What the FRICK is khôra/chora/χώρα? I've seen it described as the "place for Being", as the medium of space, as the "receptacle of reality", as a type of separation between matter and things, etc. I've also heard it become a battleground for claiming that the Greeks had a different conception of space, place, etc., than we did post-Descartes.
Well? What the frick is going on here? How can a place or receptable of Being not be a being itself?
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Extension.
Nobody is going to fall for that obvious troll. In fact, I'll one up you. Nobody even knows what extension is. Is extension "the outer projection" of some inner core of materiality?
>Oh yeah, the core "extends" outwards and gives us the illusion of space, but it itself not real.
>Kind of like how an atom is its nuclear core and electron shell, and then mostly empty space in-between.
Wow, that was very insightful. But what determines the empty space between that? Or the extension of the core?
>uhhh you gotta dig deeper to find the extension there... there's like uhhh non-atoms and they have non-extension and that's the extension of extension.
Non-extension? The opposite of extension? Don't you want to say intension? But that's ridiculous. First of all, that's not intension, intension is determined by the "core" of things. You just have a system of turtles all the way down, so it can't even explain what it wanted to explain.
Extension refers to everything which participates in the form under consideration. Read plato
the concept of extensions was before atoms were a thing. extension is an empirical concept garnered from the solidity of material objects, just like how Aristotle uses "matter" sometimes to mean the pure substratum, but also to just mean wood or bronze or whatever particular material something is made of. extension only makes sense if you lived in a time when physics had to be based on immediate sense perceptions.
basically, extension is when solid matter fills space.
>the concept of extensions was before atoms were a thing.
I wasn't literally positing the atomic model as the structure of the universe, I was just using it as a model. and IIRC I think this is how Descartes envisions how extension works anyway. there's a "core" and it "extends" outward. I'm just saying that it feels like a homunculus-like argument, one of infinite regression.
>just like how Aristotle uses "matter" sometimes to mean the pure substratum, but also to just mean wood or bronze or whatever particular material something is made of
What do you mean? The former just feels like a general definition, the latter the same but filled in with a particular quality.
>extension only makes sense if you lived in a time when physics had to be based on immediate sense perceptions.
How so?
Sounds like the dark matter of the world of Being, like the "form" of form or some shit.
I'm probably totally wrong by the way, just feeling drunk and brave.
It's "the Other", "non-being", the totality of relations between material things as conceived by thought.
>Aristotle merged his teacher's concept with his definitions of prima materia (hylé), place (topos) and substratum (hypokeimenon), in the book 4 of Physics: "This is why Plato says in the Timaeus that matter and the khôra are the same; for the receptive and the khôra are one and the same. Although the manner in which he speaks about the receptive in the Timaeus differs from that in the so-called unwritten teachings, nevertheless he declares that place and the khôra are the same".
Plato solved the problem of uniting the spiritual and material world by hypothesizing a “between” that he called “receptacle, mother, nurse” – khora. In his thought, this mysterious and incomprehensible “place” receives the ideal forms of the One and gives birth to the Many – beings that populate our experience. The implication is is that there is a higher causal world of invisible ideas, forces, purposes, essences that determines the course of things in the lower world of material, vital, mental forms and processes. Human souls are a kind of conscious fulcrum of interaction between the two spheres or planes of existence because of their faculties of consciousness and knowledge. The essential connection between the two has been referred to in a mythological way as Khora, or a kind of mysterious “mother” that is the point of union between the two poles: spirit and matter.
It's actually neither being nor non-being, so the appropriate designation, par the Neoplatonic interpretation of the dialogue Parmenides, is "The One."
Holy frick all of philosophy really is one big wankathon over categorical distinction isn't it?
No wonder this shit never clicked in my tradLARP phase. In those days I'd hear "categorical distinction" and have in mind some troony with green hair browbeating about something.
Wait until you realize that theological terms used in describing the Holy Trinity are actually synonyms for each other in philosophical and occupy the same intelligible niche, so the boilerplate explanation of the Holy Trinity dating from the Council of Nicaea actually gibberish. It's abuse of categorical distinction.
Ironically, given the content of this thread, perichoresis makes more sense. Perichoresis is rotation around, "encompassing", "two sides of the same coin", and is derived from khoreo, meaning, to withdraw, to advance, to make space for, to contain. And khoreo is derived from... khora! Although, probably in the colloquial sense and not the Platonic sense.
In the chainless chaosmos, the stone of three faces, merging in each other's duty, implement the noble work of distinction: carving forms from the wellspring of Memory.
