 Now, first of all, evidence for Democritus. Democritus wrote more works than anyone who preceded him. So you will have noticed in the supplementary reading at the end of the biographical information, there's a list of his writings, and over 100 writings that were attributed to him. Now, compare that with someone like Socrates. Socrates is a very influential philosopher, right? He wrote nothing, not a single word. He never bothered to write anything. So Democritus is essentially a contemporary of Socrates, but one who did write something. And this is why I'm so interested in him. Lots of people write books about Socrates, who himself wrote nothing, and how influential he was. Well, that situation should be compared with Democritus, who we actually have writings, and we have testimony directly about his influence. So where do we get evidence for him if none of his works have survived? Well, Diogenes Laerges tells us some facts about his biography. A guy named Thracilus preserved a list of his writings, which Diogenes Laerges quotes. That's basically what you read for today. Then there is testimonia, descriptions of his views by Aristotle and the doxographic tradition to which Aristotle gave rise. Then there are fragments. Most of these are devoted to his ethics, whereas most of the testimony about his views is devoted to his physics. But there are fragments of his ethics contained in a very late anthology of philosophy produced in the fifth century AD. So basically way after the Hellenistic age into the period of late antiquity or verging on middle ages. There are also imitations of his work. There are people that wrote works either attributed to a democratist or in a democratian style that have survived. There are also lots of people who have attacked him, especially early church fathers who rejected the materialism and atheism and hedonism and empiricism of this school of philosophy. Also his influence on other writers, most obviously Epicurus and Lucretius, but also Cicero, Seneca, Plutarch, and so forth, as I'll show. Now you write about his biography, so I'm not going to spend much time on it. One thing is that there's confusion about his birth date. We don't know exactly when he was born or when he died. He is said to have lived a long life, something like 100 years. There are some descriptions of his early education in Darjean's lairishes, which are in fact impossible, because they're anachronistic about the time period when Persians were traveling through democracy's hometown of Abdurah. There's also confusion about his later or higher education. He's said to be a pupil of Anaxagoras, but also said to have rejected everything that Anaxagoras said. He has said to have been a pupil of somebody named Lucipus, but other people denied that there ever was a philosopher named Lucipus and may have been a fictional figure in a dialogue written by a democratist. We have reports of his travels, but then we also have reports that he didn't go to all these places. So it said that he went to Athens, and there it said that nobody recognized him, and there's even a famous quote, I went to Athens and nobody recognized me. But then there's other people who have reported denials that he ever went to Athens. He's also supposed to have traveled to Persia, Syria, Egypt, India, and even Ethiopia, and there's a quotation of him saying, I have traveled much further than anybody else in the world, and I have gone to these places and gathered more from their wisdom traditions than anybody else has ever done. Now we don't know if that was just made up by a later biographer or if he really said that. Furthermore, there's questions about his interactions with the philosopher Protagoras, who's also from Abdurah, about whether he ever directly interacted with Socrates. The quote about, I went to Athens and no one recognized me, seems to be a reference to Socrates, not recognizing him. Also about Plato. It said, Plato never mentions the name Democritus in any of his works, and yet they were contemporaries. Democritus a little bit older, but we know he was an extremely influential philosopher. And you may have noticed the crazy quote about Plato expressing a wish to burn all of the books of Democritus and buying up from the bookstores all of Democritus' work so they could be destroyed, but then a couple of Pythagoreans persuaded him, no, they're already too widely dispersed, you can't possibly do it that way. So he did it the way that's really affected, which is never mentioned the guy's name. If you wanna kill someone in philosophy, what you do is don't cite them. Don't ever mention them. Like Kant tries to do this with Plato, right? He writes this entire giant, idealistic work, 800 pages long, and mentions Plato twice in it as a size. And he also wrote this critique of teleology that goes on for hundreds of pages about teleology. Never once mentions the name Aristotle. So whoever your main influence is, and the person who you have anxiety about how much influence they've had over you, tends to be somebody whose name you just completely submerge and never mention it. At least that's how ancient philosophers do it. Why was Plato so antagonistic against democracy in the first place? Well, one, the most interesting way to think of it is that because their views were different. So, Demacris was a materialist philosopher, and Plato was an idealistic philosopher, and Demacris was a naturalistic, inclined philosopher, and Plato believed in intelligent design, creationism, and their theology, and every aspect of their philosophy is different. That's the interesting distinctions. The last interesting one would be something like I was just alluding to, that it was some kind of rivalry, and even including a source that was contained in this reading saying that Plato didn't mention him because he didn't want to go up against the biggest, strongest philosopher at the time. I don't think there's much to those. I think it's more