Leucippus and Democritus: Determinism, Atoms, the Void and Man as Microcosm; Why Book Two of Wisdom Begins with Truth

Orientation #

He says these are “the last two thinkers here,” Leucippus and Democritus, taken together, finishing the review of predecessors in Book I of Wisdom [ed.: Metaphysics]; he then moves to the question of what Book II is doing there, and announces that the fifth reading of Book II treats how the road of each reasoned-out knowledge is determined, the first reading how man is toward truth. The previous class treated Anaxagoras’s Nous.

The class, in order #

1. Leucippus: total necessity (“nothing happens at random”) #

Leucippus: nothing happens at random, everything comes to be from reason and by necessity — determinism in the modern sense.

• Possible source: mathematical science of nature. In the Nicomachean Ethics (third book, inferred) Aristotle names four causes: nature, man (will, choice), luck or chance, and necessity. Nature fits natural things, choice ethics, luck and chance both (since neither achieves its result 100%); necessity is what you have in geometry — the Pythagorean theorem is necessary, neither by nature nor by choice. One accustomed to mathematical knowledge may conclude all things are necessary.

2. Determinism as the absolute principle of modern science (“the past necessarily determines the future”) #

Point: Leucippus states what became modern science’s unquestioned principle.

• Galileo, Kepler, Newton; Laplace: given the position and momentum of every particle at one moment plus a super-calculating mind, the whole future course of the universe could be predicted.
• Why “absolute”: it comes from the oldest and most mathematical part of modern science; when biology or psychology try to be scientific, they reach for determinism first.
• Claude Bernard, Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine (c. 1860s), three parts: scientific method in general; the experimental method in biology; concrete examples from his own research. In part one he grasps the merely probable character of the method — “doubt is intrinsic to the experimental method”: no matter how often a hypothesis is confirmed, it can be tested again and overthrown.
• Why confirmation is not a syllogism: “if A then B; but B; therefore A” does not follow. His logic example: “If Berquist dropped dead last night, you’ll be absent from class today; but he is absent; therefore Berquist dropped dead” — wishful thinking, not logical thinking. Day and night follows both from the sun going round the earth and from the earth turning on its axis: the same prediction from different hypotheses.
• Einstein on Newton: Newtonian physics predicted so well men took it for the truth — 19th-century anomalies in planetary paths were resolved by predicting unknown planets, and the planets were found there. Then relativity predicted all Newton predicted, by a different hypothesis, plus more; it then became clear a scientific theory is never known in the strict sense to be true. More and more exact predictions give greater probability only.
• Yet Bernard exempts determinism from his own doubt: “to doubt determinism would be to doubt science.”

3. Heisenberg and the fall of determinism (“the principle of indeterminism”) #

• Heisenberg formulated indeterminism out of quantum theory — part of the Copenhagen interpretation, named for Niels Bohr’s circle.
• Solvay Congress, 1927: Einstein brought thought experiments against the Copenhagen interpretation; Bohr stayed up nights and refuted each. He describes a photograph of the two leaving a session, Einstein cocky, Bohr worried — but Bohr found the mistake in Einstein’s final objection, a mistake of overlooking the applications of Einstein’s own relativity theory. Einstein never again publicly attacked it.
• Freud as the psychological case: dreams look least necessary and least rational, yet scientific psychology must make even them determined. His cousin Donald’s dream: chased by a tiger down a dead-end street, turns to face it, and the tiger asks, “How would you like to buy a raffle ticket?” The principle at work: you had to dream that, and it tells something about you — and sometimes dreams do tell something about us.
• Aristotle will reject determinism (sixth and ninth books of Wisdom), as regards the natural world partly through the potency or ability of matter. Heisenberg himself said quantum theory reintroduced a version of Aristotle’s potency.
• His “spiral” as opposed to a circle: you return to the same place at a different level of experience. Among the Greeks (Empedocles, Anaxagoras) only change of place was recognized, then other changes; so too in experimental science, change of place seemed the only change until quantum theory forced other kinds.

4. Democritus’s other fragments (“don’t try to understand everything”) #

Most surviving Democritus fragments are ethical, domestic or political, though Aristotle says he lived in greater familiarity with nature than all and must have written more.

• Don’t generate children — you don’t know what you’ll get; adopt instead. A student ties this to modern “designer babies”; he agrees the idea is the same, minus the technology.
• “Don’t try to understand everything, lest you become ignorant of everything” — good advice to the moderns, who try to understand everything and end up understanding nothing.

5. Sense qualities by custom (“what truly exists are the atoms and the empty”) #

Sweet, bitter, warm, cold, color exist by custom; none of these really exist; only atoms and the empty.

• Mathematical influence again: in mathematics there are no sense qualities — and also no substance and no purpose. So a man who thinks of the world only mathematically finds a world without sense qualities, substance or purpose: “just like the way the moderns kind of think.”

