Chōra and basho. A playing field between west and east.

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.