This is such a pretty sentence but i have no idea what the frick it means
Why don't you read Timaeus and find out for yourself? At least you'll get a better idea than many responses in this thread. The Greeks did not have a fundamentally different conception of space/place as such, seeing as Aristotle was fine treating it as its own category, along with his treatment of space as a continuous quantity, which agrees with Descartes insofar as both agree that space/place/extension is infinitely divisible, at least theoretically (Descartes was actually at odds with Newton and other early physicists here, who believed that space had either a principial or an actual limit to its division, and was therefore actually discrete. Ironically Descartes was the one who preserved a more consistent and realistic notion of extension). What they did have is a different conception of reality in its totality. The Greeks clearly didn't reduce corporeal being to matter or extension like Descartes did. So chora is not exactly the same as "extension" or "place." It's a more general receptacle for corporeal beings, which corresponds roughly to Aristotle's hyle, again something quite different from "place", considered as one of his categories.
This anon has already provided a useful quote demonstrating the link between hyle and chora according to Aristotle.
>Why don't you read Timaeus and find out for yourself?
Says the guy who failed to immediately recognize the "receptacle" metaphor as being lifted from the Timaeus (so he had read it and has even engaged with the topic) and expects everybody to have his particular niche opinion (that he lifted from somewhere else) after reading a notoriously difficult passage.
You smug pseuds are the worst. Absolutely cancerous for good faith discussion.
There is no guarantee that the OP has read Timaeus. It's likely he is referencing secondary sources. He says in his post that, "I've seen it described as"...
>You smug pseuds are the worst.
Did I say something you disagree with or are you just hostile for no good reason? The reason I told OP to read the dialogue is because many people make out notions like chora to be far more "mystical" than they actually are. If you have a good head on your shoulders you can get a very good idea of what is meant by it if you focus on its description.
>his particular niche opinion
My "opinion" was a general statement which few would disagree with. Aristotle himself agreed with it, which was quoted from Physics in the post above mine.
There’s no proof he didn’t read it (especially considering it’s an obscure topic) except that (in your eyes), he doesn’t hold your opinion. I don’t find anything that you’ve said to be disagreeable—I just dislike your attitude and find it unphilosphical and immature. It’s the height of arrogance to think that the answers to these questions are easy to find, and only the impetuous youth (who probably have only seen a glimpse of the truth) have the lack of self-reflection to practice the discipline with humility.
Nah he posted well and you did not
>.t hypocrite
well you're a hypocrite so why should I listen to you
>Greeks and Cartesians have the same definition of space/place
>but they don't have the same definition of being
>except chora is a receptacle for beings, which is matter, which isn't place
>except when we look at Aristotle, who says it is place
You're all over the place man.
when we look at Aristotle, who says it is place
Aristotle doesn't say it is place. He states that place is one way in which a thing can come-to-be. Because things change place. There are no other contradictions in the statements you listed. It's possible to have different definitions for being and the same definitions for place, I can't see how that is contradictory.
In case you’re still not seeing the contradiction, here’s a hint: what role does matter play in Aristotle’s metaphysics? According to Aristotle, what is a being?
So is khora another word for form? That’s what I’m getting at from your post. Otherwise it has to be something that isn’t matter and isn’t form.
Think the place of refuse not unlike the rustled tavern we are in. From the small voice, nurtured by the Khoraic humus, threads of life get to begin. With an extreme care to observe first approximations of the voice: in them the destination is inscribed.
Read Derrida
Khora is sunyata
What is sunyata
https://thekyotoschoolofphilosophy.wordpress.com/the-standpoint-of-sunyata/
This probably won't help you in figuring out what Timaeus is doing with it, but it may provoke some questions; chora's first use in Timaeus is by Socrates at 19a, and then twice by Critias at 22e and 23b, and in all three uses, its the standard use of it as "land" or "country". Whatever Timaeus is doing with it is likely connected to this use, especially if we recall what prompts Timaeus' speech, which is Socrates' request to see his city-in-speech from the previous day (resembling the city of the Republic) put into motion, i.e. to see it go to war (Thucydides regularly describes the Peloponnesian War as a "motion"). Note that Timaeus and Hermocrates are from Sicily, the dialogue takes place before the Sicilian expedition, Hermocrates is the Sicilian general who beats the Athenians, and Critias' story about Atlantis resembles the Sicilian expedition were Atlantis = Athens during the war, and Athens in the story = Sicily.
This...uh, probably *profoundly* less helpful than what you're looking for. Only other suggestion I can give is that the word derived from it, "choris", is regularly used in Plato for "separated" or "apart from".
What, no
>Not realizing chora is the ground and the void like sunyata
>Talking like a pretentious Straussian
Ngmi
>This...uh, probably *profoundly* less helpful than what you're looking for.
No but that was really interesting anyway.
>Only other suggestion I can give is that the word derived from it, "choris", is regularly used in Plato for "separated" or "apart from".
If khora is the receptacle of being, then how can it be separated from being?
>If khora is the receptacle of being, then how can it be separated from being?
