The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature

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Note from Marx-Engels Collected Works Volume 1, 1975 :

Marx’s work Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature is part of a general research on the history of ancient philosophy which he planned as far back as 1839.

During his research on ancient philosophy Marx compiled the preparatory Notebooks on Epicurean Philosophy (see this volume, pp. 401-509). In early April 1841 Marx submitted his work to the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Jena as a dissertation for a doctor’s degree (see this volume, p. 379) and received the degree on April 15. He intended to have his work printed and for this purpose wrote the dedication and the foreword dated March 1841. However, he did not succeed in getting it published, although he thought of doing so again at the end of 1841 and beginning of 1842.

Marx’s own manuscript of the thesis has been lost. What remains is an incomplete copy written by an unknown person. This copy has corrections and insertions in Marx’s handwriting. Texts of the fourth and fifth chapters of Part One and the Appendix, except for one fragment, are missing. Each chapter of Part One and Part Two has its own numeration of the author’s notes. These notes, in the form of citations from the sources and additional commentaries, are also incomplete. They are given, according to the copy of the manuscript which has survived, after the main text of the dissertation and marked in the text, in distinction to the editorial notes, by numbers and brackets. Obvious slips of the pen have been corrected. Changes made by Marx which affect the meaning are specified.

In the first publication of the thesis in Aus dem Literischen Nachlass" von Kar1 Marx, Friedrich Engels und Ferdinand Lassalle, Bd. I, Stuttgart, 1902, the fragments from the Appendix "Critique of Plutarch’s Polemic Against the Theology of Epicurus", have been omitted as well as all the author’s notes except for some excerpts. The first publication in full (according to the part of the manuscript that has been preserved) was carried out by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, CC CPSU, in 1927 in Volume One of MEGA (Marx/Engels, Historisch-Kritische Gesamtausgabe, Erste Abteilung, Band 1, Erster Halbband, S. 3-81).

The first translation into English was done by the Austrian-born Kurt Karl Merz in 1946 in Melbourne (a typewritten copy of it is kept in the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, CC CPSU, in Moscow). The foreword to the thesis was published in the collection: K. Marx and F. Engels, On Religion Moscow, 1957, pp. 13-15. In 1967 a translation by Norman D. Livergood was published in the book: Activity in Marx’s Philosophy, Hague, 1967, pp. 55-109. Two excerpts from the dissertation (see this volume, pp. 84-87 and 103-05) were published in Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, New York, 1967, pp. 60-66, and Kari Marx. Early Texts, Oxford, 1971, pp. 11-22.

Dedication

To his dear fatherly friend,

Ludwig Von Westphalen,

Geheimer Regierungsrat

at Trier,

the author dedicates these

lines as a token

of filial love

You will forgive me, my dear fatherly friend, if I set your name, so dear to me, at the head of an insignificant brochure. I am too impatient to await another opportunity of giving you a small proof of my love.

May everyone who doubts of the Idea be so fortunate as I, to be able to admire an old man who has the strength of youth, who greets every forward step of the times with the enthusiasm and the prudence of truth and who, with that profoundly convincing sun-bright idealism which alone knows the true word at whose call all the spirits of the world appear, never recoiled before the deep shadows of retrograde ghosts, before the often dark clouds of the times, but rather with godly energy and manly confident gaze saw through all veils the empyreum which burns at the heart of the world. You, my fatherly friend, were always a living argumentum ad oculos [visible proof]. to me, that idealism is no figment of the imagination, but a truth.

I need not pray for your physical well-being. The spirit is the great physician versed in magic, to whom you have entrusted yourself

Foreword

The form of this treatise would have been on the one hand more strictly scientific, on the other hand in many of its arguments less pedantic, if its primary purpose had not been that of a doctor's dissertation. I am nevertheless constrained by external reasons to send it to the press in this form. Moreover I believe that I have solved in it a heretofore unsolved problem in the history of Greek philosophy.

The experts know that no preliminary studies that are even of the slightest use exist for the subject of this treatise. What Cicero and Plutarch have babbled has been babbled after them up to the present day. Gassendi, who freed Epicurus from the interdict which the Fathers of the Church and the whole Middle Ages, the period of realised unreason, had placed upon him, presents in his expositions only one interesting element. He seeks to accommodate his Catholic conscience to his pagan knowledge and Epicurus to the Church, which certainly was wasted effort. It is as though one wanted to throw the habit of a Christian nun over the bright and flourishing body of the Greek Lais. It is rather that Gassendi learns philosophy from Epicurus than that he could teach us about Epicurus' philosophy.

This treatise is to be regarded only as the preliminary to a larger work in which I shall present in detail the cycle of Epicurean, Stoic and Sceptic philosophy in their relation to the whole of Greek speculation. The shortcomings of this treatise, in form and the like, will be eliminated in that later work.

To be sure, Hegel has on the whole correctly defined the general aspects of the above-mentioned systems. But in the admirably great and bold plan of his history of philosophy, from which alone the history of philosophy can in general be dated, it was impossible, on the one hand, to go into detail, and on the other hand, the giant thinker was hindered by his view of what he called speculative thought par excellence from recognising in these systems their great importance for the history of Greek philosophy and for the Greek mind in general. These systems are the key to the true history of Greek philosophy. A more profound indication of their connection with Greek life can be found in the essay of my friend Köppen, Friedrich der Grosse und seine Widersacher.

If a critique of Plutarch's polemic against Epicurus' theology has been added as an appendix, this is because this polemic is by no means isolated, but rather representative of an espèce, [species - Ed.] in that it most strikingly presents in itself the relation of the theologising intellect to philosophy.

The critique does not touch, among other things, on the general falsity of Plutarch's standpoint when he brings philosophy before the forum of religion. In this respect it will be enough to cite, in place of all argument, a passage from David Hume:

“... 'Tis certainly a kind of indignity to philosophy, whose sovereign authority ought everywhere to be acknowledged, to oblige her on every occasion to make apologies for her conclusions which may be offended at her. This puts one in mind of a king arraign'd for high treason against his subjects.”

Philosophy, as long as a drop of blood shall pulse in its world-subduing and absolutely free heart, will never grow tired of answering its adversaries with the cry of Epicurus:

Not the man who denies the gods worshipped by the multitude, but he who affirms of the gods what the multitude believes about them, is truly impious.

Philosophy makes no secret of it. The confession of Prometheus:

In simple words, I hate the pack of gods [Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound]

is its own confession, its own aphorism against all heavenly and earthly gods who do not acknowledge human self-consciousness as the highest divinity. It will have none other beside.

But to those poor March hares who rejoice over the apparently worsened civil position of philosophy, it responds again, as Prometheus replied to the servant of the gods, Hermes:

Be sure of this, I would not change my state

Of evil fortune for your servitude.

Better to be the servant of this rock

Than to be faithful boy to Father Zeus.

(Ibid.)

Prometheus is the most eminent saint and martyr in the philosophical calendar.

Berlin, March 1841

Draft of New Preface

Note from Marx-Engels Collected Works Volume 1, 1975 :

At the end of 1841 and beginning of 1842 Marx made a new attempt to publish his dissertation. He drafted the beginning of a new preface in which many passages were altered or crossed out. It was probably at the same period that he wrote the note against Schelling which was inserted in Marx’s handwriting in the copy of the manuscript.

The treatise that I herewith submit to the public is an old piece of work and was originally intended as part of a comprehensive exposition of Epicurean, Stoic, and Sceptic philosophy. At present, however, political and philosophical arrangements of an entirely different kind prevent me from bringing such a task to completion.

Only now the time has come in which the systems of the Epicureans, Stoics and Sceptics can be understood. They are the philosophers of self-consciousness. These lines will at any rate show how little has so far been achieved towards solving the problem.

[late 1841 & early 1842]

Part One: Difference between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature in General

I. The Subject of the Treatise

Greek philosophy seems to have met with something with which a good tragedy is not supposed to meet, namely, a dull ending. The objective history of philosophy in Greece seems to come to an end with Aristotle, Greek philosophy's Alexander of Macedon, and even the manly-strong Stoics did not succeed in what the Spartans did accomplish in their temples, the chaining of Athena to Heracles so that she could not flee.

Epicureans, Stoics and Sceptics are regarded as an almost improper addition bearing no relation to its powerful premises. Epicurean philosophy is taken as a syncretic combination of Democritean physics and Cyrenaic morality; Stoicism as a compound of Heraclitean speculation on nature and the Cynical-ethical view of the world, together with some Aristotelean logic; and finally Scepticism as the necessary evil confronting these dogmatisms. These philosophies are thus unconsciously linked to the Alexandrian philosophy by being made into a one-sided and tendentious eclecticism. The Alexandrian philosophy is finally regarded entirely as exaltation and derangement-a confusion in which at most the universality of the intention can be recognised.

To be sure, it is a commonplace that birth, flowering and decline constitute the iron circle in which everything human is enclosed, through which it must pass. Thus it would not have been surprising if Greek philosophy, after having reached its zenith in Aristotle, should then have withered. But the death of the hero resembles the setting of the sun, not the bursting of an inflated frog.

And then: birth, flowering and decline are very general, very vague notions under which, to be sure, everything can be arranged, but through which nothing can be understood. Decay itself is prefigured in the living; its shape should therefore be just as much grasped in its specific characteristic as the shape of life. Finally, when we glance at history, are Epicureanism, Stoicism and Scepticism particular phenomena? Are they not the prototypes of the Roman mind, the shape in which Greece wandered to Rome? Is not their essence so full of character, so intense and eternal that the modern world itself has to admit them to full spiritual citizenship?

I lay stress on this only in order to call to mind the historical importance of these systems. Here, however, we are not at all concerned with their significance for culture in general, but with their connection with the older Greek philosophy.

Should not this relationship urge us at least to an inquiry, to see Greek philosophy ending up with two different groups of eclectic systems, one of them the cycle of Epicurean, Stoic and Sceptic philosophy, the other being classified under the collective name of Alexandrian speculation? Furthermore, is it not remarkable that after the Platonic and Aristotelean philosophies, which are universal in range, there appear new systems which do not lean on these rich intellectual forms, but look farther back and have recourse to the simplest schools-to the philosophers of nature in regard to physics, to the Socratic school in regard to ethics? Moreover, what is the reason why the systems that follow after Aristotle find their foundations as it were ready made in the past, why Democritus is linked to the Cyrenaics and Heraclitus to the Cynics? Is it an accident that with the Epicureans, Stoics and Sceptics all moments of self-consciousness are represented completely, but every moment as a particular existence? Is it an accident that these systems in their totality form the complete structure of self-consciousness? And finally, the character with which Greek philosophy mythically begins in the seven wise men, and which is, so to say as its central point, embodied in Socrates as its demiurge — I mean the character of the wise man, of the sophos — is it an accident that it is asserted in those systems as the reality of true science?

It seems to me that though the earlier systems are more significant and interesting for the content, the post-Aristotelean ones, and primarily the cycle of the Epicurean, Stoic and Sceptic schools, are more significant and interesting for the subjective form, the character of Greek philosophy. But it is precisely the subjective form, the spiritual carrier of the philosophical systems, which has until now been almost entirely ignored in favour of their metaphysical characteristics.

I shall save for a more extensive discussion the presentation of the Epicurean, Stoic and Sceptic philosophies as a whole and in their total relationship to earlier and later Greek speculation.

Let it suffice here to develop this relationship as it were by an example, and only in one aspect, namely, their relationship to earlier speculation.

As such an example I select the relationship between the Epicurean and the Democritean philosophy of nature. I do not believe that it is the most convenient point of contact. Indeed, on the one hand it is an old and entrenched prejudice to identify Democritean and Epicurean physics, so that Epicurus' modifications are seen as only arbitrary vagaries. On the other hand I am forced to go into what seem to be microscopic examinations as far as details are concerned. But precisely because this prejudice is as old as the history of philosophy, because the differences are so concealed that they can be discovered as it were only with a microscope, it will be all the more important if, despite the interdependence of Democritean and Epicurean physics, an essential difference extending to the smallest details can be demonstrated. What can be demonstrated in the small can even more easily be shown where the relations are considered in larger dimensions, while conversely very general considerations leave doubt whether the result will hold when applied to details.

