Research

I am researching Plato's chora and the basho of the Kyoto School at the Dutch Open Universiteit.

In the Timaeus,  Plato used a word for space, ‘chōra’ (xώρα), to indicate a third kind of reality, besides eternal being and everchanging becoming. This concept did not fit in well with Greek philosophy and almost disappeared from view, until it was rediscovered by Jacques Derrida in the late 1960s. Derrida’s khōra is a radical otherness, defying any naming or logic. It became an aspect of Derrida’s philosophy of deconstruction. However, in 1926, Nishida Kitarō had already developed his concept of basho, Japanese (場所) for space, with a reference to Plato’s chōra. Nishida’s basho was the space of absolute nothingness, related to Buddhist emptiness, and a cornerstone to the philosophy of the Kyoto School. The ancient Greek chōra, the postmodern khōra and the Japanese basho overlap as being formless, but both Derrida and Nishida diverged from Plato’s concept. They found a possible weakness—a  ‘soft spot’, so to speak—in Plato, where they could situate their own brainchild, namely, postmodern ‘deconstruction’ and the Japanese logic of basho.  How are chōra, khōra, and basho related to each other? Are they completely different, or do they have a common ground?

I approach this question by first adding context to chōra, khōra and basho, from the history of Platonism, post-modernism and Kyoto School philosophy, on the basis of textual references. Plato’s chōra quickly merged with Aristotle’s hylē, ‘matter’, becoming the prime matter of creation in Greek and Medieval philosophy. Derrida’s khōra opened Plato’s text to a renewed reading, and it had diverging parallels in postmodern theological and feminist thought.  Nishida’s basho reappeared in the Kyoto School as ‘absolute mediation’ (Tanabe), ‘interrelatedness’ (Watsuji), ‘formless self’ (Hisamatsu), ‘the field of emptiness’ (Nishitani), ‘dynamic śūnyatā’ (Abe) and ‘infinite open’ (Ueda). Only recently has the question of an overlap of chōra and basho received scholarly attention. To give some examples, Rolf Elberfeld calls it ‘the self as a field of consciousness’, Augustin Berque ‘a place for ‘absolute being-thereness’, comprising the self’, and John Krummel a “self-forming formlessness”. I argue that ‘field’ is a better translation of chōra and basho than ‘space’ or ‘place’, to avoid the pitfalls of materialism. Its paradoxical nature of being empty yet permanent connects it with the question of a substratum of reality. There is a relevance to the myth of creatio ex nihilo, and to the question of overcoming dualism, as Plato calls chōra a third kind, triton genos. Derrida’s philosophy of ‘deconstruction’ operates by opening up the metaphysics of Plato’s Timaeus from within the text, but the Kyoto School basho goes much further, because of its connection to Nāgārjuna’s emptiness. The possibility of an overlap of chōra, khora and basho became evident in recent debates on deconstruction and emptiness, kenōsis and God, and interrelatedness and embodiment. These debates also included ecological ethics when basho was extended to nature, which was also the subject of Plato’s Timaeus. Both Nishida and Derrida focused on Plato’s chōra as ‘having no form’, a quality which questions the suitability of language to indicate its nature. Formlessness brings in concepts like apophasis, pre-verbal psychology, Zen, and Dao. If chōra, khōra and basho are beyond words, are they better understood as dynamics? In an excursus, I discuss Rolf Elberfeld’s method of ‘transformative phenomenology’, which could feature open-ended creativity as a function of a future philosophical praxis, engaging with chōra and basho. From Elberfeld, I borrow the phrase ‘a playing field between East and West’ (German:  Spielraum) to indicate the overlap.

My conclusion is that, because of the variety of readings of the ancient Greek chōra, the postmodern khōra and the Japanese basho, it is impossible to present a final statement on the overlap of the three concepts. I argue that the subject may therefore serve—and continue to serve—as a fertile ‘playing field’ between East and West for global comparative philosophy, in which the overcoming of dualism and a non-dual concept of the self will be core topics. The paradox, the enigma, the Zen kōan, the logic of myth, Plato’s ‘bastard reasoning’ and the various forms of non-binary logic, all appear to me as different linguistic ways of pointing to formlessness and to a formless self, meaning a self-contradictory identity beyond, yet including, body and mind. A formless self was the core doctrine of Hisamatsu, who wrote that ‘in the West such Nothingness has never been fully awakened, nor has there been penetration to such level’. This is creating an East-West juxtaposition rather than finding ways to bridge the gap, apparent in most other Kyoto School thinkers. Nishida’s contribution to articulating a ‘Zen element’ was mu no basho, the spatiality of what later in his career developed into the true self as self-contradictory. If he is correct in claiming that Zen ‘kensho means to penetrate to the bottomlessly contradictory existence of one’s own self’, then I agree with Izutsu when he points to ‘the philosophical potential hidden in the Zen experience of reality’. I do not think this potential has been exhausted at all, nor its overlap with Western philosophy. Chōra, khōra and basho are therefore fertile fields for further exploration.

