A medida do bom ânimo (euthumia) no quadro da reflexão ética de Demócrito

Abstract

In a passage from Book IX of the Lives and Doctrines of the Illustrious Philosophers, Diogenes Laertius writes that the end of human life is, for Democritus, good cheer / euthumia (τέλος δ ̓ εἶναι τὴν εὐθυμίαν. DK68A1.45). By examining the terms that express this horizon, we have, in addition to the notion of euthumia, which appears there, whether as a noun, adjective or verb, many other terms pertinent to its lexical field. When it comes to establishing the conditions or procedures at its origin, we have a series of testimonies and fragments in which a whole series of operations of a noetic nature are attributed to the soul, among which are those expressed by the terms φρονεῖν / φρόνησις, λογίζεσθαι / λογισμός and βούλεσθαι. Through these operations it is possible to proceed to the calculation of measure, a notion that occupies a central position in the framework of the philosopher's ethical reflection, and on which the achievement of the state of mind that one seeks to achieve immediately depends. The vocabulary of measure is quite rich in the corpus democriteum. We have, on the one hand, a series of terms pertinent to the lexical field of the notion of measure, such as those formed from the radical μέτρ- (μετρεῖν, μέτριος, μετριότης, σύμμετρος, συμμετρία), and those that express the idea of ​​“temperance” or “moderation” in the execution of actions, in the satisfaction of desires and needs, in the conformation of attitudes and behaviors (σωφρονεῖν, σωφροσύνη). On the other hand, a significant number of terms formed by the addition of the adverb εὖ with the intention of characterizing a good and convenient state of attitudes and actions are noteworthy. I intend to show, throughout my text, the nuances and convergences that serve to affirm the internal coherence of the set of ethical fragments of the philosopher among themselves, as well as the connection between his physics and his ethics. To this end, we will make use of the fragments collected by Stobaeus in his anthologies, of the sentences that were transmitted to us under the name of "Democrates", in addition to other collections of sentences that constitute the so-called Gnomica Democritea, including material from the Corpus Parasinum and from some authors listed in the Patrologia Migne.