its “supreme position” does depend on a good arrangement that involves these parts in the following ways.
•The parts must be well arranged among themselves; this is what Simplicius means by the simple phrase “through the good arrangement of its parts.”
•The same parts must be well arranged in relation to the whole they compose—that is, the whole cosmos or universe (terms significantly not distinguished by Simplicius).
•Finally, the cosmos itself must be well arranged in relation to its own parts, both as particular parts and as a whole of parts. This is what Simplicius implies when he speaks of “its whole good arrangement in respect of its parts.”
Simplicius sums up this line of thought by observing that “in general, we do not only say that the parts have a well-arranged position in relation to each other and to the whole, but also that the whole has it in relation to its parts.”118
I single out this final position of Simplicius—himself the last great pagan Neoplatonist—for its special promise as an answer to a question that will preoccupy the rest of this chapter and the next three chapters: Is place, as well as space, essentially relative or absolute? Are they heteronomous in status, that is, dependent on other entities for their being and character, or autonomous, that is, able to stand on their own no matter what their parts (or constituents) and motions are? Simplicius’s response is that place/space is both absolute and relative. Not just both in the sense of an indifferent mixture, but both in the sense of one through the agency of the other. The place of the universe would not be absolute unless it were also relative—and relative in the particular ways just described. And it would not be relative—relative to the parts of which it is composed—unless these were the parts that, in proper arrangement, make up the cosmic whole. Put otherwise, the place of the universe is absolute in certain respects (e.g., in its transcendent all-measuring role) and relative in certain others (i.e., the three modes of relativity just singled out).
Simplicius’s model, ingenious and satisfying as it is in many respects, leaves us with two major unresolved questions. Is there a place of this world, the cosmos? Is there infinite space beyond the cosmos? Aristotle, of course, would respond negatively to both of these questions. Given that place on his view requires an unmoving and immediate inner boundary, the outer heaven cannot count as a place since it has no such boundary; and it is not set in any subsequent extracosmic space either, since there is “no place or void or time outside the [outer] heaven.”119 It was the audacity of Aristotle’s archrivals, the Atomists, not only to propose an unbounded void but also to argue that precisely because there is such a void the cosmos can be located in it. The void gives room for the world to be found within it—just as the world in turn gives “space for body” (in Philoponus’s phrase). It is clear that any such void is infinite in the sense of unbounded. As Hahm comments with reference to the Stoic void, “If there is any void at all beyond the cosmos, it is necessarily infinite, for there is nothing that can bound it.”120 But the void elicits its own disquieting questions: Is it necessarily empty (as its name, kenon, certainly implies and as the Stoics explicitly posited in the idea of a strictly external void)? If so, the cosmos will float in this void as an anchorless entity adrift in infinite space: “How can the cosmos remain intact though situated in an infinite void?”121 Or is it empty only in principle, being always filled in fact (as Philoponus holds)? But then it threatens to become a redundant entity or, rather, nonentity.
Yet no sooner do we give up on the idea of void—or perhaps just restrict its domain of application, as in Strato’s idea of the microvoid—than we run into other questions, at least equally difficult to resolve. Could the universe be at once infinite and plenary? If it were entirely full of bodies, there would then be no space for motion, and it would become a frozen Parmenidean One. Yet if it were not chock-full, we would need more than microvoids internal to bodies to allow for motion. Perhaps, after all (as the Atomists held), there are empty “intervals” between bodies. But how can we determine just how big such intervals would need to be in order to make motion possible? There seems to be no way of giving a generally satisfactory answer to this last question. Maybe because of this difficulty, the very idea of interval (diastema) was expanded by the Neoplatonists to become extension, ultimately the “spatial extension” posited by Philoponus. Yet this latter idea, especially under the guise of “cosmical extension,” returns us to the deeply perplexing issue of whether the cosmos itself has a place. A place for the cosmos may be asserted—as it is by Simplicius—but then we must ask: a place where? Is its place a place in the universe at large, that is, in a space that exceeds the world-place itself? And is such a space finite or infinite?
By this circuitous route, we return once again to Archytas, who is reported to have posed the following conundrum.
If I came to be at the edge, for example at the heaven of the fixed stars, could I stretch my hand or my staff outside, or not? That I should not stretch it out would be absurd (atopos), but if I do stretch it out, what is outside will be either body or place. . . . If it is always something different into which the staff is stretched, it will clearly be something infinite.122
Alexander of Aphrodisias claimed that this thought experiment comes to naught, since what is outside the cosmos is nothing at all, not even a void.
He will not stretch out his hand; he will be prevented, but prevented not as they say by some obstacle bordering the universe (to pan) on the outside, but rather by there being nothing (to meden einai). For how can anyone stretch something, but stretch it into nothing? How can the thing come to be in what does not even exist?123
Simplicius insists similarly that Archytas’s conundrum is question-begging: “In imagination it assumes in advance what it seeks to prove, that there is something, whether empty or solid, outside the universe.”124
Despite these telling objections, Archytas’s provocative puzzle kept arising in ancient and medieval debates, and it still haunts contemporary cosmological thinking. For it will always occur to the cosmologically curious to ask, what lies beyond the last boundary of the known world? If there is some thing there, then I can (at least in principle) get to this thing and even reach beyond it. If there is no thing, then there might be, not nothing (as Alexander assumes), but empty space. This observation indicates that Archytas’s exclusive alternative of “body or place” needs to be supplemented. If place is always bounded—as it is for Archytas and Aristotle alike—then it is not what we encounter when we stretch out our hand or staff beyond the final frontier of the cosmos. What such extracosmic stretching gets us into is something else, and its increasingly unrefusable name is space. This word (or its equivalent in other languages: spatium, Raum, espace, etc.) is required if we are to designate a domain that, itself unbounded, affords sufficient room for motion of all kinds, including the modest motion of a hand or staff as it reaches out tentatively beyond the world’s outer limit.
But space thus regarded is precisely what “infinite space” means—at least minimally. Infinite space is space for (motion) and space without (bounds). In its twofold character, such space brings together two of the most ancient terms in Greek philosophy, attributable to Plato and Anaximander, respectively: “room” (chōra) and “the boundless” (to apeiron). Their conjunction, which is conceptual as well as historical, suggests that if the cosmos indeed has a place, it is a place in space: space at once endlessly voluminous and boundaryless. Moreover, the world not only has a place, it is in place: it is in the very place of infinite space, occupying particular stations in the regions that make up the spatial universe. Just as Archytas’s conundrum drives us to the idea of infinite space from the known fact of the cosmos, so this same space preserves a place—indeed, innumerably many places—for the world from whose edge we are asked to stretch out our hand or staff, or (in Lucretius’s version) throw a long javelin. The Archytian axiom abides, but only as applicable to a much larger domain than Archytas himself envisioned. To be is still to be in place, but a place that is part of an unending space.