like the situation with Kant. You're really influenced by somebody, you're writing these ideas up yourself, and so you don't mention them because you want it to be assumed that this is your set of views. So, people don't often talk about this, but for example, in Plato's work on natural philosophy called the timeus, there's an account of atoms there. So, the basic elements of Plato's view is that there are atoms. Well, that's a view of democracies, and that was put forth by Demacris much earlier than Plato ever started writing philosophy. There's also questions about his interaction with the leading physician and medical writer of the time, Hippocrates, in fact, there was a fictionalized novel kind of dialogue about an interaction between them that I'll say more about in a little bit. But as you can see, this slide is mostly question marks, and that's appropriate. We just don't really know much about the biography in the strict sense, and Diogenes Lyarchus's work, biography or the lives of the ancient philosopher, again, don't assume that that means something like what we would, an historian would write, a biography of Abraham Lincoln or something, where we would expect it to be based on facts and so forth. In fact, the very idea of writing a lives of someone is more about writing a story that tries to encapsulate what their way of life was. And so, you try to depict the actions that they took in their own life and somehow embodying the philosophical ideas that they have, and that's more the point of that genre than actually telling us reliable facts about these people, which is why there are so few of them even in biographers. Now, here's a summary of why I consider him an archetype of the philosopher in the Hellenistic Age. First of all, because he had a direct influence on every organized school in the Hellenistic Age, and I could demonstrate that in those slides at the end of the presentation. The second is because of an image of him in the Hellenistic Era as the so-called laughing or cheerful philosopher as opposed to perichlitus, the crying philosopher, and I'll show you an illustration of that. And the reason this is important is because identifying a democrat is the laughing philosopher and the cheerful and tranquil philosopher is really important because almost all of Hellenistic ethics is oriented towards trying to find a way to be a cheerful and not anxious person, someone who has a tranquil life. That's a goal of almost every other school, and if democrat is supposed to be the emblem of a philosopher who's actually like that, that suggests his influence. Also, the idea of democratist turning the tables on Hippocrates who's supposed to have come to diagnose some mental problems of democratist and then ends up getting diagnosed and admitting that it's actually his problem, and I'll show you some illustrations about that. That's important because a lot of Hellenistic ethics is oriented around a therapeutic ideal, an idea that philosophy is analogous to medicine. Medicine treats illnesses of the body, philosophy treats illnesses of the soul, and they're exactly parallel. We all accept that there's a legitimate art of treating illnesses of the body, and we all accept that there's not just a body but a soul, and therefore, we all accept that there must be a form of therapy for this, and this has an impact on almost all the schools, including skepticism, and so this anecdote about democratist being a very early person to practice that conception philosophy again suggests his influence. Now, here's one of many, many illustrations that compare the sorrowful, sad, herapitis to the cheerful democratist, which became a subject for art, and there are hundreds of these paintings in the late middle ages, Renaissance, and into modern art because it is a challenge for the artist to depict emotion, and these are like paradigms of emotional state, sadness, and cheerfulness. But here's the philosophical content of this comparison. It's that heraclitus looking at everything in the world and what's happening and what people are really like, it leads him to weep. It makes him sorrowful because he sees what a horrible, pitiful, miserable world we actually live in, and it drives him to tears as he thinks about it. Democritus looking at the very same things is driven to laugh at them and take nothing seriously. Looking at the follies of human beings and how everything's set up and just the crazy absurdness of it all, his reaction is a cheerful laughing at it all. Now, which of these people do you wanna be like? It's sort of the idea. Do you wanna be somebody who, with respect to everything you see, it turns you miserable and sad or someone who can look at that all and laugh at it? Well, there's a serious question in there and the point I'm making now is that Democritus is associated with a latter kind of philosophy and as we'll see, the Stoics also want you to be in that state and the Epicureans also want you to be in that state and even the skeptics want you to be in that state with respect to things because there's a big problem. If wisdom ends up making you more miserable, not more happy, cheerful, tranquil, et cetera, but more miserable, if what wisdom consists in is realizing how horrible it all really is, then most people aren't gonna want to pursue wisdom, be a sort of discouragement from doing philosophy, discouragement from doing science. And I think this is a discouragement for a lot of people to this day to do philosophy and to do science because when we start discovering what we're really like and what the world's really like and it's seeming to be indifferent to our needs and things like that, it is a kind of depressing thing. So, but if we could find a way to be realistic about what the world's like and what we should do and what other people are like and react to it with cheerfulness and tranquility, that's kind of an ideal of Hellenistic philosophy. Now, here's how this story, this hilarious