To Laugh or to Cry?

On human life.

Weep for the troubles of human life now more than usual, Heraclitus: it overflows with many calamities. You, on the other hand, Democritus, laugh even more, if ever you laughed: life has become more ridiculous. Meanwhile, seeing these things, I wonder: how far in the end, Heraclitus, I may weep with you, or how, Democritus, I may joke merrily with you. Alciato - Emblem 152.

Democritus (ca. 460-370BC) was supposedly known as ‘the laughing philosopher’ because of his wry amusement at human foibles. He was a prolific author, but only fragments of his writings (on ethics) survive. Very little remains, likewise, of Heraclitus’ (fl. 500BC) treatise On Nature; its most famous doctrine being that everything exists in a state of flux, the apparent unity and stability in the world concealing a dynamic tension between opposites. I don’t know how Heraclitus became typecast as ‘the crying philosopher.’

Will it be farce, or tragedy, then, on which the curtain is about to rise? I am with Heraclitus, and say the latter - I find such comedy as there is too black to laugh at. On the other hand, Montaigne makes a strong case for the opposing view:

I am clearly for the first [Democritus’] humour: not because it is more pleasant to laugh than to weep, but because it expresses more contempt and condemnation than the other, and I think we can never be despised according to our full desert. Compassion and bewailing seem to imply some esteem of and value for the thing bemoaned; whereas the things we laugh at are by that expressed to be of no moment.

Here is a page featuring more depictions of the laughing and crying philosophers, which introduced me to Hendrick ter Brugghen’s paintings (1628) of the pair. Click on the thumbnails to see (much) larger versions of the same.