Chaos came to be
And then broad-breasted Earth
suggesting that it was necessary that there should first be a space (chōra) available to the things that are, because he thinks as most people do that everything is somewhere (pou) and in place (en topō). (208b27–33)
Here Aristotle rejoins the analysis of chaos at stake in the last two chapters. Rather than a species of no-place, of sheer void, chaos is for Aristotle a kind of place, however inchoate and formless it may be. Indeed, it is just because chaos is some sort of place and not a void that Aristotle can exclaim that “the potency of place must be a marvelous thing, and take precedence of all other things.” For, adds Aristotle, “that without which nothing else can exist, while it can exist without the others, must needs be first.”7 In these last words, the Archytian axiom is literally reinscribed in Aristotle’s text as he prepares to make his own case for the primacy of place in the physical world.
Before he can make this case, however, he must come to terms with Plato on the subject of place. He does so by an ambivalent admixture of praise and critique. The praise is straightforward: “While everyone says that place is something, [Plato] alone tried to say what it is” (209b16–17). The critique, however, is less than straightforward. For one thing, it rests on the supposition that for Plato “matter and space are the same thing” (209b12) and thus that place is also reducible to matter: inasmuch as “place is thought to be the extension of the magnitude [of a physical thing occupying that place], it is the matter” (209b6–7). For another, in the Physics “space” as chōra is no longer an independent term designating a vast extent such as that found in the Receptacle. Considered as “magnitude” (megethos), space is brought down to the scale of “place” qua discrete topos—given that place is coextensive with the magnitude of a particular thing-in-place.8 As W. D. Ross puts it bluntly, “The doctrine of place in the Physics is not a doctrine of space. Neither here nor elsewhere does Aristotle say much about space, chōra, and he cannot be said to have a theory about it.”9 Not to have a theory of chōra, to replace it with considerations of megethos and topos, is tantamount to a rejection of what had been most important, or in any case most challenging, in Plato’s cosmology.
Beyond this, Aristotle levels at Plato the general charge that “we should ask Plato why the Forms and numbers are not in place, if place is the ‘participative’ (to metalēptikon), whether ‘the participative’ is the great and the small or whether it is matter, as he writes in the Timaeus" (Physics 209b34–36). The charge is unanswerable; not only does the term “the participative” not occur in the Timaeus (which limits itself to claiming that the Receptacle “partakes in some very puzzling way of the intelligible” [Timaeus 51a–b]), but, more important, the Forms and Space, along with the items of Becoming, are posited by Plato as ultimate metaphysical givens, necessary postulates of any adequate cosmology. Elsewhere, notably in On Generation and Corruption, Aristotle takes Plato to task for failing to “say clearly whether the omnirecipient [i.e., the Receptacle as all-receiving (pandeches)] is separated from the elements” (Physics 329a14–15; see also 329a23–25) and for “making no use of it” in that Plato does not show precisely how, apart from Demiurgic intervention, the matrix of Becoming is transubstantiated into the geometrically configurated primary bodies (Physics 329a15–23).10
II
Place is thought to be some surface and like a vessel and surrounder.
—Physics 212a28–29
Having laid Plato to rest—albeit in an unquiet grave—Aristotle proceeds to make his own case for the priority of place. Although he makes this case in the text entitled Physikē akroasis (Hearkening to Nature), a text considered by Heidegger to be “the basic book of occidental philosophy,”11 Aristotle operates as much like a phenomenologist as a physicist, carefully investigating “in what way [place] is.”12 In so doing, he inaugurates an alliance between physics and phenomenology that extends into the recent past: the very word “phenomenology” was coined by Lambert in 1764 to designate the study of physical phenomena as they appear to the senses; Mach and Einstein continued to draw on this sense of the term.13 What is unique in Aristotle’s enterprise is its concern for general principles of change and motion—a concern combined with a scrupulous description of concrete phenomena. As Aristotle says in opening the Physics, “Start from the things which are more knowable and obvious to us and proceed towards those which are clearer and more knowable by nature” (184a17–18). To be “more knowable and obvious to us" is to be the potential object of a descriptive, phenomenological investigation, since such an investigation considers how things present themselves to the human observer in his or her immediate life-world.
A first instance of Aristotle’s protophenomenological description is found early in book 4 of the Physics.
These are the parts and kinds of place: above, below, and the rest of the six dimensions. These are not just relative to us. Relatively to us, they—above, below, right, left—are not always the same, but come to be in relation to our position, according as we turn ourselves about, which is why, often, right and left are the same, and above and below, and ahead and behind. But in nature each is distinct and separate. ‘Above’ is not anything you like, but where fire, and what is light, move. Likewise, ‘below’ is not anything you like, but where heavy and earth-like things move. So they differ not by position alone but in power too.14
Notice the fine balance here struck between matters of physics proper—which considers place as something “distinct and separate” and as having its own “power” (dynamis) when considered “in nature” (en de tē phusei)—and matters of phenomenological description: for example, the relativity of right versus left to our own particular position at a given moment. A complete consideration of place will have to take both matters into account: how place is “in itself and how it is relative to other things.
Much the same dual focus is evident in Aristotle’s treatment of two basic aspects of place: (a) just as in Husserlian phenomenology the method of “free variation” helps to discern how many basic kinds of a given phenomenon there are, so Aristotle does not hesitate to project two variant kinds of place: the “common place” (topos koinos), “in which all bodies are” (209a33), and the “special place” (topos idios) that is “the first in which a body is” (209a34); (b) since each kind of place involves an “in” as an integral component, Aristotle proceeds to specify eight senses of being in something.15 Two of these can be considered logical or classificatory, two are metaphysical, one is political, two delineate part-whole relations, and a final one is expressly descriptive: “as [a thing is] in a vessel and, generally, in a place” (210a23–24). It is striking that this last sense of “in,” the most manifestly phenomenological sense, is also declared to be “the most basic of all” (ibid.).16 To be in a place is very much like being in a vessel, and the question becomes just how this is so—thereby calling for further descriptive refinement.
It is the analogy of the vessel that allows Aristotle to refute the persisting temptation to regard either form or matter as providing the key to the nature of place: “Since the vessel is nothing pertaining to that which is in it (the primary ‘what’ and ‘in which’ are different), place will not be either the matter or the form, but something else” (210b27–30). Matter and form inhere in the body that is located in a given place—the matter furnishing the substratum, the form providing shape. The form belongs primarily to the surface of the located body, not to the place locating it, even if the two are contiguous and coextensive.17 As Aristotle states with phenomenological precision,
It is because it surrounds that form is thought to be place, for the extremes of what surrounds and of what is surrounded are not in the same [spot]. They are both limits, but not of the same thing: the form is a limit of the object, and the place of the surrounding body. (211b10–14)
But this leaves unanswered just how place is “thought to be some such thing as a vessel” (209a27–28). The answer is clearly to be sought in the containing and, more specifically,