Anaxagoras and the atomistsC.C.W.TaylorANAXAGORASIn the course of the fifth century BC the political and cultural pre-eminence ofAthens attracted to the city a considerable number of intellectuals of variouskinds from all over the Greek world. This phenomenon, the so-called ‘SophisticMovement’, is fully described in the next chapter; here it suffices to point out that,in addition to the discussions of moral and theological questions for which thesophists are more widely known, the activities of many of them includedpopularization and extension to new areas, such as the study of the origins ofcivilization, of the Ionian tradition of general speculative enquiry into the naturalworld (see Chapter 2). Anaxagoras stands out from his sophistic contemporariesas a truly original thinker, who sought not merely to transmit the Ionian tradition,but to transform it radically in a number of ways, and in so doing to enable it tomeet the challenge of Eleatic logic, which had threatened the coherence of thecosmological enterprise.An Ionian from Clazomenae on the central coast of Asia Minor, Anaxagoraswas a contemporary of Protagoras and Empedocles. Aristotle says (
Metaphysics984a11–12: DK 59 A 43) that he was older than the latter, and (probably) thathis writings are later than those of Empedocles (the interpretation of the crucialsentence is disputed). It is reliably attested that he spent thirty years in Athensand that he was closely associated with Pericles, though there is some disputeamong scholars on when the thirty years began and ended, and whether theywere a single continuous period or discontinuous. Socrates in the
Phaedo (97b–98c: DK 59 A 47) describes reading Anaxagoras’ book as (probably) quite ayoung man, but implies that he was not personally acquainted with him; somehave taken this as evidence that Anaxagoras had already left Athens for good byabout the middle of the century, but the evidence is weak.It is clear that, incommon with other intellectuals, his rationalistic views on matters touching onreligion (in his case, his materialistic accounts of the nature of the sun and otherheavenly bodies) made him unpopular in certain circles, and there is a tradition(questioned by Dover [6.6]) that he had to flee from Athens (with the assistanceof Pericles) to escape prosecution. He is said to have died at the age of 72,probably in the early 420s.He appears to have written, as did Anaximander, a single comprehensive prosetreatise, referred to by later writers, such as Simplicius, by the traditional title
OnNature. In the
Apology (26d, DK 59 A 35) Socrates states that it was on sale fora drachma, about half a day’s wage for a skilled craftsman, which indicates thatit could be copied in well under a day. The surviving quotations from it (almostall preserved by Simplicius), totalling about 1,000 words, therefore probablyrepresent quite a substantial proportion of it. In what follows I shall be concernedwith two central topics of this work, the nature of the physical world and thenature and cosmic role of mind.
The Physical WorldFor all post-Parmenidean thinkers the central challenge was to show how naturalobjects, including the world order itself, could come to be, change and cease tobe without violating the Eleatic axiom that what is not cannot be. Parmenideshad argued that that axiom excluded coming to be (for what comes to be comesfrom what is not), change (for what changes changes into what it is not) andceasing to be (for what has ceased to be is not). Anaxagoras’ contemporaryEmpedocles met this challenge by redescribing change (including coming andceasing to be) as reorganization of the four elements, earth, air, fire and water.Those elements satisfy the Parmenidean requirement in its full rigour, since theyare eternal and changeless. What we observe and call change, coming to be anddestruction is in reality nothing but reorganization of these elementalcomponents; hence neither organic substances, such as animals and plants, northeir components, bones, hair, blood, leaf tissue, etc.,
strictly speaking ever comeinto being or cease to be. Put anachronistically, coming into being reduces toelemental rearrangement, and what is reduced is thereby eliminated from a strictor scientific account of the world.Anaxagoras agreed with Empedocles that what is conventionally regarded ascoming to be and destruction is in fact reorganization of basic items. He assertsthis fundamental thesis in fragment 17:The Greeks are not correct in their opinions about coming to be anddestruction; for nothing comes to be or is destroyed, but they are mixedtogether and separated out from things which are in being. And so theywould be correct to call coming to be mixing together and destructionseparation.The language is strikingly reminiscent of Empedocles’ fragment 9:Now when they [i.e. the elements] are mixed and come to light in a man ora wild animal or a plant or a bird, then they say it has come to be, andwhen they separate, then they call that dismal destruction; they do not callit as they ought, but I too assent to their usage.But there is a crucial difference, in that Anaxagoras rejected Empedocles’ corebelief in the primacy of the four elements. Even if we accept (as I shall assume)that Anaxagoras’ book was written later than Empedocles’ poem on nature, itmust be a matter for conjecture how far Anaxagoras arrived at his view of whatwas physically basic through conscious opposition to the views of Empedocles.What is, however, indisputable, is that Anaxagoras’ view of the physically basicconstituted a radical departure from that of Empedocles (and
a fortiori from thatof his Ionian predecessors); that divergence, moreover, marked a fundamentalinnovation in the conception of physical reality and of the relation betweenreality and appearance.For Anaxagoras’ account of what is physically basic we may begin withfragments 1 and 4. Fragment 1, according to Simplicius the opening sentence ofAnaxagoras’ book, describes the original state of the universe, in whicheverything that there is was so mixed up together that nothing wasdistinguishable from anything else. What these things were fragment 4 tells us;they were ‘the wet and the dry and the hot and the cold and the bright and thedark and a lot of earth in with them and an infinite number of seeds, all unlikeone another’. In this list we see: first a list of the traditional opposite qualities, asin Anaximander for example; second, earth, one of Empedocles’ four elements;and third, an infinite number of seeds. ‘Seeds’ is a biological term, denotingroughly what we would call the genetic constituents of organisms; the seed of akind of plant or animal is what develops into a new instance of that plant or animaltype, and, as Vlastos [6.19] points out, the process was ordinarily conceived asone in which the seed, seen as ‘a compound of all the essential constituents of theparent body from which it comes and of the new organism into which it willgrow’ (p. 464), develops by assimilating more of the same kinds of constituentsupplied by the environment. That these constituents were identified byAnaxagoras with the organic stuffs, flesh, blood, fibre, etc., which composeorganisms of different kinds, is suggested by fragment 10: ‘How could hair cometo be from what is not hair, and flesh from what is not flesh?’ For the nakedembryo to develop into the hirsute adult, the seed must have contained hair, thepresumably minute quantity of which was supplemented by the amounts of haircontained in the nourishment which the growing animal assimilated.In Anaxagoras’ primeval mixture, then, we find qualities, namely theopposites, and stuffs mingled together without any categorial distinction. Thestuffs include the four Empedoclean elements; earth is mentioned in fragment 4,and air and
aithēr, the bright upper atmosphere, (traditionally conceived as aform of fire) in fragment 1, while the principle of fragment 10 (‘
F cannot cometo be from what is not
F’) implies that water is a constituent in the mixture too.But the elements have no special status relative to other stuffs; earth is no moreprimitive than bone or flesh (contrast Empedocles frs 96 and 98). In fact thecentral and most novel feature of Anaxagoras’ world-picture is that it contains noelemental stuffs. Relative to substances such as trees or fish, and to their parts,such as leaves and fins, all stuffs are elemental, since substances come to bethrough rearrangment of stuffs. But relative to other stuffs, no stuffs areelemental, since every stuff is a component of every stuff; ‘so everything is ineverything, nor is it possible for them to be apart, but everything has a share ineverything’ (fr. 6), ‘in everything there is a share of everything, except mind’ (fr.11).Some interpreters (Cornford [6.5], Vlastos [6.19]), finding a literal reading ofthese statements intolerably uneconomical, have urged a restricted reference forthe second occurrence of ‘everything’, interpreting ‘in everything there is a shareof everything’ as ‘in every substance there is a share of every opposite’. On thisview the basic items of Anaxagoras’ ontology are the opposites, stuffs such asflesh and earth being ‘reduced’ to clusters of (opposite) qualities as in Berkeleyand Hume. (Schofield even describes stuffs as ‘logical constructions’ of opposites([6.17], 133).) The texts in which these statements occur contain no hint of anysuch programme. They give no justification for restricting the reference of‘everything’ more narrowly than to the ‘all things’ which were together in theoriginal mixture, which undoubtedly include the stuffs air and
aithēr (fr. 1) andon the most natural reading earth and an infinite number of seeds (fr. 4).Moreover, the idea that qualities are ontologically more basic than stuffs alsolacks support from the fragments. Those, to repeat, present the picture of theoriginal state of things as a mixture of constituents of all kinds, every one ofwhich is equally a constituent, not only of the mixture, but of every otherconstituent. Further, they attest that the ‘everything in everything’ principleholds in the present world order as much as it did in the original state (fr. 6). Cansense be made of these claims on the generous interpretation of ‘everything’which is here adopted?Before proceeding to that question we should consider another restriction onthe generality of ‘everything’ proposed by Cornford [6.5]. Observing correctlythat the concept of seed is a biological one and that the biological processes ofnutrition and development are particularly prominent in the fragments andtestimonia, Cornford restricts the ‘everything in everything’ principle to organicsubstances, interpreting it as ‘in every organic substance there are seeds of everyorganic substance’. While the indefinite variety of observable biologicaltransformations provides grounds for accepting that every organic substance cancome from every other, and must therefore (by the principle that
F cannot comefrom what is not
F) be a constituent of every other, there is no ground to extendthis to non-organic substances. To use his example ([2.15], 280), since we neverobserve acorns turn into emeralds, there is no reason why Anaxagoras shouldhave believed that acorns contain portions of emerald. On the other hand,Aristotle reports (
Physics 203a23–4, DK 59 A 45) that Anaxagoras held thatevery part is a mixture in the same way as the whole (i.e. the universe) becausehe saw that anything comes to be from anything, and Lucretius cites the comingto be of gold, earth and other non-organic stuffs along with, and explained by thesame process as, organic generation (I.830–42, DK 59 A 44). Thecomprehensive character of traditional Ionian explanation makes it plausible thatAnaxagoras should have accepted the universal thesis. Xenophanes had alreadynoticed the transformation of animals and plants into stone by fossilization (DK21 A 33), and the transformations of stone into earth and earth into water byerosion, of water to wine, wine to animal tissue, etc. were matters of commonobservation (see Simplicius’ commentary on the passage from the
