In 1929, Alfred North Whitehead famously wrote that “the safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.” Whitehead did not mean that subsequent philosophers were in some sense subordinate to Plato, but that Plato had raised the full gamut of philosophical issues that all later philosophers would grapple with.
While Whitehead may be mostly correct, it turns out that Plato was far better at raising questions than answering them. Plato’s theory of eternal, unchanging, perfect Forms has not aged particularly well, nor has his plans for totalitarian government, his advocacy of eugenics, or his proposal to imprison and execute atheists merely for rejecting state-sanctioned beliefs. In Book 10 of his dialogue Laws—a work of political philosophy that describes how a real city should be governed—Plato writes:
[Nonbelievers] are to be placed by the judge, as the law decrees, in the house of sound-mindedness for at least five years. During this time, none of the other citizens may associate with them, except members of the Nocturnal Council, who shall visit them for the purposes of admonition and the salvation of their souls. When their term of imprisonment has run its course, any who are deemed to be sound-minded again may dwell among the sound-minded, but if not, and he is convicted once more of such a crime, let the penalty be death.
In Plato’s ideal city, if an atheist refuses this instruction—the “salvation of his soul”—he is imprisoned, and, if he remains unconvinced, executed; afterward, his body is “cast out beyond the borders, unburied.” Such ruthless thought-policing is difficult to reconcile with the legacy of the philosopher who mentored him—the man who declared that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” Few examples better illustrate how far Plato had drifted from the spirit of Socrates.
Plato’s belief in a creator of the universe—along with his utter contempt for atheists and freethinkers—was readily assimilated into the Christian worldview. The philosopher Karl Popper went so far as to claim that Plato had laid the intellectual groundwork for all future totalitarian regimes. After reading the Republic, Timaeus, and Laws, it’s hard to argue that Popper was wrong.
In fact, it’s difficult to not draw direct parallels between Plato’s program and the later inquisitors of the Catholic Church, who held that unbelief is not merely an intellectual error, but a crime that warrants coercion and, ultimately, death. In either case, capital punishment is the penalty for independent thinking.
Needless to say, Plato will not occupy the privileged place he typically holds in our history of atheism and humanism. That crown belongs to another thinker—one who may justly be regarded as the pinnacle of ancient Greek thought and the clearest forerunner of the materialism and secular humanism that many atheists embrace today. His name was Democritus.
The details surrounding the life of Democritus are scarce. We know he was born around 460 BCE—10 years after Socrates—in the Thracian city of Abdera (modern northeastern Greece), a prosperous Ionian colony with commercial ties throughout the eastern Mediterranean. He supposedly inherited considerable wealth, which he spent on education and travel to Egypt, Babylonia, Persia, and possibly India, where he learned geometry and astronomy, among other topics.
As a student of Leucippus—the presumed founder of atomism—Democritus developed a materialist philosophy that, transmitted through the recovered works of Epicurus and Lucretius, would greatly influence the establishment of modern science. Democritus also acquired a reputation as “the laughing philosopher,” supposedly because he regarded human ambition, superstition, greed, and political quarrels as fundamentally absurd.
But it was his unabashed materialism that incurred the hostility of Plato. According to Diogenes Laertius, “Plato wished to burn all the writings of Democritus that he could collect.”
If this sentiment is true, Plato would be pleased to know that not one of Democritus’s more than 70 books survive except in fragments, and even these are not all known with certainty to be authentic. So while we have the names of Democritus’s various books—across the fields of physics, cosmology, astronomy, mathematics, biology, medicine, psychology, ethics, politics, language, and literature—we have only around 300 fragments, or an estimated half a percent of his total output. For Plato, nearly all of the works attributed to him have survived.
Had Democritus’s books survived, Whitehead may have characterized all subsequent philosophy as a series of footnotes to Democritus, rather than Plato. But Democritus was centuries ahead of his time. The Western mind was still entranced by its own rationalist illusions, and most ancient philosophers and theologians found little use for a materialist account of reality.
But Democritean materialism proved far more useful—and far more accurate—in explaining the natural world. It also led to an egalitarian ethics that remains far superior to the authoritarian elitism of Plato.
Let’s now turn to the teachings of Democritus—a philosophical system that could have stimulated human progress centuries earlier, had Plato’s rationalism and theology not buried it under a pile of teleological nonsense.
It hardly needs pointing out that the ancient atomism of Democritus varies greatly from modern atomic theory. Democritus did not have the benefit of controlled experiments, advanced mathematics, or sophisticated instruments with which to penetrate the depths of reality. But he nevertheless hit upon an important insight that science would eventually bear out: that nature is best studied—not by appeals to supernatural agents and forces—but by a quantitative reckoning of matter’s constituent parts and laws.
Here’s how Aristotle describes the atomist position in his Metaphysics:
They say that the differences between things are due to the shape (rhysmos), arrangement (diathigē), and position (tropē) of the atoms….A differs from N in shape, AN from NA in arrangement, and Z from N in position.
Democritus believed that the physical world, in other words, was a geometric puzzle composed of atoms of various sizes, shapes, and positions that hooked together to form the everyday objects presented to our senses. To understand how nature works, then, you need only understand the mechanics of how atoms combine and break apart.
