is such.”49 For room or space to combine place and void, it must be at least as capacious as void; hence it must be as infinite as the void it coadunates with place. With the Stoics, therefore, we take a concerted step toward the view that space, affording room and as modeled on the void, is—properly and primarily—infinite.
III
Place is animated through the primal soul and has a divine life.
—Proclus, cited by Simplicius
It is likely that place first enjoyed the divine illumination, especially the place of more complete and perpetual things.
—Simplicius, with reference to Damascius
Neoplatonic notions of place and space take account of Stoic, Epicurean, and earlier Atomist conceptions—while always addressing themselves explicitly to Plato and even more especially to Aristotle. In many respects, then, Neoplatonists confirm ideas and distinctions that we have already encountered. Iamblichus (A.D. ca. 250–ca. 325), for example, distinguishes “limit” and “boundary” in a manner reminiscent of the distinction to which my discussion of Aristotle progressed in the last chapter.50 Syrianus (active in the fifth century A.D.) speaks of “room” in a sense that directly recalls Chrysippus: “Extension goes through the whole cosmos and receives into itself the whole nature of body . . . conferring room (chōra) and receptacle and boundary and outline and all suchlike upon all things that fill up the visible cosmos.”51 The extension that gives room is designated by the same term (diastēma) as that used by many previous thinkers, but here its meaning is not restricted to mere “interval” construed as a span or gap or interstice between or within determinate entities (whether atoms or bodies). For a Neoplatonist such as Syrianus, diastēma refers to the boundless and immobile and (usually) incorporeal spread-outness that “goes through the whole cosmos,” a cosmos no longer distinguished from the universe. Such extreme expansiveness is coextensive with what Syrianus calls intriguingly “a different body, the more universal one.”52 This body is in turn identified with “broad, shared place”—place so broad as to have no effective limits.53 The more we push the roomfulness of extension, however, the closer we come to the quite modern idea of a space that in its uncompromised infinity is considered “absolute.”
Thus far we find ourselves on more or less familiar terrain. What do the Neoplatonists introduce that is novel? At least two basic lines of thought.
(1) The first is that there are more kinds of place, each with more sorts of power, than Aristotle dreamed of. Plotinus strikes the opening note in his Enneads: “The place of the intelligible world is the place of life and the very principle and source of the soul and the Intellect.”54 Both kinds of place here mentioned—that of the “intelligible world” and that of “life”—are unreducible to the physical surrounder made paradigmatic by Aristotle in the Physics. Once Pandora’s box is opened in this fashion, there is no limit to the sorts of place one can consider as fully valid instances. When Aristotle spoke of the mind as “the place of forms” in the De Anima, he was speaking metaphorically. But when Iamblichus talks of “formal place,” he is not ascribing place to forms by means of a trope. He means straightforwardly that forms—in the Platonic sense—possess their own proper sort of place, to be distinguished from physical place as well as from the place of life and from what Iamblichus calls “intrinsic place.”55 The claim of variety comes paired with a claim concerning the plurality of the powers of place. As Richard Sorabji remarks, “It is because the concept of place has so many other applications [than simply surrounding] that a dynamic conception is required to fit all the cases.”56 When Aristotle said that place “has some power,” he meant the particular power of encompassing the physical things it contains. Iamblichus does not deny this power—especially if it is not merely an external delimiting function but one that bestows boundary (horizein)—yet he insists that place possesses a set of distinctive strengths beyond that of surrounding (periechein).
One has to conceive place not only as encompassing and establishing in itself the things existing in place, but as sustaining them by one single power. Regarded thus, place will not only encompass bodies from outside, but will fill them totally with a power which raises them up. And the bodies sustained by this power, falling down by their proper nature, but being raised up by the superiority of place, will thus exist in it.57
Iamblichus’s own list of the plenipotentiary powers of place includes, then, supporting, elevating, and filling up. Underwriting this list is the basic twofold action of
•raising up bodies that would otherwise fall into the degradation of prime matter, filling them with a power that elevates them;
•drawing together bodies and parts of bodies that are already dissipated from their contact with prime matter, the lowest form of existence in the Neoplatonic universe: “gathering together the scattered ones.”58
“Up” and “together” are thus to be added to the “around” and “in” of the repertoire of placial powers. To be implaced is not just to be cozily contained by an encircling surface but to be sustained by powers that ensure that what is in place will be inherently stronger for having been there. If the Aristotelian model of containment makes possible definition and location, the Iamblichean model of sustaining engrafts the dynamism of implacement onto what exists in place. This is why Iamblichus says expressly that “place is naturally united with things in place”59—instead of just surrounding them or offering them “bare extension” (diastēma psilon), much less (as the Stoics are held to assert) merely “supervening upon them” (paruphistasthai). To be “united with” (sumphuēs) is to be dynamically linked with something—to make a difference not just in its shape or form but in its very being or reality (ousia). Place is thus “never separate from [a body’s] first entrance into existing things and from the principal reality.”60 Through place, reality is reached. Through reality, place is maintained.
Indeed, place has its own being, on the basis of which it is a “cause” (aitia) and not something merely inert or passive (argos, adranēs)—something caused by something else in turn. As Simplicius points out in the sixth century A.D., the essence of something and its place are difficult to distinguish, driving him to posit an “essential place” that is “naturally united with substance [i.e., the substance of what is in place].”61 For Iamblichus and Simplicius alike, a place “has reality in itself and “has an active power as well as an incorporeal and definitive reality.”62 In attributing such power and reality to place, these authors contest Aristotle’s denial of place’s intinsic causal power. Not only does place have such a power, it is a causal power: it is “a power that acts” (drastērios dunamis).63
(2) The second new line of thought is that the less material place is, the more powerful it becomes. This notion derives from the basic premise that “everywhere the incorporeal reality ranks as prior to the corporeal one.”64 It follows that places incorporeal in nature will be superior in effective power to material places. Another corollary is that incorporeal places will be more powerful than anything physical they can be said to contain: as Iamblichus says, “Place, being incorporeal, is superior to the things that exist in it; and as something more independent it is superior to those things which are in need of and wanting to be in place.”65 The power of incorporeal place is even exerted over extension itself: instead of being dependent on a pregiven cosmic or universal extendedness, place generates the very spread-outness of the things it serves to situate.66 Iamblichus explicitly contrasts this view with that of the Stoics—who are said to hold that “place subsists upon bodies”67—and claims to have rejoined Archytas: “Clearly he assumes place to be of a higher rank than things that act or are acted upon.”68
In Iamblichus—that exemplary Neoplatonic thinker of place—we see the
