Plato's Timaeus: summary and how to read it

The Timaeus is the dialogue in which the philosopher tries to answer a question that most of us ask in silence: why is there a world, and not chaos? His answer is one of the most beautiful that Antiquity left us, and also one of the hardest to read. This summary follows the book in the order in which it unfolds, explains the ideas that intrigue most (the craftsman, the receptacle, the solids, the eyes), and ends with practical advice: what to skip, and what to read slowly.

A book you have already seen, without knowing it

There is a famous fresco, painted by Raphael in the sixteenth century and now in the Vatican Museums in Rome, that almost everyone has seen. In the center, two men walk side by side. The older one points his finger to the sky and carries a book in his other hand. It is Plato, and the title of the book is in plain view. It is not the Republic, nor the Symposium, his best-known works. It is the Timaeus. The younger one holds out his hand with the palm facing down: it is Aristotle. What each of them holds in hand and gesture is the subject of What is Raphael's School of Athens?, and we come back to the fresco at the end.

The scene: Solon, Egypt and an island

The dialogue opens with Socrates recalling a conversation from the day before, about what the ideal city would be like, very much like the one in the Republic. He says he would like to see that city in motion, the way one who sees a painted animal wants to see it walk. Critias, one of the guests, answers with a story: the lawgiver Solon is said to have heard it from Egyptian priests, centuries before. That is where the island of Atlantis comes from, told as an example of the ideal city in action. That passage has its own article, Was Atlantis real? What Plato wrote in the Timaeus, because the subject of this book is something else. Socrates hardly speaks again, and the word passes to Timaeus, the astronomer, who is going to tell the origin of everything.

Everything that comes to be has a cause

Timaeus starts from a distinction that already appears in Plato's Theory of Forms: the measure no one gave you: there is what always is and never changes, which is grasped by reason, and there is what always changes and never quite comes to be, which is grasped by the senses. The river you see changes every day, but what makes it a river does not. This world, which we see and touch, belongs to what changes. And everything that comes to be needs a cause (Timaeus, 27d-28a).

The consequence is the engine of the book, and soon comes a warning that says a lot about it. Discovering the maker and father of the universe is a difficult task, and once discovered, it is impossible to communicate it to everyone (28c). That is why Timaeus warns that he will offer a plausible account, the best a man can give on a subject of this size (29c-d). Notice the humility: the boldest book of Plato on the origin of the world presents itself as an attempt.

The craftsman and the model: the kósmos

Who would the cause be? Timaeus gives it a name that comes from the workshops: demiourgós, the craftsman, the one who works and shapes in the service of the people. Think of a cabinetmaker making a table. He has the wood before him and a model of a table in his mind, and the table will be as good as the model. In the same way, the craftsman of the Timaeus fixes his eyes on what does not change, and that is why what he makes is beautiful (28a). Since the world is beautiful, Timaeus concludes, the model can only be the eternal one (29a).

The Greeks had a word that carries this whole idea: kósmos, an ordered world, from the same root as cosmetic. For a Greek, the universe is not only large, it is arranged, and it is beautiful for that reason. If you want to know who this craftsman is and whether he is "God," there is an article devoted only to that: Did Plato believe in God? The Demiurge of the Timaeus. A caveat in advance: the personal God of the Bible comes much later, and the Timaeus does not yet speak of him.

Why there is a world: goodness without envy

Here is the question that truly matters: why did the craftsman make the world? He did not need to. Timaeus's answer is that the craftsman was good, and in one who is good, no envy about anything arises. Free from envy, he wanted all things to be as much like himself as possible (29e). The world does not exist out of necessity, nor by chance, nor to satisfy anyone: it exists because whoever is good does not keep the good for himself.

There was a disorder, a movement without rule, and the craftsman brought it to order, because he judged order to be better. He made the world a living being, with soul and intelligence, because what has intelligence is better than what does not (30a-b). The idea changes how you look around you: if Timaeus is right, the order you find in the world was not you who put it there. It was already there before you arrived, and you are invited to recognize it. The article Why was the world created, according to Plato? sticks to this question alone.

Time: a moving image of eternity

With the world ready, the craftsman wanted to make it even more like the model. But the model is eternal, and something that has come into being cannot be eternal in the same way. So he made the nearest thing possible: a moving image of eternity, which is what we call time (37d). Days, nights, months and years did not exist before the heavens; they were born together with them, and the Sun, the Moon and the planets were set to mark them, like the hands of a clock (38b-c).

From this Timaeus draws an almost grammatical consequence. Of what is eternal we can only say that it is: to say that it was or that it will be is to apply to it something that only holds for what passes (37e-38a). It is an idea that a man born in North Africa in the fourth century is going to take very seriously. For what he did with it, see What is time, according to Saint Augustine, and, on Plato's side, What is time for Plato?.