II. Opinions on the Relationship between Democritean and Epicurean Physics

The way in which my general outlook is related to earlier points of view will become quite obvious if a brief review is made of the opinions held by the ancient authors concerning the relationship between Democritean and Epicurean physics.

Posidonius the Stoic, Nicolaus and Sotion reproach Epicurus for having presented the Democritean doctrine of atoms and Aristippus' teaching on pleasure as his own. Cotta the Academician asks in Cicero: “What is there in Epicurus' physics which does not belong to Democritus? True, he modifies some details, but most of it he repeats after him.” Cicero himself says similarly:

“In physics, where he is the most pretentious, Epicurus is a perfect stranger. Most of it belongs to Democritus; where he deviates from him, where he endeavours to improve, he spoils and worsens it.”

Although many authors reproach Epicurus for aspersions against Democritus, Leonteus, according to Plutarch, affirms on the contrary that Epicurus honoured Democritus because the latter had adhered to the true doctrine before him, because he had discovered the principles of nature earlier. In the essay De placitis philosophorum Epicurus is called one who philosophises after the manner of Democritus. Plutarch in his Colotes goes further. Successively comparing Epicurus with Democritus, Empedocles, Parmenides, Plato, Socrates, Stilpo, the Cyrenaics and the Academicians, he seeks to prove that “Epicurus appropriated from the whole of Greek philosophy the false and did not understand the true”. Likewise the treatise De eo, quod secundum Epicurum non beats vivi possit teems with inimical insinuations of a similar kind.

In the Fathers of the Church we find this unfavourable opinion, held by the more ancient authors, maintained. In the note I quote only one passage from Clement of Alexandria, a Father of the Church who deserves to be prominently mentioned with regard to Epicurus, since he reinterprets the warning of the apostle Paul against philosophy in general into a warning against Epicurean philosophy, as one which did not even once spin fantasies concerning providence and the like. But how common was the tendency to accuse Epicurus of plagiarism is shown most strikingly by Sextus Empiricus, who wishes to turn some quite inappropriate passages from Homer and Epicharmus into principal sources of Epicurean philosophy.

It is well known that the more recent writers by and large make Epicurus, insofar as he was a philosopher of nature, a mere plagiarist of Democritus. The following statement of Leibniz may here represent their opinion in general:

“Of this great man” (Democritus) “we scarcely know anything but what Epicurus borrowed from him, and Epicurus was not capable of always taking the best.”

Thus while Cicero says that Epicurus worsened the Democritean doctrine, at the same time crediting him at least with the will to improve it and with having an eye for its defects, while Plutarch ascribes to him inconsistencyand a predisposition toward the inferior, hence also casts suspicion on his intentions, Leibniz denies him even the ability to make excerpts from Democritus skilfully.

But all agree that Epicurus borrowed his physics from Democritus.

III. Difficulties Concerning the Identity Of the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature

Apart from historical testimony, there is much other evidence for the identity of Democritean and Epicurean physics. The principles — atoms and the void — are indisputably the same. Only in isolated cases does there seem to be arbitrary, hence unessential, difference.

However, a curious and insoluble riddle remains. Two philosophers teach exactly the same science, in exactly the same way, but — how inconsistent! — they stand diametrically opposed in all that concerns truth, certainty, application of this science, and all that refers to the relationship between thought and reality in general. I say that they stand diametrically opposed, and I shall now try to prove it.

A. The opinion of Democritus concerning the truth and certainty of human knowledge seems hard to ascertain. Contradictory passages are to be found, or rather it is not the passages, but Democritus' views that contradict each other. For Trendelenburg's assertion in his commentary to Aristotelean psychology, that only later authors, but not Aristotle, knew of such contradictions, is factually incorrect. Indeed, in Aristotle's Psychology it is stated: “Democritus posits soul and mind [Verstand] as one and the same, since the phenomenon is the true thing.” But in his Metaphysics he writes: “Democritus asserts that nothing is true or it is concealed from us.” Are not these passages of Aristotle contradictory? If the phenomenon is the true thing, how can the true thing be concealed? The concealment begins only when phenomenon and truth separate. But Diogenes Laertius reports that Democritus was counted among the Sceptics. His saying is quoted: “In reality we know nothing, for truth lies at the deep bottom of the well.” Similar statements are found in Sextus Empiricus.

This sceptical, uncertain and internally self-contradictory view held by Democritus is only further developed in the way in which the relationship between the atom and the world which is apparent to the senses is determined.

Sensuous appearance, on the one hand, does not belong to the atoms themselves. It is not objective appearance, but subjective semblance [Schein]. “The true principles are the atoms and the void, everything else is opinion, semblance.” “Cold exists only according to opinion, heat exists only according to opinion, but in reality there are only the atoms and the void.” Unity therefore does not truly result from the many atoms, but rather “through the combination of atoms each thing appears to become a unity". The principles can therefore be perceived only through reason, since they are inaccessible to the sensuous eye if only because of their smallness. For this reason they are even called ideas. The sensuous appearance is, on the other hand, the only true object, and the aisthesis [sensuous perception] is the phronesis [that which is rational]; this true thing however is the changing, the unstable, the phenomenon. But to say that the phenomenon is the true thing is contradictory. Thus now the one, now the other side is made the subjective and the objective. The contradiction therefore seems to be held apart, being divided between two worlds. Consequently, Democritus makes sensuous reality into subjective semblance; but the antinomy, banned from the world of objects, now exists in his own self-consciousness, where the concept of the atom and sensuous perception face each other as enemies.

Thus Democritus does not escape the antinomy. This is not yet the place to explain it. It is enough that we cannot deny its existence.

Now let us listen to Epicurus.

The wise man, he says, takes a dogmatic, not a sceptical position. Yes, exactly this makes him superior to all the others, that he knows with conviction. “All senses are heralds of the true.” “Nor is there anything which can refute sensations, neither like can refute like, because of their equal validity, nor can unlike refute unlike, because they do not pass judgment on the same thing, nor the concept, because the concept depends on the sensuous perceptions,” as it says in the Canon. But while Democritus turns the sensuous world into subjective semblance, Epicurus turns it into objective appearance. And here he differs quite consciously, since he claims that he shares the same principles but that he does not reduce the sensuous qualities to things of mere opinion.

Since therefore sensation was in fact Epicurus' standard, since objective appearance corresponds to it: then we can only regard as a correct. conclusion that at which Cicero shrugs his shoulder:

“The sun seems large to Democritus, because he is a man of science well versed in geometry; to Epicurus it seems to be about two feet large, for he pronounces it as large as it seems.”

B. This difference in the theoretical judgments of Democritus and Epicurus concerning the certainty of science and the truth of its objects manifests itself in the disparate scientific energy and practice of these men.

Democritus, for whom the principle does not enter into the appearance, remains without reality and existence, is faced on the other hand with the world of sensation as the real world, full of content. True, this world is subjective semblance, but just because of this it is torn away from the principle, left in its own independent reality. At the same time it is the unique real object and as such has value and significance. Democritus is therefore driven into empirical observation. Dissatisfied with philosophy, he throws himself into the arms of positive knowledge. We have already seen that Cicero calls him a vir eruditus [Man of Science]. He is versed in physics, ethics, mathematics, in the encyclopedic disciplines, in every art. The catalogue alone of his books given by Diogenes Laertius bears witness to his erudition. But since it is the characteristic trait of erudition to expand in breadth and to collect and to search on the outside, we see Democritus wandering through half the world in order to acquire experiences, knowledge and observations.

“I have among my contemporaries,” he prides himself, “wandered through the largest part of the earth, investigating the remotest things. I have seen most climates and lands, and I have heard most learned men, and in linear composition with demonstration no one surpassed me, not even the so-called Arsipedonapts of the Egyptians;”

Demetrius in the Homonymois [Men of the Same Name] and Antisthenes in the Diadochais [Successions of Philosophers] report that he travelled to Egypt to the priests in order to learn geometry, and to the Chaldeans in Persia, and that he reached the Red Sea. Some maintain that he also met the gymnosophists in India and set foot in Ethiopia. On the one hand it is the lust for knowledge that leaves him no rest; but it is at the same time dissatisfaction with true, i. e., philosophical, knowledge that drives him far abroad. The knowledge which he considers true is without content, the knowledge that gives him content is without truth. It could he a fable, but a true fable, that anecdote of the ancients, since it gives a picture of the contradictory elements in his being. Democritus is supposed to have blinded himself so that the sensuous light of the eye would not darken the sharpness of intellect. This is the same man who, according to Cicero, wandered through half the world. But he did not find what he was looking for.

An opposite figure appears to us in Epicurus.

Epicurus is satisfied and blissful in philosophy.

“You must,” he says, “serve philosophy so that true freedom will he your lot. He who has subordinated and surrendered himself to it does not need to wait, he is emancipated at once. For to serve philosophy is freedom itself. Consequently he teaches: “Let no one when young delay to study philosophy, nor when he is old grow weary of his study. For no one can come too early or too late to secure the health of his soul. And the man who says that the age for philosophy has either not yet come or has gone by is like the man who savs that the age for happiness is not yet come to him, or has passed away.”

While Democritus, dissatisfied with philosophy, throws himself into the arms of empirical knowledge, Epicurus has nothing but contempt for the positive sciences, since in his opinion they contribute nothing to true perfection. He is called an enemy of science, a scorner of grammar. He is even accused of ignorance. “But,” says an Epicurean in Cicero, “it was not Epicurus who was without erudition, but those are ignorant who believe that what is shameful for a boy not to know ought still to be recited by the old man.

But while Democritus seeks to learn from Egyptian priests, Persian Chaldeans and Indian gymnosophists, Epicurus prides himself on not having had a teacher, on being self-taught. There are some people, he says according to Seneca, who struggle for truth without any assistance. Among these people he has himself traced out his path. And it is they, the self-taught, whom he praises most. The others, according to him, are second-rate minds. While Democritus is driven into all parts of the world, Epicurus leaves his garden in Athens scarcely two or three times and travels to Ionia, not to engage in studies, but to visit friends. Finally, while Democritus, despairing of acquiring knowledge, blinds himself, Epicurus, feeling the hour of death approaching, takes a warm bath, calls for pure wine and recommends to his friends that they be faithful to philosophy.

C. The differences that we have just set forth should not be attributed to the accidental individuality of the two philosophers; they embody two opposite tendencies. We see as a difference of practical energy that which is expressed in the passages above as a difference of theoretical consciousness.

We consider finally the form of reflection which expresses the relation of thought to being, their mutual relationship. In the general relationship which the philosopher sees between the world and thought, he merely makes objective for himself the relation of his own particular consciousness to the real world.

Now Democritus uses necessity as a form of reflection of reality. Aristotle says of him that he traces everything back to necessity. Diogenes Laertius reports that the vortex of atoms, the origin of all, is the Democritean necessity. More satisfactory explanations are given by the author of De placitis philosophorum:

Necessity is, according to Democritus, fate and law, providence and the creator of the world. But the substance of this necessity is the antitype and the movement and impulse of matter.

A similar passage is to be found in the Physical Selections of Stobaeus and in the sixth book of the Praeparatio evangelica of Eusebius. In the Ethical Selections of Stobaeus the following aphorism of Democritus is preserved — it is almost exactly repeated in the 14th book of Eusebius : human beings like to create for themselves the illusion of chance — a manifestation of their own perplexity, since chance [Zufall] is incompatible with sound thinking. Simplicius similarly attributes to Democritus a passage in which Aristotle speaks of the ancient doctrine that does away with chance. Contrast this with Epicurus:

“Necessity, introduced b by some as the absolute ruler, does not exist, but some things are accidental, others depend on our arbitrary will. Necessity cannot be persuaded, but chance is unstable. It would be better to follow the myth about the gods than to be a slave to the heimarinene [what has been decreed, destiny] of the physicists. For the former leaves hope for mercy if we do honour to the gods, while the latter is inexorable necessity. But it is chance, which must be accepted, not God, as the multitude believe.” “It is a misfortune to live in necessity, but to live in necessity is not a necessity. On all sides many short and easy paths to freedom are open. Let us therefore thank God that no man can he kept in life. It is permitted to subdue necessity itself.”

