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Two and a half thousand years ago, a Greek thinker looked at the world and saw atoms and empty space. This closing lecture from Academy of Ideas on the Presocratics profiles Democritus, the founder of atomism. He taught that everything is made of tiny, indestructible building blocks moving in the void — and that qualities like color and sweetness exist only by human convention. The video also opens his ethics: a good life, Democritus believed, is not about chasing pleasure but about achieving a calm, well-disciplined soul. From Feynman’s favorite sentence to Galileo’s echo of the same idea, this is the story of a mind centuries ahead of its time.
Full Video Transcript
The Presocratics Lecture 7, Democritus. We have reached the final lecture in our exploration through the ideas of the earliest known philosophers of Western civilization, the Presocratics.
In this final lecture, we will direct our attention to Democritus, who is most famous for being one of the founders of the philosophical doctrine known as Atomism.
As a quick side note, a philosopher known as Leucippus is often heralded as the founder of Atomism and the teacher of Democritus.
However, nothing is known of Leucippus and some ancient philosophers denied that he even existed.
Thus, for our lecture we will proceed with attributing the ideas of atomism to Democritus alone.
The Presocratics’ influence on Plato and Aristotle is well known.
However, the ideas of Democritus are somewhat unique among the Presocratics
in that his atomism, along with playing a formative role in shaping the thought of Plato and Aristotle,
influenced the mechanical philosophy.
a view which was to become dominant during the scientific revolution.
The mechanical philosophy was developed by thinkers such as René Descartes,
Pierre Gassendi, Galileo Galilei, and Isaac Newton.
While many of the ideas of the mechanical philosophers have been abandoned,
the idea that the universe is composed of tiny building blocks called atoms
remained influential up until the 20th century.
And as we will see, the idea of atoms was first put forth by Democritus
over 2,000 years ago. The great 20th century physicist Richard Feynman
once said that, if in some cataclysm
all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed and only one sentence passed
on to the next generation of creatures,
what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words?
I believe that it is the atomic hypothesis, that all things are made of
atoms, little particles that move around in perpetual motion.
So who was this man who first put forth the scientific statement which, according to Feynman, contains the most information in the fewest words?
Democritus was born in approximately 460 BC in Abdera, a town in northern Greece.
Perhaps more than any other pre-Socratic philosopher, Democritus deserves the epithet genius.
He is said to have written over 60 works on topics ranging from ethics, physics, astronomy, medicine, and musical theory.
To name but a few of his subjects of interest.
Unfortunately, none of these works survive, and for knowledge of him, we must rely on a few fragments of his works which remain,
and on the reports of other ancient philosophers.
Although Democritus was interested in a wide range of subjects,
he is most famous for the claim that the universe is composed of atoms and void,
an idea which, as we mentioned, was to have a profound influence on future philosophers and scientists.
The word atom comes from the Greek word atomos, which combines the privative a, indicating absence, with the verb tomos, which means to split.
So the word atomos, or atom, means unsplittable.
Democritus’ atoms were to him the fundamental building blocks of everything in the universe and were indivisible, solid, and indestructible.
These atoms exist in the void, which Democritus conceived of as empty space or nothingness,
and all things in this world are created when atoms collide and become entangled with each other.
Along with positing the existence of void, something which earlier pre-Socratics such as Parmenides had denied as a possibility,
Democritus was groundbreaking for his explanation regarding the nature of qualities such as hot, cold, sweet, or wet.
Empedocles, if you remember from a previous lecture, claimed that the basic
constituents of the universe are particles of water, earth, air, and fire. A
fire particle, for example, is hot, while a water particle has the quality of
wetness. Democritus asserted that atoms are not hot or wet. In fact, he claimed
that they have no qualities whatsoever. To understand this idea, it will be
helpful to invoke a concept commonly used today in the discipline of
philosophy of mind. Qualia are the phenomenal qualities that make up our
subjective experience. Our experience of the redness of a rose, the sound of a
beautiful song, or the sweetness of honey are all examples of qualia. Democritus
proposed that the qualia are not to be found in the atoms as they exist in
reality. In other words, the objective character of atoms is that they are
completely devoid of all qualities. Being devoid of all qualities, Democritus
thought that atoms are defined solely by three different quantitative measures.
More specifically, he believed that atoms differ from one another according to
their shape, arrangement, and position. If atoms are defined solely by quantitative
characteristics and are wholly devoid of qualities, then how is it that our
experience is always an experience of qualia? To take a concrete example, if a
rose is nothing but a collection of atoms that are devoid of color, then how
How is it that we experience a rose as being red?
To understand how Democritus answered this we must familiarize ourselves with a distinction
which was present in the mind of every ancient Greek thinker of the 5th century BC.
