Samuel Beckett and the Physical Continuum

Abstract

The word ‘continuum’ invokes a controversy that endured for more than two millennia. Aristotle contended in his Physics that a continuum (such as length, time or movement) cannot be constituted by indivisibles nor be resolved into them. Though Augustine decreed the thought of Epicurus long dead, interest in Atomism persisted into the late medieval period, long before its ‘rediscovery’ in the Renaissance. Given Beckett's marked empathy for Atomism, and the wide assumption that Atomism anticipated the radical paradigm shifts of the new physics of his day, a scrutiny of this School and of ‘the incoherent continuum’ is warranted. Beckett found in Leibniz a compelling image of how the ‘soul’ (the self conceived as an atomist monad) might reify its relation to the contingent world; and in Windelband a sense of the petites perceptions as unconscious mental states that translated his aesthetic from an attractive but unsatisfactory Atomism to a monadic awareness in which indivisibles are simultaneously limited (indivisibilities of substantial form) and unlimited (a continuum infinitely divisible). The advantage of the Monad over the Atom, with respect to medieval disputes over the nature of the physical continuum or its existence as discrete or continuous, was that he did not need to commit himself to either the physical or the metaphysical, as the continuum could be simultaneously ‘both’ and/or ‘neither’.