCKEON: It’s like a deck of cards being shuffled. This is true of a finite system; it’s demonstrable. That is to say, if you take a bottle of a gas, put it next to a bottle that doesn’t have any gas, and open a connection between the two, the particles of the gas will move into the other bottle and eventually you’ll have a complete diffusion. It’s extremely hard to reassemble all the gas into one bottle. Therefore, the problem with respect to the universe is whether the universe itself is running down or whether it is maintaining a steady amount of energy. What would the evidence be that it’s running down? Is there any indication that it’s expanding?
MILSTEIN: That’s the red-shift.
MCKEON: Yes. The spectral line shows movement. And if the universe is expanding, it would be very much like the bottle of gas: there’s an awful lot of space out there and it would be very hard to get the particles back together. Is there any evidence that it isn’t expanding? . . . Is there any theory of a steady state of the universe?
MILSTEIN: Yes.
MCKEON: What is that?
MILSTEIN: That matter is being created.
MCKEON: Yes. In the universe as a whole, which is a finite, closed system, there is a way of reshuffling the energy that doesn’t exist in the bottles; therefore, although the universe is expanding, it’s also regrouping itself. Consequently, it is the case today, in the year 1963, that we are still arguing about whether the universe is subject to old age and disease or whether it isn’t. Plato is opting for the steady-state universe. Even before today, there were similar forms of law that we still use. Can any of you think of any laws that were implicit even in the Newtonian world when we weren’t so cosmological—at least, not until Laplace and Lagrange got their cosmologies going? . . . Nope? Newton himself has ceased to enter into this argument? What’s the law of the conservation of matter?
STUDENT: Matter can be neither created nor destroyed.
MCKEON: Whatever the changes in the composition of matter, the total amount of the matter is constant. What’s the law of the conservation of energy?
STUDENT: Is it that the total energy is the same?
MCKEON: Now that we have reached the twentieth century, it’s hard to tell the difference between matter and energy, they tend to run together. But notice, Plato’s half-paragraph is the statement of a problem which is a perfectly real problem, a cosmological problem, for which he states one position.
We then move along to 33b. This is the eighth step of the argument. Mr. Milstein?
MILSTEIN: This is a question about the form of the universe and whether all the parts can be considered within the whole of this global shape.
MCKEON: What does that mean? Maybe you ought to simplify it. Isn’t that kind of silly, the notion of a universe that’s circular? We know since Newton that circular motion is just straight-line motion which is slightly bent.
MILSTEIN: But he includes individual motions within this global shape so that they are the parts rather than just a part.
MCKEON: Well, let me ask a question. He takes away all the other six motions from the universe—this is at 34a. What’s he throwing out?
MILSTEIN: He wants to consider an equation for the whole universe.
MCKEON: What are the other six motions? . . . Yes.
STUDENT: Up and down, left and right, and forward and back.
MCKEON: In modern language, how do we talk about this? We don’t talk about six motions.
STUDENT: Vectors?
MCKEON: But why should there be six motions in linear motion?
STUDENT: It would be motion through space.
MCKEON: And why should there be six motions through space?
STUDENT: Because there are three dimensions.
MCKEON: Because space is three-dimensional. That is, if you take the perpendicular dimension, that’s up and down. If you make a plane out of it, you get the left and right plus the up and down. If you want to make a solid, you get the forward and back. So, what he is saying here is that the motion of the universe as a whole is not linear: it is a kind of motion which returns upon itself. And again, this would be your knowledge that you could get a universe. That is to say, within parts of the system you’d have linear, straight-line motion; but the universe would be a universe only if the major movements were curvilinear in the sense that they return on themselves. This, for instance, is part of Riemann’s cosmology. What’s a day?
STUDENT: When the sun returns?
MCKEON: This is a motion that comes back on itself. What’s a year?
STUDENT: When the earth returns.
