Democritus · Philosophy
Democritus’ thoroughgoing materialism of the mind: the soul itself is made of fine, swift, spherical atoms, and we perceive the world because thin films of atoms (<em>eidôla</em>) stream off objects and strike our senses.
Democritus’ materialism was complete: it did not stop at stones and stars but reached all the way into the living, perceiving, thinking soul. If reality is nothing but atoms and void, then the soul - the principle of life and consciousness - cannot be some immaterial, otherworldly substance. It too must be made of atoms. And Democritus specified which kind: the soul is composed of the finest, smoothest, roundest, and most mobile atoms of all - the same spherical atoms he thought composed fire. Why these? Because the soul is the source of life and motion, and only the most agile, slippery, fast-moving atoms could thread through the body, animate it, and respond with the quickness that living things show. These soul-atoms are distributed throughout the body, interspersed among the heavier atoms of flesh and bone, giving life and sensation to the whole.
This is one of the earliest fully materialist theories of mind in human history. There is no ghost in the machine for Democritus, no immaterial spirit added to the body - only a special, especially mobile kind of matter, doing the work we attribute to soul. Life is what happens when enough of these fine fiery atoms are present and properly distributed; death is their dispersal. Breathing, on his account, is the mechanism by which we keep replenishing our soul-atoms against the squeezing pressure of the surrounding air, which is forever trying to push them out; we live as long as we can breathe in fresh soul-atoms to replace those forced out, and we die when the pressure wins. The mind, for Democritus, is simply a particularly refined arrangement of matter - a thought as radical today, in the age of neuroscience, as it was in ancient Abdera.
If the soul is atoms, then perception must be a purely physical transaction between atoms - and Democritus worked out an ingenious account of how it happens. The problem he faced: how can an object ‘over there’ affect my eye ‘over here’ across a gap? His answer is one of the most memorable ideas in ancient philosophy. Every object, he held, is constantly shedding from its surface incredibly thin films or husks of atoms - ‘images’ or eidôla - that preserve the shape and arrangement of the object’s surface, like a continuous succession of fragile, atom-thin masks peeling off and flying through the air in all directions. When one of these films enters your eye, it stamps its pattern upon the soul-atoms there, and that is seeing: the reception of a thin atomic replica of the object’s surface. To see a tree is to have a tree-shaped film of atoms register on the moist atoms of your eye.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Democritus held the soul to be composed of fine, smooth, spherical (fiery) atoms spread through the body, and that perception works by eidôla - thin films of atoms that stream off objects and strike our sense organs. Explain his materialism of soul and perception in your own words.
Leads to Epicurus.
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