Plotinian Matter

In the metaphysics of the enneads, matter (hylē) is the lowest stage of emanation — the limit at which the procession from the-one exhausts itself. plotinus is careful and somewhat ambivalent about its status: matter is not actively evil, but ontologically deficient, the “indeterminate, unfixed” residue of the descent. The treatise Enn. I.8, On the Nature and Source of Evil, is the classical text.

Plotinus’s distinctive doctrine is that matter is privation (sterēsis) — not a positive principle competing with the Good (as in Manichaean dualism) but the absence of measure, form, and intelligibility: “the Measureless is evil primarily; whatever, either by resemblance or participation, exists in the state of unmeasure, is evil secondarily, by force of its dealing with the Primal — primarily, the darkness; secondarily, the darkened. Now, Vice, being an ignorance and a lack of measure in the Soul, is secondarily evil, not the Essential Evil” (Enneads I.8, in this recon’s chunks). Vice is secondary evil; matter as the Measureless is primary evil — but only privatively.

Plotinus distinguishes carefully between substratum and privation, recognizing that matter cannot be reduced to either alone: “the one concept defines the relation of substratum to what is not substratum, while that of Privation, in bringing out the indeterminateness of Matter, applies to the Matter in itself: but this still makes Privation and Matter two in reason though one in substratum” (Enneads, this recon). The doctrine is more subtle than the Aristotelian hylē — Plotinus’s matter is closer to the Platonic khora, the formless receptive ground, than to Aristotelian potentiality.

The doctrine is anti-Gnostic. Edinger emphasizes that for Plotinus the visible universe, though produced through the descent into matter, is not therefore a prison: “His attitude to the visible universe was utterly opposed to that of the Gnostics. For them it was an evil prison, vitiated in its very nature, produced as a result of the fall of a spiritual power, with which man… had absolutely nothing in common” (Edinger 1999). The Plotinian descent is necessary and good; the visible cosmos is the radiant lower limit of the divine self-display, not its negation.

For the Lineage this is the philosophical safeguard against the Gnostic temptation that recurs in the depth tradition — the temptation to read matter, body, and the world as opponents of soul rather than as the proper field of soul’s work.

Relationships

• the-one
• emanation
• khora
• prima-materia
• reason-and-necessity

Primary sources

• enneads (Plotinus 270, esp. I.8 and II.4)
• edinger-psyche-in-antiquity-book-one (Edinger 1999)