Physics citedabove (DK 59 A 45)). It is therefore highly plausible that Anaxagoras shouldhave held that we can have no reason to say of any two things that they cannot betransformed into one another by some chain of causation, however long. Weknow that the atomists, following Parmenides, appealed to the Principle ofSufficient Reason, arguing, for example, that since there was no more reason foratoms to have one shape rather than another, and since they obviously had someshapes, therefore they must have all possible shapes (Simplicius,
Physics 28.9–10). Similarly, Anaxagoras may have reasoned that since some transformationsare observed to occur, and there is no reason for one transformation to occurrather than another, all transformations must be assumed to occur.I shall take it, then (1) that Anaxagoras drew no systematic distinction betweenstuffs and qualities and (2) that he believed that every amount or bit of any stuff(or quality) contains quantities or bits of every other stuff (or quality). On theassumption that if a given amount of a given stuff (amount
A of stuff
S) containsamounts
B, C, D…of stuffs
X, Y, Z…then
A is larger than
B, and larger than
Cand larger than
D etc.,…it immediately follows that there is no smallest quantityof any stuff. For any quantity of any stuff, however small, contains smallerquantities of every stuff, and so on
ad infinitum. Anaxagoras asserted thisconclusion explicitly: ‘for there is no smallest part of what is small, but always asmaller’ (fr. 3), and according to Simplicius deduced it from the premiss thateverything is in everything and is separated out from everything.But if there is a portion of every stuff in every stuff, what distinguishes onestuff from another? Anaxagoras’ answer is given at the end of fragment 12;‘Nothing is like anything else, but each single thing most clearly is and was thatof which it contains most’. This dark saying is explained by Aristotle in
Physics187b1–7 (not in DK):Therefore they say that everything is mixed in everything, because theysaw everything coming into being from everything. And they appeareddifferent and were called by different names from one another on accountof the quantitatively predominant component in the mixture of infinitelymany components; for there is nothing which is as a whole pure white orblack or sweet or flesh or bone, but the component each thing has most of,that is what the nature of the thing appears to be.That is to say, every stuff contains amounts of every stuff, but in differentproportions, and in each stuff the component of which there is the largest amountgives its character and name to the whole. Thus a lump of earth contains, inaddition to earth, ‘seeds’ of every other stuff and quality, but it contains moreearth than any of the others (the other ‘seeds’ may be thought of as impurities inthe sample of earth). So any sample of earth is not
pure earth, but
predominantlyearth; in general, to be a sample of
S is to be
predominantly S. (The texts leave itindeterminate whether something predominantly
S must contain more
S than allother components put together, or merely more
S than any other component; Ishall assume that the weaker condition is sufficient.)This doctrine may seem to threaten Anaxagoras with a dilemma. Either itcommits him to the existence of samples of pure
S, which is inconsistent with thedoctrine that everything contains a bit of everything, or it is empty. Taking thefirst horn, it is clear what it means to say that a sample of
S is predominantly
S.Analyse the original sample, by whatever physical process is available, into itscomponents S, A, B, C… Continue the analysis until you reach pure samples ofeach component. Then you will discover that the amount of pure
S is larger thanthe amount of pure
A, larger than the amount of pure
B, etc. But now it is false thateverything contains a bit of everything; analysis will have succeeded in doingwhat Anaxagoras explicitly says (fr. 8) it is impossible to do, namely separatefrom one another the things in the cosmos ‘and chop them off with an axe’.Prima facie Anaxagoras should prefer the other horn. According to this there areno pure samples of any stuff; every sample of every stuff, however small, willcontain as impurities amounts of every other stuff. But now what does it mean tosay that gold contains more gold than hot, sweet, blood, vegetable fibre…? Itcan’t mean that it contains more pure gold than pure hot…since there are no suchpure stuffs. It means that it contains more gold than hot etc., i.e. more stuff thatcontains more gold than hot etc., and the stuff that that stuff contains more of isthe stuff that contains more gold etc., and so on for ever. That is to say, we cannever give a complete specification of what it is that gold contains most of; goldjust is what contains more
gold than anything else, and so on for ever. Insemantic terms, we have no account of what
F means if all we can say is ‘“
A is
F”means “
A is predominantly
F”’.But in order to understand the name of a stuff it is not necessary that it shouldbe possible, even in principle, to isolate pure samples of that stuff. As Kripke1 hasshown, the names of stuffs are proper names whose reference is fixed by thoseobservable properties which typically, though contingently, characterize thatstuff. Thus gold is that stuff, whatever it is, which is yellow, shiny, malleable,etc. The specification of what stuff it is which has those properties is the task ofthe best available theory, in modern terms the theory of elements, whichidentifies gold as the element with atomic number 79. The only resourceavailable to Anaxagoras to identify stuffs is via their constitution; thus gold justis that stuff which when analysed yields more samples of yellow, shiny,malleable stuff than red, warm, sticky, liquid stuff (and so on for every stuff-description). Analysis goes on for ever, in principle at least; even when thetechnical limit is reached of whatever process of physical separation has beenemployed, we know a priori that every sample of yellow, shiny, malleable stuffcontains infinitely many samples of every kind of stuff, but always more ofyellow, shiny, malleable stuff than of any other.An objection to the attribution of this theory to Anaxagoras is that it seemsflatly to contradict Aristotle’s evidence (DK 59 A 43, 45, 46) that inAnaxagoras’ system the elements were ‘the homoeomerous things’. InAristotelian terminology a homoeomerous substance is one whose parts are ofthe same nature as the whole, e.g. every part of a piece of flesh is a piece of flesh,as opposed for example to a plant, whose parts are leaves, roots etc., not plants.In general, stuffs, which we have seen to be among Anaxagoras’ basic things, arein Aristotelian terms homoeomerous. Hence Anaxagoras is committed to holdingthat every part of a piece of gold is a piece of gold, which contradicts the accountgiven above, according to which a piece of gold contains, in addition to pieces ofgold, portions of every other substance and quality. (This contradiction is thebasis of Cornford’s interpretation of ‘everything in everything’ as ‘everyopposite in every substance’.) This difficulty seems to me illusory. Onepossibility (adopted by McKirahan [2.7], 208, n. 38) is that in identifyingAnaxagoras’ basic substances as ‘the homoeomerous things’ Aristotle meansmerely to identify them as stuffs, i.e. the things which
in Aristotle’s theory arehomoeomerous, without attributing to Anaxagoras the thesis that those stuffs arein fact homoeomerous. This may well be right. It is, however, possible thatAnaxagoras may have maintained (the texts are silent) that stuffs and qualitiesare indeed homoeomerous, despite containing portions of every stuff and quality.He could do so consistently if by ‘homoeomerous’ he meant ‘having every part ofthe same kind as the whole’, and if by part he understood what is produced bydivision. He
might then have maintained that however minutely one divided up alump of gold, what would be produced would be fragments of gold, the otherstuffs and qualities being separable, if at all, not by division, but by otherprocesses such as smelting. That would be, in effect, to distinguish parts, separableby division, from portions, separable, if at all, otherwise than by division. (It isnot necessary for this hypothesis to suppose that Anaxagoras marked thatdistinction by any explicit distinction of terminology.) I emphasize that thissuggestion is offered merely as a possibility, and that I am not maintaining that ithas positive textual support. The crucial point is that the interpretation of the‘everything, in everything’ doctrine which I have defended above is not
inconsistent with Aristotle’s statements that Anaxagoras’ basic things werehomoeomerous.That doctrine is neither empty nor viciously regressive; it is an ingeniousconstruction which allows Anaxagoras to maintain consistently two of hisfundamental theses: (1) there is a portion of every stuff in every stuff, (2) eachstuff is characterized by the character of its predominant portion. Its crucial flawis its lack of explanatory force; the character of a stuff is ‘explained’ by itsprincipal component’s having precisely that character, which is in turn‘explained’ by its principal component’s having precisely that character, and soon
ad infinitum. A central element in explanation, the simplification of a widerange of diverse phenomena via laws connecting those phenomena with a smallrange of basic properties, is absent. Nor is this an oversight, since the effect ofthe principle ‘What is
F cannot come from what is not
F’ is precisely to excludethe possibility that the ‘explanation’ of something’s having a property should notcontain that very property in the explanans. The slogan ‘Appearances are thesight of what is non-apparent’ (fr. 21a) thus proves to state a central, and quitestartling, Anaxagorean doctrine. At first sight it appears to state the empiricistaxiom that theories about what is unobserved must be based on observation, andit was presumably in that sense that Democritus is said by Simplicius to haveapproved it. But in fact Anaxagoras’ claim is much stronger; he is asserting thatthe observable phenomena literally do give us sight of what is unobserved, inthat the very properties which we observe characterize the world through andthrough. (This was presumably the point of the remark of Anaxagoras to hisassociates recorded by Aristotle (
Metaphysics 1009b26–8, DK 59 A 28), thatthey would find that things are just as they supposed.) This does not contradictfragment 21, where Anaxagoras is reported by Sextus as declaring that theweakness of the senses prevents us from judging the truth, and as supporting thisclaim by citing the imperceptibility of the change produced by pouring apigment drop by drop into a pigment of a different colour. Rather, the twofragments complement one another. The senses are unable to discern the infinitevariety of components in any observable thing, and hence to detect in them themicroscopic rearrangements whose accumulation eventually produces anobservable change (fr. 21); yet the nature of those components has to be what isrevealed by observation at the macroscopic level (fr. 21a).Just as there are in Anaxagoras’ theory no elements, i.e. basic stuffs, so there areno basic properties. It cannot, therefore, be the task of theory to devise an accountof the world sufficient to explain the phenomena, since the phenomena mustultimately be self-explanatory. Theory has, however, the more limited task ofexplaining how the observed world has come to be in the state in which it is; thisbrings us to another central Anaxagorean concept, that of Mind.
