Plato’s Cosmology and Influence on Western Thought
Plato’s Cosmology
The pursuit of knowledge can be risky. While humans naturally tend to learn, the impulse for power and pleasure, prejudices, customs, and comfort, which drive most people, can present challenges to philosophers and those seeking virtue and truth. This can lead to feelings of discomfort and ignorance, provoking hatred towards those considered wise.
Cosmology
In his later years, Plato devoted himself to studying the origin and constitution of the Cosmos, its structure, and components. In the dialogue Timaeus, he recounts the origin of the cosmos, using the latest developments in his theory of ideas as presented in Philebus: the distinction between the two worlds and the world of ideas as a model for the sensible world. The sensible world, the cosmos, is not eternal; it had a beginning. Plato proposed a story about the origin of the cosmos with the following elements:
- A divine creator, acting as an active (efficient) and intelligent cause (reminiscent of Anaxagoras).
- An eternal Model, the world of Ideas, serving as a guiding principle for the Demiurge’s actions. The end, the main cause, should be used to explain everything.
- An eternal matter, ever-moving, disorderly, and chaotic in a pre-existing empty space (atoms).
The Demiurge’s action in Plato’s cosmology has a sense of optimism: the world is the best of all possible worlds, though not perfect. While the Demiurge desired a beautiful world, the character of the area prevented the full realization of the ideas. The Demiurge created the cosmos as a gigantic living being, divine, with a soul that moved everything. Its movement was based on musical harmonies and numerical proportions (Pythagorean) in accordance with time.
Later Influences
Plato is one of the most influential thinkers in Western thought. His ideas have been adopted to varying degrees, while others have criticized them vehemently. He influenced early Christian thought, Renaissance social utopian thinking, and modern philosophical rationalism and idealism. In the nineteenth century, figures like F. Nietzsche sharply criticized him for subverting human values. In the twentieth century, Heidegger accused him of creating an idealized, unreal human and establishing the bases of Nazism and fascism.
Plato’s Revision of His Theory
In the early dialogues, according to Socrates, the search for the definition of virtue requires identifying something common to all virtuous acts that can be defined as virtue. This common element is called by Plato an Idea (a term that first appears in Euthyphro).
Mature Dialogues
In the mature dialogues, Plato characterizes the ideas as:
- Essence: That by which everything is what it is. The ideas and essences have the characteristics of the Being of Parmenides (one, eternal, immutable…).
- Substance (ousia, in Greek): Something that exists in itself, as a transcendent reality of things. The ideas are separate from things. They are not mental representations, nor are they material realities (immaterial Platonic). They are intelligible, knowable only by intelligence. They are the object of thought and concepts, designated by the word and definition objects, and therefore an object of science (episteme).