Chapter 20 Chapter 17 Plato's Theory of the Creation of the Universe

Plato's theory of the creation of the universe was put forward in "Timaeus", which was translated into Latin by Cicero, and later became the only known dialogue in the Western Middle Ages.Whether in the Middle Ages or earlier in Neoplatonism, this piece has had a greater influence than any other of Plato's works; which is very strange, because more than other works in this piece. Apparently there's a lot more stuff that's downright stupid.As philosophy this piece is not important, but historically it has been so influential that we must examine it in considerable detail.

The place occupied by Socrates in the earlier dialogues is replaced in the Timaeus by a Pythagorean; Including the view, it is also generally adopted by Plato.The dialogue begins with a synopsis of the first five volumes of The Nation, and then proceeds to the myth of Atlantis, an island beyond the Pillars of Hercules, which is said to be larger than Libya and Asia put together.The Pythagorean astronomer Timaeus then proceeded to tell the history of the world up to the creation of man.What he said was roughly as follows. What is constant is known by reason and reason, and what is variable is known by opinion.Since the world is sensible, it cannot be eternal, but must have been created by God.And since God is good, he made the world according to the pattern of eternity; since he is not jealous, he would like to make all things as much like himself as possible. "God desires that all things should be as good as possible and nothing bad". "Seeing that the entire visible world is not static, but in an irregular and disorderly movement, God created order out of disorder." (It thus appears that Plato's gods are not like the Judaic and Christian gods; Plato's gods did not create the world out of nothing, but merely rearranged pre-existing matter.) God puts intellect in the soul, And put the soul in the body.He made the whole world into a living being both soul and reason.There is only one world, not many worlds, as the pre-Socratics claimed; there cannot be more than two worlds, because the world is a created copy and is designed to conform as closely as possible to to the eternal original as understood by God.The whole of the world is one visible animal, in which all other animals are contained.It is a ball, because it is better to be like than not to be like, and only the ball is everywhere alike.It is revolving because circular motion is the most perfect; since revolving is its only motion, it need not have hands or feet.

Each of the four elements of fire, air, water, and earth is obviously represented by a number and constitutes a continuous ratio, that is to say, the ratio of fire to air is equal to that of air to water, and equal to that of water to earth.God created the world with all the elements so it is perfect without aging or disease.It is harmonious by proportion, which endows it with the spirit of friendship, and is therefore indissoluble, except by God.God created the soul first and then the body.The soul is composed of the indivisible-immutable and the divisible-changeable; it is a third and intermediate nature.

This is followed by a Pythagorean exposition of the planets, leading to an explanation of the origin of time: when the Creator and the Father saw the creature which he had created, the image of the created Eternal God, In motion, in life, he rejoices; with joy he resolves to make the copy more like the original; and since the original is eternal, he seeks to make the universe as eternal as possible.The ideal quality of life is immortality, but it is impossible to give this property perfectly to a living being.He therefore resolved to give eternity a moving image; and when he had ordered heaven, he made this image, being eternal, move according to number, while eternity itself was always one.We call this image "time".Before that there was neither day nor night.With regard to the Eternal Essence we can never say that it was or will be; only that it is true that it is.But this implies that it is true to say that "moving images of eternity" existed in the past and will exist in the future.

Time and celestial bodies appear at the same instant.God made the sun so that the animals could learn arithmetic—were it not for the succession of day and night, it is conceivable that we would not be able to think of numbers.The spectacle of day and night, moon and year creates knowledge of numbers and gives us the notion of time, and thus philosophy.This is the greatest gift we have received from the visual scene. Besides the world as a whole, there are four kinds of animals: namely, gods, birds, fish, and land animals.The gods are primarily fire, and the stars are divine, eternal animals.The Creator told the gods that he could. could. destroy them, but he wouldn't.After he had created the immortal and divine parts, he left it to the gods to create the mortal parts of all other animals. (This is probably not to be taken too seriously, like Plato's other passages about God. Timaeus begins by saying that he is only looking for probabilities and cannot be sure. Many details are obviously just imagined, not meant to be.)

Timaeus said that the Creator created a soul for each star.Souls have feelings, love, fear and anger; if they overcome these, they can live with integrity, otherwise they cannot.If a person has a good life, he will go to his star to live happily forever after death.But if he is evil all his life, he will become a woman in the next life; if he (or she) continues to be evil, he (or she) will become a beast, and will continue to go through the cycle until reason finally takes over. Upwind.The gods put certain souls on the earth, some on the moon, some on other planets and constellations, and left it to the gods to mold their bodies.

There are two kinds of causes: one is rational, and the other is driven by other causes and has to push others.The former are endowed with mind and are producers of good things, while the latter produce random, unplanned accidental actions.Both should be studied, for creation is both, made of necessity and mind. (We should note that inevitability is not subject to the Creator's power.) Timaeus then proceeds to discuss the role of inevitability.Earth, air, fire, and water are not first principles or letters or elements; they are not even syllables or first composites.Fire, for example, should not be called this but this—that is to say, it is not a substance, but rather a state of substance.Here a question arises: is the intelligible essence merely the name?The answer, he tells us, is whether mind and real opinion are the same thing.If it is not, then knowledge must be knowledge of essences, and therefore essences can never be mere names.But of course mind and opinion are different, for the former is cultivated by teaching, the latter by persuasion; the former is accompanied by true reason, the latter not; But the mind is only an attribute of God and very few people.

