Stoic Gunk

DANIEL NOLAN

ABSTRACT
The surviving sources on the Stoic theory of division reveal that the Stoics, particularly Chrysippus, believed that bodies, places and times were such that all of their parts themselves had proper parts. That is, bodies, places and times were composed of gunk. This realisation helps solve some long-standing puzzles about the Stoic theory of mixture and the Stoic attitude to the present.

This paper seeks to address two of the central questions to be answered in any account of the physical and metaphysical doctrines of the Stoics. The rst is the question of what attitude the Stoics took towards wholes and parts; and the second, the related question about the divisibility of objects, which is closely connected to the question of what parts objects in fact possess. To my mind modern commentators have misunderstood the Stoics, particularly Chrysippus, on these central issues, or at the very least overlooked an important option. They have thus overlooked an interpretation of the Stoics which closely ts the surviving fragments of Stoic writings on the topic: the possibility that the Stoics embraced a non-atomic mereology, and postulated that material objects were such that each of their parts themselves had further parts, without any nite limit. In other words, to use the jargon of contemporary mereology, Stoics postulated the existence of gunk:1 objects which are not composed of mereological indivisibles (mereological atoms), but which are such that all of their parts themselves have proper parts. This paper is divided into three sections, each related to one of its goals. The rst is to explain what gunk is. The second is to examine a range of sources about the Stoic theory of parts and wholes, to show why these sources support my interpretation, and to explain how this interpretation helps with puzzles about mixture and the present. The third is to discuss what seems to be the biggest problem for my interpretation: some testimonia about the Stoic attitude to innity which are apparently in tension with my claim.
Accepted October 2005 1 This sense of the term, though not the concept, is due to David Lewis: see Lewis 1991. Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2006 Also available online www.brill.nl Phronesis LI/2

STOIC GUNK

163

1. Atomless Gunk I will begin with some notes about terminology. The word part, used as a technical term in contemporary mereology (the theory of parts and wholes),2 is used in a somewhat broader sense than in its non-technical uses: in this sense, for example, the parts of a given object A include A itself, in analogy to the usage in set theory according to which each set is one of its own subsets. Some mereologies postulate for convenience a null part, a part which is a part of every object: I will not do so here, but in systems with a null part, this is also something the mereologist counts among the parts. A proper part of an object is a part which is not the object itself nor the null part. (This is analogous to a proper subset in set theory, where a proper subset of a set S is any subset of S which is not identical with S, nor identical with the null set.) It is the expression proper part which probably corresponds most closely with our ordinary expression part, but nonetheless I shall be using part in its extended sense, to avoid confusion, and I shall say proper part when I mean a part other than the object itself. A mereological atom is an object that has no proper parts. (This use of atom coincides more with the original meaning of atom as an indivisible (or uncuttable) object, and I stress that this usage of atom is not the use of that term in modern physics or chemistry: for famously, we can split the atom of physics and chemistry.) To assert the existence of gunk is to assert that there is an object such that all of its parts have proper parts: it follows from this that each of its parts can themselves be further divided, without end, and without at any stage (nite or innite) reaching a bedrock of indivisible minimal parts (that is, the object is not made up of atoms). Alfred North Whiteheads view of space was like this, for example: at the fundamental level there were only regions of space, not points, but there was no limit to how small a region of space might be. The concept of gunk is unfamiliar to many, but it is not very abstruse: all of its parts have parts is a natural, if sloppy, way of characterising what it is for a thing to be gunk. (It comes to the same thing as the technical denition only if part is taken in the sense of proper part, and it is further assumed that the object has some parts, in this sense.) It is tempting to say that what makes something a piece of gunk is its being innitely divisible, but this is not quite right. Gunk is innitely divisible,
2 For an introduction to contemporary mereology, the reader may wish to consult Simons 1987.

164

DANIEL NOLAN

but there are ways of being innitely divisible besides the way gunk is. One way to be innitely divisible, for example, is the way a geometrical line-segment is thought to be divisible in a geometry based on points: every line segment can be divided into smaller line segments, but at the end-point of division there is an innity of extension-less points, which cannot themselves be divided further. Another similar way to be innitely divisible might be to be an object which was innitely large: one might be able to take away parts of some xed nite (non-zero, non-innitesimal) size ad innitum without having to come to a halt, even if those nite parts themselves are not further divisible. A third way, if it is coherent, is an Aristotelian way, in which the potential for innitely many divisions may exist, even in an object which has no actual proper parts at all! (This is what some people have in mind when they speak of an object having a potential innity of parts: but perhaps not what they all mean.) So while many commentators have held that the Stoics wished to be committed to innite divisibility, the further claim that the sort of innite divisibility they had in mind was gunky is one I am interested in defending.3

2. What the Stoics Said 2.1 Parts, Wholes and Innite Division

It is not an entirely easy matter to determine what the Stoics had to say about parts and wholes: little of the Stoics metaphysical writings have survived, and it can be hard to pierce the veil of ancient testimonia to nd what the Stoics in fact argued, as opposed to how their opponents or other reporters thought they argued. I shall be discussing some of the fragments which purport to be direct quotations of what the Stoics said, as well as the ancient testimonia. I shall rst discuss two passages which seem to
3 Some readers may be wondering where in this taxonomy of innite divisibility I would include divisibility into innitesimal magnitudes, especially as Michael White (1982, 1992) has suggested this as a model for Stoic innite divisibility. (Or rather in 1992 he has suggested a fuzzied version of this as our model.) If every innitesimal body has another innitesimal part smaller than it, and there are none of minimal size, then it turns out to be a gunky view (albeit one with extra features that strike me as unneccessary). If it is indeterminate whether there is a least size of indeterminate bodies, which might well be the view in White 1992, then it will be indeterminate whether this can be tted with a gunky framework.