The Epicurean Velleius in Cicero says something similar about Stoic philosophy:

"What are we to think of a philosophy in which, as to ignorant old women, everything seems to occur through fate? ... by Epicurus we have been redeemed, set free.”

Thus Epicurus even denies disjunctive judgment so as not to have to acknowledge any concept of necessity.

True, it is claimed that Democritus also used the concept of chance, but of the two passages on this matter which can be found in Simplicius the one renders the other suspect, because it shows clearly that it was not Democritus who used the category of chance, but Simplicius who ascribed it to him as a consequence. For he says: Democritus assigns, generally speaking, no cause for the creation of the world, he seems therefore to make chance the cause. Here, however, we are concerned not with the determination of the content, but with the form used consciously by Democritus. The situation is similar in regard to the report by Eusebius that Democritus made chance the ruler of the universal and divine and claimed that here it is through chance that everything happens, whereas he excluded chance from human life and empirical nature and called its supporters foolish.

In part, we see in these statements only a desire of the Christian bishop Dionysius for conclusion-forcing. In part, where the universal and divine begin, the Democritean concept of necessity ceases to differ from chance.

Hence, this much is historically certain: Democritus makes use of necessity, Epicurus of chance. And each of them rejects the opposite view with polemical irritation.

The principal consequence of this difference appears in the way individual physical phenomena are explained.

Necessity appears in finite nature as relative necessity, as determinism. Relative necessity can only be deduced from real possibility, i.e., it is a network of conditions, reasons, causes, etc., by means of which this necessity reveals itself. Real possibility is the explication of relative necessity. And we find it used by Democritus. We cite some passages from Simplicius.

If somebody is thirsty and drinks and feels better, Democritus will not assign chance as the cause, but thirst. For, even though he seems to use chance in regard to the creation of the world, yet he maintains that chance is not the cause of any particular event, but on the contrary leads back to other causes. Thus, for example, digging is the cause of a treasure being found, or growing the cause of the olive tree.

The enthusiasm and the seriousness with which Democritus .introduces this manner of explanation into the observation of nature, the importance he attaches to the striving to ascertain causes, are naively ] expressed in his avowal:

“I would rather discover a new aetiology than acquire the Persian crown.”

Once again Epicurus stands directly opposed to Democritus. Chance, for him, is a reality which has only the value of possibility. Abstract possibility, however, is the direct antipode of real possibility. The latter is restricted within sharp boundaries, as is the intellect; the former is unbounded, as is the imagination. Real possibility seeks to explain the necessity and reality of its object; abstract possibility is not interested in the object which is explained, but in the subject which does the explaining. The object need only be possible, conceivable. That which is abstractly possible, which can be conceived, constitutes no obstacle to the thinking subject, no limit, no stumbling-block. Whether this possibility is also real is irrelevant, since here the interest does not extend to the object as object.

Epicurus therefore proceeds with a boundless nonchalance in the explanation of separate physical phenomena.

More light will be thrown upon this fact by the letter to Pythocles, later to be considered. Suffice it here to draw attention to Epicurus' attitude to the opinions of earlier physicists. Where the author of De Placitis philosophorum and Stobaeus quote the different views of the philosophers concerning the substance of the stars, the size and shape of the sun and similar matters, it is always said of Epicurus: He rejects none of these opinions, all could be right, he adheres to the possible. Yes, Epicurus polemicises even against the rationally determining, and for precisely this reason one-sided, method of explanation by real possibility.

Thus Seneca says in his Quaestiones naturales: Epicurus maintains that all these causes are possible, and then attempts in addition still other explanations. He blames those who claim that any particular one of them occurs, because it is rash to judge apodictically about that which can only be deduced from conjectures.

One can see that there is no interest in investigating the real causes of objects. All that matters is the tranquillity of the explaining subject. Since everything possible is admitted as possible, which corresponds to the character of abstract possibility, the chance of being is clearly transferred only into the chance of thought. The only rule which Epicurus prescribes, namely, that “the explanation should not contradict sensation", is self-evident; for to be abstractly possible consists precisely in being free from contradiction, which therefore must be avoided. And Epicurus confesses finally that his method of explaining aims only at the ataraxy of self-consciousness, not at knowledge of nature in and for itself. it requires no further clarification to show how in this matter, too, Epicurus differs from Democritus.

We thus see that the two men are opposed to each other at every single step. The one is a sceptic, the other a dogmatist; the one considers the sensuous world as subjective semblance, the other as objective appearance. He who considers the sensuous world as subjective semblance applies himself to empirical natural science and to positive knowledge, and represents the unrest of observation, experimenting, learning everywhere. ranging over the wide, wide world. The other, who considers the phenomenal world to be real, scorns empiricism; embodied in him are the serenity of thought satisfied in itself, the self-sufficiency that draws its knowledge ex principio interno. But the contradiction goes still farther. The sceptic and empiricist, who holds sensuous nature to be subjective semblance, considers it from the point of view of necessity and endeavours to explain and to understand the real existence of things. The philosopher and dogmatist, on the other hand, who considers appearance to be real, sees everywhere only chance, and his method of explanation tends rather to negate all objective reality of nature. There seems to be a certain absurdity in these contradictions.

It hardly seems still possible to presume that these men, who contradict each other on all points, will adhere to one and the same doctrine. And yet they seem to be chained to each other.

The task of the next section is to comprehend their relationship in general.

IV. General Difference in Principle Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature

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V. Result

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Part Two: Difference between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature in detail

I. The Declination of the Atom from the Straight Line

Epicurus assumes a threefold motion of the atoms in the void. One motion is the fall in a straight line, the second originates in the deviation of the atom from the straight line, and the third is established through the repulsion of the many atoms. Both Democritus and Epicurus accept the first and the third motion. The declination of the atom from the straight line differentiates the one from the other.

This motion of declination has often been made the subject of a joke. Cicero more than any other is inexhaustible when he touches on this theme. Thus we read in him, among other things:

“Epicurus maintains that the atoms are thrust downwards in a straight line by their weight; this motion is said to he the natural motion of bodies. But then it occurred to him that if all atoms were thrust downwards, no atom could ever meet another one. Epicurus therefore resorted to a lie. He said that the atom makes a very tiny swerve, which is, of course, entirely impossible. From this arose complexities, combinations and adhesions of the atoms with one another, and out of this came the world, all parts of it and its contents. Besides all this being a puerile invention, he does not even achieve what he desires."

We find another version in the first book of Cicero's treatise On the Nature of the Gods:

“Since Epicurus saw that, if the atoms travelled downwards by their own weight, nothing would be within our control, for their motion would be determined and necessary, he invented a means for escaping this necessity, a means which had escaped the notice of Democritus. He says that the atom, although thrust downwards by its weight and gravity, makes a very slight swerve. To assert this is more disgraceful than to he incapable of defending what he wants."

Pierre Bayle expresses a similar opinion:

“Before him” (i.e., Epicurus) “only the motion of weight and that of reflection were conceded to the atom.... Epicurus supposed that even in the midst of the void the atoms declined slightly from the straight line, and from this, he said, arose freedom.... It must he noted, in passing, that this was not the only motive that led him to invent this motion of declination. He also used it to explain the meeting of atoms; for he saw clearly that supposing they fall] move with equal speed downwards along straight lines, he would never be able to explain that they could meet, and that thus the creation of the world would have been impossible. It was necessary, then, that they should deviate from the straight line."

For the present I leave the validity of these reflections an open question. This much everyone will notice in passing, that the most recent critic of Epicurus, Schaubach, has misunderstood Cicero when he says:

“The atoms are all thrust downwards by gravity, hence parallel, owing to physical causes, but through mutual repulsion they acquire another motion, according to Cicero (De nature deorum, I, xxv [, 69]) an oblique motion due to accidental causes, and indeed from all eternity."

In the first place, Cicero in the quoted passage does not make the repulsion the reason for the oblique direction, but rather the oblique direction the reason for the repulsion. In the second place, he does not speak of accidental causes, but rather criticises the fact that no causes at all are mentioned, as it would be in and for itself contradictory to assume repulsion and at the same time accidental causes as the reason for the oblique direction. At best one could then still speak of accidental causes of the repulsion, but not of accidental causes of the oblique direction.

For the rest, one peculiarity in Cicero's and Bayle's reflections is too obvious not to be stressed immediately. They foist upon Epicurus motives of which the one nullifies the other. Epicurus is supposed to have assumed a declination of the atoms in order to explain the repulsion on one occasion, and on another freedom. But if the atoms do not meet without declination, then declination as an explanation of freedom is superfluous; for the opposite of freedom begins, as we see in Lucretius, only with the deterministic and forced meeting of atoms. But if the atoms meet without declination, then this is superfluous for explaining repulsion. 1 maintain that this contradiction arises when the causes for the declination of the atom from the straight line are understood so superficially and disconnectedly as they are by Cicero and Bayle. We shall find in Lucretius, the only one in general of all the ancients who has understood Epicurean physics, a more profound exposition.

We now shall consider the declination itself.

Just as the point is negated [aufgehoben] in the line, so is every failing body negated in the straight line it describes. its specific quality does not matter here at all. A falling apple describes a perpendicular line just as a piece of iron does. Every body, insofar as we are concerned with the motion of falling, is therefore nothing but a moving point, and indeed a point without independence, which in a certain mode of being-the straight line which it describes-surrenders its individuality [Einzelheit]. Aristotle therefore is correct when he objects against the Pythagoreans: “You say that the motion of the line is the surface, that of the point the line; then the motions of the monads will also be lines." The consequence of this for the monads as well as for the atoms would therefore be-since they are in constant motion — that neither monads nor atoms exist, but rather disappear in the straight line; for the solidity of the atom does not even enter into the picture, insofar as it is only considered as something falling in a straight line. To begin with, if the void is imagined as spatial void, then the atom is the immediate negation of abstract space, hence a spatial point. The solidity, the intensity, which maintains itself in itself against the incohesion of space, can only he added by virtue of a principle which negates space in its entire domain, a principle such as time is in real nature. Moreover, if this itself is not admitted, the atom, insofar as its motion is a straight line, is determined only by space and is prescribed a relative being and a purely material existence. But we have seen that one moment in the concept of the atom is that of being pure form, negation of all relativity, of all relation to another mode of being. We have noted at the same time that — Epicurus objectifies for himself both moments which, although they contradict one another, are nevertheless inherent in the concept of the atom.

How then can Epicurus give reality to the pure form-determination of the atom, the concept of pure individuality, negating any mode of being determined by another being?

Since he is moving in the domain of immediate being, all determinations are immediate. Opposite determinations are therefore opposed to one another as immediate realities.

But the relative existence which confronts the atom, the mode of being which it has to negate, is the straight line. The immediate negation of this motion is another motion, which, therefore, spatially conceived, is the declination from the straight line.

The atoms are purely self-sufficient bodies or rather bodies conceived in absolute self-sufficiency, like the heavenly bodies. Hence, again like the heavenly bodies, they move not in straight, but in oblique lines. The motion of failing is the motion of non-self-sufficiency.

If Epicurus therefore represents the materiality of the atom in terms of its motion along a straight line, he has given reality to its form-determination in the declination from the straight line, and these opposed determinations are represented as directly opposed motions.

Lucretius therefore is correct when he maintains that. the declination breaks the fati foedera, [bonds of fate] and, since he applies this immediately to consciousness, it can be said of the atom that the declination is that something in its breast that can fight back and resist.

But when Cicero reproaches Epicurus that

“he does not even attain the goal for which he made all this up -for if all atoms declined, none of them would ever combine, or some would deviate, others would be driven straight ahead by their motion. So it would be necessary as it were to give the atoms definite assignments beforehand: which had to move straight ahead and which obliquely”,

this objection has the justification that the two moments inherent in the concept of the atom are represented as directly different motions, and therefore must be allotted to different individuals: an inconsistency, but a consistent one, since the domain of the atom is immediacy. Epicurus feels this inherent contradiction quite well. He therefore endeavours to represent the declination as being as imperceptible as possible to the senses; it takes place

In time, in place unfixt (Lucretius, De rerum nature, II, 294).

it occurs in the smallest possible space.