ancient novel that's written in the Hellenistic period goes. So the people in Democritus' hometown, the people in Abderah are very worried about Democritus' mental health because he's laughing at everything, everything he sees, he seems to be cracking up when they're saying, and they think, this guy's got some kind of problem with manic depression or something, we've got to deal with this. And so they call on the most famous physician, Hippocrates, to come and treat him. So Hippocrates shows up and finds him doing some solitary researches, hanging around by tombs, doing some philosophical investigations of logic or atomism or possibly dissecting animals and that sort of thing. And Hippocrates himself in seeing this thinks, God, I wish I had time to do this stuff. I'm so busy treating other people and traveling around and writing these books and publishing them and so forth. I don't have any time to investigate nature. And so then Democritus has made to respond with a diatribe about how the only valuable thing is learning about nature. And your condition is what everybody else's is, that they're confused about what they should be doing and they're running around getting themselves worried and bothered about things that don't really matter. And so then he sort of convinces Hippocrates that, yeah, you're the one who's sick and so are all these other people, all the people of Abder and so forth that have reported him and it's actually Democritus's mental state that we should pursue and imitate. Okay, so those are fictional stories and pictures about him, but the fact that that's how he's conceived of in the period shows his importance to some widespread, widely held views. Okay, now let me talk about his natural science and last time two good questions came up about atomistic natural science. Somebody asked about plurality of worlds and then somebody else who was it asked about, well, how do they account for consciousness or sensation? Those are really good questions and what I wanna say is I'm gonna give a really, really brief overview of Democritus's version of this which won't even begin to answer your question and then we're gonna go into more depth about it when we have more text and more time in talking about Epicureanism. But the main thing is that both of those would be good topics for a research project to look at theories of plurality of worlds in the Hellenistic age, why some people accepted them, why others rejected them and for example, how an atomistic and materialistic theory of reality could account for phenomena like life, sensation, consciousness and so forth. Those would be good topics to spend the next nine weeks researching and writing up into a paper. There's a lot of work to be done on those topics to figure out about them. Okay, so here is a very capsule account of Democritus's natural science or physiologia. The first point is that the natural principles of things, there's two principles basically, being and non-being or being and nothingness. And according to Democritus, the one exists no more than the other. They have to exist equally and that's because there's some kind of rational principle that there's no more of this than the other thing. There's no more, there's no sufficient reason for there to be more being than there is non-being or vice versa. And he holds that no being can come to be out of nothing and no being can be destroyed or resolved into nothing. This is an early expression of what we now call the principle of conservation of matter, okay? All there can be is a rearrangement of matter, not a creation out of nothing of new matter or a total destruction of matter into nothingness. Furthermore, beings are not infinitely divisible. They are divisible but not infinitely. At some point we will reach entities which we call atoms and the word atom just means uncuttable from the Greek word ah tomos. Tomos meaning cuttable and then we have an alpha-privileged prefix there, okay? Now, as we know, this is a very influential theory so we also hold, we also believe that there are things called atoms. Do we believe they're still uncuttable? Well, there is a bit of a problem about that. On the one hand, we do because we split the atom, this is what allows us to create nuclear energy and nuclear weapons and so forth. But on the other hand, we still hold the essential philosophical view here that there are entities in our physics that are no longer, no longer further divisible but whose recombination gives rise to all the other phenomenon. So, suppose I can divide a human body into parts like eyes, nose, ears, hearts, liver, arms, hands and so forth and then I can divide those parts into things like tissues and blood and sinews and so forth and then let's suppose I can divide those parts further into molecules, organic molecules and I can carbon, sorry, organic molecules, hormones, things like this, which then can be divided further into elements, atoms like carbon and oxygen and so forth. Well, now it turns out here I've reached what we call atoms using this Greek term by the inspiration of Democritus but we now have this theory about subatomic particles so that we can divide an atom into a neutron, proton, electron and so forth. Now, some people think that electrons are truly indivisible entities, that there's the atoms because you can't divide those anymore but then we also have this new standard theory of subatomic particles, muons, gluons, quarks and so forth, okay? Now, at this point we seem to reach indivisible entities so it's the recombination and how muons, gluons and quarks work that explain to us how atoms work and it's the recombination of atoms that explain how molecules work and it's the recombination of inorganic molecules that explain how organic molecules work and it's the recombination of organic molecules that explain how body parts and so forth come into existence. So you might think that what we've arrived at is just a different level. The atom is