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endymions_bower(Cross-posted from Kyklos Apollon)
The question of matter is one of the key questions of Platonism, because the way in which one answers it determines whether one’s interpretation of Platonism is fundamentally monistic or dualistic.
This is clearly the primary disagreement between Plotinus and certain of his successors, especially in the so-called Athenian school. Proclus criticizes Plotinus for positing “intelligible matter”, that is, for extending the hylomorphic (form/matter) structure all the way to Being itself:
The school of Plotinus … makes Being out to come from form and intelligible matter, form corresponding to the One and existence (huparxis), power [potentiality] to matter. And if this is what they mean, they are correct; but if they mean to attribute some shapeless, formless and indefinite nature to intelligible substance, they diverge it seems to me from Plato’s thought. For the Unlimited is not the matter of Limit, but its power; and Limit is not the form of the Unlimited, but its Existence (huparxis); and Being issues from these, insofar as it does not remain established in the One, but has already received a multiplicity of henads and of powers, which have been mingled into one substance. (Plat. Theol. III 9, 39f)
Proclus is explaining here that while the opposition of form and matter is valid on the Intellectual plane, with respect to Being itself there is only henadic or existential individuality and power/potentiality. On the Intellectual plane these will appear, legitimately, as form and matter, however—How, then, does this occur?
For Proclus, the intellectual structure of the cosmos, which is at once the form things possess as well as the thinking of that form, and as much the thinking of that form by the observer as the thinking of its own form by the object (and even, e.g., a chemical ‘thinks’ itself insofar as it displays its properties), is ultimately the Gods thinking.
Each God, we know, contains according to Proclus all the other Gods and all else that is. But in the intellectual organization, each God thinks their distinction from the rest. This is how the structures of mediation of which the cosmos fundamentally consists come to be. Any God, in performing this diacritical meditation, so to speak, in which they think their own sameness-and-difference from the rest, is the one whom Plato calls the Demiurge in the Timaeus—and this, I believe, is why the Demiurge is not given a discrete identity in this work.
In the Timaeus, Plato speaks of a process through which the cosmos passes from disorder (ataxia) to order (taxis). It was widely understood by Platonists, however, that this was not truly a process in time, for whatever particular evolutionary or formative processes have gone on in the cosmos, Formation itself is continuous, and hence eternal, and it is Formation itself that the Platonist, unlike the natural scientist, is concerned with.
So the ‘disorder’ here is not a state prior to order, but a state outside of order. It is the outside of any particular order as much as it is the state outside all order; in fact, it is more the former than the latter. For Proclus explains that the precosmic “disorder” is in fact “illuminated by all the orders of the Gods prior to the Demiurge” (In Tim. I, 387). Now, “all the orders of the Gods prior to the Demiurge” simply means all the other Gods, and even the Demiurge him/herself, insofar as s/he is a God simply, and not an Intellective God—a God, as opposed to a God thinking.
Now we can understand the distinction Proclus is drawing between himself and Plotinus: matter is not a formless substance of some kind, but the outside of any particular formal scheme, which is always actually some alternative formal scheme, some other ‘perspective’, so to speak; it is the unknown dimension of anything, which is for that thing the possibility of being other than it is.
Thus in a way matter resembles what physicists call an ‘interference pattern’. ‘Matter’ is the result of superimposing total world-views complete in themselves, expressing the simultaneous ‘membership’ of beings in all of them; which appears from the viewpoint of the being as a kind of vagueness or indeterminacy, but in which a God would see, not determinism, but ontological freedom.
The question of matter is one of the key questions of Platonism, because the way in which one answers it determines whether one’s interpretation of Platonism is fundamentally monistic or dualistic.
This is clearly the primary disagreement between Plotinus and certain of his successors, especially in the so-called Athenian school. Proclus criticizes Plotinus for positing “intelligible matter”, that is, for extending the hylomorphic (form/matter) structure all the way to Being itself:
The school of Plotinus … makes Being out to come from form and intelligible matter, form corresponding to the One and existence (huparxis), power [potentiality] to matter. And if this is what they mean, they are correct; but if they mean to attribute some shapeless, formless and indefinite nature to intelligible substance, they diverge it seems to me from Plato’s thought. For the Unlimited is not the matter of Limit, but its power; and Limit is not the form of the Unlimited, but its Existence (huparxis); and Being issues from these, insofar as it does not remain established in the One, but has already received a multiplicity of henads and of powers, which have been mingled into one substance. (Plat. Theol. III 9, 39f)
Proclus is explaining here that while the opposition of form and matter is valid on the Intellectual plane, with respect to Being itself there is only henadic or existential individuality and power/potentiality. On the Intellectual plane these will appear, legitimately, as form and matter, however—How, then, does this occur?
For Proclus, the intellectual structure of the cosmos, which is at once the form things possess as well as the thinking of that form, and as much the thinking of that form by the observer as the thinking of its own form by the object (and even, e.g., a chemical ‘thinks’ itself insofar as it displays its properties), is ultimately the Gods thinking.
Each God, we know, contains according to Proclus all the other Gods and all else that is. But in the intellectual organization, each God thinks their distinction from the rest. This is how the structures of mediation of which the cosmos fundamentally consists come to be. Any God, in performing this diacritical meditation, so to speak, in which they think their own sameness-and-difference from the rest, is the one whom Plato calls the Demiurge in the Timaeus—and this, I believe, is why the Demiurge is not given a discrete identity in this work.
In the Timaeus, Plato speaks of a process through which the cosmos passes from disorder (ataxia) to order (taxis). It was widely understood by Platonists, however, that this was not truly a process in time, for whatever particular evolutionary or formative processes have gone on in the cosmos, Formation itself is continuous, and hence eternal, and it is Formation itself that the Platonist, unlike the natural scientist, is concerned with.
So the ‘disorder’ here is not a state prior to order, but a state outside of order. It is the outside of any particular order as much as it is the state outside all order; in fact, it is more the former than the latter. For Proclus explains that the precosmic “disorder” is in fact “illuminated by all the orders of the Gods prior to the Demiurge” (In Tim. I, 387). Now, “all the orders of the Gods prior to the Demiurge” simply means all the other Gods, and even the Demiurge him/herself, insofar as s/he is a God simply, and not an Intellective God—a God, as opposed to a God thinking.
Now we can understand the distinction Proclus is drawing between himself and Plotinus: matter is not a formless substance of some kind, but the outside of any particular formal scheme, which is always actually some alternative formal scheme, some other ‘perspective’, so to speak; it is the unknown dimension of anything, which is for that thing the possibility of being other than it is.
Thus in a way matter resembles what physicists call an ‘interference pattern’. ‘Matter’ is the result of superimposing total world-views complete in themselves, expressing the simultaneous ‘membership’ of beings in all of them; which appears from the viewpoint of the being as a kind of vagueness or indeterminacy, but in which a God would see, not determinism, but ontological freedom.