Moreover Cicero, and, according to Plutarch, several ancient authors, reproach Epicurus for saying that the declination of the atom occurs without cause. Nothing more disgraceful, says Cicero, can happen to a physicist. But, in the first place, a physical cause such as Cicero wants would throw the declination of the atom back into the domain of determinism, out of which it was precisely to be lifted. And then, the atom is by no means complete before it has been submitted to the determination of declination. To inquire after the cause of this determination means therefore to inquire after the cause that makes the atom a principle-a clearly meaningless inquiry to anyone for whom the atom is the cause of everything, hence without cause itself.

Finally, Bayle,-supported by the authority of Augustine, who states that Democritus ascribed to the atom a spiritual principle — an authority, by the way, who in contrast to Aristotle and the other ancients is without any importance-reproaches Epicurus for having thought out the concept of declination instead of this spiritual principle. But, on the contrary, merely a word would have been gained with this “soul of the atom", whereas the declination represents the real soul of the atom, the concept of abstract individuality.

Before we consider the consequence of the declination of the atom from the straight line, we must draw attention to another, most important element, which up to now has been entirely overlooked.

The declination of the atom from the straight line is, namely, not a particular determination which appears accidentally in Epicurean physics. On the contrary, the law which it expresses goes through the whole Epicurean philosophy, in such a way, however, that, as goes without saying, the determination of its appearance depends on the domain in which it is applied.

As a matter of fact, abstract individuality can make its concept, its form-determination, the pure being-for-itself, the independence from immediate being, the negation of all relativity, effective only by abstracting from the being that confronts it; for in order truly to overcome it, abstract individuality had to idealise it, a thing only generality can accomplish.

Thus, while the atom frees itself from its relative existence, the straight line, by abstracting from it, by swerving away from it; so the entire Epicurean philosophy swerves away from the restrictive mode of being wherever the concept of abstract individuality, self-sufficiency and negation of all relation to other things must be represented in its existence.

The purpose of action is to be found therefore in abstracting, swerving away from pain and confusion, in ataraxy. Hence the good is the flight from evil, pleasure the swerving away from suffering. Finally, where abstract individuality appears in its highest freedom and independence, in its totality, there it follows that the being which is swerved away from, is all being., for this reason, the gods swerve away from the world, do not bother with it and live outside it.

These gods of Epicurus have often been ridiculed, these gods who, like human beings, dwell in the intermundia [The spaces between the worlds, literally: inter-worlds] of the real world, have no body but a quasi-body, no blood but quasi-blood, and, content to abide in blissful peace, lend no car to any supplication, are unconcerned with us and the world, are honoured because of their beauty, their majesty and their superior nature, and not for any gain.

And yet these gods are no fiction of Epicurus. They did exist. They are the Elastic gods of Greek art. Cicero, the Roman, rightly scoffs at them, but Plutarch, the Greek, has forgotten the whole Greek outlook when he claims that although this doctrine of the gods does away with fear and superstition, it produces no joy or favour in the gods, but instead bestows on us that relation to them that we have to the Hyrcanian fish, from which we expect neither harm nor advantage. Theoretical calm is one of the chief characteristics of the Greek gods. As Aristotle says:

“What is best has no need of action, for it is its own end."

We now consider the consequence that follows directly from the declination of the atom. In it is expressed the atom's negation of all motion and relation by which it is determined as a particular mode of being by another being. This is represented in such a way that the atom abstracts from the opposing being and withdraws itself from it. But what is contained herein, namely, its negation of all relation to something else, must be realised, positively established. This can only be done if the being to which it relates itself is none other than itself, hence equally an atom, and, since it itself is directly determined, many atoms. The repulsion of the many atoms is therefore the necessary realisation of the lex atomi, [Law of the atom] as Lucretius calls the declination. But since here every determination is established as a particular being, repulsion is added as a third motion to the former ones. Lucretius is therefore correct when he says that, if the atoms were not to decline, neither their repulsion nor their meeting would have taken place, and the world would never have been created. For atoms are their own sole object and can only be related to themselves, hence speaking in spatial terms, they can only meet, because every relative existence of these atoms by which they would be related to other beings is negated. And this relative existence is, as we have seen, their original motion, that of falling in a straight line. Hence they meet only by virtue of their declination from the straight line. It has nothing to do with merely material fragmentation.

And in truth: the immediately existing individuality is only realised conceptually, inasmuch as it relates to something else which actually is itself — even when the other thing confronts it in the form of immediate existence. Thus man ceases to he a product of nature only when the other being to which he relates himself is not a different existence but is itself an individual human being, even if it is not yet the mind [Geist]. But for man as man to become his own real object, he must have crushed within himself his relative being, the power of desire and of mere nature. Repulsion is the first form of self-consciousness, it corresponds therefore to that self-consciousness which conceives itself as immediate-being, as abstractly individual.

The concept of the atom is therefore realised in repulsion, inasmuch as it is abstract form, but no less also the opposite, inasmuch as it is abstract matter; for that to which it relates itself consists, to be true, of atoms, but other atoms. But when I relate myself to myself as to something which is directly another, then my relationship is a material one. This is the most extreme degree of externality that can be conceived. In the repulsion of the atoms, therefore, their materiality, which was posited in the fall in a straight line, and the form-determination, which was established in the declination, are united synthetically.

Democritus, in contrast to Epicurus, transforms into an enforced motion, into an act of blind necessity, that which to Epicurus is the realisation of the concept of the atom. We have already seen above that he considers the vortex (dini) resulting from the repulsion and collision of the atoms to be the substance of necessity. He therefore sees in the repulsion only the material side, the fragmentation, the change, and not the ideal side, according to which all relation to something else is negated and motion is established as self-determination. This can be clearly seen from the fact that he conceives one and the same body divided through empty space into many parts quite sensuously, like gold broken up into pieces. Thus he scarcely conceived of the One as the concept of the atom.

Aristotle correctly argues against him:

“Hence Leucippus and Democritus, who assert that the primary bodies always moved in the void and in the infinite, should say what kind of motion this is, and what is the motion natural to them. For if each of the elements is forcibly moved by the other, then it is still necessary that each should have also a natural motion, outside which is the enforced one. And this first motion must not be enforced but natural. Otherwise the procedure goes on to infinity."

The Epicurean declination of the atom thus changed the whole inner structure of the domain of the atoms, since through it the form-determination is validated and the contradiction inherent in the concept of the atom is realised. Epicurus was therefore the first to grasp the essence of the repulsion — even if only in sensuous form, whereas Democritus only knew of its material existence. Hence we find also more concrete forms of the repulsion applied by Epicurus. In the political domain there is the covenant, in the social domain friendship, which is praised as the highest good.

II. The Qualities of the Atom

It contradicts the concept of the atom that the atom should have properties, because, as Epicurus says, every property is variable but the atoms do not change. Nevertheless it is a necessary consequence to attribute properties to atoms. Indeed, the many atoms of repulsion separated by sensuous space must necessarily be immediately different from one another and from their pure essence, i.e., they must possess qualities.

In the following analysis I therefore take no account of the assertion made by Schneider and Nürnberger that “Epicurus attributed no qualities to the atoms, paragraphs 44 and 54 of the letter to Herodotus in Diogenes Laertius have been interpolated”. If this were truly so, how is one to invalidate the evidence of Lucretius, Plutarch, and indeed of all other authors who speak of Epicurus? Moreover, Diogenes Laertius mentions the qualities of the atom not in two, but in ten paragraphs: Nos. 42, 43, 44, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59 and 61. The grounds these critics give for their contention — that “they did not know how to reconcile the qualities of the atom with its concept" - are very shallow.” Spinoza says that ignorance is no argument. [Spinoza, Ethics, Part I, Prop. 36, Appendix] If one was to delete the passages in the ancients which he does not understand, how quickly would we have a tabula rasa!

Through the qualities the atom acquires an existence which contradicts its concept; it is assumed as an externalised being different from its essence. It is this contradiction which mainly interests Epicurus. Hence, as soon as he posits a property and thus draws the consequence of the material nature of the atom, he counterposits at the same time determinations which again destroy this property in its own sphere and validate instead the concept of the atom. He therefore determines all properties in such a way that they contradict themselves. Democritus, on the other hand, nowhere considers the properties in relation to the atom itself, nor does he objectify the contradiction between concept and existence which is inherent in them. His whole interest lies rather in representing the qualities in relation to concrete nature, which is to be formed out of them. To him they are merely hypotheses to explain the plurality . which makes its appearance. It follows that the concept of the atom has nothing to do with them.

In order to prove our assertion it is first of all necessary to elucidate the sources which here seem to contradict one another.

In the treatise De placitis philosophorum we read:

“Epicurus asserts that the atoms have three qualities: size, shape, weight. Democritus only assumed two: size and shape. Epicurus added weight as the third."

The same passage is repeated word for word in the Praeparatio evangelica of Eusebius.

It is confirmed by the testimony of Simplicius and Philoponus, according to whom Democritus attributed to the atoms only difference in size and shape. Directly contrary stands Aristotle who, in the book De generations et corruptions, attributes to the atoms of Democritus difference in weight. In another passage (in the first book of De caelo) Aristotle leaves undecided the question of whether or not Democritus ascribed weight to the atoms, for he says:

"Thus none of the bodies will be absolutely light if they all have weight; but if all have lightness, none will be heavy."

In his Geschichte der alten Philosophie, Ritter, basing himself on the authority of Aristotle, rejects the assertions of Plutarch, Eusebius and Stobaeus. He does not consider the testimony of Simplicius and Philoponus. Let us see whether these passages are really so contradictory. In the passage cited, Aristotle does not speak of the qualities of the atom ex professo.[as someone who knows their profession] On the other hand, we read in the eighth book of the Metaphysics:

"Democritus assumes three differences between atoms. For the underlying body is one and the same with respect to matter, but it differs in rhysmos, meaning shape, in trope, meaning position, or in diathige, meaning arrangement."

This much can be immediately concluded from this passage [Democritus does not posit the <difference> contradiction between the quality of the atom and its concept]. Weight is not mentioned as a property of the Democritean atoms. The fragmented pieces of matter, kept apart by the void, must have special forms, and these are quite externally perceived from the observation of space. This emerges even more clearly from the following passage of Aristotle:

"Leucippus and his companion Democritus hold that the elements are the full and the void.... These are the basis of being as matter. just as those who assume only one fundamental substance generate all other things by its affections, assuming rarity and density as the principles of qualities-in the same way Leucippus and Democritus also teach that the differences between the atoms are the causes of the other things, for the underlying being differs only by rhysmos, diathige and trope .... That is, A differs from N in shape, AN from NA in arrangement, Z from N in position.”

It is evident from this quotation that Democritus considers the properties of the atom only in relation to the formation of the differences in the world of appearances, and not in relation to the atom itself. it follows further that Democritus does not single out weight as an essential property of the atoms. For him weight is taken for granted, since everything corporeal has weight. In the same way, according to him, even size is not a basic quality. It is an accidental determination which is already given to the atoms together with figure. Only the diversity of the figures is of interest to Democritus, since nothing more is contained in shape, position and arrangement. Size, shape and weight, by being combined as they are by Epicurus, are differences which the atom in itself possesses. Shape, position and arrangement are differences which the atom possesses in relation to something else. Whereas we find in Democritus mere hypothetical determinations to explain the world of appearances, in Epicurus the consequence of the principle itself will be presented to us. We shall therefore discuss in detail his determinations of the properties of the atom.

First of all, the atoms have size. And then again, size is also negated. That is to say, they do not have every size; but only some differences in size among them must be admitted. Indeed, only the negation of the large can be ascribed to them, the small, — also not the minimum, for this would be merely a spatial determination, but the infinitely small, which expresses the contradiction. Rosinius, in his notes on the fragments of Epicurus; therefore translates one passage incorrectly and completely ignores the other, when he says:

“In this way Epicurus tried to make plausible the tenuity of the atoms of incredible smallness, by saying, according to Laertius, X, 44, that they have no size.”

Now I shall not concern myself with the fact that, according to Eusebius, Epicurus was the first to ascribe infinite smallness to the atoms, whereas Democritus also assumed atoms of the largest size — Stobaeus says even as large as the world.