now on a lower level because using microscopes and other kinds of technology we're able to get further and further down. Now there's also theories that say, supposedly we could get further. Let's start cutting up muons, gluons, and clerks or conceiving them as being strings vibrating in n dimensional space or whatever. Now, there isn't any empirical evidence for that theory. It's a speculative mathematical idea. And so as far as physics is concerned, we still remain at the level of these indivisible particles of particle physics. But if we can keep dividing down further, then those new levels of division will be the new atoms of our theory. The only thing that would invalidate democracy's theory is if we could somehow show that there is no limit to this process, that we can divide our strings into something else. And we can divide that something else further into something else and this process can go on infinitely. But if we hold a theory that, no, this stops somewhere and we have these basic entities that have these basic properties and it's only their recombination that gives rise to the variety of phenomena, then we believe in atomism still, okay? And so we still believe in essentially the same theory that was advanced back then. And I've written an article called Lucretius and Modern Science in the Cambridge companion to Lucretius that quotes people beginning with Newton but down to Bohr and Einstein and other people paying homage to Democritus and talking about describing their scientific achievements in proving atomistic theory as being vindication of these ancient Greek views of Democritus. Now, being and nothingness exists as atoms and void respectively and everything else, those are the things that exist by nature, everything else is compounded out of their recombinations and exists merely as he says by convention. So this includes things like earth, air, water, fire, the planetary and other heavenly bodies, plants, animals, humans, and also all human artifacts and so forth are just recombinations of this kind of material. So are all qualitative experiences like of red, hot, sweetness and all of our thoughts about them, okay? So our sensation is based on atomic collisions. Our thoughts are basically just kind of attenuated or weakened thoughts and consciousness, if you will, is some kind of awareness of the distinction between our perceptions and our thoughts and so that's one kind of way that we would try to answer the earlier question. The basic theory of perception is that perception happens when objects fall into our sense organs like our eyes. They're either being emitted off of the surfaces of objects or there are rays extending from light sources that bounce off them and then fall into our sense organs. But at any rate, there's a purely materialist explanation of how this all happens by contact of physically hard bodies, atoms of various shapes and sizes. Now the implications of this for is cosmology. We just assume, because we don't have any reason to assume that the universe is finite. If it's finite, it'd have to be a certain shape. What shape is it? Is it a sphere? Is it a dodecahedron? Well, we just assume that it's actually infinite in all directions and infinite atoms are just assumed to have been constantly moving in time infinitely backwards and infinitely forwards have been constantly moving in this void and recombining and this gives rise to an infinite, it gives rise to everything but specifically to an infinite plurality of worlds. Worlds are cosmos being understood to just be temporary envelopments of atoms in large void spaces. And there are supposedly an infinite variety of shapes and sizes of atoms and they're constantly colliding, rebounding with one another, becoming entangled because some of them have shapes with hooks on them and others have shapes with eyelets and those ones, when they crash together end up getting connected and combining and forming larger and larger structures giving rise to visible compounds of things like earth, air, water, and fire, the heavenly bodies, plants, animals, et cetera. And the theory about how worlds are generated is that they get caught in a kind of swirl or vortex in which heavy things like earth fall to the bottom and light things like fire rise out to the surface. And so we can assume that beyond our solar system are not just other solar systems but an infinite number of them in all directions. And so you have a picture that looks something like this. This is actually a diagram taken from Descartes' Principles of Philosophy which depicts his theory of vortices but it's inspired by Democritus so we've got, in Descartes' view, the sun is the center of a solar system here that rotates and has other bodies rotating in its proximity and then it's bounded just by other vortices going in every direction. Very influential view in early modern science here are some diagrams taken from scientific textbooks to try to further visualize this idea of vortices. Here we are in our solar system and then here's other solar systems running up against us. Notice there's no concept of galaxies or clusters or superclusters or void space in between them. This assumes a plenum where all that space is filled. And there's a very psychedelic looking one from a book in 1640. Now any questions about those physics? As I said we're gonna show how that's modified by Epicureanism but spend a lot more time, spend an entire lecture dedicated to talking about this physics later but I wouldn't be surprised that there were just at least clarificatory questions. So would it kind of seem like they were more into thinking divided by density than gravity or any such force like that? Well they can, it's a complicated matter. So atomism can very well account for the fact that things have different densities because now you can talk about objects being combinations of atoms and void and less dense objects have less atoms. More dense objects have more atoms. And