Within the depth-psychology and philosophical corpus surveyed by Seba, ‘Quantity’ functions not as a mere mathematical descriptor but as a contested ontological category, one whose status illuminates the boundaries between substance, soul, number, and the conditions of knowability. Plotinus provides the most sustained engagement, arguing that time is emphatically not Quantity in the strict sense, that the soul cannot be a thing of quantity (it is ‘all-everywhere’ rather than divisible by magnitude), and that Quantity strictly understood is that which is ‘not inbound with things.’ These positions stand in productive tension with Aristotle’s categories, where quantity, quality, and substance partition the real. Seaford’s historical-philological approach situates the philosophical abstraction of quantity within the monetisation of the Greek world: the merchant’s focus on the quantitative aspect of commodities to the exclusion of the qualitative anticipates Pythagorean number-ontology. Aurobindo dissolves quantity into a substratum that ‘exceeds’ all qualities and quantities alike, while Plato’s Timaeus treats quantity as the foundation of cosmic proportion and elemental mixture. The convergent anxiety running through these sources is that quantity, once abstracted, tends toward the unlimited—a homogeneous continuum that both constitutes and threatens the qualitative determinations of individual being.
time is not Quantity. Quantity in the strict sense is the Quantity not inbound with things; if things
Plotinus sharply distinguishes measured extension from Quantity proper, arguing that strict Quantity is an abstract category independent of particular things, and that time, though measurable, is of a fundamentally different nature.
, The Six Enneads, 270thesis
The soul is not a thing of quantity; we are not to conceive of the All-Soul as some standard ten with particular souls as its constituent units.
Plotinus denies that the soul can be understood through the category of Quantity, since soul is omnipresent and indivisible, unlike geometrical or numerical magnitudes which diminish upon partition.
, The Six Enneads, 270thesis
Quality and Quantity, though attributive, are real entities, and on the basis of this reality distinguishable as Quality and Quantity respectively
Plotinus affirms that Quantity, like Quality, possesses a real ontological status prior to its attribution, requiring investigation of its intrinsic nature rather than reduction to mere relational predication.
, The Six Enneads, 270thesis
we must allow contrariety to Quantity: whenever we speak of great and small, our notions acknowledge this contrariety by evolving opposite images
Plotinus argues that Quantity admits of genuine contrariety through the opposition of great and small, many and few, making it a category with internal dialectical structure.
, The Six Enneads, 270thesis
The doctrine focuses on the quantitative aspect of things to the exclusion of the qualitative, with the result that numbers seem concrete. Focusing on the quantitative aspect of things is what the trader does.
Seaford identifies the Pythagorean reduction of reality to number as structurally homologous to the merchant’s abstraction of monetary value, whereby quality is subordinated to quantitative exchange-value.
, Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy, 2004thesis
geometry is the study of magnitudes. The differences of magnitudes do not eliminate the existence of magnitudes as such, any more than the differences of substances annihilate the substances themselves.
Plotinus defends the irreducibility of Quantity as a genus against the proposal that geometrical figures should be reclassified as Quality, insisting that differentiation within magnitudes presupposes magnitude itself.
, The Six Enneads, 270supporting
Existence without quantity, without quality, without form is not only conceivable, but it is the one thing we can conceive behind these phenomena.
Aurobindo posits a pure Existence that transcends and subtends quantity, quality, and form alike, such that these categories emerge from and dissolve back into an Absolute that exceeds all determination.
, The Life Divine, 1939supporting
it is impossible that from the elements of quantity there should be composed not a quantity but a substance.
Aristotle exposes the categorical incoherence of composing the soul from elements drawn from all genera, since quantity-elements can only produce a quantity, not a substance.
, De Anima (On the Soul), -350supporting
a quality takes character from a body and a quantity from a substance, as time is related to motion and motion to the moved
Plotinus situates Quantity within a hierarchy of ontological dependence, where quantity derives its essential character from substance, analogously to quality’s dependence on body.
, The Six Enneads, 270supporting
The accumulation of money, on the other hand, has no such limits. And it may destroy the limits that define social relations.
Seaford traces the philosophical problem of the unlimited to monetary quantity, arguing that money’s homogeneous and infinitely accumulable nature dissolves the qualitative limits that structure both nature and social life.
, Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy, 2004supporting
Pricing involves both delimitation and measurement (peras and metron). It both delimits specific sums from the unlimited homogeneous continuum of monetary value
Seaford argues that monetary pricing enacts a philosophical operation structurally parallel to Pythagorean number-theory: the imposition of limit (peras) upon an unlimited quantitative continuum.
, Money and the Early Greek Mind: Homer, Philosophy, Tragedy, 2004supporting
if a thing of magnitude on diminution retains its identity in virtue of its quality, this is only saying that bodily and quantitatively it is different even if its identity consists in a quality quite independent of quantity
Plotinus distinguishes qualitative identity from quantitative continuity, arguing that the soul cannot be a definite magnitude precisely because its essential nature is independent of quantitative determination.
, The Six Enneads, 270supporting
Plato has not indicated what are the quantities between which his geometrical proportion holds. It may be conjectured that the quantities in question are the total volumes of the four primary bodies.
The Timaeus commentary identifies cosmological quantity as the underlying parameter of geometric proportion among the four primary bodies, relating the problem of quantity to elemental physics.
, Plato’s cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997supporting
the quantity of signals to be transmitted is represented by the number of details to be transmitted per unit of time, similar to the measurement of a frequency
Simondon treats quantity as a technical parameter of information transmission, measuring signal density per unit time and implicitly connecting quantitative measure to the problem of individuation across temporal sequences.
, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020aside
money, a pure nomos, a human convention, is the measure of all values
Vernant situates the Protagorean formula within a broader argument about money as the quantitative measure of all things, contrasting this sophistic position with Platonic and Pythagorean commitments to non-conventional, qualitative being.
, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983aside