created 2025-05-29, & modified, =this.modified
tags:y2025philosophygreek
Clinamen is the unpredictable swerve of atoms in the atomistic doctrine of Epicurus. The swerving, according to Lucretius, provides the “free will of which living things throughout the world have.”
Jonathan Swift satirized the theory:
Epicurus modestly hoped that one time or other, a certain fortuitous concourse of all men’s opinions—after perpetual justlings, the sharp with the smooth, the light and the heavy, the round and the square—would, by certain clinamina, unite in the notions of atoms and void, as these did in the originals of all things.
Greek alchemists distinguished two models of material analysis – the four basic elements (earth, water, fire or air), and that all substances consists of atoms.
Clinamen, was introduced as an impulsive indeterminacy in the motion of the indivisible atom.
This atomic swerve should be regarded as an internalization of the universal atomic motion in every single solid and indestructible atom, causing collisions and joining compounds and bodies. With the form of the smallest rare particles of the mind, the atomic swerve is also responsible for the generation of volition
Epicurus gives only implicit reference of the swerve, and Lucretius seems the official proponent. Epicurus writes:
The atoms move continuously forever, and some separate far from each other, while others remain vibrating, whenever they happen to be locked in by interweaving or encased by atoms that tend to interweave. This is because the nature of the void separates each of them and is unable to provide resistance, and their actual solidity makes the rebound from the collision extend as far as the surrounding entanglement allows the return from the collision. There is no beginning to these (rebounds), since the atoms and the void are eternal.
Thought
I recall wondering where traffic originated from on a commute home. I remember seeing the flow of traffic going, and then small features that altered the flow, like someone going through a yellow light turning red, or not, and how these small perturbations in flow could affect traffic elsewhere.