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The Nature of Things
The acclaimed new translation of the classic poem at the heart of Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve
Lucretius' poem On the Nature of Things combines a scientific and philosophical treatise with some of the greatest poetry ever written. With intense moral fervour he demonstrates to humanity that in death there is nothing to fear since the soul is mortal, and the world and everything in it is governed by the mechanical laws of nature and not by gods; and that by believing this men can live in peace of mind and happiness. He bases this on the atomic theory expounded by the Greek philosopher Epicurus, and continues with an examination of sensation, sex, cosmology, meteorology, and geology, all of these subjects made more attractive by the poetry with which he illustrates them.
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Lucretius' poem On the Nature of Things combines a scientific and philosophical treatise with some of the greatest poetry ever written. With intense moral fervour he demonstrates to humanity that in death there is nothing to fear since the soul is mortal, and the world and everything in it is governed by the mechanical laws of nature and not by gods; and that by believing this men can live in peace of mind and happiness. He bases this on the atomic theory expounded by the Greek philosopher Epicurus, and continues with an examination of sensation, sex, cosmology, meteorology, and geology, all of these subjects made more attractive by the poetry with which he illustrates them.
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
304 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 56
About the author
Lucretius
560 books341 followersTitus Lucretius Carus (c. 99 BC – c. 55 BC) was a Roman poet and philosopher. His only known work is the epic philosophical poem "De Rerum Natura" about the tenets and philosophy of Epicureanism, and which is usually translated into English as On the Nature of Things.
Very little is known about Lucretius's life; the only certain fact is that he was either a friend or client of Gaius Memmius, to whom the poem was addressed and dedicated.
Very little is known about Lucretius's life; the only certain fact is that he was either a friend or client of Gaius Memmius, to whom the poem was addressed and dedicated.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 803 reviews
January 29, 2023
According to Lucretius, the infinitely small perception is only a ray of light, allowing elementary particles to meet and repel each other without any original affinity.
The particles move, collide, unite and separate, uniquely formatted by the chance of encounters having no meaning.
The infinitely small, random number Pi is only an aggregate of forms disappearing and reborn according to their paths and impacts as absurd as unforeseeable.
No need to analyze each result; they mean nothing. Each product results from a quantum wind grouping a corpuscular all-comer without a mind. Each element, like a pinball ball, reveals different imagery in its contingent projections.
No plan, no garden of Eden, no promised land.
No life after death. When the body extinguishes, the soul had also ruined.
There's nothing to conquer or defend in an infinitely small, under the influence of its inconsistent pilings.
Reading is a real ordeal for a believer whose pillars crumble page after page.
Since everything, according to Lucretius, fire, hymnals, Bibles, and Gospels is only a disordered world without gods developing an incomprehensible order.
How to accept disappearing in smoke without the hope of a beyond? First, remove the cause and effect.
Still, life is nothing else by maintaining the course of its values in the middle of the imponderable drift of the elements.
The particles move, collide, unite and separate, uniquely formatted by the chance of encounters having no meaning.
The infinitely small, random number Pi is only an aggregate of forms disappearing and reborn according to their paths and impacts as absurd as unforeseeable.
No need to analyze each result; they mean nothing. Each product results from a quantum wind grouping a corpuscular all-comer without a mind. Each element, like a pinball ball, reveals different imagery in its contingent projections.
No plan, no garden of Eden, no promised land.
No life after death. When the body extinguishes, the soul had also ruined.
There's nothing to conquer or defend in an infinitely small, under the influence of its inconsistent pilings.
Reading is a real ordeal for a believer whose pillars crumble page after page.
Since everything, according to Lucretius, fire, hymnals, Bibles, and Gospels is only a disordered world without gods developing an incomprehensible order.
How to accept disappearing in smoke without the hope of a beyond? First, remove the cause and effect.
Still, life is nothing else by maintaining the course of its values in the middle of the imponderable drift of the elements.
August 26, 2024
ALL MATTER?
NEVER MIND!
-Bertrand Russell’s Grandmother
(Mocking his Materialist Philosophy)
A rollicking new translation of De Rerum Natura!
When I was in my late teens I had a stunning Lucretian prise de conscience that utterly knocked the wind out of my youthful sails. It seemed the overwhelming answer to Eliot’s “overwhelming question.”
Or was it really?
Perhaps it is only the crass materialist’s non-workable answer to life’s big puzzle, I later reckoned, when my early Faith reappeared and took deep root - giving me a harbour of peaceful refuge from the materialists’ amoral typhoon.
When the eminent American philosopher George Santayana was a green undergrad he carried a copy of Lucretius everywhere he went...
So go figure.
I think back then, at the dawn of the Twentieth Century, it was probably the now conveniently forgotten Loeb Classical Library - English and Latin on facing pages - that he packed in his vest pocket (yes, even Freshmen wore suits to classes in those days).
Santayana, like Bertrand Russell though, was a dyed-in-the-wool member of the New Freethinkers, which is where it was at in American and European colleges for this New Generation.
Bright young things all, as Evelyn Waugh waspishly muttered at the time, a more wary undergrad himself. “All the Fun of the Fair!” Sam Beckett would later rejoinder.
Gaudeamus igitur
Juvenes dum sumus!
So it goes...
What this new Brains Trust - and their young confederates around the world - were about to do of course, was... throw out the Baby with the Bathwater.
Totally Dis tradition and all its values: all the accumulated wisdom, mystery, legends, and profound insights of our classical cultural heritage - and pave the way to our Shining Instant Society, with all its myriad Instant Gratifications... and build a shining highway to the Total Devaluation of Mankind.
And I, of course as an undergrad thought Santayana was so incisive - until I read the Lucretius bit - and only much later cottoned to his game...
So I DID finally read Lucretius (and no, it wasn’t this new jazzed-up translation).
Yikes!
Was this the Cult Classic of the great Santayana - who even had the apparent temerity to gush over the mystical chorus at the end of Faust at a much later time, not for its wisdom but for its metaphysics - this lengthy Latin lay written by a gregarious, morally bankrupt Roman Materialist?
All this book does is sweep the table clean of the priceless family silverware and china plates - and replace it all with cheap plastic.
Including the dying vision of that redeemed fallen hero Faust, the last great gasp of our forgotten all-encompassing worldview.
Plastic?
In exchange for that great Western vision?
Welcome to the Real World of smoke and mirrors, kids!
We grow too soon old...
And too late smart.
Well, all that took place starting a hundred years ago, way before we were born - and you know what?
If this Roman dude who crowned Aphrodite as queen of the world could see all the hordes of stressed-out happy-camper Black Friday shoppers now, materialists just like him -
He might finally see that on Aphrodite’s well-rutted road his philosophy has now constructed a dead end - to block and alienate idealistic dreamers - in a soulless neon jungle.
Built on the cracked foundation of a dead empire’s empty materialism.
NEVER MIND!
-Bertrand Russell’s Grandmother
(Mocking his Materialist Philosophy)
A rollicking new translation of De Rerum Natura!
When I was in my late teens I had a stunning Lucretian prise de conscience that utterly knocked the wind out of my youthful sails. It seemed the overwhelming answer to Eliot’s “overwhelming question.”
Or was it really?
Perhaps it is only the crass materialist’s non-workable answer to life’s big puzzle, I later reckoned, when my early Faith reappeared and took deep root - giving me a harbour of peaceful refuge from the materialists’ amoral typhoon.
When the eminent American philosopher George Santayana was a green undergrad he carried a copy of Lucretius everywhere he went...
So go figure.
I think back then, at the dawn of the Twentieth Century, it was probably the now conveniently forgotten Loeb Classical Library - English and Latin on facing pages - that he packed in his vest pocket (yes, even Freshmen wore suits to classes in those days).
Santayana, like Bertrand Russell though, was a dyed-in-the-wool member of the New Freethinkers, which is where it was at in American and European colleges for this New Generation.
Bright young things all, as Evelyn Waugh waspishly muttered at the time, a more wary undergrad himself. “All the Fun of the Fair!” Sam Beckett would later rejoinder.
Gaudeamus igitur
Juvenes dum sumus!
So it goes...
What this new Brains Trust - and their young confederates around the world - were about to do of course, was... throw out the Baby with the Bathwater.
Totally Dis tradition and all its values: all the accumulated wisdom, mystery, legends, and profound insights of our classical cultural heritage - and pave the way to our Shining Instant Society, with all its myriad Instant Gratifications... and build a shining highway to the Total Devaluation of Mankind.
And I, of course as an undergrad thought Santayana was so incisive - until I read the Lucretius bit - and only much later cottoned to his game...
So I DID finally read Lucretius (and no, it wasn’t this new jazzed-up translation).
Yikes!
Was this the Cult Classic of the great Santayana - who even had the apparent temerity to gush over the mystical chorus at the end of Faust at a much later time, not for its wisdom but for its metaphysics - this lengthy Latin lay written by a gregarious, morally bankrupt Roman Materialist?
All this book does is sweep the table clean of the priceless family silverware and china plates - and replace it all with cheap plastic.
Including the dying vision of that redeemed fallen hero Faust, the last great gasp of our forgotten all-encompassing worldview.
Plastic?
In exchange for that great Western vision?
Welcome to the Real World of smoke and mirrors, kids!
We grow too soon old...
And too late smart.
Well, all that took place starting a hundred years ago, way before we were born - and you know what?
If this Roman dude who crowned Aphrodite as queen of the world could see all the hordes of stressed-out happy-camper Black Friday shoppers now, materialists just like him -
He might finally see that on Aphrodite’s well-rutted road his philosophy has now constructed a dead end - to block and alienate idealistic dreamers - in a soulless neon jungle.
Built on the cracked foundation of a dead empire’s empty materialism.
September 24, 2024
First, an apology for only giving it three stars. I am well aware that this is a brilliant piece of poetry, but my Latin is very poor, and I rapidly abandoned my initial plan of reading it in the original with the English translation alongside. In a way, though, I'm following Lucretius's advice: he explicitly says at one point that it's wrong to allow yourself to be swayed by beautiful words, and you should judge an idea on its merits. Reading him in my barbarian's tongue is certainly one way to do that.
I have often debated the question of whether it is right to call atheism a religion, and with Lucretius it seems natural to argue that it is. The poem reminded me rather strongly of Dante - when I got to the bibliography, I was interested to see that Santayana had written a book comparing Lucretius, Dante and Goethe - but while Dante loves the One, Lucretius goes a step further and praises the Zero. His noble goal is to convince you that divine intervention is never required in order to explain what happens in the world, and that, if we just stop and and think carefully enough, we can liberate ourselves from irrational terror of the supernatural. Given that he's writing in the first century BC and science barely exists yet, this is ambitious indeed. But Lucretius has faith in his project; it's hard to avoid using the word.