MCKEON: What’s a great year? . . . Did I catch you? [L!] For the cosmologist, if you take the total set of all the planets, a great year is similar. You see, the difference between the day and the year is a question of whether you’re looking at the curvilinear motion of the sun or the earth. Your month would, likewise, give you another kind of curvilinear motion, the moon’s. But if you take all of the planets and look to the time when they would all get back at the starting point, this is the great year. A great year is when the sun gets back; that is, the sun, the moon, all the other planets get back; it’s a calculable time calculated in terms of the universe.2 It is in this sense we have demonstrated that the figure which is suitable and natural to the motion of the universe is curvilinear.
STUDENT: Why would Plato ask about curvilinear motion defining his universe?
MCKEON: Because that’s the only one he considers. In other words, he . . .
STUDENT: In other words, why have the universe move rather than maintain itself?
MCKEON: We see it move. Remember, we’ve . . .
STUDENT: Why, then, didn’t he want a part that didn’t move rather than have a universe as a whole move?
MCKEON: We are first dealing with the motion of the universe as a whole, on the supposition that there is a defining condition that the motion of the whole would have. We will go on in the second part to the motion of the parts.
STUDENT: It is in a sense, then, related to his conception of the soul, of living, in other words, of having a soul as well as a body.
MCKEON: Well, it’s connected with the supposition that there is an equation you can write for the entire universe, something which we now call a general field equation, an inclusive equation of a distinctive sort, but not one that would determine the motion of any particular part because then you need to take into account other forces that are parts of the universe, which he doesn’t bring in here. Therefore, if Plato could not prove that the universe was moving curvilinearly, you wouldn’t have a universe.
Problem nine begins at 34a, the next paragraph, a short one. Miss Marovski, what’s he talking about here? What’s he worried about now?
MAROVSKI: The problem he’s just finishing up is that of the corporal . . .
MCKEON: Corporeal.
MAROVSKI: . . . corporeal universe, and he’s beginning a description of the soul. In this paragraph he wants to relate soul to the whole universe.
MCKEON: O.K., what is the relation of the soul to the universe?
MAROVSKI: It infuses it entirely everywhere.
MCKEON: All right, but let me ask the same question I asked about the previous answer. This seems kind of silly to me. Why should the soul be at the center?
MAROVSKI: Well, he needs an axis of the movement, something to be the basis of the self-movement of the world.
MCKEON: Remember what we said about the soul. All we said was that you have evidence that there is a soul if you have motion. If you have an animal that moves from place to place or responds to a pin, then you have a soul. But why should the soul be in the center? Why should not the location of the faculty be in different parts?
MAROVSKI: Because, well, it’s not only in the center, it’s throughout. From the center of a sphere, the sphere is moving curvilinearly . . .
MCKEON: This is what the man says, but what does that mean? Why should he say this?
MAROVSKI: Well, when a sphere moves, it moves around its own axis, which is the center, and the soul is the center, the axis.
MCKEON: The soul doesn’t have to be round and pointed for the object to revolve. Yes?
STUDENT: But from the center it can easily be defused throughout the whole rest of the body.
MCKEON: But why? It seems to me that if you have a soul which is fast enough, and the soul is very fast, it could get around practically instantaneously.
STUDENT: But if the soul is not in the center, then it’s going to be moved externally by it.
MCKEON: That’s nearer to it. Can you explain that a little bit further?
STUDENT: Well, the main thing about the soul is that it moves itself.
MCKEON: Yeah, but that isn’t going to help much.
STUDENT: But if a soul was not at the center, the center would not be moved by itself.
MCKEON: Why not?
STUDENT: Well, the soul . . .
MCKEON: Why couldn’t the soul be moved by itself if it were up in the upper northwest corner.
STUDENT: Well, then, the center would not be moved by itself.
MCKEON: Why not?
STUDENT: It wouldn’t be moved by the soul.
MCKEON: No. If you have two forms, you have a circular universe with a center and you have a northwest corner. If the soul is in the center, then the upper northwest corner will not be moved by itself. If the upper northwest corner is where the soul is, then the center wouldn’t be moved by itself (see fig. 8).3
STUDENT: But we said that the soul would be throughout the whole.
