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Journal of the History of Philosophy, Volume 9, Number 1, January

1971, pp. 67-78 (Article)
3XEOLVKHGE\-RKQV+RSNLQV8QLYHUVLW\3UHVV
DOI: 10.1353/hph.2008.1536

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http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/hph/summary/v009/9.1brennan.html

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N O T E S A N D DISCUSSIONS

67

Viro Nobilissimo ac celeberrimo D. D. Renato des Cartes

Salutem a Domino
Nobilissime Vir,
Litterae tuae ad Senatum Academiae nostrae exaratae XIII. Cal. Mart. Egmondae, lectae sunt in Curia VII. Cal. April. tma cure Apographo literarum tum
tuarum ad Illustrissimum Dominum legatum, turn ipsius exceUentissimi D. legati
ad illustres hujus Provinciae ordines.
Rebus autem omnibus, sessionibus aliquot bene expensis sententia est lata,
cujus ut et testimonii in ea memorati gemini apographo his inclusum vides,
acquiesces uti speramus, et amplissimi senatus Academici curare ac fidem ultro
agnosces. Quod superest Deum Opt. Max. supplices rogamus, ut laboribus et
studiis nostris utrimque clementer benedicat.
Groeningae XVI. Cal. May 1645. Nobil. D.
Addictissimus
Matthias Pasor Philosophiae professor et
p. t. Academih a secretis.
Iussu senatus
Nous ne croyons pas trop nous hasarder en pr6sumant que la lettre latine de
Descartes ~t Matthias Pasor, du 26 mai 1645, mentiorm6e par J. Orcibal et
G. Milhaud, est la r6ponse ~ la lettre officielle ci-dessus, qui accompagnait les
Acta du S6nat de l'universit6 de Groningue et 6tait sign6e de son secrdtaire Pasor.
Notons que ce m~me 26 mai 1645, nous dit A. Baillet, Descartes "r&rivit au
sieur Tobie d'Andr6 pour le remercier en son particulier de ses bons offices et pour
le prier de presenter en son nom ses tr6s-humbles actions de graces aux juges." 10
PAUL DmON
Villiers-sur-Morin, France

WHITEHEAD ON PLATO'S COSMOLOGY

In the Fall of 1934 Professor Alfred North Whitehead offered a course at H a r v a r d
called Cosmologies Ancient and Modern, a title suggested in the second paragraph
of Part I I of his book, Adventures o[ Ideas. When he began these lectures Whitehead was 73 years old. H e had been rather seriously ill the previous Spring and
did not come to class until the third week of the term, the opening lectures of the
course having been given by his assistant, Dr. Kaiser. When he finally appeared in
the lecture room in Emerson Hall, Whitehead seemed frail, even a little older than
his years. His high collar of clerical style (that year he favored a cravat of rich
blue) and his gentle way of speaking conveyed the air of a benevolent vicar. Despite
10 A. Baillet, La Vie de Monsieur Descartes, Paris 1691, t. II, p. 256.