I would love to know what his contemporaries thought of his arguments. From our perspective, there are a few cases where he definitely gets it right. I was impressed with his arguments about lightning, where I thought he pretty much nailed it. If lightning is the wrath of Zeus, why does it only come when there are clouds in the sky? Why is it particularly likely to strike high objects? Why does it strike godfearing and upright men as often as reprobates and sinners? A natural explanation does indeed seem more plausible. At the other end of the scale, his astronomy is completely bogus, and anyone who knew the first thing about the subject would have groaned in pain; Lucretius ignores all the careful empirical work that had been done over the preceding five hundred years and makes it up from first principles. And his explanation of magnetism is if anything even worse. He claims that a magnet sucks out the air between it and the object it's attracting; five minutes of experimentation with an actual magnet should have been enough to determine that no such thing happens. Perhaps he never saw one.
But it's his beloved atomic theory that provides the most interesting passages. Was he extremely far-sighted or just lucky? In one place, he makes a very sensible analysis of what happens when wood burns. He argues that it's a case of the atoms being rearranged, and uses a nice analogy: the atoms are letters, and they are recombined to make different words. You feel he's just about to invent the concept of the molecule. But then, a bit later, he discusses the different behaviours of oil and wine when you try to pour them through a fine sieve. The oil goes though with difficulty, and he says this shows that the atoms of oil must be much larger than the atoms of wine. But if he'd stopped and thought about it a moment longer, he'd surely have realized that this was not quite right. You can burn oil, and then it becomes something different. So oil can't be atomic; the atoms must initially be combined into the large units characteristic of oil which have trouble passing through the sieve, but these large units are broken up by burning. So near to an extraordinary insight, and he walks right past it!
Poor Lucretius. The bitter passages about sex give the impression that things didn't work out for him with women, and he died young, "driven mad by a love potion". But people are still reading his poem, long after he was dissolved back into his component atoms. It's the immortality he wanted.
I have often debated the question of whether it is right to call atheism a religion, and with Lucretius it seems natural to argue that it is. The poem reminded me rather strongly of Dante - when I got to the bibliography, I was interested to see that Santayana had written a book comparing Lucretius, Dante and Goethe - but while Dante loves the One, Lucretius goes a step further and praises the Zero. His noble goal is to convince you that divine intervention is never required in order to explain what happens in the world, and that, if we just stop and and think carefully enough, we can liberate ourselves from irrational terror of the supernatural. Given that he's writing in the first century BC and science barely exists yet, this is ambitious indeed. But Lucretius has faith in his project; it's hard to avoid using the word.
I would love to know what his contemporaries thought of his arguments. From our perspective, there are a few cases where he definitely gets it right. I was impressed with his arguments about lightning, where I thought he pretty much nailed it. If lightning is the wrath of Zeus, why does it only come when there are clouds in the sky? Why is it particularly likely to strike high objects? Why does it strike godfearing and upright men as often as reprobates and sinners? A natural explanation does indeed seem more plausible. At the other end of the scale, his astronomy is completely bogus, and anyone who knew the first thing about the subject would have groaned in pain; Lucretius ignores all the careful empirical work that had been done over the preceding five hundred years and makes it up from first principles. And his explanation of magnetism is if anything even worse. He claims that a magnet sucks out the air between it and the object it's attracting; five minutes of experimentation with an actual magnet should have been enough to determine that no such thing happens. Perhaps he never saw one.
But it's his beloved atomic theory that provides the most interesting passages. Was he extremely far-sighted or just lucky? In one place, he makes a very sensible analysis of what happens when wood burns. He argues that it's a case of the atoms being rearranged, and uses a nice analogy: the atoms are letters, and they are recombined to make different words. You feel he's just about to invent the concept of the molecule. But then, a bit later, he discusses the different behaviours of oil and wine when you try to pour them through a fine sieve. The oil goes though with difficulty, and he says this shows that the atoms of oil must be much larger than the atoms of wine. But if he'd stopped and thought about it a moment longer, he'd surely have realized that this was not quite right. You can burn oil, and then it becomes something different. So oil can't be atomic; the atoms must initially be combined into the large units characteristic of oil which have trouble passing through the sieve, but these large units are broken up by burning. So near to an extraordinary insight, and he walks right past it!
Poor Lucretius. The bitter passages about sex give the impression that things didn't work out for him with women, and he died young, "driven mad by a love potion". But people are still reading his poem, long after he was dissolved back into his component atoms. It's the immortality he wanted.
Read
October 15, 2019 The Nature of Things is a long narrative Latin poem which sets out Epicurean philosophy. This I read in an English prose translation. The Epicureans believed in atomic theory and so this aspect of the work feels most familiar and recognisably modern and one can be impressed that people through speculation, raw brain power, and idle after dinner conversations over olives and watered wine had a perception of reality very close to what scientists have achieved today after much experimentation and great efforts and expenditures. Lucretius is also recognisable in his handling of the gods, the Epicureans were rather sceptical over the traditional stories of gods chasing each over about full of adulterous intent pausing only to swallow their own children, rape their nieces, aid mortals to abduct beautiful women and so on.
On the other hand his teachings on the causes of winds or dreams seem all the odder by comparison.
Despite which his rediscovery in the Renaissance made an impact by opening up new worlds of scepticism, doubt and atoms.
The most impressive and moving section for me was towards the end when he describes the descent of man from the age of Gold, to the silver age to his own age of iron when men fight in armies and train animals as weapons of war, he wrote and died it seems just before the series of vicious civil wars which would give birth to Rome's Imperial era.
I came to this book in a curious way, tempted by Brian Aldiss who bookends his Helliconia Trilogy with quotes from Lucretius which acted on my imagination as the taste of honey lures the child to drink the bitter wormwood medicine. Beware of reading and where it leads you!
On the other hand his teachings on the causes of winds or dreams seem all the odder by comparison.
Despite which his rediscovery in the Renaissance made an impact by opening up new worlds of scepticism, doubt and atoms.
The most impressive and moving section for me was towards the end when he describes the descent of man from the age of Gold, to the silver age to his own age of iron when men fight in armies and train animals as weapons of war, he wrote and died it seems just before the series of vicious civil wars which would give birth to Rome's Imperial era.
I came to this book in a curious way, tempted by Brian Aldiss who bookends his Helliconia Trilogy with quotes from Lucretius which acted on my imagination as the taste of honey lures the child to drink the bitter wormwood medicine. Beware of reading and where it leads you!
January 9, 2016
Epicurian Physics
31 July 2013
Well, here I am, once again sitting in the passenger seat of my Dad's car on our final trek to Melbourne, and since I have been reading, sleeping, or driving for most of the day, I might as well fix up a couple of my reviews while I am sitting here (and since I have a smartphone, and my Dad has this adapter that allows me to plug my laptop into the cigarette lighter, I might as well make use of it – such are the benefits of having an electronic engineer as a father).
Lucretius (I wonder if there is a connection with Star Trek) wrote this treatise on the natural world some time during the 2nd century BC. The period is important because it gives us an idea of the background in which the text was written. In a way it is probably one of the last ancient texts that have a scientific feel to it since most later philosophical texts (unless they dealt with medicine) focused mainly on ethics (with maybe the exception of Ptolemy), as opposed to scientific explanation (though there are probably a lot that have been lost). It wasn't until the renaissance that people began to once again question the nature of the world in which they lived.
The reason behind this is probably two-fold. Firstly, there was no need for industrial development namely because the culture was a slave based culture. Who needed machines when you had slaves to do all of the menial tasks. This can actually be seen in the United States in the lead up to the civil war, as well as in England, because in the North, where slavery was illegal, there was a lot of industrial development, while in the South, where slavery was legal, the society was still very much an agrarian society. The second reason was simply that nobody saw a need to actually question the world around them. As far as anybody was concerned, if something happened, then it was because the gods had willed it to happen, and there was no need to venture beyond that (and even then, to suggest that the gods didn't exist, even in Rome, was nothing short of blasphemous).
Lucretius wrote at an interesting time: it was after the decline of the Greek culture and during the rise of the Roman culture. Lucian wrote in Latin, but at this time Latin was still a very basic language, used mostly for trade and war. However the Greeks had already had a developed language that was being used much more culturally, which suggests that what Lucretius began was the slow morphing of the Latin language, as well as the Roman culture, into the culture that ended up producing the greats such as Cicero and Tacitus, among many others.
Lucretius was not the first to write a treatise that was enquiring into the nature of the world. This had been begun centuries early, almost as early as the Seven Sages of antiquity. There were sages like Democritus who developed the idea of the atom, Aristotle who wrote treatises on zoology, and even Plato dabbled in writing a scientific treatise (not that there was a distinct field of study at the time because back then everything was philosophy). The person, however, who influenced Lucretius the most was a guy named Epicurus.
Now, during this period there were three popular philosophies: the Epicurians, the Stoics, and the Cynics. I will describe these philosophies in a nutshell: Epicurians pretty much believe 'if it feels good, do it'; Stoics believe 'no pain, no gain'; and Cynics believes 'life sucks, and then you die'. Okay, that is probably being very basic description of each of these philosophies, but that is how I remember them. Mind you, we get the term stoic from the stoic philosophers, and the word cynic from the cynic philosophers.
It is interesting to see how Lucretius understands the universe, and in a way there is a lot of what we understand in his ideas: such as the idea of the atom, that everything is made up of atoms, that there is space between the atoms which determines the hardness of the objects. We also know that Lucretius comes to his understandings through observation, something that is done very much today, however there is no well defined scientific method in the way that he performs his enquiries. Another aspect that we see is the idea of the vacuum, which Lucretius suggests is the space between the atoms. However his understanding of a vacuum is different to our understanding because he does not necessarily see the air as molacules. Because he can see anything (despite being able to feel wind, which demonstrates, at least to me, that there is something there) then he assumes that there is nothing there. Further there is no concept that nature abhors a vacuum.
Lucretius seems to see everything in the form of atoms, though this is not unusual today in modern physics where certain elements have both wave and particle like properties, however we must remember that much of what Lucretius was writing about was little more than educated guesses. Basically he had come up with a theory, based on observation, and used this basis to try to explain everything. Light (and darkness) are particles that hit the eyes, which allows us to see. Sound is also made up of particles, however we note that he does not seem to understand the concept of waveforms. By saying this I refer to where he tries to understand why one can hear sound through solid objects. We know this because the sound hits the object causing the object to vibrate, which then causes the air behind the object to also vibrate and thus continue the sound wave. We also notice, interestingly, that his concept of colour comes, once again, from particles. An object has a certain colour because the particles on that object also have that colour.
It is ideas like this that makes a typical modern like me baulk, namely because even though I may have only completed year 12 physics, I still remember quite a lot of it, and as such know that what he is suggesting is basically wrong. I know that an object has a certain colour because the object absorbs that particular part of the colour spectrum. However, Lucretius was not working from much because there was not all that much before him. In a way Lucretius is no different from the early scientists of the modern era in that much of what he was writing about were educated guesses, and it was only after further study and experimentation that we have come to understand that the beliefs of those that came before us were, well, wrong. Once again I point to the idea of light travelling as a wave. Many of us who do not understand, or have not been taught, advanced Physics believe that is the case, but those of us who know advanced Physics know that light can also travel as a particle (it's called a photon).
