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Lesson 1.6: The Knowledge
13 Plays2 months ago
Topics discussed:
- The atomistic philosophy of Democritus
- The role of chance in our success or failure (and what that means for our ethics according to Democritus)
- Democritus' maxims for how to achieve ataraxia (tranquility)
- Democritus' notion that what's good for us is good for society
For more information, visit theluxuryofvirtue.com.
Recommended
Transcript
Fascination with Physics
00:00:02
Speaker
I'm going to begin here with a bit of a personal or note in case you have not taken a class with me face to face or you don't know me personally. I have a weird fixation and fascination with the physics of the 19th and 20th centuries. I'm interested in physics in general. I'm what my colleague calls physics curious.
Planck and Einstein Anecdotes
00:00:30
Speaker
But the history of physics in particular I find very illuminating. I love these little factoids like the fact that Max Planck, who is a very famous physicist, was told to pick another major because you know physics was pretty much done. There's nothing else left to discover. Lo and behold, there was a lot left to discover. I love the fact that Albert Einstein, even though he is in part responsible for the dawn of something called quantum mechanics, he never liked the idea of quantum mechanics. He never accepted it. He always tried to find a different theory that could avoid the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics.
00:01:19
Speaker
I love that in the early 1900s, not everyone accepted the atomic hypothesis yet. This idea that there are some entities which are not divisible any further, that they are the ground level of reality. They are fundamental in a sense. They are fundamental particles, we might say.
00:01:40
Speaker
And it is because of this interest in physics that I've taken seminars on quantum mechanics, I read books on physics, and I did eventually work my way through the introductory lectures on physics by Richard Feynman. You can find them, they are called, I believe, the Feynman Lectures in Physics.
Feynman's Thought Experiment
00:02:06
Speaker
And I want to begin today with an interesting thought experiment that Feynman poses. I think it's in the very first lesson, actually. He asks you to wonder what would happen if a cataclysmic event occurs and essentially lots and lots of people die um and a small group of people have to attempt to rebuild society, civilization.
00:02:32
Speaker
What is the most important idea, the most valuable statement you can give to them in order to help them move along the way, start in the process of restarting civilization? Well, before I give you the answer, lots of people have pondered this. I actually remember hearing an episode of a radio lab where one of the commentators, I don't know who it is, said something like you know the idea that race is a construct. And I thought, I'm not even sure that he's taking the question seriously. How would that idea help you restart civilization? And why would having some cataclysmic event happen to us make us forget that? I mean, I just thought, that's not really the kind of information I think Feynman was trying to get you to think about.
Post-Apocalyptic Survival Knowledge
00:03:28
Speaker
And this makes me think of another book called The Knowledge, which is essentially a handbook in case you want to survive after some apocalyptic event. And in it, there's a bunch of things that I think would be valuable. They're good candidates for what Feynman is thinking as the most valuable thing that you might want to tell people that are starting fresh, rebooting the whole thing.
00:03:55
Speaker
In the book The Knowledge, you can find things like how to purify water to make it okay to drink, how to grow food, how to start fires, how to preserve food. These are things that at least I certainly don't know how to do or haven't done myself. I did read the book, but I haven't tried it yet.
00:04:17
Speaker
And so I think these are the kind of things that Feynman was trying to get at, right? There are just basic things that we no longer know how to do that are essential to our survival. How many of us, for example, really know how computers work, can build one on our own? What even is a computer chip?
00:04:41
Speaker
Now I have some ideas. I know it has to do with lithography and and logic gates, and I know the basics of all that, but I wouldn't be able to build one even with the background in logic and computer science that I have. no It's a very modest background. I don't have degrees in this, but you know whenever I get a chance, I do study it, and I don't think I'd be able to build a microchip.
00:05:06
Speaker
But these are the kinds of things that we would need to get back to the level of civilization or complexity that we're in right now. So I think these are good candidates for what Feynman is trying to get us to think about when he asked that question.
Atomic Hypothesis as Civilization's Key
00:05:24
Speaker
But that's not the answer that he gives. Ultimately, what he thinks is the key to rebooting civilization is a simple idea.
00:05:35
Speaker
the atomic hypothesis. As I already stated, this is the idea that everything that exists in reality is composed of little indivisible entities. Now, it happens to be the case that when you think of atoms, it turns out that those things are actually divisible, but this doesn't undermine the atomic hypothesis.
00:06:01
Speaker
Forget what we call atoms, just this idea that there are fundamental particles, and based off of those, everything else is built. That's what the atomic theory gets at. And Feynman says, that's what you need to get civilization started anew. Embedded in that idea, in other words, is almost everything you need to get to where we are again.
Modern Physics and Atomic Hypothesis
00:06:28
Speaker
physicists today still make use of this atomic hypothesis. If you look at some of the theories that are trying to unify the theories of the very large and the theories of the very small,
00:06:43
Speaker
Just for some context here, when you're looking at very large objects, you utilize something called relativity theory associated primarily with Albert Einstein. And when you look at the very small, you're using something called quantum mechanics to try to predict the behavior of these very tiny particles that behave in erratic ways.
00:07:07
Speaker
And some people, some physicists, are trying to figure out how to bridge these two theories, and they'll use theories like quantum gravity and other ones. Let me talk about quantum gravity, though. The only thing I really want to mention about quantum gravity, actually, is that there is something called Planck units within this theory. Planck length, Planck time, Planck mass, Planck temperature. And the idea here is that There is actually a minimum level of division that you can do on, for example, length. A Planck length is the minimum length that is possible in our universe. That's not to say it's the smallest length we can measure. It's to
Planck Units and Quantum Gravity
00:07:56
Speaker
say that you can't divide
00:07:59
Speaker
length anymore than a plank length. That is the smallest unit of measurement with regards to length. If you want to think about this in terms of pixels, it's kind of a good analogy. Just like an image is broken down ultimately into little tiny pixels, that's what these plank units are. It's just the smallest unit of that particular dimension. So same thing goes with time.
00:08:28
Speaker
You can only break down time into shore seconds and microseconds, but if you keep breaking it down, there's still a bottom level. You bottom out at a unit of time called plank time, and you can't split time any more than that. So the atomic hypothesis is clearly alive and well. It's still being utilized in physics. And so we can see that it clearly is important for the field But why would this be good for anything else? How is this good, for example, for politics or for ethics? Well, the person who came up with the atomic theory in the first place did find the implications to the atomic hypothesis not only in physics but also in politics and ethics.
Democritus' Atomic Theory Foundations
00:09:21
Speaker
And this person who argued and defended the atomic hypothesis, he wasn't born in the 1800s, he wasn't born in the Renaissance, he was born in 460 BCE. This idea that everything exists is made out of little tiny atoms.
00:09:42
Speaker
goes back all the way to Democritus of Abdera. And he is the person we'll be discussing today. And Democritus did not just use his hypothesis to explain his view of reality. He also used it to give us ethical maxims, recommendations on how and why it is that you should live in a certain way.