68

HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY

his recent illness and delayed start, Whitehead taught the course with confidence
and good humor; so far as I recall, he did not miss a class after taking over the
desk where William James and Santayana had sat as his predecessors. There were
about 40 Or 50 Harvard men in Philosophy 12b, most of them graduate students.
On Saturday mornings, three or four Radcliffe girls might come to visit. Whitehead disapproved of this practice, not, I suppose, for anti-feminist reasons, but
because the girls were not duly registered members of the course.
I took down Whitehead's lectures verbatim in a kind of amateur speed-writing
I had developed in my first year of graduate study. It was not unsuited to the old
metaphysician's leisurely pace. His classroom delivery was quite unlike that of
those formal lectures from which he constructed his well-known philosophical
books. Whitehead dispensed his wisdom to us in the form of intelligent and
amiable chats. He talked slowly, pausing occasionally to gaze out the window.
A diagram on the board would take up a little time---("I do not understand why
they should devise chalk the lecturer cannot see!"). There were moments too for
stories like that of the tipsy Cambridge don trying to unlock his door with a
matchbox, muttering "Damn the nature of things!" To his summaries of particular
philosophical doctrines, Whitehead would append "That's Epicurus!" or "That's
Hume!" or, in the case of Russell, "That's Bertie!" I have omitted from my
transcription of his commentary on Plato a number of passionate little interjections
like "Readthe Symposium!" or "For God's sake, be clear-headedI'"
Philosophical writings recommended by Whitehead as relevant to his course
included Plato's Timaeus, especially 28-63, and A. E. Taylor's commentary on
that work; Lucretius's De Rerum Natura, and Cyril Bailey's Greek Atomists and
Epicurus. Whitehead also recommended Santayana's Some Turns o] Thought in
Modern Philosophy (particularly the essay on Locke) and Lawrence Henderson's
Order oJ Nature. Of his own books, Whitehead suggested that we read Science
and the Modern WorM, first turning to chapter V ("The Romantic Reaction");
Process and Reality, especially part II, chapter 2, section 3, Part III and Part V;
Adventures oj Ideas, particularly chapters VIII and XI. Very much on Whitebead's mind were the two lectures he had recently given at the University of
Chicago under the title "Nature and Life," now included in the book Modes oJ
Thought.
Late in the course, Whitehead passed from his reflections on Plato, Epicurus,
Descartes, and Hume, to his own cosmological speculations. "I am now at the
beginning of the construction of a metaphysics," he said in his twenty-second lecture. "There won't be much time to do it now at the end." But he had time enough
to present something of his "Sociology of Nature," illustrating by chalk diagrams
such typical Whiteheadian entities as "occasions of experience." With squiggles
to indicate prehensive tentacles incorporating into unities of experience all data
taken as relevant, these atomic diagrams looked like sketches for a Monadology of
the Future; and indeed Whitehead told us that he wanted "to produce a metaphysics

N O T E S AND DISCUSSIONS

69

which has some of the characteristics of Epicurus and some of Leibniz." At this
point his idiom was close to that of his "Nature and Life" lectures, particularly
the seccmd where mind gets so thoroughly mixed with body, feeling with fact.
Whitehead closed his course by reading from Process and Reality some passages
on God that brought us back to the Artificer of the Timaeus who persuades, but
cannot compel.
The discourse on Platonic cosmology below is taken from the first five lectures
Whitehead gave in Philosophy 12b. He was fascinated by Plato's later dialogues
and held up to us the ideal of a new Timaeus, a cosmological adventure which
would unite mathematics and the Good. He wanted to achieve in his own philosophy something he thought Plato had accomplished in his--to separate out of the
welter of existence a definite number of ultimate cosmological factors. Of his
large books, Whitehead was closest that year to the Adventures of Ideas of 1933,
in Part 11 of which ("Cosmological"), he discusses "Plato's seven main n o t i o n s " - the Forms, the physical elements, the Soul, Eros, harmony, mathematical relations,
and the Receptacle. It hardly needs pointing out that the Platonic factors Whitehead deals with in these lectures are all (with the exception of Eros, whose
classical locus is the Symposium) found in the fable of the world's creation
offered to Timaeus by Socrates. God (or his helper, the Demiurge) constructs the
universe in a fashion remotely analogous to the technique of an artist, inspired
and benevolent, gazing at a fair model (the Forms) and working out of a mysterious matrix (the Receptacle) which is at once matter, space, and motion. Whitehead has said that all philosophy after Plato consisted of footnotes to him. Certainly the God of his own metaphysical writings is rather like the Platonic
Demiurge; his "Eternal Objects," deficient though they may be in "actuality" are
Plato's Forms somewhat Aristotelianized. The Whiteheadian principle of Interconnectedness has some link to the Platonic Receptacle, although it is perhaps
more proximately derived f r o m the 19th century Absolute Idealism that filtered
into Whitehead's metaphysics via Bradley. Plato's Eros, the current in the universe
that oscillates between the divine and the mortal, becomes in Whitehead's cosmology the essential "Creativity" inherent in the nature of things.
To Plato---at least, to the composer of the early and middle dialogues--the
paradigm of reality is the unchanging world of Forms. But Whitehead was a
loyal son of his century and to him reality is Process first and last. In these lectures,
as well as in Science and the Modern World, he claimed the transition of things
to be an all-pervasive fact inherent in the very character of what is real. So he was
delighted to point out to us that in the Sophist Plato seemed at last to realize the
limitations of a static conception of being, offering his readers instead a quite
literally dynamic concept of the real. Central to Whitehead's commentary on Plato
is an appeal to the philosopher's assertion in the Sophist that Being is Power
(86vcqxtg), that we cannot allow the real to be conceived in terms of everlasting
and meaningless fixity. If Whitehead had ever heard of the suggestion that this

