Atomism
440 BCE – 300 BCE c.
Nothing exists but atoms and empty space, and everything else — colour, sweetness, the soul — is a matter of how the atoms happen to be arranged.
- Active
- 440 BCE – 300 BCE
- Where
- Abdera
- Status
- extinct as a school, vindicated as physics
- Tradition
- Greek
The claim
Being is atoms, uncuttable and unchanging; not-being is void, which nonetheless exists. All change is rearrangement, and nothing happens for a purpose.
What it held
Atomism is a reply to Parmenides that concedes almost everything and then finds the one loophole. Parmenides said what is cannot come to be or change. The atomists agree — about atoms. Each atom is exactly what Parmenides said being must be: ungenerated, indestructible, homogeneous, without internal parts. The trick is to allow many of them, and to allow the void between them, by asserting flatly that what is not does exist.
Everything then follows mechanically. Atoms differ only in shape, arrangement and position, and their collisions produce every visible quality. Sweetness is one shape, bitterness another. Colour is not in the object. Even the soul is atoms, finer and rounder than the rest, which is why it disperses at death and why there is nothing to fear in dying.
No purpose enters anywhere. Democritus explicitly rejects final causes, which is why Aristotle argues with him at such length and why the tradition was so easily read as atheism.
How it argued
Inference from what appearances require: since we see change, and since Parmenides' argument holds for whatever is truly real, reality must be plural and separated by void.
What it was arguing against
Eleatic monism, from inside its own premises. Later, against Aristotle's teleology and against any account in which nature aims at something.
Where it disagreed with itself
Whether atoms are physically or theoretically indivisible. Whether Democritus is a sceptic about the senses — he calls them bastard knowledge — or merely a realist about a reality they misreport.
Common misconceptions
That it is the same theory as modern atomic physics. The reasoning is a priori rather than experimental, and Democritus' atoms are genuinely uncuttable in a way that the twentieth century's are not. And the atomists are not modern materialists in ethics: Democritus wrote extensively on cheerfulness and moderation.
How it began
Leucippus is barely more than a name, and Epicurus is said to have denied he existed. Democritus, who did the work, was so prolific that his catalogue of titles rivals Aristotle's.
What became of it
Taken up by Epicurus with modifications, carried into Latin by Lucretius, and then almost entirely lost — Plato is said never to have mentioned Democritus by name. It returned in the seventeenth century as the mechanical philosophy.
Lasting influence
Epicureanism entirely. Through Lucretius, the scientific revolution: Gassendi, Boyle and Newton all read him. The word atom is his.
Why it still matters
It is the founding statement of the view that the world is matter in motion and nothing besides, which is still the default assumption of the sciences.
Put another way
Letters of an alphabet: the same few shapes, differently ordered, spelling out tragedy or comedy.
Where to start
Lucretius. It is the only complete ancient statement of the position and it is a great poem.
The surprising bit
Democritus was known in antiquity as the laughing philosopher, for finding human anxiety funny. Not one of his sixty or so books survives whole.
In their own words
By convention sweet, by convention bitter; in reality atoms and void.
Nothing occurs at random, but everything for a reason and by necessity.
Connections
- Answers
- Eleatic School
- Influenced
- Epicureanism, Roman Epicureanism
The verdict
A guess arrived at by pure argument that turned out, two thousand years later, to be broadly right.