The word has appealed to me for a long time as it captures the reality of metaphysical ideas such as soul and psyche. They have a virtual reality that is not appreciated by skeptics, and they have an ontological status of "not real" that is not appreciated by fundamentalist true believers. Calling the story of Christ a "myth" for example is similar but not as powerful as thinking of it as being a force in the metaxy. In the metaxy (the in between state) it becomes clear that there is a force on the real world. Also we cant simply create the metaxy out of a force of imagination or will... it happens, it is there.
I think of all my work as a psychotherapist as in the metaxy. I am not there to judge the ontological status of peoples stories as real or imagined, true or false etc. (unless they really are mentally ill - and even then I tend to stick to the metaxy as long as I can).
Given all that I am not sure if I am using the word right... I came across it in Hillman. I have found other references. Other people do use it and it has its origins in Plato. I have added a few quotes and links below in this email at the end past your Original Message. I have used the word by the astrologer Liz Greene? Obviously a useful idea for astrologers!
I have started a Wikipedia entry - (just copied this email in full) and you may want to edit that as you find more on the meaning of the word. Feel free too to remove anything from you there you don't want in that semi public space (so far it is all under my username) It might be a nice project to create a proper entry!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Waltzzz/Metaxy
Appendix:
http://home.salamander.com/~wmcclain/ev-rcs-matrix.html
Principle of metaxy reality
The divine as phenomenon
Immanentist constructions which attempt to pull the divine into the phenomenal world:
* The gnostic political movements.
* The metastatic apocalypse.
* The neo-platonic revival of the 15th century.
"God" as a synonym for the demiurge is an ancient usage. More recently, he is sometimes a space alien, or a scientist in another universe.
http://home.salamander.com/~wmcclain/ev-advice.html
The In-Between. One of Voegelin's favorite symbols is Plato's metaxy, the "in-between" of subject and object, man and God, time and eternity, mortality and immortality. We exist at neither of the "poles" in this "tension", but in the reality between them. It is an error to believe that we can move to a really existing end point in either direction. The "poles" are directions or "indices", not objects we can pull into the metaxy.
http://www.ucc.ie/academic/sociology/staff_szakolezai.htm
the end of metaphysics?:
Since the mid-19th century, but going back to the 'radical Enlightenment', it is widely assumed that the critique of religion, and the end of metaphysics, is the starting point of all forward-looking social theory. Comte's positivism was thought to end all religion and philosophy, Marx proclaimed the hatred of gods as the Preface to his doctoral dissertation, Nietzsche radicalised the critique of metaphysics, Heidegger declared Nietzsche the last metaphysician, Derrida declared Heidegger's 'Being' as the metaphysics of presence … can it be continued? Should it be continued? At the same time when this dead end was reached, a series of thinkers deeply steeped in the Central European tradition, and starting from Nietzsche, but then taking further inspiration from Plato, reached a completely different end-point: the reassertion of metaphysics. These include the Hungarian Karl Kerenyi, Bela Hamvas and Elemer Hankiss, the Czech Jan Patocka (the care of the soul), the Polish Julius Domanski (philosophy as a way of life), but also the Vienna-educated Eric Voegelin (metaxy, anamnesis), and the approach is also close to the works of influential French thinkers like Pierre Hadot (philosophy as a way of life, philosophical conversion) or Michel Foucault (the care of the self, parrhesia) in his last period. Following research done in some forthcoming publications, the aim is to develop along these lines a full-scale book project. The central concept of this project is the various, philosophical and religious approaches to conversion, arguing that nihilism can only be reversed by turning around. This project also incorporates the recent ideas of Agnes Horváth on Plato and the Florentine 'neo-Platonist', and will be done together with her.
http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/gthursby/fonda/dispg.html
Marc Fonda's Dissertation "My dissertation, defended April 28, 1995, is entitled "Examining the New Polytheism: A Critical Assessment of the Concepts of Self and Gender in Archetypal Psychology."