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HISTORY

OF PHILOSOPHY

f a m o u s passage m i g h t c o n c e i v a b l y be a Stoic interpolation, he m a d e no m e n t i o n

of it in class.
I n editing his d i s c o u r s e on P l a t o ' s c o s m o l o g y w h i c h follows, I have s u p p l i e d
footnotes to identify the P l a t o n i c texts W h i t e h e a d refers to, as well as a few crossreferences to his Adventures of Ideas.
JOSEPH GERARD B ~ t ~

Barnard College
Columbia University

Cyril Bailey's book on the Greek atomists is a masterpiece of modern critical

learning. 1 The ordinary scholar is in such a blue funk for fear of being unhistorical
that he reduces Plato to the level of the rest of the Athenians. The learning of critical
scholarship is something you cannot do without, and critical scholars are much fewer
than learned men. Cyril Bailey really deals with Lucretius, with what he thought; he
correlates him with the thought of modern times. Lucretius and Epicurus make rather
an easy subject, because they belong to the clearheaded set. z The theory of Epicurus
is that the universe is an uncommonly complex sort of thing, so that it is only a clearheaded person who will be adequate to deal with all that variety of experience. On
the other hand, there are people of sufficiently great metaphysical insight who become
metaphysically inadequate because they get all muddled. Plato is essentially the man
who is seeking adequacy [even if it be at the expense of c l a r i t y ] ) If you come to Plato
for the first time, your first impression is: what a muddle the man's in! But what an
astounding number of unborn scientific ideas the man puts out! One's first impression
of the Timaeus is that it is both muddled and silly. But when you look into the principles Plato is trying to express, you find he puts up a very deep metaphysical and
cosmological suggestion.
Look, for example, at Plato's doctrine of the four elements, of the solids; 4 as a
matter of fact, what an astounding anticipation of modern physics. We have gone
from 40 up to 92 elements, and then knocked them to pieces, as they themselves are
only combinations. The fire, air, earth, water theory is the foreshadowing of modern
physical science. W h a t fantastic stuff it is, I mean Plato's bringing in the doctrine of
the solids! In Plato's time, they were just putting forward mathematics, especially that
of irrational numbers. That was a new discovery and nearly knocked over religion.
Plato's was the first divination that these new sciences, which had up to then only been

Cyril Bailey, The Greek Atomists and Epicurus, Oxford, 1928.

2 Whitehead divided philosophers into two classes, muddle-headed and clear-headed,
with Plato and himself in the first category, Aristotle, Epicurus, and Hume in the second.
Later in these lectures, Whitehead say, "There is a danger in clarity, the danger of overlooking
the subtleties of truth."
s Words and phrases in brackets supplied.
9 Timaeus 32b, 53c-57c.

NOTES AND DISCUSSIONS

71

sporadically and pragmatically studied, had suddenly been given a tremendous push
forward. This is the key to the understanding of the physical structure of the universe
- - t h e fantastic theory of proportions, the vibration of the strings and the laws of
harmonics. Are there any special shapes in mathematics? Only ten years ago, someone
discovered that there are but five regular solids. Mathematics has just caught up to the
question of the importance of shape and measurement. Two hundred years after the
Timaeus, Archimedes gave the sciences a second important principle of mensuration.
There was the mystical element in these shapes, you know. The circle was the most
sacred form. Take an all-wise God, and he always thinks rightly. The stars think to
move in the most perfect way possible; hence they move in circles. That is Plato's
proof that the stars are gods. The universe moves in a circle, because it is the most
beautiful way in which to move. s
Think of the suggestion that the shapes discovered in mathematics are going to be
exemplified in the structure of the universe. This question was up a blind alley. After
Archimedes, science (not mathematics) went to sleep pretty much. The next great j u m p
was in the fifteenth century when Kepler discovered that the planets move in elliptical
orbits. But if the mathematicians had been studying for 2000 years without anything
but mystical hopes, Kepler would never have spotted the motion of the planets.
You have that crude ancient notion of fire, earth, air and water, and the stars going
around in circles. Mystical, yes, but it contained an extraordinarily good notion of the
structure of the world. Even Kepler's discovery was n o t as true as he thought it was.
Y o u r best discoveries are never so good as you hope they are. His was good enough
to suggest the law of gravitation.
I want you to realize how a man like Plato combines the deepest wisdom with the
most futile application. Every good idea is brought in as a sweeping notion, and its
limitations have to be found out. Of course, he's muddle-headed. The difference between Lucretius' doctrine of the soul, for example, and Plato's, is this: Lucretius'
doctrine is clear, but it cannot possibly be true.

