What the demiurge has to say about causal closure...
A top-down, bottom-up cosmology.
“Heretical Christian” Philip Goff wrote he believes God has limited power on the basis of suffering. I come to that conclusion from a different path, since I think any being must be limited. (I guess that would make me no less a heretic if I were a Christian.) So what is God? A being? Beyond being?
David Bentley Hart differentiates the “demiurgic god of Deism” from God:
God is not, in any of the great theistic traditions, merely some rational agent, external to the order of the physical universe, who imposes some kind of design upon an otherwise inert and mindless material order. He is not some discrete being somewhere out there, floating in the great beyond, who fashions nature in accordance with rational laws upon which he is dependent.1
But that’s what I think God is. Rather, that would be my most generous interpretation after beating down the first image to come to my mind—a mob boss vaguely resembling a mall Santa who insists we prove our loyalty to him by murdering our own children. The Bible Belt God I grew up with doesn’t follow rational laws—he’s a supernatural power who makes His presence known by breaking nature.
And yet when DBH says, “God is the infinite ‘ocean of being’ while creatures are finite vessels containing existence only in limited measure”2, I recognize that we’re essentially in agreement about what matters, so I don’t want to quibble over semantics. It’s just when I’m looking down at my cosmological plate, I don’t like seeing my first principles touching my divine beings, even if they’re in some sense ultimately mixed together. Besides, keeping things apart makes the Euthyphro dilemma a lot easier to deal with.
So I “cast my vote” for a limited god, though I prefer the original demiurge.
A god of the people
THE WORD ‘DEMIURGE’ comes from the Greek dēmos, meaning people or public, and ergon, meaning work. Originally it just meant craftsman, but in Plato’s Timaeus, the humble artisan gets promoted to a powerful—but not all-powerful—cosmic position.
As a mirror reflection of the first principle, the “ungrudging” demiurge creates the world in his likeness or image.3 This detail might seem a quaint irrelevancy, but in one stroke it establishes the fundamental intelligibility of the universe, all without making a mystery of how we might fail to understand it.
The first principle-demiurge distinction establishes the relation of transcendence within immanence. The first principle is the transcendent whole, and the demiurge represents its “becoming immanent”. Of course, first principles aren’t beings. The ground of being can’t be a being. It’s just that stories unfold in time and tend to be more interesting when they have a protagonist.
Some may wrinkle their noses at the word transcendence. But this transcendence is no more woo than believing nature obeys the laws of physics. The laws of physics aren’t physical objects, nor are they empirically derived, so if they aren’t just in our heads, then where are they? If they exist nowhere, does that make them nothing?
Maybe you’d rather talk about nature’s “habits” or “the Humean mosaic” instead? Fair enough. Still, it’s interesting that when the demiurge whispers in our ears—”Nature obeys the laws, the laws govern nature”—we can’t help but echo his charming words.
Sean Carroll, Can science explain everything? 4
But the demiurge doesn’t just deliver the laws of physics and walk away. He is nature obeying the laws of physics...and much more. If we’re nice, he might stick around to help us solve a conceptual hurdle in philosophy of mind.
A Box of Nature
ONCE UPON A TIME we believed in two kinds of substance: Soul Stuff (thoughts, feelings, agency) and Material Stuff. We abandoned Soul Stuff and set our sights on finding the Atom, because we believed fundamental Matter would give us the god-like power to predict everything.
But we never found Matter—just Not-Stuff. So we replaced Matter with “Efficient Causes” and Not-Stuff with “Fundamental Physics” and placed them in a box we called “Nature” which we declared “causally closed”—nothing gets in or out.5
Meanwhile, in physics our predictions proved astounding, but they lacked precision and consensus the further we moved up the hierarchy of complexity through biology up to the social sciences. No big deal, many thought. Everything reduces to what’s in the box, at least in principle, so science will figure it all out…someday.6
But others thought the box was too small. Agency, desires, moral responsibility, life, minds, not to mention the rational basis on which science rests, all of it was outside the box. How could we put what’s outside the box inside the box without breaking the laws of physics and violating causal closure?7 That would amount to a supernatural intervention!
