Metaxy

Metaxy (μεταξύ) — “between” — is the Platonic term for the middle region that is neither one pole nor the other. Diotima in the Symposium names Eros as a daimon who is metaxy theou kai thnetou — between god and mortal — and the Phaedrus extends the structure: the winged soul, the chariot’s upward flight, the lover’s beholding of beauty that is neither the Form itself nor mere sensible object, all inhabit the between.

Hillman’s reading is definitive for the Seba tradition: “these attempts to describe Eros by the conventionally erotic fail to recognize the metaxy, the mediate nature of erotic experience. The compulsive urge of the behavior pattern is self-inhibited by the other end of the same eros spectrum. Eros, as intermediary, creates his own psychic space, his own world between” (Hillman 1972). The erotic is not reducible to compulsion nor to sublimation; it generates the middle region in which psyche itself is at home.

henry-corbin‘s mundus-imaginalis is the full theological elaboration of the metaxy: the ʿālam al-mithāl in Ibn ʿArabi is the world of imagination that stands between the sensible and the intelligible, and whose reality is precisely the reality of the between. Russell preserves the lineage: Corbin called Hillman’s Re-Visioning Psychology “the psychology of the resurgence of the Gods,” and Hillman in turn revered Corbin’s “great cosmology of the imagination, which refuses any chasm between psyche and world” (Russell 2023).

For the depth tradition, the metaxy is the classical ancestor of the imaginal, of the transcendent function, of every account of psyche as the middle region that mediates between matter and spirit.

Relationships

• plato-phaedrus
• eros-as-daimon
• mundus-imaginalis
• daimon
• transference
• image-as-psyche

Primary sources

• plato-phaedrus (Plato)
• plato-symposium (Plato)
• The Myth of Analysis (Hillman 1972)