I like your rendition. “Theory” is “seeing.” Doesn’t have to mean without value.
Right. The divine with flesh. Or divine flesh. Does this echo Plato, etc. ? In the beginning was the word. Is “word” here best understood as a concrete saying ? That would be the union of sound and sense, mother and father.
Just for clarity, I don’t mean “quality” in terms of qualities." Related, sure. But I mean the “feeling” or “sensory” “matter” that we recognize as a folk song or a tomato.
So that makes sense, and may be the best reading in terms of Plato’s intention, but I think of the “underlying substance” as a “non-substance” or a “no-thing.” When I see a ripe red tomato, it’s not just a clump of concepts. The tomato is “there” in its “color.” Or consider the difference between the “idea” of the smell of a rose and “the quality” of the smell of a rose. The “smell” is “more than” our registering it in terms of signs.
Anything sensed or recognized must be formal, because we can describe it, and the description would be with the use of forms. What Plato is talking about is a supposed universal substance which underlies all sensible things. Why it gets self-contradictory, and therefore difficult to talk about, is that because it is just assumed because of an apprehended logical necessity, it then becomes a universal form itself, hence it appears as a “universal quality”. But this is exactly what it is assumed not to be, any specific universal quality, but able to receive any quality, as underlying everything. As the most ultimate or absolute universal, the basis of every particular instance of universal qualities, it cannot actually be understood as a universal at all.
I have a hard time to understand what you say here. Anything sensed can be described as a quality. Even if the words have not yet been formulated for that specific description, we can get creative. So I think “the quality of the smell of that rose”, and “the smell of that rose”, each refer to the very same thing. If you smell the rose, and recognize the smell as a quality, you are apprehending it as an idea. We might say that any form of recognizing is apprehending with an idea. To give a name to that idea is something slightly different.
Now the issue with “matter” is that this is an idea created from a logical necessity, rather than from the recognition of sensations. You see that the tomato sits there, and persists through time, as the forms which describe it change from green to red, etc.. The particular thing is not just believed to be changing forms, because we believe that there is an underlying substance which supports our designation that it remains being the same thing, that particular tomato, regardless of its changing forms. So we conclude that it is logically necessary to assume an underlying substance to support or claim that the changing forms are still the very same thing. Otherwise, the tomato would be infinitely divisible, each division producing another type of changing form, and there would be nothing to support the claim that the tomato itself is “there”, as an object. There would only be changing forms
Look for example at the difficult which Whitehead has in validating the existence of objects, when he starts from “process” principles. That’s the issue of denying the reality of matter, as an underlying substance.
They appear to be two separate words that appear far back in Ancient Greek. From the Liddell and Scott Lexicon:
χώρα , Ion. χώρη, ἡ, A. = χῶρος , space or room in which a thing is, defined as partly occupied space, distd. fr. κενόν and τόπος
χορός , ὁ, A. dance, “αἰεὶ δ’ ἡμῖν δαίς τε φίλη κίθαρίς τε χοροί τε” Od. 8.248 ; “μετὰ μελπομένῃσιν ἐν χορῷ Ἀρτέμιδος” Il. 16.183 ; “τοὶ δ’ ἄνδρες ἐν ἀγλαΐῃς τε χοροῖς τε τέρψιν ἔχον” Hes. Sc. 272 , cf. 277 ; “εἰς χ. ἐλθέμεν” Il. 15.508 , cf. Od. 18.194 ; “οὐδέ κε φαίης ἀνδρὶ μαχεσσἀμενον τόν γ’ ἐλθεῖν, ἀλλὰ χορόνδε ἔρχεσθ’ ἠὲ χοροῖο νέον λήγοντα καθίζειν” Il. 3.393
In regard to the passages from Timaeus, χώρα has a meaning of “territory” and the notion of boundaries between beings. That makes it closer to the word for separation:
χωρίς , Adv., also χωρί, q. v.: (v. χῆρος):- A. separately, apart, once in Il., 7.470 ; “χ. μὲν πρόγονοι, χ. δὲ μέτασσαι, χ. δ’ αὖθ’ ἑρσαι” Od. 9.221 , cf. 4.130 , Sapph. Supp. 20a . 16 , IG 12.108.32 , al.; “χ. ἡ τιμὴ θεῶν” A. Ag. 637
Separation is the issue before the recognition of “Chora” as a kind of being at Timaeus 52d.
So I agree with most of what you wrote, but maybe you are missing what I’m talking about. Yes, we can attribute the “quality” of redness. But I am talking about the “component” of existence that is not “category” or “idea.”
We “exist in” the “fusion” of category and “sensation-emotion.” I can talk about “redness.” But redness is there “also” in a way that “exceeds” the “immaterial conceptual.”
