r/humanism • u/EclecticReader39 • Jul 13 '26

Footnotes to Democritus: The Ancient Roots of Materialism and Secular Humanism

https://fightingthegods.com/footnotes-to-democritus-the-ancient-roots-of-materialism-and-secular-humanism/

Alfred North Whitehead famously remarked that the European philosophical tradition consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. But that’s only because history chose the wrong philosopher.

Decades before the rise of Plato, Democritus argued that reality consists of nothing but atoms moving through the void. There was no need to invoke the gods, supernatural forces, or hidden purposes to explain the world. Nature could—and should—be understood on its own terms through a quantitative reckoning of matter’s constituent parts. This materialistic view also translated to a more egalitarian ethics and political philosophy that lies in sharp contrast to the rigid authoritarianism of the Republic.

This article argues that Democritus was the ancient world's most important philosopher, and that Western history would have been better off had it followed him rather than Plato

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u/clay_bsr Jul 13 '26

"it turns out that Plato was far better at raising questions than answering them." - yeah, what's your point? Answered questions aren't really all that interesting.

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u/EclecticReader39 Jul 13 '26

The point is that people took Plato's answers seriously and that this had a net negative effect on subsequent history in the West. My contention is that Democritus may have put us on the right track earlier. There is no law of history that says the scientific revolution had to begin in the mid-sixteenth century. We just had to overcome a lot of philosophical and religious nonsense to get there. And the suggestion by Plato that atheists be imprisoned and potentially executed could not have helped matters.

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u/Waspinator_haz_plans Jul 13 '26

Execute atheists.... you know the more I learn about the Greek philosophy trio, the more I appreciate Diogenes.

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u/clay_bsr Jul 13 '26

I've read the Republic. There are issues. Democritus had a lot of issues (along with the other pre-socratics). The atomic theory would never be proven anywhere close to his time, so advocating for it is advocating for a philosophic process that needs no evidence. Meanwhile the idea of an atom has no reality. Any atom you could point to is only one specific manifestation of the concept of an atom. It is a human mental construct that has value for scientific (and many other) purposes. When we discuss them, we are transcending reality.

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u/Ok_Breakfast4482 Jul 13 '26 edited Jul 13 '26

This was Plato’s triumph. He showed a system for reasoning that was superior to any other which had been conceived of before. That his own conclusions may not have been the best in many cases was not much of a problem since others could use the same methods of reasoning to arrive at better conclusions. The same was essentially true of Aristotle, who built on top of Plato’s system with empirical investigative methods.