There was a malicious story put abroad in the ancient world, probably originating with the satirist Timon, that on one of his journeys to southern Italy Plato had procured at great price a copy of Philolaus of Croton's one work on Pythagorean cosmogony, and on his return to Athens, plagiarised its doctrines for his own Timaeus. The figure of Timaeus, who by Plato's account was a leading citizen of Epizephyrean Locri, was believed to be a thinly disguised portrayal of Philolaus himself. In the Timaeus Plato presents the Locrian as visiting Athens, and, while enjoying the hospitality of Socrates during a festive season, giving a lengthy account of the creation and the wherewithal of the natural order. This, the story implied, was a fiction through which Plato hoped to present Timaeus as his mouth-piece and thereby claim as his own the cosmological teachings of the Pythagoreans. It was a story that held wide currency at one time - at least amongst those who were not admirers of Plato - and it was sometimes cited as evidence that Philolaus had indeed written a book on general cosmological matters.
What is instructive in the story for our purposes is that it acknowledges the Timaeus as the work in which Plato owes the greatest debt to Italian Pythagoreanism. In this respect the story is consistent with a widely held view among later generations that on his journeys to the western parts of the Greek world Plato had made contact with the Pythagoreans, and that the Timaeus, legitimately or not, was the fruit of that encounter. Plato's admirers, of course, told a different story of the identity of Timaeus and the origins of his doctrines as Plato presents them. They believed that the very purpose of Plato's travels to the west was to seek out Pythagoreanism in its heartland. This was in order to be instructed in its teachings, initiated into its mysteries, and to discuss his own philosophy with its living teachers. Timaeus, they believed, was one of those teachers, an historical figure, whom Plato had met and possibly studied under during his sojourn in the Magna Graecian cities. But it was never denied in these circles that he was a Pythagorean nor that the Timaeus was a thoroughly Pythagorean work. In the first century A.D. a document appeared called On the World-Soul and Nature which bore Timaeus' name. It was in fact an epitome of the Timaeus and obviously a neo-Pythagorean forgery but it was widely believed to have been the original document upon which Plato based his own work. Among those sympathetic to Plato and Platonism it was believed that, far from plagiarising Philolaus, the Timaeus communicated genuine Pythagorean science under the full authority of one of its greatest exponents.
It is not difficult to see how these sorts of stories developed, for the Pythagorean element in the Timaeus is certainly pronounced and it demands some explanation. There is a recognisable strand of Pythagoreanism throughout Plato's dialogues, but it is never as forthright as it is in this case. There is no explicit acknowledgment of Pythagorean influence in the work - Plato rarely mentions the Pythagoreans in any of his writings - but his use of Pythagorean ideas is unmistakable. Similarly, it is not explicitly stated that Timaeus of Locri is a Pythagorean, but the evidence we are given makes his philosophical affiliations clear. Locri, like Tarentum and Croton and many other of the city states of Magna Graecia, was a noted Pythagorean strong-hold. Plato tells us that Timaeus is one of its statesmen, as well as an accomplished philosopher, and, above all, an astronomer who has made the nature of the universe his special field of expertise. From this information it seems certain that he is to be understood to be a Pythagorean, or at least a philosopher under marked Pythagorean influence. This is confirmed by the general tenor of his teachings. The entire structure of his account of the creation of the world and the creation of man depends upon the correspondence between the macrocosm and its microcosmic reflection. Man and cosmos in Timaeus' world share a common order. What is true of the cosmos is true of man. The cosmos is a Living Creature, he teaches, and man is its reflection in miniature. This is the single most commanding idea in the Pythagorean cosmology, an idea that is given its most forthright expression in the doctrine of the harmony of the spheres whereby the order of the universe finds a resonance in the human soul. Timaeus' account of the construction of the soul of the world, which is one of his key doctrines, strongly bears this Pythagorean stamp. He describes how the World-Soul was made according to certain arithmetic and harmonic proportions, some of which correspond to one version of the Pythagorean's emblem, the tetractys. This is evidence enough of his Pythagorean credentials. There is little disagreement on this point in any case. Today, as in the past, the Timaeus is recognised as the most overtly Pythagorean dialogue in the Platonic corpus, and it is understood that its central character is portrayed as an Italian Pythagorean visiting Athens.
This Pythagorean element in the Timaeus is arguably the work's most outstanding feature. No serious study of the dialogue can overlook the question of Pythagorean influence, nor can any credible attempt at interpretation fail to offer an explanation as to why it is so Pythagorean. The first and most immediate problems raised by the work stem from here - the question of the identity of Timaeus, for example, and of why Plato chose a Locrian to deliver the most important statement on cosmology and 'natural science' in any of his dialogues. A more general question is the extent of Plato's contacts with Italian Pythagoreanism. What precise bearing did his Pythagorean contacts in Magna Graecia have on his work? What did he find in the Italian Pythagoreans that attracted him? These matters are often so perplexing, though, that attempts by modern commentators to address them have sometimes given risen to hypotheses as unlikely as the stories told in ancient times. Taylor, for instance, whose commentary is one of the most thorough and extensive studies of the Timaeus in the twentieth century, was so impressed by the Pythagorean influence in the dialogue that he came to doubt that Timaeus' views were at all representative of Plato's own. Instead, he argued, the Timaeus is merely a record of Pythagorean beliefs, a type of anthology in which Plato sought to preserve the main tenets of old Pythagorean cosmological thought, without necessarily endorsing it himself. This, Taylor believed, is the only possible explanation for Plato writing a work that reproduces the doctrines of the Pythagoreans with such fidelity. The dialogue's value, he says, is not as an account of Plato's teachings, but as the fullest and most detailed account of early Pythagorean doctrine to survive to us. This view, however, has met with little or no support from other scholars and is today widely regarded as eccentric and unsubstantiated; but it is an understandable point of view nevertheless - like the ancient accusations of plagiarism it arises from the observation that the Timaeus is remarkably Pythagorean. This Pythagorean influence upon the work will be one of the main themes of this present study.