00:10:13
Speaker
As I already mentioned, he was born in 460 BCE. e And let me say two things about this while I'm on the subject. This is a time period when there is so much philosophical action going on that it's kind of mind-boggling. So, Democritus and his teacher, Lucipus, who we'll talk more about in a second,
00:10:38
Speaker
were contemporaries of so many different important figures in intellectual history. Here's one, Thucydides. Thucydides is an important historical figure, precisely because he wrote history. He was perhaps the first person who tried to learn about what it is that we should do in the present by studying the past. He believed that by thinking hard about what has happened before our time, we can figure out the best course of action today. Also living in this time period was Hippocrates. Hippocrates was, of course, a central figure in Greek medicine. And to this very day, if you become a doctor, you take the Hippocratic oath. We've already mentioned Socrates before.
00:11:28
Speaker
Socrates will be a major inspiration for several of the schools of philosophy that will arise after his death. And during the same time period that Democritus is teaching, we also have the Sophistic movement that we covered in the last lesson. So people like Protagoras were, of course, a little bit older, but still around.
00:11:53
Speaker
The second thing I wanted to mention about this time period is that this is still during the great geopolitical conflict known as the Peloponnesian War.
00:12:06
Speaker
this war lasted almost 30 years. And what's perhaps surprising about this time period is that as the war drags on, we actually see Athens growing weaker and weaker. Now it's still the case that the Spartans cannot defeat Athens at sea, but Athens at their prime, that's in the past,
00:12:34
Speaker
By the time that you get to the four tens BCE after 20 years of war, Athens and Sparta too, they're shadows of their former selves. So even though we are entering the time period of some of the biggest names in philosophy, Plato, Aristotle, the city where they'll find themselves will actually be at its weakest geopolitically speaking.
Democritus and Lucipus' Contributions
00:13:05
Speaker
Before I leave the subject of the contemporaries of Democritus, let me mention a really quick Leucippus. Lucipus was the teacher of Democritus, and we should call them co-founders or joint discoverers of the atomic hypothesis. However, we know so very little about Lucipus that, at least in my experience, most scholars just kind of treat them as a unit, and they tend to give more emphasis to Democritus because we have some of his writings and his fragments.
00:13:41
Speaker
We don't have, I think, anything from Lucipus, so I'll be focusing on Democritus, but we must, of course, admit that Lucipus, his teacher, played a role in developing Democritus' ideas. Okay, so let's get into Democritus now. We've already mentioned the main thing about Democritus, atomic theory.
00:14:03
Speaker
and And we've already mentioned that this is a massively important hypothesis, literally some physicists saying that it's the most important thing to reboot civilization. But Democritus wrote on many, many topics and they all intersected with his views on physics. So he wrote on ethics. He wrote a ton on ethics, actually. Most of what we have of his is on ethics.
00:14:31
Speaker
He also wrote on embryology, magnetism, mathematics, astronomy, biology. The calendar, by the way, the calendar is something that every civilization during this time period, and even now, has to wrestle with getting your calendar straight. It's actually very difficult, but I will get into that right now.
00:14:52
Speaker
Pythagoreanism is another topic that Democritus wrote on and music. And despite all these different writings that we know that he worked on, all that's left now is testimonials. All that we have left is reports about what
Conflict with Christian Ideology
00:15:14
Speaker
Democritus thought. Why is that?
00:15:19
Speaker
Well, I try to look into this a little bit, and it looks like some philosophers and historians of philosophy believe that the reason why we have so little of Democritus, and it looks like none almost of his writings, just little fragments, is because his ideology, his whole worldview was deliberately targeted for destruction.
00:15:48
Speaker
If you read books like Materialism, a historical and philosophical inquiry by Robin Brown and James Lademan, or Greenblatt is the name of the author of a book called The Swerve, we see that there's a particular group of people that were very, very much opposed to the democracy in a worldview. And these people are Christians.
00:16:15
Speaker
Because of the implications of atomic theory, which we'll look at a little bit later, many early Christians saw the philosophy as a direct challenge to their religion. And so when the Christians gained power in the Roman Empire in a couple of centuries, any writings having to do with atomic theory, including those of Democritus, were targeted for destruction.
00:16:44
Speaker
And so, as I said, all we have now is testimonies. And I should add, the testimonies that we have in many cases are from Christians, but they're very hostile to the view. In other words, it's something like, here's what Democritus thought and look how wrong it is. And here are five reasons why it's false. And from that information, that's how we have to rebuild Democritus' views.
00:17:42
Speaker
Okay, so let's dig into these views and figure out why they're so controversial. According to atomism, there's just two things that exist.
Atoms and Void Concept
00:17:55
Speaker
It's atoms and void. And atoms, as I've mentioned already, they are indivisible particles, tiny, tiny particles that we cannot see.
00:18:09
Speaker
And they are actually what everything that we do see is made up of. In addition to the atoms, there is just empty space. There's a void. And in this void, the atoms are constantly moving around. The language that we typically use to describe those things that are not atoms or void is you know a technical term, it's a compound. So a compound is any collection of atoms arranged in a particular way. And everything we see is a compound of some sort. Chairs are a compound. We are compounds. And so that's sort of the the word that I'll be using when I'm talking of collections of atoms.
00:18:55
Speaker
Interesting to note that like Anaxagoras and Empedocles, the views of Democritus are a response to the ideas of Parmenides. So i remember, Parmenides is a monist. He believes that reality is singular, unchanging, eternal. There's also what is not, the set of things that do not exist, and that actually does not exist. What is not does not exist. That's a weird way to put it, but there is that which is, which is a singular, whole, eternal reality, and and that's all there is. There is also seeing as what is not.
00:19:34
Speaker
A better way to put it is the set of things that don't exist is empty. There's nothing in there, right? Now, remember, Parmenides is a monist. He believes that reality is singular, eternal, and unchanging. And that's all there is. If you think that there is multiplicity, or if you think that things change, or if you think you would divide a loaf of bread into two pieces,
00:19:59
Speaker
You are mistaken. Those are illusions. According to Parmenides, all is one. And we mentioned before that Zeno's paradoxes are an attempt to defend this kind of view. Well, Democritus comes along and says,
00:20:15
Speaker
I don't think so. Obviously there's change. And the way Democritus thought about this is that, well, if everything is a compound, there then what change is, is just that compound changing its configuration. Some atoms leave, other atoms are added. And essentially all change can be accounted for just different collections of atoms changing over time.
00:20:43
Speaker
By the way, Parmenides also thought there is no space. But Democritus believed that there must be some space in which the atoms could move around because if the atoms couldn't move around, well, then the compound couldn't change. So you need there to be space for the atoms to be able to shift so that we can account for division and change and decay and death eventually, right? So there must be atoms and void. And this is all a direct consequence to responding to these ideas from Parmenides.
00:21:16
Speaker
Even the idea that odd atoms are indivisible comes from Parmenides. Democritus thought, obviously the compounds that we see are capable of division, right? I just mentioned growth, change, decay, death. These are all results of something happening to the compound.
00:21:36
Speaker
When I was born, I wasn't the size that I am now. I've been growing over time. That could be accounted by new atoms getting added to the compound that is me. And over time I've changed, lost weight, gained weight, whatever. Those are also changes in the compounds that I am.
00:21:57
Speaker
eventually I will die and decay. And that is again, just atoms basically leaving the compound so that there's not much left of me. That shows that all compounds are divisible, but does that mean that you can keep dividing and keep dividing and keep dividing the way Zeno's paradoxes go? Well, Democritus says no, because if you keep dividing things, eventually you're going to create what does not exist. You're going to divide something into non-existence.
