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What is the Matter with Matter, According to Plotinus?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 July 2016

A.A. Long
A.A. Long*
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
*
[email protected]
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Abstract

Modern science is not linguistically original in hypothesizing the existence of dark matter. For Plotinus, the matter that underlies all perceptible objects, is essentially obscure and describable only in the negative terms of what it lacks by way of inherent properties. In formulating this theory of absolute matter, Plotinus took himself to be interpreting both Plato and Aristotle, with the result that his own position emerges as a highly original and equivocal synthesis of this tradition. Plotinus did not claim that matter is nothing, but the puzzling status he attributes to it can be aptly compared to Berkeley's doctrine that material substance is a self-contradictory notion.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 78: The History of Philosophy , July 2016 , pp. 37 - 54
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2016 

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References

1 I take this information from the Wikipedia article on ‘dark matter’, which is based on references dating to the year 2013.

2 Ennead 2.4.10.

3 For the details and interpretative controversies, see M.L. Gill, Aristotle on Substance (Princeton, 1989).

4 Aristotle had described matter per se, which he also calls the ultimate substratum, as ‘neither a particular thing nor of a particular quantity nor spoken of in any of the other ways by which a being is determined’ (Metaph. 7.3, 1029a20). Similarly, the Aristotelian commentator, Alexander: ‘Absolute matter is a shapeless and amorphous nature, with no delineation according to its own account’, Comm. in De an. p. 3, 27ff. Bruns. Plotinus frequently echoes these statements and adapts them to his own metaphysical scheme.

5 My procedure is deliberately short on a vast range of exegetical questions, which typically predominate in treatments of Plotinus. As the interpreter of Plato that he took himself to be, Plotinus presupposed his readers' familiarity with the entire previous traditions of Greek philosophy. I will highlight only a selection of this background, to the extent that it is necessary for following his main argument in Ennead II.4. The essential historical details are excellently treated by P. Kalligas in vol. 1 of his commentary, The Enneads of Plotinus, trans. by E. Fowden and N. Pilavachi (Princeton and Oxford, 2014).

6 Ennead 2.4. The title ascribed to the work by Porphyry, Plotinus's editor, is On the Two Kinds of Matter. I will be concerned here only with the kind of matter that Plotinus posits for the physical world as distinct from the non-physical matter that he calls ‘intelligible’. The excerpts that I cite from On Matter are in my own translation. I am presently preparing a translation and commentary on the whole work for the series The Enneads of Plotinus, eds. J. Dillon and A. Smith (Parmenides Publishing).

7 Calcidius, In Tim. 290 (SVF 1.86).

8 Cf. Aristotle, Physics 1.7.

9 Ennead VI.3.9.

10 Cf. Ennead 1.8.9 where Plotinus repeats the notion of seeing the dark by cutting off the light of intellect.

11 ‘Evil’ has inappropriate theological connotations. Hence I disagree with parts of D. O'Brien's account in his paper, ‘Plotinus on matter and evil’, in L.P. Gerson, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Plotinus (Cambridge, 1996), 171–95. For a more balanced interpretation of matter's badness, even to the point of granting it ‘an element of goodness’, see van Riel, G., ‘Horizontalism or verticalism? Proclus vs Plotinus on the procession of matter’, Phronesis 46 (2001), 129–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 See Ennead II.4.5.

13 For a clear introduction to Plotinus's metaphysical categories, see P. Remes, Neoplatonism (Berkeley & Los Angeles, 2008), 47–59.

14 See Plato, Timaeus 53b.

15 Plotinus insists (Ennead II.4.14) that absolute matter is always privation and essentially ‘not-being’ in response to Aristotle's position (Physics I.9) that matter loses its privation when the privation is replaced by its contrary.

16 For a different view, see Burnyeat, M., ‘What Descartes saw and Berkeley missed’, Philosophical Review 90 (1982), 3–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 I thank Christian Wildberg and Lloyd Gerson for their helpful criticism of a version of this paper that I delivered in Princeton and Toronto. They should not be presumed to endorse all my readings of Plotinus. I also thank the officers of the Royal Insitute for giving me the opportunity to present a paper in this series on ancient philosophy.