ABSTRACT
Desiring, then, that all things should be good and, so far as it might be, nothing
imperfect, the god took over all that is visible-not at rest, but in discordant and
unordered motion-and brought it from disorder into order, since he judged that order
6.1 THE ORIGINAL AND THE COPY
I have presented the later Presocratics, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Leucippus and
Democritus, as builders of bridges across the gulf that had opened up between the extreme
positions of Parmenides and Heraclitus. They tried to reconcile the view that the world,
however complex and changing it appears, must in reality be completely intelligible,
with the doctrine that reality is ever moving, ever evading the grasp of the human mind,
and that its order, if it exists, is a hidden one. The two great thinkers who are the subject of
this and the following chapter, Plato (427-347 BC) and Aristotle (384-322 BC), forged
more powerful and more comprehensive syntheses of these opposed views, but their
solutions differed radically from each other. Both recognized that neither the intellectual
nor the sensible aspects of our experience can be denied, and that they must be brought
into some kind of relation with each other. Plato gave pre-eminence to the intel-
lectual, mathematical side of this relationship (the world of pure Forms or Ideas) whereas
Aristotle identified what he called substances, that is the basic realities, with individual,
perceptible things: animals and plants, heavenly bodies, and human artefacts. Plato’s
philosophy, being more mathematical, has had the more direct impact on architectural
proportion. He is a pivotal figure in this story, connecting Pythagoras with Alberti
and Palladio, and indeed with Le Corbusier. In the view of Karl Popper it was also Plato
who chose geometry as the new basis, and the geometrical method of proportion
as the new method; who drew up a programme for a geometrization of
mathematics, including arithmetic, astronomy, and cosmology; and who became
the founder of the geometrical picture of the world, and thereby also the founder
of modern science-of the science of Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and
Plato’s cosmology, set out principally in the Timaeus, weaves together strands inherited
from the previous Greek thinkers-the mathematics of Pythagoras, the finite, spherical
universe of Parmenides, the flux and the tuning of opposites of Heraclitus, the four
elements of Empedocles, the primeval mixture of Anaxagoras, the atoms of Leucippus
and Democritus, and the latter’s distinction between the image and the thing itself-as
well as, inherited from his own teacher Socrates (c. 470-399 BC) and the sophist
Protagoras (c. 485-20 BC), the new emphasis on the human. The basis of Plato’s
synthesis is the notion of the image. The world perceived by the senses is an image or
eikon, a copy or representation of the real world comprising the eternal Ideas or Forms.
