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
I
The nature of the universe is bodies and void [to pan esti sōmata kai kenon].
—Epicurus, Peri phuseōs (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 of Aristotle—or, indeed, from those of Plato and 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: (1) 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” (anankē). 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 (341–270 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 other hand, an infinite space calls for an infinite number of bodies within it; otherwise, it would be merely the region for a few, or even many, bodies—but not for all possible bodies.6
The Atomists would agree with their archrival Parmenides that what is real is a plenum, adding only that what is real is plural and not singular. Since the void per se is empty of any material body, this means that the void in any of its three basic guises is necessarily “unreal” or “not real” (mē on). Yet the void exists (einai); indeed, as we have just seen, it must exist—exist as providing space—if the motion of the atoms is to be possible.7 As Aristotle is reported to have said concerning this double ontology: “The real exists not a whit more than the not real, empty space no less than body.”8 Atoms and the void, the ultimate constituents of the physical universe, both exist, although only one is real in any strict sense. Even if one has “being” (to on) and the other does not, they rejoin each other in the co-necessity of their common existence.
The ingrained wholism of Aristotle and Plato—their passionate desire for perfection, especially of a teleologically ordered sort—ends in a cosmographic picture of a closed and finite world with no further universe around it. In contrast, the Atomists seek, beyond minuscule atoms, that which is infinitely large—a universe of empty space. In the first case, an overriding concern with formal, rational order (an order that, if not found initially, has to be added to the precosmic matrix) eventuates in a world of discrete places, whereas in the second case a commitment to “saving the appearances” (and especially the appearances of particular perceptual objects) calls for a vision of an infinite spatial universe, populated by sporadic and endlessly varying combinations of atomic units—both universe and atoms sharing in a like imperceptibility.9 This difference of vision suggests that a radical departure from the primacy of place (first evident in Hesiod) occurred in the thought of the inaugural Atomists. For does not classical Atomism—a thousand years before Philoponus and two thousand years before Newton—plunge us into an unaccommodating, placeless space? Is there any place for place within the Atomistic void?
Democritus and Leucippus will not help us directly with these questions. Not only is the surviving evidence of their full-scale systems—called intriguingly the Great World System and the Little World System—extremely scanty, but these founding figures were not alive to answer Aristotle’s scathing critique of the void. Epicurus, who visited Athens at the time of Aristotle’s death in 322 B.C, was in a better position to answer this critique. This latter-day Atomist conceded to Aristotle that void is indeed placelike in certain basic respects. The concession was so striking that modern editors of Epicurus have been tempted to alter the standard Atomistic phrase “bodies and space” (sōmata kai chōra)” or “bodies and void” (sōmata kai kenon) to “bodies and place” (sōmata kai topos). However controversial this emendation has proven to be,10 the temptation is based on a substantive point. For the more Epicurus pondered Aristotle’s objections to the void as superfluous—superfluous precisely insofar as it duplicates what is already accomplished by place qua topos—the more he came to conceive of the void as locatory in nature. Void is that “in which” (hopou) atoms are located and that “through which” (di’ hou) they move.11 Precisely as such, it is what immediately situates any given atom. Does this mean that void surrounds the atoms it situates? One recent commentator draws our attention to
the striking similarity of Epicurean void, [regarded] as place, to Aristotle’s fluid, immediate place for moving objects. . . . [This void] is not a sort of extension that could be filled or not
