Pleasure, Knowledge and Sensation in Democritus

Abstract

W hile historians of philosophy, ancient and modern, have generallY and rightly considered the main interest of Democritus to lie in his metaphysics and epistemology, the bulk of the fragments of his writings deal not with these but with ethical topics. It is, therefore, of obvious interest to enquire what connexion, if any, may be discerned between the ethical writings and the main body of the atomistic system. Further, this enquiry, as undertaken by modern critics, has produced considerable divergence in its results. Thus on the one hand Dyroff 1 was unable to see any connexion at all, while Bailey2 is content with the conclusion that the ethical doctrine, whicl was in itself in no sense a coherent system, had only a loose connexion with the main atomistic theory. In contrast, Natorp3 held that the ethical theory is closely integrated with the cosmological, a view which has been developed with impressive erudition by Vlastos.4 In this paper I attempt to show that while there certainly exists a close connexion between the two main strands in Democritus' philosophy, the exact nature of that connexion has not been adequately outlined by either Natorp or Vlastos. To be more precise, their mistake seems to me to lie in looking for the connexion in some description of the ultimate end of human action as conceived by Democritus, rather than in the relation of his accounts of moral and of theoretical knowledge.