In Heart's Ease, Spirituality in the Music of John Tavener, June Boyce-Tillman has kindly allowed me to publish a chapter on 'John Tavener and Sacred Silence'. My contribution comes out of a number of presentations at the Tavener Study Days in Winchester, both as research and through musical performances inspired by Tavener. The contributors to this book include scholars, musicians, theologians, medical practitioners, informed listeners and practitioners in religious traditions. It includes case study material, empirical studies, philosophical, theological and theoretical contributions along with accounts from lived experience of the spirituality generated by Tavener’s music. Warmly recommended!

For a postgraduate degree (MPhil) at Canterbury Christchurch University, UK, I wrote a thesis on 'Star Music. The ancient idea of cosmic music as a philosophical paradox'. Here's the abstract: ‘Star Music’ regards the ancient Pythagorean-Platonic idea of heavenly harmony as a philosophical paradox: stars are silent, music is not. The idea of ‘star music’ contains several potential opposites, including imagination and sense perception, the temporal and the eternal, transcendence and theophany, and others. The idea of ‘star music’ as a paradox can become a gateway to a different understanding of the universe, and a vehicle for a shift to a new – and yet very ancient – form of consciousness. The ancient Greeks had a type of unitary consciousness, intermingling continually with a transpersonal dimension. This ancient state of consciousness was related to a musical understanding of the world, the Pythagorean-Platonic experience of the universe as an ordered cosmos. The research is approached from the angle of musicianship, exploring how music is reflected in the world of thought. By reflexive re-reading of the primary sources, new insights into the nature of musical consciousness are explored. The idea of ‘star music’ can be found throughout the history of music and thought in the West, including Plato’s works and that of other ancient philosophers, through the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Romantic era and the twentieth century up to contemporary New Age music. As a conclusion, the paradox of ‘star music’ is connected to an experience of a shared transcendent meaning of music, which can be present in the moment of a musical performance. In other words, ‘star music’ is a living paradox.' The complete thesis can be downloaded from https://repository.canterbury.ac.uk/item/88649/star-music-the-ancient-idea-of-cosmic-musicas-a-philosophical-paradox or at https://www.academia.edu/ .

Tone-Zodiac of Ficino (Voss 2006, p. 186)

The text below is an excerpt from an essay written for the MA on Myth, Cosmology and the Sacred of Canterbury Christ Church University in 2015. The complete essay is available at https://www.academia.edu/.  'A tone-zodiac is a circle indicating the connections between the twelve signs of the zodiac and the tones of a musical scale. The oldest known tone-zodiac is found in Ptolemy’s Harmonics (second century CE). It is founded on the vision of Pythagoras of the heavens as a musical harmony. The tone-zodiac is not expressing the generally known ‘Harmony of the Spheres’, which is based on the planetary movements, but connects music with the properties of the ‘fixed stars’, the constellations of the zodiac. To each star sign a note is assigned, thus creating a circle of sounds and images. History has produced a small number of tone-zodiacs. The oldest known tone-zodiac appears in The Harmonics by the Alexandrian Ptolemy (c. 90 – c. 168 CE). He presents his tone-zodiacs in chapter 8 of book III of the Harmonics, written near the end of his life. He lays out a two-octave Pythagorean scale on a zodiac circle, noting that the rotating movements of the stars are all circular and regular and similar to the movements within the tone-system. In this form of the tone-zodiac, the octave (2:1) comes opposite in the circle, and so cuts it in two (1:2), which he considers “a great mystery”. Ptolemy says that “for this reason the effect of the planets is at its strongest in opposition, when they occupy diametrically opposed positions in the zodiac, and a similar relationship obtains among tones which are an octave apart from one another”. To the modern sense of consonance it seems strange to portray opposition by the octave and conjunction by the double octave. After Ptolemy ancient and medieval scholars in Western Europe discussed the connections between the planetary movements and the musical scale, but not to the zodiac. As more Greek sources became available in the second millennium CE the interest in ancient science, including astrology, grew. In the Italian Renaissance the tone-zodiac surfaces again. Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499) presents a tone-zodiac in his letter to the musician-philosopher Domenico Benivieni2. He uses a one-octave scale and places the major seventh as the opposite aspect. However, he manages to keep the Ptolemaic consonances of whole-tone (sextile), fourth (square) and fifth (trine) in the same place. Angela Voss argues that Ficino is advocating in his letter a tuning system in accordance with contemporary practice and the requirements of musicians, and which correlates more exactly with astrological law. As Ficino was a practising astrologer and a musician himself he may have chosen to adapt the Ptolemaic tone-zodiac to fit his own practice. Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) tried to show that the geometry of the heavens is ruled by musical harmony, connected to the Platonic solids. In his Mysterium Cosmographicum (1596) he elaborates on Ptolemy’s tone-zodiac, based on the double-octave scale, introducing correspondences between the astrological aspects and the regular plane figures of geometry. Kepler also signals the problem of comparing the arithmetically divided circle of the Zodiac with the logarithmically divided string'. More on Roel Hollander's webpage on THE ASTROLOGICAL ZODIAC & TONALITY .