II
The Tirnaeus expresses the extreme infinitude of the universe. By taking one selection of the dialogue, you can get one approach; by taking a different one, you can get
another. The universe is so complex, it is doubtful whether there is more than one
way of looking at it or not. Plato says in his Epistles that he has not achieved a
complete systematization of his ideas. 6 Is there a twentieth century philosophy? There
is no one twentieth century system, but m a n y divergent and obviously important points
of view.
If you take the later Platonic dialogues, you will find a real difference from the
great popular ones like Republic and Phaedrus. In the later dialogues, Plato is experimenting with a different set of ideas. The nineteenth century is at its weakest in its
approach to these dialogues. F o r the materialistic-mechanistic view of the world was
5 Tim., 34a, b.
6 Epistle V1L 341c. See Adventures o/Ideas (New York, 1933), p. 188.

72

HISTORY

OF PHILOSOPHY

then t r i u m p h a n t = s o triumphant that it became the only common-sense point of view.

Most of the nineteenth century commentators on Plato did not know much physics
or mathematics. This led to two different views of the soul, and it was a thoroughgoing dualism. First, the soul is bunk; only they did not say "the soul is bunk," but
"the soul is an epiphenomenon." This was first cousin to the view of Epicurus, who
held that the soul was simply finer atoms. The gods enjoyed themselves in the hypermundia, but they really did not influence the other atoms, especially those of the
soul. The second view is that Nature is the way in which the soul interprets its purely
subjective experience. This is Idealism. All these classical critical scholars (and they
had a somewhat feeble grasp of things) took the nineteenth century view as commonsense. N o w you can see how silly this is. When you have a supreme genius, the last
thing you should expect from him is c o m m o n sense. Plato is often near the nineteenth
century view, but he never quite adopts any one of its points.
B u t there are m a n y views of Plato besides the nineteenth century one. There is
Aristotle's view of him, the Romantic literary idea of Plato, and the Christian view.
Plato was at the basis of Christian theology. Augustine thought he was very nearly
a saint. But Plato's doctrine [in the Timaeus] was nearer to the doctrine of the
Gnostics and the other forms of detestable heresies than it was to the orthodox
Christian theology. 7
W h a t are Plato's fundamental notions concerning the universe? W e find in whatever is that there is no Becoming. Back of the universe, there must be something
which does not change. There is that which becomes and perishes. There is Passage.
Then there is the sort of being which really is. The doctrine of the unchanging world
of F o r m s belongs more to the earlier dialogues. Probably the Timaeus was written
when Plato was well over seventy. But he holds on to the Eternal, a dimension of being
accessible to the operation of Mind. There is the Eternal, and there is that which
becomes and perishes. Plato liked yachting, the sport of the aristocrat. Yachting--the
turn and the flash! where everything is becoming and nothing really is! Aristotle was
the son of a professional man, and had no such amusements. This shows how fundamental notions are reflected in a man's habit of life, and vice versa. The formation
of systems is the critique of fundamental notions. Take melody. Melody is always
becoming and never is as a whole. The world, to Plato, is in a state of melody; it is
always becoming--as an imitation of the real melody.
G o d is the artisan of the world, and then there are the various souls. 8 Here Plato
decidedly connects the Unchanging and the world of Becoming by G o d and the souls.
The function of G o d is to contemplate and gaze upon the beauty of the eternal Ideas.
But this resolves into an activity which is the creation of the world. G o d is ever the
same, yet there is a motion, an activity in God. G o d is in motion as the soul is the principle of activity. Plato says the Soul is the principle of self-motion. 9 He says precious
little about God.
Does it belong to the essence o f G o d to contemplate the Forms? Doubtless they
belong together, G o d and the Ideas, to form the spirit of the whole dialogue. In the

r See Adventures o/ Ideas, p. 166.