My experience is “articulated.” I experience objects that are unified. For me “substance” is “just the identity” of the object. Not a “stuff” but our “taking the object as a whole that endures through time.” And as a topic for discussion.
Yes, they are two separate words, but most likely having a linked origin, as they consist of related ideas. That’s common with words. “Choir”, for example is most likely derived from “chorus”, but today they are separate words.
I agree, “chora” is a sort of medium. In a similar way, “the chorus” was a medium between the actors and the audience.
It’s not a mode of separation though, rather a mode of unifying the active with the passive. If something is at rest, and another thing acts upon it, we call this causation. But there is a necessary medium between the cause and the effect, which we understand as “force”. There is no direct, necessary, cause to effect relation, so without the “force” we have Hume’s problem of causation. An understanding of the force as the medium, is what would unite cause and effect in a necessary relation.
Yes, I think I understand what you mean. The point I made is that we cannot call this component of existence a “quality”, because qualities fall into the category of ideas. That’s why Aristotle made the distinction between form and matter. So for Plato in The Timaeus, it seems like there must be a type of universal which is not properly a qualitative form. That’s probably why the first principle became “the One” for Pythagoreans and neo-Platonists. One is more like a quantity rather than a quality. As the foundation for numbers, “unity” is the first principle. Aristotle explained the different senses of “unity”, and argued that “One” cannot be called a Form.
Perhaps we are on the same page. More dialogue will help. I might put it as : there is a sensory and emotional “non-stuff” that “constitutes” objects. For instance, a dog wags its tail, hoping for a treat. The presence of that dog is “articulated.” The “unity” of the barking dog is “there” but what is unified ? We might call it “sound” and “color.” But the “concept” of sound is not “sound itself.” We might call this “pre-stuff” the “matter” or “mother” of things. We can’t quite “speak” it. For it is the “other” to all categorization.
Looking into interpretations of the unwritten doctrine, I found this:
The paradigm at play in Platonism is ghostly in the sense of being inaccessible to being seized by us as a positive entity or even an express formula or structure. The ground of all that we see and apprehend plays in and out of our experience but remains “ghostly,” out of reach of our ordinary daytime thought and rational language. This profoundly Platonic point of view is fundamentally different from the usual two-worlds dualism commonly attributed to Plato. The duality of surface and ground in question here is actually a unity that expresses itself in terms of the (1) apophantic, or what appears (phansis) by lighting up (φανός), and (2) the apophatic, or what withdraws from expression, literally what moves “away from” (apo) “speech” (phasis).
…
Apophatic thinking does not encircle and capture its object, like a prey, but rather opens itself to relation with what it cannot objectively comprehend and is rather comprehended by. Such thinking cannot grasp and deliver what it is about but can only correspond to and reflect or refract this Other to which it reacts and relates. I contend that this is the nature of thinking as Plato bequeaths it to us and to a vast swathe of Western philosophical and intellectual tradition.
…
My argument in this essay aims to demonstrate that Plato’s esoteric doctrine, such as it has been excavated and reconstructed by the Tübingen school, pivots on ideas that cannot be properly articulated at all rather than only on secrets that, for extrinsic reasons, are withheld from the larger public. It is of the very essence of Platonism, in my understanding, that its highest and deepest ground must escape complete rationalization and remain inaccessible to rational comprehension and human grasp. The nature of reason itself must be discovered as broken open to and turned toward something other than and transcendent of finite understanding and the human mind.
What do you make of the above?
Also of this ?
According to Plato, if people did not have these “ideas” in view, that is to say, the respective “appearance” of things – living beings, humans, numbers, gods – they would never be able to perceive this or that as a house, as a tree, as a god. Usually they think they see this house and that tree directly, and the same with every being. Generally they never suspect that it is always and only in the light of the “ideas” that they see everything that passes so easily and familiarly for the “real.” According to Plato, what they presume to be exclusively and properly the real – what they can immediately see, hear, grasp, compute – always remains a mere adumbration of the idea, and consequently a shadow.
source
This gels with what “idea” currently signifies for me. But “a shadow” doesn’t mean “unreal.” Just incomplete.
Where does the daughter fit in?
More to the OP:
The thought of the chōra—or rather the necessity yet inability to think the chōra, to bestow meaning and form on that which receives meaning and form precisely because it has no meaning and form of its own—this unavoidable thought of the unthinkable, this name for the unnamable, problematizes the very opposition that establishes and maintains the metaphysics of Platonism. As Timaeus speaks and Socrates silently listens, Plato preemptively undermines Platonism by introducing, out of necessity, the thought of a non-intelligible matrix of reality that is neither sensible nor intelligible but is needed if sensible things are to be or become in some sense images of intelligible Ideas.