STOIC GUNK

165

me to bear directly on the question of what parts Stoics thought material objects had. Then I shall examine how the hypothesis that the Stoics were committed to gunk can shed light on the Stoic theories of mixture and of time, in a way which resolves some of the perplexities of ancient and contemporary critics. I shall be focussing on Chrysippus theory in what follows, since his physical theories seem to be both one of the most fully worked out and best attested to in Stoic thought. The rst passage is from Plutarch, quoting verbatim from Chrysippus, and is strong evidence that Chrysippus at least rejected ultimate parts, where these are, presumably, parts which do not themselves have (proper) parts (LS 50C):4
Chrysippus says that when asked if we have parts, and how many, and of what and how many parts they consist, we will operate a distinction. With regard to the inexact question we will reply that we consist of head, trunk and limbs for that was all that the problem put to us amounted to. But if they extend their questioning to the ultimate parts, we must not, he says, in reply concede any such things, but must say neither of what parts we consist, nor, likewise, of how many, either innite or nite. I have, I think, quoted his actual words, so that you may see how far he conserved the common conceptions, urging us to think of each body as consisting neither of certain parts nor of some number of them, either innite or nite.

I am glad that Plutarch went to the trouble of quoting Chrysippus verbatim, since I reject Plutarchs gloss on the passage quoted. In rejecting ultimate parts, either nite or innite in number, Chrysippus need not be urging us to think of each body as consisting neither of certain parts nor of some number of them, either nite or innite. For, despite what Plutarch might think, one can reject ultimate parts without denying that an object has parts at all. Nor need one say that one cannot number the parts:5 there are in fact at least innitely many parts in any piece of gunk (at least continuum-many, indeed, which is not the smallest grade of innity), though whether Chrysippus would have realised that this is a consequence of his acceptance of real parts of objects together with the denial of ultimate parts is another matter, which I will take up in Section 3. However, certainly the only natural way of reading what Chrysippus, as quoted by
4 References of the form LS are to Long and Sedley 1987, and the LS translations are theirs. Sometimes, as in this case, I will not reproduce the entire LS selection. LS 50C is an extract from Plutarchs On Common Conceptions 1078E-1081A. 5 Unless by numbering the parts one means assigning a nite number to them (e.g. a counting number): if that is what is meant, it is a case where the parts cannot be numbered.

166

DANIEL NOLAN

Plutarch, is saying, is that while objects have parts, they do not have ultimate parts, either nite or innite. Plutarch goes on to complain that Chrysippus must be saying that the (ultimate?) parts are neither nite nor innite, and so Chrysippus must be attempting some impossible via media between nitude and innitude. But Plutarch has missed the point: Chrysippus denies the existence of ultimate parts, and instead claims that matter, while divisible, is such that every division is itself capable of further division (itself has proper parts). Chrysippus need not nd some third alternative to number the ultimate parts,6 since Chrysippus simply denies the existence of ultimate parts. The next source discussed comes from the characterisation of the Stoic view by Sextus Empiricus in LS 50F (Against the Physicists ii 121-126, 139-142). Sextus follows his characterisation and critique of a certain view of innite divisibility by saying This, then, was the appropriate reply to those who say that bodies, places and times are divided to innity, namely the Stoics. At the beginning of the discussion that this is drawn from, he had characterised three approaches, and labelled one of them as the view that bodies, places and times are divided to innity:
Next, every motion involves three things, namely bodies, places and times bodies to do the moving, places for the movement to happen in, and times for the movement to take. So it is either with these all being divided into innitely many places, times and bodies that motion happens, or with them all terminating at a partless and minimal magnitude, or with some of them divided to innity while others terminate at a partless and minimal magnitude . . . Taking them in order, let us start our argument with the rst school of thought, according to which all are divided to innity.

The discussion then continues with Sextus offering paradoxes of motion against those who hold that body, place and time are divided to innity. Two things are evident from the above passage, however. The rst is that the view that bodies, places and times are divided to innity is distinguished from views according to which division terminates at a partless and minimal magnitude. Perhaps by this latter expression Sextus intended only the atomists, who held that the process of division (of bodies at least) terminated in nitely many parts each with a positive nite magnitude.7 But the expression is broad enough to encompass theories according to
The Greeks did not include a number zero among the numbers. Sextus mainly has in mind the Epicureans, to judge from Against the Physicists ii 141-144, unless the defenders of indivisible places and bodies who were attacked
7 6

STOIC GUNK

167

which bodies, places and times are divided innitely, with this division terminating at innitely many magnitudes. An example of such a view would be one that held that space could be divided into points, with zero or innitesimal magnitudes: a view which, it can be argued, was defended by Xenocrates, among others (and criticised by Aristotle, among others). If Sextus can be read as including the latter variety of view, then we have here a case where the Stoic view is distinguished from the view of innite divisibility which is more common today, according to which, for example, space is innitely divisible, not only because there is no minimum size of regions, but also because it can be ultimately divided into points. So if we adopt this reading, Sextus distinguishes the Stoic view from the theory of innite division which holds that division terminates in partless and minimal magnitudes. If the Stoics held that bodies, places or times were divided innitely (as Sextus tells us), but there were no least parts or ultimate parts (as the quote from Chrysippus in Plutarch establishes), we have a characterisation of the Stoic view which could virtually only be that of a gunk theory. Of course, the fact that Sextus characterises the Stoic theories in this way (if indeed he did intend to distinguish them from any view committed to minimal and partless parts) is no guarantee that the Stoic theories were indeed this way: it is possible that Sextus may have misunderstood. But it is certainly strong evidence. Another piece of the puzzle provided by Sextus is evidence that the Stoics took these parts into which bodies are supposed to be innitely divided to be real parts, and that it was not just that there were unlimited possibilities for creating parts through acts of division (which is all that Aristotelian innite division is often taken to be). Sextus talks as if the Stoics are committed to bodies being divided to innity and not merely divisible to innity. In the Greek of AP ii 121, as well as saying that the rst option involves pntvn totvn ew perouw temnomnvn (ii 121) or ew peiron tmnetai (ii 123) or ew peiron tmnesyai (ii 131), (everything is innitely divisible, or divisible ad innitum in Burys 1936 translation), Sextus also characterises the division of body as ew peira smata (ii 121)? into innite bodies, or, as Bury 1936 translates it, into an innite number of bodies. There is more substantial evidence from Sextus that the Stoics did not intend their account of innite division to be merely about a potential
by Diodorus Cronos (alluded to in ii 143) included people besides those who held Epicurean doctrines.

