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Plato's Vision of Chaos

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

Jerry S. Clegg
Jerry S. Clegg
Affiliation:
Mills College, Oakland, California
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Extract

In the creation myth of the Timaeus Plato describes God as wishing that all things should be good so far as is possible. Wherefore, finding the whole visible sphere of the world not at rest, but moving in an irregular fashion, out of disorder He brought order, thinking that this was in every way an improvement. To achieve His end He placed intelligence in soul and soul in body, reflecting that nothing unintelligent could ever be better than something intelligent (30 a—b). From this account of creation it would seem that God confronted a chaotic world whose disorderly motions existed in full independence of the principle of soul. Yet, in his doctrinal pronouncements in the Laws (892 a) and the Pbaedrus (245 e) on the origin of motion, Plato declares soul to be elder born than bodies and the prime source of all their changes and transformations.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Classical Quarterly , Volume 26 , Issue 1 , May 1976 , pp. 52 - 61
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1976

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References

1 F.M. Cornford, Plato's Cosmology, 175–7. G.R. Morrow, ‘Necessity and Persuasion in Plato's Timaeus,’ Studies in Plato's Metaphysics, 432–7.

2 G. Vlastos, ‘The Disorderly Motion in the Timaeus;’ ‘Creation in the Timaeus: Is it a Fiction?’ Studies in Plato's Metaphysics, 416–19. Crombie, I. M., An Examination of Plato's Doctrines ii. 216–19.Google Scholar

3 Cornford: ‘if you abstract Reason and its works from the universe what is left will be irrational Soul, a cause of wandering motions … (Plato's Cosmology, 203). Morrow: ‘chance and necessity characterize the world prior to the entry of the intelligent cause … the disorderly motions upon whict intelligence works are due to the irrational parts of the world soul’ (Studies in Plato's Metaphysics, 432, 437). Vlastos: ‘some occurrences … are not fully susceptible of rational explanation, and we are to expect these whenever [necessity] operates in isolation from [intelligence]. And this is precisely the condition of the primal chaos …’ (Studies in Plato's Metaphysics, 418). Crombie: Necessity is ‘the element of brute fact with which reason was faced when it came to its creative work’ (An Examination of Plato's Doctrines ii. 216, 219).Google Scholar

4 The point that nothing empirical is fully intelligible is a sufficient refutation of Taylor' thesis that what Plato calls necessity would ‘vanish from our account of the world’ if we were to have knowledge, not just of some, but of all the causes responsible for change (Commentary on Plato's Timaeus, Oxford 1928, 300). Only the Forms are objects of knowledge for Plato; thus not even God can have anything but a probable opinion about His creation which can never match in full the features of the Forms it participates in.