To me this makes sense as “the dyad.” The one/father/idea crossed “perpendicularly” with dyad/mother/chora gives us the world we know. The offspring, son or daughter, is “intelligible” or “articulated” reality. Does this connect to Kant ?
Intuition and concepts … constitute the elements of all our cognition, so that neither concepts without intuition corresponding to them in some way nor intuition without concepts can yield a cognition. Thoughts without [intensional] content (Inhalt ) are empty (leer ), intuitions without concepts are blind (blind ). It is, therefore, just as necessary to make the mind’s concepts sensible—that is, to add an object to them in intuition—as to make our intuitions understandable—that is, to bring them under concepts. These two powers, or capacities, cannot exchange their functions. The understanding can intuit nothing, the senses can think nothing. Only from their unification can cognition arise. (A50–51/B74–76)
But in our exclusive attention to the setting apart of one thing from another, we forget what lies at the basis of such setting apart (was dem zugrunde liegt). What gets lost in the translations of kechōrismenon as abgesondert, abgetrennt, and so forth is precisely the chōra that underlies any chōrizein, any separation or articulation of the diferences between phenomena. hat this chōra gets forgotten, overlooked, is presumably because it does not present itself as an object, as a Gegenstand; it is, says Heidegger, “Das Gegenstandlose der Gegend,” “the objectlessness of the region” (336). This is why, as Heraclitus says, no one recognizes it. In our exclusive attention to beings, we overlook being as the chōra that lets them be.
At the inception of Platonic metaphysics, there occurred, according to Heidegger, a transformation in the essence of truth. In “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth” (1931–32, 1940), Heidegger claims that “what remains unsaid in Plato’s thinking is “a change in the determination of the essence of truth,” namely a change from an understanding of truth as ἀλήθεια, as the unconcealment or unhiddenness of beings, to truth as the correctness (ὀρθότης) of human apprehension and assertion about beings.73 With the determination of the being of beings as the Ideas, the locus of truth changes; truth is no longer the self-showing of things in unconcealment, it is the correspondence or agreement (ὁμοίωσις) of human representations and linguistic propositions to the Idea, the “outward look” (εἶδος), which in turn determines the being of a being from above, as it were. Natural things are given form by resembling something supernatural. They cannot show themselves in an intelligible manner from themselves; to make sense they must receive the imprint of a look—an eidos—from something supersensible that transcends them.
It’s as if there is something uselessly fundamental here.
This last quote points at a deep dualism that is maybe hard to “see around.” The objects are “given meaning” by us. “Mindstuff” which is “godstuff” has to “paint” objects to make them what they are. Also logocentrism. Truth is a property of sentences with “immaterial meaning” in the “mind of God.” This “mind of God” is where the “true singular meanings” of basic concepts live.
Yet the “mind of God” also glows as a goal. For Peirce, truth is the ideal limit of convergent scientific inquiry. The “mind of God” is “to be achieved.”
The son includes the male and female, the fact that it’s called the son rather than the daughter, or just doesn’t distinguish between the two is due to historical patriarchy I would think.
I think what you are getting at though, is the symbolic place in the trinity for the daughter. I think it works equally well, if you reverse the way it is described, by replacing son with daughter.
So the mother in the marriage is always have mother half father, and her mother was also half mother, half father, add infinitum.
But this still leaves out mother, or daughter from Godhood, because God is always referred to as farther, a male. And mother, or daughter is only ever the receptacle.
This is where the analogy of grounding the trinity in human form breaks down and we have to focus instead on the divine principles being referred to.
Father represents Plato’s forms and mother represents Plato’s matter, or material. The two are universal and necessary for the son/daughter to emerge in finite, or particular being.
Discontinuous maybe but Einstein seems relevant here:
The very fact that the totality of our sense experiences is such that by means of thinking (operations with concepts, and the creation and use of definite functional relations between them, and the coordination of sense experiences to these concepts) it can be put in order, this fact is one which leaves us in awe, but which we shall never understand. One may say " the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility." It is one of the great realisations of Immanuel Kant that the setting up of a real external world would be senseless without this comprehensibility. In speaking here concerning “comprehensibility,” the expression is used in its most modest sense. It implies: the production of some sort of order among sense impressions, this order being produced by the creation of general concepts, relations between these concepts, and by relations between the concepts and sense experience, these relations being determined in any possible manner. It is in this sense that the world of our sense experiences is comprehensible. The fact that it is comprehensible is a miracle.
How do we read “miracle” ? He can’t mean “against current empirical theory” because he’s talking about what makes the “empirical real world” and its theory possible or meaningful in the first place.
I’m not well read on Plato, I’m coming at this from the perspective of Theosophy, which is an attempt to relate Vedic, or Hindu, to Christian traditions.