This, on the one hand, contradicts the testimony of Aristotle. On the other hand, Eusebius, or rather the Alexandrian bishop Dionysius, from whom he takes excerpts, contradicts himself; for in the same book we read that Democritus assumed as the principles of nature indivisible bodies perceptible through reason. This much at least is clear: Democritus was not aware of the contradiction; he did not pay attention to it, whereas it was the chief interest of Epicurus.

The second property of the Epicurean atoms is shape. But this determination also contradicts the concept of the atom, and its opposite must be assumed. Abstract individuality is abstract identity-to-itself and therefore without shape. The differences in the shape of the atoms cannot, therefore, be determined although they are not absolutely infinite. It is rather by a definite and finite number of shapes that the atoms are differentiated from one another. From this it is obvious that there are not as many different figures as there are atoms, while Democritus assumes an infinite number of figures. If every atom had a particular shape, then there would have to be atoms of infinite — size; for they would have an infinite difference, the difference from all the others, in themselves [an sich], like the monads of Leibniz. This leads to the inversion of Leibniz's assertion that no two things are identical, and there are infinitely many atoms of the same shape. This obviously negates again the determination of the shape, because a shape which no longer differs from another is not shape.

Finally, it is highly important that Epicurus makes weight the third quality, for in the centre of gravity matter possesses the ideal individuality which forms a principal determination of the atom. Hence, once the atoms are brought into the realm of presentation, they must also have weight.

But weight also directly contradicts the concept of the atom, because it is the individuality of matter as an ideal point which lies outside matter. But the atom is itself this individuality, as it were the centre of gravity presented as an individual existence. Weight therefore exists for Epicurus only as different weight, and the atoms are themselves substantial centres of gravity like the heavenly bodies. If this is applied to the concrete, then the obvious result is the fact which old Brucker finds so amazing and of which Lucretius assures us, namely, that the earth has no centre towards which everything strives, and that there are no antipodes. Furthermore since weight belongs only to that atom which is different from the other, hence externalised and endowed with properties, then it is clear that where the atoms are not thought of as many in their differentiation from one another, but only in relation to the void, the determination of weight ceases to exist. The atoms, as different as they may be in mass and shape, move therefore with equal speed in empty space. Epicurus thus applies weight only in regard to repulsion and the resulting compositions. This has led to the assertions that only the conglomerations of the atoms are endowed with weight, but not the atoms themselves.

Gassendi already praises Epicurus because, led purely by reason, he anticipated the experimentally demonstrated fact that all bodies, although very different in weight and mass, have the same velocity when they fall from above to below.

The consideration of the properties of the atoms leads us therefore to the same result as the consideration of the declination, namely, that Epicurus objectifies the contradiction in the concept of the atom between essence and existence. He thus gave us the science of atomistics. In Democritus, on the other hand, there is no realisation of the principle itself. He only maintains the material side and offers hypotheses for the benefit of empirical observation.

III. Atomoi archai and atoma stoicheia

Schaubach, in his treatise on the astronomical concepts of Epicurus, to which we have already referred, makes the following assertion:

"Epicurus, as well as Aristotle, has made a distinction between principles [Anfänge] (atomoi archai, Diogenes Laertius, X, 41) and elements (atoma stoicheia, Diogenes Laertius, X, 86). The former are the atoms recognisable only through reason and do not occupy space. These are called atoms not because they are the smallest bodies, but because they are indivisible in space. According to these conceptions one might think that Epicurus did not attribute any spatial properties to the atom. But in the letter to Herodotus (Diogenes Laertius, X, 44, 54) he gives the atoms not only weight but also size and shape.... I therefore consider these atoms as belonging to the second species, those that have developed out of the former but can still be regarded again as elementary particles of the bodies.

Let us look more closely at the passage which Schaubach cites from Diogenes Laertius. It reads: For instance such propositions that the All consists of bodies and non-corporeal nature, or that there are indivisible elements and other such statements.

Epicurus here teaches Pythocles, to whom he is writing, that the teaching about meteors differs from all other doctrines in physics, for example, that everything is either body or void, that there are indivisible basic elements. It is obvious that there is here no reason to assume that it is a question of a second species of atoms. It may perhaps seem that the disjunction between ‘The All consisting of bodies and non-corporeal bodies’ and ‘that there are indivisible elements establishes a difference between soma and aroma stoicheia, so that we might say that soma stands for atoms of the first kind in contrast to the atoma stoicheia. But this is quite out of the question. Soma means the corporeal in contrast to the void, which for this reason is called asomaton’. The term soma therefore includes the atoms as well as compound bodies. For example, in the letter to Herodotus we read: ‘The All is body ... if there were not that which we call void, space and non-corporeal nature.... Among bodies some are compound, others the things out of which the compounds are made, and these latter are indivisible and unchangeable.... Consequently these first principles are necessarily of indivisible corporeal nature’

Epicurus is thus speaking in the passage cited first of the corporeal in general, in contrast to the void, and then of the corporeal in particular, the atoms.

Schaubach’s reference to Aristotle proves just as little. True the difference between arche and stoicheion, which the Stoics particularly insist upon, can indeed also be found in Aristotle, but he nonetheless assumes the identity of the two expressions. He even teaches explicitly that stoicheion denotes primarily the atom. Leucippus and Democritus likewise call the Fullness and void.

In Lucretius, in Epicurus’ letters as quoted by Diogenes Laertius, in the Colotes of Plutarch, in Sextus Empiricus, the properties are ascribed to the atoms themselves, and for this reason they were determined as transcending themselves [sich selbst aufhebend].

However, if it is thought an antinomy that bodies perceptible only to reason should be endowed with spatial qualities, then it is an even greater antinomy that the spatial qualities themselves can be perceived only through the intellect.

Finally, Schaubach, in further support of his view, cites the following passage from Stobaeus: ‘Epicurus [states] that the primary (bodies) should be simple, those bodies compounded from them however should have weight’

To this passage from Stobaeus could be added the following, in which atoma stoicheia are mentioned as a particular kind of atom: (Plutarch.) De placit. philosoph., I, 246 and 249, and Stob., Physical Selections, I, p. 5. For the rest it is by no means claimed in these passages that the original atoms are without size, shape and weight. On the contrary, weight alone is mentioned as a distinctive characteristic of the atomoi archai and aroma stoicheia . But we observed already in the preceding chapter that weight is applied only in regard to repulsion and the conglomerations arising therefrom.

With the invention of the atoma stoicheia we also gain nothing. It is just as difficult to pass from the atomoi archai to the aroma stoicheia as it is to ascribe properties directly to them. Nevertheless I do not deny such a differentiation entirely. I only deny that there are two different and fixed kinds of atoms. They are rather different determinations of one and the same kind.

Before discussing this difference I would like to call attention to a procedure typical of Epicurus. He likes to assume the different determinations of a concept as different independent existences. just as his principle is the atom, so is the manner of his cognition itself atomistic. Every moment of the development is at once.. transformed in his hands into a fixed reality which, so to say, is separated from its relations to other things by empty space; every determination assumes the form of isolated individuality.

This procedure may be made clear by the following example.

The infinite, to apeiron, or the infinitio, as Cicero translates it, is occasionally used by Epicurus as a particular nature; and precisely in the same passages in which we find the stoicheia described as a fixed fundamental substance, we also find the apeiron turned into something independent.

However, according to Epicurus’ own definitions, the infinite is neither a particular substance nor something outside of the atoms and the void, but rather an accidental determination of the void. We find in fact three meanings of apeiron.

First, apeiron expresses for Epicurus a quality common to the atoms and the void. It means in this sense the infinitude of the All, which is infinite by virtue of the infinite multiplicity of the atoms, by virtue of the infinite size of the void.

Secondly, apeiria is the multiplicity of the atoms, so that not the atom, but the infinitely many atoms are placed in opposition to the void.

Finally, if we may draw from Democritus a conclusion about Epicurus, apeiron also means exactly the opposite, the unlimited void, which is placed in opposition to the atom determined in itself and limited by itself.

In all these meanings -and they are the only ones, even the only possible ones for atomistics-the infinite is a mere determination of the atoms and of the void. Nevertheless, it is singled out as a particular existence, even set up as a specific nature alongside the principles whose determination it expresses.

Therefore, even if Epicurus himself thus fixed the determination by which the atom becomes stoicheion as an independent original kind of atom-which, by the way, is not the case judging by the historical superiority of one source over the other, even if Metrodorus the disciple of Epicurus-as it seems more probable to us — was the first to change the differentiated determination into a differentiated existence; we must ascribe to the subjective mode of atomistic consciousness the changing of separate moments into something independently existing. The granting of the form of existence to different determinations has not resulted in understanding of their difference.

For Democritus the atom means only stoicheion a material substrate. The distinction between the atom as arche and stoicheion as principle and foundation belongs to Epicurus. Its importance will be clear from what follows.

The contradiction between existence and essence, between matter and form, which is inherent in the concept of the atom, emerges in the individual atom itself once it is endowed with qualities. Through the quality the atom is alienated from its concept, but at the same time is perfected in its construction. It is from repulsion and the ensuing conglomerations of the qualified .atoms that the world of appearance now emerges.

In this transition from the world of essence to the world of appearance, the contradiction in the concept of the atom clearly reaches its harshest realisation. For the atom is conceptually the absolute, essential form of nature. This absolute form has now been degraded to absolute matter, to the formless substrate of the world of appearance.

The atoms are, it is true, the substance of nature, out of which everything emerges, into which everything dissolves; but the continuous annihilation of the world of appearance comes to no result. New appearances are formed; but the atom itself always remains at the bottom as the foundations Thus insofar as the atom is considered as pure concept, its existence is empty space, annihilated nature. Insofar as it proceeds to reality, it sinks down to the material basis which, as the bearer of a world of manifold relations, never exists but in forms which are indifferent and external to it. This is a necessary consequence, since the atom, presupposed as abstractly individual and complete, cannot actualise itself as the idealising and pervading power of this manifold.

Abstract individuality is freedom from being, not freedom in being. It cannot shine in the light of being. This is an element in which this individuality loses its character and becomes material. For this reason the atom does not enter into the daylight of appearances or it sinks down to the material basis when it does enter it. The atom as such only exists in the void. The death of nature has thus become its immortal substance; and Lucretius correctly exclaims:

When death immortal claims his mortal life (De verum nature III, 869).

But the fact that Epicurus grasps the contradiction at this its highest peak and objectives it, and therefore distinguishes the atom where it becomes the basis of appearance as stoicheion from the atom as it exists in the void as arche — this constitutes his philosophical difference from Democritus, who only objectives the one moment. This is the same distinction which in the world of essence, in the realm of the atoms and of the void, separates Epicurus from Democritus. However, since only the atom with qualities is the complete one, since the world of appearance can only emerge from the atom which is complete and alienated from its concept, Epicurus expresses this by stating that only the qualified atom becomes stoicheion or only the atomon stoicheion is endowed with qualities.

IV. Time

Since in the atom matter, as pure relationship to itself, is exempted from all relativity and changeability, it follows immediately that time has to be excluded from the concept of the atom, the world of essence. For matter is eternal and independent only insofar as in it abstraction is made of the time moment. On this Democritus and Epicurus agree. But they differ in regard to the manner in which time, removed from the world of atoms, is now determined, whither it is transferred.

For Democritus time has neither significance nor necessity for the system. He explains time in order to negate it [aufzuheben]. It is determined as eternal, in order that — as Aristotle and Simplicius state — the emergence and passing away, hence the temporal, is removed from the atoms. Time itself offers proof that not everything need have an origin, a moment of beginning.

There is something more profound to be recognised in this notion. The imagining intellect that does not grasp the independence of substance inquires into its becoming in time. It fails to grasp that by making substance temporal it also makes time substantial and thus negates its concept, because time made absolute is no longer temporal.

But this solution is unsatisfactory from another point of view. Time excluded from the world of essence is transferred into the self-consciousness of the philosophising subject but does not make any contact with the world itself.

Quite otherwise with Epicurus. Time, excluded from the world of essence, becomes for him the absolute form of appearance. That is to say, time is determined as accidens of the accidens. The accidens is the change of substance in general. The accidens of the accidens is the change as reflecting in itself, the change as change. This pure form of the world of appearance is time.