While modern physics has moved far beyond Democritus’s simple mechanical atoms, his basic intuition—that nature can be explained through the quantitative study of its underlying components rather than through supernatural purposes—proved remarkably prescient. Democritus had in essence (if not in detail) advocated for the mathematization of nature millennia before Galileo wrote his famous lines:
It [the universe] is written in the language of mathematics, and the characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures, without which it is humanly impossible to comprehend a single word of it, and without which one wanders in vain through a dark labyrinth.
For this great foresight, Democritus was censored, denigrated, and superseded by all manner of philosophers with teleological agendas. But the fact remains that he was among the first to develop the surprisingly modern view that the universe is written in the exclusive language of geometry.
Democritus was also a proto-psychologist, maintaining that the senses must be taken seriously, but not literally. “Sweet exists by convention, bitter by convention, colour by convention,” Democritus wrote, “atoms and Void (alone) exist in reality.”
With Democritus, there is no distinction between the natural and supernatural, the earthly and heavenly realms, or life on earth and life after death. The world as it exists is self-contained, the simple combination, dissolution, and recombination of atoms swirling around an infinite and eternal void according to natural laws. There is no need for a creator, and no need for divine intervention.
There is, in addition, an underlying moral unity to Democritean atomism. If we are all, at bottom, composed of the same fundamental stuff, then we are all, in the end, of equal worth. Metaphysical egalitarianism therefore provides a powerful foundation for moral and political equality—dispelling at once with the gods, the existence of “chosen people,” and the notion of innate superiority by birth. This way of thinking has its obvious Eastern counterparts, and makes one wonder if Democritus did in fact travel to India.
It also makes a mockery of Plato, who divided citizens into gold, silver, bronze, and iron natures and gave the state authority to identify, sort, and selectively breed the guardian class in order to preserve the excellence of the city. That such nonsense could be elevated to the heights of philosophical respectability was possible only because it rested upon an equally misguided conception of reality.
Democritus had a different vision: he believed that the supreme judge of morality lies not in God or the State, but in a virtuous character. “Men find happiness neither by means of the body nor through possessions,” Democritus wrote, “but through uprightness and wisdom.” Happiness is to be cultivated internally, and when no one is looking: “Virtue consists, not in avoiding wrong-doing, but in having no wish thereto.” The upshot is that character development, contra Plato, cannot be compelled by threat of imprisonment or death.
Egalitarianism flowed effortlessly into Democritus’s politics: “Poverty under democracy is as much to be preferred to so-called prosperity under an autocracy as freedom to slavery.” A society of virtuous individuals freed from superstition were perfectly fit to govern themselves, and to elect leaders of similarly good character. But “when base men enter upon office,” Democritus wrote, “the more unworthy they are, the more neglectful, and they are filled with folly and recklessness.” This makes democracy all the more important—as a means to remove immoral or ineffective leaders.
Although it would be anachronistic to call him a socialist, Democritus defended principles of mutual aid and social responsibility that would later become central to egalitarian political traditions. He called for voluntary political redistribution that was to benefit not only those in need, but society at large:
When the powerful prevail upon themselves to lend to the indigent, and help them, and benefit them, herein at last is pity, and an end to isolation, and friendship, and mutual aid, and harmony among the citizens; and other blessings such as no man could enumerate.
Democritus was a champion for political unity, harmony, and equality. How far this vision is from the rigid political hierarchy we find in Plato’s Republic. And, it must be said, from our own times.
Democritus, I think, provides a striking example of how one’s metaphysical beliefs can positively impact one’s views on ethics and politics. His egalitarianism was thorough-going; since we’re all made of the same fundamental stuff, we’re all of equal worth, and therefore deserving of equal consideration and political participation. This is, one could argue, a more-or-less natural disposition—until it’s indoctrinated out of us by convincing us we are somehow more deserving than others in the eyes of God, or the State, or both.
Was Democritus an atheist, then? We can’t know for sure, but his condemnation by Plato and outright censorship by others suggests as much. And if he did believe in the gods, he thought that they must have been composed of the same atoms drifting through space as everything else—and therefore subject to the same natural laws. Democritus did not believe the gods created the world, nor did they intervene in it, since he claimed that the universe has existed forever.
When Democritus does explicitly mention the gods, it is not in a flattering light:
Men ask in their prayers for health from the gods, but do not know that the power to attain this lies in themselves; and by doing the opposite through lack of control, they themselves become the betrayers of their own health to their desires.
This is an early argument for the inefficacy of prayer, in that, by appealing to divine intervention, the faithful avoid doing the necessary, often burdensome work of effecting positive outcomes themselves. Prayer becomes, in a Democritean reading, an abdication of personal responsibility.
Why exercise and eat well when you can simply pray for health? Why learn how the world actually works when you can offer sacrifices to the gods of fertility, healing, love, and war? To the Laughing Philosopher, all of this was patently absurd, and socially destructive.
Thousands of years later, humanity has accumulated vastly more knowledge, but Democritus’s central challenge remains: whether we should trust our own understanding of nature, or continue asking invisible forces to do the work that reason and effort demand of us.
References & Further Reading
Aristotle. Metaphysics. Translated by Hugh Lawson-Tancred. London: Penguin Books, 1998.
Karl Popper. The Open Society and Its Enemies (London: Routledge, 2012).
Kathleen Freeman. Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers: A Complete Translation of the Fragments in Diels, Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948).
Paul Cartledge. Democritus (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).
Plato. Complete Works. Edited by John M. Cooper. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1997.