Why was the world created according to Plato?

Source lesson: F&T 3.5 - Timeu, de Platao

Why is there a world, and not just disorder? In the Timaeus, Plato gives one of the most beautiful answers that Antiquity left us: the world exists because the one who ordered it was good, and whoever is good does not keep the good to himself. This article follows Timaeus' reasoning step by step, from the question of cause to the reason the world was made.

First, the question of cause

Timaeus, the astronomer who takes up the word in the dialogue to tell the origin of everything, starts from a distinction that Plato had already worked out in other dialogues, the one that the Theory of Forms explains: there is what always is and never changes, which is grasped by reason, and there is what always changes and never fully comes to be, which is grasped by the senses. The world we see and touch belongs to the second group. And everything that changes, everything that comes to be, needs a cause (Timaeus, 27d-28a).

Here Timaeus makes a caveat that says a lot about the book. Finding the maker and father of this universe is a difficult task, he warns, and making him known to everyone is impossible (28c). What he will offer is a plausible account: the best a man can do on a subject of this size. It is worth noticing the humility.

The craftsman who looks at the model

Who would that cause be? Timaeus gives it a name that comes from the workshop: demiourgós, in Greek the craftsman, the one who works and shapes. It is not yet the personal God that history would bring much later. It is the philosophical question about a cause, named with a word from a trade (the question is discussed in the article Did Plato believe in God? The demiurge of the Timaeus).

Think of a carpenter making a table. He has the wood in front of him and, in his mind, a model of how the table should be. The better the model, the better the table. That is how, Timaeus says, the world was made: the demiurge fixes his eyes on what is unchanging, and so whatever he makes in that way is beautiful (28a). And the world is beautiful, he concludes (29a). Therefore, the craftsman looked at the eternal.

The Greeks had a word that carries this whole idea: kósmos, ordered world, from the same root as "cosmetics". For a Greek, the universe is not merely large. It is beautiful, well arranged.

The answer: whoever is good does not keep the good to himself

Now comes the question that really matters. The craftsman did not need to make the world. Why did he make it?

Timaeus answers that he was good, and that in someone who is good no envy of anything arises. Free of envy, he wanted all things to be as much like himself as possible (29e, paraphrased).

Notice what this says. The world does not exist out of necessity, nor by accident, nor to satisfy anyone. It exists because whoever is good does not keep the good to himself. Before, there was disorder, motion without rule, and the craftsman brought it into order because he judged order to be better (29e-30a). He made the world a living being, with soul and intelligence (30b), because, for Timaeus, what has intelligence is better than what does not.

This is an answer that does not depend on the book's geometry or astronomy. It speaks of a goodness that wants to share the good it has.

What this answer changes in how we look

The class draws a consequence from this for anyone who looks around. If Timaeus is right, the order you find in the world is not something you put there. It was already there before you arrived, and you are invited to recognize it.

Whoever wants to see how other traditions answer the question of meaning will find an overview in What is the Meaning of Life?. Timaeus' answer has its own mark: order already exists, and the task of the one who looks is to recognize it, not to invent it.

How Christians read this answer

Augustine, the Christian thinker from North Africa, knew the Timaeus and was struck by how much it sounds like the beginning of the Bible: a world that had an origin, an order that comes from a good God and, at the end, the same gaze before a beautiful world. In Genesis (1:31), God sees everything he had made, and it was very good.

That is why Christians read the Timaeus with one hand on the heart and the other on the pen. They accepted the goodness that does not keep the good for itself. And they corrected the craftsman, who became the Creator: Plato's craftsman works on a matter that was already there, in disorder, while the God of the Bible finds nothing ready. This point has its own article: Did God create the world out of nothing? Plato's craftsman.

To take away

For Plato, the world was created because the one who ordered it was good and did not want to keep the good for himself. Three things come out of this answer: a craftsman who looks at the eternal, a world that is beautiful because it is ordered, and an order that comes before us and that it is up to us to recognize. Whoever wants to see where this answer fits in the whole book, and how to enter it without getting lost in its driest parts, will find the route in Timaeus, by Plato: summary and how to read it.

This article paraphrases the Timaeus and does not reproduce the text of any translation. The references 27d-28a, 28a, 28c, 29a, 29e-30a and 30b follow Stephanus pagination, which lets you locate the passage in any edition.

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