Apprehension in the Timaeus
Apprehension in the Timaeus
Plato’s Nervous Narrator
This chapter offers a reading of Plato’s Timaeus, a dialogue that deals with the creation of the cosmos and the human being. Timaeus elaborates on the mathematical, musical, and geometrical bases of cosmic order. In the tripartite plan of exposition, he first describes the work of reason in creating the world soul and body, time, living creatures, and the human soul. He then proceeds to the work of necessity in an account that seems barely able to domesticate a vision of elemental violence. In the third section, Timaeus shows how reason and necessity have to work together to bind and contain an unruly human creature full of the stuff of chaos, a creature whose makeup reflects the pleonexia of its origins. This chapter considers the idea that the Timaeus is “a place of doctrinal safety,” Socrates’s description of the city of Kallipolis at the beginning of the Timaeus, and how Timaeus’s account of the creation of the cosmos advances the Kallipolitan agenda.
Keywords: cosmos, Plato, Timaeus, creation, cosmic order, reason, pleonexia, doctrinal safety, Socrates, Kallipolis
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