The Eleatic challenge left Greek thought in an uncomfortable position.
Experience presents us with change, multiplicity and motion.
Argument appears to show that these things are not as straightforward as they seem.
If something cannot come from what is not, how can anything come into being?
If what is cannot become what is not, how can anything perish?
If motion requires traversing infinitely divisible distances, how can anything ever arrive?
The temptation is to choose.
Perhaps change is real and our reasoning must be mistaken.
Or perhaps reasoning is right and change is an illusion.
But Greek thought takes another path.
What if the alternatives themselves are incomplete?
What if we can preserve something from the Eleatic insight while also accounting for the changing world of experience?
This is where the pluralists and atomists become important.
They do not simply solve the problem.
They transform the space in which the problem can be addressed.
Nature becomes a field of possibilities.
The problem of preserving change
Consider the Eleatic argument about coming into being.
If something genuinely comes into existence, it must come either from what already exists or from what does not exist.
Neither seems satisfactory.
But perhaps we have made an assumption that does not need to be made.
Perhaps things do not come into being from nothing at all.
Perhaps what appears to be coming into being is actually a new combination of things that already exist.
And what appears to be destruction is their separation.
This possibility allows change to occur without requiring being itself to emerge from non-being.
It is a remarkably simple conceptual move.
But it depends upon a new distinction.
The things we encounter in experience may change their relations and configurations without their underlying constituents coming into existence or passing away.
The problem of change has been shifted.
We no longer need to explain how being becomes non-being.
We need to explain how persistent constituents can enter into different relations.
Empedocles: four roots
Empedocles offers one influential version of this possibility.
The world consists of four basic “roots”: earth, air, fire and water.
These do not come into being or perish.
Instead, they combine and separate under the influence of Love and Strife.
Whatever we think of the physical theory, its conceptual significance is striking.
The world can change because relations among persistent elements change.
A tree grows.
An animal develops.
A body decays.
But perhaps none of these processes involves something emerging from absolute nothingness.
The constituents persist.
Their organisation changes.
This offers a way of reconciling permanence with becoming.
The world can be genuinely dynamic without requiring fundamental entities themselves to be generated from nothing.
Change has not been eliminated.
It has been re-described.
Anaxagoras: everything in everything
Anaxagoras proposes a different response.
He too resists the idea that things simply come into existence from nothing. But his account is radically more complicated.
Everything contains portions of everything else, in varying configurations. What we call a thing is determined by what predominates within its organisation.
Again, the precise interpretation is difficult, but the conceptual move matters.
The world is not necessarily composed of a small number of simple substances.
It may be composed of a multiplicity of constituents whose combinations produce the things we experience.
What appears to be qualitative transformation can therefore be understood through changes in organisation.
The distinction between thing and relation becomes increasingly difficult to keep apart.
What something is depends partly upon how its constituents are organised.
The world is beginning to look less like a collection of fixed objects and more like a dynamic system of configurations.
The many as a response to the one
The pluralists therefore respond to the Eleatic challenge by accepting part of its premise.
Something fundamental must persist.
But they reject the conclusion that change is therefore impossible.
Instead, they multiply what can persist.
There is not one unchanging reality from which apparent diversity must somehow be derived.
There may be many persistent realities whose combinations account for the diversity of experience.
This is an important conceptual development.
The problem is no longer:
One or many?
It becomes:
How can many persistent things generate changing configurations?
That is a much more productive question.
The alternatives have not simply been reconciled.
They have been reorganised.
The atomists go further
Leucippus and Democritus take the possibility of persistent constituents in a different direction.
Reality, they propose, consists of atoms and void.
Atoms are indivisible, ungenerated and imperishable.
Yet they can move, collide, combine and separate.
The enormous variety of the experienced world can therefore emerge from differences in arrangement and motion.
Here the conceptual strategy becomes especially clear.
If change is difficult to explain at the level of ultimate constituents, perhaps change should be understood at the level of relations among constituents.
The same atoms can participate in different configurations.
The same underlying reality can therefore generate different appearances without itself being created or destroyed.
The world becomes a space of possible arrangements.
And that phrase—possible arrangements—is crucial.
Nature is no longer conceived simply as a collection of things with fixed properties.
It becomes something like a combinatorial field.
Given these constituents, what configurations are possible?
What configurations are impossible?
What conditions make one arrangement more likely than another?