00:22:28
Speaker
But just like Parmenides, Democritus says, well, you can't create what does not exist. That doesn't make any sense. So he says, at a certain point, things are no longer divisible. At a certain point, things are indivisible. So that's kind of hard to understand, right? So let me give you, once again, one of Zeno's paradoxes, and then hopefully that will give you a better idea of what it is that Democritus is saying.
Refuting Zeno's Paradox
00:22:58
Speaker
Zeno has a very famous paradox, which we've covered before, about Achilles and a tortoise engaging in a foot race. Now, according to Zeno, if we give the tortoise a head start, in order for Achilles to catch up to and overtake the tortoise, Achilles would have to get halfway to the tortoise.
00:23:22
Speaker
And from there, he would have to get halfway again to the tortoise and then halfway again and halfway again. But if Achilles has to keep getting halfway before he can get the full way, well, he'll never get there because you can always keep dividing the ground over and over and over into halfway points. And because this is performed infinitely, technically Achilles will never reach the tortoise.
00:23:51
Speaker
And so, of course, Zeno suggests, well, that means that the reason such thing is movement, the reason no such thing is change, right? Achilles does not overtake the tortoise. All reality is singular, and all of Zeno's paradoxes taken as a whole are supposed to defend this idea from Parmenides that reality is singular. Well, Democritus is not buying it, and here is his basic response I know you think you can divide the track indefinitely, but that is simply not the case, and not even practically speaking. But as a matter of fact, what he's saying through his atomic theory is that you cannot divide the track indefinitely. That track that Achilles and the tortoise are racing on, you can divide it, sure, a couple of different times, maybe even dozen, hundreds of times, whatever.
00:24:46
Speaker
But at some point, you reach a point where you literally cannot divide it anymore. At that point, when division is no longer possible, that is the atomic threshold rate. That is where we reach the level of the atom, and these atoms are no longer divisible.
00:25:08
Speaker
And his reasoning is very simple. If you really thought you can divide things infinitely, well, then you would create things that don't exist, what is not. And that goes against Pramanity's thought. So the mock-criticists in a nutshell are saying this idea of infinite division is just wrong-headed. It's not true. There is a bottom line to how much you can divide things. And at that bottom line, that's where we see the atoms.
00:25:37
Speaker
Okay, let's talk a little bit about compounds.
Atomic Collisions and Compound Formation
00:25:41
Speaker
Remember, everything we see, including us, is made out of a compound. How exactly does that happen? Well, Democritus believes that it is simply accidental collisions, just random movement of atoms that create these compounds.
00:26:00
Speaker
properties of the atoms themselves make them stick together in certain ways. And when you get enough of these together, you make, well, let's talk about really tiny things. You make maybe a speck of dust. You get more of these, you know, compounds in a certain configuration with a certain proportion of certain atoms. You get maybe a plant and then you keep growing up from there and humans are obviously very complex. Some of the biggest things you can make are obviously planets.
00:26:29
Speaker
And so everything just is a product of the accidental collision of atoms. Now, although Democritus does not exactly mention this, I want you to notice that this doesn't necessarily preclude the existence of self-organizing things. I mean, it might be the case that there are fragments that say something like this from Democritus. I just, I'm not aware of them. But nonetheless, even if everything is just accidental to collisions,
00:26:59
Speaker
Through these accidental collisions, it might be the case that eventually something is made that has the property of being self-organizing. So humans are an example of this. And I'll give you just one example. I have a cut on my hand literally right now at this moment from when I was gardening over the weekend.
00:27:20
Speaker
And it's been a couple of days and it's actually almost completely healed, right? So I can barely now see where I was originally cut. There's just a little bit of redness still there. And basically, this is because my body knows how to repair itself. And so even though I am a collection of atoms, these atoms do have perhaps a a method of self-preservation, right? These collections of atoms have a way of propelling themselves into the future.
00:27:55
Speaker
And this isn't indefinite, as we know. I will eventually die and decay. But the general idea here is that even if the origin of some collection of atoms is random, it might be the case that that particular amalgamation, that particular configuration of atoms makes it so that they are robust, so that they can you know withstand the test of time. They can self-organize. They can fix themselves.
00:28:22
Speaker
Of course, we are these self-organizing creatures and we give birth to other self-organizing creatures that are born very, very small and grow over time and heal themselves. And then eventually, of course, they also die and decay.
00:28:39
Speaker
The point that I want to drive home here is maybe this. Everything is a product of accidental collisions, and these accidental collisions sometimes might give rise to self-organizing things, which themselves give rise to other self-organizing things. So you can make this view of Democritus compatible with something like evolutionary theory at some point.
00:29:00
Speaker
Democritus, again, doesn't say anything like this, but we can kind of fix up that idea right now just to make the idea more appealing to you. But even though we might have the property of being self-organizing, self-preserving, ultimately all compounds, says Democritus,
00:29:21
Speaker
including humans, right? All compounds are mortal. Everything we see, tables, chairs, plants, trees, us, will eventually die. Only the atoms are eternal. The atoms on Democritus' view will always be around. Interesting little idea from Democritus. He says that it's likely that any and all possible compounds will eventually be formed.
00:29:48
Speaker
So he says, not only do we have what we see right now, but almost any other conceivable configuration of atoms interacting with each other will take place given it an infinite amount of time. And this sort of reminds me of you know the multiverse theory, where everything that can exist, does exist. It's just in a very far away parallel universe. And in any case, I thought I should mention that.
00:30:14
Speaker
Also, Democritus believes that there is very likely innumerable worlds, right? There's not just planet Earth, but there's possibly many other planets, some of which, of course, might have intelligent life like ours. And so he seems to have gotten some of these ideas made from Anaxagoras and Empedocles, but they seem to fit in right into his overall atomic theory.
Materialistic View of the Soul
00:30:39
Speaker
Let's get into at least one of the reasons why the philosophy of Democritus was so threatening to Christianity. It has to do with the soul. So according to Democritus, well, everything is made out of atoms. That must include the soul. In philosophical terms, this means that he is a materialist. And the basic idea here is that Your psyche, your basic personality and the source of your desires and your center of cognition and all that stuff, your psyche is essentially made out of atoms. There is no non-physical thing that exists or continues to exist after your death. When you die and the compound that you are decomposes into its constituent atoms, well, at that point, your soul ceases to exist
00:31:37
Speaker
And that's it for you. Nothing else after that. Of course, that runs exactly counter to the idea that a non-physical soul will live after we die and go to either heaven or hell, as Christian dogma states.
00:31:57
Speaker
Interesting factoid though, according to Democritus, the soul is actually spread throughout the body. It's not centralized in any one region. It's found across our entire body. And this kind of makes sense from a modern point of view. Today, we are much more comfortable with the idea that we feel and think with our entire body. There is plenty of psychological and neuroscientific evidence to support that kind of idea.
00:32:28
Speaker
I'm thinking here of the work of Antonio Damasio and Lisa Feldman Barrett, etc. And this is kind of ah just a cool factoid that might help you understand Democritus' ethics later on. Okay, two more things before I get into his ethics.
00:32:46
Speaker
Number one, according to Democritus, there are gods. They are made out of atoms like everything else. The main difference between the gods and us is that the compounds that the gods are made out of are just a little bit more resilient, right? So they're not eternal, but they do live longer than us. And maybe that alone is worth the title of God. and However, I should say that after Democritus, his philosophy of atomism would regularly be associated with either atheism or at least skepticism about the traditional religious views of the day.