From Chapter 2:
http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/gthursby/fonda/ch2.html
To Hillman, the soul is the via regia into the world. Imagination and feeling are the means by which we come to apprehend and connect ourselves with those objects, persons, images that surround us. Casey informs us that the notion of the mundus imaginalis as an intermediator represents an "intermediate world...teeming with transmuted substances, stylized sensuous forms, and legions of figures each with a proper place....It is a world no longer human--or at least not exclusively or primarily human. It is another world, with another kind of reality...."63 For Richard Avens, in comparison, Hillman's notion of the soul as transhuman refers to a "realm of between or metaxy" and has the primary function of connecting "the human with the non-human world or, in the terms of the later Heidegger, to integrate earth and sky, the gods and mortals."64
http://www.artsci.lsu.edu/voegelin/EVS/EVS/PANEL4.html
Voegelin
In his unfinished History of Political Ideas Voegelin gives a thorough analysis of a number of thinkers as he traces the development of modernity's spiritual and political disorder and the degrees to which attempts to grapple with the problems aided in understanding or contributed to the deterioration. Voegelin's position gradually evolved into an understanding of the true nature of consciousness as the central issue, and, contra Husserl, it seemed to him that it was "ridiculous to pretend that there was nothing to consciousness but the consciousness of objects of the external world."29 From his understanding of Classic and Christian philosophy, and from his personal recollections of early childhood experiences that formed his own consciousness, he derived a theory of the center of consciousness as "the experience of participation, meaning thereby the reality of being in contact with reality outside myself,"30 reality here including all kinds of experiences, not only the spiritual, and these experiences are kept in balance in the soul. Following William James and Plato, Voegelin argued that the central experience is not in an isolated mind but in what Plato called the metaxy, the In-Between, and the most crucial In-Between experiences were those that involved response to the movements of divine presence. These experiences are expressed in linguistic symbols and therefore language participates in the metaxy character of consciousness. Voegelin believed that symbols participate equally in divine and human reality and signify the "divine reality in its presence itself "31 This is, of course, reminiscent of Heidegger's theory of language as expressing the presencing of Being, but for Heidegger Being is not God and there is no divinehuman encounter in which the human soul has the freedom to choose whether or not to respond.
Through his History of Political Ideas Voegelin traces the spiritual struggle in the human soul in its essential existence in tension toward the divine ground of its being. In Volume V, in a section entitled "The Problems of Modernity" where he is dealing with the period around the end of the sixteenth century, he says that "the compound of sentiments that we call 'modem' contains a will to self-assertion against the ancient model that is not less strong than the will to overcome medieval limitations by means of the model. The very opposition to antiquity has shaped the consciousness of modernity."32 Later, however, he would decide that this opposition was not consciously directed against antiquity.
Voegelin's theory of consciousness is presented in considerable detail in Anamnesis, and in Vols. IV and V of Order and History. Consciousness is "the specifically human mode of participation in reality"33 and the reality of this world is grounded in the divine ground of Being. "There are no things that are merely immanent."34 In other words, everything, not just human beings, is drawn toward the divine as much as it has material existence, an idea already clearly expressed in Plato's Phaedo [74d-75b]. There is nothing Beyond God for Voegelin, and God is the source of all things that come to be.
Since man is not completely immanent but is In-Between, he experiences his earthly existence as unrest and those who are most sensitive to the attraction to the ground of existence engage in searching, questioning, wondering. Their experience of divine reality engenders symbols which exist in the In-Between. "The man who asks questions, and the divine ground about which the questions are asked, will merge in the experience of questioning as a divinehuman encounter and reemerge as the participants in the encounter that has the luminosity and structure of consciousness....The ground is not a spatially distant thing but a divine presence that becomes manifest in the experience of unrest and the desire to know."35 The divine is a subjectivity which merges with human subjectivity and the human commitment to the search for our origins calls forth the divine presence, as the divine can move within the human soul and call forth a response, although the soul is also free to refuse and can demonically close itself against the divine presence. It is this demonic rejection that Voegelin sees as the principle source of the pneumopathological. disorders of modernity. The public order has been despiritualized, Christian transcendental experience has atrophied, souls have closed themselves off from Christianity, and the state has become entirely secular, all of which has had an effect
http://www.rogerwoolger.com/pages/death.html
When Aristotle, following his master, Plato, tried to summarize the knowledge of his day, he was obliged, after writing the Physics, to add another volume, "beyond" (meta) the realm of physics, which in Greek became the Metaphysics. Plato had already designated a metaxy or intermediary world of subtle spiritual forms that were not physical. Indeed, according to the eminent Indian scholar Ananda K. Coomeraswamy, Plato had already been influenced by the teachings of ancient India, for we find Plato's idea clearly expressed in the Hindu Upanishads as follows:
There are two states for man-the state in this world and the state in the next; there is also a third state, the state intermediate between these two, which can be likened to the dream [state]. While in the intermediate state a man experiences both the other states, that of this world and that in the next; and the manner whereof is as follows: when he dies he lives only in the subtle body, on which are left the impressions [samskaras, Skt] of his past deeds, and of those impressions is he aware, illumined as they are by the light of the Transcendent Self [atman, Skt]É
Brihadaranyaka Upanishad
This transcendent or intermediary world has been noticed in almost all cultures and traditions in one form or another. Buddhists from Tibet talk of the bardo realm in which many states of the spirit/soul, i.e. bardos , exist between lifetimes on earth. The Spiritualists in their teachings call it the Spirit World, following the great visionary Swedenborg who reported visiting its many dimensions. In his terminology, its "heavens" and "hells" were "states" corresponding to different port-mortem spiritual and moral conditions. (Swedenborg's work has so many parallels with Mahayana Buddhism that it led the Zen master D. T. Suzuki, to call him "the Buddha of the West"). In Celtic tradition the intermediary realm is often called the Middle Kingdom or the Faery World. Australian aborigine's call it the Dreamtime, the Sufis of Persia called it the alam al-mithal or Mythic World, which Henry Corbin has dubbed the mundus imaginalis.) Jung called it the collective unconscious, though this term tends to be grossly misunderstood. A good survey of depictions of the "otherworld" (Zaleski's term) from many cultures is to be found in Suki Miller's After Death: How People around the World Map the Journey after Death.