The funny thing that I have noticed is how much of our science is still actually based on the findings of Lucretius. The wave particle duality of light aside, we still understand sight as working on the basis of things striking the retina in our eyes. Lucretius had an understanding that the eyes were more than simply windows, or doors, that allowed the brain to see out (namely because he points out that if you remove the eyes then, well, you can't see) but rather an integral part of how we see. The same goes with the idea of smell, that we smell things because particles drift into our nose which causes the nerves in our nose to react to the particle. While Lucretius may not have had a full understanding of the nervous system, he still understands the reactions and senses that are caused when the body feels pain.
As for religion, I was going to suggest that Lucertius is a 'functional Athiest' namely that while he believed in the gods, he does not believe that they have any power or control over the way the universe functions. However I thought about this for a bit and realised that it is not that he is an Atheist, but more of what one would consider an ancient version of a Deist. The reason I say that is because he still believed in the polytheistic religion of the time, but responded in the same way to the gods that a modern Deist would respond to Christianity, namely that while God may exist, he has little or no influence, or care, over the operation of the universe in which we live.
This brings me onto Lucretius' idea of the soul. He believes in the soul but not in its immortality. In fact he goes to great pains to demonstrate that before birth the soul, and the mind, of that particular individual, does not exist, and as such, after death the soul ceases to exist as well. Lucretius has no interest or time for theories and ideas relating to the afterlife (which is probably why he holds to the Epicurian idea of if it feels good, do it). In fact, he seems to think that the whole idea of the afterlife, and in particular Hades, is absurd (and spares no haste in pointing that out). As such, Lucretius does not believe in reincarnation either, so it is clear that his ideas are purely materialistic, in much the same way that modern materialism holds their beliefs.
It is interesting to compare some of Lucretius' thoughts to the what modern evolutionists accept today. One of the things that I noted was Lucretius' ideas of the origins of various parts of the body, such as the limbs. The modern belief is that a need arose therefore the body adapted an organ to meet that need. However Lucretius holds the opposite view in that the organ exists prior to the need arising, and when the need became apparent, the body was able to meet that need with the limb. As such it appears that Lucretius is not an evolutionist (and the evolutionists claim that it is the Christians that are backward). Further, Lucretius believes in a young Earth, but his argument in this regard is incredibly flawed. His argument is that because there is no recorded history dating back before the Theban and Trojan wars then, ergo, there must not have been anything, therefore the Earth is young. Obviously he is not an anthropologist (nor has he read Herodotus, which I would find very surprising from such a learned person). Mind you, similar flawed reasonings (and educated guesses) are still made today in relation to the arguments verses the young Earth and old Earth theories. As for me, I find both postulations (namely, the Bible says the Earth is 6000 years old, therefore it must be so, to which I respond by saying, no it doesn't; and it is the best theory we have, so we might as well stick to it, to which I respond, but what if it is wrong) have their flaws.
Mind you, Lucretius' section of cosmology seems to read more like an evolutionist's, in that it is suggested that he may have come up with something similar to the big bang theory thousands of years before modern science had postulated it. It seems that he believes, just as the modern cosmologist believes, that the universe began as a chaotic mess and that it was only through the collision of particles (which is the word that I feel obliged to use, because that is what I understand Lucretius' atom to be, though it is interesting that in the modern world we seem to continue to break this building block into smaller and smaller things – these days we have quarks, which are sub-subatomic particles). However, I also notice that Lucretius believes that the Earth is stationary and that the stars, sun, and moon, move around the Earth. In reponse to that, I wonder why the Catholic Church branded Galileo as a heretic when their ideas were actually taken from the pagans. Also, finally, it is interesting to see how he describes that lightning is caused by the collision of particles in the clouds (which themselves are made up of particles) and points to the sparks that are created when certain rocks are smashed together. Once again, it goes to show how many of Lucretius' theories came about through observation and educated guessing, which in many ways is how modern scientists come up with their theories.
31 July 2013
Well, here I am, once again sitting in the passenger seat of my Dad's car on our final trek to Melbourne, and since I have been reading, sleeping, or driving for most of the day, I might as well fix up a couple of my reviews while I am sitting here (and since I have a smartphone, and my Dad has this adapter that allows me to plug my laptop into the cigarette lighter, I might as well make use of it – such are the benefits of having an electronic engineer as a father).
Lucretius (I wonder if there is a connection with Star Trek) wrote this treatise on the natural world some time during the 2nd century BC. The period is important because it gives us an idea of the background in which the text was written. In a way it is probably one of the last ancient texts that have a scientific feel to it since most later philosophical texts (unless they dealt with medicine) focused mainly on ethics (with maybe the exception of Ptolemy), as opposed to scientific explanation (though there are probably a lot that have been lost). It wasn't until the renaissance that people began to once again question the nature of the world in which they lived.
The reason behind this is probably two-fold. Firstly, there was no need for industrial development namely because the culture was a slave based culture. Who needed machines when you had slaves to do all of the menial tasks. This can actually be seen in the United States in the lead up to the civil war, as well as in England, because in the North, where slavery was illegal, there was a lot of industrial development, while in the South, where slavery was legal, the society was still very much an agrarian society. The second reason was simply that nobody saw a need to actually question the world around them. As far as anybody was concerned, if something happened, then it was because the gods had willed it to happen, and there was no need to venture beyond that (and even then, to suggest that the gods didn't exist, even in Rome, was nothing short of blasphemous).
Lucretius wrote at an interesting time: it was after the decline of the Greek culture and during the rise of the Roman culture. Lucian wrote in Latin, but at this time Latin was still a very basic language, used mostly for trade and war. However the Greeks had already had a developed language that was being used much more culturally, which suggests that what Lucretius began was the slow morphing of the Latin language, as well as the Roman culture, into the culture that ended up producing the greats such as Cicero and Tacitus, among many others.
Lucretius was not the first to write a treatise that was enquiring into the nature of the world. This had been begun centuries early, almost as early as the Seven Sages of antiquity. There were sages like Democritus who developed the idea of the atom, Aristotle who wrote treatises on zoology, and even Plato dabbled in writing a scientific treatise (not that there was a distinct field of study at the time because back then everything was philosophy). The person, however, who influenced Lucretius the most was a guy named Epicurus.
Now, during this period there were three popular philosophies: the Epicurians, the Stoics, and the Cynics. I will describe these philosophies in a nutshell: Epicurians pretty much believe 'if it feels good, do it'; Stoics believe 'no pain, no gain'; and Cynics believes 'life sucks, and then you die'. Okay, that is probably being very basic description of each of these philosophies, but that is how I remember them. Mind you, we get the term stoic from the stoic philosophers, and the word cynic from the cynic philosophers.
It is interesting to see how Lucretius understands the universe, and in a way there is a lot of what we understand in his ideas: such as the idea of the atom, that everything is made up of atoms, that there is space between the atoms which determines the hardness of the objects. We also know that Lucretius comes to his understandings through observation, something that is done very much today, however there is no well defined scientific method in the way that he performs his enquiries. Another aspect that we see is the idea of the vacuum, which Lucretius suggests is the space between the atoms. However his understanding of a vacuum is different to our understanding because he does not necessarily see the air as molacules. Because he can see anything (despite being able to feel wind, which demonstrates, at least to me, that there is something there) then he assumes that there is nothing there. Further there is no concept that nature abhors a vacuum.
Lucretius seems to see everything in the form of atoms, though this is not unusual today in modern physics where certain elements have both wave and particle like properties, however we must remember that much of what Lucretius was writing about was little more than educated guesses. Basically he had come up with a theory, based on observation, and used this basis to try to explain everything. Light (and darkness) are particles that hit the eyes, which allows us to see. Sound is also made up of particles, however we note that he does not seem to understand the concept of waveforms. By saying this I refer to where he tries to understand why one can hear sound through solid objects. We know this because the sound hits the object causing the object to vibrate, which then causes the air behind the object to also vibrate and thus continue the sound wave. We also notice, interestingly, that his concept of colour comes, once again, from particles. An object has a certain colour because the particles on that object also have that colour.
It is ideas like this that makes a typical modern like me baulk, namely because even though I may have only completed year 12 physics, I still remember quite a lot of it, and as such know that what he is suggesting is basically wrong. I know that an object has a certain colour because the object absorbs that particular part of the colour spectrum. However, Lucretius was not working from much because there was not all that much before him. In a way Lucretius is no different from the early scientists of the modern era in that much of what he was writing about were educated guesses, and it was only after further study and experimentation that we have come to understand that the beliefs of those that came before us were, well, wrong. Once again I point to the idea of light travelling as a wave. Many of us who do not understand, or have not been taught, advanced Physics believe that is the case, but those of us who know advanced Physics know that light can also travel as a particle (it's called a photon).
The funny thing that I have noticed is how much of our science is still actually based on the findings of Lucretius. The wave particle duality of light aside, we still understand sight as working on the basis of things striking the retina in our eyes. Lucretius had an understanding that the eyes were more than simply windows, or doors, that allowed the brain to see out (namely because he points out that if you remove the eyes then, well, you can't see) but rather an integral part of how we see. The same goes with the idea of smell, that we smell things because particles drift into our nose which causes the nerves in our nose to react to the particle. While Lucretius may not have had a full understanding of the nervous system, he still understands the reactions and senses that are caused when the body feels pain.
As for religion, I was going to suggest that Lucertius is a 'functional Athiest' namely that while he believed in the gods, he does not believe that they have any power or control over the way the universe functions. However I thought about this for a bit and realised that it is not that he is an Atheist, but more of what one would consider an ancient version of a Deist. The reason I say that is because he still believed in the polytheistic religion of the time, but responded in the same way to the gods that a modern Deist would respond to Christianity, namely that while God may exist, he has little or no influence, or care, over the operation of the universe in which we live.
This brings me onto Lucretius' idea of the soul. He believes in the soul but not in its immortality. In fact he goes to great pains to demonstrate that before birth the soul, and the mind, of that particular individual, does not exist, and as such, after death the soul ceases to exist as well. Lucretius has no interest or time for theories and ideas relating to the afterlife (which is probably why he holds to the Epicurian idea of if it feels good, do it). In fact, he seems to think that the whole idea of the afterlife, and in particular Hades, is absurd (and spares no haste in pointing that out). As such, Lucretius does not believe in reincarnation either, so it is clear that his ideas are purely materialistic, in much the same way that modern materialism holds their beliefs.