8 Tim., 34b-37c.
Tim., 37b.

NOTES AND DISCUSSIONS

73

Tirnaeus, God is the Artisan, the Maker, the Fashioner, the Demiurgos. 10 But God
did not bring forth the world from nothing. It is a mistake to tie Plato up with the
first chapter of Genesis, for there, G o d created the w o r d from nothing. Plato's God
brought the world out of a welter of confusion.

III
There are certain things in Nature, says Plato, that are not influenced by time, for
example, numbers, blueness; these are the eternal Forms. There is a tendency in
Plato's early dialogues to look u p o n the static beauty of the eternal Forms. The discovery of the importance of mathematical proportion [plays its part here]--how the
beauty of the Parthenon depends on its proportions, or the melody on the length of
the string.
The Greeks prided themselves on their humanity. They condemned i n h u m a n practices as un-Greek, although they were not without them themselves. The Greeks saw
the workmen impressing the beauty of the Forms while building the Parthenon. They
saw the Mixed--the beauty of the Aegean and the olive groves, and the horrible
catastrophes of the world. 11 The Greeks were the first people who looked upon social
life as a thing of beauty.
You have the world with its Passingness, its sense of transition. Then you have its
Activity, more than passingness, action in changing environment. You have Power
(~rvctpt~), that which directs activity, the Soul. Then you have the Beauty of the
w o r l d - - y o u feel the artist impressing the Forms. If you knock out Soul, there is no
directive agency. It is the Soul which, entertaining its experience in the Forms, impresses its activity on the body of the world. The notion of Activity is a somewhat
later notion in Plato. There is a very interesting discussion of it in the Sophist. There
is an entirely wrong tradition among the commentators that Plato is trying to bring
out one definite system. In his later years, he had an entirely different notion; he was
considering those important and fundamental notions without which the universe
could not be understood, but these were not stated in sufficiently fundamental terms.
Now in this dialectical verbalization, you can easily find contradiction. But he does
not abandon his earlier notions because of the contradiction involved. What he means
is that you must seek a more fundamental mode of expression, a more fitting verbalization. Consider that passage in the Sophist about Power: "Being is an energy arising
from a power . . . .
Anything affected by anything, however slight, has existence. . . .
I venture to state that Being is Power." 12 Power belongs to the being and essence of
everything. Mind and life belong to complete B e i n g - - n o t Absolute Being la (Plato
ao Tim., 28-34.
la In the Philebus, Plato distinguishes between the ontological principle of the Limit
(n~ptt~) and that of the Unlimited (rn~tpov), roughly corresponding to the cosmological
factors of the Forms and the Receptacle of the Timaeus. The Mixed (lalK~6V)is a compound
of the two principles, and the mode of being we find in the mortal world. See Philebus 26,
27. J. G. B.
~2 Sophist, 247e. See Adventures of Ideas, p. 153.
~a Whitehead is here referring to Jowett's translation of x~ naweL~q 6wt (Sophist, 248e).
See Adventures of Ideas, p. 203.

