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