6. The word “atom” and the thought experiment (“cut in every way it can be cut”) #

• Root T-O-M, to cut, in both atom and anatomy; ana- = up, so anatomy is cutting up (Aristotle’s more particular biological works); a- is the negative, as in amoral, agnostic. So “atom” means uncut, and in Aristotle’s report of Democritus, uncuttable.
• The thought experiment (Einstein’s term): imagine the bodies around us, and our own body, cut in every way they can be cut. Nothing could be left, for a thing is cut into what it is made of, and then these bodies would have been made out of nothing — absurd. Therefore something uncut remains, and that, being uncut when cut in every way, is uncuttable.
• Tension in Aristotle’s reports: sometimes atoms have size and shape, sometimes they sound like points. In pure geometry the only uncuttable is the point, since a line with any length can be cut again. If they have size, Democritus may anticipate Aristotle’s own view that natural things cannot have just any size, their size being connected with their nature — which is other than quantity taken abstractly. So there may have been hesitation in his mind.
• What we call an atom should not have been so called: it is uncuttable only by chemical means. Heisenberg: compare Democritus’s atoms not with our atoms but with our elementary particles, or whatever is smaller.

7. The empty (“nothing is, in order to save change”) #

• Empedocles denied the empty; Democritus affirmed it, because bodies couldn’t move without empty space — otherwise we’d be packed tight like sardines in a can, or clothes in a suitcase you have to sit on to close: no give at all.
• But the empty is nothing, so he says nothing is, which is absurd. Democritus seems willing to admit a contradiction to save change. Men trying to hold onto change do this all down through history — as with Heraclitus a bit — denying the impossibility of something both being and not being.

8. Man a microcosm (“man is a little cosmos”) #

• Micro- + cosmos: one foot in the material world (body), one in the immaterial (understanding and will). The stone is only material, the angels only immaterial; man is in both. This is used in discussing why it was fitting for God to assume human nature: God takes the cosmos back to himself.
• Third book On the Soul: by sensing I take on the colors, sounds, smells of things around me; by understanding, their natures; so “the soul is in some way all things” — a universe in miniature.
• Against those who say man is only a tiny part of the universe: we have a science called cosmology, where man takes the whole universe inside his mind.

9. Man the most imitative animal (“we imitate nature”) #

Two reasons we imitate nature:

• Knowledge begins from the senses: the tree gives shade from sun and cover from rain, so I make an umbrella — a tree I can walk around with.
• Our mind is made to the image and likeness of God, so it sometimes makes what is already in nature before noticing it there. From a Scientific American article in his office: biologists noticed certain things about how birds fly only after we had succeeded in making an airplane, and found we had put into the plane what was already in the bird.
• Einstein’s saying, that the most puzzling thing about the universe is that it should be understandable — not puzzling if the universe is the product of understanding and, as Anaxagoras says, mind is everywhere, the greater and the lesser.

10. What Book I achieved, and Aristotle’s next step (“what’s the road to take to wisdom”) #

• After the proemium, Book I recounts what the predecessors said about the causes and why: partly to see whether what they said is sufficient, partly to see whether they touched on any cause besides matter, form, mover and end. Negative conclusion: they did not go all the way. Affirmative: there seem to be only these four kinds. Book II will give reasons that within each kind there is a first cause.
• Put yourself in Aristotle’s shoes: wisdom is most desirable but hard, and there are only two ways to get knowledge you lack — discover it yourself or learn it from one who has it. The critique shows he cannot simply learn it from them; he must discover.
• He asks the class what the next step would be. A student: “back to nature.” His example: you know it is extremely desirable to get to Boston, and that all before you failed to get there. The natural question is not why they failed but how do you get to Boston — so, what is the road to wisdom? Aristotle does take that up, but perhaps not fully until Book VI.
• A second question also occurs to him: how are discoveries made? Aristotle treats that at the beginning of Book III. So what is Book II doing here? (Aside: the Greeks label it not “beta” but “alpha the lesser” — a kind of lack of appreciation.)

11. The prior, more general question, and why it belongs to the wise man (“how should one determine the road to follow”) #

• “What road in geometry / natural philosophy / ethics / politics / wisdom?” are parallel questions, like the road to Boston, Springfield, New York. To find any of them you get a map — and the question how to read a map comes before the question what road to Boston, and once answered opens up every road.
• So before “what road in wisdom?” comes: how should the road to follow be determined, in any knowledge at all?
• Objection he puts himself: that general question is presupposed to geometry as much as to wisdom, so why treat it here? Nobody wanting Boston has a better claim to the map lesson than anybody wanting New York.
• Reply, drawn from the class: the man who teaches map-reading directs all the travellers. Students: “there is one knowledge over everything” — the wise man. The sixth attribute of the wise man in the second reading: he directs others, he is the most architectonic, the chief artist. Since the same knowledge covers opposites, the man who considers how the road of each reasoned-out knowledge should and should not be determined directs everybody; so it is most appropriate to the wise man. That is the fifth reading of Book II.
• Aristotle is very brief there and more expansive in the first book of the Nicomachean Ethics, though the matter is more proper to wisdom. Boethius, De Trinitate, distinguishes natural philosophy, mathematics and first philosophy and their roads, quoting Aristotle from the Ethics rather than here — because the Ethics treatment is more concrete and expansive; Thomas has a famous commentary on it, an expansion of what Aristotle does later in Book VI distinguishing the sciences and their methods.
• Aside: the mice agree to hang a bell on the cat — until someone asks who will put the bell on the cat’s neck. There is always “a sticking before.”

