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Democritus_and_Heraclitus_by_Hendrick_Terbrugghen

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2024 Is My Gothic Year

2024 is the year I immerse myself in all things Gothic. Topics I expect to address in the coming months include: Horace Walpole, the romance (as a broad category of literature) and the romance (as a commercial genre category), Ann Radcliffe, Frankenstein, William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein movies, gothic romance paperbacks of the 1960s and 1970s, gothic horror, elegiac poetry of the 18th century, Matthew Lewis, Minerva Press, Edmund Burke, Joseph Addison, The Castle of Otranto, serendipity, representations of the Frankenstein laboratory, Graveyard Poets, so many Frankenstein remakes/spinoffs/remixes, shilling shockers, fantasy, the fantastic, the horrid, and the sublime.

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Wipe: A Brief History of Toilet Hygiene

Wipe: A Brief History of Toilet Hygiene by D. M. Davisson

Abderitic

Abdera is a real place. In the western classical era Abderites were the foolish rural counterparts to the cosmopolitan urban Athenians. Notably, Democritus, the laughing philosopher, was from Abdera. Cicero described Abdera as a republic of fools, and it became short-hand for the classical Greeks for the folly of the self-satisfied and petty-minded.

Kant, in his essay “Is the human race constantly progressing?,” argues humanity is obviously constantly improving because a loving God wouldn’t allow humans to degenerate. The worst possible way of understanding human change over time he termed “abderitic.”

(“Retrogression toward wickedness” is moral terrorism, “perpetual progression toward improvement” is eudaemonism, and abderitism is “a perpetually changing upward tendency and an equally frequent and profound relapse.”)

About abderitism he writes:

“This opinion may well have the majority of voices on its side. Bustling folly is the character of our species: people hastily set off on the path of the good, but do not persevere steadfastly upon it; indeed, in order to avoid being bound to a single goal, even if only for the sake of variety they reverse the plan of progress, build in order to demolish, and impose upon themselves the hopeless effort of rolling the stone of Sisyphus uphill in order to let it roll back down again.

…

“…It is a vain affair to have good so alternate with evil that the whole traffic of our species with itself on this globe would have to be considered as a mere farcical comedy, for this can endow our species with no greater value in the eyes of reason than that which other animal species possess, species which carry on this game with fewer costs and without expenditure of thought.”

Kant may have found the idea of abderitism repugnant but I think it captures our experience perfectly. Bustling folly is the character of our species.

Democritus and Heraclitus by Hendrick Terbrugghen

A common motif through the renaissance and later is to depict Heraclitus and Democritus together. Heraclitus is cast as the weeping philosopher and Democritus as the laughing philosopher. Democritus was a citizen of Abdera.

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