How Plato Reconceives Nature as Self-Transcending

It’s widely assumed that whatever interest Plato has in nature is entirely subordinate to his manifest interest in transcendence or “becoming like God.” This paper aims to show that in the Republic, Symposium, andTimaeus, Plato is equally interested in transforming our understanding of nature itself, and that he does this by transforming our understanding of transcendence itself. In these dialogues, Plato suggests that we “become like God” only when we understand both ourselves and nature in general as pointing beyond and (often) striving to go beyond merely materialistic or mechanical ways of functioning, toward rational self-government. Transcendence, as we see in the Romantic poets and Hegel and Whitehead, is nature’s self-transcendence. And people who see this kind of transcendence everywhere, as Plato and these writers do, aren’t likely to despoil nature as we currently do.