It was Democritus who endowed the Pythagorean units with the properties of Parmenidean being. Pythagoras reasoned that quantity is the basis of reality, and that all is reducible to number.[1] Parmenides reasoned that Being is One, unchanging, and indivisible. The atom is the Pythagorean point or unit, and this unit, Democritus argued, is unchanging and "uncuttable"; and it was Parmenides who showed that being is uncuttable.

Democritus accepted the Pythagorean void or empty space. So if he argued that being is the atom, it isn't difficult to understand how he arrived at the conclusion that what is "non-atom" is non-being. Empty space is "not atom", and so empty space is "not-being" or nothing. The atom of Democritus is without "whatness". It has size, shape, and position in space, and of course it is impenetrable. The various kinds of elements are explained by an appeal to quantity (those atoms of the same kind are really of the same size and shape).

Now, "the modern atom" is very different from the atom of Democritus, Epicurus, and Lucretius, but the philosophical mindset is not all that different (this is partly due to the fact that just as ancient atomism stemmed from a philosophy that confused mathematical entities with real entities, so too is modern atomism rooted in a philosophy that confuses logical being with real being, namely that of Descartes). There are some physicists today who attempt to explain the various kinds of atoms by an appeal to quantity alone, for example, the number of protons. We can ask, why is oxygen a different kind of thing than fluorine? Why is the beryllium atom a different kind of atom than carbon? Again, some appeal to quantity alone as an explanation of the "qualitative" differences between the atoms of the various elements.[2] For the only differences we can measure here are quantitative differences. But does quantitative difference explain or account for qualitative difference?

When we come across something unfamiliar, our first question is always, "What is it?" and not, "How much of it is there?" "What" is more fundamental than "How much". "What" is a qualitative term. When we ask how much of something there is, the question, in order to be intelligible, always refers to some specific kind of thing. Quantity does not answer a qualitative question. Number does not explain why carbon is a different kind of thing than helium.

And when a chemist wants to know what a particular chemical is, he simply studies its activity (how it reacts with other chemicals, for instance). For it is by the activity that we come to know "what" a thing is.[3] Carbon acts differently than helium. It is a different kind of thing. A change in quantity does not necessarily imply a change in kind (quality). A quantitative change does not necessarily give us a different kind of thing; it often gives us more or less of the same kind of thing. Quantity is a different mode of being than quality. If quantity gives us more or less of the same, then it follows that substantial quality (formal cause) is prior to quantity. Certainly sodium "has more" than carbon, but that does not account for the radical difference between the two.

In short, the "whatness" of an atom (as well as the "whatness" of any substance) cannot be measured. What is intelligible cannot be measured in so far as it is intelligible, but only insofar as it is quantified. The carbon atom has an intelligible structure, and this intelligible structure or nature is revealed through its activity. The "whatness" of a thing is its intelligible nature or essence. That is why the intellect seeks to know first and foremost what the thing is. The intellect wants to "make sense" out of the thing, and the thing is only intelligible if it has an essence or nature. The atom is intelligible because it is a nature existing. It is a composite of potency and act. Its formal principle is its substantial form, and it is this "immaterial" principle that makes the gold atom to be "what it is". We know that the gold atom is not a pure form, because it can change; and pure forms do not change. The gold is potentially something else. It can be transformed. And if it can be transformed, that is, if it can have a change of form, then there must be a subject of the form. The ultimate subject of a thing's form is its prime matter (potency). This first matter is not a "part". It is continuous. Prime matter is the potential principle of the whole entity. This primordial potency has the aspect of a subject, and it belongs to the form to actualize this subject, which is in potency to receive form. Prime matter is the ultimate potency, that is, pure potentiality. The gold atom is, fundamentally speaking, prime matter "golding", just as carbon is prime matter "carboning", etc. It is prime matter that acquires the intelligible structure of gold, that is, the substantial form of gold. The quantity of an atom follows upon its nature.

The fact that we change an atom by changing its quantity does not imply that quantity determines it to be "what it is". To transform any substance requires that we first change its secondary matter (the quantified thing), that is, its parts. If we want to kill a frog, we start by rearranging its parts, such as cutting it in half. The parts are parts of the substance. A material substance is a composite of both matter and form, and so the form needs matter if it is going to "form". The intelligible structure (form) of a material substance makes matter intelligible. A material substance, like a human person, cannot attack the intelligible structure of a thing directly. We can only do so by first attacking the already constituted and extended substance. We change the parts. And so it is no surprise that removing subatomic particles changes the atom. It is also faulty logic to conclude that since a qualitative change is initiated and accompanied by a quantitative change, quantity determines the substantial quality.

Subatomic particles are too poor in property to account for the rich heterogeneity of our experienced world. The properties of mass and charge are the only properties of electrons and protons. The neutron has only one property, namely weight, and it enjoys a magnetic moment by its spin. A neutron's place in nature seems to be limited and determined to one,[4] like all the other fundamental particles. Its place in nature seems to be the nucleus toward which it tends. For it does not have enough interiority and independence to make a permanent abode elsewhere. The negative meson lasts in independent status for only millionths of a second, and the neutral meson has a much shorter lifetime. And so it is true that such entities are of greater potency, and thus are poorer in act. They are in matter's poorhouse, so to speak. And they are poor in quality so that they can serve a higher unity, one much richer in qualities. In fact, as we move closer to the inorganic world, form becomes very faint, so much so that a mineral is almost entirely under the dominion of inertia; and this explains the success of the empiriological method in the region of the mineral, its lesser success in biology where form is greater and more "exertive" (there is less predictability and more variation in biology than there is in physics).

And so it isn't the poorer that determines the richer, but the richer that determines and elevates the poorer. The subatomic particles are not rich enough in being to determine what goes on at the macroscopic level. Rather, they are organized and unified, that is, they are made to serve a higher unity, one they do not determine, but only serve.

Notes

¹"Now the Pythagoreans also believe in one kind of number - the mathematical; only they say it is not separate but sensible substances are formed out of it. For they construct the whole universe out of numbers - only not numbers consisting of abstract units; they suppose the units to have spacial magnitude....All...suppose numbers to consist of abstract units, except the Pythagoreans; but they suppose numbers to have magnitude,..." (Aristotle Met. M8, 1083b8)

²For an excellent treatment of the quantity-quality leap, see F. F. Centore, Persons. A Comparative Account of the Six Possible Theories (Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1979) 69-72.

³Since formal cause and final cause coincide, and since nothing is in the intellect that is not first in the senses, it follows that we come to know "what" a thing is, that is, its nature, through its activities.

⁴See V. E. Smith, Philosophical Physics, 200-201.

Copyright © 1998 by Douglas P. McManaman
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