L’âme du monde : Platon, Anaxagore, Empédocle

Abstract

Was there an antecedent to Plato’s concept of the World Soul in the writings of the Presocratics? Given the scarcity of our evidence, it is safer to narrow the question down: Does Plato himself point to such an antecedent? Two Presocratic philosophers may appear as a case in point: Anaxagoras and Empedocles. (1) In the Cratylus, Plato identifies the Anaxagorean Intellect with a soul ‘ordering and holding the nature of everything’. In the Phaedo, he criticizes Anaxagoras’ theory because it presents the Intellect as a mere physical force and not a cognitive capacity fixing goals. In the Timaeus, he elaborates a theory of the World Soul as a self-moving nature which acts upon bodies but also possesses an intellect grasping intelligible realities. (2) Was there, in Empedocles’ poems, something analogous to Plato’s World Soul? Love in particular is a candidate. Unfortunately, the question cannot be properly answered as long as there is no agreement on the nature of Love and Strife, the daimones and the phren hiere in Empedocles’ poems. Passages from the Timaeus and Politicus, however, suggest that Plato thought of Empedocles while formulating his own cosmological ideas. But in so doing he restructured Empedocles’ conception of Love and Strife radically, as he did with Anaxagoras’ conception of the cosmic Intellect. Only with this caveat in mind we can speak of Anaxagoras’ Nous and Empedocles’ Philie as antecedents of Plato’s World Soul.

Keywords

• Plato
• Anaxagoras
• Empedocles
• World Soul
• Presocratics