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HISTORY

OF PHILOSOPHY

never read Hegel), but complete Being. H e then shows that you cannot say that
e v e r y t h i n g moves, that everything is active. The F o r m s are active in their relationships,
You must not overstate the activity of everything, and you must not understate it. NotBeing is not Nothing; it is Other-than-Being, a form o f Being. 14
T h e F o r m s in themselves have an eternality and a static quality. But their relation
to Soul has a relation to the worm of Becoming. It is the Supreme Artist, with his
gaze on the Forms, who brings order out of the irrational. A p a r t from God, there
would be no orderliness. Plato says neither G o d nor the World are antecedent to
one another. You cannot abstract G o d from the world, for you will have left only
frozen Forms; and you cannot abstract the world from God, for you will have left
only confusion. The eternality of the F o r m s gives you the Ideals, the Patterns, which
have passed into the world by way o f the Soul. The Soul is controlled by Understanding, which is within Soul. Plato says in the Tirnaeus that G o d put intelligence
in Soul and Soul in Body, for this was the most beautiful way to create a world. 15
When he talks of "Body," Plato is thinking about the turbulence of the world.
The Body is the aboriginal notion of Being. The order in the worM, where there is a
m i n i m u m of Soul, is by the mathematical Forms. Body, he says, is visible and tangible.
Visibleness requires Fire (not at all a bad shot!) and tangibleness requires resistance,
solidity which is Earth. H e associates Fire with Light. We say that light is a form of
electro-magnetic vibration. If you told Plato of Newton's law of Mass and Inertia, he
would say, "Yes, I always thought that was an important notion." Then he makes a
shot at mathematics, at proportion. Mathematics, thought Plato, could deal with
Matter. This is true, but he thought it was easier than it was. Two thousand years of
development of algebra had to come before this was possible. The derivative s o u l s - the H e a v e n s - - a r e G o d ' s triumph, for here he managed to banish confusion. The
stars are always doing the same thing, for it is the best thing to do. Became of that
motion, you have Time. Here you have the stars giving you a moving image of
eternity. 1~
IV

When he gets to a certain point in the T i m a e u s , Plato comes to the course of History, which has an element of o p i n i o n in it. The number of people in this room
illustrates something which is not history; that which is not history enters into the
universe by a universal soul. But when you look at the history of the universe, you
find an element that is seemingly so completely understandable that it is almost out
of the way of history. The heavens exemplify perfection, for example, by beauty.
When Plato discourses on the nature of a circle, or a solid, you have history which has
become more than h i s t o r y - - t h e link between the world and the Demiurge. The whole
thing is integrated in much the same w a y - - a l t h o u g h more satisfactorily--in the modern
theory of relativity and the quantum theory. Plato looks on the universe as the chosen

14 Soph., 258.
Is Tim., 30b.
1, Tim., 38b.

NOTES AND DISCUSSIONS

75

home of the gods, for there they are, exhibiting perfection and eternity. The beauty of
the history of Ideas lifts you out of potentiality.
There is another question in Plato i n regard to those eternal Forms.17 As a matter
of fact, he is essentially conceiving of the world as flux. When I contemplate that desk,
however, I am not impressed by the fact that everything is flux. The Forms seem to
touch the world and to disappear. This leads Plato to the doctrine of Imitation. The
heavens imitate everlastingness. The beauty of the Forms is that they are precise,
measurable; they are accurate. By the heavens we regulate our own time. When you
get away from the heavens to the flame you get away from this accuracy. The flame
is only "such-like." is
Perception immediately runs from the imitation perceived to the F o r m which
works with the mind--passage to the eternal form of fire, which the understanding
grasps. H u m e says [something like this] when he talks of ideas as impressions of the
understanding. Plato is conceiving a flux of Forms; the very fact that your head
waggles, modifies it; hence you can never see the perfect Circle. The total result of
the impression is sensation. It is as if one F o r m gave a butterfly kiss to the universe,
and then flew off again. Since that time, mathematics has moved on a bit--consider
Leibniz and his completely independent introduction of a new notion to mathematics,
that is, the flux, the flux which can itself have a form. This is the astounding discovery of differential calculus.
The Greeks cared for athletics and the beauty of it. The first thing you think
of when you deal with a horse is--has he a good action? It is curious that Plato did
not hit on the notion of the form of a flux as well as the flux of a form. When you
describe what is going oa in differential expressions, you do so in terms of the / o r m
o / t h e flux. When you have an integral for this equation, then you have the flux o[ the
[orrn. But Plato did not know that, so he doesn't touch it. Because they had less detailed
knowledge than we, Plato and the ancients often went off into aesthetic mysticism.
But if Plato came to Harvard today, he would ask his way to the department of
mathematics; I haven't the slightest doubt of it.
The interest of the Soul to Plato is self-motion; thinking is essentially motion.
Plato has two points of view: the wonderful intelligible, eternal changelessness of the
Forms is apparently devoid of motion. ~9 Then he looks o n soul as that which gives
motion to the eternal things and thereby makes them important. 2~ The early Plato runs
away with the notion of eternal changelessness being the best. I n the Timaeus, he
makes use of the notion of a form of a flux--the stars with their eyes fixed on beauty
revolve in circles, because it is the most beautiful thing to do. 21 When Plato is
abstracting the Soul, the self-moving element, he gets the Receptacle in the abstraction. The Receptacle minus Soul is disorderly motion.
Plato abstracts soul from body completely. He fails to note the essential immanence of soul and body, and the essential immanence of both transition and eternity.