168

DANIEL NOLAN

innity, as, for instance, Aristotle and other Peripatetics treated division. Evidence suggesting that Sextus took the Stoics to be committed to the actuality of the parts which make up the innite division can be found in the argument against the Stoics in LS 50F (Against the Physicists ii 139-42 in Bury 1936). Sextus, in his argument against the position he identies as the Stoic position, argues that if a body can be divided without end, there will be no rst part to begin movement. For this argument to touch the Stoic position, the Stoics would presumably have to believe the body has the division in actuality, and not merely in potentiality: for saying there is no rst part is different from saying that it is merely possible that there be no rst part. Sextus seems to be treating Stoic division as not merely potential. Interestingly, Sextus does not include this no rst part argument in the battery of similar arguments he offers against Stratos Peripatetic account of innitely divisible bodies in the same discussion (Against the Physicists ii 155-167 in Bury 1936): this omission would be explained if Sextus took the Peripatetics to be committed only to potential parts, while the Stoics had a stronger commitment to the actuality of a bodys parts. I do not want to say that Sextus argument about the possibility of movement succeeds against the Stoics, of course: merely that it presupposes that the Stoics would have accepted that the parts of the body are already there whenever it begins to move. The mere fact that Sextus offers the argument is evidence that Sextus interpreted the Stoics as committed to actual parts, and the fact that he does not offer it against Strato is evidence that Sextus perceived a contrast here between the two views of division and parthood.8 It seems that Sextus evidence plus the quote from Chrysippus we owe to Plutarch together establish that the Stoics treated bodies, places and times as gunk: actually divided into innite bodies, though without any ultimate parts. As well as evidence from ancients such as Plutarch and Sextus Empiricus, however, the thesis that Stoics believed in gunk solves two longstanding puzzles in the interpretation of Stoic physics: the
8 This interpretation of Sextus account of the Stoics runs counter to Dirk Baltzlys 1998 interpretation of Against the Physicists i 352. Baltzly suggests that Sextus has the Stoics in mind when he attributes to unnamed dogmatists the view that proper parts of bodies are somehow in us i.e. mind-dependent. I reject Baltzlys interpretation, since the views Sextus explicitly attributed to the Stoics seem to be quite different from the views of the unnamed dogmatists: and as Baltzly himself points out, the views attributed to the unnamed dogmatists are in conict with things we know from other sources that Chrysippus wanted to maintain, such as his response to the Sceptics growing argument.

STOIC GUNK

169

problem of the Stoic theory of mixture, and the Stoic theory of the relation between the present and time. 2.2 Blending

Alexander in his On Mixture offers a description of Chrysippus threefold account of types of mixture (Alexander, On Mixture 216, 14-218, 6, LS 48C). First there is juxtaposition (paraysiw) when two or more substances9 are put together in the same place, and juxtaposed with one another by joining as he says, while they each preserve their own substance and quality at their surface contact in such a juxtaposition, as occurs, one may say, with beans and grains of wheat when they are placed side by side. (LS 48C) Then there is fusion, or through-and-through fusion (sugxsiw), when the substances themselves and their intrinsic qualities . . . are destroyed together, as he says happens in the case of medical drugs when the things mixed together undergo mutual destruction and another body is generated out of them. (LS 48C) So far so good. But interpreters have more trouble with the third sort, which I will follow LS in calling blending, which occurs when
certain substances and their qualities are mutually extended through and through, with the original substances and their qualities being preserved in such a mixture. for the capacity to be separated again from one another is a peculiarity of blended substances, and this occurs only if they preserve their own natures in the mixture . . . He [Chrysippus] believes that such a coextension of blended bodies occurs when they pass through one another, so that no part among them fails to participate in everything contained in such a blended mixture; otherwise the result would no longer be blending but juxtaposition. (LS 48C)

This krsiw (krasis) or mjiw (mixis) is no minor detail in Stoic physics: for blending is a pervasive relation in Stoic thought. It applies to examples like water and wine (LS 48D) and blending is the relation pneuma bears to other material substances. It is the relation that re bears to hot bodies, light to illuminated air and, in virtue of the role of pneuma, it is the relation which souls bear to the bodies of animals and humans (Alexander, On Mixture 217-218, on p. 119 of Todd 1976). Apparently, such blending sometimes produces a mixture which is of greater volume than any of its

Here and elsewhere when I use the word substance, the reader should be careful not to read an Aristotelian conception of substance into what I say. (Though Alexander, when he uses the word substance in reporting Stoic views, may or may not have intended Aristotelian connotations.)