That being, the distinction between things that exist by nature and things that exist
by convention or custom.
To use the Greek words, thinkers in this ancient period distinguished between that which exists
by physis and that which exists by nomos.
What exists by nature or by physis is something that is objective and written into the fabric
of nature or reality, so that even if human beings were wiped from this earth, that which
exists by nature would remain in existence.
What exists by custom or nomos is something which is an artificial human construction
and dependent on the human mind for its existence.
If human beings were wiped from the earth, that which exists by convention would also
disappear forever. Now, Democritus thought that the qualia we experience do not exist by nature
or in reality, but exist by convention or nomos. Our experience of sweet, bitter, cold, and red
arise when the atoms of the world contact the atoms in our body, and thus are artificial
constructions wholly dependent on human beings. Qualities, to put it another way, arise from the
physical interaction of the atoms of the world with the atoms of our body. In reality, sweet,
bitter, cold, red, and all other qualities do not exist and have no objective basis within the
nature of things. Democritus’ most famous fragment conveys this notion. He wrote,
By convention sweet, by convention bitter, by convention hot, by convention cold, by convention
color, but in reality, atoms and void. In the 17th century, Galileo, who as we mentioned at the
onset of this lecture was influenced by Atomism, echoed this exact idea of
Democritus’s.
I think therefore that these tastes, odors, colors, etc., so far as their
objective existence is concerned, are nothing but mere names for something
which resides exclusively in our sensitive body, so that if the perceiving
creatures were removed, all these qualities would be annihilated and
abolished from existence.
Democritus’ doctrine of atomism also put forth some intriguing epistemological insights,
or in other words, insights into the nature of knowledge.
The truth, according to Democritus, is that in reality there exists atoms and void.
However, this truth lies hidden from our senses.
Just as we cannot see from the surface what lies at the depths of the ocean,
we cannot through our senses perceive and come to obtain knowledge of atoms,
which are too small to be perceived.
In reality, wrote Democritus, we know nothing, for truth is in the depths.
Our experience of the world does not convey the truth regarding the nature of things.
There are no colors, sounds, tastes, or smells in reality.
What we perceive with our senses is only apparent knowledge.
Real knowledge or truth lies hidden within the depths of the universe.
A person must know that he is separated from reality, wrote Democritus.
Although, according to Democritus, the truth lies concealed within the depths of reality,
it is not impossible to arrive at truths.
Democritus himself thought he had arrived at a truth with his postulation that objective
reality is constituted solely by atoms and void.
To arrive at the truth, Democritus, like Parmenides before him, thought that one must rely on
the mind or reason, a view which in epistemology has come to be known as rationalism.
While Democritus was similar to Parmenides in that he thought it was only through the
use of our reason that we could obtain legitimate knowledge or truth, he was unlike Parmenides
in that he thought we must not disregard our senses altogether, but instead utilize them
as a starting point on the road to truth.
Before we leave Democritus and conclude this final lecture on the Presocratics, we must
briefly attend to his ethical ideas.
Diogenes Laertius, in his Lives of Eminent Philosophers, had this to say about Democritus’s
thoughts on the good life.
The end of action is tranquility, which is not identical with pleasure, as some by a
false interpretation have understood, but a state in which the soul continues calm and
strong, undisturbed by any fear or superstition or any other emotion.
This he calls well-being and many other names.
In order to achieve tranquility and peace of mind,
Democritus thought it was necessary that one develop self-discipline
and become the master of one’s passions.
The courageous man is he who overcomes not only the enemy, but pleasures also.
But some are masters of cities, yet slaves to women, he wrote.
However, Democritus did not preach asceticism or a total renunciation of pleasures altogether.
Instead, indulging in pleasures in a controlled manner is necessary for
tranquility and peace of mind.
Self-control increases delights and makes pleasures greater, he wrote.
It is likely that Democritus saw the masses of men as slaves to their passions
and desires, chasing blindly after money, fame, honor, sexual gratification, and
social acceptance, and concluded that such a slavish life is not a life worth
living. One must become the master of oneself, the maker of one’s destiny, and the sculptor of
one’s character. Such a life is the only life appropriate to the human being. As the 3rd century
Neoplatonist Porphyry wrote, Democritus said that to live badly, and not with prudence and self-control
and holiness, was not to live badly, but to be a long time in dying. We will conclude our final
lecture of the Presocratic series with a quote from Democritus which is eerily similar to
one of the more famous quotes by Shakespeare. Democritus, unlike the other Presocratics,
was not merely a natural philosopher. He was a polymath and a genius with profound insights
into the human condition. The world is a stage, he wrote, life an entrance. You came, you
saw, you went away.
Source: Academy of Ideas