The Bodily Dimension in Thinking

Chapter On. On the Origin of the Difference of Psyche and Soma in Plato’s Timaeus

3 Chapter One  On the Origin of the Difference of Psyche and Soma in Plato’s Timaeus P lato is commonly known in the history of philosophy as an initiator of a dualistic concept of body and soul that favors the soul at the expense of the body. By contrast, Nietzsche is known as the thinker who reversed the Platonic order between the “true” intelligible world and the “untrue” sensible world by reinscribing thinking in terms of intelligible ideas in a bodily activity. He is known as well as one who also attempted to think (in) the overcoming of the so-called platonic dualism.1 Since then there have been many attempts to rethink what seems to be—for thought at least—an insurmountable gap between the sensible and the intelligible in terms of a more original unity. As I will show, in order to find this more original unity we do not need to “disprove” Plato, since Plato’s text itself can be reread in a nondualistic manner. This requires that we focus less on what different voices in Plato’s texts say and more on how thinking unfolds in the text. This chapter proposes especially a rereading of Plato’s Timaeus, a text that deals with the creation of the cosmos and of human beings. But this text also deals— at another level—with the creation of a speech that attempts to articulate its own coming to be. This is why it lends itself particularly to question how we come to think the “body” that we find at play in our own thought. Paul Friedländer points out that the Timaeus constitutes Plato’s attempt to bring together the insights of the physicists concerning the nature of the physical world with the teleological principle of the idea of the good in such a way that the mechanical and accidental causes of the physical world are shown to be subordinated to the “good” as the highest principle of reason.2 Almost all commentaries on Plato’s Timaeus have been faithful to this attempt by emphasizing the primacy of the supersensual eidetic principle in the becoming of the world.3 The present reading of the Timaeus4 distinguishes itself from traditional interpretations insofar as the direction of its questioning is rather “nonplatonic ”—if we intend by “platonic” the maxim to let a discourse be guided by supersensual ideas or even a highest idea (goodness). I do not intend to set out (like Friedländer and others) from the difference between physical causes and eidetic cause and seek their unity by showing how the physical causes are subordinated to the eidetic cause. Rather, I will question how this distinction between a realm of the supersensual and the sensual comes to be in and for thinking. This entails that in my reading I encounter the performativity of the text in its coming to sense in a double sense—that is, in the genesis of what it has to say and in the sensible traces that carry its meaning. In other words, my reading attempts to stay particularly sensible to the way what is thought and said arise in thinking and saying.Thereby I seek to trace the genesis, that is, the original becoming of thinking and thus the becoming of a thinking that thinks (in) the difference of body and “soul.” Like Nietzsche I will trace the distinction between a supersensual realm of being and a sensual realm of being back to a “bodily” activity that withdraws from conceptualization.The way I intend to explain the genesis of this difference also draws from Heidegger’s analysis of the origin of Greek (and Western) thought through the differencing of thinking and being (Scheidung von Sein und Denken). According to Heidegger, the differencing of being and thinking occurs when thinking places itself over against being, conceiving being as permanent presence. Consequently, the original occurrence of the disclosure of being in thinking and the occurrence of the differencing of being and thinking conceals itself. I will problematize with respect to Plato’s Timaeus the relation between the soma (body) and the psyche (soul) of the kosmos (world) and of humans by tracing these notions back to the original occurrence of their differencing.This differencing occurs in legein through rhythm (rythmos) and harmony (harmonia ). Legein is commonly translated as saying or speaking. However, as we will see, the way Plato uses this verb suggests that its more archaic senses reverberate in it, namely the sense “to gather...