It is interesting to compare some of Lucretius' thoughts to the what modern evolutionists accept today. One of the things that I noted was Lucretius' ideas of the origins of various parts of the body, such as the limbs. The modern belief is that a need arose therefore the body adapted an organ to meet that need. However Lucretius holds the opposite view in that the organ exists prior to the need arising, and when the need became apparent, the body was able to meet that need with the limb. As such it appears that Lucretius is not an evolutionist (and the evolutionists claim that it is the Christians that are backward). Further, Lucretius believes in a young Earth, but his argument in this regard is incredibly flawed. His argument is that because there is no recorded history dating back before the Theban and Trojan wars then, ergo, there must not have been anything, therefore the Earth is young. Obviously he is not an anthropologist (nor has he read Herodotus, which I would find very surprising from such a learned person). Mind you, similar flawed reasonings (and educated guesses) are still made today in relation to the arguments verses the young Earth and old Earth theories. As for me, I find both postulations (namely, the Bible says the Earth is 6000 years old, therefore it must be so, to which I respond by saying, no it doesn't; and it is the best theory we have, so we might as well stick to it, to which I respond, but what if it is wrong) have their flaws.
Mind you, Lucretius' section of cosmology seems to read more like an evolutionist's, in that it is suggested that he may have come up with something similar to the big bang theory thousands of years before modern science had postulated it. It seems that he believes, just as the modern cosmologist believes, that the universe began as a chaotic mess and that it was only through the collision of particles (which is the word that I feel obliged to use, because that is what I understand Lucretius' atom to be, though it is interesting that in the modern world we seem to continue to break this building block into smaller and smaller things – these days we have quarks, which are sub-subatomic particles). However, I also notice that Lucretius believes that the Earth is stationary and that the stars, sun, and moon, move around the Earth. In reponse to that, I wonder why the Catholic Church branded Galileo as a heretic when their ideas were actually taken from the pagans. Also, finally, it is interesting to see how he describes that lightning is caused by the collision of particles in the clouds (which themselves are made up of particles) and points to the sparks that are created when certain rocks are smashed together. Once again, it goes to show how many of Lucretius' theories came about through observation and educated guessing, which in many ways is how modern scientists come up with their theories.
April 1, 2012
There are a handful of books that seem to float above the rabble. They are certainly not scripture, but belong on a shelf above philosophy. Reading Lucretius is like reading the dreams of Darwin or Newton interpreted by the hand of Shakespeare. On the Nature of Things belongs on the shelf next to Bacon, Dante, Montaigne, Marcus Aurelius and the rest of my demi-Gods.
August 12, 2016
Introduction
Further Reading
A Note on the Text and Translation
Acknowledgements
--The Nature of Things
Notes
Glossary of Proper Names
Further Reading
A Note on the Text and Translation
Acknowledgements
--The Nature of Things
Notes
Glossary of Proper Names
September 21, 2015
The antiquity of this book calls for respect and appreciation. However, for a modern reader it is very boring to read. It's a long (300 pages) poem written in the first century BC in which the author pontificates about the physical sciences for the purpose of defending Epicureanism philosophy. It is of some interest for the modern reader to see where the author is correct and not so correct when judged from the perspective of modern science. However, Lucretius was a poet in his day, not a mathematician or noted natural philosopher, and thus he is not necessarily a qualified spokesperosn for his era's understanding of the physical universe.
For example, in this poem Lucretius makes fun of the absurdity of people walking upside down on the other side of the earth. Well, it so happens that Eratosthenes of Cyrene who lived approximately 100 years before Lucretius calculated the circumference of the Earth (and tilt of the Earth's axis) to a remarkably level of accuracy. This is an example of the poet (Lucretius) not being the best spokesperson for the science of his day.
The purpose of this poem was to explain to the Romans in Latin verse the ideas of Epicurus who lived approximately 300 years before Lucretius. Lucretius honors the teaching of Epicurus with the use of richly poetic language and metaphors. He presents the principles of atomism; the nature of the mind and soul; explanations of sensation and thought; the development of the world and its phenomena; and explains a variety of celestial and terrestrial phenomena. The universe described in the poem operates according to these physical principles guided by probability, not by the divine action of the traditional Roman deities.
Most of what may be original and creative with regard to science contained in this book should probably be credited to Epicurus. Lucretius' role is to give it poetic form in Latin.
For example, in this poem Lucretius makes fun of the absurdity of people walking upside down on the other side of the earth. Well, it so happens that Eratosthenes of Cyrene who lived approximately 100 years before Lucretius calculated the circumference of the Earth (and tilt of the Earth's axis) to a remarkably level of accuracy. This is an example of the poet (Lucretius) not being the best spokesperson for the science of his day.
The purpose of this poem was to explain to the Romans in Latin verse the ideas of Epicurus who lived approximately 300 years before Lucretius. Lucretius honors the teaching of Epicurus with the use of richly poetic language and metaphors. He presents the principles of atomism; the nature of the mind and soul; explanations of sensation and thought; the development of the world and its phenomena; and explains a variety of celestial and terrestrial phenomena. The universe described in the poem operates according to these physical principles guided by probability, not by the divine action of the traditional Roman deities.
Most of what may be original and creative with regard to science contained in this book should probably be credited to Epicurus. Lucretius' role is to give it poetic form in Latin.
Read
November 1, 2020Penguin Classics edition, tr. A.E. Stallings
This translation begins beautifully, which initially made me keen to read the rest of it.
Life-stirring Venus, Mother of Aeneas and of Rome,
Pleasure of men and gods, you make all things beneath the dome
Of sliding constellations teem, you throng the fruited earth
And the ship-freighted sea – for every species comes to birth
Conceived through you, and rises forth and gazes on the light.
The winds flee from you, Goddess, your arrival puts to flight
The clouds of heaven. For you, the crafty earth contrives sweet flowers,
For you, the oceans laugh, the skies grow peaceful after showers,
Awash with light. For soon as morning wears the face of spring,
And the West Wind is free and freshens, warm and quickening,
The airy tribe of birds, O Holy One, is first to start
Heralding your approach, struck with your power through the heart;
Then beasts, the wild and tame alike, go romping over the lush
Pastureland and swim across the rivers’ headlong rush…
This may be somewhat misleading if you've never read the poem before - indeed, Richard Jenkyns in the introduction calls the beginning "the most magnificent and spectacular act of worship in classical Latin literature". But it's also a great example of how the atheist Epicurean Lucretius thinks it's entirely valid to use the gods in metaphor and artistic imagery whilst also repudiating their existence on a factual level. And how well he writes that imagery (and Stallings too).
That metre: "Fourteeners ... widely used in the sixteenth century by English translators of Latin tragedy and epic, who seem to have considered it the native equivalent of the classical hexameter"(Stallings). I love a historically appropriate choice like this.
I hadn't seriously thought of reading Lucretius before this year, but in two different works about Machiavelli - William Landon's Great Courses lecture series Books that Matter: The Prince, and Alexander Lee's big new biography, Machiavelli: His Life & Times (2020), plus a few other papers, it had become clear that Lucretius is now seen as an important influence. (Machiavelli being a topic I was landed with at university twenty years ago, and have always felt I had unfinished business with due to not doing much work on him at the time.) Meanwhile, over 100 years after Machiavelli, Sir Thomas Browne, even more cautious in matters of religion, had advised "avoid reading too much Lucretius, “there being divers impieties in it, and ’tis no credit to be punctually versed in it”," I read this summer in the introduction to the NYRB Religio Medici & Urne Buriall. I looked at two or three of the most popular recent Lucretius translations, and this one in particular seemed lovely.
The Nature of Things - an epic poem about atheism and science - is a fantastic idea, and in the historical context, a subversive one. There must be a lot of people out there who would love it, but who've probably never thought of it as something they might read.
For me, there were two major obstacles which made it a slog at times. I usually love epic poems, but I overall found this one heavier-going than any I've read. (A friend suggested to me in August that news might put me off starting it: Boris Johnson had publicly talked about Lucretius as his summer reading, but I am - in Epicurean style - currently keeping away from news and politics to the extent that I still don't know anything more about this, which edition(s) he read, what he thought of it etc, and for the moment don't care to.)
Firstly, whilst there are quite a few statements I agree with in The Nature of Things, and arguments that are reasonable, I do have a sense of something missing, and I especially noticed that at times when I'd just been listening to the Rig Veda on audio. It feels to me like ancient poetry and spirituality go together and that it's strange without the latter, an idea I'm sure would have exasperated Lucretius. He does occasionally include god metaphors and lovely descriptions of natural phenomena, from Brownian motion to charismatic megafauna, and adorable images like "flocks of stars grazing their way across the night sky". Evidently he is showing that the world can still be wondrous without religious belief and through scientific fact - much as Richard Dawkins would assert two millenia later in Unweaving the Rainbow. "Here is the deepest reason why Lucretius’ philosophy must be poetry also," says Jenkyns. "You cannot command a person into a feeling".
And then I have never got on very well with old non-fiction. As I think I've said in an earlier review, this was always a secret shame of mine when I was studying history, and likewise later, with psychology I never had any inclination to read a book of Freud cover to cover, although I knew from recent publications how indebted certain areas of modern psychology are to him (including the currently buzzy field of trauma), and that those who still assume all of Freud is 1-star hogwash are misinformed. I love social history, the history of popular culture and customs - and I'm very interested to hear summaries of old theories and beliefs in secondary sources. But ploughing through hundreds of pages of science from hundreds of years ago, at least half of it now superseded, has never been my idea of fun for some reason. The notes in this edition of Lucretius could also have been more helpful in explaining what modern knowledge is on some of his theories, as a lot of its readers, especially in the UK - where education specialises earlier - won't have studied physics beyond the age of 16, if even that far. There were various points on which I knew the correct/modern take, but on several was not sure, especially in the first half, and I won't be alone in that.
Yet I'm currently enthralled by the details of everyday late medieval life in a modern version of Piers Plowman, a text I understand bores a lot of Eng Lit students - and I'm sure there are readers out there who would feel similarly about the Roman science in The Nature of Things. A lot of it is astoundingly correct and perceptive, especially considering they didn't have microscopes - and other bits are just plain wrong but understandably so (oh, but beasts did "crawl from briny pools to land" as part of evolution), or weirdly wrong. (Among the latter: Why, if one has observed that shadows occur because light is blocked, then assume that the darkness of night is because of particles of darkness? If making other correct deductions about how the body worked from injuries to parts of it, injuries that were evidently more often seen by the public in the grisly Roman world than now, how did they not conclude that the head was the seat of the mind?) If you find that sort of primary-source history of science interesting, you should read this - and as it's rather a modern translation and short it'll be easier than ploughing through Newton or similar.
Though there are details of Roman life in The Nature of Things in metaphors and analogies. Having read the Odyssey earlier this year, and seen how background details show nature as wilder and closer, and a world of small chiefdoms, it was evident in Lucretius how much more urbanised and technological the Romans were. Different enough that it seemed a little odd to be tagging both as 'Classical antiquity' when I have 'medieval' and 'early modern' separate - but then I've never specialised in the Classical world. There are lions in both - but in Lucretius the lions might be caged, as if for the arena. Yet Romans - at least the readership Lucretius expected - had considerably more knowledge of nature than the average 21st century Westerner; he can refer to wild plants assuming the reader will know their scent:
Take anything that breathes forth from its flesh a pungent smell –
Heal-all, loathsome wormwood, overpowering lad’s-love, fell
Centaury – and then lightly pinch it with your thumb and finger
For the non-Classicist, it's perhaps easy to forget how lively and lived-in Roman buildings once were. Not after this:
Dizzy children think the columns in a peristyle
Are going round, and that the entire court is in a spin,
Once they themselves stop turning, so that they almost begin
To believe the house threatens to tumble in about their ears.