MindIn the famous passage of the
Phaedo cited above, in which Socrates describes hisintellectual progress, he states that he was dissatisfied by the absence ofteleleogical explanation from the theories of the early philosophers. Anaxagoraspromised to make good this deficiency, since he claimed that the world isorganized by Mind. Socrates, assuming that this organization by a cosmicintelligence must aim at the best possible state of things, eagerly perusedAnaxagoras’ book for an account of that state and how it was attained, and wasall the more disappointed to discover that in his cosmology Anaxagoras made nouse of teleology, remaining content, like his predecessors, with purelymechanistic explanations.The evidence of the fragments of Anaxagoras’ views on Mind is consistentwith this passage. The most important piece of evidence is fragment 12, whichcontains a number of theses about the nature and activity of Mind, as follows:Nature Mind is (a) unlimited(b) self-directing(c) separate from everything else(d) the finest and purest of allthings(e) all alike, the greater and thelessActivity Mind (f) takes thought for everythingand has the greatest power(g) controls everything whichhas a soul(h) directed the entire cosmicrotation, initiating it andcontinuing it(i) knew all the mixtures andseparations of everything(j) organized whatever was, isand will be.The first problem is, what is the reference of Anaxagoras’ term
Nous? Is it mindin general, instanced in different individual minds (as in ‘the concept of mind’),or a single cosmic mind? The answer is that it is probably both. The specificationof mind given by (a)–(e) seems to be an attempt to differentiate mind as aconstituent of the universe from all other constituents. Mind is the finest andpurest of all things, it is self-directing (as opposed to other things, which(according to (f), (g) and (j) are directed by mind), and it (alone) is separate fromeverything else, whereas everything else contains a portion of everything else.(Compare fr. 11, ‘In everything there is a portion of everything except mind, butthere are also some things which contain mind.’) But the account of mind’sactivity, most especially (h), strongly suggests the activity of a single suprememind, which organizes the cosmos as a whole. It is clear, too, that that is how Platorepresents Socrates as understanding Anaxagoras, especially
Phaedo 97c: ‘Mindis what organizes and is the cause of everything…the mind which organizeseverything will organize and arrange each thing as is best’. The characteristicslisted in (a)–(e) are characteristics of all minds, both ‘the greater and the less’(i.e. presumably the supreme cosmic mind and subordinate minds, including butnot necessarily restricted to human minds), which are explicitly stated in (e) allto be alike. The activities listed in (f)–(j) are activities of the cosmic mind,though (g) may also perhaps refer to an individual mind directing each ensouledthing, doubtless under the overall direction of the cosmic mind. (Aristotle says(
On the Soul 2–4, DK 59 A 100) that Anaxagoras sometimes identified soulwith mind and attributed the latter to all animals, but appears unsure of whatprecisely he meant, while the pseudo-Aristotelian work
On Plants reports that heregarded plants as a kind of animals and attributed consciousness and thought tothem (815a15ff., DK 59 A 117).) Assuming that the fragments refer both to thecosmic mind and to individual minds, they are inexplicit as to the relationbetween the former and the latter. The minds of humans and of other animals areclearly subordinate to the cosmic mind, but it is unclear what the model ofsubordination is, i.e. whether particular human and other minds are parts of thecosmic mind, or agents operating under its direction.The only assertion which Anaxagoras supports by any argument is (c): mindcannot be a constituent of any stuff, for if it were it would (by the ‘everything ineverything’ principle) be a constituent of every stuff. Why should it not be?Empedocles had maintained that ‘everything has intelligence and a share inthought’ (fr. 110); why should Anaxagoras have demurred? The reason which hegives in fragment 12 is that if mind were a constituent of anything, the otherconstituents would prevent it from exercising its directive function. Mind has tobe external to what it controls, as the rider has to be external to the horse. It ishard to see any force in this argument. We think of organisms as self-directing,and assume that some part of the organism functions as a control mechanism.Why should the mind of a human or animal not be a built-in control mechanismfor the animal, or the cosmic mind such a mechanism for the cosmos as a whole?It is problematic precisely because what is implied by the description of mindas unlimited. All stuffs exist eternally (fragment 17), and are thereforetemporally boundless, and are unlimited in amount (fragments 1 and 3). Perhaps(a) is simply to be read as making the same claims for mind, but the opening ofthe fragment appears to contrast mind with the other things, and it is at leasttempting to look for a sense of ‘unlimited’
(apeiron) in which mind alone isunlimited. Such a sense may be suggested by fragment 14, which states that mindis where all the other things are. Mind is not, as we have seen, a constituent ofanything else, but it knows and controls everything, and is here said to be whereeverything else is. The picture seems to be of mind as everywhere, pervadingeverything without being part of anything. This would differentiate mind fromthe other stuffs, for though every stuff is contained in every stuff, there are someplaces where it is not, namely those places which are occupied by other stuffs.Mind, on the other hand, if this suggestion is right, is not excluded from anyplace by the presence of any stuff in that place. This, together with thedescription of mind as the finest and purest of all things, may suggest thatAnaxagoras was groping towards the conception of mind as immaterial, but itwould be anachronistic to suggest that that conception is clearly articulated in thefragments.The fragments provide scant information on how the cosmic mind directs andorganizes the cosmos. Fragment 12, supplemented by some secondary sources(DK 59 A 12 (Plutarch), 42 (Hippolytus) and 71 (Aetius)), indicates that acosmic rotation separated out the original undifferentiated mass by centrifugalforce into the main elemental masses, and also attests that the original rotation iscontinuing and will continue to a greater and greater extent. But what theconnection is between the rotation and other kinds of natural change, e.g. thegeneration and development of plants and animals, and how mind is supposed toorganize the latter, remains obscure. In particular, our extant evidence,consistently with Socrates’ complaint in the
Phaedo (see above) says nothingabout how natural change, of whatever kind, is directed towards the best.It is none the less likely that Anaxagoras held the cosmic mind to be divine.The explicit statements to this effect in ps.-Plutarch’s
Epitome and in Stobaeus(DK 59 A 48) are not confirmed by similar assertions in the fragments.However, the description of its activity in fragment 12, as ‘taking thought foreverything and having the greatest power’, ‘controlling’
(kratein) everythingensouled and the whole cosmic rotation, ‘knowing everything that is mixedtogether and separated out’ and ‘organizing’
(diakosmein) everything isirresistibly suggestive not only of traditional divinities such as Zeus but also ofthe cosmic divinities of Anaxagoras’ philosophical predecessors, the divine mindof Xenophanes which ‘without labour controls all things by the thought of itsmind’ (DK 21 B 25, cf. 26) and the holy mind of Empedocles ‘darting throughthe whole cosmos with swift thoughts’ (DK 31 B 134).
2In this respect, as in many of the details of his astronomy and cosmology,Anaxagoras preserves some of the features of earlier Ionian thought. Theconventional picture of him as a child of the fifth-century enlightenment is tothat extent one-sided, yet it is not altogether inaccurate. In fact the two aspectsare complementary; Anaxagoras represents in a striking way the vitality of theIonian tradition, specifically its adaptability to the rigour of Eleatic thought andto the critical spirit of the later fifth century. That feature is, if anything, even morepronounced in the thought of the atomists, especially that of Anaxagoras’younger contemporary Democritus.
THE ATOMISTSAtomism was the creation of two thinkers, Leucippus and Democritus. Theformer, attested by Aristotle, our primary source, as the founder of the theory,was a shadowy figure even in antiquity, being over-shadowed by his morecelebrated successor Democritus to such an extent that the theory came to begenerally regarded as the work of the latter, while Epicurus, who developed andpopularized atomism in the third century BC, went so far as to deny thatLeucippus ever existed. Nothing is known of his life. Even his birthplace wasdisputed, some sources associating him with one or other of the two main centresof early Greek philosophy, Miletus and Elea, others with Abdera, the birthplaceof Democritus. Of his dates all that can be said is that since he was certainly olderthan Democritus he lived during the fifth century. No lists of his works survive,and only a single quotation is ascribed to him by a single ancient source(Stobaeus).Only a little more is known about Democritus. He came from Abdera, on thenorth coast of the Aegean (also the birthplace of Protagoras), and is reported ashaving described himself as young in the old age of Anaxagoras, i.e. probably inthe 430s. He is traditionally said to have lived to a very great age (over 100 yearson some accounts), and may therefore be supposed to have lived from about themiddle of the fifth till well into the fourth century (though some scholars disputethe accounts of his longevity). He is quoted as saying that he visited Athens(where no one knew him), and is said to have had some slight acquaintance withSocrates. Of his works, which according to the list preserved in DiogenesLaertius’
Life were many and encyclopaedic in scope, including a completeaccount of the physical universe and works on subjects including astronomy,mathematics, literature, epistemology and ethics, none survive. Ancient sourcespreserve almost 300 purported quotations, the great majority on ethics (seebelow), but also including some important fragments on epistemology preservedby Sextus. Our knowledge of the metaphysical foundations and physicaldoctrines of atomism relies on the doxographical tradition originating fromAristotle, who discusses atomism extensively. The precise relation betweenLeucippus and Democritus is unclear. Aristotle and his followers treat Leucippusas the founder of the theory, but also assign its basic principles to both Leucippusand Democritus; later sources tend to treat the theory as the work of Democritusalone. While it is clear that the theory originated with Leucippus it is possiblethat the two collaborated to some extent, and almost certain that Democritusdeveloped the theory into a universal system.
