‘A feast of reason’ – cosmology in the Timaeus

Anticipating ‘a complete and splendid banquet of discourse’, Socrates prompts Timaeus to begin his narration about ‘the knowledge of the nature of the universe’ after calling upon the gods, ‘as custom requires’ (27b). To launch the ‘discourse about the universe’ with the epic convention of the invocation of the gods places Timaeus’ description of the origin and the nature of the cosmos in the realm of poetic invention – the realm of muthos.

Timaeus explains that we cannot know the cause of the creation of the cosmos with certainty and that his transmission is only a probable story (eikōs muthos, 29c–d). Why is the origin of the cosmos difficult to ascertain and the pattern on which it is built unknowable? For Plato it is not because, as Heraclitus remarked, ‘nature loves to hide itself’ (B123). If Plato contended that he had some privileged way of knowing the origin of the cosmos, he would be enlisted in the ranks of a mystic.3 But the cosmos Plato envisages is a formidable construct of reason. In How Philosophers Saved Myths Luc Brisson elucidates Plato's presentation of Timaeus’ discourse as both eikōs muthos and eikōs logos as follows: ‘And this is because the dialogue is a discourse on the constitution of the sensible world, that is the “image” or “copy” of the intelligible world.’ As Brisson notes, Plato contrasts (29b3–c3) the true discourse and a credible discourse in terms of their corresponding subjects, the model (paradeigma) and its copy (eikon). Timaeus’ discourse is a description of the physical world of becoming which cannot be known with certainty.

The starting point of Plato's cosmology (27d–28a) is the distinction between being (‘that which is always real and has no becoming’) comprehensible by rational understanding and becoming (‘that which is becoming and is never real’) perceived by the senses.