In the end—or more exactly, in the beginning—the Receptacle offers what Whitehead calls a “community of locus” for its various inhabitants, a “real communication between ultimate realities.”105 The Receptacle thus furnishes what I have elsewhere called “in-gathering.”106 Thanks to its connection-making capacity, the precosmic Receptacle gathers heterogeneous constituents into the arc of its Space, giving place to what otherwise might be depthless or placeless—thus allaying the most acute metaphysical anxiety. Its action creates implacement for everything, in-gathered within its encompassing embrace. In Plato’s own words, “it is always receiving all things” (50b).
In this way we rejoin the idea of place as matrix with which this chapter opened. If we have had to reject the notion of place as a material begetter, as a physical fons et origo—these literalistic meanings of “matrix” being questioned by the working of the Receptacle, which, unlike Tiamat’s monster-begetting body, lead us to distinguish between sensible quality, material body, and place—there has emerged a valid matricial sense of place that consists in the sheer connectiveness that place in all its guises uniquely affords. From Plato we learn that receptivity is connectivity.
But we are by no means restricted to the Receptacle as a paradigm of implacement, evocative and suggestive as this paradigm remains still today. Other models are possible if it is indeed true that placing and being placed are matters of connecting, whether in the context of cosmogony or cosmology, of phenomenology or metaphysics, or in everyday life. Just as there is no place without depth, so there is no place that does not connect the disparities of being and experience, of perception and language, of chaos and cosmos. And if it is also true that (as Kierkegaard said) “existence separates,” then we need to heed E. M. Forster’s celebrated counsel: “only connect!”107 Both Kierkegaard and Forster were thinking more of people than of places. But it is in and by places that the most lasting and ramified connections, including personal connections, are to be made.
If place is “there as a matrix for everything” (Timaeus 50c), it tempers any fear that a matrix of places—whether this be conceived as primordial waters, as night, as chaos, as earth, or as Receptacle—is a devastating void, an abysmal atopia. If we can think of the Receptacle as some kind of no-place, this is only because, as a reservoir of connections yet to come, or at least yet to be specified, its place-full and place-filling potentiality is always still to be realized in time-to-come. There is, after all, a right and full time for places to come into being, and even if we have found places to be pervasively present at the creation of things, their destiny is also to be ongoing and ever-increasing in their connectivity.
Place is thus, in Plato’s own word, “ever-lasting.” And, just as this last locution—aei on, the source of aiōnios, means literally “always in being”—brings together time and place, so the same two forces are conjoined in a telling Neoplatonic fragment of the sixth century A.D.:
everything you see PLACE or
TIME
which separate in Two
making a double pair
OROMESDESwho is Light
Ahura-Mazda
AREIMANIOSwho is Dark
Ariman
PLACE
(Topos)
——Zerauné akerené
TIME
(Chronos)108
3
Place as Container
Aristotle’s Physics
Everything remains naturally in its proper place.
—Aristotle, Physics 212b34–35
No one thinks or speaks—even when the thought or word is erroneous—without recognizing, from this very fact, the existence of place.
—Henri Bergson, “L’Idée de Lieu chez Aristote”
I
That place was a continuing cynosure of ancient Greek thought is abundantly evident in Aristotle’s treatment of the topic: for Aristotle, where something is constitutes a basic metaphysical category.1 Except for the extraordinary cases of the Unmoved Mover and the heavens (ouranos) taken as a single whole, every perishable sublunar substance (including the earth as a whole) is place-bound, having its own “proper place” as well as existing in the “common place” provided by the heavens.2 Thanks to this stress on the importance of place for each particular “changeable body”—that is, changeable with respect to motion or size—the Stagirite situates his most scrupulous examination of place in the context of physics rather than of cosmology. Cosmology is of decidedly less interest to Aristotle than to Plato; and of cosmogony only the barest traces survive in Aristotle’s text, typically in the form of bemused and skeptical citations from pre-Socratic figures. The at least quasi-mythical aura of the Timaeus—its ambiguous status as a mixed “third genre” (triton genos) of discourse (Timaeus 48e, 52a)—gives way to the sturdy, no-nonsense attitude of the Physics, wherein place is conceived in the cautious, finite terms of container and limit, boundary and point. Chōra yields to Topos, the bountiful to the bounded.
It is precisely because of its indispensable role within the physical world that, for Aristotle, place “takes precedence of all other things” (Physics 208b35). In particular, it assumes priority over the infinite, void, and time.3 Place is requisite even for grasping change itself (kinēsis), with which the study of physics is always concerned; for “the most general and basic kind [of] change is change in respect of place, which we call locomotion.”4 Locomotion, after all, is movement from place to place.5 On Aristotle’s view, one simply cannot study the physical world without taking place into account: “A student of nature must have knowledge about place” (208a27). For wherever we turn in the known universe—outside of which there is “neither place, nor void, nor time” (De Caelo 279a18)—we find place awaiting us and shaping any move we might wish to make. Remember that even a void, were it to exist, would be a “place bereft of body” (208b26).
Given this perception of the pervasiveness of place, it is not surprising to find Aristotle offering his own version of Archytas’s archetypal argument for the primacy of place—an argument whose other advocates include Zeno, Parmenides, Gorgias, Plato, and, much more recently, Whitehead. Aristotle puts it this way:
For everyone supposes that things that are are somewhere, because what is not is nowhere—where for instance is a goat-stag or a sphinx? 6
It is at this very point that Aristotle makes a rare gesture toward muthos by citing the Theogony as an early testimonial to the inevitability of implacement. Having just argued for this inevitability from the various phenomena of anti-peristasis (i.e., the replacement of one body by another: despite the exchange of bodies, the place remains the same), natural movement (whereby different kinds of bodies move to “distinct and separate” regions [208b18]), and the void (in its empty placelikeness), Aristotle observes,
These are the reasons, then, for which one might suppose that place is something over and above bodies, and that every body perceptible by sense is in place. Hesiod, too, might seem to be speaking correctly in making Chaos first; he says
Foremost of all things
Chaos came
