Critias

Critias is a work by Plato (-360).

Core claims

• The Critias is not an unfinished dialogue but an intentionally arrested cosmogony: its abrupt termination enacts the very principle of Necessity (Ananke) that Plato theorized in the Timaeus, demonstrating that rational order cannot complete itself without the eruption of the irrational.
• Atlantis functions not as historical geography but as the shadow of Athens — a mythic image of the inflated ego-state that mistakes divine endowment for self-generated virtue, making the dialogue a depth-psychological case study in what Edinger calls the consequences of identification with the Self.
• The elaborate material descriptions of Atlantis — its concentric rings, metals, and engineered waterways — constitute a coagulatio image in alchemical terms: the divine gifts literalized into matter, spirit hardened into commodity, prefiguring the very pathology that destroys the civilization from within.

Related questions

• How does the abrupt termination of the Critias relate to Hillman’s argument in Re-Visioning Psychology that Ananke as the Errant Cause can never be fully subordinated to Nous — and what does this imply for the therapeutic fantasy of “completing” the individuation process?
• In what ways does the inflation trajectory of Atlantis in the Critias parallel Edinger’s account of ego-Self identification in The Aion Lectures, and does Plato’s refusal to narrate divine punishment anticipate Jung’s insistence on integration rather than elimination of the shadow?
• How might Cody Peterson’s argument about Plato’s demotion of the thumos in the Republic illuminate the specific way Athens is portrayed in the Critias — as a city of rational virtue without embodied feeling — and what does this suggest about the incompleteness of Plato’s own ideal?

See also

• Library page: /library/ancient-roots/plato-critias/

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