Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
view of Plato and the philosophers. Plato himself was being educated in Athens pre-
cisely at the moment when the new alphabet was first included in the Athenian cur-
riculum, so it was only natural that he would be one of the first to enact a new style of
thought made possible by the phonetic alphabet. While the Homeric Greeks experien-
ced surrounding nature to be filled with gods—they felt the presence of Zeus in a thun-
derstorm and Poseidon in the ocean waves—Plato articulated a new way of seeing and
feeling, according to which the sensuous cosmos that we see around us was not the only
potency in the world. For Plato, and the students in his academy, the perceived things
that populate this world—the material things we see around us, which are subject to
change, to growth and decay—are not the only reality. They are, rather, derivative cop-
ies of bodiless, eternal ideas that exist in some abstract realm. These archetypal ideas
exist elsewhere, outside the body's world; the rational intellect alone has the capacity to
gain access to that eternal domain beyond the stars.
Plato thus inaugurated the notion of an eternal heaven hidden beyond the material
world, an ideal realm where the true source of things really exists. In the hands of later
philosophers, and of the Christian Church, this notion led to an increasingly dualistic
way of thinking, according to which everything genuinely meaningful and wondrous
about the world was assumed to exist elsewhere, in some otherworldly dimension; while
the sensuous, material world of nature was viewed as an illusory, derivative, and increas-
ingly drab world, fallen away from its divine source.
But Plato himself was perhaps less of a dogmatic dualist than those who followed
him, and may be best understood as a dualistic animist. In one of his richest writings,
entitled the
Timaeus
, he articulated an idea that would have powerful repercussions dur-
ing the European Renaissance almost two thousand years later. This was the notion that
became known, in its Latin version, as the
anima mundi
—the 'soul of the world'. In his
Timaeus
, Plato states that “This world is indeed a living being supplied with soul and
intelligence . . . a single visible entity, containing all other living entities.” Hence the
world itself was considered to have a soul—the
anima mundi
—which had given birth
to matter and then caused it to remain in ceaseless motion.
Anima mundi
was feminine,
and permeated every aspect of the material universe.
In the
Timaeus
Plato also writes of a divine Creator who had enfolded the laws of
mathematics and the beautiful symmetries of geometry into every aspect of the world.
Although he also suggests in this work that every being was contained in and nourished
by
anima mundi
, he nonetheless seems to insist on the primacy of the human intellect
over emotion, the body, and the rest of the material world. According to philosopher
Mary Midgley, for Plato the aim of human existence was to engage in intellectual en-
quiry into the laws governing the motions of the stars and planets, because the celestial
realm was where the divine intellect was best displayed and comprehended. The Earth,
