The Panacea of Knowledge 151these are only effects and not causes, occurring as a "blind" necessity
devoid of teleology and "meaning." Democritus's universe of atoms is
meaningless. In Nietzsche's words: "The world is entirely without rea-
son and instinct, shaken together. All of the gods and myths are useless"
(8,106). The sense of meaning that people impose on things is mislead-
ing. "Only in opinions," contended Democritus, "do sweetness, cold-
ness, and color exist; in truth, nothing exists besides atoms and empty
space."
With this phrase "in truth," Democritus was exploding the entire
familiar world, just like today's natural sciences. We see the sun rise, but
are aware that this is not really occurring. Science, from Democritus to
modernity, teaches us that we cannot trust our senses. The atomic sub-
stance of the world is not perceptible; it is at best calculable. Democritus
placed a high value on mathematics. Of course, people would go on
feeling and having moral convictions, but he explained that these were
only intricate motions of atoms. In his universe, there is no spirit that
holds together and guides everything and has a moral significance. Good
and evil are not cosmic reality, but occur only in human moral illusions.
Democritus's image of the world is nihilistic, since it denies the existence
of a universal teleologica! meaning based on morality. Nietzsche under-
stood it as such, and so did the idealist opposition of the time, namely
Plato. It is said that Plato burned the works of Democritus.
Plato's response to the lifeless universe of Democritus was his theory
of forms, according to which general concepts are considered to be sub-
stances and hence more real than the reality from which they are
abstracted. The idea of a tree is more real than each individual tree.
Goodness is more real than any individual good deed, beauty is more
real than any individual thing of beauty, and so forth. These ideas are
elevated so high above sensuality and the reality that can be grasped with
the senses that they become more and more empty. However, since
Plato seized upon them so intensively in his quest to revolutionize ethi-
cal life, he inevitably draped these ideas in mythical images and devel-
oped a curious mysticism of participation in the being of ideas.