And a reference to "the overwhelming fumes of charcoal" reminded me of how medieval people disliked coal and its smoke (there was legislation against burning it in London) before its use became inevitable due to wood shortage and population growth.
In contrast with the Roman-ness is some of the poetry: there are some very modern-sounding passages here, sometimes frustratingly unannotated. They jump out. I'd really like to know whether this is Lucretius being surprisingly modern, or if it's Stallings. Though she does at least explain, when using a line from Shelley's 'Ozymandias' that she adopted it - otherwise one might plausibly have wondered (with Shelley being a famous atheist) if Lucretius had inspired the same line in the 19th century poem. At one point a similar Wordsworth reference/borrowing is noted, though an "untrodden ways" suggesting one of the Lucy poems, is not. No doubt there were others from poets I know even less of. Meanwhile, some notes quote lines from other, later poets influenced by Lucretius, in a sort of mirror image of the notes often found in comparatively recent classic literature. And not only poets: this passage about the seasons is thought to have inspired Botticelli's Primavera:
Spring and Venus come, and wingèd Cupid leads the way,
And Mother Flora, in Zephyr’s footsteps, scatters a bouquet
Of blossoms coloured bright to catch the eye, and smelling sweet,
Carpeting the path that stretches out before their feet.
Scorching Heat comes next, with Ceres head to toe in dust,
Attended by the Northerlies that in the summer gust;
Next in the annual procession, we see Autumn traipse,
Swaying arm and arm with Dionysus, lord of grapes,
Then other seasons follow, and the other winds blow past:
Volturnus the sky-thunderer, the South-wind’s lightning blast.
And then, with snow and frost in tow, the Solstice of the year,
While Winter, his teeth chattering with cold, brings up the rear.
The poem's main content and message - about atheism - feels astonishingly contemporary for a Roman work. If you read much content from the New Atheist movement of the 00s, all the usual arguments are here, and at least one which, IIRC, wasn't in The God Delusion or God Is Not Great, as I remember working it out for myself, through a fog of illness - a recursive epiphany that I was glad my mind could still muster - in spring 2008 on a miserable holiday with a soon-to-be-ex, not long after reading Dawkins' bestseller. The soul, the self, the personality, is the nervous system (as the latter two can be changed through damage to the nervous system). Or as Lucretius puts it:
For the spirit is so closely bound up with the veins and tissue,
Sinews and bones, that even teeth possess a share of sense:
One of the key ideas that Lucretius is missing in the poem, and seems to need, to be grasping for, is the nervous system. (The modern idea of body organ systems was centuries away yet.)
However, though there is acknowledgement, in the poem that damage to the body can damage the spirit, there isn't consideration of how this fits with something mentioned by Jenkyns: "Both Stoicism (which does believe in a divine providence) and Epicureanism assert that the mind of the wise man, enlightened by philosophy, is an impregnable citadel."
The historical Jesus almost certainly hadn't been born when Lucretius was writing, so there was no 2000 years of Christianity to draw on for examples. However, in discussing cruelties perpetrated in the name of religion - in tones very much like those of the early 21st century - there's a Greek foundational myth to return to: Agamemnon's sacrifice of Iphigenia.
It's surely no coincidence that this translation was published in 2007, when interest in atheist literature had been building for several years. But codified atheism seems to have arrived alongside axial age religion itself. It was even kind of retro: "Epicurus held that natural science is the route to philosophical understanding, and his system, from one point of view, can be seen as the revival, in a transformed shape, of an older tradition of Greek thought," before "the discovery that science and philosophy are different modes of enquiry … in the later fifth century Socrates made the distinction absolute." Very similar to a contemporary point of view in which psychology and neuroscience are expected to answer many of the questions of philosophy. (One which I tend to like, but a number of philosophy enthusiasts on GR don't.)
Also in here are commonly-heard arguments against reincarnation - though with an unusual conclusion that if one can't remember a previous incarnation, there may as well be simple death; and besides, a form of reincarnation exists through the recycling of matter and particles that make up the body.
Like Dawkins' atheist church idea, and various atheist meetups that endeavoured to replicate the structure of religious practice, "Epicurus … seems to have wanted his followers to form a kind of ‘church’, encouraging them to share their lives together" - and may, ironically, have influenced Christianity.
The abrupt ending to what is surely an unfinished work - an account of the Plague of Athens - would be eerie at the best of times, and is more evocatively so in 2020. But my overriding impression of the poem's message is that the so-called Four Horsemen of New Atheism were really just footnotes to Lucretius.
(Sept-Oct 2020)
This translation begins beautifully, which initially made me keen to read the rest of it.
Life-stirring Venus, Mother of Aeneas and of Rome,
Pleasure of men and gods, you make all things beneath the dome
Of sliding constellations teem, you throng the fruited earth
And the ship-freighted sea – for every species comes to birth
Conceived through you, and rises forth and gazes on the light.
The winds flee from you, Goddess, your arrival puts to flight
The clouds of heaven. For you, the crafty earth contrives sweet flowers,
For you, the oceans laugh, the skies grow peaceful after showers,
Awash with light. For soon as morning wears the face of spring,
And the West Wind is free and freshens, warm and quickening,
The airy tribe of birds, O Holy One, is first to start
Heralding your approach, struck with your power through the heart;
Then beasts, the wild and tame alike, go romping over the lush
Pastureland and swim across the rivers’ headlong rush…
This may be somewhat misleading if you've never read the poem before - indeed, Richard Jenkyns in the introduction calls the beginning "the most magnificent and spectacular act of worship in classical Latin literature". But it's also a great example of how the atheist Epicurean Lucretius thinks it's entirely valid to use the gods in metaphor and artistic imagery whilst also repudiating their existence on a factual level. And how well he writes that imagery (and Stallings too).
That metre: "Fourteeners ... widely used in the sixteenth century by English translators of Latin tragedy and epic, who seem to have considered it the native equivalent of the classical hexameter"(Stallings). I love a historically appropriate choice like this.
I hadn't seriously thought of reading Lucretius before this year, but in two different works about Machiavelli - William Landon's Great Courses lecture series Books that Matter: The Prince, and Alexander Lee's big new biography, Machiavelli: His Life & Times (2020), plus a few other papers, it had become clear that Lucretius is now seen as an important influence. (Machiavelli being a topic I was landed with at university twenty years ago, and have always felt I had unfinished business with due to not doing much work on him at the time.) Meanwhile, over 100 years after Machiavelli, Sir Thomas Browne, even more cautious in matters of religion, had advised "avoid reading too much Lucretius, “there being divers impieties in it, and ’tis no credit to be punctually versed in it”," I read this summer in the introduction to the NYRB Religio Medici & Urne Buriall. I looked at two or three of the most popular recent Lucretius translations, and this one in particular seemed lovely.
The Nature of Things - an epic poem about atheism and science - is a fantastic idea, and in the historical context, a subversive one. There must be a lot of people out there who would love it, but who've probably never thought of it as something they might read.
For me, there were two major obstacles which made it a slog at times. I usually love epic poems, but I overall found this one heavier-going than any I've read. (A friend suggested to me in August that news might put me off starting it: Boris Johnson had publicly talked about Lucretius as his summer reading, but I am - in Epicurean style - currently keeping away from news and politics to the extent that I still don't know anything more about this, which edition(s) he read, what he thought of it etc, and for the moment don't care to.)
Firstly, whilst there are quite a few statements I agree with in The Nature of Things, and arguments that are reasonable, I do have a sense of something missing, and I especially noticed that at times when I'd just been listening to the Rig Veda on audio. It feels to me like ancient poetry and spirituality go together and that it's strange without the latter, an idea I'm sure would have exasperated Lucretius. He does occasionally include god metaphors and lovely descriptions of natural phenomena, from Brownian motion to charismatic megafauna, and adorable images like "flocks of stars grazing their way across the night sky". Evidently he is showing that the world can still be wondrous without religious belief and through scientific fact - much as Richard Dawkins would assert two millenia later in Unweaving the Rainbow. "Here is the deepest reason why Lucretius’ philosophy must be poetry also," says Jenkyns. "You cannot command a person into a feeling".
And then I have never got on very well with old non-fiction. As I think I've said in an earlier review, this was always a secret shame of mine when I was studying history, and likewise later, with psychology I never had any inclination to read a book of Freud cover to cover, although I knew from recent publications how indebted certain areas of modern psychology are to him (including the currently buzzy field of trauma), and that those who still assume all of Freud is 1-star hogwash are misinformed. I love social history, the history of popular culture and customs - and I'm very interested to hear summaries of old theories and beliefs in secondary sources. But ploughing through hundreds of pages of science from hundreds of years ago, at least half of it now superseded, has never been my idea of fun for some reason. The notes in this edition of Lucretius could also have been more helpful in explaining what modern knowledge is on some of his theories, as a lot of its readers, especially in the UK - where education specialises earlier - won't have studied physics beyond the age of 16, if even that far. There were various points on which I knew the correct/modern take, but on several was not sure, especially in the first half, and I won't be alone in that.
Yet I'm currently enthralled by the details of everyday late medieval life in a modern version of Piers Plowman, a text I understand bores a lot of Eng Lit students - and I'm sure there are readers out there who would feel similarly about the Roman science in The Nature of Things. A lot of it is astoundingly correct and perceptive, especially considering they didn't have microscopes - and other bits are just plain wrong but understandably so (oh, but beasts did "crawl from briny pools to land" as part of evolution), or weirdly wrong. (Among the latter: Why, if one has observed that shadows occur because light is blocked, then assume that the darkness of night is because of particles of darkness? If making other correct deductions about how the body worked from injuries to parts of it, injuries that were evidently more often seen by the public in the grisly Roman world than now, how did they not conclude that the head was the seat of the mind?) If you find that sort of primary-source history of science interesting, you should read this - and as it's rather a modern translation and short it'll be easier than ploughing through Newton or similar.
Though there are details of Roman life in The Nature of Things in metaphors and analogies. Having read the Odyssey earlier this year, and seen how background details show nature as wilder and closer, and a world of small chiefdoms, it was evident in Lucretius how much more urbanised and technological the Romans were. Different enough that it seemed a little odd to be tagging both as 'Classical antiquity' when I have 'medieval' and 'early modern' separate - but then I've never specialised in the Classical world. There are lions in both - but in Lucretius the lions might be caged, as if for the arena. Yet Romans - at least the readership Lucretius expected - had considerably more knowledge of nature than the average 21st century Westerner; he can refer to wild plants assuming the reader will know their scent:
Take anything that breathes forth from its flesh a pungent smell –
Heal-all, loathsome wormwood, overpowering lad’s-love, fell
Centaury – and then lightly pinch it with your thumb and finger
For the non-Classicist, it's perhaps easy to forget how lively and lived-in Roman buildings once were. Not after this:
Dizzy children think the columns in a peristyle
Are going round, and that the entire court is in a spin,
Once they themselves stop turning, so that they almost begin
To believe the house threatens to tumble in about their ears.
