The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History

4 The Emergence of Space in Hellenistic and Neoplatonic Thought

4 The Emergence of Space in Hellenistic and Neoplatonic Thought All that is is place. -Lucretius, De rerum natura All there is is place. -Richard Sorabji, Matter, Space, and Motion The nature of the universe is bodies and void [to pan esti somata kai kenon]. -Epicurus, Peri phuseos (On Nature) One's thought of the void does not give out anywhere. -attributed to Cleomedes Part of the perennial appeal of Aristotle's conception of place as something confining and confined is doubtless the philosophical support it offers to human beings' longing for cozy quarters-not merely for adequate shelter but for boundaries that embrace, whether these boundaries belong to decorated rooms in the home or to indecorous glades in the forest primeval. But human beings (and doubtless other animals) also long for wide open spaces and thus for lack of containment, perhaps even for limitlessness. The cozy can be too confining, and just to peer out beyond thick walls or through dense treetops into the sky is to discover the inviting and intriguing presence of empty spaces and unoccupied places. One way to sanction this different longing is to posit a cosmological model radically divergent from that ofAristotle-or, indeed, from those of Plato and 79 80 From Place to Space Anaximander, the thinker of the Boundless, to apeiron. 1 The ancient Greek world knew such a model: put in crude but compelling terms, the Atomists held that there is nothing but "atoms and the void." Atoms are incredibly condensed and indivisible bits of matter (a-tomos means "uncuttable"), and the void is the open space, the free leeway, required for their random motions. Consider the cosmogony of Leucippus, the earliest Atomist and the presumed mentor of Democritus (both lived in the fifth century B.C., approximately two generations before Plato). The coming to be of the worlds (cosmoi) is thus: (I) In severance from the infinite, many bodies, of all varieties of shape, move into a great void. (2) These, being assembled, create a single vortex, in which they collide, gyrate in every way, and are sorted like to like. (3) When because of the number they are no longer able to move round in equilibrium, then the fine ones move into the void outside, as if sifted, while the remainder stay together, become intertwined, join courses with each other, and bring about a first system, in the shape of a sphere.2 This cosmogony is said to proceed by "necessity" (ananke). Unlike Plato's account in the Timaeus, however, this likely story includes no formative Demiurge, since "all varieties of shape" are present from the start. Also present are "the infinite" (again to apeiron, but now construed not just as boundless but as a positive being), "the great void," and "many bodies." These three crucial constituents of the universe-that is, of to pan-are uncreated and pregiven. From them, everything else ensues: regions of "like" things as well as the earth, the sun, the moon, the stars, and all other celestial bodies. The great void is the gathering area for those bodies that will form "a first system," that system being our own cosmos.3 Other cosmoi will form in what Leucippus calls "the void outside." Taken together, the great void and the void outside constitute the infinite void, and this all-encompassing void is differentially populated throughout by those compact indivisible material bodies called "atoms." The Atomist model entails a double infinity: the infinity of space and the infinity of the atoms that populate this space. Just as there can be no end to space in the universe, so there is no end to the number of atoms (and thus, as a corollary, to the number of worlds to which atomic combinations in turn give rise). As Epicurus (341-27° B.C.) put it, "The totality is infinite both in the quantity of atomic bodies and in spatial magnitude."4 Instead of there being a fixed number of elements that make up material bodies-as Empedocles , Plato, and Aristotle all believed-the elements and bodies themselves are constituted from an unlimited number of atoms in diverse configurations. In fact, the two Atomist infinities here in question are closely related. On the one hand, an infinite number of atoms requires an infinite space in which to move; anything less would curtail their motions. (Also required is that this infinite space be essentially empty [kenon] or at least "porous" [manon] .)5 On The Emergence of Space 81 the...