17 The function of the Forms or Models in the creation of the world is mentioned in
Timaeus 28, 29, 48e, 49a, 50d, 51d, 52a. J. G. B.
la Tim., 49d.
lg Phaedo, 78d, e.
~o Tim., 37a, b.
~x Tim., 39d; Phaedrus, 245d, e.

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HISTORY

OF PHILOSOPHY

There is transition of transition; a flux of the flux. [There is] always a f o r m in any
flux, but each form is always qualifying. Yet Plato [in his doctrine of Soul] is preparing
the way for almost every variety of philosopher who came after him. But he manages
only to show how intensely naturalist is any point of view since. He is preparing
the way for the Cartesian doctrine of souls which only think and need nothing else
to exist. But why do our souls manage to run about with our bodies?
Plato is fortunately not consistent; he is thinking of the connections of all motion
which is the Receptacle. 22 It is so disorderly that there is no influence whatsoever; it is
a completely positivistic universe. The notion of the Forms existing only for a moment
without qualifying the experience or souls, or without entering for a moment the "go"
of the universe, is ridiculous. If you abstract Time, you have the frozen Forms. If you
abstract Order, you have complete confusion. A n d there is no complete disorder. When
you make a complete abstraction from numbers, you have no meaning left. He brings
in also the notion of P e r s u a s i o n . 2a Soul persuades the motion to receive order insofar
as it is possible. This shows Plato's care in being adequate. Every form of flux is
always breaking down. But the universe exhibits order. He tries to account for this
at the cost of the very difficult idea of Persuasion. H e prefers an idea like Persuasion,
which is difficult, to a simple one which is not true.

V
There is a tendency among commentators to make Plato a systematic philosopher.
But Plato tried to catch every aspect the universe presented; he was not anxious to put
up something which could not be rejected. H e knew there were inconsistencies in his
ideas. This comes out in his notion of the Receptacle. It is clear that he does not know
what to say about it. H e says it is "bare of all forms." 24 Then he says it is a welter
of confused happenings. 25 This notion is very characteristic of what is quite important
in philosophy. There is a Receptacle which binds together everything that happens,
but it does not impose Forms; it holds within it the sphere of the universe. When he
passes on to the notion of the Receptacle as an abstraction from Souls, then there
will be a similar confusion. The Receptacle does not exist by itself, but only as the locus
of happenings. Plato is apt to look on anything that has an internal form of motion
in it as Soul. With this in mind, the Receptacle ought not to have motion; it's very
different from Soul. There is that other way (he talks about it in the S o p h i s t ) of
thinking about things; anything you can say of a thing exists--the very definition of
existence is to act or be acted upon. 26 W h a t you can do is to stop thinking, close your
mind except to certain aspects of an object. Good! But c o m p l e t e abstraction is impossible. There is a unity, an essential togetherness in the universe--this is the notion
of the Receptacle. The idea o f the Receptacle is the other side o f Plato's notion that

2z
26
24
25
26

Tim., 49a-52d.
Tim., 48a.
Tim., 50d, e.
Tim., 52c.
Soph., 248c.

