more real than the implaced thing; it is itself situated in increasingly intellective and ever more elevated kinds of place: material things are in the world’s body (i.e., the cosmos), which is in the World Soul, which is in the Intellect, and so on. There is a virtual shell game of steadily improving implacement in which each place-level is at once sustained and surpassed in the next until we reach the ultimate level of the One that provides (again in Plotinus’s phrase) “the place of the intelligible world.” This escalating model of implacement can be regarded as an attempt to reconcile Aristotelian encasement with Platonic ascension to the final forms of things.69
The intellective or noetic nature of place was a theme throughout the history of Neoplatonic thought, for which place was a central theme for four continuous centuries—from Plotinus (A.D. ca. 205–260) to Simplicius (who flourished after A.D. 529). The two thinkers who pursued this particular theme furthest, however, were Damascius and Proclus. For Damascius, who served in the sixth century as the last head of the Athenian branch of the Neoplatonic school, place in general exhibits its power and superiority by its ability to measure what is in place. The positioning of the parts of something as well as the size of that something are measured by the place it is in. The measure (metron) is conceived as a mold or outline into which the implaced thing is set: “Place is as it were a sort of outline (proüpographē) of the whole position (thesis) and of its parts, and so to say a mould (tupos) into which the thing must fit, if it is to lie properly and not be diffused, or in an unnatural state.”70 As the idea of mold indicates, far from being a measure that proceeds in terms of numbers, placial measure is more like a shaping force that acts to hold off the diffusion inherent in prime matter. Such measuring resembles measuring through more than measuring out: it is through the configuration of a given place that the measure of a thing-in-place is taken.71 Rather than giving exact quantitative assessments—which require a rigid ruler of some sort—place as metron is more plastic than it is rigid, with the result that, as Sorabji comments, “it can allow for a variety of positionings, as it does in the case of the moving heavens.”72 Aristotle’s obsessive question as to what kind of place the heavens occupy is here answered by the view that they occupy a nonrigid, molded place—not entirely unlike the receptive regions proffered by primordial chōra, which is also characterized by Plato as acting like a mold. Such a place, precisely by virtue of its measuring power, ranks as superior to all the particular places it encompasses. Simplicius, commenting on Damascius, brings out the assumption at stake here: “The nature of the measure is superior to the nature of the measured and is not in need of the same things as [the measured] is.”73 Given this assumption, it is clear why Neoplatonists tend to give priority to places that are noetic in nature.
But the matter is more complicated than this. Proclus (ca. 411–485), a quintessential Neoplatonist, considered place to be a body and not just something around a body (or through which a body moves, or in which it is located). Yet, despite its corporeality, place is at the same time immobile, indivisible, and above all immaterial. Place an immaterial body? Proclus is driven to this intriguing idea in an effort to imagine an adequate vehicle for the World Soul. Such a vehicle must be immaterial—that is, must lack the dissipative effects of prime matter—if it is to escort anything as pure as the World Soul. Indeed, the place of the World Soul “must be the most immaterial of all bodies, of those that move as well as of the immaterial ones among those that move.”74 The only candidate for such a sheerly immaterial place is light and, more especially, supracelestial light. This latter, hinted at in Plato’s Myth of Er, is luminous without being literal illumination. Proclus appropriates this most diaphanous of media as a model for place of all kinds and in particular for that place which is “the luminous vehicle of the World Soul.”75 This is not sheer spiritualism, for there is a distinctive geocosmic specificity in Proclus’s model of the universe.
Let us then conceive two spheres, one made of a single light, the other of many bodies, the two equal to each other in volume. But seat one concentrically with the other, and on implanting (embibazein) the other in it, you will see the whole cosmos residing in its place, moving in the immobile light.76
Instead of thinking of the cosmos as an isolated island in an empty universe, Proclus contends that the physical world is coextensive with the luminous supracelestial sphere. As a form of light, this sphere is bodily and elemental; but as a place, it is immaterial. To be immaterial in this manner, however, is to be quite dynamic: the sphere of light is “called place (topos) as being a certain shape (tupos) of the whole cosmic body, causing unextended things to be extended. . . . [Such a] place is animated through the primal soul and has a divine life, being stationary, self-moving intrinsically, [even if it is not] externally active.”77 The sphere of supracelestial light is a Place of places, for it is the vehicle of the World Soul as well as the very place of the cosmos—at once its center and periphery, situating everything in between. Nowhere is there not such light; wherever there is something, it is there in the light—there somewhere, there in a particular place within the absolute Place of the universe. I capitalize this Proclean Place to suggest that it is an adumbration of infinite space. As “supracelestial,” the ultimate sphere of light has a peculiar standing: as bodily, it has sufficient density to count as a place (thus is able to mold, measure, etc.), and yet, as immaterial, it is not the positive infinity of the physical universe that will be the obsession of seventeenth-century speculation. If not yet strictly infinite, however, the supracelestial sphere can be considered absolute: it “forms a kind of absolute place against which the cosmos can rotate and other things move.”78
What Proclus teaches us is that in Neoplatonic thinking there is no contradiction between the bodily and the noetic character of place. A place like the supracelestial sphere is composed of light—it is corporeal—and yet it ranks high in the ascending noetic scale of being. This vision is in many ways the exact converse of the Atomist view of place. Where place for the Atomists is mechanical and physical, that is, bodily and material (and nothing else), place for the Neoplatonists is dynamic and intellective—and one thanks to the other. Moreover, indivisibility now pertains to place, not to atoms: as Proclus puts it bluntly, “Place is an indivisible body.”79 The immateriality of place also allows Neoplatonists to escape the confines of the Aristotelian container model, whose resolute physicalism dictates that the encompassing surface of place has to be material if this surface is to secure sensible bodies in place. Once it is agreed that place need not be physical, place can effect more than delimitation and location: it can preserve and order, support and sustain, raise up and gather. The singular inertia of a material surface is replaced by the plural dynamics of an immaterial presence. The dynamics can be forceful—even holding up bodies from a quasi-gravitational downward pull—as well as subtle. The subtlety is evident both in the nonnumerical measuring power of place and in such ideas as the situatedness of all things in “the luminous vehicle of the World Soul.”
A Neoplatonic approach to place vindicates the common conviction that place always implies some sort of quantity (i.e., some amount of “room”) while also always involving a set of distinctive qualities (as is indicated in such expressions as a “pleasant place,” a “dangerous place”). Just as it is advantageous not to have to tie the quantum of place to arithmetical determination (or else we find ourselves in the midst of land surveys, property lines, and the like), so it is helpful not to limit the qualitative aspects of place to literally sensible properties. Thus Proclus’s idea of a preternatural “light above the Empyrean”80 enables us to draw on the panoply of properties of a natural phenomenon such as light while not enclosing ourselves in the straitjacket of a reductive physics. The immateriality of the noetic notion of place also rejoins Epicurus’s idea of “intangible substance”—without, however, exacting a commitment to a macro- or microvoid. As corporeal, the universe is plenary and not vacuous; but as immaterial, it enjoys the flexibility required for the empowerment and determination of things in place. This conception also artfully avoids the awkward dichotomy inherent in the Stoic view that the world is plenary whereas what lies beyond the world is vacuous. Moreover, when place is recognized as immobile as well as indivisible and immaterial, place can assume an absolute status: as when Syrianus, Proclus’s master, proclaims that “an extension goes