Atomism and Atheism Conflict
00:33:32
Speaker
So in the book that I mentioned earlier by Brown and Ladyman called Materialism, we see that animistic philosophy and materialism, right the denial that the soul lives on after we die and atheism, they just sort of constantly crop up together.
00:33:52
Speaker
And even though a Democritus does not seem to have been an atheist, he certainly denied some of the traditional views of the gods, saying that they're not really eternal. They're just more resilient than we are as compounds. You can tell that by the time that Christianity comes around with atomism and atheism being more closely linked, this is certainly at odds with what Christians were teaching. Could you imagine seeing that God is made out of atoms?
00:34:21
Speaker
that wouldn't fly at all. Second thing I want to say before jumping into the ethics is that like other philosophers before him, Democritus explained natural phenomena through the movement of natural forces in the case of Democritus, specifically atoms. Just like the people that we've covered before, lightning is not a product of you know whatever, Zeus being angry. Floods are not a product of, I don't know, God getting in the bathtub or whatever. Everything is explicable through the movement of atoms.
00:35:01
Speaker
This of course puts the traditional gods out of a job. If Zeus isn't up there throwing lightning bolts, then what exactly is he doing? And that's why people that are the descendants, intellectually speaking, of Democritus,
00:35:16
Speaker
That is, people that believe in atomistic theory. A couple of centuries from now, we'll say that they you know they don't believe in God and they don't have any need for the God hypothesis. I'm thinking particularly of the mathematician and physicist Simon Pierre de la Place, who in the 1700s gave you know his account of how the universe works.
00:35:42
Speaker
And he famously said to his student, who, by the way, is Napoleon, that he doesn't need God to explain anything in his view of the world. So, just like Democritus over 2,000 years ago says we can explain all natural phenomenon just through the movement of Adam's, Laplace, a couple of millennia later, saying the same thing so you can see how this runs against a grain of Christianity.
00:36:29
Speaker
Let's jump now into the ethical views of Democritus.
Ethics of Eudaimonia
00:36:34
Speaker
And let me begin by stressing this point. All of the ideas that Democritus gets about how it is that one should live and why come directly from atomism. In other words,
00:36:52
Speaker
His views about ethics are interrelated and based upon his views about physics. Now, this is entirely unlike some later moral thinkers, I'm thinking in particular of Immanuel Kant, who literally divided you know reality into two worlds. There's the world as we see it and the world as we really as it really is.
00:37:19
Speaker
And of course, the laws of nature only act upon the world as we see it. And you know that's how he does his thing. Let's not get into that here. What I can say is that philosophers in the ancient period sort of applauded this. you know Cicero is one source that we have on this topic. And he says, yeah, all of his ideas about how to live come from atomism. so Very, very important. And I should also note that it looks like he took ethics to be an extremely important topic because most of the fragments that we have from Democritus are about the good life. So this is fairly central to his views. So let's talk about them.
00:38:08
Speaker
Here's what I want to do to sort of show you the gravity of democracies when it comes to ethics. So, you know, everyone we've covered so far, they're basically giving you a little snapshots of you know how it is that you should live.
00:38:24
Speaker
little bit of ethical advice here and there. But we're slowly moving into the age of ethical systems, right? So in the generation after Democritus, we're going to see philosophical schools arise. We're also going to see what the philosopher Pierre Hadut calls spiritual movements. And you know the names of these, right? These are the the Stoics, the skeptics, the cynics, the Epicureans.
00:38:51
Speaker
the Platonic Academy, right? That's Plato's school. So we're getting into that time period. And during that time period, philosophy was really a movement. Really, it was a way of life. It was darn near a religion.
00:39:08
Speaker
there is talk of people converting into the philosophical life. And we get a lot of what it was like for them at the time by the philosopher Pierre Haddow. Now, Pierre Haddow has reconstructed what ancient philosophy was like during that particular time period. And he says that philosophers really ran against the current of society at the time.
00:39:34
Speaker
They took on a whole new lifestyle. They left their old ways behind. They were seen by other people as bizarre. You can see this in some comic authors and poets who basically poke fun of those people trying to live the philosophical lifestyle.
00:39:51
Speaker
They would grow their beard out. They would say they don't care about money. And each school and movement were sort of weird in their own different way, right? So we'll get to all of those in the next unit. But for now, let me just put it this way. It looks like during this time period when there's schools of philosophy,
00:40:13
Speaker
that is after Democritus, the students who were looking into entering one of these schools, they were really more like disciples. And they would learn the dogmas of the head of the school, sometimes called the master, and they would just memorize them, right? So if you are going to the school headed by the Stoics, you have to just memorize their dogmas and try to live according to them, try to apply them to your life.
Integration of Ethics and Physics
00:40:42
Speaker
Sure, if you're an advanced student, you get to try to defend those dogmas, but in general, you just take on this you know semi-religious approach to philosophy. This is how you live from now on. Well, the reason why I'm mentioning this trend in philosophy happening in the 300s BCE is because we already see some of this in the work of Democritus. Democritus appears to be a very important step towards that kind of thing, because Democritus gives us a system of ethics that he interweaves with his dogmas on physics. So the whole thing is interrelated, it's supported by his ideas, and it's a whole way of life.
00:41:32
Speaker
In fact, there's a way of describing this whole philosophy as a way of life, and that is typically called eudaimonic ethics. So eudaimonia means flourishing. So think about it as the ethics of how to thrive or flourish.
00:41:51
Speaker
That might not be a bad translation. So if that's what these schools of philosophy are all about, eudaimonic ethics, the ethics of flourishing, well, then it seems like Democritus was about that too, because we actually get some information from an important historian of ancient philosophy who lived in the ancient world. We've mentioned him before. His name is Diogenes Laurdius.
00:42:17
Speaker
And from this Diogenes we learned that Democritus did see the chief good, the point of life, so to speak, as eudaimonia, which I described earlier as flourishing. And he had a theory, Democritus did, as to what flourishing consists of. According to Democritus, the way to flourish is to achieve a state of tranquility. The word in Greek for tranquility, or the tranquility that Democritus spoke of at least,
00:42:49
Speaker
is, I'm sure I'm pronouncing this wrong, Yuthumayi. I will not be calling it that. I would just refer to it as tranquility. Sometimes, Democritus also spoke of Adoraxia. Adoraxia translated into English means something like not being disturbed. So whether you want to think about it as tranquility or having the capacity to not be disturbed by events in life,
00:43:17
Speaker
That general idea, that whole being imperturbable, being immune to what happens, that's what Democritus thought flourishing was. And here is how he taught you how to be tranquil, how to achieve the state of evenness of mind, or another word for it is equanimity.
00:43:41
Speaker
Democritus believed that his maxims would show you the way. Now, these are supposed to be little phrases that you memorize and you think about them. And whenever something happens in your life, you reflect on how these maxims apply to your situation and you get better and better at living according to the maxims. So you can see that this is kind of like the schools of philosophy that we will see beginning with Plato and Aristotle.
00:44:13
Speaker
And Democritus firmly believed that his maxims, if taken to heart, would eventually lead to tranquility. On that note, it seems to have at least worked for him. He seems to have been in a perennial state of calmness and contentment. And this was so much the case that people would call him the laughing philosopher. He was just like, you know, Zen, I guess I want to say.