MCKEON: I know, but this, again, is a figure of speech. Can you tell me what it means?
STUDENT: Well, every part of the universe moves itself.
MCKEON: But what’s that mean? . . . Yes?
STUDENT: Isn’t it that the soul being equally distributed throughout the whole universe would indicate that there is really no actual geometric center in the sense that he’s talking about. Rather, wherever there is soul, there you have a certain organizing principle, or whatever you want to call it. It exerts its action by means of it, and it is . . .
MCKEON: This is playing around the edge, but what does this mean? . . . Well, let me answer. This is also an argument which is a long one. The way in which you raise it is to ask in a philosophic way, What’s it mean to locate anything spatially? For a long time, both in antiquity and in the Middle Ages, there are two kinds of location. Let me give you the medieval terminology because it will give you a word to hang onto, even if you don’t understand about the word. One kind of location is circumscriptive, and the other kind of location is definitive. You locate a thing circumscriptively when you can say that if it is at x, it is not at y, and you would then draw a circle about where it is located in general (see fig. 8). For any physical object, that is, as long as you can continue with bodies, things are located circumscriptively. However, when you are dealing with an animating principle, then the definitive comes in. Suppose, for example, you were talking about my feeling of pain. If you stick a pin in my finger, I feel a pain, but do I feel it here at x or do I feel it here at y? Equally? If I didn’t feel it in the one place, I wouldn’t feel it in the other. Again, with my living body, you can stick the pin anywhere in me and I will get not necessarily the same amount of reaction, but I will get the same kind of reaction. The soul, in other words, which makes me sensitive, is in all parts and not merely at the center, which makes the perceptions.
Now, the same would be true of a moving principle. A moving principle, if it is an intelligent moving principle, would be located at the motive center, which would have a location in the brain—I think that Plato would probably have put it in the heart, but he did talk about the localization of functions—but it would also be in the feet, if you’re going to move with your feet, or the arms, if you’re swinging yourself. Therefore, what he is here saying is that the soul has to be so located in the universe that if it is to move the universe as a whole, the moving principle that actualizes the equation is everywhere. This all right?
O.K. Having fixed that up, we’re up to the tenth argument, beginning at 34b: why is the soul prior to the body? Mr. Henderson, the tenth argument is that the soul is prior in excellence and origin to the body. What does that mean? . . .
HENDERSON: Well . . .
MCKEON: This he works out very carefully.
HENDERSON: I can’t see from our reading how he does the analysis as such.
MCKEON: Well, let’s begin with the three parts that we’re going to differentiate. Let’s start at the beginning of 35a. What are the three parts?
HENDERSON: “[T]he unchangeable and indivisible essence.”
MCKEON: All right, the unchangeable and the indivisible.
HENDERSON: Then there’s “the divisible.” . . .
MCKEON: The divisible. Do you recognize these?
HENDERSON: . . . and “the generated.”
MCKEON: All right. What are these first two?
HENDERSON: Our old equation.
MCKEON: Our old proportion, that is, we have here the unchanging and the changing; and we’re saying that in between there is something that makes a relation. How does it make the relation between our equation and the changes that we see on a starry night?
HENDERSON: I don’t follow your question?
MCKEON: We have an equation, which we write down; it’s simply in terms of variables. We have the confidence when we go out and see the irregular, apparent motions of heavenly bodies that they will, when properly modified, fit the equations. Why? What does the generator do?
HENDERSON: It modifies . . .
MCKEON: No, it’s all right here. “[H]e compounded a nature which was a mean between the indivisible and the divisible and corporeal” [35a]. He then gives you a series of numbers, which we’ll only touch on lightly but enough so we can get this. The general character of these numbers appears at 35b–36d. What does this generator do?
HENDERSON: He creates a mean.
MCKEON: I know, but a mean how?
HENDERSON: Well, there’s an arithmetic mean and a harmonic mean.
