Between Chora and the Good: Metaphor's Metaphysical Neighborhood

Chapter 2: The Matrix

51 The Matrix 2 Sacred Places E. V. Walters’s Placeways chronicles his journey along the sacred path to Plato’s Academy and the matrix. He calls attention to Ptolemy’s distinction between topos, the space of geography—and Descartes’s extension or Aristotle’s innermost container—and chora, a qualitative, phenomenological place that organizes and evokes images, memories, feelings, meanings, and the work of the imagination.1 Like the Rome of Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents “in which nothing once constructed ever disappears,” the matrix seems to hold in storage the entire contents of past experience. We have known this archival and creative or threatening power of place in Delphi, Chartres, or Ravenna and as a child put to bed in a strange place, but we have been with Plato on the banks of the Ilissus and with Proust in Combray. It is, Walters continues, “a unity of experience, organizing the communication and mutual influence of all things within it. Every place implies a form of dwelling together, and all the realities in a place, living people, images, animals, memories, plants, bacteria, and other hidden forces. Even though we barely acknowledge them at all, they participate in one another’s natures and form a topistic structure , the structure of mutual immanence.”2 Plato identifies the receptacle’s primordial contents with morphe (shape), dynamis (powers), and pathe (feeling), the passions expressed 02_chap_Bigger.qxd 04/02/2005 4:58 pm Page 51 in the elementary shapes. In the immediacy of an opalescent experience of becoming, as in Zen meditation or listening to a late Beethoven quartet, these forms, feelings, and powers are and are not subjective /expressive or objective/physicalistic. Like Kant’s imagination or, even better, James’s “booming, buzzing confusion” and Bradley’s “living experience,” the matrix is the common root of these and other “groundless grounding” distinctions. As hypodoche, it gives place (chora) and life to its creatures through their genetic ties and their material and social connections. Levinas finds similar roots in the mysterious and often-frightful il y a he uses in a “deduction” of the hypostasis. The receptacle is a “container of forces” or a homologous “container of feelings” and, as chora, matrix of their ontic expression, real or virtual, and is the common root of what has hitherto been taken to be the mind/body dualism. Moreover, it is through the hypodoche that Plato, Aristotle, Heidegger, and Husserl are now with us in a timeless present. She is apprehended, Plato says, in a bastard (skotie) or dark reasoning, perhaps reflecting Democratus’s “bastard cognitions” (DK 68 B11) of sight, hearing, and smell. Sense is deictic, disclosing situated material things and not, as Milton’s Lucifer said, “a place in the mind.” For the romantic, however, this external field is metaphorical , a sort of accessory to mind. For Hegel it is “configured with deep feeling and detailed richness of insight . . . feeling is made the center.”3 This phenomenon is at work in the “strange presences” that haunt nature in Wordsworth’s Prelude, which led Whitehead to give such a prominent role to feeling. We experience energies in place, perhaps something like an erotic conatus, a creative drive and directness, which the early Renaissance scholars sought to reawaken. More important is a Neo-Platonic transformation of energeia from the Aristotelian potency/act (dynamis/energeia) distinction into “energy,” physical and psychical.4 Place is a nexus of energies, destructive and creating, sustaining and threatening, and hardly ever wholly benign. Plato’s description of chora as a “dreaming state from which we cannot arouse ourselves” (Tim., 52C) becomes in Thomas Taylor’s NeoPlatonic translation: “We cannot release ourselves from this fallacious and dreaming energy.”5 Our discussions must retain these Platonic insights; they are on the way to the truth about the Holy Spirit, God’s immanence in the res extensa. Overtones of this matrix that gives beings a place, virtual or real, in which to be and be appeared to is heard in the da of Dasein or in the “real” (das Wirkliche), which, with questionable etymology, 52 ■ Between Chora and the Good 02_chap_Bigger.qxd 04/02/2005 4:58 pm Page 52 Heidegger identifies with physis, “to bring hither and forth into presencing.” What gives existence, being, gives it to a being, which, paradoxically, is not there to receive its gift and does not exist even if, as the arché or source, it...