It is an axiom of Stoic cosmology that the void is infinite and place finite.36 With no bodies strictly occupying it—in contrast with the ancient Atomist “void outside”—the Stoic void is neither bounding nor bounded. According to Chrysippus (280–206 B.C.), “the void beyond the cosmos is infinite, unbounded (apeiron) in the literal sense of the word; it has neither beginning nor middle nor end.”37 In fact, the Stoic void lacks both bodies and boundaries: it is “an interval empty of body, or an interval unoccupied by body,”38 where to be an “interval” (diastēma) is precisely not to be a place for a body. Cleomedes characterizes such a void as something “very simple, since it is incorporeal and without contact, neither has shape nor takes on shape, neither is acted upon in any respect, nor acts.”39 In other words, void is an empty extension that has taken the place of place itself: it has (de)voided place. If this is beginning to sound like “negative cosmology”—as is already indicated in the very word “in-finite” (and in a-peiron)—we can at least say, in a more positive vein, that the Stoic void is infinitely large, infinitely absorptive, and altogether external to the cosmos. It gives room, if not place proper, to an expanding cosmos. It is a macrovoid outside the cosmos—the very converse of a microvoid internal to the cosmos and to bodies in that cosmos.
Such an extramundane void is a negatité (to borrow a useful term from Sartre): even if not (a) nothing, it is also not an entity, neither a thing nor a place. It stands in stark contrast with the packed and plenary character of the cosmos, which for the Stoics does not possess void of any kind—neither in the form of microvoids nor as the tiny interstices between polygons that are mentioned in the Timaeus. The cosmos has everything the void lacks; it is full of places and bodies, and full of one in being full of the other—double plenitude.
Chrysippus declared place to be “what is occupied through and through by an existent, or what can be occupied by an existent and is through and through occupied whether by one thing or by several things.”40 Nothing empty, nothing a lacking, nothing tenuous here! Place is a dense fabric in the even denser place-world it composes. Guaranteeing coherence and connection in this cosmic plenum is the pneuma, the cosmic breath or spirit that circulates throughout the plenary world. Composed of fire and air, the pneuma is an active force that transmutes Plato’s and Aristotle’s geometric continuum of discrete bodies-in-places into a dynamic network of implaced and interpenetrating bodies.41 Proceeding by a combination of habit (hexis) and tension (tonos), connection (sunecheia) and sympathy (sumpatheia), the pneuma constitutes “the physical field which is the carrier of all specific properties of material bodies.”42 This field is a close concinnation of places; it is as place-full as the void is sheerly space-rich.
“Under Chrysippus’s guidance,” writes David Hahm, “the Aristotelian cosmos of elements, each moving by nature to its own concentric sphere, is finally given a comfortable home in the infinite void.”43 Yet there is a darker side to Stoic physics: isolation, not comfort, looms. The cosmos, the physical world as we know it, is “an island embedded in an infinite void.”44 To be an island, however replete with places and bodies, is to be sequestered in an ocean of indifference. Moreover, if the only void is the void “outside the world,”45 this leaves precious little leeway for maneuver in this world.
The Stoics were not insensitive to the problems inherent in the bifurcation of the universe into empty and full, void and place, the incorporeal and the corporeal, with material bodies brought forcibly into place by inescapable pneumatic forces. To address this dilemma, some Stoics speculated that a third entity is required to break the gridlock of their fiercely dichotomous universe. Thus Chrysippus “distinguishes an unnamed entity, different from void or place, that is capable of being occupied by being, but is only partly occupied.”46 This third thing is none other than “room.” Room is not just space for roaming—as it was for Epicurus—but extension allowing for possible occupation. Extension and room, diastēma and chōra, come together in a single complex, or more exactly a duplex, entity: cosmos-cum-void.47 The duplexity is evident in Sextus Empiricus’s assertion that for the Stoics the universe is “the external void together with the world.”48 Or we might say that void and place merge in space, and they do so in the room space furnishes.
Yet this leaves us wondering if “room” and “space”—both terms being translations of chōra—are not merely terms of compromise, posited to conceal the abyss opened up by the diremptive difference between place (topos) and the void (kenon) that lies at the heart of Stoic cosmology. This is not to say that the compromise in question represents an admixture of equal parts of place (or world) and of void. Void is given the major emphasis insofar as its infinity is presupposed by the very room that promises to heal the cosmologically troublesome dichotomy of void and world: “The ‘whole’ [i.e., to holon] is finite, since the world is finite, but the ‘all’ [i.e., to pan] is infinite (apeiron), since the void outside the world is such.”49 For room or space to combine place and void, it must be at least as capacious as void; hence it must be as infinite as the void it coadunates with place. With the Stoics, therefore, we take a concerted step toward the view that space, affording room and as modeled on the void, is—properly and primarily—infinite.
III
Place is animated through the primal soul and has a divine life.
—Proclus, cited by Simplicius
It is likely that place first enjoyed the divine illumination, especially the place of more complete and perpetual things.
—Simplicius, with reference to Damascius
Neoplatonic notions of place and space take account of Stoic, Epicurean, and earlier Atomist conceptions—while always addressing themselves explicitly to Plato and even more especially to Aristotle. In many respects, then, Neoplatonists confirm ideas and distinctions that we have already encountered. Iamblichus (A.D. ca. 250–ca. 325), for example, distinguishes “limit” and “boundary” in a manner reminiscent of the distinction to which my discussion of Aristotle progressed in the last chapter.50 Syrianus (active in the fifth century A.D.) speaks of “room” in a sense that directly recalls Chrysippus: “Extension goes through the whole cosmos and receives into itself the whole nature of body . . . conferring room (chōra) and receptacle and boundary and outline and all suchlike upon all things that fill up the visible cosmos.”51 The extension that gives room is designated by the same term (diastēma) as that used by many previous thinkers, but here its meaning is not restricted to mere “interval” construed as a span or gap or interstice between or within determinate entities (whether atoms or bodies). For a Neoplatonist such as Syrianus, diastēma refers to the boundless and immobile and (usually) incorporeal spread-outness that “goes through the whole cosmos,” a cosmos no longer distinguished from the universe. Such extreme expansiveness is coextensive with what Syrianus calls intriguingly “a different body, the more universal one.”52 This body is in turn identified with “broad, shared place”—place so broad as to have no effective limits.53 The more we push the roomfulness of extension, however, the closer we come to the quite modern idea of a space that in its uncompromised infinity is considered “absolute.”
Thus far we find ourselves on more or less familiar terrain. What do the Neoplatonists introduce that is novel? At least two basic lines of thought.
(1) The first is that there are more kinds