We wrung Our hands wrung themselves in despair.
Demiurge to the rescue!
THE DEMIURGE SAID: “No need to worry, kids. It’s all good! Check it out, the box you call “Nature” only contains Efficient Causes and Fundamental Physics. Fundamental Physics isn’t really physics, it’s an idealized physics which we have no reason to believe is even possible. Plus, reductionism makes the other sciences seem like they should really just be physics. Not everything has to be physics! And causes aren’t billiard balls knocking about in a closed box—they’re reasons, explanations. We can have many explanations for any event without thereby producing miracles. Physics is a science that systematically excludes minds, agency, purpose, and intention from its models for methodological purposes, only describing mass, charge, spin, fields and such; what it doesn’t take into account couldn’t possibly break its equations. Anyway, physics doesn’t describe ‘nature in-itself’—it describes nature as if mind, agency, and purpose don’t exist. ‘Nature in-itself’ is a metaphysician’s dream, but it has only ever been Mind’s shadow.”
“But if that’s the case,” we asked, “how can we know Nature?”
“Maybe the better question is, how can you not?” the demiurge replied.
Mind in Nature
LIKE THE LAWS OF PHYSICS, the first principles in Platonic cosmology transcend the world and so can’t be empirically verified, they can only be “seen” through their effects in the world (remember the sun analogy?) and judged by their explanatory value.
So rather than demonstrate the existence of God, Timaeus hypothesizes on the basis of first principles to explain why the universe is the way it is. No ontological argument required.8 For once, Socrates stops his relentless interrogations and takes a backseat.
Timaeus explains if his speeches prove incoherent or imprecise “we should be well-pleased with them…remembering that I who speak as well as you my judges have a human nature, so that it’s fitting for us to be receptive to the likely story about these things.”9 He’s reminding himself and his audience to be receptive to an eikon muthos. The meaning of this phrase is complicated. I’ll just go with the translator in calling it a likely story.
In this likely story we see three basic principles at work, which aren’t super neat and tidy (nothing is in Plato), but I’ll call them:
The Good makes love to Necessity, and the result of this ongoing cosmic copulation is Becoming—the universe as we know it, along with its variety of forms.
For God so loved the world he made it eat its own poop.
THE DEMIURGE’S FIRST ACT is not to create a mindless material world, but an Animal, a Cosmic Soul (ψυχὴ κόσμου).12 Anyway, Timaeus speculates the Animal must be spherical, revolve in place, and contain a great variety of lesser animals inside itself. It won’t need sensory organs because the uni-verse must be self-contained (presumably by definition):
“…for the animal was artfully born so as to provide its own waste as food for itself, since he who put it together considered that the animal would be much better if it were self-sufficient than in need of other things.”13
Consider this a colorful way of expressing the conservation of energy, but here “energy” means both power and vitality.
We, however, are far from self-sufficient. We might think ourselves lucky for getting to enjoy In-and-Out Burgers, but our lack of self-sufficiency comes at a price. To explain our creation, which gets handed off to an ambiguous pantheon of lesser gods,14 Timaeus speaks for the demiurge in the first person:
“Gods of gods…you are to go about fashioning and begetting animals by interweaving mortal with immortal; and make them grow by giving them nourishment, and, when they’ve withered away, receive them back again.”15
Over time we weaken from our constant battle to maintain our forms, eventually succumbing to the external environment, whose triangles will one day overpower our own.16 Death isn’t evil, however, but a process of return in which “the whole nature of the body flows backwards by necessity”.17 We live somewhere in the middle of nature’s continuum within the process of the Good descending into its shadowy opposite.18 This means we’re not glued together quite as well as the Cosmic Soul—call it planned obsolescence if you like.