Composition is the merely passive form of concrete nature, time its active form. If I consider composition in terms of its being, then the atom exists beyond it, in the void, in the imagination. If I consider the atom in terms of its concept, then composition either does not exist at all or exists only in the subjective imagination. For composition is a relationship in which the atoms, independent, self-enclosed, as it were uninterested in one another, have likewise no relationship to one another. Time, in contrast, the change of the finite to the extent that change is posited as change, is just as much the real form which separates appearance from essence, and posits it as appearance, while leading it back into essence. Composition expresses merely the materiality of the atoms as well as of nature emerging from them. Time, in contrast, is in the world of appearance what the concept of the atom is in the world of essence, namely, the abstraction, destruction and reduction of all determined being into being-for-itself.

The following consequences can be drawn from these observations. First, Epicurus makes the contradiction between matter and form the characteristic of the nature of appearance, which thus becomes the counter-image of the nature of essence, the atom. This is done by time being opposed to space, the active form of appearance to the passive form. Second, Epicurus was the first to grasp appearance as appearance, that is, as alienation of the essence, activating itself in its reality as such an alienation. On the other hand, for Democritus, who considers composition as the only form of the nature of appearance, appearance does not by itself show that it is appearance, something different from essence. Thus when appearance is considered in terms of its existence, essence becomes totally blended [konfundiert] with it; when considered in terms of its concept, essence is totally separated from existence, so that it descends to the level of subjective semblance. The composition behaves indifferently and materially towards its essential foundations. Time, on the other hand, is the fire of essence, eternally consuming appearance, and stamping it with dependence and non-essence. Finally, since according to Epicurus time is change as change, the reflection of appearance in itself, the nature of appearance is justly posited as objective, sensation is justly made the real criterion of concrete nature, although the atom, its foundation, is only perceived through reason.

Indeed, time being the abstract form of sensation, according to the atomism of Epicurean consciousness the necessity arises for it to be fixed as a nature having a separate existence within nature. The changeability of the sensuous world, its change as change, this reflection of appearance in itself which constitutes the concept of time, has its separate existence in conscious sensuousness. Human sensuousness is therefore embodied time, the existing reflection of the sensuous world in itself.

Just as this follows immediately from the definition of the concept of time in Epicurus, so it can also be quite definitely demonstrated in detail. In the letter from Epicurus to Herodotus time is so defined that it emerges when the accidentals of bodies, perceived by the senses, are thought of as accidentals. Sensuous perception reflected in itself is thus here the source of time and time itself. Hence time cannot be defined by analogy nor can anything else be said about it, but it is necessary to keep firmly to the Enargie itself; for sensuous perception reflected in itself is time itself, and there is no going beyond it.

On the other hand, in Lucretius, Sextus Empiricus and Stobaeus, the accidens of the accidens, change reflected in itself, is defined as time. The reflection of the accidentals in sensuous perception and their reflection in themselves are hence posited as one and the same.

Because of this interconnection between time and sensuousness, the eidola [images], equally found in Democritus, also acquire a more consistent status.

The eidola are the forms of natural bodies which, as surfaces, as it were detach themselves like skins and transfer these bodies into appearance. These forms of the things stream constantly forth from them and penetrate into the senses and in precisely this-way allow the objects to appear. Thus in hearing nature hears itself, in smelling it smells itself, in seeing it sees itself. Human sensuousness is therefore the medium in which natural processes are reflected as in a focus and ignited into the light of appearance.

In Democritus this is an inconsistency, since appearance is only subjective; in Epicurus it is a necessary consequence, since sensuousness is the reflection of the world of appearance in itself, its embodied time.

Finally, the interconnection between sensuousness and time is revealed in such a way that the temporal character of things and their appearance to the senses are posited as intrinsically One. For it is precisely because bodies appear to the senses that they pass away. Indeed, the eidola, by constantly separating themselves from the bodies and flowing into the senses, by having their sensuous existence outside themselves as another nature, by not returning into themselves, that is, out of the diremption, dissolve and pass away.

Therefore: just as the atom is nothing hut the natural form of abstract, individual self-consciousness, so sensuous nature is only the objectified, empirical, individual self-consciousness, and this is the sensuous. Hence the senses are the only criteria in concrete nature, just as abstract reason is the only criterion in the world of the atoms.

V. The Meteors

Ingenious as Democritus' astronomical opinions may be for his time, they present no philosophical interest. They neither go beyond the domain of empirical reflection, nor have they any more definite intrinsic connection with the atomic doctrine.

By contrast, Epicurus' theory of the celestial bodies and the processes connected with them, or his theory of meteors (in this one term he includes it all), stands in opposition not only to Democritus, but to the opinion of Greek philosophy as a whole. Worship of the celestial bodies is a cult practised by all Greek philosophers. The system of the celestial bodies is the first naive and nature-determined existence of true reason [Vernunft]. The same position is taken by Greek self-consciousness in the domain of the mind [Geist]. It is the solar system of the mind. The Greek philosophers therefore worshipped their own mind in the celestial bodies.

Anaxagoras himself, who first gave a physical explanation of heaven and in this way brought it down to earth in a sense different from that of Socrates, answered, when asked for what purpose he was born: For the observation of the sun, the moon and the heaven. Xenophanes, however, looked up at heaven and said: The One is God. The religious attitude of the Pythagoreans, Plato and Aristotle to the heavenly-bodies is well known.

Indeed, Epicurus opposes the outlook of the whole Greek people.

Aristotle says it often seems that the concept provides evidence for the phenomena and the phenomena for the concept. Thus all men have an idea of the gods and assign the highest region to the divine, barbarians as well as Hellenes, and in general all who believe in the existence of the gods, evidently connecting the immortal with the immortal, for otherwise it is impossible. Thus if the divine exists-as it actually does-then what we say about the substance of the celestial bodies is also correct. But this corresponds also to sensuous perception, insofar as human conviction is concerned. For throughout the time that has passed, according to the memories handed down from people to people, nothing seems to have changed, either in heaven as a whole, or in any part of it. Even the name seems to have been handed down from the ancients to the present time, and they assumed that which we also say. For not once, not twice, but an infinite number of times have the same views come down to us. For since the primary body is something different, apart from the earth and the fire and the air and the water, they called the highest region "ether", from thein aei [to run always]. giving it the by-name: eternal time. But the ancients assigned heaven and the highest region to the gods, because it alone is immortal. But the present teaching testifies that it is indestructible, ungenerated and not subject to any mortal ills. In this way our concepts correspond at the same time to intimations about God. But that there is one heaven is evident. It is a tradition handed down from our ancestors and the ancients and surviving in the form of the myths of later generations, that the heavenly bodies are gods and that the divine encompasses all nature. The rest was added in mythical form for the belief of the masses, as useful for the laws and for life. Thus the myths make the gods resemble man and some of the other living creatures, and invent similar things connected with and related to this. If we discard the additions and hold fast only to the first, namely, the belief that the primary substances are gods, then we must consider this as having been divinely revealed, and we must hold that after all sorts of art and philosophy had, in one way or another, been invented and lost again, these opinions came down to us like relics.

Epicurus, on the contrary, says:

To all this we must add that the greatest confusion of the human soul arises from the fact that men hold that the heavenly bodies are blessed and indestructible and have conflicting desires and actions, and conceive suspicion according to the myths. As to the meteors, we must believe that motion and position and eclipse and rising and setting and related phenomena do not originate in them owing to One ruling and ordering or having ordered, One who at the same time is supposed to possess all bliss and indestructibility. For actions do not accord with bliss, but they occur due to causes most closely related to weakness, fear and need. Nor is it to be supposed that some fire-like bodies endowed with bliss arbitrarily submit to these motions. If one does not agree with this, then this contradiction itself produces the greatest confusion in men's souls.

Aristotle reproached the ancients for their belief that heaven required the support of Atlas who: 'In the places of the West stands, supporting with his shoulders the pillar of heaven and earth (Aeschylus, Prometh., 348 ff.). Epicurus, on the other hand, blames those who believe that man needs heaven. He finds the Atlas by whom heaven is supported in human stupidity and superstition. Stupidity and superstition also are Titans.

The letter of Epicurus to Pythocles deals entirely with the theory of the heavenly bodies, with the exception of the last section, which closes the letter with ethical precepts. And appropriately,' ethical precepts are appended to the teaching on the meteors. For Epicurus this theory is a matter of conscience. Our study will therefore be based mainly on this letter to Pythocles. We shall supplement it from the letter to Herodotus, to which Epicurus himself refers in writing to Pythocles.

First, it must not be supposed that any other goal but ataraxy and firm assurance can be attained from knowledge of the meteors, either taken as a whole or in part, just as from the other natural sciences. Our life does not need speculation and empty hypotheses, but that we should live without confusion. just as it is the business of the study of nature in general to investigate the foundations of what is most important: so happiness lies also in knowledge of the meteors. In and for itself the theory of setting and rising, of position and eclipse, contains no particular grounds for happiness; only terror possesses those who see these things without understanding their nature and their principal causes. So far, only the precedence which the theory of the meteors is supposed to have over other sciences has been denied; and this theory has been placed on the same level as others.

But the theory of the meteors is also specifically different in comparison both with the method of ethics and with other physical problems, for example, the existence of indivisible elements and the like, where only one explanation corresponds to the phenomena. For this is not the case with the meteors. Their origin has no simple cause, and they have more than one category of essence corresponding to the phenomena. For the study of nature cannot be pursued in accordance with empty axioms and laws. It is constantly repeated that the meteors are not to be explained haplos (simply, absolutely), but poilachos (in many ways).

This also holds for the rising and setting of the sun and the moon, the waxing and waning of the moon, the semblance of a face on the moon, the changes of duration of day and night, and other celestial phenomena.

How then is it to be explained?

Every explanation is sufficient. Only the myth must be removed. it will be removed when we observe the phenomena and draw conclusions from them concerning the invisible. We must hold fast to the appearance, the sensation. Hence analogy must be applied. In this way we can explain fear away and free ourselves from it, by showing the causes of meteors and other things that are always happening and causing the utmost alarm to other people.

The great number of explanations, the multitude of possibilities, should not only tranquillise our minds and remove causes for fear, but also at the same time negate in the heavenly bodies their very unity, the absolute law that is always equal to itself. These heavenly bodies may behave sometimes in one way, sometimes in another; this possibility conforming to no law is the characteristic of their reality; everything in them is declared to be impermanent and unstable. The multitude of the explanations should at the same time remove [aufheben] the unity of the object.

Thus while Aristotle, in agreement with other Greek philosophers, considers the heavenly bodies to be eternal and immortal, because they always behave in the same way; while he even ascribes to them an element of their own, higher and not subjected to the force of gravity; Epicurus in contrast claims the direct opposite. He reasons that the theory of the meteors is specifically distinguished from all other physical doctrine in this respect, that in the meteors everything occurs in a multiple and unregulated way, that everything in them is to be explained by a manifold of indefinitely many causes. Yes, in wrath and passionate violence he rejects the opposite opinion, and declares that those who adhere to only one method of explanation to the exclusion of all others, those who accept something Unique, hence Eternal and Divine in the meteors, fall victim to idle explanation-making and to the slavish artifices of the astrologers; they overstep the bounds of the study of nature and throw themselves into the arms of myth; they try to achieve the impossible, and exert themselves over absurdities; they do not even realise where ataraxy itself becomes endangered. Their chatter is to be despised. We must avoid the prejudice that investigation into these subjects cannot be sufficiently thorough and subtle if it aims only at our own ataraxy and bliss. On the contrary, it is an absolute law that nothing that can disturb ataraxy, that can cause danger, can belong to an indestructible and eternal nature. Consciousness must understand that this is an absolute law.

Hence Epicurus concludes: Since eternity of the heavenly bodies would disturb the ataraxy of self-consciousness, it is a necessary, a stringent consequence that they are not eternal.

But how can we understand this peculiar view of Epicurus?

All authors who have written on Epicurean philosophy have presented this teaching as incompatible with all the rest of physics, with the atomic doctrine. The fight against the Stoics, against superstition, against astrology is taken as sufficient grounds.

And we have seen that Epicurus himself distinguishes the method applied in the theory of the meteors from the method of the rest of physics. But in which definition of his principle can the necessity of this distinction be found? How does the idea occur to him?