MCKEON: O.K., but what’s the name of these? . . . It combines the same and the other, doesn’t it? In other words, if it is the case that I observed something which I will call the motion of Venus and something which I will call the motion of Mars, they would have a very odd curve in the observed space where I see them at night; it would be very hard to write that equation. I will be able to write it only if I can relate it to the unchangeable position of the universe. It will turn out that, in point of fact, both of the planets’ orbits are elliptical, and I’ll get these odd, apparent motions by considering the way in which this elliptical motion is observed from a point which is related to both but in different ways: they’re going at different speeds. The same would be the equation, the other would be the variables that I put in as constants, and I would differentiate the two.
That middle aspect is the soul. Why is it older than the body? . . . These are old arguments. What would it mean to say that one is older than the other? Yes?
STUDENT: It existed first.
MCKEON: I know, but “existed first” is just a literal way of putting it. We are relating this as being, respectively, the body, with the apparent position of the body, and the motion of the body; and we’re asking, Why is the one, the self-motion of the body, prior to, more important, more dignified, older than the other?
STUDENT: When we’re talking about our equation with motion, aren’t we kind of saying that what makes the body is your perception of the body, and in the mere perceiving of the body, or at least in being able to invent an equation, we have to have a motion, one enabling us to make this definition.
MCKEON: Have you answered my question why the soul is older than the body?
STUDENT: It’s older in the sense that its motion is first. In other words, you have to perceive the motion in order to understand the body.
MCKEON: Well, I know, but then the body would be older than the soul.
STUDENT: Older only in the sense that physically the material is before the motion.
MCKEON: You began with the perceived motion and you got the soul out of it.
STUDENT: Well, the motion that generates the body, though.
MCKEON: This isn’t a motion which generates the body. This is merely the path of Mars, as opposed to the apparent position of Mars. Yes?
STUDENT: Going back to our original definition, the soul is the always existent, whereas the body . . .
MCKEON: Not the soul. The unchanging is the always existent. The demiurge is going to make the soul here. Yes?
STUDENT: If you have the equation first, then the equation actually sets down the pattern for the elliptical, and the apparent motion comes after the pattern of the elliptical.
MCKEON: Yeah. This is the sense in which it is the older. That is to say, if you have bodies going around each other in a system, that will explain why you see them in apparent motion. If you want to put this in two separate ways, the argument here would be between two possible positions. One would be the position which holds that you can talk about absolute space, absolute motion, absolute position of bodies; then you can explain the apparent positions in these terms. There were other scientists—and this was true in Greece long before the special theory of relativity—who argued that there isn’t any such thing as absolute space or absolute simultaneity; all you have are the frames of reference relative to the observer, and you can translate from one frame of reference to the other. Plato is taking a position in this argument. He is saying that there is an absolute space; therefore, the position that the planet assumes is prior to the apparent position that it is given when observed from the earth. Isn’t this clear? Yes?
STUDENT: I don’t understand why we haven’t just argued the priority of the unchangeable, of the intelligible.
MCKEON: We began with that.
STUDENT: I know, but now the point is to prove the priority of the soul as opposed to the priority of the unchanging.
MCKEON: Notice what we are now down to. We began by saying that we have to give a cause for the divisible because it’s visible. Having said that it’s visible, we said that we can explain it in terms of an animating principle. Now we need to ask, When we make the universe that will be moving, do we first have to consider what the position of the planets will be really and then go on to their relative position, or can we begin with their relative position? And we have said that, since there is absolute space, absolute time, absolute motion, we’ll begin with the planet’s absolute motion. This is what Newton did, too. This is not what Einstein did in the special theory. So this, then, is the tenth argument.
The eleventh argument—it begins with the paragraph at the end of 36d—has to do with the union of the soul with the body, which is the “beginning of never-ceasing and rational life enduring throughout all time” [36e]. Let me explain this so we can get around to the interesting part. What this means is that the movement of the universe, which we have attached to the soul, is a binding together of the same and the other, that is, the taking of a general equation and deciding how it would apply to the various planets, the big stars, and whatever else you wanted it to, so that you would have one being or essence compounded out of the same and the other. For practical purposes, this means that the soul, this middle region, is something which would be manifested to us both by sense, that is, we would go out and see the moving stars, and by reason, that is, we would go out and write the equation of the motion of the stars. And when we get these two together, we’ve got ourselves a universe.
