Birth of Physics - Michel Serres
Leucippus, Democritus and, later, Epicurus envisioned atoms as a way of thinking about motion, change, and combination as fundamental to Being. We do ourselves a disservice if we think of them as introducing only atoms as new, smaller beings. They introduced the void as the positive concept of nothingness that exists between atoms. We must understand both concepts as conjoined — we don’t get one without the other. Without an empty gap between atoms, the atomists argued that motion was not possible. The void is, therefore, not simply the unthinkability of non-Being as non-existence. The void turns non-Being into a positive concept as the emptiness that allows atoms to move and combine to form things.
We are at a key moment in the history of Western thought where nothing and emptiness become concepts that can be thought. The upshot is fundamental: Being no longer must be thought as essence. Democritus, writes: “By convention, sweet; by convention, bitter; by convention, hot; by convention, cold; by convention, color; but in reality, atoms and void” (Quoted in Richard D. McKirahan, Philosophy before Socrates, 334). Existence is conventional, but underwritten by a twofold reality of atoms-and-void. Within this single statement, two paths are open to philosophical thought. Western metaphysics will follow one path: convention is illusion and atoms-and-void reality.
Michel Serres’ reading of Lucretius’ De rerum natura recovers the path not taken by Western metaphysics. His reading requires us to embrace two simultaneous truths, which is expressed as the interdependence of the clinamen and turbulence. To understand this, we have to understand how “Lucretius describes two forms of chaos” (Birth of Physics, 51). The first form is the reigning down of atoms in a “laminar flow.” This is not a Garden of Eden of perfect order that will be thrown into disorder. Serres is clear that the chaos of the laminar flow is non-existence because there is no relationship at all among atoms. This first chaos is the irrelevance of order and therefore the irrelevance of disorder. Up, down, and flow don’t make any sense because everything is always in the exact same relationship to each other all the time because the atoms do not combine. They all exist — which is not properly existence — in complete and essential isolation from each other. Serres will emphasize this point throughout. “Nothing can happen, nothing is produced, in a homogeneous field” (53). “If everything flows continually, they are not yet born, they are not formed, natured” (79). But never more clearly than this:
This idea goes to the heart of philosophy, that is, metaphysics. If we had only the principle of identity, we would be mute, motionless, passive and the world would have no existence: nothing new under the sun of sameness. (40)
The laminar flow is the impossibility of existence because it is identity as essence.
The second form of chaos emerges after the clinamen disturbs the laminar flow. This disturbance is the beginning of existence because it is the beginning of atoms combining with each other. Existence appears exactly when pure identity is rendered obsolete by a minimal distubance in the laminar flow of atoms in the void. We shall have to return to the notion of “the minimum” that is important to Serres’s thought. For the moment we shall note that this path not taken by the West was emergent again the late 1970’s: “During the course of this history, which runs up to Laplace and a dominant positivism, the second hypothesis lies dormant. Today, it is reawakening, out of some of Leibniz’s dreams and from the other side of Laplace, where chaotic multiplicity slept” (51).
As Physics reawakens to the clinamen and turbulence, Lucretius re-emerges as our contemporary and our preference for the primacy of order is reversed: “in other words, how an order, or several orders, emerge from disorder. And it is turbulence that secures the transition” (47).
Let us now return to “the minimum.” The clinamen is not a spatial concept. It is the unfolding of time as “the minimum angle for the formation of a vortex” (25). The minimum angle is not defined ahead of time by a universal law. Nor does the minimum angle unfold inside a pre-defined, actually existing Cartesian grid. Nor is it conceivable as randomness if by randomness we mean merely the flip side of law-driven order. Each of these characterizations contains the clinamen within quantifiable and measurable systems that are presumed to exist before the clinamen. The clinamen was Serres’ way of making being a function of time well beyond what Heidegger imagined.
We must think of the clinamen as a qualitative concept before it is quantitative. “The angle remains a shape, a corner, like a quality, and it resists efforts at quantification” (27). We are not dealing with angles made by perfectly straight lines where the angle can be measured at any point as the gap between the lines. We are dealing with declination — the movement of a curve away from a tangent as it eventually forms a spiraling vortex. If we stare deeply into the original moment of declination — the moment when the curve and the tangent separate — we find it impossible to find (and therefore to quantify) the original separation. Where exactly does it start? Where exactly would we place our measuring device? We can measure its trajectory through differential equations as the curve unfolds in time, but we cannot measure the origin because we will not find it. We have to treat time as primary, not reducible to space: “The proto-dynamics of Lucretius consists in asking ‘what really happens when this angle appears or subsists over a length of time’ And the answer is ‘everything’” (42, my emphasis). All we have is the time of the unfolding without a measurable origin. Yet this unfolding is the unfolding of “everything.”
For Serres in BP, the clinamen frees us from making a choice between reality and illusion. We thus open our perception and experience to new ways of being in the world. This, for Serres, is the holy alliance between Science, Philosophy, and Religion. When we combine these we develop a powerful capacity to take in more information without falling into a skeptical nihilism. Rather, we see fullness and beauty because we no longer see essences.
Take a thing in your hands, anything at all, from the earth, from the water, a stone or an animal. Read this object from the world. Read it as it was written, in the letters of its atoms. Written in its crystalline depths and in its full, smooth molecules, which roll against each other, is how this thing was born, is how it was made part of nature. It is the written memory of its formation, of its emergence from chaos. (BP, 204)
We are in the qualitative temporality of fluid dynamics, turbulence, and vortices. Measurement, mathematics, and quantification can model the emergent systems, but this is always retrospective. (For an extended and more systematic example of this mode of reading, see the opening pages of Serres’ The Incandescent.) Even if our models are made predictive using AI, this can happen only after loading the model with mountains of retrospective data. As qualitative temporality, the clinamen makes visible and suspends our need to look for final explanations that reduce all that there is to an expression of Being-as-essence. From the perspective of Newton’s stable space and time, the clinamen creates space and time by breaking up a prior state of non-Being as non-existence. Understood this way, the clinamen is an intervention into the status of our explanations and, therefore, our concepts of time.
Taking laminar flow as a starting point, we don’t see disorder emerging from a prior order. We see order emerging from a collision of atoms as they move out of the non-existence of non-Being. Serres’ reading of Lucretius challenges us to an exercise of thought that uses the metaphor of the laminar flow to render inoperative (katargesis) our Aristotelian bias toward cause-and-effect and potential-to-actual as fundamental laws of Being and Becoming. Taken seriously as an exercise of thought, the laminar flow forces us to confront the impossibility of essences as a basis for Being. It forces us to think about Being and existence as provisional combinations of atoms that have no original, obligatory, or necessary relationship to one another. As a figure of thought, the clinamen forces us to stare deeply into it, and in the depths of this stare we find, not nothing and emptiness, but what Henri Bergson called movement without a mobile: “There are changes, but there are underneath the change no things that change: change has no need of a support. There are movements, but there is no inert or invariable object which moves: movement does not imply a mobile” (Key Writings, 317).
