DEMOCRITO. – Greek philosopher, born at Abdera (Thrace) about 460 B.C., died there at the age of 109. He travelled throughout the Greek world and probably beyond it as well. His life, entirely devoted to study and scientific research—he used to say that he “preferred the discovery of a single cause to the kingdom of the Persians” (B 118)—was surrounded in the Alexandrian age by romanticized details. The confusion with Bolo Democratico of Mende (2nd century B.C.) accounts for the reputation for mysticism and magic that was subsequently added to his image.
The list of his works, preserved by Diogenes Laertius, is due to Thrasyllus of Mende (1st century A.D.) and comprises 13 tetralogies, plus two groups (generally regarded as spurious) of 9 works each, under the twofold heading of Unclassified Works and Notes. The tetralogies include works on ethics, physics, mathematics, music (that is, language, literature, and music), and technology. The fragments that have come down to us, authentic in their entirety, number about 300.
D. is the last natural philosopher of the Presocratic age and the first great figure of a scientist in the ancient world. A disciple of Leucippus, he developed his atomism with greater logical rigor. The assertion of certain modern scholars that he, like Epicurus later, also professed a mathematical atomism is without foundation and is contradicted by the texts (cf. Aristotle, De gen. et corr., I, 2, 316 a 14). Recently discovered texts of Archimedes have revealed that he found, though without providing its proof, the volume of the pyramid. D.’s contribution to the special sciences must have been considerable, and to him is due the first great systematization of that theory of progress which begins with Anaxagoras and becomes canonical in Epicurus. Above all, however, he possessed a metaphysical mind, far removed from the vulgar empiricism that certain modern reconstructions have attributed to him. Continuing the spirit of the Eleatic tradition, he maintained and deepened the distinction between sense knowledge and intellectual knowledge, considering the former obscure and spurious and only the latter legitimate and true (B 11). It is the intellect which, through its reasoning, arrives at knowledge of the atoms and therefore also of the void, and this is the only knowledge of which one can be certain. The rest, depending on the disposition of the sense organs and of the elements with which they come into contact, can be nothing more than a matter of opinion. All sensible qualities exist by convention (νόμω), and since the constitution of individual things eludes our direct experience, “the truth remains for us in the depths” (A 49; B 6-10; 117). Against the alogical realism of Protagoras, who concluded from Anaxagoras’s panspermia that all sensations are true, D., appealing to the superior authority of the intellect, objects, as Aristotle would later do, that then the opposite is also true (A 114). The contrast between the difficulties of experience and the demands of reason did not, however, possess in him a dogmatic and therefore skeptical character, but, as appears from frgm. 125, where the senses are introduced to refute reason, a critical character. Under such conditions, science could be nothing other than experience controlled by reasoning. As for the gods, the fundamental text is in Cicero (Nat. der., I, 120 [A 74]): “now he asserts that in the universe there are certain images (εἴδωλαι; by material images that depart from bodies or are formed in the air, the vision of the eyes and of the mind is explained), endowed with divinity; now he calls gods the atoms of which the human soul is composed, likewise scattered throughout the universe; now animate images that are accustomed to help or harm human beings; now images of such magnitude that from outside they embrace the entire world.” This text should not be interpreted in the sense that D. admitted the existence of the gods, but rather that the theories mentioned above served him to explain the mystical phenomena and visions whose reality, as an observer, he did not believe he could deny.
In the field of ethics, the figure of the contemplative life (βίος θεωρητικώς), which the Greeks had already known through Anaxagoras, takes shape with him in an even more clearly defined form. The supreme ideal is
knowledge, and the life consecrated to study is supported by a quietistic morality, remote from every excess and placing the good in the absolute tranquility and harmony of the soul (εὐθυμία, εὐστέω). Within the limitations of human things, contemplation of life is not free from a certain vein of pessimism, which detachment from the world and the awareness of superiority acquired through the habit of science and the search for causes incline toward a smile. Hence the legend—not perhaps entirely so—of D. the laughing philosopher, just as the ideal of theory gave rise to that of D. blinding himself in order to speculate more effectively with the mind. Many features of D.’s soul are found in Euripides, but it cannot be demonstrated that the latter knew him; later they would become characteristic of the educated men of the Alexandrian age.