This'll be picky of me, but strictly it's the receptacle of *becoming*. But to touch on your question, I think the way separation plays into it is that it seems to be that which distinguishes an "of this sort"; compare Socrates' use of chora at 19a, where it's a physical place where people are sorted out into. What's tricky is being able to speak precisely about what's going on, since Timaeus points to certain insufficiencies with language and what we can be content with (so "of this sort" is fine, but "this" and "that" imply Being and so fall short of precision). This is made trickier by the fact that Timaeus has to use images to describe it (e.g., "receptacle" / "reception", "nurse").
>Why not?
Depends on already knowing what sunyata is, and if the reader doesn't, it adds a whole bunch of extra homework that distracts from the original question. Plus, depending on which tradition one takes their bearing on sunyata from, which one actually resembles the Greek "chora", a word that doesn't innately mean "emptiness" or "void" but rather "demarcated space" or "countryside"? It just muddies things.
>y-y-y-you can't point to other uses of the word in different contexts in the same piece of writing, or the dramatic context in which everyone's speaking!
Lol eat my ass.
"Receptacle of becoming... there's two ways it can go. And one way is thinking about it as the mind.
>And one way is thinking about it as the mind.
I don't dislike that suggestion; can you say more what you're thinking of?
You absolute tease.
Anon... you're gonna need to fill in for him
Well, philosophically speaking, what is the realm of becoming? It's the sensible realm. And what is the receptacle of the sensible? The mind through perception. The mind acts like a sieve (another Timaeus metaphor) that captures parts of the world and then re-produces it (copies). It's a middle, transitory ground between being and becoming. It's not a space, as in something we need to think in terms of the dimensions of length, width, and depth, but a place, a special place where this magic happens.
I won't say that that's fully right, only because of how difficult the chora passages are, but it seems plausible given the peculiar discussion of dreaming and images around its "proper" introduction. Perhaps then it's the "space" that makes the *discussion* of the city of the Republic possible (and so, obliquely responds to Socrates' request at the beginning of Timaeus), with its culmination in images like the sun, divided line, and cave. I'll need to chew on this, there's a lot to work out, but it's a thoughtful take.
>What, no
Why not?
Report: a "khora" is a receptacle-void that acts a combinatory matrix for ontic and ontological forms. khoras are the fields that determine the contingent relationality of eternal ideas. here is a cat, and here is a man, but it is only in the khora that they are related out of their timelessness into an empirical being-with. a khoric "library" is the metalanguage of a khora: it describes how forms programmatically interact given some set of ground-conditions. you can either ask the Librarian to direct to some ground-conditions yourself (if you're a novice Amaranth, ie if you're in the 99.9th percentile of elite humanity), or you can input a few familiar objects and see how they derive from noetic axioms. remember: khoric libraries describe "algorithmics of connections" between forms, how bodies, objects, fields, participate in their actuality and in their virtuality simultaneously. so if you ask for a "table", you'll get an answer in a basically demiurgic programming language, but if we had to translate, it'd say something like "given the neural schematics of beings disposed to perceiving in a spatiotemporal mass-gradient, given the conditions of their home Ground, 'tables' emerge as the solution to an ontic deadlock between contingency and apperception in [the heuristic zones related to 'perceived-geometric-utility', α, ε, δ, etc. you get the idea]".
yeah
Bros... how the hell do we defeat the third man argument?
Self-predication makes sense if we mean it to mean self-participation. Redness doesn't have the infinite regression because red participates in red perfectly. If we talk about red, we must mean what we've defined it to mean as a reference to a certain quality of the world, or else we would be talking about a different quality.
But when we talk about concrete objects, like individual substances in the world, then we've done goofed. No man perfectly partakes in the form of man, unless you mean the form of THIS man. Man is a historically and contextually defined form with an arbitrary cutoff point. There's nothing arbitrary about forms of quality like redness, but with forms of substance, arbitrary is the name of the game once we've moved past the hint of intelligible distinction.
You can't. It's over.
Transcendental idealism, I choose you!
uhhh, no.
For an indeterminate situation, there is thus an equivalent to what Plato
named, with respect to the great cosmological construction of the
Timaeus—an almost carnivalesque metaphor of universal presentation—the ‘errant cause’, recognizing its extreme difficulty for thought.
What is at stake is an unpresentable yet necessary figure which designates
the gap between the result-one of presentation and that ‘on the basis of
which’ there is presentation; that is, the non-term of any totality, the nonone of any count-as-one, the nothing particular to the situation, the
unlocalizable void point in which it is manifest both that the situation is
sutured to being and that the that-which-presents-itself wanders in the
presentation in the form of a subtraction from the count. It would already
be inexact to speak of this nothing as a point because it is neither local nor
global, but scattered all over, nowhere and everywhere: it is such that no
encounter would authorize it to be held as presentable.