Abstract

“Man - a world in miniature”. On the political anthropology of Democritus. On a purely materialistic basis, the atomistic explanation of the world presents some difficulties to elucidate the political existence of human beings in a meaningful way - which led Epicurus, for example, to exclude politics from the sphere of the individual’s life as much as possible. Nevertheless, his great predecessor Democritus posed the question of man’s existence as a political-social being decidedly from the point of view of atomic theory in the sense of system conformity. For him, the human condition is not a reality that could be explained mythically or religiously, separated from the cosmos, but constitutes a special moment in it. In this respect, the principles that govern the life of the cosmos must also explain human existence. Under the banner: ‘Man - a world in miniatureʼ (mikros kosmos), Democritus sought to give mankind a model for life in which atomistic philosophy and the political world converge in a systemic way. However, the cosmos in its physical processuality is not simply suitable as a benchmark for human life, as it should take place in a polis, since the processes constituting the cosmos are not based on laws appropriate to human beings and therefore offer no room for the emancipation of individual needs for knowledge and freedom of thought. The ascertainment of relations between cosmic universal laws and the political world can provide a new answer by way of questioning the inner world of thought and its freedom.