This is not a dialogue, but mainly a long speech delivered by Timaeus, an Italian philosopher, likely invented by Plato. Timaeus attempts to explain the creation of the Universe, followed by the creation of Man. He begins by describing the nature of the universe. “Since the god wanted nothing more than to make the world like the best of the intelligible things, complete in every way, he made it a single visible living thing, which contains within itself all the living things whose nature it is to share its kind.”
After the god formed the lesser gods, the daemons, and the four main elements, next humans were formed. “The first innate capacity they would of necessity come to have would be sense perception, which arises out of forceful disturbances. This they all will have. The second would be love, mingled with pleasure and pain. And they would come to have fear and spiritedness as well, plus whatever goes with having these emotions, as well as their natural opposites. And if they could master these emotions, their lives would be just, whereas if they were mastered by them, they would be unjust. And if a person lived a good life throughout the due course of his time, he would at the end return to his dwelling place in his companion star, to live a life of happiness that agreed with his character.”
Timaeus next speaks of the Soul. “We must pronounce the soul to be the only thing there is that properly possesses understanding. The soul is an invisible thing, whereas fire, water, earth, and air have all come to be as visible bodies. So anyone who is a lover of understanding and knowledge must of necessity pursue as primary causes those that belong to intelligent nature, and as secondary all those belonging to things that are moved by others and that set still others in motion by necessity…. These pursuits have given us philosophy, a gift from the gods to the mortal race whose value neither has been nor ever will be surpassed.” However, Timaeus also speaks of a second Soul housed within man. “And within the body they [the gods] built another kind of soul as well, the mortal kind, which contains within it those dreadful but necessary disturbances: pleasure, first of all, evil’s most powerful lure; then pains, that make us run away from what is good; besides these, boldness also and fear, foolish counselors both; then also the spirit of anger hard to assuage, and expectation easily led astray. These they fused with unreasoning sense perception and all-venturing lust, and so, as was necessary, they constructed the mortal type of soul.”
Timaeus speaks of the dichotomy between the Necessary and the Intellect. “For this ordered world is of mixed birth: it is the offspring of a union of Necessity and Intellect. Intellect prevailed over Necessity by persuading it to direct most of the things that come to be toward what is best, and the result of this subjugation of Necessity to wise persuasion was the initial formation of this universe.” Next, Timaeus speaks of the nature of evil. He states, “no one is willfully evil. A man becomes evil, rather, as a result of one or another corrupt condition of his body and an uneducated upbringing. No one who incurs these pernicious conditions would will to have them.”
Timaeus goes on to relate the nature of Forms and detail the difference between Understanding and Belief. “If understanding and true opinion are distinct, then these “by themselves” things definitely exist—these Forms, the objects not of our sense perception, but of our understanding only. But if—as some people think—true opinion does not differ in any way from understanding, then all the things we perceive through our bodily senses must be assumed to be the most stable things there are. But we do have to speak of understanding and true opinion as distinct, of course, because we can come to have one without the other, and the one is not like the other. It is through instruction that we come to have understanding, and through persuasion that we come to have true belief. Understanding always involves a true account while true belief lacks any account. And while understanding remains unmoved by persuasion, true belief gives in to persuasion. And of true belief it must be said, all men have a share, but of understanding, only the gods and a small group of people do.” Timaeus goes into more detail on the nature of Forms. “That which keeps its own form unchangingly, which has not been brought into being and is not destroyed, which neither receives into itself anything else from anywhere else, nor itself enters into anything else anywhere, is one thing. It is invisible—it cannot be perceived by the senses at all—and it is the role of understanding to study it.” Finally, he states, “There are being, space, and becoming, three distinct things which existed even before the universe came to be.”
Finally, Timaeus speaks about the necessity of proportion in the well-ordered life. “Now all that is good is beautiful, and what is beautiful is not ill-proportioned. Hence we must take it that if a living thing is to be in good condition, it will be well-proportioned…. In determining health and disease or virtue and vice no proportion or lack of it is more important than between body and soul…. There is in fact one way to preserve oneself, and that is not to exercise the soul without exercising the body, nor the body without the soul, so that each may be balanced by the other and so be sound.” Timaeus ends by going back to philosophy and the search for the higher truths. “If a man has seriously devoted himself to the love of learning and to true wisdom, if he has exercised these aspects of himself above all, then there is absolutely no way that his thoughts can fail to be immortal and divine, should truth come within his grasp.” However, we must remember that we cannot ever be sure how much Plato, himself, agreed with this account of Creation, which he has sketched out through the imaginary voice of Timaeus.
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