But why do we have to die? Just as our “triangles”19 wear out and continuously get replaced for the sake of maintaining our lives, perhaps our deaths sustain the Animal and enable the widest variety of life forms.
We must remember, nature isn’t outside us, we’re inside it. In the lingo of Michael Levin, we’re the “agential material” of the cosmos. But we have our own agential material which has their own agential material…each echoes of the ultimate form.
We are microcosms in the macrocosmic soul. Each of us has an instinct or intuition of the whole within us. By coming to know ourselves, we can come to know nature. By coming to know nature, we can come to know ourselves. We are physical, constrained by Necessity, but Necessity exists only in relation to the Good.
Cosmopsychism?
IT’S HARD TO CLASSIFY Platonic cosmology with a tidy ism. Clearly this isn’t physicalism, not even non-reductive physicalism. It isn't substance dualism, and calling it 'substance monism' doesn't work, since substances play no role. Idealism doesn’t capture the dualistic interplay of The Good and Necessity. The closest fit is cosmopsychism, but there’s more going on here. Let's compare this to other options:
Bottom-up panpsychism: Mind was always in the box at the micro-level. Consciousness is fundamental, present even in elementary particles. Build macro-consciousness from micro-consciousness.
Top-down cosmopsychism: The universe itself is fundamentally conscious. Individual minds are differentiated aspects of this larger mind, like waves in an ocean.
A Platonic synthesis: The universe is the ongoing self-reflection of The Good through Necessity. Mind manifests at every scale to various degrees or levels of expression. We’re neither building consciousness up from particles nor dissolving into an undifferentiated cosmic soup—we’re individuated centers of agency within a larger Cosmic Soul. We might think of the universe as suspended between two causal poles, suggesting neither pure bottom-up nor pure top-down causation. This fits our lived experience—sometimes physical, sometimes mental, sometimes both, sometimes who the hell knows.
For an Eastern-Western evolutionary version of dual causation, check out what Marco Masi has written about Sri Aurobindo’s cosmology, (Plato meets Teilhard de Chardin, but with more bells and whistles).
For those who prefer to stick to scientific naturalism, Erik Hoel’s causal emergence dovetails very nicely with this structure.
But you might be wondering, what, exactly, is interacting with what?
Non-dualistic interactionism
IN MANY RELIGIOUS TRADITIONS the divine craftsman forms inanimate matter (clay, dust, dirt, mud) into animate beings. The demiurge in Plato’s Timaeus, however, does things differently. He doesn’t use material substance to create the world, only abstract models and biological processes.20 The Platonic solids aren’t solid—they’re mathematical structures, geometric forms that are supposed to make possible the visible phases of matter.21 These “solids” are an idea of a rock, but no rock in itself.22
We might imagine Timaeus making use of the Pythagorean Tetractys, where qualitative forms like “oneness” and “twoness” become countable numbers in the quantitative mathematical realm.
The opening lines of the Timaeus are revealing: “One, two, three . . . but now where’s our fourth…?” The fourth could refer to motion, the fourth dimension.
But surely the divine craftsman requires some kind of medium?
Necessity, or physicality, deals with what I think of as “instantial” or derivative conceptions of time and space.23 This time is a science-y time which is tied to the orderly motion of the planets. Instantiated space is called, well, Space (Khora). Timaeus describes it as “a third kind”—almost free of all forms:
“graspable by some bastard reasoning with the aid of insensibility, hardly to be trusted, the very thing we look to when we dream and affirm that it’s somehow necessary for everything that is to be in some region and occupy some space, and that what is neither on earth nor somewhere in heaven is nothing.” 24
The primordial Receptacle, with her scattered pieces of fire, air, water, and earth, is likened to a passive womb who gives birth to the universe. But she’s not as passive as Timaeus at first leads us to believe, since she “sways irregularly in every direction, she herself is shaken by those kinds and, being moved, in turn shakes them back…”25 The translator likens Khora to an electromagnetic field.26 The descriptions of her are as contradictory and baffling as quantum physics.27
Whatever she is, the Platonic conception of physicality is too integrated within the divine cosmic order to be considered incompatible.28 The Good and Necessity both have genuine causal efficacy. But it's non-dualistic because they're not two separate substances in the Cartesian sense. They're interpenetrating principles of one reality, like concave and convex aspects of a single curve. The Good can't act except through Necessity, and Necessity has no determinate form except as shaped by The Good.
