The Receptacle of Becoming

The following is an amended excerpt from the author's doctoral thesis: Myth in the Timaeus: A Study of the Mythological Underpinnings of the Platonic Cosmology. The purpose of the excerpt is merely to point out that the best way to understand Plato's very confounding description of the 'Receptable of Becoming' - the 'ground' of all things - is to realize that it is a philosophical development from mythological precedents. In particular, as with other aspects of Plato's cosmology, the mythological models are taken from the distinctive cultus of Athens (and Attica) with the goddess Ge - "our mother and nurse" - being the parallel with the mysterious 'Receptacle' just as Hephaestos is the mythological model for Plato's Demiurge.  

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An aspect of the Platonic cosmology that is sometimes described as unique and innovative, is the Receptacle of Becoming. This is indeed a strange conception, and one of the most mysterious and obscure of the Locrian's teachings. Having made a new beginning to his speech at 47A Timaeus returns to a distinction he had made at the outset between two orders of existence; the intelligible, eternal model and its visible copy. But now he explains that the copy is not self-subsistent, "it needs the support," as Cornford says," of a medium, just as a reflection requires a mirror to hold it." This medium is the Receptacle.


It is, Timaeus admits, "a form difficult and obscure..." and he makes several attempts to describe its nature. He explains that, in the world of visible things, it alone has any continuous existence. The primary bodies such as fire, water and so on are merely qualities and not substances; they are fleeting appearances in the Receptacle, which alone remains unchanged. He compares the Receptacle to a mass of plastic material, and to gold, to illustrate its malleability. Yet, he says, the Receptacle is wholly passive and has no qualities of its own - it is purely substance.

 

Students of the Timaeus have debated and continue to debate what Plato had in mind in this section of the dialogue, and they have searched the teachings of earlier thinkers for some parallel in vain. It is one of the most confounding of the Locrian's doctrines. There is no evidence that it was a Pythagorean teaching and there is no obvious precedent for it among the other Presocratic cosmologies. It may be compared, in some respects, to Hesiod's 'Chaos' perhaps, but Hesiod could certainly not be the immediate inspiration for the idea. Even more than the Demiurge it stands out as a remarkable leap from no obvious starting point in Greek cosmological thought.


A possible clue to this strange conception lies not so much in Timaeus' rather inadequate attempts to describe what has no nature, but in the two names he calls it. We should heed Plato's own admission that the Receptacle is, mysteriously, beyond definition and description, but we should also note well the few clues he does provide. At 50D Timaeus likens the Receptacle to a "mother". At 49A he likened it to a "nurse". 'Mother' and 'Nurse' - these are the two concrete descriptions given to the amorphous Receptacle of the cosmos; it is compared to other things (such as gold) but it is directly and explicitly called 'Mother' and 'Nurse'.


To some scholars this merely compounds the mystery. Guthrie, for instance, finds the dual simile inexplicable and in particular cannot see any way in which the Receptacle functions as 'nurse'. He complains that since "there [is] no obvious similarity between a receptacle and a nurse, Plato might have done better to omit 'nurse' and keep to the mother image." The maternal character of the Receptacle is plain enough, that is - it is womb-like and so on - but how is it also a 'nurse'? How does this 'mother' 'nurse' creation or whatever it is it nurses? Nothing of what Timaeus proceeds to tell us of the Receptacle sheds any light on these questions; the analogy is not pursued. Mothers nurse their offspring, of course, but this act would seem to contradict the otherwise entirely passive character of the Receptacle. What does Plato have in mind?

 

If we are reading the Timaeus with the understanding that the Hephaistos mythos and the Athenian myths of the earthborn form the Receptacle's mythological underpinnings then both of these names, 'Mother' and 'Nurse' make at least some sense. The true nature of the Receptacle remains as obscure as ever, to be sure, but at least one of its precedents is revealed. Plato is alluding to the figure of Ge and to the earth itself. In the mythology of the earthborn there is a play upon the ambiguities of mothering and nursing. Ge is mother in the sense that she gives birth to Erechtheus and, by extension, to all of the Athenians. She is nurse in the sense that she nurtures her children through the provision of agricultural bounty and the free exploitation of her resources. The Receptacle is "mother and nurse" inasmuch as it is like the earth. It is like the fertile soil that is moulded and remoulded, worked and reworked, by the ploughman's tools, the unchanging earth that bears diverse crops year after year and that endures as human settlements and even whole civilizations come and go.


Plato does not develop this in these very dense and obscure passages, but earlier in Timaeus' speech, in the context of the cycles of the celestial bodies, the earth is referred to as "our nurse". Given that these are the only two occasions in Timaeus' discourse where he resorts to the 'nurse' analogy, we may suspect some connection. In one of Plato's fullest references to the earth-born myth in the Menexenus, Socrates describes the soil from which the Athenians were born as "our mother and nurse". Given that the Receptacle passage and this passage are the only two places in all of Plato's works where we have the 'Mother' and 'Nurse' images together, we may again suspect a connection. It seems that, when composing his description of the strange Receptacle, Plato had the goddess Ge somewhere in mind.


The Presocratic character of Timaeus' cosmology must again be stressed. Myth is being recast into a different vocabulary. There is no suggestion that Plato has slavishly or crudely based the Receptacle upon this mythological model, but at least the notion that the Receptacle is 'Mother and Nurse' can be traced to that source. There is enough evidence to maintain that the goddess Ge was at times not far from Plato's thoughts when he described the Receptacle in those terms. It is another instance where ideas and motifs from the earth-born myth inform the teachings of Timaeus of Locri.

 

This does not provide a full explanation of the Receptacle by any means, but it is a useful and constructive point from which to view it in new ways. It provides a context for the understanding of the gold analogy that Timaeus employs, for instance. When Timaeus says that the Receptacle is like gold he is referring to one of the properties of the metal that make it sacred: its unparallelled malleability, symbolic of materia prima. But in Athens gold was also emblematic of autochthony and featured as the sacred metal of the Attic cults. On the grounds of the metal's malleability the analogy with the "stuff" of the Receptacle is apt, but if the Receptacle is, mythologically speaking, Ge, the analogy is even more appropriate.


The autochthons are the golden race gestating as embryonic metals, gold, in the womb of the earth. Gold was especially associated with Erechtheus. Even in Plato's time noble-born Athenian infants were presented with a gold necklace to symbolize their autochthony and their descent from him. When considering the gold analogy we should note not only the metallurgical reasons for it, but also take account of the full mystique of the metal and its associations in Athenian mythology in particular.



@Copyright, R. Blackhirst, 2020