Physical PrinciplesAccording to Aristotle, the atomists, like Anaxagoras, attempted to reconcile theobservable data of plurality, motion and change with the Eleatic denial of thepossibility of coming to be or ceasing to be. Again like him, they postulatedunchangeable primary things, and explained apparent generation and corruptionby the coming together and separation of those things. But their conceptions ofthe primary things and processes differed radically from those of Anaxagoras.For the latter the primary things were observable stuffs and properties, and theprimary processes mixing and separation of those ‘elements’. For the atomists,by contrast, the primary things were not properties and stuffs but physicalindividuals, and the primary processes not mixing and separation but theformation and dissolution of aggregates of those individuals. Again, the basicindividuals were unobservable, in contrast with the observable stuffs ofAnaxagoras; consequently their properties could not be observed, but had to beassigned to those individuals by theory.Since the theory had to account for an assumed infinity of phenomena, itassumed an infinite number of primary substances, while postulating theminimum range of explanatory properties, specifically shape, size, spatialordering and orientation within a given ordering. All observable bodies areaggregates of basic substances, which must therefore be too small to beperceived. These corpuscles are physically indivisible (
atomon, literally‘uncuttable’), not merely in fact but in principle; Aristotle reports an (unsound)atomistic argument, which has some affinities with one of Zeno’s argumentsagainst plurality, that if. (as for example Anaxagoras maintained) it weretheoretically possible to divide a material thing
ad infinitum, the division mustreduce the thing to nothing. This Zenonian argument was supported by anotherfor the same conclusion; atoms are theoretically indivisible because they containno void. On this conception bodies split along their interstices; hence where thereare no interstices, as in an atom, no splitting is possible. (The same principleaccounts for the immunity of the atoms to other kinds of change, such asreshaping, compression and expansion; all require displacement of matter withinan atom, which is impossible without any gaps to receive the displaced matter.)It is tempting to connect the assumption that bodies split only along theirinterstices with the Principle of Sufficient Reason, which the atomists appealedto as a fundamental principle of explanation (arguing for example that thenumber of atomic shapes must be infinite, because there is no more reason for anatom to have one shape than another (Simplicius,
Physics 28.9–10, DK 67 A 8)).Given the total uniformity of an atom, they may have thought, there could be noreason why it should split at any point, or in any direction, rather than any other.Hence by the Principle of Sufficient Reason, it could not split at all.Atoms are in a state of eternal motion in empty space; the motion is not theproduct of design, but is determined by an infinite series of prior atomicinteractions (whence two of Aristotle’s principle criticisms of Democritus, thathe eliminated final causation and made all atomic motion ‘unnatural’). Emptyspace was postulated as required for motion, but was characterized as ‘what is not’,thus violating the Eleatic principle that what is not cannot be. We have noevidence of how the atomists met the accusation of outright self-contradiction.As well as explaining the possibility of motion, the void was postulated toaccount for the observed plurality of things, since the atomists followedParmenides (fragment 8, 22–5) in maintaining that there could not be manythings if there were no void to separate them. The theoretical role of the void inaccounting for the separation of atoms from one another has an interestingimplication, recorded by Philoponus (
Physics 494.19–25 (not in DK),
OnGeneration and Corruption 158.26–159.7, DK 67 A 7). Since atoms areseparated from one another by the void, they can never strictly speaking comeinto contact with one another. For if they did, even momentarily, there would benothing separating them from one another. But then they would be as inseparablefrom one another as the inseparable parts of a single atom, whose indivisibility isattributed to the lack of void in it (see above); indeed, the two former atomswould now be parts of a single larger atom. But, the atomists held, it isimpossible that two things should become one. Holding atomic fusion to betheoretically impossible, and taking it that any case of contact between atomswould be a case of fusion (since only the intervening void prevents fusion), theyperhaps drew the conclusion that contact itself is theoretically impossible. Hencewhat appears to be impact is in fact action at an extremely short distance; ratherthan actually banging into one another, atoms have to be conceived as repellingone another by some sort of force transmitted through the void. Again, though nosource directly attests this, the interlocking of atoms which is the fundamentalprinciple of the formation of aggregates is not strictly speaking interlocking,since the principle of no contact between atoms forbids interlocking as much asimpact. Just as impact has to be reconstrued as something like magneticrepulsion, so interlocking has to be reconstrued as quasi-magnetic attraction. Ifthis suggestion is correct (and it is fair to point out that no ancient source otherthan Philoponus supports it) it is a striking fact that, whereas the post-Renaissance corpuscular philosophy which developed from Greek atomismtended to take the impossibility of action at a distance as an axiom, the originalform of the theory contained the a priori thesis that all action is action at adistance; consequently that impact, so far from giving us our most fundamentalconception of physical interaction, is itself a mere appearance which disappearsfrom the world when the description of reality is pursued with full rigour.
Chance and NecessityWhile the broad outlines of the views of the atomists on these topics can be fairlyreadily reconstructed, there is much obscurity about the details. The atomists’universe is purposeless, mechanistic and deterministic; every event has a cause,and causes necessitate their effects. Broadly speaking the process is mechanical;ultimately, everything in the world happens as a result of atomic interaction. Theprocess of atomic interaction has neither beginning nor end, and any particularstage of that process is causally necessitated by a preceding stage. But exactlyhow the atomists saw the process as operating is obscure. This obscurity islargely attributable to the fragmentary nature of the evidence which we possess,but it may be that the statement of the theory itself was not altogether free fromobscurity.The fundamental text is the single fragment of Leucippus (DK 67 B 1):‘Nothing happens at random, but everything from reason and by necessity.’ Thedenial that anything happens ‘at random’
(matēn) might well be taken inisolation to amount to an assertion that all natural events are purposive, since theadverb and its cognates frequently have the sense ‘in vain’ (i.e. not in accordancewith one’s purpose) or ‘pointlessly’. If that were the sense of ‘not
matēn’ then‘from reason’
(ek logou) would most naturally be understood as ‘for a purpose’.These renderings are, however, very unlikely. The majority of the sources followAristotle (
On the Generation of Animals 789b 2–3, DK 68 A 66) in asserting thatDemocritus denied purposiveness in the natural world, explaining everything bymechanistic ‘necessity’.
3 A reading of Leucippus which has him assert, notmerely (
contra Democritus) that some, but that all natural events are purposive,posits a dislocation between the fundamental world-views of the two of suchmagnitude that we should expect it to have left some trace in the tradition.Moreover, the attribution of all events to necessity, a central feature of themechanistic Democritean world-view, is itself attested in the fragment ofLeucippus. We ought, then, to look for an interpretation of the fragment whichallows it to be consistent with Democritus’ denial of final causation.Such an interpretation is available without forcing the texts. Sometimes (e.g.Herodotus VII.103.2, Plato
Theaetetus 189d)
matēn is to be rendered not ‘withoutpurpose’ but ‘without reason’ (‘in vain’ and ‘empty’ have similar ranges ofapplication). Given that construal of
matēn, ‘from reason’ is to be construed as‘for a reason’, where the conception of reason is linked to that of rationalexplanation. The first part of the fragment (‘Nothing happens at random, buteverything from reason’) thus asserts, not universal purposiveness in nature, buta principle which we have already seen to be pervasive in atomism, the Principleof Sufficient Reason. Instead of a radical discontinuity between Leucippus andDemocritus, the fragment, thus construed, attests commitment to a principlebasic to atomism. The second half (‘and by necessity’) makes a stronger claim,which links the notion of rational explanation to the notions of necessity and ofcause. The stronger claim is that whatever happens has to be happen, cannot buthappen. This amounts to a specification of the reason whose existence is assertedin the first half of the sentence; nothing happens without a reason, and, in thecase of everything which happens, the reason for which it happened was that ithad to happen. But the claim that whatever happens happens ‘by necessity’ is notjust the claim that whatever happens has to happen, though the former impliesthe latter. For the concept of necessity is not a purely modal concept requiringelucidation via its connection with other such concepts, such as possibility andimpossibility. Rather, necessity is conceived as an irresistible force bringing itabout that things have to happen. This is indicated both by the causal force of thepreposition
hypo (rendered ‘by’ in the expression ‘by necessity’), and also by thefact that Democritus is reported as
identifying necessity with impact and motion((Aetius I.26.2, DK 68 A 66) on the interpretation of this see below). Impact andmotion, then, take over the determining role traditionally assigned to Necessity,when the latter is conceived (as in Parmenides and Empedocles) as anineluctable, divine cosmic force (cf. Plato,
Protagoras 345d5 ‘Against necessitynot even the gods fight’).Nothing, then, just happens; every event occurs because it had to occur, i.e.because it was made to occur by prior impact (namely, of atoms on one another)and prior motion (namely, of atoms). So there can be no chance events, i.e. noevents which simply happen. On the other hand, we have evidence that theatomists assigned some role to chance in the causation of events, thoughprecisely what role is not easy to determine. Aristotle (
Physics 196a24–8, DK 68A 69), Simplicius (
Physics 327.24–6, DK 68 A 67; 330.14–20, DK 68 A 68) andThemistius (
Physics 49.13–16 (not in DK)) all say that Democritus attributed theformation of every primal cosmic swirl to chance (indeed Aristotle finds a specialabsurdity in the theory that while events in a cosmos occur in regular causalsequences, the cosmos itself comes into being purely by chance). Cicero (
On theNature of the Gods I.24.66, DK 67 A 11) says that heaven and earth come intoexistence ‘without any compulsion of nature, but by their [i.e. the atoms’] chanceconcurrence’, while Lactantius (
Divine Institutions I.2.1–2, DK 68 A 70) baldlyattributes to Democritus and Epicurus the view that ‘everything happens orcomes about fortuitously’. Aetius I.29.7: ‘Democritus and the Stoics say that it[i.e. chance] is a cause which is unclear to human reason’ may be read either asasserting or as denying that Democritus believed that there are genuinely chanceevents. Read in the latter way it attributes to Democritus the view that we explainan event as due to chance when its real cause is unknown; on the former readingthe view attributed to Democritus is that chance is itself a real cause of events,but an unfathomable one (the position mentioned by Aristotle without attributionat
Physics 19605–7). A passage from Epicurus’
On Nature (fr. 34.30 inArrighetti), which one might hope to be our most authoritative source, issimilarly ambiguous. There Epicurus describes the atomists as ‘making necessityand chance responsible for everything’, a formulation which is ambiguousbetween two positions; (1) ‘necessity’ and ‘chance’ are two names for a singleuniversal cause, (2) necessity and chance are distinct but jointly exhaustivecauses of everything.
