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Broadie 2004
Broadie 2004
ISarah Broadie
PLATOS INTELLIGIBLE WORLD?
ABSTRACT Part 1 examines the roles of (a) intelligent cause, (b) empirical
materials (re, earth etc.), and (c) the resulting cosmos, in the account of world-
making in the Timaeus. It is argued that the presence of (b) is essential for the
distinctness of (a) and (c); and an explanation is proposed for why the biblical
idea of creation faces no such problem. Part II shows how different suggestions
implicit in Platos doctrine of the intelligible model give rise to radically different
kinds of Platonic metaphysics.
remove matter used from the account would be fall back into a
story that tends to assimilate product and cause, so that the
cause either evolves into the product or constitutes it. Such
possibilities are automatically excluded if, on the other hand,
holiness is what marks off cause from product. For it is surely
essential to holiness that what is holy cannot evolve into what
is not holy, or freely function as stuff or matter of what is not
holy. Within the world, after all, except under the constraint of
some kind of emergency, it is desecration knowingly to use
some holy object as material for a secular object. One may infer
from this that for a holy being to turn itself into one that was
not, would be self-desecration, and hence impossible.
II
Turning back to the Timaeus, we see at once that the few
metaphysico-cosmological assumptions just assembled carry
momentous suggestions concerning human nature. For if the
human intellect is at all like the one that crafted the universe
and in some way it must be, if both deserve the name, and if
human intellect can understand through cosmology something of
the divine ones reasoningsthen human intellect must, in some
measure, not be part of the natural world, and in the same
measure it must be immaterial. But this, which is a metaphysical
consequence of Platos cosmology, is a theme for another
occasion. For the present we are still concerned with the
metaphysical underpinnings of that cosmology.
Now, our survey of these may not have encountered any
serious incoherence as yet. But I have not yet said anything about
the most essentially Platonic factor in Platos pre-cosmic
metaphysical situation. This is the intelligible model, paradigm,
or Form to which divine intelligence, like a craftsman, looks in
fashioning the cosmos (28e5ff.). Obviously, if the cosmos is
formed from matter by an immaterial intelligent cause, then this
cause must be assumed to be, or to possess, or to be in touch
with, whatever is necessary for its intelligent-causal function to be
realised. If, as Plato assumes, this requires the craftsman god to
refer to an intelligible model, then that model, and his knowledge
of it, are part of the show. Let us now look at this part of the
72 ISARAH BROADIE
us, when in fact they are in no such place and may even be
non-existent, and all that is physically present to us is the
representing medium. We are prone to a double mistake.
Without realising it, we project properties of the representing
medium on to the represented original, so that the original
seems to us to be, for example, here, when only the medium is
here. And we end up thinking that what is in fact an image in
or borne by the representing medium is the one and only real
thing; i.e. we think we are dealing with just that, not with an
original and its representative. Now, it is plain that the
transparency of the medium, by which I mean the fact that in
our basic interaction it does not draw attention to itself,
facilitates these mistakes.7 Suppose we manage to correct these
mistakes. Thus we no longer have the illusion that the objects
represented are here with us, nor the illusion that what is in
fact the image of the object is all there is. We shall now be
correctly reading what goes on with the objects as going on in
whatever space or domain they are in, whether far from us or
in a different world from us.
But the medium will still be transparent, if it is a good one.
Thus, now that we are reading correctly we are still taking no
notice of the medium as such, and we are surely giving much less
attention than before to the representations in it, since we no
longer confuse them with the realities we are interested in, but are
instead surefootedly using them as signs of those realities. The
point is that if the sensible world is essentially a representation of
the intelligible original, then the right attitude towards the
sensible world and things within it is not to be curious about
them at all, as the cosmologist most certainly is, but simply to
look through them. This is so even if it is true, and we believe,
that the sensible objects we are treating as signs of intelligibles are
actually caused by those intelligibles, and are meant to be caused
by them. For there is no reason why such a set-up should make us
at all interested in the signs themselves, any more than a medical
technician reading blips on a screen is interested in the blips
itself had come to be.9 Was there then already something which
had come to be; and who made that, and out of what, and
according to what model? And why do we hear no more about
this previously made article?10 The fact is that in this passage,
ostensibly about divine world-making, Plato is making a point
about human construction. We, when setting out to make a so
and so, can generally choose whether to take as our model some
instance of a so and so which already exists in the spatio-
temporal world, perhaps one which has been constructed by
human beings before us. Plato is reminding us that human
makers are at their best and most godlike (cf. 90b6-c6) if and only
if they look instead to the eternal paradigm of whatever it is they
propose to make.
But what does it mean for a maker to look to an eternal
paradigm rather than to one that has merely come to be? Here
for the human case is an interpretation that stays in touch with
common sense. Rather than directly try to reproduce a thing that
has already come to be in the world, whether it is a shuttle
someone has made or an existing political constitution,11 the
would-be shuttle- or constitution-maker should go back within
himself to rst principles,12 asking what such a thing essentially is
and is for. He will work out an answer, and it is common sense
that he will be better guided by an intellectually sought for,
intellectually worked out, answer than he would by staring at an
intellectually unanalyzed pre-existing object of the kind. For if he
merely tries to reproduce the latter, (a) he may labour over
supercial characteristics as if they were essential ones, and (b) he
may mindlessly reproduce characteristics which were appropriate
9. This is particularly suggested by the denite article ton at 28c6. (For a detailed
interpretation of the passage see S. Broadie, Theodicy and Pseudo-history in the
Timaeus, Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy XXI (2001), 128, esp. 216.)
10. Presumably the previously made article is itself a world, if it could be the
paradigm for making a world. Yet far from worrying that it is oating about
somewhere beyond this world so that they might get in each others way, Plato is
entirely denite elsewhere that ours is the one and only world that has come to be
(31a2-b3; 92c9).
11. Cf. Republic 472e1; 500e1. The Timaeus opens with an interchange (17c1-19a6)
about yesterdays discourse by Socrates, the subject of which is said to have been an
ideal city state with many features of the one presented in the Republic.
12. This is meant in a relaxed sense, i.e. as returning to rst principles of the relevant
subject matter. Someone designing a gun goes back to rst principles of ballistics and
metallurgy, not to rst principles of sub-nuclear physics.
PLATOS INTELLIGIBLE WORLD? 77