170

DANIEL NOLAN

individual ingredients, and at other times the volume of the blend is the same as that of one of its ingredients. (An example of the former would be the mixture of water and wine, while an example of the latter is light in air, or perhaps the pneuma in other bodies.) Contemporary commentators have not been very happy with Stoic blending.10 Long (1974 p. 160) calls the Stoic theory of blending ingenious but untenable; R. Todd, while accepting the Stoics had a distinctive theory of mixture when it came to pneuma, holds that the Stoics could not have intended to apply this theory of mixture literally to more mundane cases such as the mixture of water and wine, incense in air, heat in iron, etc. since this would be inherently paradoxical (Todd 1976 p. 46), and Gould (1970 p. 112) says of the Stoic theory of mixture that the critics again and again harp on its paradoxical character, and have no difculty in branding it logically unsound, though Gould says little about why. Is this because modern commentators take what Alexander attributes to Chrysippus to be incoherent? There are certainly readings on which the theory of blending set out by Alexander is incoherent. If the original substances survive blending (they are preserved), then surely they will be parts of the blend, and presumably parts of the original substances will be parts of the blend as well. So Chrysippus would be in trouble if no part of the blend fails to participate in everything contained in such a blended mixture, unless the parts blended change their parts, which is at least odd. However, there are other ways to take the story of blending presented. An account can be given whereby blending is different from juxtaposition and fusion, and in which every part of the blend which lls a region occupied by the mixture contains parts of all of the original substances mixed. Furthermore, according to this account, for any magnitude equal or less to the total magnitude of the blend, there is a part of the blend which is of that size and has as parts some of the parts of each of the original substances which are blended. This would give us a theory according to which the original substances are extended through and through, in a certain sense. This is a sense in which no matter how small a sample of the blend is taken, that sample will contain parts of all of the original substances blended; and in

Again, the primary Stoic I am attributing this view of blending to is Chrysippus. Alexander (On Mixture 216.4) tells us that some later Stoics, like Sosigenes, hold more Aristotelian accounts of blending, but dismisses these as theories which are in many respects inconsistent, adopting some Aristotelian doctrines while not sufciently repudiating the traditional Stoic theory.

10

STOIC GUNK

171

which original substances can be spread out so that for example a drop of wine could come to have parts across the entire ocean if it is blended with the ocean (LS 48B), without supposing there is any unblended residue of the original substances anywhere.11 The way this can be done requires that the original substances and the substance formed by blending are entirely composed of gunk. If the substances have divisions of minimum size, and the minimal parts are to survive the blending, then we will be unable to avoid juxtaposition rather than blending, since the atoms of each original substance will not contain any of the other blended substances. Furthermore, if minimal parts survive the blending, and if regions the size of a single atom can only contain one atom at a time, regions the size of a single atom will not contain a blend, but only a sample of one of the original substances. Likewise, even if the substances are made up of innitely many point-occupiers, the fundamental point-occupiers will continue to be of their unblended substance, and unless points are simultaneously occupied by more than one point-occupier, the putative blend will remain in some sense a juxtaposition of heterogenous point-occupiers occupying their zero-magnitude or innitesimal magnitude areas (the points). However, if each of the substances to be blended has no ultimate parts, the blend itself can contain all of these parts without there having to be any continuous region in the blend which is wholly occupied by part of only one of the blended substances. For there can be a division of the blend, such that no matter how many stages of division are carried out, all of the so-far divided proper parts of the blend contain proper parts of both of the blended substances. (This can be easily generalised for blends of more than one substance, but for convenience I shall assume that there are only two substances to be blended.) Furthermore, one can insist that

11 Another, less ambitious, claim that might be salvaged is that there could be a mixture which had a division into a privileged set of parts M, such that each member of M had parts of each of the original mixed substances in it, and the members of M were further such that each member of M had proper parts that were also among the members of M. No matter how small, then, there would always be some parts of the mixture that contained parts of each of the blended substances. This claim would be cleaner in that it would not invoke any notions of location or magnitude (the smaller than relation invoked in the use of small is just the relation of being a proper part of, which does not involve notions of magnitude) but it is harder to interpret the reports of the Stoic claims that all parts of the mixture contain parts of all of the mixed substances as implying commitment only to this purely mereological claim.

172

DANIEL NOLAN

any continuous region of the blend is wholly occupied by a piece of the blend which has parts of the original blended substances among its own parts. Thus, any sample of the blend, thought of as a spatially continuous piece of the blend, will participate in everything contained in such a blended mixture that is, it will have a part of each of the substances contained in the blend. Of course, there is a sense of sample where we can acquire a sample which contains only one of the original substances: for one way of taking a sample is to remove one of the blended substances (as water is supposed to be removable from a water/wine blend by the application of an oily sponge (LS 48D)). Since the substances are preserved, I take it that the substances and their parts would have to be literally parts of such a gunky blend; it is hard to see how one could consistently deny them the status of parts of the blend while holding that the substances as a whole are preserved. The parts of these substances, however, do not wholly occupy any region within the blend, since any region in which they are located also contains proper parts of the other blended substance. Neither is it a case of juxtaposition, with the region of the blend being composed of regions wholly occupied by parts of one of the blending substances adjacent to regions wholly occupied with parts of the other blending substance; each region within the blend is wholly occupied only by a part of the blend which is not a part of either of the original substances.12 However, every continuous region in which the blend is found contains parts of each of the blended substances, on this model, so the blended substances are indeed extended through and through. None of the continuous subregions is entirely lled with a part of one of the original substances, of course: but this does not mean that parts of the substances are not extended through such regions. 2.3 Where Are the Blended Substances While They are Blended?