4The passage of Lactantius is of little weight; he states that the fundamentalquestion is whether the world is governed by providence or whether everythinghappens by chance, and says that Epicurus and Democritus held the latter view. Itis plausible that he took their denial of providence to commit them to that view,since he himself took those alternatives to be exhaustive. This passage, then,gives no independent ground for the attribution to either philosopher of the thesisthat literally everything happens by chance.We are still, however, left with those passages attesting Democritus’ belief thatevery cosmic swirl, and therefore every cosmos, come into being by chance.That might be thought to be confirmed by the statement in Diogenes Laertius’summary of Democritus’ cosmology that he identified the cosmic swirl itselfwith necessity (IX.45, DK 68 A 1). On this interpretation the statement thateverything happens by necessity is confined to events within a cosmos, andstates that all such events are determined by the atomic motions constituting theswirl. The swirl itself, however, is not determined by itself, nor by anything; itjust happens. Eusebius (
Praeparatio Evangelica XIV.23.2, DK 68 A 43) alsoreports Democritus as ascribing the formation of worlds to chance, and goesfurther by reporting him as holding that the pre-cosmic motion of the atoms wasalso random (‘these atoms travel in the void
hōs etuchen (literally “as itchanced”). On this view necessity governs, but is local to, a world order, whichitself arises by chance from a pre-cosmic state where there is no necessity.The recognition of pure chance is, however, inconsistent with the Principle ofSufficient Reason, which we know the atomists accepted. It therefore seemspreferable to look for some interpretation of the evidence which is consistentwith that principle. That interpretation is provided by the first reading of theAetius passage cited above, namely that the ascription of events to chance is aconfession of ignorance of their causes, not a denial that they have causes. Somefeatures of the evidence support this suggestion. Diogenes’ summary of thecosmology of Leucippus (IX.30–3, DK 67 A 1) concludes with the sentence,‘Just like the coming into being of worlds, so do their growth, decay, anddestruction occur according to a certain necessity, the nature of which he does notexplain.’ In line with his famous dictum, then, Leucippus held that all eventsincluding the formation of worlds happen according to necessity, but was unableto say what it is that necessitates cosmic events. It is then plausible that either hehimself or Democritus said that such events may
be said to occur by chance, inthe sense that we are (whether merely in fact or in principle is indeterminate)ignorant of their causes. Simplicius’ evidence suggests just that; in
Physics 327.24–6 his attribution to Democritus of the view that the cosmic swirl arises bychance is avowedly his own inference from the fact that Democritus did
not sayhow or why that occurs. In
Physics 330.14–20 he says that although Democritusappeared
(edokei) to have made use of chance in his account of the formation ofworlds, in his more detailed discussions
(en tois merikōterois) he says thatchance is not the cause of anything. That suggests that he merely seemed toascribe cosmogony to chance (perhaps by speaking of it as a chance occurrencein the sense of an occurrence whose cause is unknown). Explanations of specifickinds of events and of particular events were governed by the principle that thereare no chance events, but no attempt was made to offer explanations of thefundamental cosmic processes themselves. That need not imply that they areliterally uncaused, but that they might as well be treated as such, since theiractual causes are of a degree of complexity outstripping the powers of the humanmind to discover.For the atomists, then, everything happens of necessity; the identification ofnecessity with the mechanical forces of impact and motion may have been due toDemocritus. But what exactly was his view on this? Aetius (I.26.2, DK 68 A 66)reports him as identifying necessity with ‘impact and motion and a blow ofmatter’. Are impact and motion given equal status in this identification, or is ittaken for granted that motion is always caused by prior impact? On the formerconstrual some motion may be either uncaused, or attributable to a cause otherthan impact. In favour of the first alternative is Aristotle’s evidence (
Physics252a32–b2, DK 68 A 65) that Democritus held that one should not ask for acause of what is always the case. He might then have said that the atoms aresimply always in motion. But while that principle allows him to exclude thequestion, ‘What causes the atoms to be in motion?’, the Principle of SufficientReason requires that the question, ‘Why is any particular atom moving with anyparticular motion?’ should have an answer, and it might appear inevitable thatthat answer should refer to a prior atomic collision. We have, however, to recallthe evidence from Philoponus that atoms never actually collide or come intocontact, with its implication that the basic physical forces are attraction andrepulsion. Attraction, as we saw, explains, not atomic motion, but the immobilityof atoms relative to one another, since the relative stability of atoms in anaggregate has to be explained, not by their literal interlocking, but by their beingheld together
as if interlocked by an attractive force operating over the tiny gapsbetween the atoms in the aggregate. In addition, some form of attraction mayalso have explained some atomic motions; Sextus cites Democritus (
AdversusMathematicos VII.116–8, DK 68 B 164) as holding that things of the same kindtend to congregate together, and as illustrating that phenomenon by examples ofthe behaviour of animate (birds flocking together) and inanimate things (grainsof different sorts being separated out by the action of a sieve, pebbles of differentshapes being sorted together by the action of waves on a beach). That thisprinciple was applied to the atoms appears from Diogenes’ account of thecosmogony of Leucippus, where atoms of all shapes form a swirling mass fromwhich they are then separated out ‘like to like’. The separation out of atoms ofdifferent
sizes could adequately be accounted for by the stronger centripetaltendency of the larger, itself a function of their greater mass. But the context inDiogenes, where the atoms have just been described as of all shapes, with nomention so far of size, suggests that ‘like to like’ is here to be understood as ‘liketo like in shape’. Aetius’ report of Democritus’ account of sound (IV.19.3, DK68 A 128) asserts that atoms of like shape congregate together, and contains thesame illustrative examples as the Sextus passage; it is plausible, though notexplicitly asserted, that this same principle accounts for the formation ofaggregates of spherical atoms, for example flames.We have, then, evidence that Democritus’ dynamics postulated threefundamental forces: a repulsive force which plays the role of impact in aconventional corpuscular theory, and two kinds of attractive force, one of whichdraws together atoms of the same shape and another which holds together atomsof different shapes in an atomic aggregate. It is plausible that he applied the term‘necessity’ to all three, regarding them alike as irresistible. It must, however, beacknowledged first that the evidence for this theory is fragmentary and also thateven if it is accepted we have no idea whether or how Democritus attempted tounify these forces into a unified theory. Stated thus baldly, the theory hasobvious difficulties; for example, if two atoms of the same shape collide, do theyrebound or stick together? If all atoms have both attractive and repulsive forcethere must be some yet more basic principles determining what force orcombination of forces determines their motion. Our sources give no hint ofwhether Democritus had so much as considered such questions.
