Chora (philosophy)

Chora (Greek χώρα "place, area, land, space") is a term in ancient Greek natural philosophy that Plato introduces in the dialogue Timaeus . In this dialogue Timaeus of Lokri explains the creation of the world. The exact meaning of χώρα in Plato is unclear. In the epic of the Odyssey , Chora stands for cultivated land, or “black earth that brings wheat and barley”, and thus describes the rural arable land, on whose income a prosperous polis in ancient Greece was dependent.

The cosmogony depicted in Timaeus is divided into several phases or levels, of which the first and fundamental "pre-cosmic phase" (Greek προκοσμική φάση) or the "third genus" can be described. This phase or genre is already a creation in which the chora represents the “where ” and the intelligible being the “where from”, whereby the intelligible being is imprinted on the chora and thereby sets it in motion. This phase or genus is pre-cosmic insofar as in a second phase the demiurge intervenes in the chora and only through this the cosmic elements earth, water, air, fire and ether are formed in the form of the platonic solids , as well as the perceptible ordinary solids . The designation of the third genus comes from the fact that three causes are necessary for the constitution of the world: the demiurge, the ideas and thirdly the chora.

The meaning of the chora is problematic and controversial, because Plato gives sometimes contradicting references. Possible interpretations are:

1. as " wet nurse of becoming"
2. as space
3. as matter
4. as the identity of space and matter
5. as a modern concept of space

There are reasons for all of these interpretations; one has also tried to harmonize them.

Only mutually dissimilar images or traces of the four material elements earth, fire, water and air move in the chora. However, through the action of the demiurge, these take on the shapes of the corresponding four regular polyhedra and serve as the basic building blocks of the material world, while the world is adorned with the fifth regular polyhedron - the dodecahedron that embodies the ether .

literature

• Jacques Derrida: Chōra . Passagen Verlag, Vienna 2005, ISBN 978-3851657296 .
• Filip Karfik: The animation of the cosmos. Studies on cosmology, theory of the soul and theology in Plato's Phaedo and Timaeus. Saur, Munich 2004, ISBN 3-598-77811-2 .
• Kyung Jik Lee: The concept of space in "Timaeus" in connection with natural philosophy and the metaphysics of Plato . Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2000 ( dissertation (online) (PDF; 1.1 MB), University of Konstanz , 1999).

Remarks

1. ↑ Elke Stein-Hölkeskamp: The archaic Greece. Munich 2015, p. 160.
2. ↑ Filip Karfik, p. 202.
3. ↑ Kyung Jik Lee, p. 101.
4. ↑ Filip Karfik, p. 202
5. ↑ Kyung Jik Lee, p. 28.
6. ↑ Kyung Jik Lee, pp. 101-120. ( Memento of the original from May 3, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
7. ↑ Filip Karfik, p. 203 f.