And he fights not only against astrology, but also against astronomy itself, against eternal law and rationality in the heavenly system. Finally, opposition to the Stoics explains nothing. Their superstition and their whole point of view had already been refuted when the heavenly bodies were declared to be accidental complexes of atoms and their processes accidental motions of the atoms. Thereby their eternal nature was destroyed, a consequence which Democritus was content to draw from these premises. In fact, their very being was disposed of [aufgehoben]. The atomist therefore was in no need of a new method.

But this is not yet the full difficulty. An even more perplexing antinomy appears.

The atom is matter in the form of independence, of individuality, as it were the representative of weight. But the heavenly bodies are the supreme realisation of weight. In them all antinomics between form and matter, between concept and existence, which constituted the development of the atom, are resolved; in them all required determinations are realised. The heavenly bodies are eternal and unchangeable; they have their centre of gravity in, not outside, themselves. Their only action is motion, and, separated by empty space, they swerve from the straight line, and form a system of repulsion and attraction while at the same time preserving their own independence and also, finally, generating time out of themselves as the form of their appearance. The heavenly bodies are therefore the atoms become real. In them matter has received in itself individuality. Here Epicurus must therefore have glimpsed the highest existence of his principle, the peak and culminating point of his system. He asserted that he assumed the atom so that nature would be provided with immortal foundations. He alleged that he was concerned with the substantial individuality of matter. But when he comes upon the reality of his nature (and he knows no other 'nature but the mechanical), when he comes upon independent, indestructible matter in the heavenly bodies whose eternity and unchangeability were proved by the belief of the people, the judgment of philosophy, the evidence of the senses: then his one and only desire is to pull it down into earthly transience. He turns vehemently against those who worship an independent nature containing in itself the quality of individuality. This is his most glaring contradiction.

Hence Epicurus feels that here his previous categories break down, that the method of his theory becomes different. And the profoundest knowledge achieved by his system, its most thorough consistency, is that he is aware of this and expresses it consciously.

Indeed, we have seen how the whole Epicurean philosophy of nature is pervaded with the contradiction between essence and existence, between form and matter. But this contradiction is resolved in the heavenly bodies, the conflicting moments are reconciled. In the celestial system matter has received form into itself, has taken up the individuality into itself and has thus achieved its independence. But at this point it ceases to be affirmation of abstract self-consciousness. In the world of the atoms, as in the world of appearance, form struggled against matter; the one determination transcended the other and precisely in this contradiction abstract-individual self-consciousness felt its nature objectified. The abstract form, which, in the shape of matter, fought against abstract matter, was this self-consciousness itself. But now, when matter has reconciled itself with the form and has been rendered self-sufficient, individual self-consciousness emerges from its pupation, proclaims itself the true principle and opposes nature, which has become independent.

All this can also be expressed from another point of view in the following way: Matter, having received into itself individuality, form, as is the case with the heavenly bodies, has ceased to be abstract individuality; it has become concrete individuality, universality. In the meteors, therefore, abstract-individual self-consciousness is met by its contradiction, shining in its materialised form, the universal which has become existence and nature. Hence it recognises in the meteors its deadly enemy, and it ascribes to them, as Epicurus does, all the anxiety and confusion of men. Indeed, the anxiety and dissolution of the abstract-individual is precisely the universal. Here therefore Epicurus' true principle, abstract-individual selfconsciousness, can no longer be concealed. It steps out from its hiding place and, freed from material mummery, it seeks to destroy the reality of nature which has become independent by an explanation according to abstract possibility: what is possible may also be otherwise, the opposite of what is possible is also possible. Hence the polemic against those who explain the heavenly bodies haplos [simply, absolutely] that is, in one particular way, for the One is the Necessary and that which is Independent-in-itself.

Thus as long as nature as atom and appearance expresses individual self-consciousness and its contradiction, the subjectivity of self-consciousness appears only in the form of matter itself. Where, on the other hand, it becomes independent, it reflects itself in itself, confronts matter in its own shape as independent form.

It could have been said from the beginning that where Epicurus' principle becomes reality it will cease to have reality for him. For if individual self-consciousness were posited in reality under the determination of nature, or nature under the determination of individual consciousness, then 'its determination, that is, its existence, would have ceased, because only the universal in free distinction from itself can know at the same time its own affirmation.

In the theory of meteors therefore appears the soul of the Epicurean philosophy of nature. Nothing is eternal which destroys the ataraxy of individual self-consciousness. The heavenly bodies disturb its ataraxy, its equanimity with itself, because they are the existing universality, because in them nature has become independent.

Thus the principle of Epicurean philosophy is not the gastrology of Archestratus as Chrysippus believes but the absoluteness and freedom of self-consciousness - even if self-consciousness is only conceived in the form of individuality.

If abstract-individual self-consciousness is posited as an absolute principle, then, indeed, all true and real science is done away with [aufgehoben] inasmuch as individuality does not rule within the nature of things themselves. But then, too, everything collapses that is transcendentally related to human consciousness and therefore belongs to the imagining mind. On the other hand, if that self-consciousness which knows itself only in the form of abstract universality is raised to an absolute principle, then the door is opened wide to superstitious and unfree mysticism. Stoic philosophy provides the historic proof of this. Abstract-universal self-consciousness has, indeed, the intrinsic urge to affirm itself in the things themselves in which it can only affirm itself by negating them.

Epicurus is therefore the greatest representative of Greek Enlightenment, and he deserves the praise of Lucretius:

When human life lay grovelling in all men's sight, crushed to the earth under the dead weight of religion whose grim features loured menacingly upon mortals from the four quarters of the sky, a man of Greece was first to raise mortal eyes in defiance, first to stand erect and brave the challenge. Fables of the gods did not crush him, nor the lightning flash and growling menace of the sky.... Therefore religion in its turn lies crushed beneath his feet, and we by his triumph are lifted level with the skies.

The difference between Democritean and Epicurean philosophy of nature which we established at the end of the general section has been elaborated and confirmed in all domains of nature. In Epicurus, therefore, atomistics with all its contradictions has been carried through and completed as the natural science of selfconsciousness. This self-consciousness under the form of abstract individuality is an absolute principle. Epicurus has thus carried atomistics to its final conclusion, which is its dissolution and conscious opposition to the universal. For Democritus, on the other hand, the atom is only the general objective expression of the empirical investigation of nature as a whole. Hence the atom remains for him a pure and abstract category, a hypothesis, the result of experience, not its active [energisches] principle. This hypothesis remains therefore without realisation, just as it plays no further part in determining the real investigation of nature.

Appendix : Critique of Plutarch's Polemic against the Theology of Epicurus

Note from Marx-Engels Collected Works Volume 1, 1975 :

Two fragments from the Appendix have been preserved: the beginning of the first paragraph of Section Two and the author’s notes to Section One. The general title of the Appendix, which is missing in the first fragment, is reproduced here according to the contents. The text of this fragment corresponds almost word for word to the text of the third notebook on Epicurean philosophy and was written in an unknown hand on paper of the same kind as the text of the notebook. On this ground some scholars assume that this fragment does not belong to the Doctoral dissertation, but is part of a non-extant work on ancient philosophy. The content of the fragment, however, and the quotations from Plutarch in it are closely connected with the author’s notes to the Appendix. As the available data do not yet permit a final decision as to where this fragment belongs, in this edition it is included in the Doctoral dissertation.

I. The Relationship of Man to God

1. Fear and the Being Beyond

⁽¹⁾ Plutarch, That Epicurus Actually Makes a Pleasant Life Impossible (published by Xylander), 1 I, 1100. ...one point, that of pleasure they derive from these views, has, I should say, been dealt with (i.e., from Epicurus): ... their theory ... does remove a certain superstitious fear; but it allows no joy and delight to conic to us from the gods.

⁽²⁾ [Holbach,] System of Nature (London, 1770), I, P. 9. The idea of such powerful agencies has always been associated with that of terror; their name always reminded man of his own calamities or those of his fathers; we tremble today because our ancestors have trembled for thousands of years. The idea of Divinity always awakens in us distressing ideas ... our present fears and lugubrious thoughts ... rise every time before our mind when we hear his name. Comp. p. 79. When man bases morality on the not too moral character of a God who changes his behaviour, then he can never know what he owes to God nor what he owes to himself or to others. Nothing therefore could be more dangerous than to persuade man that a being superior to nature exists, a being before whom reason must be silent and to whom man must sacrifice all to receive happiness.

⁽³⁾ Plutarch, 1.c., 1101. For since they fear him [God] as a ruler mild to the good

and hating the wicked, by this one fear, which keeps them from doing wrong, they are freed from the many that attend on crime, and since they keep their viciousness within themselves, where it gradually as it were dies down, they are less tormented than those who make free with it and venture on overt acts, only to be filled at once with terror and regret.

2. Cult and the Individual

⁽⁴⁾ Plutarch, 1.c., 1101. No, wherever it [i.e., the soul] believes and conceives most firmly that the god is present, there more than anywhere else it puts away all feelings of pain, of fear and of worry, and gives itself up so far to pleasure that it indulges in a playful and merry inebriation, in amatory matters....

⁽⁵⁾ Ibid., 1.c.

⁽⁶⁾ Ibid., 1.c., 1102. For it is not the abundance of wine or the roast meats that cheer the heart at festivals, but good hope and the belief in the benign presence of the god and his gracious acceptance of what is done.

3. Providence and the Degraded God

⁽⁷⁾ Plutarch, 1.c., 1102. ... how great their pleasures are, since their beliefs about God are purified from error: that he is our guide to all blessings, the father of everything honourable, and that he may no more do than suffer anything base. For he is good, and in none that is good arises envy about aught or fear or anger or hatred; for it is as much the function of heat to chill instead of warm as it is of good to harm. By its nature anger is farthest removed from favour, wrath from goodwill and from love of man and kindliness, hostility and the spreading of terror; for the one set belong to virtue and power, the other to weakness and vice. Consequently it is not true that Heaven is prey to feelings of anger and favour; rather, because it is God's nature to bestow favour and lend aid, it is not his nature to be angry and do harm....

⁽⁸⁾ Ibid. Do you think that deniers of providence require any other punishment, and are not adequately punished when they extirpate from themselves so great a pleasure and delight?

⁽⁹⁾ "But he is not a weak intellect who does not know an objective God, but he who wants to know one." Schelling, "Philosophical Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism" [in German] in Philosophische Schriften, Vol. I, Landshut, 1809, p. 127, Letter II.

Herr Schelling should at any rate be advised to give again some thought to his first writings. For example, we read in his essay "on the Ego as principle of philosophy":

For example, let us assume God, insofar as he is determined as object, "as the real foundation of our cognition, then he belongs himself, insofar as he is object, in the sphere of our cognition and therefore cannot be for us the ultimate point on which this entire sphere is suspended"(l.c., p. 5).

Finally, we remind Herr Schelling of the last words of the letter from which we have just quoted:

"The time has come to proclaim to the better part of humanity the freedom of minds, and not to tolerate any longer that they deplore the loss of their fetters". P. 129, 1.c.

When the time already had come in 1795, how about the year 1841?

We might bring up for this occasion a theme that has well-nigh become notorious, namely, the proofs of the existence of God. Hegel has turned all these theological demonstrations upside-down, that is, he has rejected them in order to justify them. What kind of clients are those whom the defending lawyer can only save from conviction by killing them himself? For instance, Hegel interpreted the conclusion from the world to God as meaning: "Since the accidental does not exist, God or Absolute exists." However, the theological demonstration is the opposite: "Since the accidental has true being, God exists." God is the guarantee for the world of the accidental. It is obvious that with this the opposite also has been stated.

The proofs of the existence of God are either mere hollow tautologies. Take for instance the ontological proof. This only means:

"that which I conceive for myself in a real way (realiter), is a real concept for me",

something that works on me. In this sense all gods, the pagan as well as the Christian ones, have possessed a real existence. Did not the ancient Moloch reign? Was not the Delphic Apollo a real power in the life of the Greeks? Kant's critique means nothing in this respect. If somebody imagines that he has a hundred talers, if this concept is not for him an arbitrary, subjective one, if he believes in it, then these hundred imagined talers have for him the same value as a hundred real ones. For instance, he will incur debts on the strength of his imagination, his imagination will work, in the same way as all humanity has incurred debts on its gods. The contrary is true. Kant's example might have enforced the ontological proof. Real talers have the same existence that the imagined gods have. Has a real taler any existence except in the imagination, if only in the general or rather common imagination of man? Bring paper money into a country where this use of paper is unknown, and everyone will laugh at your subjective imagination. Come with your gods into a country where other gods are worshipped, and you will be shown to suffer from fantasies and abstractions. And justly so. He who would have brought a Wendic god to the ancient Greeks would have found the proof of this god's non-existence. Indeed, for the Greeks he did not exist. That which a particular country is for particular alien gods, the country of reason is for God in general, a region in which he ceases to exist.