Epistemology and PsychologyWhile we have no evidence to suggest that Leucippus was concerned withepistemological questions, there is abundant evidence of their importance forDemocritus. It is quite likely that the latter’s epistemological interests werestimulated at least in part by his fellow citizen and elder contemporaryProtagoras (see below). Our evidence is highly problematic, in that it providessupport for the attribution to Democritus of two diametrically opposed positionson the reliability of the senses. On the one hand, we have a number of passages,including some direct quotations, in which he is seen as rejecting the senses astotally unreliable; on the other, a number of passages ascribe to him the doctrinethat all appearances are true, which aligns him with Protagorean subjectivism, aposition which he is, however, reported as having explicitly rejected. The formerinterpretation is supported mainly by evidence from Sextus, and the latter mainlyby evidence from Aristotle and his commentators, but we cannot resolve thequestion by simply setting aside one body of evidence in favour of the other. Thereasons are that: (1) in the course of a few lines (
Metaphysics 1009b7–17, DK 68A 112) Aristotle says both that Democritus says that either nothing is true, or it isunclear to us, and that he asserts that what appears in perception is necessarilytrue; (2) in
Adversus Mathematicos (VII.136, DK 68 B 6) Sextus ascribes someof Democritus’ condemnation of the senses to a work in which ‘he hadundertaken to give the senses control over belief. Prima facie, then, the evidencesuggests that both interpretations reflect aspects of Democritus’ thought. Wasthat thought, then, totally inconsistent? Or can the appearance of systematiccontradiction be eliminated or at least mitigated?The former interpretation is based on the atomists’ account of the secondaryqualities, whose observer-dependence Democritus seems to have been the firstphilosopher to recognize. Our senses present the world to us as consisting ofthings characterized by colour, sound, taste, smell, etc., but in reality the worldconsists of atoms moving in the void, and neither atoms nor the void arecharacterized by any secondary quality. We thus have a dichotomy between howthings seem to us and how they are in reality, expressed in the celebrated slogan(fr. 9) ‘By convention sweet and by convention bitter, by convention hot, byconvention cold, by convention colour, but in reality atoms and the void.’Further, the distinction between the reality of things and the appearances whichthat reality presents has to be supplemented by an account of the causalprocesses via which we receive those appearances. Atomic aggregates affect usby emitting from their surfaces continuous streams of films of atoms whichimpinge on our sense organs, and the resulting perceptual states are a function ofthe interaction between those films and the atomic structure of the organs. Forexample, for an object to be red is for it constantly to emit films of atoms of sucha nature that, when those films collide with an appropriately situated perceiver,the object will look red to that perceiver.Hence we are doubly distanced from reality; not only phenomenologically, inthat things appear differently from how they are, but also causally, in that weperceive atomic aggregates via the physical intervention of other aggregates(namely the atomic films) and the action of those latter on our sense organs. Anumber of fragments stress the cognitive gulf which separates us from reality: (fr.6) ‘By this principle man must know that he is removed from reality’; (fr. 8)‘Yet it will be clear that to know how each thing is in reality is impossible’; (fr.10) ‘That in reality we do not how each thing is or is not has been shown manytimes’ and (fr. 117) ‘In reality we know nothing, for truth is in the depths.’This evidence immediately presents a major problem of interpretation. On theone hand fragment 9 and associated reports stress the gulf between appearanceand reality, claiming that the senses are unreliable in that they misrepresentreality. That dogmatic claim presupposes that we have some form of access toreality, which enables us to find the sensory picture unfaithful to how things arein fact. On the other hand, fragments 6, 8, 10 and 117 make the much moreradical claim that reality is totally inaccessible, thereby undercutting the thesisthat there is a gulf between appearance and reality. Fragment 7, ‘This argumenttoo shows that in reality we know nothing about anything, but each person’sopinion is something which flows in’ and the second half of fragment 9, ‘In factwe know nothing firm, but what changes according to the condition of our bodyand of the things that enter it and come up against it’ attempt uneasily to straddlethe two positions, since they draw the radically sceptical conclusion from apremiss about the mechanism of perception which presupposes access to thetruth about that mechanism. We might conclude that Democritus simply failed todistinguish the dogmatic claim that the senses misrepresent reality from thesceptical claim that we can know nothing whatever about reality. An alternativestrategy is to look for a way of interpreting the evidence which will tend to bringthe two claims nearer to consonance with one another.We can bring the two claims closer to one another if the ‘sceptical’ fragmentsare interpreted as referring, not to cognitive states generally, but specifically tostates of sensory cognition. These fragments will then simply reiterate the thesisthat we know nothing about the nature of reality
through the senses, a thesiswhich is consistent with the slogan stated in the first half of fragment 9 andwhich dissolves the apparent tension internal to fragment 7 and the second halfof fragment 9. Support for that suggestion comes from consideration of thecontext in which Sextus quotes fragments 6–10, namely that of Democritus’critique of the senses; of this Sextus observes, ‘In these passages he more or lessabolishes every kind of apprehension, even if the senses are the only ones whichhe attacks specifically.’ It thus appears that Sextus understands Democritus asreferring in these fragments to the senses only, though in his (i.e. Sextus’) viewthe critique there directed against the senses in fact applies to all forms ofapprehension. This is confirmed by the distinction which Sextus immediately(
Adversus Mathematicos VII.135–9) attributes to Democritus between the‘bastard’ knowledge provided by the senses and the ‘genuine’ knowledgeprovided by the intellect (fr. 11). The latter is specifically said to be concernedwith things which fall below the limits of sensory discrimination, and we musttherefore suppose that the atomic theory itself is to be ascribed to this form ofknowledge. This is supported by those passages (
ibid. VIII.6–7, 56) in whichSextus associates the position of Democritus with that of Plato, in that bothreject the senses as sources of knowledge and maintain that only intelligiblethings are real; for Plato, of course, the intelligible things are the Forms, whereasfor Democritus they are the atoms, which are inaccessible to perception and,consequently, such that their properties are determinable only by theory.Thus far the prospects for a unified interpretation of Democritus’epistemology look promising. The position expressed in the fragments cited bySextus is not general scepticism, but what we might term theoretical realism. Thecharacter of the physical world is neither revealed by perception nor inaccessibleto us; it is revealed by a theory which, starting from perceptual data, explainsthose data as appearances generated by the interaction between a world ofimperceptible physical atoms and sensory mechanisms also composed of atoms.But now, as Sextus points out (
ibid. VIII.56 (not in DK)) and Democritushimself recognized (in the famous ‘complaint of the senses’ (fr. 125)) scepticismthreatens once again; for the theory has to take perceptual data as its startingpoint,so if the senses are altogether unreliable, there are no reliable data onwhich to base the theory. So, as the senses say to the mind in fragment 125, ‘Ouroverthrow is a fall for you.’Commentators who (like Barnes [2.8]) read fragment 125 as expressingcommitment to scepticism (despairing or exultant, according to taste) on the partof Democritus, naturally reject the unitary interpretation proffered above. On thisview fragments 117 and 6–10 are not restricted to sensory cognition, but expressa full-blooded rejection of any form of knowledge, which must be seen assuperseding the distinction between appearance and reality of fragments 9 (firstpart) and 11 and the claim to ‘genuine knowledge’ in the latter. Yet Sextuspresents 6–11 in a single context (
Adversus Mathematicos VII.135–40) withoutany suggestion of a conflict within the collection. Moreover, in
Outlines ofPyrrhonism I.213–4 (not in DK) he points out that, though the Sceptics resembleDemocritus in appealing to phenomena of conflicting appearances, such as thehoney which tastes sweet to the healthy and bitter to the sick, in fact Democritususes those phenomena to support, not the sceptical position that it is impossibleto tell how the honey is in fact, but the dogmatic position that the honey is itselfneither sweet nor bitter. (I interpret the latter as the assertion that sweetness andbitterness are not intrinsic attributes of the structure of atoms which is the honey(see above).) Sextus, in short, sees Democritus not as a sceptic, but as adogmatist. Indeed, Sextus does not cite fragment 125, and it is possible that hedid not know the text from which it comes; VIII.56 shows that he was aware ofthe problem which is dramatized in the fragment, but he clearly saw it as adifficulty for Democritus, rather than as signalling Democritus’ rejection of thebasis of his own theory.At this point we should consider in what sense the theory of atomism takes thedata of the senses as its starting-point, and whether that role is in fact threatenedby the appearance—reality gap insisted on in fragment 9. According to Aristotle(
On Generation and Corruption 315b6–15, DK 67 A 9; 325b24–6, DK 67 A 7)the theory started from sensory data in the sense that its role was to save theappearances, i.e. to explain all sensory data as appearances of an objectiveworld. Both Aristotle
(On Generation and Corruption) and Philoponus (hiscommentary, 23.1–16 (not in DK)) mention conflicting appearances as amongthe data to be saved; the theory has to explain both the honey’s tasting sweet tothe healthy and its tasting bitter to the sick, and neither appearance has anypretensions to represent more faithfully than the other how things are in reality.All appearances make an equal contribution to the theory. That is a positionwhich atomism shares with Protagoras, but the latter assures the equal status ofappearances by abandoning objectivity; in the Protagorean world there is nothingmore to reality than the totality of equipollent appearances. For Democritus, bycontrast, the reconciliation of the equipollence of appearances with theobjectivity of the physical world requires the gap between appearance and reality.Without the gap a world of equipollent appearances is inconsistent, and hence notobjective. But there is no ground for denying equipollence;
qua appearance,every appearance is as good as every other. Hence the task of theory is to arriveat the best description of an objective world which will satisfy the requirement ofshowing how all the conflicting appearances come about.So far from threatening the foundations of the theory, then, the appearancerealitygap is essential to the theory. But in that case what is the point of thecomplaint of the senses in fragment 125? Surely that text provides conclusiveevidence that Democritus believed that the gap threatened the theory, and hence(assuming that he understood his own theory) conclusive evidence against theinterpretation which I am advancing. I do not think that the text does providesuch evidence, for the simple reason that we lack the context from which thequotation comes. The point of the complaint need not (and given the nature ofDemocritus’ theory certainly should not) be the admission that the theory is selfrefuting.It is at least as likely to be a warning against misunderstanding theaccount of the appearance-reality gap as requiring the abandonment of sensoryevidence. We may imagine an anti-empiricist opponent (Plato, say) appealing tothe gap to support the claim that the senses are altogether unreliable, and shouldtherefore be abandoned (as is perhaps indicated by
Phaedo 65–6). In replyDemocritus points out that the attack on the senses itself relies on sensory evidence.Sextus does indeed align Democritus with Plato in this regard (
AdversusMathematicos VIII.56). It is my contention, however, that when we put theAristotelian evidence of the atomists’ acceptance of the appearances as thestarting-point of their theory together with all the other evidence, including thefragments, we have to conclude that the picture of Democritus as a failedPlatonist is a misunderstanding. The atomists’ distinction between appearanceand reality does not involve ‘doing away with sensible things’; on the contrary,appearances are fundamental to the theory, first as providing the data which thetheory has to explain and second as providing the primary application for theobservationally-based terminology which is used to describe the nature andbehaviour of the entities posited by the theory (cf. [6.46]).A final objection, however, comes from Aristotle himself, who describesDemocritus as concluding from conflicting appearances ‘that either nothing istrue, or it is unclear to us’ (
Metaphysics 1009b11–12). This is a very puzzlingpassage, for a number of reasons. Aristotle is explaining why some people goalong with Protagoras in believing that whatever seems to be the case is so, andin the immediate context (1009a38ff.) cites the phenomena of conflictingappearances and the lack of a decisive criterion for choosing between them asconducing to that belief. But at 1009b9 he shifts from the thought that conflictingappearances lead to the view that all appearances are true to the sceptical accountof those phenomena, namely that it is unclear which of the appearances is true orfalse, ‘for this is no more true than that, but they are alike’. This, he says (i.e. thebelief that none of the appearances is truer than any other) is why Democritussaid that either nothing is true, or it is unclear to us. So Democritus is representedas posing a choice of adopting either the dogmatic stance that none of theappearances is true, or the sceptical stance that it is unclear (which is true). Yet inthe next sentence Aristotle says that because he and others assimilate thought toperception they hold that what appears in perception is necessarily true, theposition which we have already seen him attribute to Democritus in a number ofplaces. So unless Aristotle is radically confused, the disjunction ‘either none ofthe appearances is true, or it is unclear to us’ must be consistent with the thesisthat all perceptions are true. If ‘it is unclear to us’ is read as ‘it is unclear to uswhich is true’, then the claims are inconsistent. I suggest, however, that whatDemocritus said was to the effect that ‘either nothing is true, or it (i.e. the truth)is unclear’. The first alternative he plainly rejected, so he maintained the second.And that is precisely what he maintains in fragment 117: the truth (about theatoms and the void) is in the depths, i.e. it is not apparent in perception, i.e. it isunclear
(adēlon) in the sense that it is not plain to see. That he used the term
adēlon to apply to atoms and the void is attested by Sextus (
AdversusMathematicos VII.140, DK 68 A 111), who cites Diotimus as evidence forDemocritus’ holding that the appearances are the criterion for the things that areunclear and approving Anaxagoras’ slogan ‘the appearances are the sight of thethings that are unclear’
(opsis tōn adēlōn ta phainomena). The truth, then, i.e. thereal nature of things, is unclear (i.e. non-evident), but all perceptions are true inthat all are equipollent and indispensable to theory.If that is what Democritus held, then it may reasonably be said that ‘true’ isthe wrong word to characterize the role of appearances in his theory. ‘Allappearances are equipollent’ is equally compatible with ‘All appearances arefalse’, and in view of his insistence on the non-evident character of the truth itwould surely have been less misleading for him to say the latter. Though thereare some difficult issues here, I shall not argue the point, since I am notconcerned to defend Democritus’ thesis that all appearances are true. I do,however, accept that he actually maintained that thesis and have sought toexplain why he did and how he held it together with (1) his rejection ofProtagorean subjectivism and (2) the views expressed in the fragments cited bySextus.
