Smell in Plato's Timaeus
Smell in Plato's Timaeus
... the entirety of smells is a sort of halfbreed ....
―Plato, Timaeus
In Plato's Timaeus a likely account of the natural world is put forth.
In the first part of the dialogue the creation and structure of the universe
and the soul are discussed. The second part is an account of the world that
we perceive based on the four primary bodies earth, air, fire, and water. The
senses with which these primary bodies are perceived are discussed in
detail. Here I attempt to show that smell, despite being discussed very
briefly, has a central role in Timaeus' account.
The five senses and their purpose
A division in what is often referred to as higher senses (vision and
audition) and lower senses (smell, taste, and touch) is established by
Timaeus through giving only seeing and hearing a foundational role in
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Smell in Plato's Timaeus
philosophy.1 God has given us sight to give us philosophy. We can derive
philosophy from vision because it gives us the inspiration to think of
rational abstract concepts:
... day and night, once seen, and the months and the circuits of the
years, and the equinoxes and solistices, have contrived number and
gave us a notion of time and the inquiry into the nature of the all, from
which we derived for ourselves a kind of philosophy, than which no
greater good either came or ever will come to the mortal kind as a
god-given gift. (47a-b)2
The division in vision and hearing on the one side and tasting,
smelling, and touching on the other is also reflected in the structure of the
dialogue. In the first part ― which deals with reason ― only vision and
audition are discussed (45b-47e). This discussion appears at a crucial point
in the text, right before the second account of the beginning is given. In the
second part ― which deals with necessities ― now all five senses are dealt
with (61c -68d). Here, the senses are being treated as the starting point of a
lengthy discussion of organ function, diseases, and other topics of the
1
A similar or even more one-sided focus on vision is found in most other philosophical
works. Among the lower senses touch as the most immediate and intimate sense ― the
sense that allows us to "grasp" something ― is sometimes explored. The chemical
senses, smell and taste, are widely ignored.
2
All text excerpts will follow the translation by Kalkavage unless stated otherwise.
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Smell in Plato's Timaeus
natural sciences. The sense of touch is discussed first, then taste, then smell,
then hearing, and finally (color) vision. The contexts in which the senses
are addressed in the first and second part are widely different and this
difference explains why the first discussion excludes three senses. Sight
and hearing are for the well-being of our immortal soul through revealing to
us the harmony of the world, whereas the other senses reveal nothing about
the world to our immortal soul. They merely allow for the body's survival
or are pleasurable to the mortal part of the soul (65a). The lower senses
mediate their effects through interaction of the body with particles from
outside:
Those in which the departure from the normal state or depletion is
gradual, while the replenishment is sudden and on a large scale, are
sensible of the replenishment but not of the depletion, and so afford to
the mortal part of the soul intense pleasures, but no pain. This is plain
in the case of sweet smells. (65a)3
The body also benefits from perfumes. About pleasant and painful
smells it is said that:
3
This is Cornford's translation of this passage. "Sweet smells" is translated as "perfumes"
in Kalkavage's translation.
3
Smell in Plato's Timaeus
...the one roughening and acting forcibly on the whole cavity that lies
between our head and navel, the other softening this same area and
restoring it with contentment to its natural condition. (67a)
What is it that is smelled?
Sight and hearing are distinct from touch, smell, and taste in that
they affect the immortal soul and give foundation to philosophy. But what
about the position of smell relative to taste and touch? Does it stand out in
any way? One observation made about smells by Timaeus is that they have
been born nameless, unlike tastes (sour, salty,...) or colors (blue, red,...).4
But what are these nameless objects that are being smelled? Timaeus' world
consists of four primary bodies (air, water, fire, earth) that correspond to
four regular solids (tetrahedron, hexahedron, octahedron, and icosahedron).
There are five regular solids5 but only four of them correspond to primary
bodies. About the dodecahedron which is not assigned to a primary body
Timaeus says that god used it for the whole, making a pattern of animal
figures thereon. The properties of the regular solids explain the structure
4
Odors are named either after their source (flowery, fruity,...) or after a sensation in
another modality like taste (sweet) or touch (sharp). This is true in all languages.
5
Regular solids are solids in which the faces, edges and angles are all congruent (which
means they have the same shape and size). Proposition 18 in Euclid's Elements proves
that there are exactly five regular solids. Of those five regular solids one is constructed
from pentagons, one is constructed from squares, and three are constructed from
triangles.
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Smell in Plato's Timaeus
and function of the material world including the human body and sensory
experiences. For example the properties of fire are explained by the fact
that it is made of pyramids, the lightest regular solid with the sharpest
edges. Three types of fire are involved in vision. One is the daylight, the
second is a visual stream that flows out from the eyeball towards the object
that is seen, and the third is the colored light given of from objects. These
fire particles streaming off colored objects are of different sizes, thereby
producing different color sensations.
