So how does the world we know come to be? This was the problem, first and foremost, that the Presocratic philosophers explored. Socrates had turned away from this problem in order to concentrate his attention on the very human problem of how to live the good life and how to do what is right. Plato briefly confronted the problem of the cosmos in the Phaedo, where in a kind of intellectual biography, he had Socrates admire the approach of Anaxagoras, who posited a cosmic Mind that ordered all things, and did so for the Best.
In Plato’s words:
One time as I heard someone reading from a book of Anaxagoras, as he said, a statement that Mind is the ordering principle and cause of all things, I was impressed by this explanation and thought that in some sense it was right that Mind should be the cause of all things. And I realized that if this was so, Mind as an ordering principle would set all things in order and arrange each individual things in whatever way was best. So if one wanted to discover the reason for which each thing comes to be or perishes or exists, the thing to find out would be in what way it was best for that to be or be acted on or act. Indeed, on this theory there is no need for a person to study anything else concerning that thing or any other than what is fairest and best ….
Delighted with this prospect, I believed that I had found in Anaxagoras a teacher of the causes of things according to my own way of thinking; and he would show me first whether the earth was flat or round and … would explain the cause [by] saying that it was better that it should be so …. I never imagined that once Anaxagoras had asserted that these things were ordered by Mind, he would adduce any other cause than that it was best for them to be as they were.
Socrates then got hold of Anaxagoras’ book and read it eagerly.
How my marvelous hoped were dashed … when proceeding to read, I found the man made no use whatever of Mind, nor did he ascribe any effects to its ordering of things, but he appealed to airs, aethers, waters, and many other outlandish factors![1]
Socrates lamented, when, on reading Anaxagoras’ writings, he found that the philosopher continued to explain the events of the world much as his predecessors had done, in terms of the physical processes that caused other physical processes, and not in terms of the purposes that might be accomplished by those processes. Anaxagoras had glimpsed the possibility of a purpose in nature, but failed to exploit his wonderful insight.
Plato has Socrates despair of carrying out by himself the project of showing how the world was created for a purpose; instead, Socrates offers a second-best method, that of positing the existence of Forms to provide order for the world.[2]
The question of purpose is curious one. Socrates introduces it as he reflects on his situation in the setting of the Phaedo. He is in prison awaiting execution. We readers of Plato are perhaps expected to remember that just before the execution date, Socrates received an invitation from his old friend Crito (reported in the dialogue named after him) to break out of prison. Crito had conveniently bribed the guards and arranged for a getaway car. So why am I here in prison?, he asks. A philosopher of nature like one of the Presocratics would say he was there because his bones and muscles were arranged in a certain way in a certain place. But that would miss the point. These bones and muscles might have been in rapid motion in the direction of Megara or Thebes if Socrates had accepted Crito’s invitation. But he did not. Why not? Well, if you paid attention to the dialogue in question, you would remember that Socrates showed Crito that it was not right for him to break out of prison—to break the laws and flout them, not even if he was wrongfully condemned by those laws. He is, he reminds his visitors, in prison precisely because he thought it best to remain in prison, doing what was right.[3]
Plato’s Socrates provides a powerful account of why Socrates is in prison in the Phaedo. But that does not automatically resolve the problem. Socrates has a very personal and very moral and ethical reason, as well as a legal and physical reason, for being in the municipal prison of Athens. But we have been talking about the universe and what makes it tick, not about Socrates and his plight. What sense does it make to say that the sun, the moon, the stars and planets all exist and follow their orbits for a purpose? That seems to confuse human actions and activities, which are often if not always directed towards purposes and ends for the sake of some good, with natural events. What about the universe and the heavenly bodies in it? What about the different species of plants and animals? Do they have purposes too? Is there an untold story here, or merely a clumsy attempt to connect unrelated phenomena?
Plato does not confront the, perhaps tacit, case against an end-directed cosmos. Anaxagoras’ wonderful insight (as Plato judges it) remains unexplored and undefended, a path not taken, an option not pursued.
In his late dialogue, the Timaeus, however, Plato returns to the question of world-building. He has a visitor from Italy named Timaeus expound to an audience including Socrates an account of how the world came to be in such a way that the world arose by design and not by accident.
[1] Plato Phaedo 97b-98c.
[2] Plato Phaedo 99c-100e.
[3] Plato Phaedo 98c-99c.