ATOMISM IN A NUTSHELL

Out of respect for Leucippus, our discussion of atomism will be avoid naming names as much as possible, referring to him and Democritus as the atomists, although such an impersonal approach sharply contradicts both my practice and my general inclination. I do it, however, very reluctantly, and by no means following the lead of Bertrand Russell, who does this nonchalantly, starting with the chapter on The Milesian School, where such impersonality has far less justification, in my eyes.

The most astonishing feature of Atomism is that it sounds terribly like modern science, to the point where a suspicion of later tampering might even creep in, in spite of the clear evidence that no such tampering had indeed occurred.

Atomism in a nutshell contends, according to Diogenes Laertius’ rendition, that the whole universe consists of atoms and empty space; everything else is merely thought to exist. The worlds are unlimited; they come into being and perish. Nothing can come into being from that which is not, nor pass away into that which is not. The atoms constitute all things, they are indestructible, eternal, and in constant motion. They all differ in shape and size, but what they have in common is that they are so minuscule that none of them can be further divided (hence the name atomos, undividable). As for the empty space, or void, in which the atoms move, here is indeed a revolutionary first: asserting the existence of “nothing,” which is! Aristotle writes about it, in On Generation and Corruption, with a certain ambiguity, as if he himself is unsure on the finer metaphysical points of this atomistic discovery:

Leucippus thought he had a theory which harmonized with sense-perception, and would not abolish either the coming-to-be and passing-away or motion and the multiplicity of things. He made these concessions to the facts of perception. On the other hand, he conceded to the Monists that there can be no motion without a void. The result is a theory, which states as follows: “The void is a not-being, and no part of what is, is a not-being; for what is in the strict sense of the term is an absolute plenum. This plenum, however, is not a one; on the contrary, it is a many, infinite in number, and invisible, owing to the minuteness of their bulk. The many move in the void (for there is a void): and by coming together they produce coming-to-be, while by separating they produce passing away. Moreover, they act, and suffer action, whenever they chance to be in contact (for, there they are not one), and generate by being put together and becoming intertwined. From the genuinely one, on the other hand, there could never have come to be a multiplicity, nor from the genuinely many a one: that is impossible.”

What greatly amuses me here is that, having seen so much word-parsing and a metaphysical gobbledygook ad absurdum, with Zeno’s paradoxes and all, this colossal paradox contained in the Aristotelian quotation passes unchallenged! On the one hand, “the void is a not-being, and no part of what is,” but, on the other hand, “there is a void”!!! This is exactly what the atomists have proclaimed, that the void, or nothing, is! I believe that metaphysically the existence of nothing makes much more sense than its non-existence, and, in this sense, to the atomists belongs a truly earthshaking metaphysical discovery, and they ought to be given a more proper credit for it. But, mind you, I am talking here only about the metaphysics of it and not about its physics, where the controversy about empty space has existed until the twentieth century, and was settled… sort of, in the way as will be shortly presented. To avoid confusion, I need to remind the reader that our next paragraph is still discussing metaphysics, at least as far as I am concerned.

Russell puts this issue quite concisely: “The first and most obvious way of avoiding the logical difficulty is to distinguish between matter and space. According to this view, space is not nothing, but is of the nature of a receptacle, which may or may not have any give part filled with matter.” And here is Aristotle again: “The theory that the void exists involves the existence of place, for one would define void as a place bereft of body.”

Unlike the situation with the metaphysics of empty space, or absolute space, as Newton asserts physically), the modern state of physics of it has been well summarized by Bertrand Russell in a passage that deserves to be quoted in full:

The modern physicist, while he still believes that matter is in some sense atomic, does not believe in empty space. Where there is not matter, there is still something, notably, light-waves. Matter no longer possesses the lofty status that it acquired in philosophy through the arguments of Parmenides. It is not an unchanging substance, but merely a way of grouping events. Some events belong to groups, which can be regarded as material things; others, such as light-waves, do not. It is the events that are the stuff of the world and each of them is of brief duration. In this respect modern physics is on the side of Heraclitus against Parmenides. But it was on the side of Parmenides until Einstein and quantum theory.

As regards space, the modern view is that it is neither a substance, as Newton maintained, and Leucippus and Democritus ought to have said, nor an adjective of extended bodies, as Dèscartes thought, but a system of relations, as Leibniz held. It is by no means clear, whether this view is compatible with the existence of the void. Perhaps, as a matter of abstract logic, it can be reconciled with the void. We may say that between any two things there is a greater or smaller distance, and that it doesn’t imply the existence of intermediate things. Such a point of view, however, would be impossible to utilize in modern physics. Since Einstein, the distance is between events, not between things, and involves time, as well as space. It is essentially a causal conception, and in modern physics there is no action at a distance. All this, however, is based on empirical, rather than on logical grounds. Moreover, the modern view cannot be stated except in terms of differential equations, and would therefore be unintelligible to the philosophers of antiquity.

It would seem, accordingly, that the logical development of the atomists’ views is the Newtonian theory of absolute space, which meets the difficulty of attributing reality to not-being. There are no logical objections to this theory. The chief objection is that absolute space is absolutely unknowable, and cannot therefore be a necessary hypothesis in an empirical science. A practical objection is that physics can get on without it. But the world of the atomists remains logically possible, and it is more akin to the actual world than is the world of any other of the ancient philosophers.

The purpose of the extended Russellian excerpt above was to put the atomistic theory in proper perspective insofar as subsequent developments of physics are concerned. It goes without saying that the excerpt’s role in the present entry is mostly for the reader’s reference. But, as I said before, it touches upon physics, while the highly curious metaphysics of the atomistic theory is left unchallenged, and, as Russell himself admits it, the theory itself is logically possible, which means that the logic in it is solid enough to have withstood the test of time.