An aesthetic principle?
MORAL AND LOGICAL PRINCIPLES might explain why there’s something rather than nothing, but they fall short of explaining why there’s all this, the universe as it is.
Panpsychists and cosmopsychists struggle to explain how micro-experiences combine or de-combine—but why should they combine or de-combine? Why isn’t there just one cosmic consciousness or lots of little conscious particles?
The Platonic dialogues suggest an answer in the form of an aesthetic principle: The Beautiful. The Beautiful isn't just a property of The Good but perhaps equal to it—or rather, The Good's nature just is beautiful, and beauty requires self-expression through the harmonious diversity of individuated minds that reflect the whole. We experience ourselves as separate because that’s required for cosmic harmony—the greatest possible unity of the greatest possible diversity.
And maybe the aesthetic principle can be leveraged to explain suffering as well. After all, it’s hard to see why suffering should be logically or morally necessary, but it’s not quite so hard to see why it might be aesthetically necessary.
Beauty is pain. Pain is beauty.
Art requires strife, suffering, drama—or at least a multiplicity unified into harmony. Decorating the cosmos with a single form of consciousness would be like composing a symphony with one note or a painting with one color. A beautiful cosmos might require conflict resolving into harmony.
If we imagine what it would take to achieve the greatest possible cosmic harmony, it’s easier to make sense of why suffering might be required. Beauty is often thought trivial, senseless, extravagant. Not necessary. Still, there’s reason to think Plato had such a principle in mind, like when he calls the warmongering “fevered” state in the Republic the Beautiful City. And it’s no secret that giving birth is painful. The universe might be thought of as The Good continuously suffering its own birth, of generating ever-new forms for the sake of beauty.
In that case, it would be strange to say the demiurge lacks the power to stop suffering. That would be like saying a potter lacks the power to stop his own hands from transforming clay into a work of art.
Perhaps the demiurge helps to animate these principles in our imagination, illustrating how the Good evolves through nature’s teleological processes to achieve this spectacle we call the universe.
As Plato’s Timaeus puts it: “...necessarily everything brought to a finish in this way is beautiful.”29
WHAT DO YOU THINK?
Related posts
Is the universe intelligent? A Platonic response to the indeterminacy of interpretation.
1) Do we know minds through behavior? Let’s take a hard look at the inference by analogy theory.
2) The boundaries of selfhood...and the problem of other minds.
3) What problem of other minds? An investigation into the origins of the Self.
4) Nested minds, selves within selves…Is there a Republic within you?
5) Organism as justice…Scaling up the harmony of the soul in Plato’s Republic.
Further Reading
The Timaeus, Translated by Peter Kalkavage
Marco Masi, Spirit Calls Nature.
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—Tina Lee Forsee
“The Experience of God”, 234-235.
133
“He was good, and in one who is good there never arises any grudge about anything whatsoever; and so, being free of this, he willed that all things should come to resemble himself as much as possible.” 26E
Carroll later walks backs any implication of necessary causation, claiming we invent the laws of physics merely to describe the “Humean mosaic” (which is itself a theory). But then he calls the laws of physics “patterns in nature”. 🤷
“Roughly, it says this: any physical event that has a cause at time t has a physical cause at t. This is the assumption that if we trace the causal ancestry of a physical event, we need never go outside the physical domain. To deny this assumption is to accept the Cartesian idea that some physical events need nonphysical causes, and if this is true there can in principle be no complete and self-sufficient physical theory of the physical domain.”
