THE WORLD-SOUL IN THE PLATONIC COSMOLOGY

Abstract

In each of Plato's major cosmological works, the Timaeus, the Statesman myth and the Philebus , he asserts that the body of the whole universe is alive and possesses a single World Soul which extends throughout it. I wish to offer a new in terpretation of the role of the World-Soul which gives the World-Soul a special function in the economy of the Platonic cosmology and which explains why Plato would place such re peated emphasis on the existence of such an odd-sounding creature. I suggest that Plato is not viewing the World-Soul on the model of the Phaedrus and Laws X, which view soul as a self-and-other moving motion. Nor, I suggest, is Plato view ing the World-Soul on the model of soul taken as a crafting agent that initiates order. Rather I suggest that Plato views the World-Soul merely as a maintained of order against a nat ural tendency of the corporeal to be chaotic. It is important to notice that in each of these three cos mological dialogues Plato claims that the ordered World-Soul and the order of the World-Body are severally and in their synchronizations the products of the workings of a single, eternal, divine, rational Demiurge, which resides outside the universe.^ Further, in all three of these dialogues the phe nomena are viewed as necessarily in flux. The erratic flux of the phenomena wholly characterizes the pre-cosmic and acos mic periods of the Timaeus and Statesman myth — but, in addition, it remains a potent and considerable factor even within the ordered and ensouled cosmos ( Timaeus 43a-b, Statesman 273c-d and add Philebus 43a, 59a-b and Cratylus 439d, which do not dis 2) tinguish between cosmic and acosmic periods). With these observations in tow, I suggest that the World Soul operates in the Platonic cosmology rather like a governor