The question of whether this is a case of two bodies in the same place or two objects at the same position, and if so whether that is a serious (or even fatal) problem for the Stoics, is one which arises at this point and objections to the Stoic theory of mixture as being committed to two
I am here assuming, in line with many typical mereological theories, that an object can have parts which do not ll a continuous region. Whether Chrysippus would follow me in this is another matter: but I am concerned at the moment to explore an option.
12

STOIC GUNK

173

bodies in the same place are made by both ancient and contemporary commentators.13 There seem to me to be at least two interesting questions here. Firstly, does this gunky account of mixture by itself commit its proponent to holding that two bodies can be in the same place? Secondly, if a defender of this gunky account of mixture maintains that it is a case of two bodies in the same place, is this a problem for this theory of mixture?14 As for the rst question, it seems to me that a believer in gunky bodies has several options when it comes to saying what it is for a body to be in a place (or at a position, or a location Aristotelians will see an important distinction to be drawn here, but I do not think any such distinction will be important for current purposes). Take it for granted that the mixture is in a certain place, and that certain other objects are parts of that mixture: what follows about their place? Deductively, not very much. Models are possible where an object is ascribed a location without any of its proper parts being ascribed any location at all. Normally, we think that when an object occupies a region, some at least of its proper parts occupy subregions: my foot, for example, occupies part of the space that I as a whole take up. But even for objects conceived of as ultimately being made up of atoms, there is a question about whether every proper part has a location, especially once we allow proper parts made up of parts which are spatially scattered. Where is my left kidney plus my right foot? You could say that it occupies a disconnected region one part of the region located with my kidney, one part with my foot. Or you could say that it occupies a connected region which includes those two subregions maybe those two subregions connected with a line or with a thin cylindrical region. One might even want to say that disconnected parts are only found at quite large regions maybe the object composed of my two hands (if we believe in such an object) can be found no smaller location than the region occupied by my upper body, or some other larger part which contains the two hands as proper parts. Finally, you might not want to say that such disconnected objects have a location at all perhaps the only objects which have locations are spatially connected objects. Some answers here are better than others, no doubt, and there may well be one

See further Sorabji 1988 chs. 5-6. Other interesting questions, such as how the question of the possibility of two bodies (or other objects) in one spot relates to ancient conceptions of places, and the relations of places to bodies, are ones I shall put aside here.
14

13

174

DANIEL NOLAN

correct answer to these questions but at least the question can be raised, and apparently raised intelligibly. The question becomes more acute when we are dealing with objects which do not resolve into mereological atoms. If material bodies are not composed of mereological atoms, then plausibly, some objects O will be such that when they exactly occupy a region R, each continuous (non-zero sized) subregion of that region will be exactly occupied by a part of O and only a part of O. Such Os are relatively well-behaved. There may also be objects Q even parts of well-behaved objects such as the Os such that whenever we are tempted to say they occupy a region, we can nd some other object Q, which has no parts in common with Q, which it is also tempting to say occupies that region. (In the case at hand, Q and Q together constitute a well-behaved object O, and each of the objects which exactly occupies one of the subregions of the region O exactly occupies contains parts of both Q and Q). Are we forced to say anything in particular about where such objects as Q and Q are located? It is hard to see that we are, without further principles to constrain us and in addition, this is a case where we might expect much less guidance from our ordinary ways of assigning objects to positions. We could nd locations for Q and Q easily enough we might locate Q at the smallest continuous region which contains an object which exactly occupies it and which is an object which contains Q as a part, for example, in which case Q and Q may even turn out to both take up exactly the same region as O. Or we might assign locations to only some of the objects out there for instance, for well-behaved objects such as O, but none for strange objects like Q and Q. If we take this second option, Q and Q will not be located anywhere at all (though we may still say that they are in a loose sense, since they will retain an important connection to the place where O is). If we do this, then we are not forced to say the mixed substances are in the same place the mixture is in a specic location, true enough, but while they remain mixed the components are not in a place at all (at least in the strict sense). I am not sure how best to choose between these two options, and other options which might suggest themselves for understanding the blending of gunk. Maybe we are dealing with physical (or metaphysical) questions which might be resolved differently in different possible gunky worlds, with different spaces or space-times (or things very much like spaces and times). Or maybe our linguistic practices x, somehow, what the correct way is to describe the position of gunky bodies of different sorts. It seems to me, however, that a defender of gunky mixture might hold either option

STOIC GUNK

175

(or some third option) without being convicted of obvious inconsistency. The option seems open to accept the above account of mixture without being committed to there being two mixed objects in the same place as the mixture at the same time. Whether or not the option is open to say that the ingredients of a blend, strictly speaking, lack a location, the sources seem to indicate that Chrysippus and the Stoics did not avail themselves of this option. The ancient sources agree that Chrysippus held that the blending substances coextend (Diogenes Laertius in LS 48A) or mutually coextend through and through (ntiparektenesyai . . . di lvn) according to Alexanders On Mixture, quoted in LS 48C. One gets the impression, reading the sources, that the pneuma is meant to be everywhere (albeit in different concentrations), rather than, for example, nowhere in particular. It should be noted, however, that the problem of multiple bodies being found in each others locations (at least in the sense that any region that contains within it a part of one will contain within it a part of the other) need not arise just because of the Stoics theory of mixture. Gunky division all by itself, even if it is homogeneous, may allow that we can nd two objects A and B, with no parts in common, that go together to make up a piece of gunk C such that for any part of C that exhaustively occupies a region, it contains pieces of each of the objects A and B. Perhaps this strikes us as bizarre (though whether it is deeply bizarre or merely unfamiliar is a further question), and perhaps it can be argued that this does some violence to our concept of location, or at the very least to our common conceptions about objects in space. Such a construction may not have examples in our simplest models of gunk, such as the open regions of Euclidean space. But allowing that there are such objects A, B and C is a distinctive option that falls prey to no obvious incoherence or metaphysical intractability. If Chrysippus treated blendable substances as gunk, he would have had a consistent story to tell about blending not available to his atomist rivals nor rivals, if any, who accepted innite divisibility into innite ultimate (proper-partless) parts.15 Whether Chrysippus managed to articulate this theory of mixing in an entirely consistent manner, however, is another