http://www.artsci.lsu.edu/voegelin/EVS/Panel102002.htm
Second, two clearly philosophical themes in Ibsen seem especially important since they do not only stand out within certain plays, but also mark out tensions between plays. Both of these are recognizably Voegelinian themes: the first being man’s life in the tension of the “in-between” (the Platonic metaxy) between the unchanging order of God and the ever-changing world of matter (see Voegelin 1978, e.g., pp. 111-115); the other being memory (anamnesis) as a crucial key to understanding and unlocking the human psyche (see ibid., pp. 3-51). With a keen eye for the ethical inadequacy of the extreme positions, combined with a realistic openness to life’s manifold challenges, we claim that Ibsen helps enrich Eric Voegelin’s understanding of the human condition on these two points, and several of his plays may indeed be read as a dramatic corollary to Voegelin’s works.
More links:
http://www.psybernet.co.nz/weblog/2002/08/metaxy.html
http://www.psybernet.co.nz/weblog/2002/08/metaxy.html
http://www.psybernet.co.nz/weblog/2003/01/plato-by-eric-voegelin.html
18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
Plato as a Referent for Life, August 9, 2001
Reviewer: Terence Harwick - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)
Oxford Don, Raghavan Iyer noted that the world is a fortunate place when there are two people alive -- at the same time -- who understand Plato. Eric Voegelin was clearly one of those people in the twentieth century. This material was originally published in Volume 3 of Order and History, the core of the magnus opus that Voegelin chose to publish during his life time.
I met Eric Voegelin once as a graduate student, and asked him, "why'd you publish all this stuff?" I've been digesting his answer ever since. It was "to resist totality and totalitarianism."
Particularly, seen from this standpoint, a clear core of this book is his articulation of the Platonic concept of "metaxy," or the in-between character of life. In philosophical terms, this refers most directly and fully to "in-between" the Agathon (e.g., see myth of the cave and the Divided Line in the Republic) and the apeiron (explored most directly and deeply in the Timaeus). For the philosophically uninitiated, it is possible to speak of this in more mundane terms.
An unstated corollary of Plato's notion of the "metaxy" is that life is always larger than our categories. From a Socratic/Platonic perspective, this may include but will entail more than the epistemological recognition that every way of seeing is a way of not seeing. The notion of the "metaxy" is most fundamentally a linguistic indice pointing to ontological plenty as the ground of life, albeit lived within bounds of existential scarcity. This is a notion commonly shared by the great civilizations of East and West. The notion of the "metaxy" underscores that life is lived within a tension between the "transcendent" and "immanent" dimensions of being.
When we lose track of this tension, as we have to a great extent in the modern world, and subscribe to reductive ideological notions/understandings of life -- and most particularly, when we imagine that we can encapsulate life within the pride of our own "enlightened" categories -- on a political plane, there may be little to constrain the prideful actions of ideologies, irrespective of whether their clothing is Red or Black, or whether it is "left" or "right." Irrespective of the political stripe, repression and murder become "justified" in the pursuit of an ideological aim -- which in Voegelin's philosophical terms is to dissolve the "metaxy" in the usual modernist mode, through immanetizing the transcendent "eschaton."
Voegelin's philosophical terms may sound remarkably abstract to the modern ear (recall Robert Dahl's silly review of Voegelin's The New Science of Politics for the American Political Science journal). Facile critiques such as Dahl's typically focus on the unfamiliar language while overlooking the elementary fact that what Voegelin is asking us to do in every aspect of his work is to take a journey that precisely allows us to see the world in terms other than that of our inherited climate of opinion. For those willing to be thorough scholars rather than merely play at it within the context of given suppositions, Voegelin's scholarship offers new vistas and incredibly rich fields of study. His scholarship offers the capacity to reflect upon and act in the world in a substantively grounded mode with implications for every discipline (see e.g., A.G. Ramos' New Science of Organizations).
I submit that a key to understanding this text and the greater body of his work at large is to grasp the central significance of the "metaxy" -- not as a concept within the history of ideas -- but as a life referent of perennial relevance to the recurring challenge of resisting sophistic pretensions and the inherited or emergent ideologies of any time and place.
This text demands a good deal. You'll develop insights into Plato available no where else. But for Voegelin, such studies were never a matter of antiquarian interest. They were a matter of developing meaningful referents for life. The value in this text is precisely in its yield, capable of resonating throughout your life and offering far more than the initial effort it will require of you.