Читать книгу How to Be an Epicurean - Catherine Wilson - Страница 10

The ancient Epicureans argued that everything in our experience is perishable and will someday perish. But once something exists, they reasoned, it cannot just become nothing. Correspondingly, the entire universe could not have come out of nothing. It follows that the universe must have emerged from something and that something will always exist, no matter how broken up the objects of experience come to be.

If they were right – and let’s go along with their reasoning – after the destruction of every man-made object, every geographical feature, every star and planet, and every chemical element, and after the disappearance of time and space, something must be left from which a new universe could be rebuilt.

From the time that human beings began to philosophise, many came to the conclusion that the eternal something that existed before the universe ever appeared and that can maintain it or even outlast it must be intelligent and creative – a Mind with a Plan. Creation stories take many different forms, but they have in common the idea that there must have been a definite beginning to the world and that it was brought into being for some purpose by its Creator. Human beings were the special concern of this powerful entity, and the rest of the universe was constructed according to the needs and characteristics of human beings and the grand plan of the Creator for them.

Epicurus rejected these assumptions. He maintained to the contrary that the elements of the universe are eternal and uncreated. There is no ruling mind or master plan involving them. His reasoning begins from the idea of destruction rather than from the idea of construction.

Destruction occurs when the parts of a thing, whether a boulder, or a house, or an animal body, are separated from one another by tearing, grinding, smashing, chopping, wearing away or being exploded. The truly indestructible and permanent things that remain after all such operations are the ‘atoms’ – in Greek, the ‘uncuttables’. Epicurean atoms are the ancestors of the modern scientific concept of the atom, but somewhat differently imagined. They are located and move in the void, the empty space separating visible objects and constituting the tiny gaps between the atoms of different shapes and sizes within objects. Apart from the atoms and the void in which they move and collect, sticking together and interweaving, there is nothing.

These atoms, Epicurus supposed, are far too small to be seen by human eyes. But the existence of tiny indestructible particles composing everything was suggested not only by the reasoning just described but by common observations. ‘A finger ring,’ says Lucretius, ‘is worn thin on the inside; the fall of water drop by drop hollows a stone; we see the stone pavements of streets worn away by the feet of the crowd.’ The atoms were thought to resemble the dust motes that can be seen drifting in a ray of light coming in through a window. According to Epicurus, they have different shapes and sizes, but are devoid of colour, taste and scent. They can move in all directions and have no tendencies except the tendency to fall downwards, and the ability to rebound from one other, and to become entangled with other atoms to form physical objects of perceptible sizes. Frequently, an atom ‘swerves’ in an unpredictable fashion. If they didn’t, they’d all end up in a pile at the ‘bottom’ of the world.

The Epicureans theorised that, given sufficient time, the atoms would fall into stable patterns. They would form multiple worlds, or ‘cosmoi’, each with its own plants and animals, its own stars and sun. Such worlds were, they thought, constantly coming into being and breaking up, furnishing the material for recycling into new worlds.

‘The same atoms,’ Lucretius points out, ‘constitute sky, sea, lands, rivers and sun: the same compose crops, trees and animals.’ But if the atoms have no qualities other than size, shape and motion, how can they give rise to our noisy, colourful, scented, textured world? The answer, he explains, is that combinations and arrangements of atoms can take on qualities they do not possess individually. He employs the analogy of letters and words.

The 26 letters of the Roman alphabet can be combined into at least 100,000 meaningful words of the English language. Some linguists maintain that there are up to 1,000,000 words in English, though nobody’s vocabulary could have that breadth. And from even 100,000 words, millions of intelligible, grammatically correct sentences, expressing millions of thoughts and experiences and observations can be formed. Sentences have ‘emergent’ qualities that the letters and spaces composing them do not possess. They can be gentle or inflammatory. Unlike individual letters, they can communicate information, persuade, mislead, enable actions or start a riot. In an analogous way, Lucretius suggested, starting with combinations of ‘primitive’ elements with only a few properties, everything in the noisy, colourful world of experience can be produced.

When it came to vision and hearing, the ancient Epicureans held the interesting theory that sights and sounds were rather like scents. ‘Various sounds,’ says Lucretius, ‘are continually floating through the air … When we walk near the sea, a briny taste often makes its way into our mouth; … From all objects emanations flow away and are discharged in all directions on every side.’ When we smell bacon frying in another room or catch a whiff of someone’s perfume, we can infer that tiny particles made up of still smaller atoms have drifted into our noses from some distance. Tiny particles flow into our eyes and ears as well. For the Epicureans, when I see a tree, a thin ‘film’ of coloured particles actually detaches itself from the tree and floats into my eyes. Objects, they supposed, were constantly emitting these films from their surfaces and so wearing away, while replenishing their substance by absorbing particles from the environment.

Lucretius noted how dependent colours were on the conditions of observation and the lighting. This was especially noticeable in the case of the sea, whose colour varies from hour to hour. Colour, he inferred, must depend on the arrangement of atoms in physical objects and liquids, and how it is affected by light and affects our eyes. The same must be true for scents and tastes: the particles of what we smell and savour enter our bodies and are perceived as pleasant or unpleasant, as the case may be. He pointed out that physical processes such as grinding could change a dark substance like horn to a white powder. He drew from this a correct conclusion: objects do not have fixed, permanent colours, though colours appear to be relatively stable. The tomatoes on my countertop, for example, tend to look the same uniform shade of red to me whenever I see them, regardless of the lighting. Artists, however, are trained to notice the subtle differences that depend on illumination.

Today, no one who has actually studied the visual system believes that vision occurs via films peeling off the surface of objects and travelling through the air. Nor do we believe that the entities that will survive the collapse of our universe will be anything like a dust mote, only smaller. Nevertheless, Epicurean physics is the ancestor of our modern physics, and the developing notion of the atom can be traced from its first appearance in ancient Indian and Greek philosophy. Chemistry employs the notion of an atom of a chemical element such as carbon, gold or uranium, and light is often described as a stream of particles, the photons. But we now recognise that the chemical atom is itself a composite of subatomic particles, and that it can be split, liberating vast quantities of energy – a concept the Epicureans did not recognise.

According to Epicurean cosmology, nothing that we are aware of and experience can be considered permanent. Where the universe that we probe with radio telescopes and other devices is concerned, it will probably last for a few more billion years before returning to its elements, or mutating into some new form altogether. We cannot, however, rule it out that some singularity, unpredictable by our current physics, should bring about the total collapse of our universe two minutes from now. Once all of life disappears from the universe, it may never return. Or universes may cycle in and out of existence, reinventing time, space and matter, and bringing forth new and wondrous forms, even intelligent beings.

In the meantime, everything we see, touch and know about not only can be, but will be reduced to its unknown constituents. ‘Time,’ Lucretius says, ‘wholly destroys the things it wastes and sweeps away, and engulfs all their substance.’ Nothing in nature or made by us endures. This applies to our clothes and furnishings, which wear out, to our bodies that weaken and sag and are eventually reduced to dust. It applies to empires, to economic systems and to our relationships with friends and relatives, even to those that are only brought to an end by death.

As long as our world remains intact, however, new things come into existence as the elements move, interact and combine. New life replaces the old with the birth of children and grandchildren: ‘Venus escort[s] each kind of creature back into the light of life.’ We build new houses in new styles, sew new garments and invent new musical, artistic and political forms. We accept and sometimes welcome the changes in our relationships and the formation of new ones. ‘No visible object ever suffers total destruction,’ Lucretius points out, ‘since nature renews one thing from another, and does not sanction the birth of anything unless she receives the compensation of another’s death.’