The Strange Nature of Matter

4 March 2024

The Strange Nature of Matter

I have been struck this time around, while reading the Enneads of Plotinus, how Plotinus struggles with the nature of matter; how on the one hand he refers to matter as non-being or even non-existence, and on the other hand he considers it the necessary ‘substrate’ (the word Plotinus uses in the Armstrong translation) upon which Platonic forms are in some sense present to the senses in the material world.  Plotinus’s thinking on this topic is very subtle and nuanced.  Here is an example of what I mean from Ennead III.6.7, On Impassability:

“But we must come back to matter, the underlying substrate and the things which are said to be based upon matter, from which we shall acquire a knowledge of matter’s non-existence and freedom from affections.  Matter, then, is incorporeal, since body is posterior and a composite, and matter with something else produces body.  In this way it has acquired the same name [as being – translator’s addition] in respect of its incorporeality, because both being and matter are other than bodies.   It is not soul or intellect or life or form or rational formative principle or limit – for it is unlimitedness – or power – for what does it make? – but, falling outside all these, it could not properly receive the title of being but would appropriately be called non-being, not in the sense in which motion is not being or rest not being but truly not-being; it is a ghostly image of bulk, a tendency towards substantial existence; it is static without being stable; it is invisible in itself and escapes any attempt to see it, and occurs when one is not looking, but even if you look closely you cannot see it.  It always presents opposite appearances on its surface, small and great, less and more, deficient and superabundant, a phantom which does not remain and cannot get away either, for it has no strength for this, since it has not received strength from intellect but is lacking in all being.  Whatever announcement it makes, therefore, is a lie, and if it appears great, it is small, of more, it is less; its apparent being is not real, but a sort of fleeing frivolity; hence the things which seem to come to be in it are frivolities, nothing but phantoms in a phantom, like something in a mirror which really exists in one place but is reflected in another; it seems to be filled, and holds nothing; it is all seeming.  ‘Imitations of real beings pass into and out of it,’ (Timaeus 50C 4-5) ghosts into a formless ghost, visible because of its formlessness.  They seem to act on it, but do nothing, for they are wraith-like and feeble and have no thrust; nor does matter thrust against them, but they go through without making a cut, as if through water, or as if someone in a way projected shapes in the void people talk about.  And again, if the things seen in matter were of the same kind as those from which they come to it, perhaps one might give them a power derived from those which sent them and, as this power reached matter, one might assume that it was affected by them; but, as it is, the producers of the appearances are different from the things seen in matter, and we can learn from this the falsity of the affection, since what is seen in matter is false and has no sort of likeness to what produced it.  Certainly, then, since it is weak and false, and falling into falsity, like things in a dream or water or a mirror, it necessarily leaves matter unaffected; though in the examples just mentioned there is a likeness between the things seen [in water, etc. – translator’s addition], and the things which are the causes of the appearances.”

(Plotinus, Ennead III.6, On Impassability, translated by A. H. Armstrong, Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1967, pages 239-243, ISBN: 9780674994874)

“We are thus brought back to the nature of that underlying matter and the things believed to be based upon it; investigation will show us that Matter has no reality and is not capable of being affected.

“Matter must be bodiless – for body is a later production, a compound made by Matter in conjunction with some other entity.  Thus it is included among incorporeal things in the sense that body is something that is neither Real-Being nor Matter.

“Matter is not Soul; it is not Intellect, is not Life, is no Ideal-Principle, no Reason-Principle; it is no limit or bound, for it is mere indetermination; it is not a power, for what does it produce?

“It lives on the farther side of all these categories and so has no title to the name of Being.  It will be more plausibly called a non-being, and this is not in the sense that movement and station are Not-Being (i.e., as merely different from Being) but in the sense of veritable Not-Being, so that it is no more than the image and phantasm of Mass, a bare aspiration towards substantial existence; it is stationary but not in the sense of having position, it is in itself invisible, eluding all effort to observe it, present where no one can look, unseen for all our gazing, ceaselessly presenting contraries in the things based upon it, it is large and small, more and less, deficient and excessive; a phantasm unabiding and yet unable to withdraw – not even strong enough to withdraw, so utterly has it failed to accept strength from the Intellectual Principle, so absolute its lack of all Being.