There are some extremely interesting details here, and if it weren’t so late, I’d take a shot at this beautiful number. Well, let’s take a look at 35b to 36d anyway because I think there is something you ought to observe. Someone said earlier that you have different kinds of means. We begin with the series of numbers: 1, 2, 3, 4, 9, 8, and so forth. Then we divide them into two proportions. The main proportions are, respectively, 1, 2, 4, 8—that’s the first one—and 1, 3, 9, 27. Each of these is a geometric mean. A geometric mean is one where the ratio is arrived at by multiplying by a constant. So for the first one you multiply by 2: you multiply 1 by 2, you get 2; multiply 2 by 2, you get 4; you multiply 4 by 2, you get 8. For the second one, you multiply by 3. And in the commentaries, this is always made into a lambda, with 1, 2, 4, 8 coming out one way and 1, 3, 9, 27 coming out the other way. One is the movement of the same, and the second is the movement of the other (see fig. 9).
You now take these main points and fill in the gaps. The first way you can fill them in is with arithmetic means. An arithmetic mean is a mean in which you add the same amount each time between two numbers. Therefore, in the first one, if you take 1/2 of the difference of 1 and 2, you have 1/2; so 3/2 has the same relation to 1 as to 2, that is, it is 1/2 bigger than 1 and 1/2 smaller than 2. The same thing goes in the interval between 2 and 4: 3 is bigger than 2 by 1, it’s smaller than 4 by 1. And so on. So, you have arithmetic means stuck in between the geometric ones. The remaining means are the harmonic means. The harmonic means are a fraction: 4/3, 8/3, 16/3, and the same thing with 3/2, 9/2, 27/2. Once you get those set in, you are in a series of positions which are harmonic in the literal sense: 3/2 and 4/3 are, respectively, a fifth and a fourth. You fill those in with a 9/8 interval, and that leaves you a ratio of 256 to 243. It happens that some of those 9/8ths are a tone; and, consequently, you’ve filled in all that is in between.
How seriously this is to be taken is for you to decide. In old-fashioned science, it’s always old-fashioned. In modern science you’re always doing something very much like this; but if it’s old-fashioned, it looks funny. You will notice that what he does with this lambda later, at 36b–c; is to take it in a chi or an X and put the ends together. That is to say, he makes them into two circles, of which the movement of the same is the outside one and the movement of the other is the inside one, and they influence each other as they circulate (see fig. 9). This is the picture of the universe. And you’ll notice, if you’re down there at y, you’ll be influenced by the same and the other.
Turning, now, to the selection from 57d–59d, we have a new set of questions. The first set was a set which had to do with reason, and reason can only be written in an equation. The second section of the Timaeus begins with 47e, and it has to do with necessity. A necessary movement is not one that’s self-moved; it is a movement from the outside, it’s something shoved instead of something living. Consequently, at the beginning of this section we go down to the least part, just as we began the section on reason with the biggest part, the inclusive whole. We set up the four elements, which turn out to have a mathematical basis, too: they are regular solids, and there are elaborate reasons for that. Then we go on from the regular solids to the consideration of how one body within the universe, say, on the surface of the earth, moves. Well, this leads to the question of what the difference between motion and rest is, which is where our selection begins. There are three stages in the answer to this question. What is the difference between motion and rest, Mr. Davis?
DAVIS: It’s here, but I can’t quite . . .
MCKEON: Well, take a look at 57e and tell me, What does it mean to say that motion never exists in equipoise? . . . If you have an equipoise, what do you have? . . .
DAVIS: I’m not quite sure what he means.
MCKEON: You don’t know what he’s getting at?