Jaegwon Kim (1993). Supervenience and Mind: Selected Philosophical Essays. Cambridge University Press. p. 280.
I am inclined to think that chemical phenomena, for example, are all at bottom physical, even though chemists do not describe those phenomena in physical terms. What is more, I am inclined to think the same about the phenomena studied by meteorology, biology, psychology, sociology and the other so-called "special sciences”.
David Papineau, Supervenience and Identity
“If the causal closure failed, our physics would need to refer in an essential way to nonphysical causal agents, perhaps Cartesian souls and their psychic properties, if it is to give a complete account of the physical world. I think most physicalists would find that picture unacceptable.”
Jaegwon Kim (1993). Supervenience and Mind: Selected Philosophical Essays. Cambridge University Press. p. 280.
As translator Peter Kalkavage notes, the demiurge “is introduced without fanfare, almost in passing.”
The Good or the Form of the Good might be called Being. Whatever you call it, it generally has two aspects: the One and the Indefinite Dyad, The One and the Great and the Small, the One and the Many, the intelligible and the physical, order and randomness or chaos, unity and indefiniteness, and coherence and flux, and so on and so forth.
Ananke sometimes gets translated as “wandering cause” or “errant cause”. Necessity is the closest we can get to Nonbeing without upsetting Father Parmenides, who thought “Nonbeing exists” was a contradiction. As a result, only Being could be thought to exist, but that made motion and change illusory.
“…keeping with the likely account, it must be said that this cosmos here was in truth born an animal having soul and intellect through the forethought of the god…by constructing intellect within soul and soul within body, he joined together the all so as to fashion a work that would be most beautiful and best in accordance with nature.” 29E-30B
33D
Timaeus mentions a few of the standard Greek gods, but doesn’t seem to care that much about naming these lesser gods, preferring instead to let the demiurge decide which ones are most like him.
41A-B
“Now whenever more is going out than is flowing in, everything withers; but whenever the outflow is less, then everything grows. So when the structure of the entire animal is new, having the triangles of its kinds still, as it were, fresh from the workshop, then it’s possessed of a strong interlocking of triangles with one another, and the entire mass of the structure has a pliant texture, inasmuch as it’s newly born from marrow and nourished on milk. And since the triangles encompassed within the structure, which have invaded it from without and constitute its food and drink, are older and weaker than its own triangles, the structure gains mastery over them by cutting them with its own, fresh triangles, and thus makes the animal large by nurturing it from many similar bodies. But whenever the root of the triangles grows slack through their having contended against many for a long time in many contests, they’re no longer able to cut up the incoming food-triangles and reduce them to similarity with themselves, but they themselves are easily divided by the triangles that invade them from the outside; in fact, every animal that’s mastered in this way withers, an affection that goes by the name “old age.”” 81B-E.
84C
“For this very reason we should mark off two forms of cause—the necessary and the divine—and seek the divine in all things for the sake of gaining a happy life, to the extent that our nature allows, and the necessary for the sake of the divine, reasoning that without the necessary it isn’t possible...” 68E-69A
The Platonic solids are made up of exactly two kinds of triangle.
“Timaeus is doing consciously and deliberately what Husserl says the modern physicists do for the most part unconsciously. He is adorning nature with a gorgeous dress of number, ratio and figure. This is only one of the ways in which the Timaeus transcends its antiquity and appears to be Plato’s prophecy of modern mathematical science.”