The Pythagoreanism of the Timaeus must, however, always be considered in a wider context. There is no contesting the fact of strong Pythagorean influence, nor of the importance of Pythagorean doctrines such as the microcosm's correspondence with the macrocosm to an understanding of Timaeus' teachings. We can say with confidence, however, that while Plato's use of Pythagoreanism is so plain and direct that he must have fully expected his readers to appreciate the work's Pythagorean background, it is not the only influence that can be detected. Without in any way underrating it, the Pythagoreanism of the Timaeus needs to be considered from the outset in the broader context of Plato's 'borrowings' from a much wider range of sources. 'Pythagorean' is, in any case, something of a blanket term and, in the context of the fifth and fourth century philosophical milieux of both Magna Graecia and Athens, it needs to be more carefully defined. This is the approach that Cornford argues for in his commentary. He acknowledges the Pythagorean component, but he emphasises the importance of two related yet distinct schools of western Greek thought, the Parmenidean and the Empedoclean, as well. "Much of the doctrine [in the work]," he says, "is no doubt Pythagorean..." but Timaeus also "sometimes follows Empedocles, [and] sometimes Parmenides." For general purposes it is sufficiently accurate to nominate Timaeus as a Pythagorean, but to be perfectly accurate this must be qualified by saying that his affiliations are with all three of the major philosophical schools of the western Greek city-states. It is true, of course, that all aspects of western Greek philosophy were under the sway of Pythagoras and his followers, and that both Parmenides and Empedocles may be counted as Pythagoreans themselves, but they nevertheless formed distinct and divergent philosophies of their own. Cornford's point is that Timaeus' debt to them is as evident, if it is not also as extensive, as his debt to what we know of the Pythagorean school proper. This is perhaps only a matter of emphasis, but it is also important. Timaeus' Pythagorean affiliations are among the most immediately conspicuous features of the dialogue, but on closer examination what he teaches is not entirely pure doctrine; his Pythagoreanism is supplemented by kindred doctrines from the two other main streams of Sicilian and Italian cosmological thinking. Cornford asks us to see Timaeus as representative not of one specific school of thought, but of the whole western Greek philosophical milieu.
In contrast to theories such as Taylor's, this broader approach to the Timaeus has met with widespread acceptance among the work's modern students. Timaeus' use of doctrines from Empedocles and Parmenides is as widely admitted as his primary affiliations with the Pythagoreans themselves. It is not hard to find evidence of his debt to Parmenides either, and, indeed, his adoption of Parmenidean teachings is often as undisguised as his use of fundamental Pythagorean ideas. Near the outset of his speech, for instance, he describes the cosmos as singular, finite and as "a sphere with its extremities equidistant from the centre." This conception is clearly taken from the Eleatic cosmology. "The argument [in this case] is Eleatic rather than Pythagorean," Cornford says, and notes that Diels regarded this part of the dialogue as "the best commentary" on Parmenides' comparison of the One with a perfect sphere. Similarly, later in his speech, Timaeus gives an account of the mechanisms of sight that have some obvious parallels with the theories of Empedoclean biology. The whole tenor of what Timaeus has to say on the structure and workings of the human body is in fact recognisably in debt to Empedocles' school of medical science. Timaeus is shown to be well-versed in Empedocles' teachings, and he makes extensive use of them.
From this it is not only justifiable to claim that the Timaeus is Plato's most Pythagorean work; it is, viewed in a larger perspective, a testament to his affinity with the western cosmologists in general. The Timaeus stands as something of a tribute to the approach to cosmology of all the major schools of the western hemisphere of the ancient Greek world. This is indicative of Plato's usual philosophical sympathies. Like his attraction to Pythagoreanism, they are well-marked throughout his works. Parmenides and the Eleatic school had a strong influence upon him. It is significant, for instance, that in Plato's later dialogues the Stranger from Elea tends to replace Socrates at centre stage. The Timaeus, where the Locrian stands at centre-stage and Socrates' role is reduced to a minimum, is similar evidence of Plato's respect for the philosophers from the west. The Timaeus is a work that endorses, by adoption, their approach to the questions of cosmology, creation, man and the world. In its general Pythagorean orientation, and in its debt to the distinct branches of Pythagoreanism of Parmenides and Empedocles, we have a resounding reminder that of all the Presocratic philosophers the Italians and Sicilians were closest to Plato's own mind. The only exception to this was Heraclitus, who was also admired by Plato, as Aristotle tells us, but who came from Asia Minor. Speaking generally, though, we find Plato's major cosmological work is built upon the foundations, and substantially from the materials, of western teachings.
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