It may also be that a gunky blend is the best model for Anaxagoras theory of mixture (see Anaxagoras, Diels-Kranz frs. 6, 11-12). I do not know whether we could attribute such a worked-out conception of matter to Anaxagoras on the basis of the surviving evidence, however: in particular, I am inclined to suspect that if Anaxagoras had explicitly proposed a worked-out gunky conception of division, we would have heard more about it from Aristotle.

15

176

DANIEL NOLAN

matter: Alexanders report suggests that Chrysippus incoherently insisted that the blend had no parts which were parts of only one of the original substances. I am not sure whether the best course is to construe Chrysippus-according-to-Alexander charitably, for example by assuming that by part Chrysippus meant continuous part, or to assume Chrysippus fell into an understandable incoherence, or to suspect that Chrysippus was careful enough but Alexanders gloss is imperfect. One interesting thing about this gunky construal of blending is that no conclusions about the volume of the blend follow simply from the assumption that a blend is created such that, for one innite division (for example a division into parts wholly occupying regions of non-zero magnitude), every one of those parts of the blend contain parts of the blended substances. So this story of blending is consistent with the blend being no larger than one of the blended substances (as in, presumably, the case of a human body and the associated blended soul), but also with the blend being larger than either of the blended substances (as for example when water is added to wine and the volume of the blend is the sum of the volumes of the substances to be blended). It is also consistent with more implausible theories of volume: for instance that the sea could be blended into a cup of wine, or a drop of wine added to water could produce a volume innitely larger. Since these latter results are consistent with, but do not follow from, Chrysippus account of blending, the ancient objections to the Stoic account which merely ridicule these latter conclusions are misguided. For there is nothing to stop the Stoics specifying the subsequent volume of blendings on a case by case basis, or by sorting blendings into several categories.16 Furthermore, there is nothing to stop the Stoics from saying what Chrysippus apparently said, that a quantity of substance could be spread through a much greater area by blending with another than it could on its own. For example, a drop of wine could do so by blending with the entire sea (LS 48B), or gold, supposedly, does so by blending with certain drugs (LS 48C). Plutarch denigrates this as absurd, by using the example of a dissolved leg as lling large volumes of the sea (LS 48E), but rather than stamping with derision on their absurdities, Plutarchs example leg (which he gets from the Academic Arcesilaus) seems only to show that Plutarch is a bad judge of what is absurd.

16 White 1986 also defends an interpretation of Stoic mixture in which the volume of the blend need not be equal to the sum of the initial volumes of the elements.

STOIC GUNK

177

So far I have been concentrating primarily on the Stoics theory of division of body, rather than of place or time. Stobaeus holds that Chrysippus said that bodies are divided to innity, and likewise things comparable to bodies, such as surface, line, place, void and time (LS 50A). While I will later be suspicious of Stobaeus report of Chrysippus, it is independently plausible that the incorporeals which are analogous to bodies will be treated similarly in Chrysippus physics. Certainly Chrysippus views, as so far outlined, are consistent with space being made up of gunky regions (as in Whitehead) rather than of points. Assuming that Chrysippus took a gunky attitude to time, however, solves another standing difculty of Stoic interpretation, and it is to this I shall now turn. 2.4 Time

Chrysippus seems to have denied that any time is strictly speaking present (see Stobaeus at LS 51B: He [Chrysippus] says most clearly that no time is entirely present). Nevertheless, apparently, some bodies exist in the present and act in the present (some attributes are said to belong/hold (prxein) (51B), and some lekta are presently true (see Sextus Empiricus LS 51H, though Sextus may be assuming this as fact rather than as something the Stoics would be committed to)). What could be going on? If now or the present was supposed to lack temporal magnitude, or was supposed to be thought of as some sort of limit between the past and the future (as Aristotle did in Physics IV.13, 222a10), Chrysippus would understandably be reluctant to admit a part of time corresponding to it, even among the incorporeals. If his conception of time was that it was made up of sub-intervals in the fashion of gunk, there would be many intervals of time which in some sense include the present. However, none could be entirely present, since for any region of time, it will have a smaller subregion which is entirely in the past, or entirely in the future (and surely something which has a non-present part is not entirely present). While smaller and smaller regions can be specied, each of which runs up to or through the present, there will be no region corresponding entirely to the present, since the present appears to be instantaneous, but every interval of time has some nite magnitude.17 Since there are not
Compare Whitehead on spatial points: every region which includes a point, in his sense, will have a subregion which does not include that point. Indeed, Sambursky notices this striking close kinship between Chrysippus view of time and that of Whitehead (Sambursky 1959 p. 106), though without drawing any conclusions about
17