Translator Peter Kalkavage, 129-130
If you find this perplexing, you’re not alone, I do too! Maybe Plato was thinking something like this:
“First off, Leibniz gives the name ‘monad’ to an absolutely simple substance. These absolutely simple substances must exist, because composite things exist. If we grant the existence of some composite thing — water molecules built of hydrogen and oxygen, for example — then we also grant the existence of the simpler elements of which the composite is composed (hydrogen and oxygen in our example) even if we can doubt that these ‘pieces’ may ever occur in isolation from the composite. Now, when we break a composite into its constituent parts, we can ask of those parts whether they are composite or simple. If composite we repeat the procedure, until we get to something absolutely simple — i.e., possessing no constituent parts. Leibniz calls this simple stuff ‘monads’.
The next step is to see what we can infer about the features of these newly titled monads just based on their absolute simplicity. If we’ve been following the above argument with an image of some fundamental teeny-tiny ‘grain’ of matter at the root of all composite things we’ll be here frustrated, because monads cannot have any shape, and thus have no size, teeny-tiny or otherwise. Why? If a monad had a shape (which it would need to have in order for it to have a relative size to other shaped things) then it would, by rights, have constituent parts — a ‘left half’ and a ‘right half’, for example, or a ‘surface’ and an ‘inside’. The problem is not that a thing with a shape is always in fact divisible into components, because this is not true, but rather that it is de jure divisible into components, and thus we can entertain the idea of ‘half a monad’ which contradicts the idea we started out with: absolute simplicity.”
FANTASTIC ARTICLE: John C. Brady, What Is A Monad? Leibniz’s Monadology
“But as for the triangle and whatever other figures were being born in it, we must never, ever say that these things are, since they shift right in the middle of our positing them.” 50A.
We might think of this distinction as similar to that of Kantian space vs. our scientific spacetime.
52A-C.
50E.
“The chôra is...not simply place because it is in perpetual motion, both swaying and being swayed by these powers and traces (52E). For the same reason it can’t be room or mere extension. Nor can we identify it with Aristotle’s hylê or matter. Perhaps the name in English that best suits it is Field. The word suggests the field theories of modern physics—which Plato seems to have prophesied here as an ingenious combination of Pythagorean mathematical configurations and Empedoclean process or flux. The electromagnetic field, in particular, bears a resemblance to Timaeus’ third kind: it is a medium for the play of forces, a locus of tensions and conflicts, and the medium for the transmission of wave or periodic motion. The modern field, like the third kind, is not a room for stable things but a medium for fleeting events and actions. Field also suggests the field of battle and connects the ongoing war of the elements with Socrates’ desire for a war movie. Finally, field suggests tilled soil, an image suited to the third kind as the cosmic womb.”
Peter Kalkavage, Timaeus, 125-126.
It’s indeterminate and wandering character offers the freedom necessary for creative contact with what is other than oneself. Such a contact involves spontaneity and the chance of unanticipated results…This free movement—perhaps a sort of playing or dancing like no one is watching—is essential to the life of Becoming, and it is a movement that cannot be found in “the father.”
Monica Vilhauer, Overturning Soul-Body Dualism in Plato’s Timaeus
“Intellect, we are told, persuaded necessity to lead things to the best. In other words, the world is held together and constituted by a kind of cosmic rhetoric. The metaphor of persuasion keeps the two orders of cause separate, even as it brings them together. The construction of soul required force. Here, as we approach the construction of body, the gentler, statesmanlike force of persuasion is sufficient. Body is apparently more tractable than soul and more open to the designs of artful intelligence.”
Timaeus translator Peter Kalkavage, 123
28A-B
The distinction between sacrifice that endures fate and sacrifice that transforms it feels like the heart of the piece. I also appreciate how you show that Christianity doesn’t erase the tragic insight of pagan myth, but answers it by changing the direction of hope. That idea of a tree at the center of reality carrying different meanings stayed with me. I’ve been writing about something related — how love and meaning begin to change when fear and loss stop being the final horizon — if you’d like to read it here: https://theeternalnowmm.substack.com/p/eternal-love?r=71z4jh
Fascinating. Your perspective on the limited demiurge is so insightful. Where do you think this distinction most impacts our everyday understanding of ethic? Always learn something new from your posts.