theorist of the essential relativity of place, used in departing from Aristotle. I cite from a celebrated statement of Theophrastus.
Perhaps place is not a substance in itself, but is predicated in relation to the order (taxis) and position (thesis) of bodies, according to their natures and powers, equally in the case of animals and plants and, generally, of things composed of different elements, whether animate or inanimate, that have a natural shape. For the order and position of these parts is relative to the whole being. Therefore each is said to be in its own space (chōra) through having its proper order, since each of the parts of a body would desire and demand its own space (chōra) and position (thesis).102
Theophrastus, Aristotle’s immediate successor in the Lyceum, opened the Hellenistic period in Greek philosophy; Philoponus is often considered the last great thinker of the same period. In between, Stoicism, Epicureanism, Skepticism, and Neoplatonism flourished. Yet Philoponus, the primary advocate of a purely empty extensiveness, was widely regarded as “a true upholder of Theophrastus”103—given that both thinkers attribute power to things in place rather than to place itself, and both believe that the ordering of things in place is the most important single effect of implacement.
The more closely you look at the critical span stretching from Theophrastus to Philoponus—already a first millennium!—the more one becomes convinced that the increasing interest in absolute or infinite space is shadowed at every step by an equal, though often less salient, concern with the importance of order and position in the process of implacement. Damascius’s conception of place as metron, for instance, entails an ordering of the “position” of the “parts” of something: the key words remain Theophrastian. Damascius gives the example of the head being situated above and the feet below in a human body, thereby illustrating that “the order and position of these parts is relative to the whole being.”104 Damascius also extends the relativist model to nonnatural places: “Even among incorporeal things there will be position according to their order.”105 Iamblichus as well, attests Simplicius, is Theophrastian in inspiration: “The divine Iamblichus bears witness to the same position [i.e., as adopted by Theophrastus],”106 namely, in his view that “place is of like nature with things in place.”107 Such likeness both facilitates and reflects the ordering of things in place: the more place is like what is being implaced, the better it can operate as an immanent agency of arrangement, and the more such an arrangement is realized, the more it exhibits a likeness between the things so ordered. (Much the same isomorphism is manifest in the shaking together of like with like that takes place in the primordial regions of the Timaean Receptacle.) Proclus, too, pays close attention to the power of position.
The cardinal points of the whole universe are fixed in it as a unity. For, if the oracles say that the cardinal points of the material universe are fixed in the aether above it, correspondingly we shall say, ascending, that the cardinal points of the highest universe are seated in that light.108
Indeed, not just cardinal points—which are relative to each other and to the directions they serve to specify—but the entire Neoplatonic universe of ascending/descending levels of being betokens a deeply relativist model of place. In this universe, where you are at in the scale of things—your being situated at a material or psychic or noetic level—has everything to do with the kind of being you possess. Position is relative not only to other members of the same level but to other levels in the ontological scale as well.
So powerful is the effect of this scalar model that Simplicius can claim that extension, far from being a universal feature of things, is found only at the lower levels. In the realm of intellective being, there are only unextended and incorporeal items, including the places of noetic items such as ideas and numbers. As descent is made into the realm of matter, extension becomes ever more crucial—an extension that applies to places as well as to things in places. This means that place becomes extended with bodies,109 and is not simply extended on its own and independently of bodies, as is implied on the model of Philoponean spatial and cosmical extension. Extension is thus an acquired attribute of place: “As the body that has position became extended through its decline, so also place that is the measure of position became extended, in the way that is possible for a measure that has declined from the unextended measurer.”110 In this statement of Simplicius, the Damascian idea of place as measure—intrinsically tied to the relativism of internal positions—is set within an emanationism of levels that is no less relativistic in implication. Speaking of place and time alike, Simplicius can comment that “their extension is not like that of other things, seen as they are as a mean between the unextended measurer and the extended objects measured.”111 To be “a mean between” is to have a position in a hierarchy of at least three levels, and thus to have a cosmic position that determines the very character of place and time themselves. Instead of being “God’s infinite sensoria” (Newton) or the universal forms of pure sensible intuition (Kant), place and time are creatures of the level of emanation on which they are situated.
Double positioning is at play, then, in the Neoplatonic universe: first, a structural positioning within the cosmic hierarchy (which determines, in turn, whether place is extended or not) and, second, the pinpointed positioning that is the work of extended place proper (about such place Simplicius says that “everywhere it is the position of bodies and the determination of their position”).112 Moreover, the first positioning makes possible the second: only when place becomes adequately extended at an intermediate level of the emanationist hierarchy can it begin to do its locational work. For only at this level is there a distinction to be made between the immediate, unique, and shared implacements that guarantee a complete positioning for any extended body.113 As a result, the scalar model in its Neoplatonic format allows Simplicius to adopt a relativism that is finally more radical than that of Theophrastus. Where Theophrastus had made “natural shape” (emmorphos phusis) responsible for the “order and position” of bodies, Simplicius attributes this ordering force to place: “Place is a certain arrangement and measure or demarcation of position.”114
V
The signs of the gods are perpetually scattered in places.
—Simplicius, In Aristotelis physicorum libros quattuor priores commentaria
Just as the Neoplatonic proclivity for absolutism in spatial matters harbors an unsuspected underside of place-relativism, so the latter tendency leads, by rebound as it were, to a proposal that encompasses both directions of thought. Only several sentences after the words quoted at the end of the previous paragraph—words that epitomize the relativistic position—Simplicius speculates that when particular positions are not just juxtaposed but “well arranged” (euthetismenoi), that is, “well positioned and well placed” (euthetoi kai eutopoi), they will contribute to the harmony of the whole of which they are parts. Ultimately, all bodies, once they are well arranged, will become inherent parts of the “whole universe,” and this universe itself will have its own place: “so there is, in truth, the whole place of the whole universe (holos topos tou holou kosmou), but it has its supreme position through the good arrangement in respect of its parts and through its whole good arrangement in respect of its parts.”115
This last claim is remarkable. On the one hand, there is a proper place of, or rather for, the entire cosmos. This place must be unique, since there is no other cosmos or anything else of comparable magnitude to which it could be relative. (The idea of multiple worlds, entertained by the Atomists and Epicurus, will not be taken seriously again for another thousand years.) In this regard, the single cosmic Place can be considered the “transcendent measure” of all other places, including those parts and places (and places-as-parts) of which it is composed.116 Concerning such a cosmically distinctive Place, Simplicius can say that “the essential place of the universe has stored up all the varying places and produces from within itself the proper measure of every position.”117 In this monolithic capacity, it is not unlike the Philoponean idea of “cosmical extension.” On the other hand,