As to the second alternative, that such proofs are proofs of the existence of essential human self-consciousness, logical explanations of it, take for example the ontological proof. Which being is immediate when made the subject of thought? Self-consciousness.

Taken in this sense all proofs of the existence of God are proofs of his non-existence. They are refutations of all concepts of a God. The true proofs should have the opposite character: "Since nature has been badly constructed, God exists", "Because the world is without reason, therefore God exists", "Because there is no thought, there is God". But what does that say, except that, for whom the world appears without reason, hence who is without reason himself, for him God exists? Or lack of reason is the existence of God.

"... when you presuppose the idea of an objective God, how can you talk of laws that reason produces out of itself, since autonomy can only belong to an absolutely free being." Schelling, 1.c., p. 198 [Letter X]. "It is a crime against humanity to hide principles that can be generally communicated." Ibid., p. 199.

II. Individual Immortality

1. On Religious Feudalism. The Hell of the Populace

The study is again divided into the relation of the Evil-doers and rascals, then of the of the masses and uncivilised and finally of the Decent and intelligent ones (1. c. 1104) to the doctrine of the continued existence of the soul. Already this division into fixed qualitative distinctions shows how little Plutarch understands Epicurus, who, as a philosopher, investigates the essential relationship of the human soul in general.

Then he brings fear up again as the means to reform the evil-doers and thus justifies the terrors of the underworld for the sensuous consciousness. We have already considered this objection of his. Since in fear, and specifically in an inner fear that cannot be extinguished, man is determined as an animal, we do not care at all how an animal is kept in restraint.

Now we proceed to the view of the polloi (Multitude), although it turns out at the end that few people are not included in this term; although, to tell the truth, all people I had almost said all men, vow allegiance to this banner.

In the masses, who have no fear of what comes after death, the myth-inspired hope of eternal life and the desire of being, the oldest and most powerful of all passions, produces joy and a feeling of happiness and overcomes that childish terror. Hence, whoever has lost children, a wife, and friends would rather have them continue to he somewhere and continue to exist, even if in hardship, than be utterly taken away and destroyed and reduced to nothing. On the other hand, they willingly hear such expressions as "the dying person goes somewhere else and changes his dwelling", and whatever else intimates that death is a change of the soul's dwelling, and not destruction ... and such expressions as "he is lost" and "he has perished" and "he is no more" disturb them.... They hold in store for them utter death who say: "We men are born only once; one cannot be born a second time...... For the present is of little account to them, or rather of none at all, in comparison with eternity, and they let it pass without enjoying it and neglect virtue and action, spiritless and despising themselves as creatures of a day, impermanent, and beings worth nothing to speak of. For the doctrine that "being-without-sensation and being-dissolved and what has no sensation is nothing to us" does not remove the terror of death, but rather confirms it. For this is the very thing nature dreads ... the dissolution of the soul into what has neither thought nor sensation; Epicurus, by making this a scattering into emptiness and atoms, does still more destroy our hope of immortality, a hope for which (I would almost say) all men and all women are ready to be torn asunder by Cerberus and to carry constantly [water] into the barrel [of the Danaides], so that they may [only] stay in being and not be extinguished. p. [1104 - ]1105, 1.c

There is really no qualitative difference between this and the previous category. What in the first case appeared in the shape of animal fear, appears here in the shape of human fear, the form of sentiment. The content remains the same.

We are told that the desire of being is the oldest love; to be sure, the most abstract and hence oldest love is the love of self, the love of one's particular being. But that was expressing this fact too bluntly, and so it is retracted and an ennobling halo is cast around it by the semblance of sentiment.

Thus he who loses wife and children would rather that they were somewhere, even under bad conditions, than that they had totally ceased to exist. If the issue were only love, then the wife and the child of the individual would be preserved in the greatest purity in his heart, a state of being far superior to that of empirical existence. But the facts are otherwise. Wife and child as such are only in empirical existence insofar as the individual to whom they belong exists empirically himself. That the individual therefore prefers to know that they are somewhere in sensuous space, even under bad conditions, rather than nowhere, only means that he wants to preserve the consciousness of his own empirical existence. The mantle of love was only a shadow. The naked empirical Ego, the love of self, the oldest love, is the core and has not rejuvenated itself into a more concrete, more ideal shape.

Plutarch believes that the word "change" has a more pleasing sound than "total cessation". But the change is not supposed to be a qualitative one, the individual Ego in its individual being is supposed to persist, the word therefore is only the sensuous image of what the word stands for and has to stand for its opposite. The thing is not supposed to be changed, only placed in a dark spot. The qualitative leap-and every qualitative distinction is a leap, without such leaping no ideality-is then obscured by the interposition of a fantastic distance.

Plutarch also thinks that this consciousness ....

Here the manuscript breaks off.- Ed.

2. The Longing of the Multitude

This part has been lost.

3. The Pride of the Elected

This part has been lost.

Other notes

IV. General Difference in Principle between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature

Plutarch, in his biography of Marius, provides us with an appalling historical example of the way in which this. type of morality destroys all theoretical and practical unselfishness. After describing the terrible downfall of the Cimbri, he relates that the number of corpses was so great that the Massilians were able to manure their orchards with them. Then it rained and that year was the best for wine and fruit. Now, what kind of reflections occur to our noble historian in connection with the tragical ruin of those people? Plutarch considers it a moral act of God, that he allowed a whole, great, noble people to perish and rot away in order to provide the philistines of Massilia with a bumper fruit harvest.

Thus even the transformation of a people into a heap of manure offers a desirable occasion for a happy revelling in morality!

2) Also in relation to Hegel it is mere ignorance on the part of his pupils, when they explain one or the other determination of his system by his desire for accommodation and the like, hence, in one word, explain it in terms of morality. They forget that only a short time ago they were enthusiastic about all his idiosyncrasies [Einseitigkeiten], as can be clearly demonstrated from their writings.

If they were really so affected by the ready-made science they acquired that they gave themselves up to it in naive uncritical trust, then how unscrupulous is their attempt to reproach the Master for a hidden intention behind his insight! The Master, to whom the science was not something received, but something in the process of becoming, to whose uttermost periphery his own intellectual heart’s blood was pulsating! On the contrary, they rendered themselves suspect of not having been serious before. And now they oppose their own former condition, and ascribe it to Hegel, forgetting however that his relation to his system was immediate, substantial, while theirs is only a reflected one.

It is quite thinkable for a philosopher to fall into one or another apparent inconsistency through some sort of accommodation; he himself may be conscious of it. But what he is not conscious of, is the possibility that this apparent accommodation has its deepest roots in an inadequacy or in an inadequate formulation of his principle itself. Suppose therefore that a philosopher has really accommodated himself, then his pupils must explain from his inner essential consciousness that which for him himself had the form of an exoteric consciousness. In this way, that which appears as progress of conscience is at the same time progress of knowledge. No suspicion is cast upon the particular conscience of the philosopher, but his essential form of consciousness is construed, raised to a definite shape and meaning and in this way also transcended.

By the way, I consider this unphilosophical trend in a large section of Hegel’s school as a phenomenon which will always accompany the transition from discipline to freedom.

It is a psychological law that the theoretical mind, once liberated in itself, turns into practical energy, and, leaving the shadowy empire of Amenthes as will, turns itself against the reality of the world existing without it. (From a philosophical point of view, however, it is important to specify these aspects better, since from the specific manner of this turn we can reason back towards the immanent determination and the universal historic character of a philosophy. We see here, as it were, its curriculum vitae narrowed down to its subjective point.) But the practice of philosophy is itself theoretical. It is the critique that measures the individual existence by the essence, the particular reality by the Idea. But this immediate realisation of philosophy is in its deepest essence afflicted with contradictions, and this its essence takes form in the appearance and imprints its seal upon it.

When philosophy turns itself as will against the world of appearance, then the system is lowered to an abstract totality, that is, it has become one aspect of the world which opposes another one. Its relationship to the world is that of reflection. Inspired by the urge to realise itself, it enters into tension against the other. The inner self-contentment and completeness has been broken. What was inner light has become consuming flame turning outwards. The result is that as the world becomes philosophical, philosophy also becomes worldly, that its realisation is also its loss, that what it struggles against on the outside is its own inner deficiency, that in the very struggle it falls precisely into those defects which it fights as defects in the opposite camp, and that it can only overcome these defects by failing into them. That which opposes it and that which it fights is always the same as itself, only with factors inverted.

This is the one side, when we consider this matter purely Objectively as immediate realisation of philosophy. However, it has also a subjective aspect, which is merely another form of it. This is the relationship of the philosophical system which is realised to its intellectual carriers, to the individual self -consciousnesses in which its progress appears. This relationship results in what confronts

the world in the realisation of philosophy itself, namely, in the fact that these individual self-consciousnesses always carry a double-edged demand, one edge turned against the world, the other against philosophy itself. Indeed, what in the thing itself appears as a relationship inverted in itself, appears in these self-consciousnesses as a double one, a demand and an action contradicting each other. Their liberation of the world from un-philosophy is at the same time their own liberation from the philosophy that held them in fetters as a particular system. Since they are themselves engaged merely in the act and immediate energy of development – and hence have not yet theoretically emerged from that system – they perceive only the contradiction with the plastic equality-with-self [Sich-selbst-Gleichheit] of the system and do not know that by turning against it they only realise its individual moments.

This duality of philosophical self-consciousness appears finally as a double trend, each side utterly opposed to the other. One side, the liberal party, as we may call it in general, maintains as its main determination the concept and the principle of philosophy; the other side, its non-concept, the moment of reality. This second side is positive philosophy. The act of the first side is critique, hence precisely that turning-towards-the-outside of philosophy; the act of the second is the attempt to philosophise, hence the turning-in-towards-itself of philosophy. This second side knows that the inadequacy is immanent in philosophy, while the first understands it as inadequacy of the world which has to be made philosophical. Each of these parties does exactly what the other one wants to do and what it itself does not want to do. The first, however, is, despite its inner contradiction, conscious of both its principle in general and its goal. In the second party the inversion [Verkehrtheit], we may well say the madness [Verrücktheit], appears as such. As to the content: only the liberal party achieves real progress, because it is the party of the concept, while positive philosophy is only able to produce demands and tendencies whose form contradicts their meaning.

That which in the first place appears as an inverted [verkehrtes] relationship and inimical trend of philosophy with respect to the world, becomes in the second place a diremption of individual self-consciousness in itself and appears finally as an external separation and duality of philosophy, as two opposed philosophical trends.

It is obvious that apart from this there also emerge a number of subordinate, querulous formations without individuality. Some of them place themselves behind a philosophical giant of the past-but the ass is soon detected under the lion’s skin; the whimpering voice of a manikin of today or yesterday blubbers in comical contrast to the majestic voice resounding through the ages-say of Aristotle, whose unwelcome organ it has appointed itself. It is as if a mute would help himself to a voice by means of a speaking-trumpet of enormous size. Or as if some Lilliputian armed with double spectacles stands on a tiny spot of the posterior of the giant and announces full of amazement to the world the astonishingly novel vista his punctum visus [point of view] offers and makes himself ridiculous explaining that not in a flowing heart, but in the solid substantial ground on which he stands, has been found the point of Archimedes, pou sto (pou stw), on which the world hinges. Thus we obtain hair-, nail-, toe-, excrement-philosophers and others, who have to represent an even worse function in the mystical world man [Weltmensch] of Swedenborg. However, all these slugs belong essentially to the two above-mentioned sides as to their element. As to these sides themselves: in another place I shall completely explain their relation, in part to each other, in part to Hegel’s philosophy, as well as the particular historical moments in which this development reveals itself.