5In conclusion, it should be observed that the persuasiveness or otherwise ofthe atomists’ account of the secondary qualities cannot be separated from that ofthe whole theory of perception of which it is pan, and that in turn from the theoryof human nature, and ultimately of the natural world as a whole. As presented bythe atomists, the theory is entirely speculative, since it posits as explanatoryentities microscopic structures of whose existence and nature there could be noexperimental confirmation. Modern developments in sciences such asneurophysiology have revised our conceptions of the structures underlyingperceptual phenomena to such an extent that modern accounts would have beenunrecognizable to Leucippus or Democritus; but the basic intuitions of ancientatomism, that appearances are to be explained at the level of the internalstructure of the perceiver and of the perceived object, and that the ideal ofscience is to incorporate the description of those structures within the scope of aunified and quantitatively precise theory of the nature of matter in general, havestood the test of time.Democritus’ uncompromising materialism extended to his psychology.Though there is some conflict in the sources, the best evidence is that he drew nodistinction between the rational soul or mind and the non-rational soul or lifeprinciple, giving a single account of both as a physical structure of sphericalatoms permeating the entire body. This theory of the identity of soul and mindextended beyond identity of physical structure to identity of function, in thatDemocritus explained thought, the activity of the rational soul, by the sameprocess as that by which he explained perception, one of the activities of thesensitive or non-rational soul. Both are produced by the impact on the soul ofextremely fine, fast-moving films of atoms
(eidōla) constantly emitted incontinuous streams by the surfaces of everything around us. This theorycombines a causal account of both perception and thought with a crude pictorialview of thought. The paradigm case of perception is vision; seeing somethingand thinking of something alike consist in picturing the thing seen or thought of,and picturing consists in having a series of actual physical pictures of the thingimpinge on one’s soul. While this assimilation of thought to experience has someaffinities with classical empiricism, it differs in this crucial respect, that whereasthe basic doctrine of empiricism is that thought derives from experience, forDemocritus thought is a form of experience, or, more precisely, the categories ofthought and experience are insufficiently differentiated to allow one to becharacterized as more fundamental than the other. Among other difficulties, thistheory faces the problem of accounting for the distinction, central to Democritus’epistemology, between perception of the observable properties of atomicaggregates and thought of the unobservable structure of those aggregates. Wehave no knowledge of how, if at all, Democritus attempted to deal with thisproblem.
TheologyAnother disputed question is whether Democritus’ materialistic account of theuniverse left any room for the divine. According to most of the ancient sources,he believed that there are gods, which are living, intelligent, material beings (of apeculiar sort), playing a significant role in human affairs. They are atomiccompounds, and like all such compounds they come to be and perish. They didnot create the physical world (of which they are pan), nor, though they areintelligent, do they organize or control it. They are as firmly part of the naturalorder as any other living beings. Specifically, Democritus believed the gods to beliving
eidōla, probably of gigantic size, possessing intelligence, moral characterand interest in human affairs. While some sources suggest that these
eidōlaemanate from actual divine beings, the majority of sources agree that they arethemselves the only divine beings which Democritus recognized. Some modernscholars (e.g. Barnes [2.8], ch. 21 (c)) interpret this as amounting to atheism,taking Democritus to have held that the gods are nothing more than the contentsof human fantasy. But for Democritus
eidōla are not intrinsically psychological;they are not contents of subjective states, but part of the objective world, causingpsychological states through their impact on physical minds. In that case the theorymust explain their source and their properties, notably their being alive. Sincethey are of human form, it is plausible to suggest that their source is actualhumans, possibly giants living in the remote past. They are themselves alive inthat, flowing from beings permeated with soul-atoms, they contain soul-atomsthemselves. Consistently with this naturalistic theology Democritus gave anaturalistic account of the origin of religion, identifying two types of phenomenaas having given rise to religious belief, first the occurrence of
eidōla themselves,presumably in dreams and ecstatic states, and second celestial phenomena suchas thunder, lightning and eclipses.Democritus’ theology thus contrives to incorporate some of the mostcharacteristic features of the gods of traditional belief, notably theiranthropomorphism, power, longevity (though not, crucially, immortality)personal interaction with humans and interest (for good or ill) in human affairs,within the framework of a naturalistic and materialistic theory. It is thus, despitethe bold originality of its account of the divine nature, notably more conservativethan some of its predecessors (especially the non-anthropomorphic theology ofXenophanes) and than its Epicurean successor, whose main concern is to excludethe gods from all concern with human affairs.
Ethics and PoliticsThe evidence for Democritus’ ethical views differs radically from that for theareas discussed above, since while the ethical doxography is meagre, our sourcespreserve a large body of purported quotations on ethical topics, the great majorityfrom two collections, that of Stobaeus (fifth century AD) and a collection entitledThe sayings of Democrates’. While the bulk of this material is probablyDemocritean in origin, the existing quotations represent a long process ofexcerpting and paraphrase, making it difficult to determine how close anyparticular saying is to Democritus’ own words. Various features of style andcontent suggest that Stobaeus’ collection of maxims contains a greater proportionof authentically Democritean material than does the collection which passesunder the name of ‘Democrates’.Subject to the limitations imposed by the nature of this material, we can drawsome tentative conclusions about Democritus’ ethical views. He was engagedwith the wide-ranging contemporary debates on individual and social ethics ofwhich we have evidence from Plato and other sources. On what Socratespresents as the fundamental question in ethics, ‘How should one live?’ (Plato,
Gorgias 500c,
Republic 352d), Democritus is the earliest thinker reported ashaving explicitly posited a supreme good or goal, which he called ‘cheerfulness’
(euthumia) or ‘well-being’
(euestō), and which he appears to have identified withthe untroubled enjoyment of life. It is reasonable to suppose that he shared thepresumption of the primacy of self-interest which is common both to the PlatonicSocrates and to his immoralist opponents, Callicles and Thrasymachus. Havingidentified the ultimate human interest with ‘cheerfulness’, the evidence of thetestimonia and the fragments is that he thought that it was to be achieved bymoderation, including moderation in the pursuit of pleasures, by discriminationof useful from harmful pleasures and by conformity to conventional morality.The upshot is a recommendation to a life of moderate, enlightened hedonism,which has some affinities with the life recommended by Socrates (whether in hisown person or as representing ordinary enlightened views is disputed) in Plato’s
Protagoras, and, more obviously, with the Epicurean ideal of which it was theforerunner.An interesting feature of the fragments is the frequent stress on individualconscience. Some fragments stress the pleasures of a good conscience and thetorments of a bad one (frs 174, 215) while others recommend that one should bemotivated by one’s internal sense of shame rather than by concern for theopinion of others (frs 244, 264, Democrates 84). This theme may well reflect theinterest, discernible in contemporary debates, in what later came to be known asthe question of the sanctions of morality. A recurrent theme in criticisms ofconventional morality was that, since the enforcement of morality rests onconventions, someone who can escape conventional sanctions, e.g. by doingwrong in secret, has no reason to comply with moral demands (see Antiphon fr.44 DK, Critias fr. 25 DK and Glaucon’s tale of Gyges’ ring in Plato’s
Republic,359b–360d). A defender of conventional morality who, like Democritus andPlato, accepts the primacy of self-interest therefore faces the challenge ofshowing, in one way or another, that self-interest is best promoted by theobservance of conventional moral precepts.The appeal to divine sanctions, cynically described in Critias fragment 25,represents one way of doing this, and there are some traces of the same responsein Democritus. While his theory of the atomic, and hence mortal, nature of thesoul admits no possibility of postmortem rewards and punishments, the theoryallows for divine rewards and punishments in this life. Fragment 175 suggests acomplication: the gods bestow benefits on humans, but humans bring harm onthemselves through their own folly. Is the thought that the gods do not inflictpunishment arbitrarily, but that humans bring it on themselves? Or is it rather thatthe form which divine punishments take is that of natural calamities, whichhumans fail to avoid through their own folly? The latter alternative would makethe pangs of conscience one of the forms of divine punishment, while the formerwould see it as a further sanction. Either way (and the question is surelyunanswerable) we have some evidence that Democritus was the earliest thinkerto make the appeal to ‘internal sanctions’ central to his attempt to derive moralityfrom self-interest, thus opening up a path followed by others including Butlerand J.S.Mill.The attempt, however pursued, to ground morality in self-interest involves therejection of the antithesis between law or convention
(nomos) and nature
