Timaeus: Plato's Cosmos, Filtered Through Jowett
Plato's account of the making of the world, wrapped in a long introduction that spends as much time explaining the book as the book spends on the cosmos.
This edition of the Timaeus is really two books stacked on top of each other. There is Plato's dialogue, an account of how the world and the human body were made, given in the voice of Timaeus. And there is Benjamin Jowett's introduction and analysis, which in this file runs across eight numbered sections before the dialogue itself begins under the heading TIMAEUS. A reader who opens the book expecting to hear Plato speak first will instead spend a long while with his translator and interpreter.
A translator who does not flatter his author
What is unusual, and worth knowing before you start, is how frankly the introduction admits the difficulty of the work it is introducing. It does not sell the dialogue as timeless wisdom. It opens by placing the Timaeus at the hard edge of Plato's writing:
Of all the writings of Plato the Timaeus is the most obscure and repulsive to the modern reader, and has nevertheless had the greatest influence over the ancient and mediaeval world.
INTRODUCTION AND ANALYSIS.
That candour sets the tone. Jowett's analysis treats Plato as a mind of genuine reach who is also, by the standards of later science, often simply wrong. He describes the ancient natural philosopher as someone who never put his ideas to the test, one who 'accepted' the experiments nature happened to work for him but 'never tried experiments for himself which would either prove or disprove his theories.' This is the shape of the whole introduction: sympathy and correction in the same breath.
What the dialogue is actually about
The subject matter is cosmology and physiology run together as one system. The universe is treated as a living soul governed by mind; the heavens are divided into circles of 'the same' and 'the other'; the human body is read through the same four elements as the world outside it, so that disease becomes a disturbance of natural proportion. The analysis is honest that some of this resists paraphrase. Of Plato's astronomy it says the description is 'so ideal and imaginative, that we can hardly venture to attribute to many of Plato's words in the Timaeus any more meaning' than to his other myths of the heavens.
The texture of the prose, in Jowett's hands, is long-breathed and heavily qualified. Sentences accumulate clauses and hold several ideas in suspension before settling. It reads like careful nineteenth-century scholarly English, which is to say it is precise but slow, and it rewards a reader who is willing to move at its pace rather than skim.
Who it rewards and who it will bore
This book will reward a reader interested in the history of ideas, in how people once tried to explain the whole of nature at once, and in how a Victorian scholar handled a text he found both important and awkward. It will reward patience, because the introduction is where much of the interpretive work happens.
- It will bore anyone hoping for a quick, quotable Plato: the framing apparatus is long and the physics is genuinely archaic.
- It will frustrate readers who want confident answers, since the analysis keeps admitting where Plato's meaning cannot be pinned down.
- It suits students of philosophy, medicine's history, and anyone curious about pre-experimental science on its own terms.
What dates the book is its content, not its attitude. The physiology, with its network of fire and air inside the body, belongs to a world before chemistry and mechanics had names, and Jowett says as much. What does not date is the discipline of the reading: the refusal to mock the ancients for measuring them against what came after, and the insistence that their errors 'were not separable from the intellectual conditions under which they lived.' That balance is the real value here.
The book, free to read
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