The primary issues that emerge in ancient treatments of place have to do with genesis and purpose on one side and with form and embodiment on the other. It is striking that the first two issues bear on questions of causation and teleology, whereas the latter two concern such things as location and containment: thus, not where place comes from or where it is tending, but how it operates in the present. In terms of the analytical categories employed elsewhere in the Physics and in the Metaphysics, we have to do with efficient and final causes (aitia, also “explanations”) in the first case and with formal and material explanations in the second. Efficient causes concern origins, and final causes constitute ends: both are aspects of becoming as it affects and characterizes place. In contrast, location, especially location accomplished by secure containment, raises questions of the formal and material structuring of the phenomenal world: such structuring is inherently stabilizing, a matter of stabilitas loci. The ancient world, including many of Aristotle’s own predecessors (indeed, including Aristotle himself),2 considered place in all four ways, thereby leaving a rich and lasting legacy for future explorations in post-Aristotelian philosophy.
In Parts II and III we shall explore this legacy as it is assimilated and transformed in the more than two millennia that extend from 400 B.C. to A.D. 1800. In this enormous epoch, Aristotle’s Archytian emphasis on the primacy of place is deepened and broadened—especially in the Hellenistic and Neoplatonic periods—and yet finally curtailed and limited, as occurs most dramatically in medieval and early modern times. In this complex transition a preoccupation with place gradually gives way to a stress on space—where “space” connotes something undelimited and open-ended: a conception first posited by Aristotle’s antagonists, the ancient Atomists. While place solicits questions of limit and boundary, and of location and surrounding, space sets these questions aside in favor of a concern with the absolute and the infinite, the immense and the indefinitely extended. If place bears on what lies in—in a container, dwelling, or vessel—space characteristically moves out, so far out as to explode the closely confining perimeters within which Aristotle attempted to ensconce material things. In this unequal battle, spacing-out triumphs over placing-in.
What we shall observe in the two chapters constituting Part II is part and parcel of the overall transformation from a mostly secular and naturalistic worldview—in which the vernacularity of place, its habitability and idiosyncrasy, is predictably prominent—to a theological Weltanschauung in which the infinity of space becomes a primary preoccupation. If God is limitless in power, then His presence in the universe at large must also be unlimited. Divine ubiquity thus entails spatial infinity. It further follows that the physical universe itself must be unlimited if it is to be the setting for God’s ubiquity as well as the result of His creation. Not surprisingly, the increasing hegemony of Christianity supported both forms of infinity: that of God as the ultimate monotheistic being and that of His universe as the ultimate monothetic entity.
Nor is it surprising that this theological background set the stage for a comparable concern with the spatial infinity of the physical universe on the part of the natural scientists and philosophers who began to mathematize nature in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This resecularization of the world via quantification, which will be the subject of Part III, would not have been possible without the theological reflections of the preceding several centuries. Theology and physics are closely allied in their common effort to conceive of space in utterly maximal terms: a marriage epitomized in the intimate intertwining of Isaac Newton’s physical and theological writings. If theology, especially Christian theology, is universalist in its aims, why should not the new physics—standing on the shoulders of this ambitious theology—proclaim truths that hold for every material object in the universe? The colonizing tendency of Christianity is echoed in the attempts of Galilean, Cartesian, and Newtonian physics to appropriate whole realms formerly consigned to alchemy and “natural philosophy,” not to mention local custom and history. In both instances, the power of place, uncontested in the ancient world (and still potently present in medieval times), was put into abeyance—indeed, often literally abolished, and with as much relentless force as that with which native peoples were subjected to Christian indoctrination. By the end of the eighteenth century, the idea of universal space came to be regarded as obtaining not just for the external world and for God but also for the mind of the knowing subject. Immanuel Kant, with whose rigorous philosophy of space Part III shall close, internalized the very spatial infinity that had been located either in God or in the natural world in the twelve hundred years that preceded his work. Yet this act of incorporation (or, rather, inpsychicalization) is no less insistent on the infinity—and the absoluteness—of the space thereby located within the pure intuition of the knowing subject.
The saga about to unfold is a tale of the gradual ascendancy of the universe over the cosmos. “Uni-verse,” universum in its original Latin form, means turning around one totalized whole. The universe is the passionate single aim of Roman conquest, Christian conversion, early modern physics, and Kantian epistemology. In contrast, “cosmos” implies the particularity of place; taken as a collective term, it signifies the ingrediency of places in discrete place-worlds. (The Greek language has no word for “universe” instead, it speaks of to pan, “all that is,” “the All.”) In its aesthetic being—“cosmetic” and “cosmos” are second cousins linguistically via the sharing of aisthēsis, that is, bodily sensing—cosmos brings with it an essential reference to the experiencing body that is in close touch with it, takes it in, and comes to know it. The limit of a place is specified by what a body can do in that place, that is, by its sensory activity, its legwork, its history there. The universe is mapped in physics and projected in theology: it is the transcendent geography of infinite space. The cosmos is sensed in concrete landscapes as lived, remembered, or painted: it is the immanent scene of finite place as felt by an equally finite body.
Where the universe calls for objective knowledge in the manner of a unified physics or theology, the cosmos calls for the experience of the individuated subject in its midst—with all of the limitations and foreclosures this experience brings with it. To have substituted the spatial infinity of the universe for the placial finitude of the cosmos is to have effected the fateful transition from ancient to modern thinking in the West. To this transition we must now turn.3
4
The Emergence of Space in Hellenistic and Neoplatonic Thought
All that is is place.
—Lucretius, De rerum natura
All there is is place.
—Richard Sorabji, Matter, Space, and Motion
I
The nature of the universe is bodies and void [to pan esti sōmata kai kenon].
—Epicurus, Peri phuseōs (On Nature)
One’s thought of the void does not give out anywhere.
—attributed to Cleomedes
Part of the perennial appeal of Aristotle’s conception of place as something confining and confined is doubtless the philosophical support it offers to human beings’ longing for cozy quarters—not merely for adequate shelter but for boundaries that embrace, whether these boundaries belong to decorated rooms in the home or to indecorous glades in the forest primeval. But human beings (and doubtless other animals) also long for wide open spaces and thus for lack of containment, perhaps even for limitlessness. The cozy can be too confining, and just to peer out beyond thick walls or through dense treetops into the sky is to discover the inviting and intriguing presence of empty spaces and unoccupied places.
One way to sanction this different longing is to posit a cosmological model radically divergent from that of Aristotle—or, indeed, from those of Plato and Anaximander, the thinker of the Boundless, to apeiron.1 The ancient Greek world knew such a model: put in crude but compelling terms, the Atomists held that there is nothing but “atoms and the void.” Atoms are incredibly condensed and indivisible bits of matter (a-tomos means “uncuttable”), and the void is the open space, the free