The Cambridge Companion to Early Greek Philosophy
Page 27
So far from threatening the foundations of the theory, then, the appearance-reality gap is essential to it. In that case, what is the point of the complaint of the senses in B125? Does not that text provide conclusive evidence that Democritus believed that the gap threatened the theory, and hence (assuming that he understood his own theory) conclusive evidence against the interpretation that I am advancing? I do not think so, for the simple reason that we lack the context from which the quotation comes. The point of the complaint need not (and given the nature of Democritus’ theory certainly should not) be the admission that the theory is self-refuting. It is at least as likely to be a warning against misunderstanding the account of the appearance-reality gap as requiring the abandonment of sensory evidence. We may imagine an antiempiricist opponent (Plato, say) appealing to the gap to support the claim that the senses are altogether unreliable, and should therefore be abandoned. In reply Democritus points out that the attack on the senses itself relies on sensory evidence. Sextus does indeed align Democritus with Plato in this regard (M. VIII.56). It is my contention, however, that when we put the Aristotelian evidence of the atomists’ acceptance of the appearances as the starting-point of their theory together with all the other evidence, including the fragments, we have to conclude that the picture of Democritus as a failed Platonist is a misunderstanding. The atomists’ distinction between appearance and reality does not involve “doing away with sensible things”; on the contrary, appearances are fundamental to the theory, first as providing the data that the theory has to explain and secondly as providing the primary application for the observationally based terminology that is used to describe the nature and behaviour of the entities posited by the theory.17
A final objection, however, comes from Aristotle himself, who describes Democritus as concluding from conflicting appearances “that either nothing is true, or it is unclear to us” (Metaph. IV.5 1009b11-12). This is a very puzzling passage, for a number of reasons. Aristotle is explaining why some people go along with Protagoras in believing that whatever seems to be the case is so, and in the immediate context (1009a38 ff.) he cites the phenomena of conflicting appearances and the lack of a decisive criterion for choosing between them as conducing to that belief. But at B9 he shifts from the thought that conflicting appearances lead to the view that all appearances are true to the sceptical account of those phenomena, namely that it is unclear which of the appearances is true or false, “for this is no more true than that, but they are alike.” This, Aristotle says (i.e., the belief that none of the appearances is truer than any other) is why Democritus said that either nothing is true, or it is unclear to us. So Democritus is represented as posing a choice of adopting either the dogmatic stance that none of the appearances is true, or the sceptical stance that it is unclear (which is true). Yet, in the next sentence Aristotle says that because Democritus and others assimilate thought to perception, they hold that what appears in perception is necessarily true (cf. GC I 315b9 they (i.e., Leucippus and Democritus) thought that the truth was in appearance). So unless Aristotle is radically confused, the disjunction “either none of the appearances is true, or it is unclear to us” must be consistent with the thesis that all perceptions are true. If “it is unclear to us” is read as “it is unclear to us which is true,” then the claims are inconsistent.
I suggest, however, that what Democritus said was to the effect that either nothing is true, or it (i.e., the truth) is unclear. The first alternative he plainly rejected, so he maintained the second. And that is precisely what he maintains in B117: the truth (about the atoms and the void) is in the depths, that is, it is not apparent in perception – it is unclear (adêlon) in the sense that it is not plain to see. That he used the term adêlon to apply to atoms and the void is attested by Sextus (M. VII.140), who cites Diotimus as evidence for Democritus’ holding that the appearances are the criterion for the things that are unclear and approving Anaxagoras’ slogan “the appearances are the sight of the things that are unclear.” The truth, then, that is, the real nature of things, is unclear (i.e., nonevident), but all perceptions are true in that all are equipollent and indispensable to theory.
If that is what Democritus held, then it may reasonably be said that “true” is the wrong word to characterise the role of appearances in his theory. “All appearances are equipollent” is equally compatible with “All appearances are false,” and in view of his insistence on the nonevident character of the truth, it would surely have been less misleading for him to say the latter. Though there are some difficult issues here, I shall not argue the point, since I am not concerned with defending Democritus’ thesis that all appearances are true. I do, however, accept that he actually maintained that thesis and have sought to explain why he did and how he held it together with (a) his rejection of Protagorean subjectivism and (b) the views expressed in the fragments cited by Sextus.
The atomists’ account of appearances depends on the whole theory of perception of which it is part, and that in turn on their theory of human nature, and ultimately of the natural world as a whole. The theory is entirely speculative, since it posits as explanatory entities microscopic structures of whose existence and nature there could be no experimental confirmation. Developments in sciences such as neurophysiology have revised our conceptions of the structures underlying perceptual phenomena to such an extent that modern accounts would have been unrecognisable to Leucippus or Democritus; but the basic intuitions of ancient atomism, that appearances are to be explained at the level of the internal structure of the perceiver and of the perceived object, and that the ideal of science is to incorporate the description of those structures within the scope of a unified theory of the nature of matter, have stood the test of time.