NOTES AND DISCUSSIONS

77

the meaning of Being is something either acting or being acted upon. Everything that
there is, is connected with something else. Plato is obviously keeping G o d outside
of the notion of the Receptacle. H e makes the suggestion that G o d made the world,
and then let it run on its own. This is not fundamental in Plato, however; but the
notion of Immanence is really Platonic. Then, when you get to the notion of complete
abstraction, when you reach the notion of the bare universe as a whole, you have
the notion of the Receptacle.
When Plato says "disorderly motion" z7 he means, perhaps, motion abstracted
f r o m any principle of order. Then he begins to think of the principle of order in the
universe, and there he finds the principle of order to be that which contains the
possibilities. He conceives the aptitude of these possibilities for conjunction in orderly
realization. This last is very unPlatonic. (You can never conceive of a certain line of
thought in philosophy that is impossible to get out of, to break away from.) The
T i m a e u s seems to have more than one point of view. The F o r m s present us with an
unchanging world, a perfect world. Plato looks on them as G o d contemplating the
static perfection of the Forms. Then G o d in some way brings about a b a d imitation of
them which is our world. I think Plato has two different notions here, for if G o d is
producing the timeful world owing to his mental agitation consequent on his observing
the static world of Forms, the notion of the disorderly Receptacle is dead wrong.
Plato definitely s a y s that G o d found the Receptacle, that it was there at hand. 2s
When the thing is whittled down, you have God, the Receptacle, and the F o r m s
coexisting. Take whichever you like, that seems unPlatonic; the very idea of disorderly motion, existing in its own right, seems unPlatonic.
I f you take that notion in the Sophist, that everything (when you understand its
nature) is essentially connected with something and everything else, 29 then Plato's
handling in the T i m a e u s is admirable, although unfortunate in phraseology. H e does
not say what would happen if G o d can go on without contemplation of the Forms.
By the Forms, G o d is impressing himself on the world. But then there is another
n o t i o n - - t h e Eros. 3~ This is another one of those vague ideas, like the Receptacle,
which assumes significance according to what stage of abstraction you take it in.
The Eros is that aspect of the world by which it is always pressing on to fresh creation.
The world is a multiplicity of actualities, each multiplicity with its urge of the realization of certain ends. Every actuality is pressing on t o w a r d - - c r e a t i o n - - t h e essential
creativity in this world of Passage. This is a notion of confusion. So you take the Eros
in its full meaning, in characterizing God, the Eros as seen in the nature of God, an
urge toward perfection, towards order. 31
In dealing with these cosmological notions, you must be careful of what stage of
abstraction you find yourself in, and what you are abstracting. Where Plato deals
especially with Eros is in the S y m p o s i u m . H e goes through every kind of love---men
becoming drunk, and men becoming sober, men active and passive, wise and silly,

2~
2s
29
zo

Tim., 52c.
Tim., 3On.
Soph., 259a.
Symposium, 201-212.

81 Here Whitehead is presenting the Platonic Eros in terms of his own cosmology. See

Adventures of Ideas, pp. 230, 357.

78

HISTORY

OF PHILOSOPHY

asleep and a w a k e - - u n t i l you consider the notion to the end. Our physical impulses are
entwined with our nature; the sex impulses are the basic side of our lower nature.
F r e u d has made this into a psychology. Plato makes Eros into all types, finally into the
type by which you get the order of the universe, the perfection of the Ideal.
H o w has everything been realized? Is the universe only going around and around?
Has this particular lecture, these exact circumstances, been repeated from all infinity?
This is to my mind an impossible view. Whatever we are, I suggest that we are rather
a unique lot. This comes down to the very question of the Middle Ages, the problem
of Universals. Consider mathematics. T a k e one million multiplied to the power of one
million; take the prime number immediately before this resulting number and the
prime number immediately after it, multiply these two together, then raise the result
to the power of one million. I venture to say that no one ever thought of this b e f o r e - yet I d o n ' t create the number. If I d o n ' t create it, if everything must be in relation
to everything else, I don't see how you can reach out and pull in something out of
relation with the universe, like the number we just thought of.
The basic urge in the universe, that conceptual entertainment of all possibilities-this, with the emotional drive towards realization, is the basic aboriginal fact of the
universe. It is handing out a metaphysical compliment to G o d to say that he can
only look on beautiful Forms. People like to think of one divine event towards which
the world moves, that is, that there is one perfect realization of the whole thing. This
is on the face of it impossible. In the world, if you are this, you can't be that. A n d
in "this" and "that" I discern certain ideals of character. All realization is finite, and
the world is finitely realising the possibility which it becomes God's nature to contemplate. There is this finite realisation, not just one Ideal; there is the beauty of the
world, the F o r m of its passage, transition from Ideal to Ideal. Compatible ideals may
be realized, but not simultaneous and incompatible ideals, a2 There is no one final
ideal.
s~ See Process and Reality (New York, 1929), p. 517; Adventures o] Ideas, pp. 356-357.