The wet nurse of all things: the receptacle and the chóra

Timaeus notices that something is missing from the account. If there is the eternal model and the copy we see, where does the copy take place? Where do the forms appear? He proposes a third kind of thing, one of the strangest ideas in the book: the receptacle, the wet nurse of everything that comes into being, the one that receives and nurtures (49a).

It is not fire, nor water, nor earth, nor air. It has no form at all, and that is exactly why it can receive every form. Timaeus's image is that of the goldsmith: he melts gold and makes a ring, then melts it down and makes another piece, and then another. If someone points and asks what that is, the safest answer is to say it is gold (50a-b). Timaeus gives this third thing the name chóra, place, and makes clear what it is not: neither matter in our sense, nor empty space. He closes with an image from the family: the model is like the father, the receptacle is like the mother, and the world we see is the child born between the two (50d). The chóra is one of the most disputed passages in Plato, and here it enters as the book presents it, without trying to settle the debate.

The solids and the elements: a world of triangles

Within the receptacle, how do things take on a body? Here Timaeus makes a bold wager for the fourth century BC: matter, at bottom, is geometry. The elements would be made of triangles, assembled into perfect solids, and each element has its own form. Fire is made of small pyramids, sharp, and that is why it cuts and burns. Earth is made of cubes, and that is why it is firm and stays still. Air and water are made of figures with more faces, almost rounded, and that is why they move and flow easily (53c-56c).

You may remember these figures from school. They are the five regular polyhedra, the only solids whose faces are all alike, like a die, and to this day they are called Platonic solids, because of this book. Four of them became the elements. The fifth, which has twelve faces, Timaeus uses to draw the whole universe (55c). Today we know that matter is not made of pyramids and cubes, and in this Plato was wrong. But the intuition behind them crossed the centuries: Galileo, almost two thousand years later, would write that the universe is written in the language of mathematics.

Why we have eyes, and the plant upside down

In the middle of all this construction, Timaeus pauses to explain why we have eyes. The craftsman gave us eyes to contemplate the sky. Up there the stars turn in order, and by looking at them we put our own thought, which is born disordered, in order (47b-c).

Think of the last time you looked at a starry sky calmly, without hurry, far from the lights. That strange calm, hard to explain. It is the reading our class gives of the Timaeus: your soul recognizing an order and adjusting itself to it. And further on comes one of the most beautiful images of the book: the human being is like a plant, only a plant turned upside down, with its root in the sky. Our root is the head, which is why it sits at the top of the body, turned toward the stars (90a).

How to enter the Timaeus

The Timaeus is the hardest of the dialogues we read here. After the opening, it becomes almost a monologue on astronomy, geometry and ancient medicine, and what usually stalls the reader are the numerical proportions with which the craftsman composes the soul of the world, pages of fractions that seem never to end (35b-36b). When you get stuck, move on without guilt: not even the ancients agreed about them.

What is worth reading slowly is Timaeus's speech up to the birth of time and the stars, and then the passage on sight. These are the most beautiful parts, and the ones that speak most about our lives. If you can, read on a clear night. A note on editions: this article does not reproduce the text in quotation marks and uses only the Stephanus references (27d, 28a, 29e, 37d and the rest), which locate each passage in any translation you have at hand.

After the Timaeus: the book that Christians loved and corrected

For centuries, until around the twelfth century, the Timaeus was the only book of Plato that the West could read, and not everyone read it in full. For a long time, to say Plato was to say Timaeus. Christians saw in it an order coming from a good God, very close to the beginning of Genesis, in which God saw everything he had made and it was very good. But they read it 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 Creator. Plato's craftsman works a matter that was already there, disordered. The God of the Bible finds nothing ready, and creates even the matter. This path has two articles, Plato and Christianity: from the Timaeus to Genesis and Did God create the world out of nothing? The craftsman of Plato, besides the question that Augustine carried to the end, in What God was doing before he created the world.

To keep

The Timaeus takes an idea we already knew, that there is what changes and what does not change, and turns it into a question about the whole world. If everything that begins has a cause, the world does too. Timaeus imagines it as a good craftsman, who looked at a perfect model, took a mess and made an order out of it, because whoever is good wants to share the good he has. From this work came time, which imitates eternity, a matter made of geometric forms, and even our eyes, so that the order of the sky may arrange our thought as well.

Now go back to the fresco. Plato points to the sky, holding the book that explains the sky. Aristotle, beside him, holds out his hand downward and holds the Ethics, a book about how to live down here. That was the book Raphael put in Plato's hand. And the question that remains open is this: if the order of the world was already here before us, how much of our weariness comes from trying to invent an order that only needed to be recognized? If you want to see the same path in another dialogue of Plato, begin with Plato's Symposium: Summary and How to Read It.

Continue: Did Plato believe in God? The Demiurge of the Timaeus · Why was the world created according to Plato? · Plato and Christianity: from the Timaeus to Saint Augustine's Genesis · Why is Macbeth "the Scottish play"?
Source class: Timeu, de Platão