Necessity, Chance, and Freedom in the Early Atomists

Abstract

Fortune, which Democritus so disparaged, had the last laugh on the laughing philosopher when through the fragmentation of his work it obscured a cardinal principle of the atomist system, necessity. Or would Democritus have called this the fatum libellorum? At any rate, the obscurity of this principle is immediately apparent, both in the ancient doxographical tradition and in modern scholarship. Without endorsing any of the views which variously identify necessity with some one characteristic of the atoms, their weight or aboriginal motion, or with the void they move in,x one can yet attempt to undo the identification of necessity with the famous whirl of the atoms2 and to see necessity as a single concept of which the causal operation in the system is uniform. Even Zeus was subject to necessity, and one might think of Democritus as refining and systematizing an ancient belief, in the same way that in making r6 'povev physical he subscribed, says Theophrastus, to a most antique opinion, to which all the poets and sages adhered.3 Necessity occurs in none of the B fragments of Democritus con-