PSYCHOLOGY
Democritus’ uncompromising materialism extended to his psychology. Though there is some conflict in the sources, the best evidence is that he drew no distinction between the rational soul or mind and the nonrational soul or life principle, giving a single account of both as a physical structure of spherical atoms permeating the entire body. This theory of the identity of soul and mind extended beyond identity of physical structure to identity of function, in that Democritus explained thought, the activity of the rational soul, by the same process as that by which he explained perception, one of the activities of the sensitive or nonrational soul. Both are produced by the impact on the soul of extremely fine, fast-moving films of atoms (eidôla) constantly emitted in continuous streams by the surfaces of everything around us. This theory combines a causal account of both perception and thought with a crude pictorial view of thought. The paradigm case of perception is vision; seeing something and thinking of something both consist in picturing the thing seen or thought of, and picturing consists in having a series of actual physical pictures of the thing impinge on one’s soul. While this assimilation of thought to experience has some affinites with classical empiricism, it differs in the crucial respect that whereas the basic doctrine of empiricism is that thought derives from experience, for Democritus thought is a form of experience, or, more precisely, the categories of thought and experience are insufficiently differentiated to allow one to be characterised as more fundamental than the other. Among other difficulties, this theory faces the problem of accounting for the distinction, central to Democritus’ epistemology, between perception of the observable properties of atomic aggregates and thought of the unobservable structure of those aggregates. We have no knowledge of how, if at all, Democritus attempted to deal with this problem.18
ETHICS AND POLITICS
The evidence for Democritus’ ethical views differs radically from that for the areas just discussed, since while the ethical doxography is meagre, our sources preserve a large body of purported quotations on ethical topics: the great majority from two collections, that of Stobaeus (fifth century A.D.) and a collection entitled The sayings of Democrates. While the bulk of this material is probably Democritean in origin, the existing quotations represent
a long process of excerpting and paraphrase, making it difficult to determine how close any particular saying is to Democritus’ own words. Various features of style and content suggest that Stobaeus’ collection of maxims contains a greater proportion of authentically Democritean material than does the collection which passes under the name of “Democrates.”19
Subject to the limitations imposed by the nature of this material, we can draw some tentative conclusions about Democritus’ ethical views. He was engaged with the wide-ranging contemporary debates on individual and social ethics of which we have evidence from Plato and other sources. On what Socrates presents as the fundamental question in ethics, “How should one live?” (Plato, Gorg. 500c, Rep. I 352d), Democritus is the earliest thinker reported as having explicitly posited a supreme good or goal, which he called “cheerfulness” or “well-being” and which he appears to have identified with the untroubled enjoyment of life. It is reasonable to suppose that he shared the presumption of the primacy of self-interest which is common both to the Platonic Socrates and to his immoralist opponents, Callicles and Thrasymachus. Having identified the ultimate human interest with cheerfulness, the evidence of the testimonia and the fragments is that he thought that it was to be achieved by moderation, including moderation in the pursuit of pleasures, by discrimination of useful from harmful pleasures, and by conformity to conventional morality. The upshot is a recommendation to a life of moderate, enlightened hedonism, which has some affinities with the life recommended by Socrates (whether in his own person or as representing ordinary enlightened views is disputed) in Plato’s Protagoras, and, more obviously, with the Epicurean ideal of which it was the forerunner.20
An interesting feature of the fragments is the frequent stress on individual conscience, or sense of shame.21 Some fragments stress the pleasures of a good conscience and the torments of a bad one (B174, B215) while others recommend that one should be motivated by one’s internal sense of shame rather than by concern for the opinion of others (B244, B264, B84). This theme may well reflect the interest, discernible in contemporary debates, in what later came to be known as the question of the sanctions of morality. A recurrent theme in criticisms of conventional morality was that, since the enforcement of morality rests on conventions, someone who can escape conventional sanctions, for example, by doing wrong in secret, has no reason to comply with moral demands.22 A defender of conventional morality who, like Democritus and Plato, accepts the primacy of self-interest therefore faces the challenge of showing, in one way or another, that self-interest is best promoted by the observance of conventional moral precepts. Democritus seems to have attempted this both by appeal to divine sanctions (not post mortem, since for the atomists the soul-atoms were scattered on the death of the body, but in the form of misfortunes occurring during life, B175), and by appeal to the “internal sanction” of conscience. Democritus seems to have been the earliest thinker to make the latter central to his attempt to derive morality from self-interest, thus opening up a path followed by others including Butler and J.S. Mill.
