Now we need to take a step back from the world Plato’s Demiurge has produced and consider its significance. Up till now, the natural philosophers who had explained the world as we know it had all, or rather almost all, seen it as arising as the result of natural processes in which one stuff gave rise to another and another. The natural philosophers typically accounted for the world as a kind of wonderful accident that was perhaps inevitable given the behavior of the stuff the world was made of. There is some hint in their stories of a guiding intelligence inherent in some stuff that “steered” or otherwise molded the world into the magnificent ordered cosmos that we now experience, with its central earth, changeable atmosphere, and revolving heaven. But, as Plato’s Socrates complains in the Phaedo, the alleged intelligent oversight that is hinted at never plays a decisive role in the story. The universe we know is a happy coincidence somehow made possible by the behavior of the stuffs that make it up. The world came to be by chance, but apparently is preserved by a kind of balance of forces and components that ensure that it is never too hot or cold, never too dry or wet, never too light or dark.
The story Plato tells is a stark departure from the traditional view. There was, to be sure, always something there: hot and cold, dry and wet, light and dark, something like a play of qualities or powers in different regions of the as-yet undifferentiated totality. A Designer or Architect, which Plato’s Timaeus is loath to account for, appears and, fixing his gaze on the Living Creature, a kind of compendium of transcendent Forms, sets to work to organize the pre-existing chaos into an orderly and wholesome environment for gods and humans. The Designer is the ultimate craftsman working with the ultimate primitive materials to produce the ultimate product, a cosmos.
The Designer fills his mixing bowl with soul stuff and apportions this out into the world, which he designs as a large sphere that includes the heavens and a central earth. He also goes about designing the microstructure of the four elements which will provide the physical components of all things, to be inhabited, in the case of living things, by souls—and, in the case of the world as a whole, by a world-soul. The Olympian gods arise by some kind of birth process, and the Designer recruits them to design bodies for living things and fit them with appropriate souls.
The story Plato’s spokesman Timaeus tells is radically different from those of earlier philosophers. The universe arises not by some cosmic chance, but by divine design. It is true that the Designer is constrained by the materials at his disposal. Plato is at pains to point out that the physical materials have their own character: fire heats things, water is cold and wet, earth is heavy, air is light, and so on. These characteristics put constraints on what the Designer builds: he must draw on the sometimes-recalcitrant materials to make up, for instance, the body of a human being. He realizes that he can make humans very long-lived if he gives them a thick skull. But to do so would make them stupid. There is a trade-off between having humans be proof against most collisions and being intelligent and adaptive. In the end he decides to make humans intelligent and short-lived, to make them more god-like in one way and less god-like in another, so that there may be intelligent beings in the biosphere, with some physical beings able to commune with deities.[1]
The fundamental innovation of this creation story is the fact that the cosmos, its furniture, and inhabitants come about by design and not by chance. The world is built for the best. There are, it is true, constraints on the world, constraints set by the limitations the elements place on design. These are the kinds of challenges faced by a human engineer: how to maximize the usefulness of product given the limitation of the materials at hand. An automobile would be very safe to drive if it were armored like a tank; but then it would be too heavy: it would thus consume too much fuel, move too slowly, and tear up the roads it travels on. So we make cars relatively lightweight and vulnerable (and to compensate, we fit them with seatbelts and other safety devices). Similarly, the Designer does his best with the materials available to produce a harmonious world that will support the living things in it.[2]
Although Plato’s cosmology in the Timaeus is offered as a tentative account, a plausible story rather than a scientific treatise, Plato seems deeply committed to a thoroughgoing kind of cosmic teleology. In his late political dialogue, The Laws, Plato confronts the claim that the gods neglect the welfare of the human race. He has his apparent mouthpiece, known only as the Athenian, declare that the gods as omniscient and benevolent towards their creations. He maintains that the Supervisor or Manager (ho Epimeloumenos), who seems to be similar if not identical to the Demiurge of the Timaeus, organizes every detail of the universe for the best. In an imaginary defense, he admonishes the critic who sees the world as hostile, “You forget that creation is not for your benefit: you exist for the sake of the universe.”[3] But if this sounds harsh, he points out that the Manager allows souls free will to act as they will, and arranges appropriate rewards and punishments for their actions in their various incarnations, for their own welfare.[4] Plato thus seems committed to a cosmic teleology that works both on the macro and the micro scale to bring about the best of all possible worlds.
[1] Plato Timaeus 75a-d.
[2] Plato Timaeus 47e-48e, with Cornford 1937: 160-176.
[3] Plato Laws 10, 901d-903c, trans. Saunders.
[4] Plato Laws 10, 903d-904c.