(phusis) which underlies much criticism of morality in the fifth and fourthcenturies. For Antiphon, Callicles, Thrasymachus and Glaucon, nature promptsone to seek one’s own interest while law and convention seek, more or lesssuccessfully, to inhibit one from doing so. But if one’s long-term interest is theattainment of a pleasant life, and if the natural consequences of wrongdoing,including ill-health, insecurity and the pangs of conscience, give one anunpleasant life, while the natural consequences of right-doing give one acontrastingly pleasant life, then nature and convention point in the samedirection, not in opposite directions as the critics of morality had alleged. (Wehave no evidence whether Democritus had considered the objections thatconscience is a product of convention, and that exhorting people to develop theirconscience assumes that it must be.) Though the texts contain no expressmention of the
nomos-phusis contrast itself, several of them refer to law in such away as to suggest rejection of the antithesis. Fragment 248 asserts that the aim oflaw is to benefit people, thus contradicting Glaucon’s claim (
Republic 359c) thatlaw constrains people contrary to their natural bent. Fragment 248 issupplemented and explained by fragment 245; laws interfere with people’s livingas they please only to stop them from harming one another, to which they areprompted by envy. So law frees people from the aggression of others, thusbenefiting them by giving them the opportunity to follow the promptings ofnature towards their own advantage. The strongest expression of the integrationof
nomos and
phusis is found in fragment 252: the city’s being well run is thegreatest good, and if it is preserved everything is preserved, while if it isdestroyed everything is destroyed. A stable community, that is to say, isnecessary for the attainment of that well-being which is nature’s goal for us. Thisquotation encapsulates the central point in the defence of
nomos (emphasized inProtagoras’ myth (Plato,
Protagoras 322a–323a)) that law and civilization arenot contrary to nature, but required for human nature to flourish, a point alsocentral to the Epicurean account of the development of civilization (seeespecially Lucretius V).I conclude with a brief discussion of the vexed question of the connections (orlack of them) between Democritus’ ethics and his physical theory. In an earlierdiscussion ([6.46]), I argued against Vlastos’s claim [6.47] to find significantconnections between the content of the two areas of Democritus’ thought.Vlastos’s position has found some recent defenders (and my views some critics),including Sassi [6.43]; these discussions seem to me to call for some reexaminationof the question.It is, I take it, common ground that in composing his ethical writingsDemocritus had not abandoned his physical theory, and therefore that, at the veryleast, he would have sought to include nothing in the former which wasinconsistent with the latter. I shall make the stronger assumption that he took forgranted in the ethical writings the atomistic view of the soul as a physicalsubstance pervading the body. I remain, however, unconvinced of any closerconnection between physics and ethics. In particular, I see no indication that anyethical conclusions (e.g. that the good is ‘cheerfulness’) were supposed to bederived from the physical theory, or that the physical theory provided anycharacterizations of the nature of any ethically significant psychological state. Putin modern terms, I see no evidence that Democritus believed in type—typeidentities between ethical states such as cheerfulness and physical states such ashaving one’s soul-atoms in ‘dynamic equilibrium’ (Vlastos, in [4.64], 334). Myearlier criticisms of this kind of view seem to me to stand.There is, however, one particular point on which I now think that I tookscepticism too far. This was in my rejection of Vlastos’s interpretation offragment 33, that teaching creates a new nature by altering the configuration ofthe soul-atoms. My reason was that
ruthmos was an atomistic technical term forthe shape of an individual atom, not for the configuration of an atomic aggregate,for which their term was
diathigē. Hence
metaruthmizei (or
metarusmoi) in thefragment could not mean ‘reshape’ in the sense ‘produce a new configuration’.But, as Vlastos had already pointed out, the catalogue of Democritean titlesincludes
Peri ameipsirusmiōn ‘On changes of shape’ (Diogenes Laertius IX.47),which cannot refer to changes in the shapes of individual atoms (since they areunchangeable in respect of shape), and must therefore refer to changes in theshape of atomic aggregates. Further, Hesychius glosses
ameipsirusmein as‘change the constitution
(sungkrisin) or be transformed’, and though he does notattribute the word to any author it is at least likely to have been used in that senseby Democritus, since neither the verb nor its cognates are attested to anyone else.It therefore now seems to me that Vlastos’s reading of the fragment is probablyright. Teaching, like thought and perception, is for Democritus a physicalprocess involving the impact of
eidōla on the soul, with consequentrearrangement of the soul-aggregate. (Cf. fr. 197, ‘The unwise are shaped
(rusmountai) by the gifts of fortune…’) Acceptance of that causal picture doesnot, of course, commit one to endorsing type-type psychophysical identities.Psycho-physical identity having been set aside, some looser connectionsbetween Democritus’ ethics and other areas of his thought may perhaps bediscerned. I argued [6.46] for a structural parallel between ethics andepistemology, a suggestion which still seems to me plausible. Another vagueconnection is with cosmology. It is not unreasonable to suppose that Democritussaw at least an analogy between the formation of worlds
(kosmoi) from theprimitive atomic chaos by the aggregation of atoms under the force of necessityand the formation of communities (also termed
kosmoi, frs 258–9) by individualsdriven by necessity to combine in order to survive, and it may be that theaggregation of like individuals to like, which is attested as operating in theformation of worlds (DK 67 A 1 (31)), had some counterpart in the socialsphere.
ConclusionAtomism can thus be seen as a multi-faceted phenomenon, linked in a variety ofways to various doctrines, both preceding, contemporary and subsequent.Atomistic physics is one of a number of attempts to accommodate the Ioniantradition of comprehensive natural philosophy to the demands of Eleatic logic.Atomistic epistemology takes up the challenge of Protagorean subjectivism,breaks new ground in its treatment of the relation of appearance to reality andconstitutes a pioneering attempt to grapple with the challenge of scepticism.Atomistic ethics moves us into the world of the sophists and of early Plato in itstreatment of the themes of the goal of life, and of the relations between selfinterestand morality and between
nomos and
physis. Chapters in subsequentvolumes attest the enduring influence of the atomism of Leucippus andDemocritus throughout the centuries, whether as a challenge to be faced, mostnotably by Aristotle, or as a forerunner to Epicureanism in all its aspects, andthereby to the revival of atomistic physics in the corpuscular philosophy of thesixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
6NOTES1 S.Kripke,
Naming and Necessity, 2nd edn., Oxford, Blackwell, 1980.2 For fuller discussion see Lesher [6.14].3 An apparent exception is Aetius I.25.3 (DK 28 A 32, from ps.—Plutarch andStobaeus). After ascribing to Democritus (and Parmenides) the doctrine thateverything is according to necessity, the citation continues ‘and the same is fate andjustice and providence and the creator’. The reference of ‘the same’
(tēn autēn) ispresumably the feminine noun
anangkē; Democritus is therefore said to haveidentified necessity with fate, justice, providence and the creator. Apart from theauthority of this testimony, its meaning is problematic. It might be taken (inopposition to all the other evidence), as ascribing purpose and moral content tonecessity, but could as well be taken as explaining justice and providence away asnothing more than necessity, i.e. as saying ‘necessity is what (socalled) fate, justiceand cosmic providence really are’. Since in the next section ps.—Plutarch citesDemocritus’ mechanistic account of necessity as impact (I.26.2, DK 68 A 66)consistency is better preserved by the latter reading.4 In Epicurus’ own theory, chance and necessity are distinct causes (
Letter toMenseceus 133, Diogenes Laertius
Lives X, sections 122–35), so if he is assumingthat the atomists share his view, the position he ascribes to them is (2). But thatassumption is not required by the text, which leaves open the possibility that theview ascribed is (1).5 Richard McKim argues [6.39] that Democritus held all appearances to be true in arobuster sense of ‘true’ than that for which I argue here, namely that ‘they are alltrue in the sense that they are true to the
eidōla or atomic films which cause themby streaming off the surfaces of sensible objects and striking our sense organs’ (p.286). Though McKim does not discusss what it is for appearances to be true to the
eidōla, I take it that he is attributing to Democritus the account of the truth ofappearances which Epicurus is held by some writers to have maintained, namelythat sense impressions faithfully register the physical characteristics of the
eidōlawhich impinge on the sense organs. (See G.Striker ‘Epicurus on the truth of senseimpressions’,
Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 59 (1977): 125–42 andC.C.W.Taylor ‘All impressions are true’, in M. Schofield, M.Burnyeat andJ.Barnes (eds)
Doubt and Dogmatism, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1980:105–24.)While I am in total sympathy with McKim’s account of Democritus’ overallepistemological strategy, I am unwilling to follow him in attribution of theEpicurean theory to Democritus, since none of our evidence gives any support tothe suggestion that Democritus gave that or any particular account of the truth ofappearances. I agree that he probably held that, for the reason dramatized in thecomplaint of the senses, all appearances had to be in some sense or other true ifthere was to be any knowledge at all. But against McKim I hold that we haveinsufficient evidence to attribute to Democritus any account of the sense in whichappearances are true, beyond the implicit claim that all appearances areequipollent. It is plausible to suppose that Epicurus’ account was devised inattempt to make good that deficiency. See also Furley [6.33].6 I am grateful to Gail Fine, David Furley and Robin Osborne for their comments onearlier drafts.
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