00:44:43
Speaker
He was so incredibly chill that he became the paradigm of the you know unquestionably wise and tranquil philosopher. So many people in the next generation, the generation of these schools of philosophy, like the cynics and the stoics and the academics, they would use him as an example. They would try to imitate his way of life.
00:45:09
Speaker
Now he's not the only one. We'll mention someone a little bit later who is another exemplar of this kind of lifestyle. But Democritus is a big deal in this approach to ethics, the eudaimonic approach.
00:45:24
Speaker
So finally, let's dive into some of the maxims of Democritus. I'm going to start with a bit of a long one, but I'll break it up into pieces and then we can sort of really see the whole body, the whole system of his ethics. And then we'll go into some shorter ones and kind of, you know, iron out some of the details. But here is the first fragment I want to tell you about. Again, it is a bit of a long one. So let me read it in its entirety first, and then we'll break it up.
00:46:00
Speaker
The man trying to enjoy youthumai, or tranquility, should not do much, whether in public or private, nor whatever he does, choose beyond his capabilities and nature. But he should be so much on guard that even when luck falls upon and leads him to thinking about getting more, he puts it aside and does not undertake more than he is capable of.
00:46:28
Speaker
for a good load is safer than a large load. Okay, lots to unpack there before I go any further. Sorry for the gendered language. That is the way Democritus talks, right? So he's his man. You can just reread that as you know humankind. So in general, from now on, I'll just say humans. And what I'm gonna do is break it up into three pieces of advice because that's really what it comes down to, three different in thoughts. So here is the first thought.
00:47:00
Speaker
Don't do too much. Maybe another way to put it is don't want too much. So let me reread that portion for you. The human trying to enjoy youth I me or tranquility should not do much, whether in public or private.
00:47:23
Speaker
So that's the first, I don't know, 10, 15 words. And even though it's you know just a handful of words, you're supposed to already know all the background of his school of thought. So let me unpack all of that for you. And as I already mentioned, you can kind of summarize it as the thought, don't do too much or don't want too much.
00:47:46
Speaker
This is exactly the way the Epicureans, who essentially carried on the tradition of Democritus after he died. That's the way the Epicureans interpret it. To a certain extent, this is on the Epicurean interpretation, being unhappy with life is a frame of mind.
00:48:08
Speaker
If you've sort of trained yourself to want more and more and like you know to always give in to your indulgences, to every time that you want some ice cream, you get some ice cream. To think that everything you want is something that you need to have. If that's the way you've sort of trained your mind to work, then you're always going to be dissatisfied with what you have.
00:48:34
Speaker
The main message there is that we have to train our desires and our desire to fulfill those desires. And we should kind of rein them in so that instead of making our happiness contingent upon all these different things happening, I'm only going to be happy if it's the weekend. I hate Mondays. I'm only happy on Saturday and Sunday. Or I'm only happy when I've gotten some ice cream. I'm only happy when I've gotten a good night's rest. I'm only happy when the teacher doesn't give us any homework.
00:49:08
Speaker
If you train yourself to think in that way, it's going to be very hard to get to a state of tranquility. You're wanting too much. Consider this alternative. What if you train yourself to be happy with a simple life? No need for lots of money. No need for, I don't know, expensive cars, lots of followers on social media. No need to be famous. No need for your teacher to not assign you homework.
00:49:40
Speaker
If you train yourself to even want this simpler life, then you will much more easily achieve Uthuma'i or tranquility. And so the key here to contentment, to peace of mind, to not being disturbed at Araxia, that's the other word we're looking at, it's not in what you have, it's in your frame of mind.
00:50:08
Speaker
And so the jargon that the Epicureans use to describe this sort of approach to what democracies are saying is this. There's necessary and unnecessary desires.
00:50:23
Speaker
Our necessary desires, those are obviously something that we have to go ahead and fulfill. We have to meet those desires. So you have a natural desire for nourishment, right? For good food. You have a natural desire for water or otherwise you die. You have a natural desire for partnership and companionship and for a safe place to sleep, all right? These are all natural desires. And those are definitely ones that you should try to meet.
00:50:52
Speaker
But all these other desires, I have to have ice cream every day. I have to make $2 million dollars before the time I'm 50. Those are unnecessary desires. They are not actually required to be met for a normal human being to be happy. And so by feeding into those unnecessary desires, we're actually obscuring the path or obstructing the path to tranquility, to happiness.
00:51:23
Speaker
So try to distinguish for yourself which are your necessary and which are your unnecessary desires. And the necessary ones are very simple. Let me give you an example of another way to look at this and maybe you can shed some light on the difference between a way of life that will lead to tranquility and one that will lead to just kind of wanting more and more. Some people, and you probably know some of these folks from your own life,
00:51:53
Speaker
are sort of always looking for more. More pleasure, more money, more friends, more romantic partners, whatever. That's precisely what Democritus says is doing too much.
00:52:10
Speaker
Because in a certain way, those kinds of desires can be kind of put into the general category of short-term pleasures. right So if you're constantly pursuing, I want ice cream every day, I want more friends, you know you get a little bit of a dopamine boost maybe when you acquire more ice cream or another follower on social media.
00:52:36
Speaker
But if that's the sort of pleasure that you're always trying to pursue, you're quickly going to find yourself back at an unpleasant state of being. In other words, if you make your happiness contingent upon eating ice cream every day, once you get your bowl of ice cream for the day,
00:52:58
Speaker
you're gonna have to wait a whole another day before you get your next bowl, right?
Achievable Goals for Happiness
00:53:04
Speaker
So you're essentially going a big interval between your moments of pleasure. Or if you make your happiness contingent upon getting $2 million, dollars well, you're gonna have to wait until you get those $2 million dollars to get your pleasure, right? And so that is a long interval of time to get the pleasure, to wait for pleasure.
00:53:27
Speaker
So consider this instead. Try focusing instead on achievable goals, right? Those things that are more so within our reach at a regular, reliable frequency. I'll give you some examples. These are my examples, by the way. Democritus didn't say this. But how about you decide, you train yourself, in other words, to be happy as long as these things happen?
00:53:57
Speaker
You get to spend time with your family, at least for dinner, every day. You do your best to be a loving and supportive romantic partner or friend. You do your best to help others whenever the opportunity arises. You can do these things. You can spend time with your family every day. You can be a good partner or friend every day. You can help others every day.
00:54:26
Speaker
These are very achievable goals. You know what you probably can't do every day, at least not reliably? Buy a yacht or enjoy a big feast of all your favorite foods.
00:54:40
Speaker
or get a new romantic partner or whatever. Those things, those more indulgent desires are harder to produce. And so by making your happiness contingent upon reaching those harder to reach desires, you're making it that much more difficult to achieve tranquility regularly and reliably.
00:55:03
Speaker
So again, don't do too much. Be content and happy with a simple life. And that will generate tranquility much more quickly than having a more desirous approach to life. By the way, if this sounds weird to you, well, remember that democracies and all those that came afterwards trying to advocate a philosophical lifestyle What they're preaching is that you have a sort of conversion to a whole new way of being. They're basically saying the way that most people live their lives, it's not gonna get them to happiness or tranquility, peace of mind. There will be lots of ups and downs in the way that most people live their lives. If you want to get tranquility, and by the way, that is what you should go for, says Democritus, then this is the way of life that you should pursue.
