Of Democritus and Heraclitus

The two philosophers who best understood what humanity is, I think, were Democritus and Heraclitus — and they arrived at opposite conclusions from the same observations. Democritus, having looked at the human condition in full — at our pretensions, our vanities, our perpetual solemn preoccupations with things of no great importance — laughed. Heraclitus, having looked at the same spectacle, wept. Both men were responding honestly to what they saw. The question is only which response was the wiser.

I am, by temperament, on the side of Democritus. Not because the human condition is not pitiable — it plainly is, in many of its aspects — but because laughter seems to me a more honest acknowledgement of our situation than tears. Tears imply that things should be otherwise, that there has been some failure, that a better arrangement was possible and has been lost. Laughter implies only that the thing is as it is, which is strange and disproportionate and rather wonderful in its absurdity. When I see a man of great consequence brought low by a small vanity, I feel the scene calls for comedy, not elegy. The comedy is, after all, the more accurate genre for most of what happens to us.

“Heraclitus wept because he felt the weight of human folly as a burden. Democritus laughed because he felt its lightness. I have always found it easier to carry what makes me laugh than what makes me weep — and I find it lands on my shoulders with less bruising.”

There is, besides, a philosophical advantage to the laughing position. The man who weeps at the world’s folly is still, in some sense, taking it seriously — still expecting it to be other than it is, still disappointed. The man who laughs has completed the necessary adjustment: he has understood that this is the world, that this is man, and that indignation on behalf of an impossible standard serves no one. Philosophy, properly pursued, should arrive at a kind of serene amusement — not cold detachment, not contempt, but the warm recognition of a creature that has studied itself long enough to find its own antics, at last, genuinely funny.