I would say though that the trinity is representing a fundamental principle in the divine realm, so would therefore be a platonic form. It represents the cleaving of the one, or unity, into the two, or diad, something, that’s other than one, or unity. The idea being that when you divide one into two, you are actually dividing it into three; one, two and one and two together
One = farther
Two = mother
One and two together =son
So everything that is not one is in threes, trinity’s. The trinity is in everything, including the forms.
Yes, and son. In incarnation, or manifestation there would always be the three; sound, sense, word.
This echoes Saussure, sort of. Only sort of.
The “sound itself” has to be categorized as a fugitive saying of the static word. The “sense” would be something like its “total effect” on a hearer. The way the saying is there as a saying of the static word.
I’m tempting to make sense the child, the word the father, and the sound the mother. Not to exclude other readings. But the sound is “intelligible” through the word as a pattern that exceeds the now. The living word is the “sense” — the spoken word instantiated here and now for someone’s ear.
Yes, that’s the way I see it. So sound is intelligible, through sense. But is a fusion of sound and word, it is word that makes it intelligible. But word cannot be accessed directly. It is only ever mediated by sound and sense. While what is known, or learned through the sensory experience is word, but a mediated, or hosted word. Sound is only known through familiarity (conditioning).
When someone meditates, they are seeking to transcend these processes and access word and sound intuitively, or conditioned practice.
This makes sense to me. The hosted word is the word-for-me, so its always partial instantiation “lives in my ear and heart.” I mean it’s “in the world” but “does something” to what I call “me.” But the word is also hosted by a particular qualitative sound, a sound that is heard as a saying of the relatively timeless word.
I’m tempted to understand “sense” viscerally, as its total significance for me here now, but that significance is not “immaterial” in the sense of excluding the qualitative soundstuff. The “articulated” sounds-stuff is sense as the word for me now as it lives in my ear-and-heart.
Some use “sense” in the direction of non-sensory meaning. So I guess I’m trying to clarify, fuse our horizons, see if we are using these signs the same way, to see if they have or rather are the same-enough sense for both us. I mean I feel enough mutual understanding to seek more.
FWIW, I’m no Plato expert. I became more interested in Plato after reading Heidegger and Husserl. Then I stumbled on the unwritten doctrine and almost immediately saw a plausible reading of it, basically the stuff we are talking about here.
I have read lots of Jung and Freud and Campbell. Read a bio of Yeats recently that gave me some background on Theosophy. I’m definitely interested in Christian mysticism, weirdly in the direction of Derrida, you might say.
The incarnation myth/symbol looks to echo Plato and Derrida at the same time, along with Feuerbach. And Heidegger and really all kinds of thinkers. What is this tension between “time and eternity” ?
That everything temporal dies, and nothing eternal does. At a guess, anyway.
Right. But what I find most interesting is the “eternal” that “shines through” the fugitive and passing. The feeling and sound and color and so on of the world is “articulated” in a way that almost repeats.
That’s my cat again, but the moment is new, and it’s a new revelation of that same old cat. The moment is not without a reference to other moments, via things that endure.
Yes, the distance between “being” and “becoming” is essential to the account:
Let this, then, be, according to my verdict, a reasoned account of the matter summarily stated,—that Being and Place and Becoming were existing, three distinct things, even before the Heaven came into existence; and that the Nurse of Becoming, being liquefied and ignified and receiving also the forms of earth and of air, and submitting to all the other affections which accompany these, exhibits every variety of appearance; but’ owing to being filled with potencies that are neither similar nor balanced, in no part of herself is she equally balanced, but sways unevenly in every part, and is herself shaken by these forms and shakes them in turn as she is moved. And the forms, as they are moved, fly continually in various directions and are dissipated; just as the particles that are shaken and winnowed by the sieves and other instruments used for the cleansing of corn fall in one place if they are solid and heavy, but fly off and settle elsewhere if they are spongy and light. So it was also with the Four Kinds when shaken by the Recipient: her motion, like an instrument which causes shaking, was separating farthest from one another the dissimilar, and pushing most closely together the similar; wherefore also these Kinds occupied different places even before that the Universe was organized and generated out of them.
Timaeus, 52D, translated by R.G. Bury
I don’t know, it’s hard for me to relate to a few passages with no context. I’m not keen on the idea of studying unwritten doctrine. To me it’s just a form of mysticism giving license to broad speculations. For what purpose?
That is closer to the way I know Plato. Sensed objects are reflections of ideas. The whole idea that “the real” is what is sensed, and that ideas are a representation of what is real is a misunderstanding, an inversion of what is the case. In reality, sense appearances are just a shadow of the ideal.