178

DANIEL NOLAN

temporal points for a gunk-loving Stoic, but only intervals, divided into smaller and smaller intervals without limit, no region can be entirely present. Chrysippus says what we would expect him to say, given a conception of time as gunk made up of intervals, on the assumption that Chrysippus identied times with these intervals of time.18 3. A Puzzle about Innity The interpretation of Chrysippus in particular, and the Stoics in general, as holding that bodies, and perhaps place and time as well, are gunk, faces one main obstacle. Gunk has an innite number of parts (continuummany, in fact). But Chrysippus seems to have denied that bodies contain an innite number of parts. Perhaps most explicit is Stobaeus: But although these are divided to innity, a body does not consist of innitely many bodies, and the same applies to surface, line and place (LS 50A), though Diogenes Laertius can be read as indicating something similar: Division is to innity, or innite according to Chrysippus (for there is not some innity which the division reaches, it is just unceasing) (LS 50B).19 Finally, Plutarch, who I have already mentioned, characterises Chrysippus as rejecting the claim that objects have innitely many parts: you may see how he conserved the common conceptions, urging us to think of each body as consisting neither of certain parts nor of some number of them, either innite or nite (LS 50C).

whether the Stoics may have shared Whiteheads gunky conception of processes and, presumably, time. 18 I hope to have avoided many of the other issues surrounding Chrysippus ontology of time: whether it exists or is a mere something, and other questions about its ontological status. There are also questions about the Stoic theory of limits, e.g. whether limits are, or are not, nothings, and this is obviously relevant to the question of the status of the present thought of as a limit of the past and future. The claim which I do take the Stoics (or at least Chrysippus) to be making is that there is no part of time which is completely present: and it is this claim which is illuminated by the realisation that the Stoics had a gunky conception of the relation of parts to wholes. 19 Todd 1973 suggests an emendation for division to innity is inconceivable (katlhptow), but I think this emendation is unlikely given how similar the unamended passage in Stobaeus is to Diogenes Laertius, and because of the evidence from Sextus that the Stoics accepted division into innitely many bodies (and so presumably did not nd it inconceivable!) In any case, Todds emended passage would pose a very similar challenge to my interpretation of Chrysippus view on innite division, since it leaves intact the suggestion that Chrysippus allowed that division was in some sense innite, while keeping the suggestion that there is no innity produced in division.

STOIC GUNK

179

Fortunately, we can dismiss Plutarchs charge, for Plutarch characterises this urging as being what Chrysippus is doing in the passage Plutarch quoted above (see p. 165). And it is clear that, in that passage at least, Chrysippus was not urging us to think of each body as consisting neither of certain parts nor of some number of them, either innite or nite, but was instead urging us to think of each body as consisting neither of certain ultimate parts, nor some number of them, either innite or nite. Chrysippus is exactly right to urge us in this fashion, since Chrysippus rejects the existence of ultimate parts, especially those which supposedly make up bodies. Perhaps Stobaeus makes the same mistake, misreading a point about ultimate parts as a point about parts in general. Furthermore, the passage quoted from Diogenes Laertius can be read, not as rejecting innite division, but instead as rejecting innite division which somehow reaches a certain innite stage, in the way that innite division into indivisible points or indivisible point-occupants would. The innite division of gunk does not result in such a nal stage, of course. Another option to consider is that perhaps Chrysippus only believed in a potential innity of division: that there is no nite limit to the number of parts that could be created through a process of dividing, but it is not the case that all of those parts are already in existence. This is the view attributed to him by many prominent contemporary authors, including Long and Sedley (1987 p. 303) and J.B. Gould (1970 p. 116). Long, Sedley and Gould all take Diogenes Laertius claim, above (LS 50B) to be evidence for this view, and it would t with Stobaeus report. I reject this reading for four main reasons. The rst two are pieces of textual evidence I have already mentioned. Sextus Empiricus draws a contrast between Stoic division and Peripatetic division, or at least Stratos (see p. 168), and offers an objection to the Stoics, but not the Peripatetics, that seems to require that the parts of a body all be in existence. If Sextus has understood the Stoics rightly, then they believed in actual parts, in contrast to Strato. The second consideration is that the Stoic theory of mixture makes sense on the reading where the parts all exist, but it is harder to make sense of if no mixed body actually has an innity of parts. Indeed, Long and Sedley draw attention to this tension between the Stoic theory of mixture and the potential parts reading (Long and Sedley 1987 p. 304). I suggest the lesson of this tension is that the Stoics did not conceive of their innite division of bodies as always merely potential, rather than that Chrysippus and others made a relatively simple blunder. The third reason is that there is positive evidence that the Stoics believed that a not-yet-divided object was already composed of innite

180

DANIEL NOLAN

parts. Plutarch De Comm. Not. 1079a says Stoics . . . believe that man does not consist of more parts than mans nger, nor the world than man. For division pulverizes to innity, and among innities there is no more or less (LS 50C). First, this suggests that men and their ngers already have parts: unless we are to suppose that the cosmos does not have parts either (which is certainly in tension with other things the Stoics want to say about things in the world being parts of the cosmos, as well as in tension with common sense). Second, there are more than nitely many parts of each: for on the assumption that the parts of a mans nger are part of that man, the only obvious way that there could be no more parts in the nger than there were in the man would be if there was no nite limit to the number of parts of either. I suppose we might doubt that Plutarch has correctly understood the Stoics here as well, but the most straightforward understanding of this passage is that Plutarch is reporting that Stoics believed in innitely many parts of such objects as ngers, men and the cosmos, and were prepared to say so. (Sambursky 1959 p. 97 interprets the passage in this way, and his translation of Plutarch 1079a on p. 141 suggests this reading even more strongly than the Long and Sedley translation.) My fourth reason to hold that the Chrysippus did not maintain a doctrine of merely potential division is that the Stoics do not seem in general to have used potential being as opposed to actual being in their metaphysics, in contrast to Aristotle and the Peripatetics. Apart from the evidence about parthood and the innitude of division, I know of no view attributed to the Stoics which suggests that they would have adopted this Peripatetic ontological status. (The claim that there is no such surviving attribution is highly falsiable, and I would welcome counter-examples if there are any.) Todd (1973 p. 23 n. 14 and 1976 p. 57-58 n. 148) also makes the claim that this device is not explicitly employed by the Stoics (1976 p. 58 n. 148).20 If appeals to potentiality and potential being are otherwise absent from Stoic doctrine, then we would need good reason to suppose they should be read into the Stoics here. The potential innity interpretation of the Stoics should be rejected.
Todd also cites Plotinus Enneads VI. 1. 26 as evidence that In general Stoicism rejected potential being (1973 p. 23 n. 14), but I do not quite see how the relevant passage of Plotinus is to be read in this way: with equal justice, it could be read as a complaint by Plotinus that the Stoics treated all being as potential! I do not wish to hazard any specic interpretation of Plotinus VI.1.26, but I doubt that a defender of the claim that the Stoics embraced only potential innities and potential parts need be very troubled by it.
20