And a reference to "the overwhelming fumes of charcoal" reminded me of how medieval people disliked coal and its smoke (there was legislation against burning it in London) before its use became inevitable due to wood shortage and population growth.
In contrast with the Roman-ness is some of the poetry: there are some very modern-sounding passages here, sometimes frustratingly unannotated. They jump out. I'd really like to know whether this is Lucretius being surprisingly modern, or if it's Stallings. Though she does at least explain, when using a line from Shelley's 'Ozymandias' that she adopted it - otherwise one might plausibly have wondered (with Shelley being a famous atheist) if Lucretius had inspired the same line in the 19th century poem. At one point a similar Wordsworth reference/borrowing is noted, though an "untrodden ways" suggesting one of the Lucy poems, is not. No doubt there were others from poets I know even less of. Meanwhile, some notes quote lines from other, later poets influenced by Lucretius, in a sort of mirror image of the notes often found in comparatively recent classic literature. And not only poets: this passage about the seasons is thought to have inspired Botticelli's Primavera:
Spring and Venus come, and wingèd Cupid leads the way,
And Mother Flora, in Zephyr’s footsteps, scatters a bouquet
Of blossoms coloured bright to catch the eye, and smelling sweet,
Carpeting the path that stretches out before their feet.
Scorching Heat comes next, with Ceres head to toe in dust,
Attended by the Northerlies that in the summer gust;
Next in the annual procession, we see Autumn traipse,
Swaying arm and arm with Dionysus, lord of grapes,
Then other seasons follow, and the other winds blow past:
Volturnus the sky-thunderer, the South-wind’s lightning blast.
And then, with snow and frost in tow, the Solstice of the year,
While Winter, his teeth chattering with cold, brings up the rear.
The poem's main content and message - about atheism - feels astonishingly contemporary for a Roman work. If you read much content from the New Atheist movement of the 00s, all the usual arguments are here, and at least one which, IIRC, wasn't in The God Delusion or God Is Not Great, as I remember working it out for myself, through a fog of illness - a recursive epiphany that I was glad my mind could still muster - in spring 2008 on a miserable holiday with a soon-to-be-ex, not long after reading Dawkins' bestseller. The soul, the self, the personality, is the nervous system (as the latter two can be changed through damage to the nervous system). Or as Lucretius puts it:
For the spirit is so closely bound up with the veins and tissue,
Sinews and bones, that even teeth possess a share of sense:
One of the key ideas that Lucretius is missing in the poem, and seems to need, to be grasping for, is the nervous system. (The modern idea of body organ systems was centuries away yet.)
However, though there is acknowledgement, in the poem that damage to the body can damage the spirit, there isn't consideration of how this fits with something mentioned by Jenkyns: "Both Stoicism (which does believe in a divine providence) and Epicureanism assert that the mind of the wise man, enlightened by philosophy, is an impregnable citadel."
The historical Jesus almost certainly hadn't been born when Lucretius was writing, so there was no 2000 years of Christianity to draw on for examples. However, in discussing cruelties perpetrated in the name of religion - in tones very much like those of the early 21st century - there's a Greek foundational myth to return to: Agamemnon's sacrifice of Iphigenia.
It's surely no coincidence that this translation was published in 2007, when interest in atheist literature had been building for several years. But codified atheism seems to have arrived alongside axial age religion itself. It was even kind of retro: "Epicurus held that natural science is the route to philosophical understanding, and his system, from one point of view, can be seen as the revival, in a transformed shape, of an older tradition of Greek thought," before "the discovery that science and philosophy are different modes of enquiry … in the later fifth century Socrates made the distinction absolute." Very similar to a contemporary point of view in which psychology and neuroscience are expected to answer many of the questions of philosophy. (One which I tend to like, but a number of philosophy enthusiasts on GR don't.)
Also in here are commonly-heard arguments against reincarnation - though with an unusual conclusion that if one can't remember a previous incarnation, there may as well be simple death; and besides, a form of reincarnation exists through the recycling of matter and particles that make up the body.
Like Dawkins' atheist church idea, and various atheist meetups that endeavoured to replicate the structure of religious practice, "Epicurus … seems to have wanted his followers to form a kind of ‘church’, encouraging them to share their lives together" - and may, ironically, have influenced Christianity.
The abrupt ending to what is surely an unfinished work - an account of the Plague of Athens - would be eerie at the best of times, and is more evocatively so in 2020. But my overriding impression of the poem's message is that the so-called Four Horsemen of New Atheism were really just footnotes to Lucretius.
(Sept-Oct 2020)
July 19, 2014
Wow, this was a real surprise. Lucretius was just so shockingly ahead of his time. It's probably more important than Newton in terms of the sheer range of thought he originates. His conception of atomic theory is surprisingly accurate, down to recognizing that atoms are composed of about three different parts. He also figured out the law of conservation of matter, realized that the majority of matter is made up of empty space, recognized the basic principles of gravitation, heat, light, relativity, hell, he even realized that chaos and randomness played a role in atomic activity, several millennia before Heisenberg and Schrodinger. On top of that he tears down religious dogmatism as a means of understanding the natural world and replaces it with a system of secular observation and understanding, all while creating a totally original synthesis between hard science and humanism centuries before either would really be codified. Oh, and did I mention the whole fucking thing is a poem?
October 20, 2019
“Therefore death to us
Is nothing, nor concerns us in the least,
Since nature of mind is mortal evermore.”
“ Now then, learn
How tenuous is the nature of an image.
And in the first place, since primordials be
So far beneath our senses, and much less
E'en than those objects which begin to grow
Too small for eyes to note, learn now in few
How nice are the beginnings of all things—”
“And if the reason be
Unable to unravel us the cause
Why objects, which at hand were square, afar
Seemed rounded, yet it more availeth us,
Lacking the reason, to pretend a cause
For each configuration, than to let
From out our hands escape the obvious things
And injure primal faith in sense, and wreck
All those foundations upon which do rest
Our life and safety. For not only reason
Would topple down; but even our very life
Would straightaway collapse, unless we dared
To trust our senses and to keep away
From headlong heights and places to be shunned
Of a like peril, and to seek with speed
Their opposites! Again, as in a building,
If the first plumb-line be askew, and if
The square deceiving swerve from lines exact,
And if the level waver but the least
In any part, the whole construction then
Must turn out faulty—shelving and askew,
Leaning to back and front, incongruous,
That now some portions seem about to fall,
And falls the whole ere long—betrayed indeed
By first deceiving estimates: so too
Thy calculations in affairs of life
Must be askew and false, if sprung for thee
From senses false. So all that troop of words
Marshalled against the senses is quite vain.”
Is nothing, nor concerns us in the least,
Since nature of mind is mortal evermore.”
“ Now then, learn
How tenuous is the nature of an image.
And in the first place, since primordials be
So far beneath our senses, and much less
E'en than those objects which begin to grow
Too small for eyes to note, learn now in few
How nice are the beginnings of all things—”
“And if the reason be
Unable to unravel us the cause
Why objects, which at hand were square, afar
Seemed rounded, yet it more availeth us,
Lacking the reason, to pretend a cause
For each configuration, than to let
From out our hands escape the obvious things
And injure primal faith in sense, and wreck
All those foundations upon which do rest
Our life and safety. For not only reason
Would topple down; but even our very life
Would straightaway collapse, unless we dared
To trust our senses and to keep away
From headlong heights and places to be shunned
Of a like peril, and to seek with speed
Their opposites! Again, as in a building,
If the first plumb-line be askew, and if
The square deceiving swerve from lines exact,
And if the level waver but the least
In any part, the whole construction then
Must turn out faulty—shelving and askew,
Leaning to back and front, incongruous,
That now some portions seem about to fall,
And falls the whole ere long—betrayed indeed
By first deceiving estimates: so too
Thy calculations in affairs of life
Must be askew and false, if sprung for thee
From senses false. So all that troop of words
Marshalled against the senses is quite vain.”
March 23, 2022
Much on-target prediction. Philosophic argument combined with poetic aplomb. The nature of atoms, the movement of lightning, particles, sound, a refutation of the gods, sex and man's nature as opposed to the nature of non-sentient things. Attempts to locate the soul. Some missteps regarding the heavens, ether, and celestial bodies. Much worthy logical exploration about our mysterious universe. Food for thought for young and old. Well-composed and organized meditative observation and explanation.
Reminds me of Da Vinci's notebooks. The product of a powerful curious mind. A great and essential classic we would all do well to admire for its bold, uncompromising ambition to encompass all that we are called to know, seek out, discover, and dispute.
Reminds me of Da Vinci's notebooks. The product of a powerful curious mind. A great and essential classic we would all do well to admire for its bold, uncompromising ambition to encompass all that we are called to know, seek out, discover, and dispute.
Read
March 25, 2011When was the last time you read an ancient Roman text that predicts quantum theory and genetics, promotes sustainable agriculture, and is written in the form of an epic poem? Anyone? Anyone?
Jesus Christ this was weird. And good. And nothing like it will ever be written again. I dig all wildly interdisciplinary, utterly anti-parochial writers (see also: Sebald, Vico, Browne), and Lucretius joins their ranks in my mind. A poetically beautiful, prescient, coruscant puzzle-box of a book.
Jesus Christ this was weird. And good. And nothing like it will ever be written again. I dig all wildly interdisciplinary, utterly anti-parochial writers (see also: Sebald, Vico, Browne), and Lucretius joins their ranks in my mind. A poetically beautiful, prescient, coruscant puzzle-box of a book.
December 7, 2018
Το έργο αυτό κατατάσσεται άνετα στα μεγάλα ποιητικά των Λατίνων μαζί με την Αινειάδα του Βιργίλιου και τις Μεταμορφώσεις του Οβίδιου. Η ουσιαστική τους διαφορά είναι το φιλοσοφικό υπόβαθρο, αυτό του επικουρισμού. Είναι εντυπωσιακό το γεγονός ότι γράφτηκε μερικές δεκαετίες π.Χ., ειδικά στα θέματα της φυσικής φιλοσοφίας. Θα το θεωρούσα φυσιολογικό αν είχε γραφτεί τον 17ο αιώνα.
August 6, 2016
If I were to try to prove that time machines were possible, this is the book I would submit as exhibit one for my evidence. There is really no other explanation for this book than the fact that Richard Feynman had built a time machine and had the opportunity to talk with Lucretius for one hour (but no more) and explain to him what he (Feynman) has said is the most important statement he could say in the fewest words, "that all things are made of atoms—little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another".
