God Loves Triangles | Plato's Timaeus Essay 1
Essay 1 of 2 on Plato's Timaeus and Critias
humankind never has been nor ever will be granted by the gods a greater good than philosophy. Timaeus, pg. 38
Welcome to the first of two philosophical companion essays to Plato’s Timaeus and Critias. I’m Parker and in my Parker’s Ponderings Book Club we read philosophical fiction and non-fiction and I write essays to help you get the most out of the books we read and help you learn philosophy and theology more generally as well.
Here’s the latest update on the Book Club schedule:
Schedule (barring an early birth of my 2nd daughter):
June 13th - Essay 1 on Plato’s Timeaus & Critias | Intro - pg. 67
June 19th - Essay 2 on Plato’s Timeaus & Critias | pg. 67-end of Critias
June 20th - Zoom Call Discussion | 1pm central
June 26th - Essay on Perelandra | Essay covering whole book (it’s short)
June 27th - Zoom Call Discussion | 1pm central
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Atlantis Right From the Jump
The Timaeus is all about cosmogony, the origin of the cosmos (‘cosmos’ being a term that Pythagoras coined to describe the ordered universe, if you recall from our reading of the Pythagorean Source Book & Library). We find that this dialogue, named after one of the interlocutors, Timaeus, takes place the day after The Republic (or the constitution) dialogue, wherein Socrates laid out his theory of a well-ordered soul and city state.
But while the dialogue is mostly a monologue from Timaeus about the origins of the cosmos and the stuff of which it is composed, we start the dialogue with a foretelling of the myth of Atlantis from the third character, Critias—though it’s just a taste since Plato will cover Atlantis in more detail in the next dialogue, called Critias.
Timeaus and Critias are eager to tell Socrates about the myth of Atlantis and the ancient Athenians because they claim to have found a historical antecedent to Socrates’s ideal city back in ancient Egypt and ancient Athens, which Critias claims were both instructed and formed by the goddess Athena, who loves war and wisdom. In Socrates’s (Plato’s) ideal city-state, there would be three castes: the philosopher-kings, the warriors (auxiliaries), and the artisans. Critias claims that there was an analogous caste system set up in ancient Egypt and Athens, but instead of philosopher-kings, they were called ‘priests’.
What’s the significance here? Well,