"Its every utterance, therefore, is a lie; it pretends to be great and it is little, to be more and it is less; and the Existence with which it masks itself is no Existence, but a passing trick making trickery of all that seems to be present in it, phantasms within a phantasm; it is like a mirror showing things as in itself when they are really elsewhere, filled in appearance but actually empty, containing nothing, pretending everything.  Into it and out of it move mimicries of the Authentic Existents, images playing upon an image devoid of Form, visible against it by its very formlessness; they seem to modify it but in reality effect nothing, for they are ghostly and feeble, have no thrust and meet none in Matter either; they pass through it leaving no cleavage, as through water; or they Further: or they might be compared to shapes projected so as to make some appearance upon what we can know only as the Void.

“Further: if visible objects were of the rank of the originals from which they have entered into Matter we might believe Matter to be really affected by them, for we might credit them with some share of the power inherent in their senders: but the objects of our experience are of very different virtue than the realities they represent, and we deduce that the seeming modification of matter by visible things is unreal since the visible thing itself is unreal, having at no point any similarity with its source and cause.  Feeble in itself, a false thing and projected upon a falsity, like an image in dream or against water or on a mirror, it can but leave Matter unaffected; and even this is saying too little, for water and mirror do give back a faithful image of what presents itself before them.”

(Plotinus, The Enneads, Ennead III.6.7, The Impassivity of the Unembodied, translated by Stephen MacKenna, Larson Publications, Burdett, New York, 1992, pages 234-235, ISBN: 9780943914558)

1.  The paradox is that matter lacks being yet, at the same time, matter has the function of acting as the substrate upon which emanated forms leave their impressions without affecting matter in any way.

2.  Plotinus uses metaphors to illustrate how matter can lack being but still have a function; these include images in a mirror and images in a stream.  Images appear in a mirror but the mirror is unaffected by those images; in a sense the mirror is untouched by them, the mirror is not altered by the images that appear in the mirror.

3.  I think that this kind of analysis of matter needs to be understood in the context of Plotinus’s view of contemplation as the source of all things. 

4.  We live in a materialistic age.  Plotinus’s analysis of matter differs from the common understanding of matter, though it is not so distant from what some contemporary scientists say about matter.  But again, the common understanding of matter is that it is matter that is truly real and sensory manifestations are distortions, or misrepresentations of matter: when I say ‘distortions’ or ‘misrepresentations’ I man that idea that appearances are only the biological minds interpretation of material realities such as molecules and atoms (Bernardo Kastrup does a great job explaining this.)  In contrast, for Plotinus, matter is an unreal presence and it is the Platonic forms that are real and actually have Being; to the degree that sensory appearances participate in matter they are unreal, they are ‘phantoms,’ but to the extent that sensory experiences participate in eternal Platonic Forms they are, to that extent, real.

5.  A lot of what Plotinus writes here, regarding the phantom-like nature of matter is, I think, a result of the impermanence of sensory appearances.  This is why I like to say that the study of impermanence, combined with carefully distinguishing that which is impermanent from that which is eternal, is so helpful in understanding passages like this.  The phantom-like nature of appearances is due to their impermanence; and for Plotinus the phantom-like nature of appearances is due to the nature of matter.  Impermanence is what happens when Form combines with Matter.

6.  This overall picture of the sensory world is, I think, rooted in the allegory of the cave where appearances are depicted as shadows on the wall of the cave.  The shadows have no substantial reality but the prisoners in the cave think that they do.  The shadows themselves would, I think, be the substrate function of matter that Plotinus refers to.

7.  I continue to wonder if the idea of matter is necessary in Platonian Platonism.  I think it might be possible to abandon the idea of matter altogether; in a way Plotinus is pointing in that direction when he says that matter lacks all being.  I think this is also implied, or one could interpret it this way, in Plotinus’s presentation of contemplation, as I noted above.  I tend to think that dropping the idea of matter in this context would simplify the overall analysis, but I might be misguided on that point.  It depends on how one would go about accounting for the appearance of sensory objects through emanation from the Platonic Forms.  Tentatively, I think it is possible to view such emanation as a kind of energy, like light emanating from the sun.  And the metaphor I would use for the arising of sensory appearances would be like a rope appearing from intertwined threads, or colors appearing from differentiated light. 

8.  As a contemplation, this passage, and other like it, deepen the reader’s understanding of the unsubstantial nature of sensory objects and appearances.  This, in turn, helps the Platonic practitioner to turn away from sensory appearances to their transcendental source which are embedded in real Being.  This is a profound contemplation in itself and is a good example of how reading the Enneads resembles having a good spiritual teacher and guide pointing out the way to return to the Good, the One, and the Beautiful.