00:56:01
Speaker
Now, there's two ways to disagree with this. One, you can say, well, I just simply don't agree that tranquility is the goal of life. That's cool. We're going to cover lots of other philosophies of life. And maybe you'll find one that does state the goal of life as you see it too. Another way to reject this view of how one should live is to kind of piece apart the support that Democritus gives for this view, right? So we'll look at how he defends this approach through atomism a little bit later. So if you want to take that approach, you have to figure out how he grounds his ethics in atomism first. So we'll get to that in a little bit. By the way, if this sounds good to you, well, then you might be an atomist. Good for you.
00:56:51
Speaker
But in any case, as a way of summing up the comments on this first bit of advice, what seems to make the difference is the mindset and the sort of values you set for yourself. And he's saying Be happy with the simple life. That's really all the human being needs. That's all that's necessary for a human being. Just think about it. Focusing on always getting more and more and more. If that really is your goal, to always want more, when will you be happy? Never, because it's always more and then more. There is no finish line.
00:57:31
Speaker
You're just on a treadmill that runs on forever, but instead we can get off that treadmill and we can set the conditions to our happiness. So as to be very achievable, very simple life. Okay. So I said that big fragment that I read earlier,
00:57:51
Speaker
has three pieces of advice embedded into it. I've only covered the first bit, so let me move on now to the second bit. The second bit of advice is that you should decide how much is too much on the basis of your abilities and nature. In other words, you should try to figure out what you can accomplish in your life and how you should set the standards for yourself by taking into account what your natural abilities are and the kind of person that you are. So if we go back to the fragment, this is the part that we get from this section. Nor whatever this person does, they should not choose beyond their capabilities and nature.
00:58:42
Speaker
Okay, so let's unpack this. um The main message here is that you shouldn't set the bar too high. Now I can already hear that some people might object to not setting the bar too high. Does that mean we don't have to try? I'll get to that in a second. Let me just focus on this part first. He's saying that to know how much is too much for you,
00:59:09
Speaker
you really need an adequate understanding of your abilities in nature. So by implication, you need to try to learn about yourself. What makes you tick? What consistently makes you happy? What recharges you? What trains you? And you also have to get a realistic assessment of your abilities, right? the Those skills that you think you have, do you actually have them?
00:59:39
Speaker
right And with all this knowledge, that will help you set your goals and plan your life. So, a couple of comments on this. The first thing is, in my own case, it literally took me over 30 years of existing before I realized something that many of you probably already realize about yourself.
01:00:02
Speaker
But one of the things that most recharges me, the thing that gets me ready for work or taking on some new project is a couple of days in nature. Now, I don't know why I didn't realize this earlier, but if I can get, I would say a solid four or five days in nature,
01:00:24
Speaker
I get a real boost in energy for a couple of months. So in other words, if I spent a week in nature right before the semester, I'm gonna have a good semester. The most I've been embedded in nature is about two weeks. And that was a fantastic experience. I felt so recharged. I felt rejuvenated. But the point that I'm trying to make here is that it took me a long time to figure that out.
01:00:52
Speaker
And it took me just as long to figure out the things that drain me. There's a bunch of things that I do that I thought I liked doing that just kind of make me tired and and not really good for me. So I don't do them anymore, right? And once I've brought this up to some other people in my sphere, I've gotten quite a few people that say, yeah, you know what? I used to do this a lot. And and then I realized that I don't really like doing it. And you have to wonder to yourself, like, do we not know ourselves very well?
01:01:21
Speaker
Well, obviously for at least some of us, we don't know ourselves very well. And so we have to really kind of pay attention and figure out what we're all about. Now let's move on to this idea of getting a realistic assessment of your skills and abilities. I have an uncomfortable thing to admit right now, but ah I, you know, all right, let me give you the story.
01:01:52
Speaker
One time, many, many years ago, 15 years ago or so, I was at a social gathering and someone was claiming that they had photographic memory and I'm now proud of it.
01:02:05
Speaker
But I sort of insisted that this person prove it, that they showcase their wonderful talents to the rest of us. And I happen to have a book with me. What's new? I think I always have a book with me. And I just said, hey, here, take, what, 30 seconds a minute to look at this first page and then just recite it back to me.
01:02:29
Speaker
Now, needless to say, things got uncomfortable and this person did not have photographic memory. After all, they thought they did, but not really. And so, let me look at this from a couple of different angles.
Realistic Self-Assessment
01:02:45
Speaker
From the point of view of Democritus, we should not be this misguided about our own abilities.
01:02:53
Speaker
Right, so to believe that you have a skill when you really don't have that skill, that's bad. You should try to work on really figuring out what you can actually do. Only claim to have those skills that are tried and true. A second way of looking at this though, is that at least from my perspective, perhaps the way that I approach this, basically embarrassing him in public, is not the way I should have done things, but hey, that's why I'm interested in ethics, right?
01:03:23
Speaker
I wish I were a better person. And so I'm working on it, right? And that's why I'm studying all these things. And I hope that you're learning a little bit from my mistakes. Coincidentally, I do think Xenophanes from a few lessons ago would have been just fine with what I did. Remember, Xenophanes was the one who said that we should call people out when they have intellectual pretensions or epistemic pretensions when they say they know more than they can possibly know.
01:03:52
Speaker
So at least one person we've covered would be happy with what I did. But I didn't like the way I handled it. So that is not something that I plan on doing again. For myself, I am trying to get a better feel for those skills that I genuinely actually hold. And I think this is a good thing to do. And I agree with Democritus on this point.
01:04:19
Speaker
Okay, third bit of advice embedded into this fragment that I read for you earlier. Do not let good luck lead you to overestimate your own abilities. So let me go back to this fragment. We should be so much on guard that even when luck falls upon and leads us to thinking about getting more, we put it aside and do not undertake more than we are capable of.
01:04:49
Speaker
I'll just close it off by reading that last line again. A good load is safer than a large load. In other words, do what you can handle, that's a good load. And don't try to do what you can't handle, an overly large load, right? So that is what Democritus is getting at. But let's focus on the bit about luck.
01:05:11
Speaker
there is almost a psychological impulse that when something good happens, we like to take credit for it. It's just so intuitive to do this. And there's plenty of psychological evidence that we have something called confirmation bias, also known as my side bias, where we tend to interpret information in ways that are flattering to us or that confirm our preexisting beliefs.
01:05:41
Speaker
Well, obviously, if you want an accurate assessment of what you can reasonably do, then you need a lot of self-awareness to be able to tease out what was luck and what was me. Maybe the easiest domain to think about this is in the realm of economic
Role of Luck in Success
01:06:01
Speaker
success. Now, some people like to claim that they're self-made, right? The self-made man.
01:06:10
Speaker
But even before getting too democratian about this, to say that you're a self-made man is to fail to acknowledge a ton of circumstances that had to fall into place for your success to happen.
01:06:29
Speaker
I mean, I'm gonna give you a couple of things that no one chooses but contribute to overall economic success. So if you're born into a wealthy family and there's a lot of generational wealth there so that there's lots of property owned and you're basically making money passively via the property that you own, well, you can't really take credit for that. Maybe someone far up in your family line could take credit for it. But in your case, being born into a wealthy family with a lot of generational wealth, is that something you chose? It's a matter of luck.
