clinamen

Clinamen is the name Lucretius gave to the spontaneous microscopic swerving of atoms from a vertical path as they fall ^(2.216-293). According to Lucretius, there would be no contact between atoms without the clinamen, and so, "No collision would take place and no impact of atom upon atom would be created. Thus nature would never have created anything." ^(2.220-225) This was first described in Epicurean physics.

The clinamen has been taken up in discussions of determinism as a possible explanation for an incompatibilist free will.

The term has also been taken up by Harold Bloom to describe the inclinations of writers to "swerve" from the influence of their predecessors; it is the first of his "Ratios of Revision" as described in The Anxiety of Influence.

In Difference and Repetition, Gilles Deleuze employs the term in his description of multiplicities, pointing to the observation at the heart of the theory of clinamen that "it is indeed essential that atoms be related to other atoms."⁽¹⁸⁴⁾ Though atoms affected by clinamen engage each other in a relationship of reciprocal supposition, Deleuze rejects this version of multiplicity, both because the atoms are too independent and because the multiplicity is spatio-temporal instead of internal.

References

1. Lucretius; trans R.E. Latham. On the Nature of the Universe. 1951. Toronto: Penguin Books. Book 2.

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