The Story of Space: On Necessity, the Receptacle, and Spatial Receptivity In Plato’s Timaeus
Plato’s Timaeus is a “cosmontology”: it purports to tell the story of the origins of all being(s), and it does so in three parts: the works of Reason, what comes about by Necessity, and an all too short section on how Reason and Necessity cooperate to bring about the world of our experience. (1) It also plays as a family drama, with Necessity playing the role of mother and nurse of beings. The paternal Reason gives form and order to the world of beings, a world described as the offspring of Necessity and Reason. It is an imperfect world, but it is as good as it can be through the cooperation of Necessity and Reason. Given this broad context, let us now take a deep dive into the discourse on Necessity, where Plato introduces the concept of space into the history of Western Philosophy.
The Receptacle and Spatial Receptivity
The section on Necessity begins with Timaeus rehearsing, then weighing in on, some questions inherited from Presocratic philosophy: What is everything made out of? Does one elemental root underly all that is, or are there many roots? Is there birth and death in an absolute sense — a coming into and out of existence — or only the endless transformation of already and always existing stuff? Is the cosmos a just and harmonious cosmos? Is the way it is organized intelligible and meaningful?
Timaeus recasts these questions in terms of appearance: this here appears to be watery in form, but it can also evaporate into a mist. Where does it go? When it turns into mist, is it a new thing or the same? If the same, then the same thing at first appears to be water then mist, but what is it, really? Is it originally water, or vapor, or something else altogether that takes on the appearance of water, then mist? Moreover, the water in this glass is different from the water in that river, but they appear to be made of the same watery stuff. What connects the two substances? An idea of watery things?
The problem of appearances goes in both directions: something that should be the same appears to be different, and something that is different appears to be the same. It is helpful to think of this in terms of qualitative and quantitative differences — is this the same or different from that water in number? Are they two things or only one? And are two (water and ice, for example) the same or different in kind? If they are different, which one is the more true, real, original? What is the origin, or where does all the watery stuffs begin?
Initially, Space is a receptacle (hupodoche) into and out of which this and that watery quality comes to appear as such. In this capacity, space is described as the nurse or midwife of being, an agent that helps to usher beings into the world, a world of appearances. It is not the first time that Plato has made use of a reproductive analogy to further his metaphysical ends. (2) You might recall how, in the Theatetus, Socrates compares himself to a midwife of ideas, tasked with bringing ideas into the world and judging between good ideas and useless wind-eggs. Both Socrates and Plato are obsessive about reproduction, mimesis, repetition and difference.
The receptacle is analogous to women’s bodies, bodies that are imagined as empty receptacles for reproduction. The receptacle of space has no qualities of its own. As Timeaus tells us, it is like the gold that can be given many shapes and forms, or like the odorless base that is used in perfume making, or the smooth and pliant wax surface on which marks can be made.(3) It’s virtue lies in it’s lack of native qualities. But it is decidedly not a substance like gold or wax, and there is something else that is different about the receptacle.
The receptacle inherits from Necessity the ability to hold the universe together not by the imposition of limit as boundary, but by the power of its receptivity (ekmagion). It is Parmenides who introduces the goddess Necessity (ananke), accompanied by the goddess Justice (dike), in his poem “On Being.” Here, Necessity and Justice are responsible for the cosmic order exhibited by the visible patterns produced by the sun, moon, and stars:
“Moreover, Parmenides speaks ‘of the surrounding heaven, whence it grew and how Necessity guiding it fettered it to hold the limits of the stars’(4). Parmenidean necessity does not impose limits from without, as an external boundary (if there is no non-being or void, then there is no ‘outside’ to existence), but imposes limit as an internal force, through the gathering of all that is akin into a center of gravity that unites the elements into a consistent and continuous plenum. In this way, ‘strong Necessity (
ananke
To this we add the Atomists’ version of Necessity — described as a whirling motion that is the cause of all motion and change: “Everything happens according to necessity; for the cause of the coming-into-being of all things is the whirl, which he [Democritus] calls necessity” (Fr.3; KRS, 419). The whirling is a centrifugal force that pulls elements in towards the center, bringing together like and unlike kinds, unifying a heterogeneity of beings.
The rotating motion is irregular because the imperfect and uneven distribution of the elements causes the receptacle also to sway and shake as if orgasming. (6) Like a winnowing basket, when the receptacle shakes, unlike kinds are separated and like kinds are brought closer together; the lightest fly up to the top and the heaviest elements sink to the bottom. Thus earth compounds to earth, and water flows to water, the fiery rises to the firmament, and finally, air fills the space between earth and sky. This manifests in the hierarchical cosmic order —fire, the lightest element at the top; then air; then water; and finally the heaviest, earth at the bottom. The elemental passions or powers, as they were called, are thus set into place and maintained by Necessity, through the receptacle’s whirling and winnowing motions.
As Timaeus tells it, this is the state of the cosmos — a roughly sorted elemental milieu — when Reason arrives on the scene to impose order. The order imposed by Reason will bring meaning and beauty to the cosmos. In this same way that, in human reproduction, the mother is said to provide a container and raw matter for the embryonic homunculus, originating in the male seed, to come into being.
Just to be clear, I’m not advocating for these views, but reporting to you on the birth of conceptions of space in Western Philosophy. I’m hoping to show how conceptions of woman/womb and space are correlates that change in tandem throughout the history of thought. Needless to say, this is very problematic for those of us who are actual women. More on this to come…
(1) Plato’s Cosmology, Francis M. Cornford, (1935). These are the categories for the sections as formulated by Cornford, who grammatically positions Reason as active, and the feminized Necessity as passive.
(2) Page duBois has done the work of making the painstaking argument for Plato’s appropriation of women’s bodies of reproduction in: Dubois, Paige. 1988. “The Platonic Appropriation of Reproduction.” Sowing the Body (Chicago: Chicago University Press); 169–183.
(3) The example of the wax block is especially interesting in relation to its use for explaining the role of memory in knowledge production in Plato’s Theatetus.
(4) Fr. 10; The Presocratic Philosophers a Critical History with a Selection of Texts, Kirk, Raven, and Schofield, Cambridge University Press, 1983; 257–258; henceforth KRS.
(5) “On Necessity: A Primer For Interpreting chora in Plato’s Timaeus,” Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy 16 [2]:233–245 [2012].
(6) “Now the nurse of becoming, being made watery and fiery and receiving the characters of earth and air and qualified by all the other affections that go with these, had every sort of appearance in sight; but because it was filled with powers that were neither alike nor evenly balanced, there was no equipoise in any region of it; but it was everywhere swayed unevenly and shaken by these things, and by its motion shook them in turn.” Timaeus 52d-e, Cornford.
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It’s actually a pretty compelling narrative. Necessity creates a representation of itself within itself (a fetus, if you will), thus creating reason. Reason brings order to necessity by individuating — breaking necessity into parts — turning the analog into the digital. But if you keep “breaking” the digital it eventually becomes analog. And so reason eventually becomes necessity. And the cycle repeats.