Atoms, Aggregates, and Universals in Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika

[This is the introduction to an article I am currently preparing for submission. Comments welcome]

At its most capacious, 'atomism' can be taken to refer to any theory according to which the world consists in elementary units, which are not further analyzable into something more elementary. 'Units' should be understood here not to refer to particles, but to any physical or metaphysical, quantitatively or qualitatively basic principle from which the perceptible world derives. The most familiar variety of atomism, the variety that can still be called 'atomism' even in the most restricted sense, takes the basic units as elementary particles that are (i) physical; (ii) ungenerable and incorruptible; and (ii) qualitatively neutral or lacking in 'secondary' qualities, as the color, smell, etc., of compound bodies emerge from the arrangements of the atoms constituting them.

If we take atomism of this latter variety as the standard model, which we might call 'Democritean', then we may begin to construct a typology of atomisms by plotting them in relation to criteria (i)-(iii). At some remove from the Democritean model we find Leibniz's theory of monads, according to which the basic units of reality are indeed ungenerable and incorruptible, and are responsible for the qualitative variety of the phenomenal world without themselves bearing these qualities, and yet according to which, by contrast with Democritean atomism, these requisites are not the physically indivisible constituents of the phenomenal world, in the way bricks are the constituents of a house, but rather are the metaphysical requisites of the physical world. Leibniz calls them variously 'atoms of substance' or 'metaphysical atoms'. Commentators have tended to take this doctrine, and Leibniz's labels for it, as amounting to a rejection of atomism, but on a certain more capacious view of what atomism might be, we could instead take Leibniz's claim that he is committed to metaphysical rather than physical atoms as commitment to a variety of atomism.

 Quite a bit further still from the Democritean model we find the momentary quality atoms of the 7th-century CE Buddhist philosopher Dharmakīrti, or of his predecessor, the 6th-century philosopher Dignāga. These are atoms only in the sense that they are the basic units of reality, not constituted by anything else, and not comprehensible in terms of something more fundamental.

We may represent the distinctions made so far as follows:

	Atoms are physical	Atoms are ungenerable and incorruptible	Atoms are qualitatively neutral
Democritus	Yes	Yes	Yes
Leibniz	No	Yes	Yes
Dignāga-Dharmakīrti	No	No	?

 The different varieties of atomism preserve their differences when we turn to a consideration of the composite entities or pseudo-entities that arise from the atoms. Whereas Democritean atomism gives us non-substantial physical aggregates, Dharmakīrtian atomism yields something closer to property clusters. A Leibnizian metaphysical atomism gives us what can be called entia per aggregatum, but again this aggregation does not build up composite bodies out of parts; rather, bodies result at the phenomenal level from the perceptual activity of the metaphysical atoms.

One implication of any version of atomism might be thought to be that there can be no composite substances, that anything composed out of atoms will remain only an arrangement of atoms, and nothing over and above this arrangement. A possible corollary of this point is that atomism seems to push in favor of nominalism: if aggregate entities are nothing over and above the arrangement of atoms that constitute them, then surely they cannot be the instantiation of some universal or other.

The two principles that would seem to be incompatible with atomism are called in the Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika school of Indian philosophy avayavin or 'whole', and sāmānya or 'universal'. According to D. N. Shastri, these are the "two chief synthetic or unifying principles" at work in this school (Shastri 1997, 306). Yet the principle attainment of at least the Vaiśeṣika branch of this school was to spell out an atomistic theory of the natural world, and an important question arises as to how any atomistic doctrine could possibly accommodate real wholes or universals. In at least this regard, the Dharmakīrtian variety of atomism is rather more coherent, or at least predictable, to the extent that it takes only dharmas or discrete moments to exist, and denies any causal connection between them or synthesis of them. Such synthesis can exist only in our thought. Here, Leibniz's metaphysical atomism shows as a middle road, as he evidently believes that, as a result of the perceptual activity of the simple substances from which compound bodies result, these compound bodies may be elevated to the level of corporeal substances, which is to say true unities per se. At the same time, Leibniz utterly denies the reality of universals.

We can represent the distinctions of the previous paragraph as follows:

	Atoms (physical, metaphysical, or temporal)	Wholes	Universals
Dignāga-Dharmakīrti	Yes	No	No
Leibniz	Yes	Yes	No
Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika	Yes	Yes	Yes

 In this article I would like to go some distance towards illuminating the philosophical justification of the Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika defense of 'realist atomism', which simultaneously reduces reality to elementary particles, yet holds onto the reality of the substances, and even of the kinds, constituted by these particles. I would like to do so by considering this school's account, first of all, through the lens of recent scholarship by B. K. Matilal and others, who have argued that the universal in the Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika tradition must be understood as something rather more like a mass term in the Western sense. Having established this, I would like to go on to consider Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika's realist atomism through the lens of Leibniz's corporeal-substance metaphysics, an aspect of his philosophy which many scholars have thought impossible, because incompatible with his basic monadological metaphysics. Both Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika atomism and Leibnizian corporeal-substance theory might be accused of seeking to have their cake and eat it too. But this accusation is wrong in both cases, as I'll proceed to show.

*

Bimal Krishna Matilal, The Navya-Nyāya Doctrine of Negation: The Semantics and Ontology of Negative Statements in Navya-Nyāya Philosophy, Harvard University Press, 1968.

---- ---- ---- ----, The Character of Logic in India, SUNY Press, 1998.

D. N. Shastri, Critique of Indian Realism: The Philosophy of Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika and Its Conflict with the Buddhist Dignāga School, Delhi, Bharatiya Vidya Prakashan, 1997 [1964].

Fedor Ippolitovich Shcherbatskoï, Teoriia poznaniia i logika po ucheniiu pozdneïshikh buddistov, Saint Petersburg, Izdatel’stvo Asta-Press, 1995.

Comments

[Vidya]

This was very interesting, though I found Leibniz's definition of the soul as a special type of monad
different from the treatment in any Indian philosophy that deals with atomism. In addition to Dignāga-Dharmakīrti and vaiśeṣika it may be interesting to bring in the other kinds of atomism in schools such as Jaina and ājīvika too into this picture

[Tom Cabarga]

Dignaga-Dharmakirti supposedly derive from Nagarjuna. Nagarjuna, like Plato in the Parmenides, demonstrates that atomistic theories tend to produce logical contradictions. These reflections are very relevant to modern scientific ideas like the "point singularity" and suggest there may be conceptual problems associated with such ideas.