STUDENT: You have equality of something.
MCKEON: You have rest. When a thing is at rest there is no force moving it in any direction. When a thing is in motion, there is an interplay of forces. An interplay of forces would come ultimately from what? . . . I thought it was as simple as reading. . . . “[I]nequality is the cause of the nature which is wanting in equipoise” [58a]. Where does this inequality come from?
STUDENT: Forces?
MCKEON: It would be an inequality of the same and the other, wouldn’t it? When is any object moved? Let me put it in Newtonian language, and maybe it will be more clear: how long does an object move?
STUDENT: Well, if it’s in motion, it remains in motion.
MCKEON: Until when?
STUDENT: Forever, or until another force is acting upon it.
MCKEON: Until it meets an opposite and equal force. Its remaining in motion we call impetus, inertia, a variety of other things. It would be the lack of equipoise, in Plato’s language, that it had which would make it continue to move. When, on the other hand, there is no force either of a continuing motion within it or an external motion outside it, it would stop.
What’s our second question in this paragraph? . . . Why doesn’t motion stop in the universe? . . . Or on the surface of the earth? Yes?
STUDENT: Because the motion of the same and the other is becoming.
MCKEON: O.K. What’s that do? Why do we have tides?
STUDENT: Because of the motion of the waters keeps on going.
MCKEON: The force of gravity, in the case of the tides, particularly the moon, explains the rising and falling of the water. In general, what Plato is saying here is that if you have the whole universe circling around and if you have different kinds of elements with voids of different shapes, the circular motion would be enough to get them mixed up, to force things in places from which the gravitational pull would pull them out.
What’s our third question? . . . Well, the third question has to do with the way in which the elements themselves are differentiated. That is to say, even if you take only four elements, they appear, each of them, in different forms. Let’s take one, for example. “Water, again, admits in the first place of a division into two kinds; the one liquid and the other fusile” [58d]. It’s either.
STUDENT: Solid would be icelike?
MCKEON: No, he’s not talking only about ice. The early modern period had an answer to my little question about ice being a liquid for him. What do you think a metal was for the Greeks? . . . A metal was a form of water, and fusile waters are metals. The change of state of the fusile waters would depend on whether you heated them—that’s fire, which is above them; they really flow—or let them cool, in which case they’re solid, they resemble the state of earth. And you have much the same problem when you get to earth below as when you get to air above.
Let me give you what the three arguments are here since our time is running out. If you’re dealing with molar motion, that is, any particular thing within the universe, things are in motion because of external forces on them. The existence of motion is due to an indirect effect of the total motion of the universe. In the second place, none of the elements or their compounds or their derivatives or their mixtures can cease from motion because they are brought in upon each other by this total, universal motion. Finally, their state, that is, what form their matter takes, is likewise affected only by their motion, by this universal motion.
This leaves us with one set of problems, which is what we will begin with next time before starting on Aristotle, where my questions will be more on what the differences are. The third selection, which runs from 88c through 90d, has to do with the third section of the Timaeus. Remember, we began by talking about motion in the sense of a self-moved motion, which would be true only of the whole universe. Then we went on to the externally enforced motion, the necessary motion, which is true of any part of the universe. In the third section, we go to man; and man is in a peculiar position, because man, like the universe as a whole, has all three parts: he has a body, he has a soul, and he has an intelligence. Consequently, he is the only animal which could go through the mathematics that is necessary for this particular kind of an exercise; therefore, he is in a peculiar position in the whole situation. In this third section we will ask three questions. First, what is the nature of the motion of the body? The body is not at rest but is always in motion. Second, what is the nature of disease and death? And, finally, we will discuss the three levels in man.
As I say, next time I would like to tie Plato all together by considering the ways in which these different aspects add up, and then we will go on to Aristotle and ask what Aristotle does with the problem of motion that makes him different from Plato.
STUDENT: What’s the third question?
MCKEON: The third one has to do with the location in man of the equivalent of intelligence, soul, and body. In other words, there would be three souls in man.
