DEMOCRITUS
(c. 460 to 371 BC)

Democritus: An Overview

His Life and Works

His Major Ideas

Less well known to us today than Socrates, Plato or Aristotle is Democritus (mid-late 400s: a contemporary of Socrates) of Abdera (Thrace).  In his own day he was widely recognized as a brilliant thinker who brought to the ancient Greek world the atomic theory of the cosmos.  Basically his view was that all life is merely the composite structure of invisibly minute particles of hard matter: atoms.  These atoms (eternal in their being) are structured into the more visible material we observe in our world--through laws of motion (also eternal in their existence). Democritus was also a profound materialist in his view of human life.  To him life is simply patterns of motion of these soul-less atoms--operating in accordance with equally soul-less laws.   The human soul itself is simply a brief pattern in the working of the atoms--a pattern which forms in the human womb, developing and then breaking down over a human lifetime until it simply ceases to exist when we draw our last breath.  To Democritus there was no such thing as eternal life.  Likewise, God or Divinity was to him simply a construct of human thought--and had no real existence in the cosmos. In so many ways Democritus anticipated--by thousands of years--the direction science would take in its development within the modern West!

Democritus was undoubtedly the most brilliant of the Greek natural philosophers.  He was a contemporary of Socrates--but chose to remain in his native Thrace where he had grown up and studied under Leucippus.  Here he was closer to the older philosophical environment of the Ionian materialists--of whom he was undoubtedly the greatest of all.  Indeed, even in his own time he was considered the equal to Plato in intellectual stature and clarity of thought.  Unfortunately we have none of his own works today.  But he was reported so widely by others that we have a fairly clear understanding of his incredible thinking. We know that he came from a very respected (and wealthy) family from Abdera in Thrace.  Democritus was well traveled (certainly to Egypt and possibly Babylon) and well educated in astronomy and mathematics. Unfortunately we have none of his own works today.  But he was reported so widely by others that we have a fairly clear understanding of his incredible thinking.  We know that he came from a very respected (and wealthy) family from Abdera in Thrace.  Democritus was well traveled (certainly to Egypt and possibly Babylon) and well educated in astronomy and mathematics.

Democritus' great importance lies in his development of Leucippus' atomist theory of the cosmos.  According to Democritus, the world is comprised of invisibly minute, solid, unchanging and eternal atomic (atomon:  indivisible) particles suspended in a airy void.  Those two things, the atoms and the void, is all that truly "exists."  All else, particularly the things that we are able to actually see--visible matter--is merely a result of various combinations of atoms as they move mechanically through the void. Atoms do not come into being or go out of being.  They are eternal in existence.  What changes, what comes into life and what eventually wears down and dies, producing the vibrant or "lively" qualities that we recognize as the nature of all living things, is simply the way these atoms are constantly attracted or drawn together and rearranged to produce the action or "motion" we observe about such life. Also eternal are the principles undergirding such motion or such rearrangement of these atoms.  That is, the quality of motion itself is also eternal.  Thus the basic "stuff" of reality is eternal: atoms and their motion.  What changes is the resultant visible structures that we observe about life. Such a materialist vision of life necessarily raised the question of the origins and characterof human consciousness--of the existence of the soul (nous).  Democritus' answer was that the human soul too is made up of atoms, special atoms of a certain variety that are particularly lively and easily airborne--entering the body in our breathing. Human death occurs--as we well know--when a person draws his last breath.  Thus to Democritus, breath or pneuma was that special conveyance of life that gave a person a living spirit. (the Greek for air, breath and spirit are all pneuma).  At death all of that breaks down, disintegrates.  The vital qualities of a human life simply cease when no more breathe is drawn into the body.  There is no eternal nous that lives on after death. Nor was there in the theories of Democritus the existence of an eternal Nous that was Divine, that constituted anything we might call God.  His theories required no such ingredient for them to function properly.  What undergirded the working of his hypothesis about life, about the cosmos, was simply the eternal laws of nature which directed the atoms in their movement from one structure or arrangement to the next. In short, his theory was entirely mechanistic. He was also an embryologist, carefully studying the growth and behavior of biological life.  He was also an evolutionist--in that he saw human form and life developing anciently out of the structure of water and mud--like worms! (the ancient presumption about worms was that they grew out of the ground the way a plant does, drawing on the earth to supply it with the building blocks of stalks, leaves, flowers, fruit.)

Go to the history section: Ancient Greece (500 to 300 BC)

  Miles H. Hodges