Penguin Classics Timaeus And Critias [Paperback]

"Critias" is unfinished, whether it was left that way, or the ending has been lost. It's the earliest tale of Atlantis we have (Atlantis is only discussed very briefly in "Timaeus"). It can be taken as a morality parable. On the other hand, it may also be a myth that found it's way to Plato...or even a relatively accurate historical account. Or all of the above. Because, like I said: Plato is deep.

Materialism dominates Western culture today. Briefly, materialism
identifies reality as the objects that people perceive and manipulate
in their environment, or the particles that comprise them. The following
concepts fit nicely with this outlook: causality as a product of lawful
interactions among objects, reductionism where the events we perceive can
ultimately be attributed to universal laws and material particles, and
an evolutionary theory that explains the development of the universe
through natural laws from elementary particles. These materialist
meta-theories are the foundation of today's science.

Plato's philosophy denies that reality is only material objects, because
they merely reflect an underlying perfect, good, and beautiful reality.
In the Republic, Plato provides a memorable metaphor for our illusion of
reality in his depiction of cave dwellers who are constrained to see
only flickering shadows cast by firelight on the cave wall, oddly shaping
their conceptions. Plato's depiction of the world as image resembles
religious doctrines, such as the Hindu concept of maya. In the Gospels,
John's portrayal of Jesus as the manifestation of God's plan (logos - the
Word) resembles Plato's perfect eternal template from which earthly
objects manifest themselves. Unlike religous doctrines, however, that
ascribe natural phenomena such as diseases or psychological disturbances
to the will of gods, Plato sets out to explain the processes underlying
these disturbances, implying the possibility of establishing relations
between the ideal and its image through a rational investigation, and of
manipulating these relations, which might be called Platonic science.

Plato's model consists of a perfect eternity of Being having ideal
forms that only the most gifted in this mortal life can, with effort,
vaguely glimpse via thought, versus our ordinary, sensible, protean
world of Becoming which is constructed based on the ideal forms with the
four elements: fire, earth, water, and air. Timaeus distinguishes these
two realities as "that which always is and never becomes from that which
is always becoming but never is." The world's creator used the eternally
unchanging forms of Being as "his pattern for the form and function of
his product." First, the creator god made the heavens and the gods that
inhabit it, then set the conditions for making the inhabitants of earth,
but left to other gods actual implementation of these creatures. The gods
made humans with both immortal (intellectual soul) and mortal (body) parts,
the immortal part sharing much in common with that of the gods and the
whole universe, including its motions of Same and Different. Timaeus
provides all the preposterous details for this creation, including how
the soul is bonded to the body, the geometrical shapes corresponding to
the four elements, etc. Besides Being and Becoming, Timaeus describes
the third aspect of reality, the Receptacle, an unchanging plastic substance,
without attributes of its own, in which the perfect forms are impressed and
which provides the space for the position of objects in our world.

Plato casts his psychology as the workings of the soul. Timaeus refines
the concept of a tripartite soul from prior dialogs into a rational,
immortal executive that resides in the head; a good, mortal part in the
chest that governs passion, courage, etc.; and an inferior, unruly, mortal
part below the diaphram that exercises the appetites. Each of these soul
parts has a motion copied from the cosmos, which must be exercised for
proper mental health, and balanced with the exercise of the body for overall
health. Human inability to control such motions is the original cause of
irrationality and conflict. Timaeus mentions only in passing the theory
developed in the dialog Phaedrus, which describes motivation as the memory
of an ideal form, as when love results from the beauty of a person who
mediates recall of divine beauty. Timaeus describes sensations as the
product of motions of objects that are transmitted to the soul by particles
that pass through sensory organs, causing pain or pleasure, heat or cold,
hard or soft, etc., depending on their characteristics (e.g., size, speed,
strength). He formulates the basis of pain as a sudden departure from the
normal state and pleasure as a return to it. Thus, Plato presents theories
about mental structures, sensations, emotions, motivation, space and object
perception, and abnormal psychology.

Today, Plato's descriptions of creation, physical and biological processes,
human anatomy, and psychological functions are so erroneous as to be
humorously entertaining. Rather than dismissing too facilely his more
general philosophy and its relevance to psychology, however, we might
consider his account as symbolic and his specifics as suggestive. Stripped
of such unverifiable concepts as soul and divinity, could his work outline
a psychology that has value over that of materialist approaches? Alternately,
will ever more closer examination of the brain, for example, eventually yield
full understanding of self-awareness, thought, and consciousness, just as
expected when one has the circuit diagram of any machine? Plato had, at times,
an uncanny ability to see truth. Observed motions of stars do actually result
from different motions. Humans really are made of star stuff. Could Plato
genuinely have glimpsed eternal truths? Before you make up your mind on such
questions, you will have to study Plato's Timaeus.