12. The first reading: how man is toward knowing truth (“is the only truth that we know the truth we can reason out?”) #

• Something comes even before the fifth reading’s question, and it is in the very first reading: how man is toward knowing truth.
• Which is more general — “how is man toward knowing truth?” or “how should the road to truth in any reasoned-out knowledge be determined?” Students: the first.
• Why: not all truth we know is reasoned out; there is sense knowledge. If all truth were gotten by reasoning, what would we reason from? We reason to a statement from other statements.
• Confirmed by Democritus: we imitate nature; hence Aristotle and Thomas say art imitates nature, and more generally reason imitates nature. Two dogs give rise to a dog, cats to a cat, horses to a horse — and statements give rise to a statement. Eddington: put numbers into the equations and you grind out more numbers; add two numbers and you get a number.
• So if you knew no statement to be true before reasoning, you would have nothing to reason from. “How man is toward knowing truth” is thus a broader perspective on man’s mental state than his reasoned knowledge alone.
• Why it belongs to the wise man: Aristotle gives the reason at the beginning of the second reading — the consideration of truth belongs most of all to the wise man (a student adds: because he directs everything else; he says that is part of it).
• A further link: the two ways of coming to know what you don’t know — learning from one who knows, and discovering — are two ways of coming to know truth, so how man is toward truth is background to why there should be those two ways.
• “See how smart Aristotle is” — already on the road to wisdom just by asking the question. These are not the main things wisdom is about, but they are important things wisdom does talk about.

His words #

• Wisdom — his name for the Metaphysics throughout (“the first book of Wisdom,” “book two”).
• Reading — his division of the books (first, second, fifth reading of Book II) [ed.: lectio].
• Determinism — Leucippus’s “everything by reason and by necessity”; the past necessarily determines the future.
• The empty — Democritus’s void.
• Uncuttable / uncut — his rendering of atomon, from the root T-O-M with the privative a-.
• Thought experiment — Einstein’s term, applied to Democritus’s cutting argument.
• Spiral as opposed to circle — returning to the same place at a different level of experience.
• Potency or ability of matter — Aristotle’s ground for rejecting determinism.
• Microcosm — “a little cosmos,” man with a foot in each world.
• Architectonic, chief artist — the sixth attribute of the wise man, that he directs others.
• Reasoned-out knowledge — knowledge whose truths are reached by reasoning, as opposed to sense knowledge.

Texts #

Read in class

• Leucippus, fragment: nothing at random, all from reason and necessity.
• Democritus, fragments: do not generate but adopt children; do not try to understand everything; sweet/bitter/warm/cold/color by custom, only atoms and the empty truly exist; man is a little cosmos; man is the most imitative of animals.
• Aristotle, Metaphysics I — proemium, and the survey of predecessors’ causes.
• Aristotle, Metaphysics II — the plan of readings 1, 2 and 5.

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics III, four causes: nature, man, luck, necessity (inferred).
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics I, on the road of each knowledge.
• Aristotle, Metaphysics III (how discoveries are made), VI (distinction of sciences; rejection of determinism), IX.
• Aristotle, On the Soul III — the soul is in some way all things.
• Aristotle’s anatomical/biological works.
• Boethius, De Trinitate; Thomas’s commentary on it.
• Claude Bernard, Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine.
• Laplace; Galileo, Kepler, Newton; Einstein; Heisenberg; Bohr and the Copenhagen interpretation; Solvay Congress 1927; Freud; Eddington; an article in Scientific American on bird flight.

His questions #

• If a hypothesis predicts B and B occurs, does the hypothesis follow? No — it is not a syllogism; the same prediction can come from different hypotheses.
• Why did Claude Bernard not doubt determinism? Because “to doubt determinism would be to doubt science” — he excluded it from a doubt he otherwise saw correctly.
• What does T-O-M mean, and what do the prefixes in “anatomy” and “atom” do? Cut; ana- = up (cut up), a- = not (uncut, uncuttable).
• What would be left if every body were cut in every way it can be cut? Something uncut — else the bodies were made out of nothing.
• Is the empty something? It is nothing, so Democritus admits a contradiction to save change.
• You know Boston is worth reaching and all before you failed: what do you ask? Not why they failed, but how do you get there — so, what is the road to wisdom?
• Which question comes first, how to read a map or what road to Boston? How to read a map — and its analogue, how the road of any reasoned-out knowledge should be determined.
• Why should the wise man, not the geometer, answer that general question? Because the man who teaches map-reading directs all the travellers; the wise man is architectonic and directs everybody.
• Which is more general, “how is man toward knowing truth” or “how is the road to truth determined in reasoned knowledge”? The first, since not all truth is reasoned out; reasoning needs prior known statements to reason from.
• What gives rise to a statement? Two statements — reason imitates nature, as dogs give rise to a dog.