Lucretius gets the concept. I once learned a long time ago that to understand the universe one must understand entropy, and nobody really understands entropy. There are many ways we explain entropy the most succinct is "heat always goes to cold", or another is "order goes to disorder", and Lucretius clearly gets those two explanations better than most modern people. Technically the real definition of entropy involves Boltzmann's constant, a temperature and a rearrangement of possible states, but that doesn't really let one understand what entropy is but just defines it.
Lucretius uses the language of his time period, with abstract thinking, and the belief that everything is made up of atoms in motion but repelling upon being squeezed into one another and is able to get at the essence of reality better than most modern people do.
It's clear why this book was suppressed by the superstitious and myth believers of various religious tribes. The arguments made for using reason instead of pretending to know things you don't know (i.e. faith) in understanding are devastating and even when they might be wrong they are better than citing authority based on nothing but faith.
Lucretius hits it out of the ball park on many things. His explanation and effects about outer space, pre-explaining Newton's optics, physics and gravity in terms that are remarkably spot on, and his discussion of the nature of the human senses as all being separate attributes of nature as perceived by humans and can be explained by 'everything is made of atoms'. (I've just read Spinoza's Ethics and Lucretius' discussion on the five senses gave me insight into Spinoza's "one substance" and its infinite attributes of that substance but only two are known by us, extension (body) and thinking (mind), but each are separate but reside with in the one substance (God or Nature depending on how you read Spinoza).
It's clear why Thomas Jefferson had multiple copies of this book in his library, because in 1800 what was said in this book was vastly superior to what was being preached by others. I would say that no myth believer could appreciate this book and its incredibly brilliant spin on the essence of reality.
A point or two: Democritus has the atom part correct hundreds of years before Lucretius, but he doesn't know how to take it further. Epicurus has a philosophy built around pursuit of pleasure (of the contemplative type) and avoidance of pain (of any kind), but leaves the essence of reality alone. Lucretius doesn't dwell too much on ethics except a couple of statements to the effect that learning about the world and its true nature is our highest calling. What he does do is writes a book that destroys the Gods, demonstrates (he says proves) that the after life is a fairy tale best left for children and sets about explaining the world better than any other single writer until Newton comes along. That is no mean feat. (Yes, Copernicus takes the earth out of the center of the Universe, and Lucretius is wrong regarding the firmament, but Lucretius touches about everything with in nature and gives a marvelous way to think about them. It takes Newton (or perhaps Galileo) to get it as well.
Lucretius gets the concept. I once learned a long time ago that to understand the universe one must understand entropy, and nobody really understands entropy. There are many ways we explain entropy the most succinct is "heat always goes to cold", or another is "order goes to disorder", and Lucretius clearly gets those two explanations better than most modern people. Technically the real definition of entropy involves Boltzmann's constant, a temperature and a rearrangement of possible states, but that doesn't really let one understand what entropy is but just defines it.
Lucretius uses the language of his time period, with abstract thinking, and the belief that everything is made up of atoms in motion but repelling upon being squeezed into one another and is able to get at the essence of reality better than most modern people do.
It's clear why this book was suppressed by the superstitious and myth believers of various religious tribes. The arguments made for using reason instead of pretending to know things you don't know (i.e. faith) in understanding are devastating and even when they might be wrong they are better than citing authority based on nothing but faith.
Lucretius hits it out of the ball park on many things. His explanation and effects about outer space, pre-explaining Newton's optics, physics and gravity in terms that are remarkably spot on, and his discussion of the nature of the human senses as all being separate attributes of nature as perceived by humans and can be explained by 'everything is made of atoms'. (I've just read Spinoza's Ethics and Lucretius' discussion on the five senses gave me insight into Spinoza's "one substance" and its infinite attributes of that substance but only two are known by us, extension (body) and thinking (mind), but each are separate but reside with in the one substance (God or Nature depending on how you read Spinoza).
It's clear why Thomas Jefferson had multiple copies of this book in his library, because in 1800 what was said in this book was vastly superior to what was being preached by others. I would say that no myth believer could appreciate this book and its incredibly brilliant spin on the essence of reality.
A point or two: Democritus has the atom part correct hundreds of years before Lucretius, but he doesn't know how to take it further. Epicurus has a philosophy built around pursuit of pleasure (of the contemplative type) and avoidance of pain (of any kind), but leaves the essence of reality alone. Lucretius doesn't dwell too much on ethics except a couple of statements to the effect that learning about the world and its true nature is our highest calling. What he does do is writes a book that destroys the Gods, demonstrates (he says proves) that the after life is a fairy tale best left for children and sets about explaining the world better than any other single writer until Newton comes along. That is no mean feat. (Yes, Copernicus takes the earth out of the center of the Universe, and Lucretius is wrong regarding the firmament, but Lucretius touches about everything with in nature and gives a marvelous way to think about them. It takes Newton (or perhaps Galileo) to get it as well.
April 23, 2014
Why doesn't anyone write pop science books like this any more? You know, full of cutting-edge particle physics and cosmology (who cares if it's all wrong? it's magnificently wrong) but with bits about earthquakes and evolution, mixed up with hot sex tips and complaints about why women are all such fucking bitches. And the whole thing done as exquisite poetry. Brian Greene, eat your heart out. No one's going to be reading you a couple of thousand years from now.
April 8, 2018
Matter, for sure, is not one solid mass
Close packed together. We see that everything.
Diminishes, and through the long lapse of time
We note that all things seem to melt away
As years and age withdraw them from our sight.
And yet the sum of things stays unimpaired.
This is because when particles are shed
From a thing they diminish it as they leave it,
And then increase the object that they come to.
They make the one grow old, the other flourish,
But do not linger there. The sum of things
Is thus forever renewed, and mortals live
By mutual interchange one from another.
Some races increase, others fade away,
And in short space the breeds of living creatures
Change, and like runners pass on the torch of life.
Now if you think that atoms can be at rest
And can by resting beget new movements in things,
You are lost, and wander very far from truth.
For since the atoms wander through the void,
All must be driven either by their own weight
Or by some chance blow from another atom.
For often when, as they move, they meet and clash,
They leap apart at once in different directions.
No wonder, since they are extremely hard
And solid, and there is nothing behind to stop them.
To see more clearly that all particles of matter
Are constantly being tossed about, remember
That there is no bottom to the universe,
That primal atoms have nowhere to rest,
Since space is without end or any limit.
And I have shown by many words, and proved
By surest reasoning that it extends
Boundless in all directions everywhere.
Since that stands true, no rest, we may be sure,
Is given to atoms in the void abyss
But rather, as unceasing different
Movements impel them, some, colliding, leap
Great intervals apart, while others recoil
Only a short distance from the impact.
And those whose union being more closely packed
Leap back short distances after a collision,
Being fast entangled by their own complex shapes,
These constitute strong roots of stone and the brute bulk
Of iron, and other objects of that kind.
Of the rest, which wander further through the void,
A few leap far apart, and far recoil
Over great intervals; these make for us
Thin air, and make the shining light of sun.
And many wander through the mighty void
Rejected from all union with others,
Unable anywhere to gain admittance
And bring their movements into harmony.
An image and similitude of this
Is always moving present to our eyes.
Consider sunbeams. When the sun's rays let in
Pass through the darkness of a shuttered room,
You will see a multitude of tiny bodies
All mingling in a multitude of ways
Inside the sunbeam, moving in the void,
Seeming to be engaged in endless strife,
Battle, and warfare, troop attacking troop,
And never a respite, harried constantly,
With meetings and with partings everywhere.
From this you can imagine what it is
For atoms to be tossed perpetually
In endless motion through the mighty void.
To some extent a small thing may afford
An image of great things, a footprint of a concept.
Close packed together. We see that everything.
Diminishes, and through the long lapse of time
We note that all things seem to melt away
As years and age withdraw them from our sight.
And yet the sum of things stays unimpaired.
This is because when particles are shed
From a thing they diminish it as they leave it,
And then increase the object that they come to.
They make the one grow old, the other flourish,
But do not linger there. The sum of things
Is thus forever renewed, and mortals live
By mutual interchange one from another.
Some races increase, others fade away,
And in short space the breeds of living creatures
Change, and like runners pass on the torch of life.
Now if you think that atoms can be at rest
And can by resting beget new movements in things,
You are lost, and wander very far from truth.
For since the atoms wander through the void,
All must be driven either by their own weight
Or by some chance blow from another atom.
For often when, as they move, they meet and clash,
They leap apart at once in different directions.
No wonder, since they are extremely hard
And solid, and there is nothing behind to stop them.
To see more clearly that all particles of matter
Are constantly being tossed about, remember
That there is no bottom to the universe,
That primal atoms have nowhere to rest,
Since space is without end or any limit.
And I have shown by many words, and proved
By surest reasoning that it extends
Boundless in all directions everywhere.
Since that stands true, no rest, we may be sure,
Is given to atoms in the void abyss
But rather, as unceasing different
Movements impel them, some, colliding, leap
Great intervals apart, while others recoil
Only a short distance from the impact.
And those whose union being more closely packed
Leap back short distances after a collision,
Being fast entangled by their own complex shapes,
These constitute strong roots of stone and the brute bulk
Of iron, and other objects of that kind.
Of the rest, which wander further through the void,
A few leap far apart, and far recoil
Over great intervals; these make for us
Thin air, and make the shining light of sun.
And many wander through the mighty void
Rejected from all union with others,
Unable anywhere to gain admittance
And bring their movements into harmony.
An image and similitude of this
Is always moving present to our eyes.
Consider sunbeams. When the sun's rays let in
Pass through the darkness of a shuttered room,
You will see a multitude of tiny bodies
All mingling in a multitude of ways
Inside the sunbeam, moving in the void,
Seeming to be engaged in endless strife,
Battle, and warfare, troop attacking troop,
And never a respite, harried constantly,
With meetings and with partings everywhere.
From this you can imagine what it is
For atoms to be tossed perpetually
In endless motion through the mighty void.
To some extent a small thing may afford
An image of great things, a footprint of a concept.
May 14, 2023
“De Rerum Natura” é a obra-prima do poeta-filósofo Tito Lucrécio Caro (94-55 a.C). Se quiserem saber mais sobre a história e relevância deste texto que quase se perdeu nos meandros das parcas bibliotecas da Idade Média, aconselho vivamente a leitura de “The Swerve: How the World Became Modern” (2011) de Stephen Greenblatt. Mas se foi por meio de Greenblatt que me iniciei na leitura de Lucrécio, a quem agradeço, foi por meio da belíssima tradução de Agostinho da Silva (1962), para prosa em português, que cheguei ao conhecimento das palavras e pensamento de Lucrécio. Dizer ainda que se a obra se apresenta como poema, ele é mais porque é também ensaio, não apenas filosófico, mas também científico, e por isso não admira todo o ardor que Montaigne sentia por Lucrécio, explicando também o facto de se ter passado a designar a obra como poema-didático. Em suma, podemos dizer que a obra de Lucrécio é talvez o primeiro trabalho de sempre de Comunicação de Ciência. Mais do que filosofar, argumentar ou calcular, Lucrécio estava focado em dar a conhecer as ideias dos seus mestres — Demócrito (460-370 a.C.) e Epicuro (341-270 a.C.) — não se tendo poupado em esforços de comunicação, nomeadamente de persuasão, o que explicará o facto de ter sido escrito em verso.