so there's a whole class of phenomena, very important phenomena. Possibly all phenomena can be explained according to that. So that's one thing. Now then you said not gravity. Well there's an issue here. What does gravity really mean? Gravity means something like heaviness and there's a dispute in interpreting democratist's theory as to whether heaviness is recognized as an intrinsic property of atoms. Most of our testimonies say that the only intrinsic properties of atoms are shape, size, and hardness. That some of them are in pyramid shape, some of them are in cube shape, some of them have hooks and so forth. And then how many different sizes of them are there? But then other people interpret this view and this becomes important in a way that how Epicurus uses and modifies this view. Interpreted is being that since they are solid bodies they must have weight and thus they must fall towards the center of the universe or whatever. But there's a huge controversy there and we just don't have enough evidence to resolve his views about gravity. The basic account for democratists of how motion is happening is that we don't give an account of it. We account for everything else by talking about how things move. We assume that infinite time backwards there have been atoms moving in every direction and the cause of a state of atoms at any given time has to do with the previous state of atoms and which ones collided, which ones rebounded, which ones were caught up in a new compound, which ones broke free. And that we can explain any state by going to a previous state of it. And that so everything is therefore necessitated from all time and will be for all time in the future. And it's not clear that he needs a property like gravity to account for how it moves if he can account for it by just assuming motion and then assuming collisions to account for how they get tied up. But we will revisit that issue in due course. Any other, yes, please. Is it just a coincidence that searcher named one of his books, Being and Nothingness, or did he draw some influence from the property? I'm not sure if he was directly influenced by Democritus. I know he says some things about Epicurus, but I think he has a different, more kind of phenomenological take on being and nothingness. Being really, in Sartre, means something more like my existence versus the possibility of my non-existence through death and that kind of absence or negation of being. Whereas here it's really an ontological principle. It's like a basic physical principle, really. And whereas searcher's reaction to contemplating being and nothingness is nausea, Democritus is, of course, cheerfulness, happiness. So the ethics is gonna end up being different. Any other questions? Yeah. And Descartes' book with the image of the solar system in the vortex showed the sun at the center. Right. Does that mean that Democritus had an idea? So Democritus does not seem to have held that view and he has an earth-centric system, but this system is not the center of the universe. Therefore it's not technically a earth-centric view because he doesn't think there is any center since it's infinite in all directions. But he does seem to think that the earth is central to our solar system because his conception of our solar system is that heavy objects like earth have fallen to the bottom of it by some kind of centrifugal motion in this vortex or swirl. And whereas Descartes very clearly does accept the Copernican view that the sun is at the center. So that's right. And the same thing with this diagram. Okay, that was a well established point by the 17th century, but still a huge controversy in Democritus' writing. Yeah. Also for in the picture with the solar system of the vortices outside that all exists within the universe, does he think that there can be void within outside the solar system where there's nothing? Yes, but that's one misleading thing about using this Cartesian picture is that Descartes doesn't actually accept void whereas Democritus does. So the Democritus diagram should have big stretches of void and then little vortices. But maybe there are vortices packed in tightly in certain parts of the cosmos. There's since it's infinite, all of these combinations happen, every possible one. Okay, so his ethics. First of all, they're mostly expressed in the form of maxims or proverbs. If you read my paper called Maxims of Democritus of Abdrah, I explain how one can write ethics in this way and so have it be rational ethics. It's not just memorizing fortune cookie expressions and things like that, but it's actually a very logical and rational way of not only writing ethics, but propagating it. It's very much easier for people to remember proverbs and maxims than it is treatises. He calls the end, euthymia, which here I'll just translate as well-being. And it's clarified that it's not the same thing as just experiencing pleasure or enjoyment, but it turns out to be a calm, stable, tranquil, well-grounded psyche, one that isn't disturbed by fear, jealousy, envy, superstition, or any other kind of passion. It's basically his idea of, that's the point of life is to go through it with your psyche in that condition. And the best means to this, he says, is to not to focus or concentrate on those who have more things than you or better things than you, either by nature or because they've acquired it by convention. So don't spend your time looking at pictures of beautiful people on the internet and looking and following the lives of celebrities and rich people. That will actually make you miserable because then you'll envy what they have and you'll want it yourself and your inability to get those kind of things will cause distress and may even drive you to crime. Whereas if you focus on people who are less fortunate than you, people who are uglier than you, for example, something I have to remind myself all the time, no, and people that have less, people that are poorer, and