In this fashion the four simple bodies explain the entire experienced
world ― with the single exception of smells. Smells are different because
what we sense when we smell is not air, water, fire, or earth. No type of
figure has the proportions necessary for having an odor6 (66d). Smells are
something in between the stuff the world is made of. More precisely, they
are particles between water and air. It is neither water nor air, but
intermediate states that only exist for the shortest time and are unstable.7
6
Cornford's translation. Kalkavage translates: "in no form is there a proportionality for
having any smell".
7
Plato was right that the sense of smell is mediated by particles of liquids that
evaporated. Aristotle speculated that heat has a role in smell. Until modernity it was
unclear if smells are molecules like tastes or a type of radiation like heat. Aristotle of
course had a point, too. Heating a liquid will increase the evaporation rate and therefore
the same substance will smell strongly when cooked, but be odorless when frozen. Plato
also was right that molecules need to have a certain size to have smells. Aristotle's
5
Smell in Plato's Timaeus
Timaeus explains that only these intermediate bodies can be smelled
because the veins in the nose are too narrow for earth and water but too
wide for fire and ice (66d). Cornford calls this explanation unconvincing (p.
274) because earlier we are told that the simple bodies of each type come in
many different sizes and it is hard to imagine that none of the possible
combinations of these simple bodies in different sizes would have the right
dimensions to have a smell. An alternative explanation why smell gets only
to sense irregular figures and fragments is that there are five senses but only
four simple bodies.8 Accordingly sight is paired with fire, hearing with air,
taste with water, and touch with earth. There is no fifth body for the nose to
smell so it senses a half-formed thing.
The special role of smell
The sense of smell does not inform the immortal part of the soul to
be rational because what is sensed by the sense of smell is not being but
becoming. The distinction between smell and the other senses mirrors the
Platonic classification of existence in two groups that is established at the
very beginning of the account (27d-28a). This classification is crucial for
observation that animals can smell under water (De Anima Book II, Chapter 9) shows
however that Plato was wrong in assuming that all odors are vapor or mist.
8
Galen (Hippoc. et Plat., pp. 625 ff., Mueller), cited in Cornford p.275
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Smell in Plato's Timaeus
the entire cosmology and Timaeus says that, to give the clearest expression
to his thoughts, he must distinguish between being and becoming. The
fundamental difference between being and becoming is that:
... the one [being] is grasped by intellection accompanied by a rational
account, since it's always in the same condition; but the other
[becoming] in its turn is opined by opinion accompanied by irrational
sensation, since it comes to be and perishes and never genuinely is.
(28a)
Without a doubt smell can be seen as the most extreme case of this
irrational sensation, sensing only the fleeting moment of change when not
only the relative position or combinations of primary bodies is constantly
changing, but even the primary bodies themselves fall apart. In contrast to
smell stands vision, which, although an irrational sensation, does allow us
to see the heavenly bodies and their regular movements and inspires
concepts like number and geometry that can be imagined and rationalized
as unchanging and therefore not slave to opinion.
Imagined smells
In my opinion this is what motivates Timaeus' categorizing of the
senses in sight and hearing versus taste, smell, and touch. The reason why
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Smell in Plato's Timaeus
the first two are capable of affecting the immortal part of the soul is not that
they relay information to us that gives us special insight. Abstract concepts
like time, number, space, and movement can not only be inspired through
the higher senses. The regular movement of the stars and the sun can not
only be seen. Warm summers and warm days alternate with cold winters
and cold nights. The regular beating of your own or another's heart can be
felt. And even smells, those half breeds that were born without names, have
the power to inform about time and space. Anthropological descriptions
show how elaborate for example calendars based on smells can be:
In the jungle of the Andaman Islands, as one after another of the trees
and climbing plants come into flower, it is possible to recognize a
distinct succession of odours. The Andaman Islanders have
constructed their calendar on the basis of this cycle, naming the
different periods of their year after the fragrant flowers that are in
bloom at different times. Their year is thus a cycle of odours; their
calendar, a calendar of scents.9
The people of the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal not only
have scented calendars, but also scented maps that represent spatial
9
The reference is from Aroma - The Cultural History of Smell by Constance Classsen,
David Howes, and Anthony Synnott, (page 95). The rest of the discussion of the odor
world of the Andaman Islanders is also taken from that book and is based primarily on
A.R. Radcliffe-Brown's The Andaman Islanders.
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Smell in Plato's Timaeus
relationships by a smellscape rather than a landscape. Scented maps are
common in dense rainforest areas where vision is very limited but the
variety of smells is great. Although the habits of the Andaman people may
be an extreme adaptation, it is clear that smells and tastes change
throughout the day and year and that we can derive spatial information
from odor cues. So the information about these abstract notions that we get
from higher and lower senses are not fundamentally different. The true
difference is the difficulty in imagining a smell, a touch, or a taste. It is easy
to imagine a perfect circle as being visually represented, but it's difficult to
imagine touching a perfect circle; one can analyze a mixture of colors and
tones and predict what a combination of different tones will sound like, but
it's impossible to the same with smells.10 Maybe even the fact that smells
are born nameless has to do with them being difficult to imagine.11 That
vision is the principal sense capable of imagery for Plato is shown by his
10
All natural smells are a combination of very many different molecules. The smell of a
rose for example is made up of over 300 different molecules. The profession of
perfumers (and to some degree of chefs) is based on the fact that adding an odor to
another odor may lead to unexpected and unpredictable new odor experiences. Because
there is no scientific way to predict these effects, intuition and experience are the most
important skills when mixing smells.
