Places are thus void spaces: “microvoids,” as we might call them. Even if microvoids are never actually vacuous—Atomists’ claims notwithstanding—they are instances of extension at the most elementary level. Microvoids exist not only between container and contained (which for Strato are far less snugly fitting than Aristotle had imagined) but also within a given material body. Hence they pertain to two of the three aspects of atomic extension neglected by Epicurus: interiors and parts of primary bodies. In fact, they are coextensive and isometric with the interiors and parts of actual bodies that fill them. At the limit, the totality of microvoids may even be coextensive with the “cosmic body” that is equivalent to the complete physical universe.30 It is not certain that Strato espoused this extreme position, but he did maintain that any given microvoid is an integral part of cosmic extension and not a mere lacuna in this extension. Hence he managed to put together what Epicurus failed to combine: the extension of the infinitely large and the extension of the infinitesimally small.
Strato also was known in the classical world for having devised the most convincing denial of Aristotle’s notion of natural places, that is, places proper to given elements. According to Strato, every element is heavy and thus falls downward by its sheer weight. If fire and air escape upward, this movement is due to a process of ekthlipsis, that is, being “squeezed” up by the compression of other more forceful elements. By thinking this way, Strato agreed with Epicurus and the earlier Atomists in rejecting the idea of preexisting places in the void. There is indeed differential direction in the void, but this is determined by chance collisions of atoms and not by the power of extant cosmic places.31 And if there are no places carved out of the cosmos in advance, then it is all the more likely that the universe lying beyond the world is something infinitely extended: and this universe is more aptly characterized in spatial rather than placial terms. Just as for Aristotle there is no space apart from place, for Strato there is no place apart from space—no place that is not merely a portion of a much more encompassing whole whose spatiality is both incredibly large and unimaginably small.
If the unimaginably small is a distinctive concern of the Atomists and of Strato, the incredibly large is what increasingly preoccupies ancient philosophers in the wake of Aristotle and Epicurus. One exemplary form of this preoccupation is found in the Stoic proposal that an endless empty void surrounds the finite and place-bound cosmos. The explicit reason for this proposal—which continued to be widely influential in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance—is that the excess fire generated in periodic cosmic conflagrations has to go somewhere, since the volume of this fire is greater than the finite cosmos can contain. This “somewhere to go” is termed “room” (chōra), where “room” connotes spaciousness, that is, unoccupied space to which to flee.32 The extramundane void is what provides room for world-destructive conflagratory fires.33 Does this mean that such a room-giving void is a place? Cleomedes, writing in the first century A.D., claimed that the void must be “capable of receiving body.”34 This would seem to make it some kind of place. Yet the Stoics took seriously Aristotle’s admonition that the void is “that in which there is no body,”35 and such a void would be a very tenuous place indeed. Perhaps we may say that something (e.g., the cosmic fire) can be received by the extramundane void but cannot occupy it in any strict sense, that is, cannot be implaced there. It can enter the void yet cannot remain there—cannot find therein its own place.
It is an axiom of Stoic cosmology that the void is infinite and place finite.36 With no bodies strictly occupying it—in contrast with the ancient Atomist “void outside”—the Stoic void is neither bounding nor bounded. According to Chrysippus (280–206 B.C.), “the void beyond the cosmos is infinite, unbounded (apeiron) in the literal sense of the word; it has neither beginning nor middle nor end.”37 In fact, the Stoic void lacks both bodies and boundaries: it is “an interval empty of body, or an interval unoccupied by body,”38 where to be an “interval” (diastēma) is precisely not to be a place for a body. Cleomedes characterizes such a void as something “very simple, since it is incorporeal and without contact, neither has shape nor takes on shape, neither is acted upon in any respect, nor acts.”39 In other words, void is an empty extension that has taken the place of place itself: it has (de)voided place. If this is beginning to sound like “negative cosmology”—as is already indicated in the very word “in-finite” (and in a-peiron)—we can at least say, in a more positive vein, that the Stoic void is infinitely large, infinitely absorptive, and altogether external to the cosmos. It gives room, if not place proper, to an expanding cosmos. It is a macrovoid outside the cosmos—the very converse of a microvoid internal to the cosmos and to bodies in that cosmos.
Such an extramundane void is a negatité (to borrow a useful term from Sartre): even if not (a) nothing, it is also not an entity, neither a thing nor a place. It stands in stark contrast with the packed and plenary character of the cosmos, which for the Stoics does not possess void of any kind—neither in the form of microvoids nor as the tiny interstices between polygons that are mentioned in the Timaeus. The cosmos has everything the void lacks; it is full of places and bodies, and full of one in being full of the other—double plenitude.
Chrysippus declared place to be “what is occupied through and through by an existent, or what can be occupied by an existent and is through and through occupied whether by one thing or by several things.”40 Nothing empty, nothing a lacking, nothing tenuous here! Place is a dense fabric in the even denser place-world it composes. Guaranteeing coherence and connection in this cosmic plenum is the pneuma, the cosmic breath or spirit that circulates throughout the plenary world. Composed of fire and air, the pneuma is an active force that transmutes Plato’s and Aristotle’s geometric continuum of discrete bodies-in-places into a dynamic network of implaced and interpenetrating bodies.41 Proceeding by a combination of habit (hexis) and tension (tonos), connection (sunecheia) and sympathy (sumpatheia), the pneuma constitutes “the physical field which is the carrier of all specific properties of material bodies.”42 This field is a close concinnation of places; it is as place-full as the void is sheerly space-rich.
“Under Chrysippus’s guidance,” writes David Hahm, “the Aristotelian cosmos of elements, each moving by nature to its own concentric sphere, is finally given a comfortable home in the infinite void.”43 Yet there is a darker side to Stoic physics: isolation, not comfort, looms. The cosmos, the physical world as we know it, is “an island embedded in an infinite void.”44 To be an island, however replete with places and bodies, is to be sequestered in an ocean of indifference. Moreover, if the only void is the void “outside the world,”45 this leaves precious little leeway for maneuver in this world.
The Stoics were not insensitive to the problems inherent in the bifurcation of the universe into empty and full, void and place, the incorporeal and the corporeal, with material bodies brought forcibly into place by inescapable pneumatic forces. To address this dilemma, some Stoics speculated that a third entity is required to break the gridlock of their fiercely dichotomous universe. Thus Chrysippus “distinguishes an unnamed entity, different from void or place, that is capable of being occupied by being, but is only partly occupied.”46 This third thing is none other than “room.” Room is not just space for roaming—as it was for Epicurus—but extension allowing for possible occupation. Extension and room, diastēma and chōra, come together in a single complex, or more exactly a duplex, entity: cosmos-cum-void.47 The duplexity is evident in Sextus Empiricus’s assertion that for the Stoics the universe is “the external void together with the world.”48 Or we might say that void and place merge in space, and they do so in the room space furnishes.
Yet this leaves us wondering if “room” and “space”—both terms being translations of chōra—are not merely terms of compromise, posited to conceal the abyss opened up by the diremptive difference between place (topos) and the void (kenon) that lies at the heart of Stoic cosmology. This is not to say that the compromise in question represents an admixture of equal parts of place (or world) and of void. Void is given the major emphasis insofar as its infinity is presupposed by the very room that promises to heal
