The philosophical perspectives of Plato and Lucretius deal with the inevitability and contingency of world formation. Plato emphasized the inevitable meaning given by the creator, while Lucretius saw the world as a product of chance. Their ideas have important implications for understanding modern and future societies.
Plato saw the meaning of things as pre-existing before the things themselves, so he believed that things must have a “necessary meaning” given to them by the “maker” who created them, and so the world we live in is also shaped by the maker according to the necessary meaning. For Plato, the nature of things and their meaning were inseparable, and this fundamentally shaped the way we perceive and understand them.
Lucretius, however, argued that the world was made up of atoms, and that the world was created when spontaneously moving atoms happened to meet and coagulate. He saw this principle of chance as the essence of the world. Lucretius believed that before the world was formed, an infinite number of atoms were in a state of falling parallel to each other due to the weight of the atom itself. If one of these atoms broke its parallelism and tilted by an almost imperceptible deviation, it would eventually encounter its neighbor, and this encounter would cause the atoms to coagulate in a series of encounters, resulting in the formation of the world. He named the tiny deviations of one atom a “clinamen” and argued that the way the atoms encountered each other and solidified was not predetermined. In that sense, the world we live in is the product of chance.
However, Lucretius’s ideas went largely unnoticed, as the idea that the world was shaped by a creator in a sense of necessity dominated Western philosophy. Under the influence of Plato, Western philosophy had long emphasized necessity and teleology, which became the basic framework for understanding nature and society.
On the other hand, capitalism, which has developed significantly since the Industrial Revolution, triggered by the invention of machines and technological innovation, has deepened the gap between the rich and the poor, leading to serious confrontations between capitalists and workers. In response, some philosophers argued that economics is the only principle that determines the structure of human society and the direction of historical development, and that the conflict between capitalists and workers is merely following a predetermined sequence of historical development, and that capitalism will soon disappear from human history.
However, Althusser believed that the complex and diverse social structure and the historical development of humanity could not be interpreted by a single principle. Inspired by the philosophy of Lucretius, he argued that the current course of human history was not the result of a predetermined sequence of historical development but merely the result of chance. Using the example of 18th-century Italy, where capital, technology, and labor were in place for capitalism to arise, but it did not, he argued that many factors must coincide and coagulate for capitalism to occur, and that economics does not determine everything.
This argument provides a new way of looking at the world. If the world is shaped by a single pre-existing principle, then humans are merely following the course of history, which has already been directed. In this sense, the arguments of Lucretius and Althusser for the contingency of world formation are significant in that they suggest that we can move toward other worlds by attempting “new encounters” with the world we live in.
The ideas of these philosophers are not just theories of the past. Even in the midst of modern technological advances and social change, they still raise important questions. How do we understand the world and human existence, and what possibilities can we find within it? This can provide us with new perspectives and approaches to solving the problems we face. The ideas of Lucretius and Althusser provide us with keys to the future, while also inviting us to continue to reflect on the nature of human existence.
