Plotinus on Grasping Matter. A New Interpretation of Ennead 2.4.11,29-38

The traditional notion of prime matter has always raised an epistemological puzzle: how can we have cognitive access to something completely indeterminate? I argue that Plotinus offers a striking approach to this problem, one that has been obscured by a longstanding misreading. Since Marsilio Ficino in 1492, scholars have taken matter as the implied subject of 2.4.11,35–8. This produces several difficulties of textual flow, obscurity and coherence. I contend that the subject is instead the soul. This reinterpretation solves the difficulties and restores Plotinus’ approach to the epistemological problem: matter can be grasped by analogy through the representation of a simultaneously contracting and expanding mass.