Some thoughts on the Timaeus (from Twitter)

[endymions_bower]

 While I will sometimes join in when people say in jest that everything Plato says is correct, and spend a good deal of time correcting unfair or simply incorrect criticisms of Plato/Platonism, let me say in earnest that Timaeus 90e-92c is terrible.

 

For me, the most fruitful approach to such a passage is to think through its unintended or indirect consequences. Hence in this passage my attention is drawn to the antecedent "humanity" invoked here, which is neither male nor female, nor in opposition to any other animal.

 

Correlatively, there are two "humanities", one which is indeterminate, and functions as a sort of regulative ideal within the open field of animality, in which souls change taxonomic species promiscuously, and another, which is taxonomically determinate in a field of oppositions.

 

Factical "humanity" in this account comes with winners and losers, such that it is an objective misfortune not to be in a body that is taxonomically human and male. And Plato wishes to frame this misfortune as a product of passions in the individual soul.

 

I think that this must be recognized as the virtually inevitable imaginary corresponding to such a social order. Where Platonism offers an advantage over other philosophical ideologies expressing similar formations, is in its ability to bracket such formations as well.

 

Only Platonism permits us to effectively bracket ontologies, to bracket ontology itself, because it is not itself an ontology. Hence the explanations offered for why an animal chooses this or that body are less primordial than the agency of choice in that individual.

 

What we say, therefore, about why some animal has chosen their form is ultimately inseparable from the life-pattern we ourselves have chosen, the investment of desire we have made.

 

Similarly to how the account of demiurgy in the Timaeus underdetermines any actual, theological account, therefore, the account of the genesis of species and gender-forms overdetermines the real conditions of their genesis.

 

@Sodoplatonist: Well, that's one way to avoid the conspiracy. [Ref. is to his essay "The Conspiracy of the Good: Proclus' Theodicy qua Political Theological Paradigm"]

 

Of course, I don't believe that it is *bad* to be something other than taxonomically human, any more than I believe it is bad to be other than male. So I don't buy the "conspiracy" reading. Instead, I think that we need to recognize two positions in Plato.

 

@Sodoplatonist: Sure, and Proclus himself paints himself into a corner by rejecting any alternative accounts of evil (the disordered motion, evil world soul, matter itself, what have you). I don't think it's in Plato. I have difficulty attributing anything to Plato.

 

@kayeboesme: When I was reading the Timaeus (and what Proclus had written about it), I was thinking about this in terms of the desirability of having the sweet spot of control over one's circumstances; women have historically had to do a lot of thankless work while being treated like property of their fathers, husbands, and (if they outlive the husband) sons or closest male relatives. Unless one is able to incarnate into a family that allows one high degrees of freedom, it sets a hard limit based on legal and social circumstances. Is that a weird reading to take?

 

This is the "misfortune" of which I spoke. The idealized masculine human subject looks at the female or non-human animal and asks, "Why would anyone choose that?"

 

@kayeboesme: Yes, but on another level, it's conflating the idealized masculine human subject with what is actually ideal about it, as it isn't something that would matter so much in an egalitarian society (which would likely still prioritize humans), right?

 

An egalitarian society would still prioritize humans, but would, if enlightened, express this in different, more formal terms than Plato does here. It's not unlike the discussions we've had about reading the Timaeus without fixing it to a given solar system.

 

It's a similar issue, albeit less charged (for most!), in that there are aspects of the text which point to a formal/relative conception, and others which fix its reference to a single solar system and a single position within it.

 

This dialectic, so to speak, is also there regarding the demiurge himself, who "even if we discovered him, to speak of him to all men is impossible" (28c). This is, as I have argued, not apophatic theology, but simply expresses the conditions of formalizing the henadic manifold.

 

@kayeboesme: Ah, so you’re referring to the break between the experience of "we" and any possible communication to "all men" (which seems to indicate a universal)?

 

Yes, that cosmic demiurgy is not expressible as an ordinary universal, or at least not fully, because it is entangled with a given soul's divine participations. We can't simply see actual theophanic cosmogonies as declensions of a single, ontologically prior account.

NOTE: For further discussion of the issues raised here, see in particular my essay "Animal and Paradigm in Plato," Epoché 18.2 (2014), pp. 311-323, reprinted in my Essays on Plato.