01:07:09
Speaker
And that obviously makes a difference to how successful you will be. Just think about it this way. You have a nice big safety net so you can try out different ventures and different businesses. And if they fail, you fall safely into your net. And if you do well, well, then you start saying, I'm a self-made man, but you're not really, are you?
01:07:33
Speaker
How about this, if you're born into certain areas or into certain wealthy families, you have ready access to good schools, good tutors, good coaches.
01:07:44
Speaker
Although it is the case that many people are successful even though they didn't go to a good school or they didn't have great tutors or great coaches, in general, most people that, for example, get to be professional baseball players, they had good coaches.
01:08:04
Speaker
They had parents that can take them to practices during the summer and they could travel to tournaments and invest in equipment, et cetera, et cetera. And of course, those kids will have an advantage over the other kids who simply don't have the same means. They can't make it to all the games. They can't make it to all the tournaments. They can't have special one-on-one coaching.
01:08:31
Speaker
And so obviously that will make a difference in sports, in school, in the connections that you have in order to get a good job. And this wealth just compounds over time. So again, you being born with certain connections and access to certain kinds of schools and tutors and coaches, that's not something you can really claim to have been responsible for since for most of us, that happens to us as we're children and we really had nothing to do with it.
01:08:59
Speaker
How about this? What if you're born in a city that's flourishing? It's in the ascendancy. Well, neither you nor your family typically had much to do with that. That just happens to be the luck of the drop. And if you're born in a city that's in decline, well, that wasn't your fault either. It's all just luck.
01:09:19
Speaker
What if you come of age during an economic boom so that you get into a well-paid job immediately after high school and you can essentially raise a family on a single income? You single-handedly had nothing to do with the economic boom. You were just very lucky to have been born in the right decade.
01:09:41
Speaker
What if you come of age during a period when housing is cheap? This is something that millennials know about a little too much. Turns out that many millennials make more money than their parents, but they are unable to buy houses because the housing market has skyrocketed in the last decade or so. And so even though they make more money than their parents, they cannot afford a house.
01:10:10
Speaker
This shows us that being homeowners has some element of luck involved. And by the way, maybe the best example of how there's luck involved. How about genes?
01:10:25
Speaker
genes play a role in everything from height to maybe intelligence to your disposition towards certain psychological illnesses like depression or schizophrenia. If you have certain genes, you might even have certain political tendencies, right? There's this book called Predisposed by a few authors and the lead author, John Hibbing,
01:10:50
Speaker
is well known for making this case that genes might play a role in your political inclinations. So in short, luck has a lot to do with your success in life or your failure, and Democritus points this out and drives the point home. If that's the case, well, number one, don't let luck lead you to overestimate what you can do and how much you deserve. Always keep that factor in mind, chance. Given this perspective where you always give a central role to chance, Democritus asks us to, well, number two, the second thing that we learned from this, to be more understanding of the situations that those that are less well-off are in. If luck
01:11:47
Speaker
plays a gigantic role in whether or not you're successful. It also plays a gigantic role for those who are not successful, for those who are in dire straits, right? They're low in the socioeconomic spectrum. They're barely making ends meet, or maybe they're completely financially insolvent. What Democritus says is that these people deserve our pity and our help.
01:12:15
Speaker
And so this is something that we find in other fragments. And I wanted to mention it now because it really is the case that this idea of luck is central to democracy. Just remember, all compounds are just the product of accidental collisions. And so a certain sort of randomness is inherent in his philosophical system. There is a chance-iness built into his whole way of looking at things. A lot of it is luck, in short.
01:13:07
Speaker
Okay, I want to move into some of the political philosophy of Democritus, but I think this other fragment will be useful to look at as well. Actually, I'll just go ahead and tell you the main message, but this is something that Plutarch reports for ah for us. Plutarch was a historian and a philosopher, and so he tells us a little bit about Democritus. And here's sort of the gist of the fragment.
01:13:33
Speaker
Democritus basically saw that the soul and the overall person, you know the body, you might want to say, are interconnected and interrelated in a very deep way. In other words, the condition of one affects the other. And I wanted to touch on this for a bit because it will help us make more sense of his socio-political philosophy later on. And another reason why I wanted to comment on this is because psychologists are essentially backing up what democracy is is saying. So let me start with the psychology part.
01:14:12
Speaker
and then we'll tie it together to his political philosophy. um I'm getting some of this from a book called Noise. There are several authors here, but the lead author is Daniel Kahneman, who is a Nobel Laureate, recently passed away by the way. And let me just give you some tidbits here. We'll tie it together to what Democritus says. So here's one. Judges make different decisions depending on how recently they've had a meal break.
01:14:42
Speaker
In particular, it's been shown that parole judges are more lenient after a meal break and the more merciless the further away they get from that meal.
01:14:54
Speaker
In other words, if you are a judge on a parole board and you just had a meal, you're more likely to grant parole to that person. But if you are very far away from that meal, it's almost the next meal time and you're getting kind of hungry and you're kind of crabby.
01:15:14
Speaker
Well, you're less likely to grant that person parole. Notice the interconnectedness here of our mood, our feelings, and our decisions, our judgments. It really comes down to this. If you're feeling hungry, you're feeling crabby, and so you are just a little bit meaner.
01:15:35
Speaker
And if you're nice and satiated, you just had a nice meal, you're feeling good, you are more, well, maybe objective, but maybe just more merciful is the way to put it. And so there really is this interconnectedness between the mind and the body. As I mentioned before, the work of the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio also backs this idea up. Just as hunger levels affect mood,
01:16:03
Speaker
So does the temperature. So here's another little datum from the book Noise. Fewer people get asylum on hot days. All right, again, you're a judge and you're trying to see if you're going to give someone political asylum, right? Some refugee is trying to get political asylum in the United States.
01:16:24
Speaker
Well, if it's hot and you've gotten sweaty on the way to work and you're just kind of crabby in general because none of us like being too hot, well, then you're less likely to give that person in front of you asylum. But if it's a little more mild and you're not sweating just walking from the car to the building,
01:16:46
Speaker
you will be a little more lenient and you might give that person asylum after all. So this is kind of bananas for many reasons. The first reason is that you want judges to be objective and consistent.
01:17:02
Speaker
But differences in the weather or the time of the day, depending on how close it is to a meal break, make the difference between a merciful judge and a merciless judge. And so we really don't get this objectivity that we want from judges. And by the way, if you read this book, Noise, it's not just judges. It's all over the place, right? Therapists, prosecutors in the criminal justice system.
01:17:31
Speaker
people on hiring boards, it's all over the place, right? The subtitle to the book is a flaw in human judgment. The point that I'm trying to harp on here, though, is that the state of the body affects how you make decisions, right? The soul is affected by the body. I'll just give you one more sort of just ridiculous finding that I discovered in this book. Judges show less leniency if the local football team recently lost.
01:18:02
Speaker
That's right, if the local high school their team just lost or the local college, then the judge is just a little bit crabby, I guess, and they are a little more merciless.
01:18:17
Speaker
Well, what does this mean for us? What would Democritus say if you were around today? I think you might say that when you're trying to assess yourself as a person and assess your abilities, and also when you're making big decisions right about love or career, whatever, you might need to make your decisions multiple times. It might be the case that it's harder to know yourself than you think.
