Democritus gave a strange definition of “man”: “man is what we all know.”2 At first sight this seems rather silly and empty, but it is not so. Solomon Luria, the major scholar of Democritus, observes that it is not a banality that Democritus is giving us. The nature of a man is not his internal structure but the network of personal, familial, and social interactions within which he exists. It is these that “make” us, these that guard us. As humans, we are that which others know of us, that which we know of ourselves, and that which others know about our knowledge. We are complex nodes in a
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