Horizontalism or Verticalism? Proclus vs Plotinus on the Procession of Matter

Abstract

One of the central topics of the Neoplatonic debate on matter is the question of how it relates to the One Good. The basic Neoplatonic claim is clear enough. If one maintains that the Good is the first and omnipresent principle of reality, then matter, too, must be originated by the Good. This indeed is the claim that distinguishes Neoplatonism from gnostic dualism. Most Neoplatonists, particularly in the later tradition, took it that matter for this reason cannot be evil. But even those in the school who held that matter is evil (this was Plotinus's own thesis) did accept that, ultimately, matter stems from the One Good. Of course, the latter position requires a subtle argument to prove that an offspring of the Good can turn out to be evil. In the present article, we shall briefly present Plotinus's explanation of matter's being evil while stemming from the One, and confront it with the doctrine of the later Neoplatonists. We intend to show that the central point of difference between Plotinus and his successors on the issue results from a difference in perspective. Plotinus, on the one hand, proposed a vertical or hylemorphic scheme: he considered the emanation of reality from the One as a process in which a substratum (generated by a higher level) receives its specific form from above. The later Neoplatonists, on the other hand, presented a horizontal scheme: they held that the procession consists in the combination of two elements at the same level, which are modalities of a duality of primordial principles. We shall argue that this shift between Plotinus and his successors is the result of a new reading of Plato's Philebus.