On the Demiurge

a quick piece before I go (for a little break)

ON THE DEMIURGE

“If we can take this as being the position, we can see, I think, Xenocrates going to work to create a coherent Platonist doctrine to counter the attacks of Aristotle (particularly in the De Caelo 1.12). An important part of his strategy is insisting on a non-literal interpretation of the Timaeus, since a literal interpretation creates various major embarrassments, which indeed Aristotle picked on.”¹

The great artisan, contemplating himself, along with the eternal pattern encompassed in his inner gaze, shapes the unordered vista to become like himself. In this way, what he sees is himself, only broken in space and dispersed through time, and thus a pale reflection of the timeless and unbroken brilliance of his own inner nature.

That is relatively accurate summary of the creation myth in Plato’s “Timaeus”. Just as some of Plato's immediate successors took a non-literal reading of the myth (if not Plato himself, who’s actual positions remain opaque and only pale, ambiguous reflections appear throughout the dialogues) so too can we.

It strikes me that this account of (and for) the macroscopic arrangement of the cosmos into a unity of multiple phenomena, as faint reflections of the inner being of the great artisan, the demiurge, is itself reflected in the microcosm of the human being. In a Kantian sense, there are forms innate to our mind, and indeed inner nature, through which the ‘unordered’ vista of Being is shaped in space and arranged in time, and thus becomes the world of our perception.

In this reading, what Plato describes in the Timaeus is a representation in myth of the act of human perception, only on a cosmic-generative scale, but which nevertheless serves as an attractive bridge to overcome entrenched dualistic thinking.

Rather than teaching a crude oneness, or unity-qua-uniformity-qua-conformity, (against which many, especially today given neoliberalism’s cult of toxic individualism, would react aversely) the model of “as above, so below”, coming through the above interpretation of Plato’s myth, is a far more accommodating, and thus more profound, paradigm. It serves as a palatable model for understanding our relationship with the cosmos and it's directing principles.

Thus we have a unity, but with distinct parts; a vista, or horizon of the unshaped, analogue to the world of being-in-itself, upon which the active part of our mind works to fashion the world of our perception (which of course, includes our self – perception). It does this in accordance with a timeless and non-spatial pattern, in other words, our forms of perception and understanding, innate to our mind.

THE WORLD OF YOUTH

No wider than the wink of eyes-

the space between the sundered realms;

a vulgar earth, and vaster skies

that underlie the bony helm

***

Into which barrows, under brooks,

were banished, say the ancient seers,

that comely folk, who long forsook

the yoke and harrowing of years

1. Dillon, John, “The Roots of Platonism”