Epicurus - Clinamen

by Maria Odete Madeira

While disagreeing, with regards to the topos of the universal essences, Plato and Aristotle were in agreement with regards to a fundamental point: the scientific discourse (episteme) could only be considered as true when that same discourse satisfied criteria of universality and of necessity. Thus, it was demanded of the inquiry to find the foundation of any statement of truth or of falsehood, in what were the first causes and the first principles of the things, themselves.

In this way, in order to have discursive rigor, the matter and its forms or essences (eidos) should be analyzed separately as different things, both in terms of their identity as well as of the value that was assigned to them. The epistemic analysis of one should not contaminate, interpretatively, the epistemic analysis of the others.

The object of knowledge, that object's matter and its form or essence, as well as its meaning and definition, obeyed, for Plato and for Aristotle, rigorous criteria of appropriateness and agreement, that would allow a general deductive semantics. These criteria prolonged themselves in Euclid’s geometry and in the statics of Archimedes, both based upon a system of axioms that constituted self-evident truths, and upon a system of theorems derived from those same axioms.

The semantic determinism of the Greek scientific discourse was generalized as an epistemic model until Epicurus, distancing himself from the primitive atomism of Democritus, introduced the notion of clinamen (declination) as a capability, an arbitriu that the atoms have to deviate themselves spontaneously from their trajectories. Thus, Epicurus incorporated, in the philosophical and scientific discourse, an irreducible element of unpredictability at the epistemic level, absent up until then, with ontological and epistemological consequences about that which was considered as criterion of truth.

Without putting into question the “general laws of nature”, known at the time, the author localized a present and permanent dispositional element of constitutive arbitrariness (arbitriu), in any process of formation of emergent structures, as an element incorporated in the dispositional genetics of these same structures with consequences at the level of the systemic perception and cognitive processing/computation, and at the ontological level of the threat of destructuration and the opportunity of structuration, present in any physical existent, and that function as mechanisms of potential risk (linked to the mechanisms of life and death) and, thus, undetermined, permanently displaced, within the structure itself.