11
Ironically, although smells are difficult to imagine and remember they trigger the most
vivid visual imagery and memories through something called the Proust effect after the
description of childhood memories brought on by the smell of madeleines (a small cake)
in Marcel Proust's "In Search of Lost Time".
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Smell in Plato's Timaeus
discussion of an inner artist painting pictures (of what we falsely assume to
see) in the soul in the Philebus (39b, c).
Timaeus links this division of the senses in those that are capable of
imagery and those that are not to a division of the soul and the body:
... that part of the soul that's desirous of food and drink and all those
things it needs because of the nature of the body, they settled it in
between the midriff and the boundary in the navel area... (70d-e)
This part of the soul is explicitly said to not understand reason (71a).
The part of the soul that is desirous of food and drink and all those things is
easily seen to be closely connected to the lower senses of taste, smell, and
touch12. It is the unreasonable part of the soul and it takes the reasonable
part of the divided soul and its capabilities of visual imagery to control it.
The liver with its shiny mirror-like surface receives these images:
...in order that the power of our thoughts that courses from the
intellect, moving in the liver as in a mirror, when the liver receives
12
Smell, taste, and touch together give a sensation that is called flavor which is how food
is evaluated. This is called "taste" in everyday language, but drinking a fine whine with a
cold (that temporally eliminates the sense of smell) will show just how much of this
perception is smell. Drinking hot beer or eating melted ice cream will show how
consistency, temperature, and other factors have a huge influence on what is commonly
called "taste". Taste, in the biological sense, consists in humans of only five different
perceptions: sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami (the taste of glutamates).
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Smell in Plato's Timaeus
patterns and offers images to be looked at, might frighten this part of
the soul... (71b)
In this way ― through visual imagery ― vision is used to control
the part of the soul that would otherwise be guided by smell or taste.
Does smell tell us anything about the world? Should smell be
ignored in our cosmology? An answer comes from Plato's odor
categorization (or rather from Plato's refusal to categorize odors):
For these reasons, then, the varieties of smells have been born
nameless, since they don't come from forms either definite in
number or simple. But let them be spoken of here in a twofold way
― the "pleasant" and the "painful" ― the only pair of terms that
apply to them with any clarity,..." (67a)
This delimitates what smells can tell us about the world. They can only
inform us about the hedonic quality and not about anything more
profound.13 This is not strictly true; smells can tell us many things about
13
The history of attempts to categorize odors is full of unsuccessful propositions. The
most influential odor systematics comes from the Swedish taxonomist Carl von Linne
(1707-1778) who grouped odors in seven categories: aromatic, fragrant, musky, garlicky,
goaty, repulsive, and nauseous. Later researchers modified this systematics, for example
by adding ''ethereal'' (fruity) and ''empyreumatic'' (burnt organic matter). However, none
of these categorizations are satisfying and modern approaches use a method called multi-
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Smell in Plato's Timaeus
the world, but the information we get from smells is lost immediately
because we can not imagine or remember smells and not use them for
reasoning in the absence of actual odors. The unstable fleeting nature of the
perceived smells reflects the changing particles that are the object of the
sense of smell. Through smell only can we perceive the world as it really is,
constantly becoming and never being.
dimensional scaling. Many different odors will be grouped according to multiple
perceptual qualities (dimensions). The most important dimension turns out to be valence,
reinventing Plato's distinction in "pleasant" and "painful".
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Smell in Plato's Timaeus
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Peter Kalkavage Plato's Timaeus (The Focus Philosophical Library)
(Newburyport: Focus Publishing, 2001)
Francis MacDonald Cornford, Plato's Cosmology: The Timaeus of Plato
(Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1997)
R. G. Bury Plato: Timaeus, Critias, Cleitophon, Menexenus, Epistles.
(Loeb Classical Library No. 234) (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1929)
John Sallis Chorology: On Beginning in Plato's Timaeus (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1999)
H. N. Fowler and W. R. M. Lamb Plato: Statesman. Philebus. Ion. (Loeb
Classical Library No. 164) (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1925)
Sir Thomas Heath, The Thirteen Books of Euclid's Elements, Books 1 and 2
(Mineola: Dover Publications, 1956)
Richard McKeon, The Basic Works of Aristotle (New York: Modern
Library Classics, 2001)
A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, The Andaman Islanders (New York: The Free
Press, 1964)
Constance Classsen, David Howes, and Anthony Synnott Aroma - The
Cultural History of Smell (London: Routledge, 1994)
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