The Fate of Place. Edward Casey

and source of the soul and the Intellect.”⁵⁴ Both kinds of place here mentioned—that of the “intelligible world” and that of “life”—are unreducible to the physical surrounder made paradigmatic by Aristotle in the Physics. Once Pandora’s box is opened in this fashion, there is no limit to the sorts of place one can consider as fully valid instances. When Aristotle spoke of the mind as “the place of forms” in the De Anima, he was speaking metaphorically. But when Iamblichus talks of “formal place,” he is not ascribing place to forms by means of a trope. He means straightforwardly that forms—in the Platonic sense—possess their own proper sort of place, to be distinguished from physical place as well as from the place of life and from what Iamblichus calls “intrinsic place.”⁵⁵ The claim of variety comes paired with a claim concerning the plurality of the powers of place. As Richard Sorabji remarks, “It is because the concept of place has so many other applications [than simply surrounding] that a dynamic conception is required to fit all the cases.”⁵⁶ When Aristotle said that place “has some power,” he meant the particular power of encompassing the physical things it contains. Iamblichus does not deny this power—especially if it is not merely an external delimiting function but one that bestows boundary (horizein)—yet he insists that place possesses a set of distinctive strengths beyond that of surrounding (periechein).

      One has to conceive place not only as encompassing and establishing in itself the things existing in place, but as sustaining them by one single power. Regarded thus, place will not only encompass bodies from outside, but will fill them totally with a power which raises them up. And the bodies sustained by this power, falling down by their proper nature, but being raised up by the superiority of place, will thus exist in it.⁵⁷

      Iamblichus’s own list of the plenipotentiary powers of place includes, then, supporting, elevating, and filling up. Underwriting this list is the basic twofold action of

      •raising up bodies that would otherwise fall into the degradation of prime matter, filling them with a power that elevates them;

      •drawing together bodies and parts of bodies that are already dissipated from their contact with prime matter, the lowest form of existence in the Neoplatonic universe: “gathering together the scattered ones.”⁵⁸

      “Up” and “together” are thus to be added to the “around” and “in” of the repertoire of placial powers. To be implaced is not just to be cozily contained by an encircling surface but to be sustained by powers that ensure that what is in place will be inherently stronger for having been there. If the Aristotelian model of containment makes possible definition and location, the Iamblichean model of sustaining engrafts the dynamism of implacement onto what exists in place. This is why Iamblichus says expressly that “place is naturally united with things in place”⁵⁹—instead of just surrounding them or offering them “bare extension” (diastēma psilon), much less (as the Stoics are held to assert) merely “supervening upon them” (paruphistasthai). To be “united with” (sumphuēs) is to be dynamically linked with something—to make a difference not just in its shape or form but in its very being or reality (ousia). Place is thus “never separate from [a body’s] first entrance into existing things and from the principal reality.”⁶⁰ Through place, reality is reached. Through reality, place is maintained.

      Indeed, place has its own being, on the basis of which it is a “cause” (aitia) and not something merely inert or passive (argos, adranēs)—something caused by something else in turn. As Simplicius points out in the sixth century A.D., the essence of something and its place are difficult to distinguish, driving him to posit an “essential place” that is “naturally united with substance [i.e., the substance of what is in place].”⁶¹ For Iamblichus and Simplicius alike, a place “has reality in itself and “has an active power as well as an incorporeal and definitive reality.”⁶² In attributing such power and reality to place, these authors contest Aristotle’s denial of place’s intinsic causal power. Not only does place have such a power, it is a causal power: it is “a power that acts” (drastērios dunamis).⁶³

      (2) The second new line of thought is that the less material place is, the more powerful it becomes. This notion derives from the basic premise that “everywhere the incorporeal reality ranks as prior to the corporeal one.”⁶⁴ It follows that places incorporeal in nature will be superior in effective power to material places. Another corollary is that incorporeal places will be more powerful than anything physical they can be said to contain: as Iamblichus says, “Place, being incorporeal, is superior to the things that exist in it; and as something more independent it is superior to those things which are in need of and wanting to be in place.”⁶⁵ The power of incorporeal place is even exerted over extension itself: instead of being dependent on a pregiven cosmic or universal extendedness, place generates the very spread-outness of the things it serves to situate.⁶⁶ Iamblichus explicitly contrasts this view with that of the Stoics—who are said to hold that “place subsists upon bodies”⁶⁷—and claims to have rejoined Archytas: “Clearly he assumes place to be of a higher rank than things that act or are acted upon.”⁶⁸

      In Iamblichus—that exemplary Neoplatonic thinker of place—we see the “intellective theory” (noētē theōria) of implacement in its full-blown expression. The place something is in is not only more real than the implaced thing; it is itself situated in increasingly intellective and ever more elevated kinds of place: material things are in the world’s body (i.e., the cosmos), which is in the World Soul, which is in the Intellect, and so on. There is a virtual shell game of steadily improving implacement in which each place-level is at once sustained and surpassed in the next until we reach the ultimate level of the One that provides (again in Plotinus’s phrase) “the place of the intelligible world.” This escalating model of implacement can be regarded as an attempt to reconcile Aristotelian encasement with Platonic ascension to the final forms of things.⁶⁹

      The intellective or noetic nature of place was a theme throughout the history of Neoplatonic thought, for which place was a central theme for four continuous centuries—from Plotinus (A.D. ca. 205–260) to Simplicius (who flourished after A.D. 529). The two thinkers who pursued this particular theme furthest, however, were Damascius and Proclus. For Damascius, who served in the sixth century as the last head of the Athenian branch of the Neoplatonic school, place in general exhibits its power and superiority by its ability to measure what is in place. The positioning of the parts of something as well as the size of that something are measured by the place it is in. The measure (metron) is conceived as a mold or outline into which the implaced thing is set: “Place is as it were a sort of outline (proüpographē) of the whole position (thesis) and of its parts, and so to say a mould (tupos) into which the thing must fit, if it is to lie properly and not be diffused, or in an unnatural state.”⁷⁰ As the idea of mold indicates, far from being a measure that proceeds in terms of numbers, placial measure is more like a shaping force that acts to hold off the diffusion inherent in prime matter. Such measuring resembles measuring through more than measuring out: it is through the configuration of a given place that the measure of a thing-in-place is taken.⁷¹ Rather than giving exact quantitative assessments—which require a rigid ruler of some sort—place as metron is more plastic than it is rigid, with the result that, as Sorabji comments, “it can allow for a variety of positionings, as it does in the case of the moving heavens.”⁷² Aristotle’s obsessive question as to what kind of place the heavens occupy is here answered by the view that they occupy a nonrigid, molded place—not entirely unlike the receptive regions proffered by primordial chōra, which is also characterized by Plato as acting like a mold. Such a place, precisely by virtue of its measuring power, ranks as superior to all the particular places it encompasses. Simplicius, commenting on Damascius, brings out the assumption at stake here: “The nature of the measure is superior to the nature of the measured and is not in need of the same things as [the measured] is.”⁷³ Given this assumption, it is clear why Neoplatonists tend to give priority to places that are noetic in nature.

      But the matter is more complicated than this. Proclus (ca. 411–485), a quintessential Neoplatonist, considered place to be a body and not just something around a body (or through which a body moves, or in which it is located). Yet, despite its corporeality,