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endymions_bowerA friend recently asked me for an overview of μέθεξις, "participation", in Plato; I thought I'd share my response here:
On methexis, I would say that treating it exclusively or even primarily as mimesis ("imitation", e.g., the relationship between an image and that which it portrays) is indeed shortsighted from a properly Platonic perspective.
In the first place, methexis has an almost heuristic value in Plato's work. It is essentially the "safe" approach to epistemic problems counseled by Socrates in the Phaedo, which is extensively problematized in the Parmenides, and in the Philebus is revealed to be supervenient upon a more ontologically primitive process of imposing limits upon continua.
We find that the theory of participation in forms is also supervenient upon two very important forms of experience. The first is the erotic relationship explicated in the Phaedrus and the Symposium (I've written about this in "Plato's Gods and the Way of Ideas"). Here, the primordial experience of divine beauty causes us, to varying degrees, to draw forth ideality from our experiences of mortal beauty and love, as a recollection, ultimately, of the Gods, and of the God whose beauty marked us before our incarnation, but expressed through the triangular relationship with other mortal beings through the ever-receding "form".
The other is presented in the Timaeus (I've discussed this in "Animal and Paradigm in Plato"; see also this piece I wrote for Polytheist.com). Here, we have the primal gaze of one God upon another (the same as in the symposium of the Gods discussed in the Phaedrus), from out of which arises the impulse to share the experience of beauty by giving order to other things, essentially by viewing everything through the lens, so to speak, of the God who is the object of the gaze. In this sense, the encounter between the Demiurge and the Paradigm is the divine equivalent of the erotic encounter between mortals in the Phaedrus and the Symposium—both are productive of "form" and of the "participation" relationship in the flux of time.
It is important as well to note that in the Timaeus, there is evidently only really one form, strictly speaking, namely "Animality". The other forms are ultimately dependent upon this root of all form and derive their sense from their relationship to the basic project of being animal. Every true form is ultimately a way of being alive, of being sentient in time.
On methexis, I would say that treating it exclusively or even primarily as mimesis ("imitation", e.g., the relationship between an image and that which it portrays) is indeed shortsighted from a properly Platonic perspective.
In the first place, methexis has an almost heuristic value in Plato's work. It is essentially the "safe" approach to epistemic problems counseled by Socrates in the Phaedo, which is extensively problematized in the Parmenides, and in the Philebus is revealed to be supervenient upon a more ontologically primitive process of imposing limits upon continua.
We find that the theory of participation in forms is also supervenient upon two very important forms of experience. The first is the erotic relationship explicated in the Phaedrus and the Symposium (I've written about this in "Plato's Gods and the Way of Ideas"). Here, the primordial experience of divine beauty causes us, to varying degrees, to draw forth ideality from our experiences of mortal beauty and love, as a recollection, ultimately, of the Gods, and of the God whose beauty marked us before our incarnation, but expressed through the triangular relationship with other mortal beings through the ever-receding "form".
The other is presented in the Timaeus (I've discussed this in "Animal and Paradigm in Plato"; see also this piece I wrote for Polytheist.com). Here, we have the primal gaze of one God upon another (the same as in the symposium of the Gods discussed in the Phaedrus), from out of which arises the impulse to share the experience of beauty by giving order to other things, essentially by viewing everything through the lens, so to speak, of the God who is the object of the gaze. In this sense, the encounter between the Demiurge and the Paradigm is the divine equivalent of the erotic encounter between mortals in the Phaedrus and the Symposium—both are productive of "form" and of the "participation" relationship in the flux of time.
It is important as well to note that in the Timaeus, there is evidently only really one form, strictly speaking, namely "Animality". The other forms are ultimately dependent upon this root of all form and derive their sense from their relationship to the basic project of being animal. Every true form is ultimately a way of being alive, of being sentient in time.
