Chōra

Chōra (χώρα) means space, place, or region — a country, a field, the room a thing occupies. Plato raised this ordinary word to name one of the strangest and most influential ideas in his cosmology: in the Timaeus, the chōra is the 'receptacle' of all becoming, a third kind of thing alongside the eternal Forms and their fleeting copies.

The nurse of becoming

Plato calls it the 'nurse' and 'mother' of all that comes to be — a featureless matrix that receives the images of the Forms and lets them appear, much as gold can be worked into any figure while remaining gold, or soft material takes every imprint. It must itself have no character of its own, precisely so that it can receive every character; we grasp it, Plato says, only 'by a kind of bastard reasoning', barely, as if in a dream.

Space, matter, and after

The chōra hovers tantalizingly between what later thinkers would call space and what they would call matter — the 'in which' and the 'out of which' of the physical world. It deeply shaped later reflection on both, and in modern times has drawn fresh attention from philosophers seeking, as Plato did, to think the obscure ground on which all appearing depends.