What explains the transition from one arrangement to another?
These questions anticipate a style of inquiry that will recur throughout later science.
Possibility acquires structure
This is perhaps the most important conceptual shift in the whole development so far.
At first, the Greeks asked what the world is made of.
Then they asked how change is possible.
Now they can ask:
What configurations of reality are possible, and what relations make them possible?
That is a different kind of question.
Possibility is no longer simply whatever we can imagine.
A world composed of atoms and void does not permit every imaginable state.
The properties of the constituents and the relations among them constrain what can happen.
The possible therefore has a structure.
Some transformations are available.
Others are excluded.
Some combinations are stable.
Others cannot persist.
The conceptual field has acquired something resembling an internal topology: possibilities are not equally accessible, and they are not independent of one another.
One possibility can depend upon another.
A change can open or close further possibilities.
A configuration can make another configuration easier or harder to reach.
Nature begins to look less like a fixed inventory and more like a space of constrained becoming.
Constraint does not eliminate creativity
This is an important connection with what we have already seen.
The Eleatic arguments constrained the possibilities available to Greek thought.
But the constraint did not stop inquiry.
It generated new possibilities.
The pluralists and atomists show how productive such constraint can be.
Once coming-to-be from nothing is rejected, thinkers are forced to consider combination.
Once fundamental constituents must persist, their relations become more important.
Once relations become important, organisation and configuration become explanatory.
A constraint has therefore changed what can be conceived.
This is not unlike what happened with the Pythagorean discovery that numerical relations could reveal structures not obvious in individual things.
The conceptual ecology is becoming increasingly relational.
Things are understood through what they are made of.
What they are made of is understood through how those constituents relate.
And change is understood through changes in those relations.
But a new question appears
There is, however, a difficulty.
If atoms simply move and combine, why do they move at all?
What accounts for the order of their movements?
How does a cosmos arise from initially unorganised constituents?
The atomists provide naturalistic accounts, but the problem of order remains.
An explanation of what things are made of does not necessarily explain why they form the organised structures we encounter.
This question will become increasingly important.
The Greeks are discovering that there are several different kinds of explanation.
We can ask what something is made of.
We can ask what relation produces a change.
We can ask what structure something has.
And we can ask why it has that structure rather than another.
The word “why” is beginning to divide into different questions.
This is another sign that the conceptual ecology is becoming richer.
From substances to possibilities
The pluralists and atomists therefore represent more than competing physical theories.
They expand what it means to give an account of nature.
Nature can now be understood as a system in which persistent constituents enter into changing configurations.
The actual world is one configuration among possibilities.
This does not mean that every possibility is equally real.
Nor does it mean that nature is infinitely malleable.
Quite the opposite.
Possibilities are constrained by the structures of the world itself.
But that is precisely what makes them philosophically interesting.
A possibility can be real without being actual.
It can belong to the structure of what the world permits even though it is not currently instantiated.
That distinction will become enormously important later in Greek philosophy.
The ecology has changed again
Let us pause and look at the path we have travelled.
The Milesians made the world questionable.
Heraclitus made change philosophically significant.
Parmenides and the Eleatics showed that apparently obvious processes could generate profound conceptual difficulties.
The Pythagorean tradition revealed the possibility that stable relations could underlie changing phenomena.
The Eleatic challenge then forced explanations to survive argument.
Now the pluralists and atomists respond by generating new conceptual possibilities within those constraints.
The result is not a single solution.
It is a proliferation of possible accounts.
Empedocles has four roots.
Anaxagoras has innumerable constituents.
The atomists have atoms and void.
Each attempts to preserve something important while solving problems created by the others.
The conceptual ecology is therefore becoming populated.
Ideas are no longer appearing one at a time.
They are beginning to form a field of alternatives.
And once a field of alternatives exists, another transformation becomes possible.
The question of nature is no longer the only question worth asking.
What about the people doing the asking?
What is knowledge?
Can language represent reality?
Can argument persuade independently of truth?
What makes a good life?
What is justice?
What happens when the very activity of inquiry becomes an object of inquiry?
The focus of Greek thought will begin to turn.
Not because nature has ceased to matter.
But because the human beings who question nature have discovered that they too belong to the field of questions.
The question will turn toward the human.
And with the Sophists and Socrates, philosophy will begin to ask not only what the world is, but what it means to be a person capable of asking what the world is.
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