The attempt, however pursued, to ground morality in self-interest involves the rejection of the antithesis between law or convention (nomos) and nature (physis) that underlies much criticism of morality in the fifth and fourth centuries. For Antiphon, Callicles, Thrasymachus, and Glaucon, nature prompts one to seek one’s own interest while law and convention seek, more or less successfully, to inhibit one from doing so. But if one’s long-term interest is the attainment of a pleasant life, and if the natural consequences of wrong-doing, including ill health, insecurity, and the pangs of conscience, give one an unpleasant life, while the natural consequences of right-doing give one a contrastingly pleasant life, then nature and convention point in the same direction, not in opposite directions as the critics of morality had alleged. (We have no evidence whether Democritus had considered the objections that conscience is a product of convention, and that exhorting people to develop their conscience assumes that it must be.) Though the texts contain no express mention of the nomos-physis contrast itself, several of them refer to law in such a wav as to suggest rejection of the antithesis. B248 asserts that the aim of law is to benefit people, thus contradicting Glaucon’s claim (Plato, Rep. II 359c) that law constrains people contrary to their natural bent. B248 is supplemented and explained by B245; laws interfere with people’s living as they please only to stop them from harming one another, to which they are prompted by envy. So law frees people from the aggression of others, thus benefiting them by giving them the opportunity to follow the promptings of nature towards their own advantage. The strongest expression of the integration of nomos and physis is found in B252: the city’s being well run is the greatest good, and if it is preserved everything is preserved, while if it is destroyed everything is destroyed. That is to say, a stable community is necessary for the attainment of that well-being which is nature’s goal for us. This quotation encapsulates the central point in the defence of nomos (emphasised in Protagoras’ myth (Plato, Prot. 322a-323a)) that law and civilization are not contrary to nature but required for human nature to flourish; that point is also central to the Epicurean account of the development of civilization (see especially Lucretius V).23
CONCLUSION
Atomism can thus be seen as a multifaceted phenomenon, linked in a variety of ways to various doctrines, both preceding, contemporary, and subsequent. Atomistic physics is one of a number of attempts to accommodate the Ionian tradition of comprehensive natural philosophy to the demands of Eleatic logic. Atomistic epistemology takes up the challenge of Protagorean subjectivism, breaks new ground in its treatment of the relation of appearance to reality and constitutes a pioneering attempt to grapple with the challenge of scepticism. Atomistic ethics moves us into the world of the sophists and of early Plato in its treatment of the themes of the goal of life, and of the relations between self-interest and morality and between nomos and physis. The atomism of Leucippus and Democritus exercised a continuing influence throughout subsequent centuries, whether as a challenge to be faced, most notably by Aristotle, or as a forerunner to Epicureanism in all its aspects, and thereby to the revival of atomistic physics in the Corpuscular Philosophy of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
APPENDIX
I conclude with a brief discussion of the vexed question of the connections (or lack of them) between Democritus’ ethics and his physical theory. In an earlier discussion (Taylor [423], endorsed without further argument in Gosling and Taylor [414]) I argued against Vlastos’ claim (Vlastos [424]) to find significant connections between the content of the two areas of Democritus’ thought. Vlastos’ position has found some recent defenders (and my views some critics), notably Sassi [421] and Farrar [96]; these discussions seem to me to call for some reexamination of the question.
It is, I take it, common ground that in composing his ethical writings Democritus had not abandoned his physical theory, and therefore that, at the very least, he would have sought to include nothing in the former that was inconsistent with the latter. I shall make the stronger assumption that he took for granted in the ethical writings the atomistic view of the soul as a physical substance pervading the body. However, I remain unconvinced of any closer connection between physics and ethics. In particular, I see no indication that any ethical conclusions (e.g., that the good is “cheerfulness”) were supposed to be derived from the physical theory, or that the physical theory provided any characterisations of the nature of any ethically significant psychological state. In other words, I see no evidence that Democritus believed in type-type identities between ethical states such as cheerfulness and physical states such as having one’s soulatoms in “dynamic equilibrium” (Vlastos [424] 584, Farrar [96] 229). My earlier criticisms of this kind of view still stand.
There is, however, one particular point on which I now think that I took scepticism too far. This was in my rejection of Vlastos’ interpretation of B33, that teaching creates a new nature by altering the configuration of
the soul-atoms. My reason was that rythmos was an atomistic technical term for the shape of an individual atom, not for the configuration of an atomic aggregate, for which their term was diathigê. Hence metarythmizei (or metarysmoi) in the fragment could not mean “reshape” in the sense of “produce a new configuration.” But, as Vlastos had already pointed out, the catalogue of Democritean titles includes Peri ameipsirysmion, On changes of shape (D.L. IX.47), which cannot refer to changes in the shapes of individual atoms (since they are unchangeable in respect of shape), and must therefore refer to changes in the shape of atomic aggregates. Further, Hesychius glosses ameipsirysmein as “change the constitution (synkrisin) or be transformed,” and though he does not attribute the word to any author it is at least likely to have been used in that sense by Democritus, since neither the verb nor its cognates are attested to anyone else. It therefore now seems to me that Vlastos’ reading of the fragment is probably correct. For Democritus, teaching, like thought and perception is a physical process involving the impact of eidola on the soul, with consequent rearrangement of the soul-aggregate. (Cf. B197: “The unwise are shaped (rysmountai) by the gifts of fortune …,” and n.14) Acceptance of that causal picture does not, of course, commit one to endorsing type-type psychological identities.