Democritus

DEMOCRITUS. - Greek philosopher, b. at Abdera (Thrace) ca. 460 B.C., d. there at the age of 109. He traveled within the Greek world and, probably, outside it as well. His life, entirely devoted to study and scientific research — he said he "would rather discover a single cause than [have] the kingdom of the Persians" (B 118) — was in the Alexandrian age wrapped in romantic details. To the confusion with Bolus Democritus of Mendes (2nd cent. B.C.) is due the reputation for mysticism and magic that was later attached to his figure.

The list of his works, preserved by Diogenes Laertius, is owed to Thrasyllus of Mendes (1st cent. A.D.), and comprises 13 tetralogies, plus two groups (generally considered spurious) of 9 works each under the twofold heading of Unclassified Works and Notes. The tetralogies comprise works on ethics, physics, mathematics, music (that is, language, literature and music) and technical subjects. The fragments that have come down to us, on the whole authentic, number about 300.

D. is the last natural philosopher of the pre-Socratic age and the first great figure of a scientist in the ancient world. A disciple of Leucippus, he developed atomism with greater logical rigor. The assertion of some modern scholars that he, like Epicurus later, also professed a mathematical atomism is groundless and contradicted by the texts (cf. Aristotle, De gen. et corr., I, 2, 316 a 14). Texts of Archimedes, recently discovered, have revealed that he found, without however giving a demonstration of it, the volume of the pyramid. D.'s contribution in the field of the special sciences must not have been small, and to him is owed the first great systematization of that theory of progress which has its beginnings in Anaxagoras and becomes canonical in Epicurus. He was, however, above all a metaphysical mind, very far from that vulgar empiricism that certain modern reconstructions have attributed to him. Continuing the spirit of the Eleatic tradition, he held firm to and deepened the distinction between knowledge of the senses and knowledge of the intellect, considering the former obscure and spurious and only the latter legitimate and true (B 11). It is the intellect that by its reasonings arrives at the 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 that enter into relation with them, can only be an object of opinion. All sensible qualities are by convention (νόμω) and, since the constitution of individual things escapes our direct experience, "the truth remains for us in the depths" (A 49; B 6-10; 117). To the alogical realism of Protagoras, who from the panspermia of Anaxagoras concluded that all sensations are true, D., appealing to the higher instance of the intellect, objects, as Aristotle would later do, that therefore the contrary is also true (A 114). The contrast between the difficulties of experience and the demands of reason did not, however, have in him a dogmatic and therefore skeptical character, but, as appears from frg. 125, where the senses are introduced to refute reason, a critical character. Under such conditions science could only be experience controlled by reasoning. Concerning the gods the fundamental text is in Cicero (Nat. deor., I, 120 [A 74]): "now he asserts that in the universe there are images (εἴδωλα — by images, that is, material images that depart from bodies or are formed in the air, is explained the vision of the eyes and of the mind) endowed with divinity, now he calls gods the atoms of which the soul of man is formed, themselves also scattered throughout the universe, now animated images that are wont to benefit or harm men, now images of such size as to embrace the entire world from outside." This text is to be interpreted not in the sense that D. admitted the existence of the gods, but that the theories mentioned above served him to explain the mystical phenomena and the visions whose reality he, as an observer, did not believe he could deny.

In the field of ethics there takes shape in him, in an even more defined form, the figure of the contemplative life (βίος θεωρητικός), which the Greeks had already known with Anaxagoras. The supreme ideal is knowledge, and the life consecrated to study is sustained by a quietistic morality, far from every excess and which places the good in the absolute tranquillity and harmony of the soul (εὐθυμία, εὐστέω). In the limitedness of human things, the contemplation of life is not free from a certain vein of pessimism, which disinterestedness with regard to the world and the consciousness of the superiority attained from the habit of science and the search for causes incline toward a smile. Hence the legend, perhaps not entirely such, of D. who laughs, as from the theoretical ideal [comes] that of D. who blinds himself in order to be able to speculate better with the mind. Many traits of D.'s soul are found again in Euripides, but it cannot be demonstrated that the latter knew him: later they will be characteristic of the cultured men of the Alexandrian age.

Carlo Diano