01:18:43
Speaker
Maybe you should make your choices or your assessments at different times of the day, when you're hungry, when you're full, when you're tired, when you haven't had a good night's rest. And if the data that we learn from Daniel Kahneman and his colleagues is accurate, you probably won't come to the same conclusion every time. And that's good. You sort of need to take the average of all the answers yeah you give to figure out what it is that really is reflective of of who you are. OK, that was a little bit of setup for moving into the socio-political philosophy of Democritus.
01:19:23
Speaker
Let me now give you another fragment and more discuss it a little bit. Here it is. It needs to be realized that human life is powerless and short-lived and for most mixed up with having been confused and without means in order that one may care only for moderate acquisitions and that hardship be measured by the necessities.
01:19:49
Speaker
Now, I don't know if it's a translation or that Democrat is like really long sentences. I know that this is not entirely clear. So again, let's break it up a little bit. He again has three messages embedded in here.
01:20:04
Speaker
The first thing that he's trying to do is he's trying to tell you how you should try to train yourself, to convince yourself that you can be happy with moderate acquisitions. And one way to do this is by comparing yourself to the majority of humankind. If you compare yourself to the ultra rich all the time, well, then obviously you're never going to be happy. But this is an unfair comparison. This is a vanishingly small portion of the population. Who should you really compare yourself to? Well, as the majority of people. And this is why he says most people
01:20:46
Speaker
live in a state of being that is powerless and their lives are short and they are born without access to knowledge and without connections to get out of poverty. This is what it is for most people.
01:21:02
Speaker
So when you frame your life like that, well, in that case, it's a lot easier to be happy with just getting moderate acquisitions. What are those things that I said earlier? Spending time with your family, doing your best to be a good partner, to be a good friend. If accomplishing those things are the conditions for your happiness, well, you're much more likely to accomplish that than if you are committing yourself to only being happy if you make $10 million. dollars And a quick side note, it's not like he's trying to get you to think about poor people, for example, just so you can say to yourself, oh, I'm so much better than the poor. That's not the message, right? It's a way to prompt your mind, to compel your mind into entering a state of being thankful, having an attitude of gratitude, we might say. The second thing that he's trying to say is,
01:22:00
Speaker
Now you should measure hardship by the necessities. This is where the Epicureans get the idea that there is the necessary desires and the unnecessary desires. And he's basically saying you only need to fulfill the necessary ones. And all those extra desires that, you know, you don't really need to feed, just slowly train yourself to not think about them, to just hopefully get rid of them ideally.
01:22:30
Speaker
And the third message here is reflecting on the fact that most people are born without political power and that many, many people are born into destitute poverty.
01:22:44
Speaker
and that many, many people don't have access to schools and basic resources. By thinking about these things, we are reminding ourselves of our lucky circumstances as well as the unlucky circumstances of others. And this should prompt us to do good things for those in need. Right. We didn't choose to be born with the amount of intelligence that we have or with the disabilities that we have or don't have.
01:23:14
Speaker
or the parents we have or lack thereof, right? Or the country we were born in, none of that did we choose. It's all out of our control. And the same could be said for those born into destitute poverty or with some kind of severe disadvantage. So yes, we should count our blessings and also help out those that aren't so blessed.
01:23:41
Speaker
This is sort of the basic feel of Democritus' socio-political philosophy. Let me give you a few other fragments here so that we can see the general tenor of the view. Those who feel pleasure at their neighbor's misfortunes fail to understand that the results of luck are common to all.
01:24:03
Speaker
and that they lack a cause for their own joy. I think it's pretty obvious what he's saying there, but just to be clear, not only should you not feel pleasure when you see that others are in poverty, and but he's saying that you don't really have any good justification for feeling that pleasure. Just a matter of luck that you're standing where you are and the poor are where they are. Another fragment.
01:24:31
Speaker
Those to whom something unjust is being done, one must lend aid as much as one can and not look away. For to do this kind of thing is just and good. And not to do this kind of thing is unjust and bad. One of the key things to focus on here is that phrase, not look away.
01:24:57
Speaker
There is a book by the psychologist Paul Bloom called Against Empathy. And it sounds kind of controversial, right? Against empathy. But what he's saying is that empathy is something that we can, if we try, turn off. And some of us do, right? When we hear about a fund drive or we see someone who is in need and we don't want to help them, we don't want to feel the guilt of not helping, we turn away.
01:25:26
Speaker
And so what Democritus is saying is, don't turn away from the downtrodden, from the less fortunate. Look at them. Let yourself feel what you're going to feel and try to help them as much as you can. Here is another fragment.
01:25:44
Speaker
When those who have means undertake to contribute to those who do not, and to assist and benefit them, herein at last is having pity and not being solitary, and they become comrades and defend one another, and the citizens are of one mind, and there are other good things, so many, no one could enumerate them.
01:26:09
Speaker
In this fragment, we really see Democritus' everyday ethics blending into his political philosophy in general. And it all, again, blends to his atomistic philosophy. Let's kind of unpack this here. It starts by having an accurate view of how the cosmos works. And again, there is a central role here being played by chance.
01:26:35
Speaker
Once we acknowledge the role of chance, we can have a more realistic assessment of how much credit we deserve for either our successes or failures, as well as those of others. And so when we see those who are less well-off, we want to do good by them. We want to do good for them.
01:26:55
Speaker
And when we do that, that creates a sense of bonding, of community. And when we create a strong community, the community grows more robust and more cohesive, and this is good for everyone. So it really starts from understanding physics correctly, physics the way he sees it, and then getting an accurate picture of why it is that we succeed and fail.
01:27:24
Speaker
and then being good to people as a result of knowing how it is that people succeed and fail, and then society growing stronger as a result of us being good to each other.
01:27:37
Speaker
What's really interesting about this socio-political philosophy is that democracy is telling us that what's good for society is also good for you.
Philosophy of Democritus
01:27:48
Speaker
Having these habits of mind so that you know you look for opportunities to help out others and you train yourself to only try to fulfill necessary desires.
01:28:00
Speaker
and you acknowledge that luck plays a role in a lot of what happens in our lives, these are the keys to arriving at tranquility. But they're also the key to making a good, strong community. And so there really is no difference, the mockery is just saying, between helping yourself out and helping out your community.
01:28:25
Speaker
I hope you can see that Democritus saw his philosophy as an integrated system, that his physics fed into his ethics, which fed into his therapeutic elements of his philosophy, which fed into his political views. And it's all a theory about how to make not only the individual better, but also society better.
01:28:47
Speaker
And in this way, Democritus seems to be one of the first theorists to propose an ethical system, an integrated view of morality and physics and political philosophy and so on. This is why, as I mentioned earlier,
01:29:06
Speaker
The thought of Democritus is an important step towards the schools of philosophy that we'll see in the very next generation. And so this course would really not be complete without a thorough review of his views. I hope you can see that now. But there's someone else who although we know very little about them, plays a similar role in launching the schools of philosophy that will ah arise in the fourth century BCE. Now, I've mentioned him before, I've teased him before. I mentioned that he is a veteran of the Peloponnesian War,
01:29:55
Speaker
What I can mention now that you know about the schools of philosophy that will be joining us soon, is that many different schools of philosophy and spiritual movements actually trace their views and imitate the life of not only the Mocritus, but also the person that we're going to talk about next. It's time to take a look at Socrates.