This leads to a rather strange theory of space, which regards space as something intermediate between the world of essences and the world of fluid, sensible things. There is a being that is always the same, that is neither created nor indestructible, that never receives into itself anything from outside, never goes to anything else itself, and is for any What the senses cannot see and perceive, only the intellect is qualified to think about it.There is another quality of the same name and similar to it, which is perceived by the senses, created, always in motion, changing in a certain place and disappearing from a certain place; and it can only To be grasped by opinion and senses.There is also a third quality, space, which is eternal, indestructible, and provides a dwelling place for all created things, which is known without the senses but only by a false reason, and which It is hardly real; we see it as in a dream, and we may say that all beings necessarily occupy a place and occupy space, and that which is neither in heaven nor on earth has no existence.

This is a very difficult passage, and I do not pretend to fully understand it.I think that the above theory must have been born of reflections on geometry; geometry, like arithmetic, seems to be a purely rational matter, but it must involve space, and space is a part of the world of senses. aspect.Generally speaking, it is always a matter of imagination to make analogies with later philosophers, but I think Kant would have liked this view of space, which is very similar to Kant's own view. Timaeus said that the real elements of the material world are not earth, air, fire, and water, but two kinds of right triangles; one half of a square, and one half of an equilateral triangle.At first everything was chaotic, and "the various elements had different positions, and they were later arranged so that the universe was formed."But at that time God fashioned them in form and number, and "made them perfect out of things that were neither beautiful nor good."The above two triangles are, according to him, the most beautiful forms, and therefore the gods use them to compose matter.It is possible to construct four out of five kinds of regular polyhedra with these two kinds of triangles, and every atom of each of the four elements is a regular polyhedron.The atoms of earth are cubes; the atoms of fire are tetrahedrons; the atoms of air are octahedrons;

The theory of the regular polyhedron was advanced in Euclid's Thirteenth Book, and it was a new discovery at the time of Plato; it was completed by Theaetetus, who In the dialogue that bears his name, he appears to be a very young man.According to legend, he was the first to prove that there are only five regular polyhedra, and he discovered the octahedron and the icosahedron.The surfaces of the regular tetrahedron, octahedron and icosahedron are all equilateral triangles; but the surface of the dodecahedron is a regular pentagon, so it cannot be constructed with Plato's two types of triangles.For this reason, he did not use it to connect with the four elements.

Regarding the dodecahedron, Plato just said: "There is a fifth way of combination that God uses to outline the universe."This statement is vague, and implies that the universe is a dodecahedron; but elsewhere he says that the universe is a sphere.The pentagon has always been of great importance in witchcraft, apparently from the Pythagorean school, who called the pentagon "health" and used it as a symbol for identifying members of their community. ② Its properties seem to be derived from the fact that the surface of the dodecahedron is pentagonal, and it is in a sense a symbol of the universe.The title is fascinating, but it's hard to say how much of it is solid. Having discussed sensations, Timaeus goes on to explain the two souls of man, one immortal and the other mortal.The former was created by the Creator God, while the latter was created by the gods.The mortal soul is "subjected to terrible and irresistible passions,--pleasure first, which is the greatest stimulus to evil, then pain, which hinders good; There are unquenchable rages and misleading hopes; they (the gods) mix these and irrational feelings with unbridled love according to the law of necessity, and thus make man." The immortal soul is in the head, the mortal soul is in the breast. There are also a few passages of strange physiology, for example, the purpose of the large intestine is to store food to prevent gluttony; and then there is another narrative about the transmigration of souls.A cowardly or unrighteous person will become a woman in the next life.Those simple and thoughtless people who think that astronomy can be learned without knowledge of mathematics but only by observing the stars become birds; those who do not understand philosophy become land animals; and the extremely stupid become fish . The final paragraph of the dialogue concludes: We can now say that our inquiry into the nature of the universe has come to an end.The world accommodates and is completed with animals, mortal and immortal; the world itself becomes a visible animal, including the visible-sensible Creator God, who is the intellect The image of God is the greatest, the best, the best, the most perfect, - the only created sky. It is difficult to know which of the Timaeus should be taken seriously and which should be regarded as fantasies.I think that the statement of creation as the making of order out of chaos should be taken very seriously; Relationships, too.The talk about time and space is clearly what Plato believed, as was the view that the created world was a copy of an eternal archetype.The mixture of necessity and purpose in the world was a belief shared by virtually all Greeks long before the rise of philosophy.Plato accepted it, and thereby avoided the sinful problem that had plagued Christian theology.I think he's also serious about the world-animals.But the details about reincarnation and those parts about the gods, and other unimportant points, I think are just inserted in order to illustrate a possible specific content. The dialogue in its entirety, as I have said, is worth studying because of its great influence on ancient and mediaeval thought; and this influence is by no means limited to its least fanciful parts.