then this, if you focus on their condition, you'll find that you're actually elevate your mood to cheerfulness. So this is, if you're feeling sad because you think I'm an ugly person, think about people who are deformed and paralyzed and so on and then you'll realize I don't, I thank God I'm not in that kind of condition. And the great thing about this is that anyone can do it. Even if you're paralyzed, you can think about people in yet worse conditions that don't even have those limbs that you have that are paralyzed and so on. And there's always more and more miserable things. And further, as an outcome of doing that, it's not just that doing that makes me feel better about myself or some kind of schoolyard in Prado where I actually get off on thinking about when other people are made miserable. It's more that it makes me feel better about my situation and it also generates sympathy and pity and solidarity with these people. And so it actually creates a more tranquil society when we think more about the less fortunate and when we think about celebrities and rich people and beautiful people and that sort of thing, then we create a kind of society that's tied up with pursuing those things and then all of society is worse off. Now I'll just rapidly show you a bunch of slides I've created, all of these are fragments and maxims of democratists and all of them are contained in a handout that I uploaded to Triton Ed. But he has a well-developed view about how education and moral improvement happens and he thinks it essentially happens as a kind of therapy on the one hand, as I've already mentioned, but also this therapy is kind of like psychotherapy and involves talking and speaking and thinking and it's really about changing your mind and you can do that with philosophical maxims. You can get people to look at things differently and think about them differently and in this way we will be able to get them to not only improve their mood and so create the state of euthymia but we'll actually improve societies. The means by which we'll do it will make them more sympathetic and so forth and less competitive and hostile and that sort of thing. Now a large fragment, so the next three slides are actually all a continuous fragment in my view that are the beginning of his treatise on tranquility or on euthymia and it looks from the initial fragment that it's largely prudential wisdom that first of all, if you want to be a tranquil and not an anxious person, here's my first piece of advice for you. Don't try to do too many things, okay? Because the first and most obvious cause of frustration and misery is being too busy and feeling like you're running out of time and you can't actually finish things, okay? And this also stems from misestimating our own capabilities from not knowing ourselves and thinking that we are capable of doing more things than we're actually capable of. So like the idea that, you know, succeeding in school, social life or sleep, pick two, right? That's kind of the idea. There is, everybody thinks they can do more than they actually can and so ends up not succeeding at any of them. And so the first thing we do is learn, is to figure out what we're capable of doing and then not try to do too many things in general. Now the second thing is that, what is key is to experience joy and moderation and balance in life and to go through life relatively tranquilly and he describes this in a way that looks like a kind of physical or material description of the psyche, that you don't want it changing over great intervals and being altered too quickly. You don't want a state like manic depression where sometimes you're in a good mood, sometimes you're in a bad mood. You want a calm, tranquil state throughout. And the way to get that again is to keep in mind what your capabilities are. Don't try to do more things than you're capable of and in general, focus on those people who are not objects of jealousy and admiration but of pity and who are enduring greater hardship than you. And if you dwell on the latter instead of the former, then you will live with more tranquility and you will drive out these emotional defects like envy, jealousy and ill will. Now he argues that the pursuit of euthymia or tranquility in this way will make you a more just person and these fragments explain how that's so. And these fragments explain how by concentrating on those who are more pitiful and in a worse condition will create a kind of solidarity with them which will have positive political benefits. Now one of his most important and innovative ethical views is contained in this first fragment. No one should feel shame before other people more than before himself nor be more prepared to work a bad deed if no one witnesses it than if everyone does. But he should have a sense of shame for himself most of all and institute this law for his own soul so that he'll do nothing mischievous. So what's interesting here is that this idea of one should institute a law for one's own soul. Normally we think that laws are instituted by legislatures not by individuals and they are instituted by governments on the body politic not on a soul and not on my own soul but this literally contains the idea of autonomy or imposing a law on yourself and regulating your ethical behavior yourself by having a sense of shame that I shouldn't do these shameful things and if I allow that not to govern my actions only when I'm in public and can be detected but even when I can't be then I will be a more moral person and a happier person and it will come about without having to worry about laws and the political situation that I exist in. He also lays great stress on distinguishing and choosing between different kind of pleasures and also limiting desires and reconceiving of poverty and wealth as more emotional states of a conception about whether I have much or little and an issue of relative deprivation instead of my objective state of my pocket book.