STOIC GUNK

181

So my opinion is that we should not change our view of the Stoic conception of division. Most likely Stobaeus is mistaken about Chrysippus view, but even if he is not, I think my thesis about what Chrysippus and the Stoics believed about division may survive. If I am right about the Stoic conception of division, then it follows from Chrysippus view that there are an innite number of existing parts of any body (or place or time). But I do not need to claim that Chrysippus would have realised this. Believing that objects are without smallest parts and divided into parts without ceasing, but failing to believe that there were an innite number of such parts, is a natural mistake for someone like Chrysippus to make. Consider the picture Chrysippus is working with: we have a body, which is made of sub-bodies, which are themselves made of subbodies, and so on without limit. It is tempting to suppose that there is no completed totality of these bodies, but only that for any nite number of sub-divisions, there are more sub-divisions than that. Without any complete collection of these sub-bodies, then it is plausible that there is no way of appropriately measuring their quantity. This tempting supposition would be a mistake, but not one that even mathematicians would have been able to diagnose properly before Georg Cantors work on innity in the late 19th century. Just as we do not suppose that Aristotle was familiar with the works of Weirstrauss on limits, we should not suppose Chrysippus had available to him the insights of Cantor. Neither the supposition that Chrysippus realised that his account committed him to an actual innity of bodies, nor the supposition that Chrysippus failed to realise this, are completely compelling. In the absence of further information about the position of Chrysippus in particular or the Stoics in general, this question may even be unable to be settled. I am inclined, on balance, to think that the Chrysippus did realise that his view was committed to an innite number of bodies and did hold that there were innitely many parts of each body:21 but in doing this I am discounting Stobaeus report in favour of other apparently more reliable sources like Sextus Empiricus.

21 Recall that Plutarch LS 50C also suggests that Stoics . . . believe that man does not consist of more parts than his nger, nor the world than man. For division pulverizes bodies to innity, and among innities there is no more or less.

182

DANIEL NOLAN

Conclusion If I am right, Chrysippus articulated a theory of division which was importantly different from those of his Peripatetic and Atomist rivals, and which was deployed in important areas of Stoic physics, such as the issue of the nature of mixture (so important in explaining the connection between pneuma and the passive matter it acted upon) and the nature of the present. There are other issues which may also be illuminated by this interpretation of the Stoics, particularly their attitudes to questions concerning motion and questions concerning geometry. However, since these bring up somewhat independent and also independently thorny questions of interpretation concerning the Stoic theories of limits, magnitude, mathematical objects and so on, I have not addressed them here, or mentioned them only in passing. As with any interpretation of Stoic physics, we are faced with fragmentary evidence largely ltered through hostile sources, so it may be that no interpretation can hope to be conclusively demonstrated. At the very least, however, the gunk option deserves to take its place in the range of alternatives to be considered when we try to understand the Stoic position in Hellenistic physical and metaphysical debates.22 Department of Philosophy University of St Andrews References
Baltzly, D. 1998 Who are the Mysterious Dogmatists of Adversus Mathematicos ix 352?. Ancient Philosophy 18: 145-170. Bury, R.G. 1936. Sextus Empiricus III (Against the Physicists and Against the Ethicists), Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA. Gould, Josiah B. 1970. The Philosophy of Chrysippus. E.J. Brill, Leiden. Lewis, David. 1991. Parts of Classes. Basil Blackwell, Oxford. Long A.A. 1974. Hellenistic Philosophy. Charles Scribners Sons, New York. Long, A.A. and Sedley, D.N. 1987. The Hellenistic Philosophers, 2 vols. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Sambursky, S. 1959. Physics of the Stoics. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London. Simons, P. 1987. Parts, A Study in Ontology. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Sorabji, R. 1988. Matter, Space and Motion. Duckworth, London.

Thanks to Dirk Baltzly, Sarah Broadie, Jon Hesk, Tom Holden, Calvin Normore, David Sedley, an anonymous referee for this journal and audiences at the 2001 Australasian Association of Philosophy meeting, 2001 Creighton Club meeting, and at the University of St Andrews for helpful discussions of the material in this paper.

22

STOIC GUNK

183

Todd, R. 1973. Chrysippus on Innite Divisibility. Apeiron 7.1, 21-29. 1976. Alexander of Aphrodisias on Stoic Physics. E.J. Brill, Leiden. White, M.J. 1982. Zenos Arrow, Divisible Innitesimals and Chrysippus. Phronesis, 27.3: 239-254. 1986. Can Unequal Quantities of Stuffs Be Totally Blended?. History of Philosophy Quarterly 3.4: 379-389. 1992. The Continuous and the Discrete. Clarendon Press, Oxford. Williamson, T. 1994. Vagueness. Routledge, London.