Para além do impacto desta obra nas ideias dos períodos da Renascença e do Iluminismo, discutido por Greenblatt, é talvez ainda mais importante, porque responsável por esse impacto, o facto de...
..
..
... continua no blog em:
https://virtual-illusion.blogspot.com...
Para além do impacto desta obra nas ideias dos períodos da Renascença e do Iluminismo, discutido por Greenblatt, é talvez ainda mais importante, porque responsável por esse impacto, o facto de...
..
..
... continua no blog em:
https://virtual-illusion.blogspot.com...
January 29, 2024
Unbeirrbarer Hedonismus gepaart mit kaleidoskopischer Atomfülle voller Honig und Fröhlichkeit. Der philosophische Höhepunkt des Reduktionismus schlechthin.
Lukrez‘ philosophisches Versepos bietet eines der ersten systematischen philosophischen Werke, in denen das System des Materialismus zur Entfaltung gebracht wird. Lukrez übt sich in Nachfolge Epikurs und Demokrit darin, alles Sichtbare auf die Wechselwirkung von Atomen zurückzuführen. Mit Lukrez wurde mithin der Reduktionismus salonfähig:
Daraus schließt man mit Recht, daß aus glatten und runden Atomen/ Alles besteht, was unseren Sinn wohltuend berühret:/ Alles, was bitter hingegen und rauh scheint, muß durch Atome,/ Die mehr Haken besitzen, genau miteinander verknüpft sein./ Deshalb pflegen sie auch die Wege zu unseren Sinnen/ Aufzuritzen und so den Eingang zum Körper zu brechen.
In der Lateinisch/Deutschen-Ausgabe Reclams besteht das fast vollständig überlieferte philosophische Werk des Lukrez aus sechs Büchern. Grob zusammengefasst erörtert er die Grundlagen des Atomismus in Buch 1, wohingegen er dieses System in Buch 2 zum Erklären von Phänomenen verwendet. Im dritten Buch kommt er auf die berühmte Weise zu sprechen, wie Epikur die Todesfurcht überwindet, und fügt eine Abbildlehre hinzu, die bis über Leibniz zu Hans Heinz Holz ins 21. Jahrhundert weitergetragen wurde und noch immer als materialistische Antwort auf die kantische Apperzeptionslehre dient. Er schließt mit einer Kosmologie und Meteorologie, die auch die athenischen Epidemien samt Keuchhusten inkludiert. Wegweisend bleibt jedoch seine Individualitätslehre:
Aber nachdem ich gelehrt, wie beschaffen die Urelemente/ Sämtlicher Dinge und wie sie verschieden durch mancherlei Formen/ Eigenem Triebe gehorchend in ew'ger Bewegung sich tummeln/ Und wie hieraus sich alles im einzelnen könne gestalten,/ Will ich dir jetzo die Lehre beginnen, die eng sich daranschließt,/ Über die Bilder der Dinge
Viele archetypische Denkprobleme ergeben sich für Lukrez, bspw. das Seele-Leib-Problem, die Abbildtheorie, die Quantelung des Lichts, und die Fernwechselwirkung der Schwerkraft, ebenso ganz diesseitige wie das Entstehen von Donner und Blitz, von der Rundheit der Welt und die dazugehörige Rundheit der Atome. All dies, das principium individuationis und die adaequatio rei atque cogitationis, führt bei Lukrez zuletzt zu seinem fröhlichen selbst sich immunisierenden Hedonismus:
Nur dies glaub' ich dabei als sicher vertreten zu können,/ Daß es nur wenige Reste des angeborenen Wesens/ Gibt, die sich nicht durch Vernunft vollständig beseitigen ließen./ So steht nichts uns im Wege, ein göttliches Leben zu führen.
Die Furchtlosigkeit seines Denkens bricht sich gegen die Gewalt der Begriffe bahn. Er fluidisiert sie. Er spielt mit ihnen. Er wagt mit ihnen und über sie hinaus zu denken. Lukrez‘ Logik schlägt so manchem Purzelbaum und je genauer die Argumentation rekonstruiert wird, desto schleierhafter wird manches. Das aber verleiht dem widerborstigen Werk nur noch mehr Stacheln, an denen es sich zu reiben und zu kratzen lohnt.
Das naive und fröhliche Drauflos-Denken kennt Lukrez als seinen Gründer. Furchtlos der Vielfalt entgegentretend, hat der Reduktionismus dort seinen Höhepunkt erreicht, wo er als homo ludens auftritt. Der Rest, bis hin zur Schrödingers Katze und der Heisenbergsche Unschärferelation, bleibt nur ein Addendum zu Lukrez‘ kaleidoskopischen Kosmologie und nimmt höchstens diesem tummeligen Atomwirrwarr so manchen überraschenden Zauber.
Lukrez‘ philosophisches Versepos bietet eines der ersten systematischen philosophischen Werke, in denen das System des Materialismus zur Entfaltung gebracht wird. Lukrez übt sich in Nachfolge Epikurs und Demokrit darin, alles Sichtbare auf die Wechselwirkung von Atomen zurückzuführen. Mit Lukrez wurde mithin der Reduktionismus salonfähig:
Daraus schließt man mit Recht, daß aus glatten und runden Atomen/ Alles besteht, was unseren Sinn wohltuend berühret:/ Alles, was bitter hingegen und rauh scheint, muß durch Atome,/ Die mehr Haken besitzen, genau miteinander verknüpft sein./ Deshalb pflegen sie auch die Wege zu unseren Sinnen/ Aufzuritzen und so den Eingang zum Körper zu brechen.
In der Lateinisch/Deutschen-Ausgabe Reclams besteht das fast vollständig überlieferte philosophische Werk des Lukrez aus sechs Büchern. Grob zusammengefasst erörtert er die Grundlagen des Atomismus in Buch 1, wohingegen er dieses System in Buch 2 zum Erklären von Phänomenen verwendet. Im dritten Buch kommt er auf die berühmte Weise zu sprechen, wie Epikur die Todesfurcht überwindet, und fügt eine Abbildlehre hinzu, die bis über Leibniz zu Hans Heinz Holz ins 21. Jahrhundert weitergetragen wurde und noch immer als materialistische Antwort auf die kantische Apperzeptionslehre dient. Er schließt mit einer Kosmologie und Meteorologie, die auch die athenischen Epidemien samt Keuchhusten inkludiert. Wegweisend bleibt jedoch seine Individualitätslehre:
Aber nachdem ich gelehrt, wie beschaffen die Urelemente/ Sämtlicher Dinge und wie sie verschieden durch mancherlei Formen/ Eigenem Triebe gehorchend in ew'ger Bewegung sich tummeln/ Und wie hieraus sich alles im einzelnen könne gestalten,/ Will ich dir jetzo die Lehre beginnen, die eng sich daranschließt,/ Über die Bilder der Dinge
Viele archetypische Denkprobleme ergeben sich für Lukrez, bspw. das Seele-Leib-Problem, die Abbildtheorie, die Quantelung des Lichts, und die Fernwechselwirkung der Schwerkraft, ebenso ganz diesseitige wie das Entstehen von Donner und Blitz, von der Rundheit der Welt und die dazugehörige Rundheit der Atome. All dies, das principium individuationis und die adaequatio rei atque cogitationis, führt bei Lukrez zuletzt zu seinem fröhlichen selbst sich immunisierenden Hedonismus:
Nur dies glaub' ich dabei als sicher vertreten zu können,/ Daß es nur wenige Reste des angeborenen Wesens/ Gibt, die sich nicht durch Vernunft vollständig beseitigen ließen./ So steht nichts uns im Wege, ein göttliches Leben zu führen.
Die Furchtlosigkeit seines Denkens bricht sich gegen die Gewalt der Begriffe bahn. Er fluidisiert sie. Er spielt mit ihnen. Er wagt mit ihnen und über sie hinaus zu denken. Lukrez‘ Logik schlägt so manchem Purzelbaum und je genauer die Argumentation rekonstruiert wird, desto schleierhafter wird manches. Das aber verleiht dem widerborstigen Werk nur noch mehr Stacheln, an denen es sich zu reiben und zu kratzen lohnt.
Das naive und fröhliche Drauflos-Denken kennt Lukrez als seinen Gründer. Furchtlos der Vielfalt entgegentretend, hat der Reduktionismus dort seinen Höhepunkt erreicht, wo er als homo ludens auftritt. Der Rest, bis hin zur Schrödingers Katze und der Heisenbergsche Unschärferelation, bleibt nur ein Addendum zu Lukrez‘ kaleidoskopischen Kosmologie und nimmt höchstens diesem tummeligen Atomwirrwarr so manchen überraschenden Zauber.
January 16, 2022
As a college freshman, I had Rolfe Humphries as my Humanities teacher. One book the whole freshman class read was his Aeneid. He would read a passage, and add, "The translator has taken a liberty here..." Since I read Latin, he loaned me Seneca's Thyestes in the Loeb
edition from his office. Now we focus on Lucretius, who wrote the first "scientific" epic, his six books in dactyllic hexameters. Speaking of Aeneas, Lucretius begins with him, Venus the "Aeneas-maker":
"Aeneadum genetrix, hominum divomque voluptas,
alma Venus, caeli subter labentia signa
quae mare navigerum, quae terras frugiferentis.."(Loeb,p.2).
Loeb translator W Rouse has the best translation of "voluptas," for Venus, "darling" of men and gods; as for "alma Venus," non-Latinists know "alma mater," nursing/nurturing mother.
John Dryden has, "Delight of humankind, and gods above,
Parent of Rome, propitious Queen of Love
Whose vital pow'r, air,earth and sea supplies..." (Works of Dryden, ed. Noyes, p.182)
Humphries may improve on Rouse with "joy" for voluptas. RH begins with a neologism,
"Creatress, mother of the Roman line,
Joy of earth and joy of heaven"
With the return of Spring, Humphries' alone notes cattle are "tame no longer," they wade across roaring streams, "rapidos amnis" (line 15).
Humphries can be both meta-poetic, and direct, as ten lines later, addressing Venus, "I try to write here, on 'The Way Things Are," as Lucretius, "quos ego de rerum natura pangere conor."
Heri triginta lineas interpretatus sum posuique-- though I'm no RH:
(V. line 93ff)
One day will end what grew a billion years,
the complex system of the world upheld
will crash to ruin. Yet I don’t forget
how strange it hits the mind, how catastrophic
this collapse it’s hard to form the words,
hard to hear such unaccustomed rack,
as hard as not to see it, not to lift—
when true belief so easy hits the heart.
(V.115ff)
I’ll offer you much solace with my words,
lest you should think them all divine, the air,
the earth and sun, and sea and stars and moon—
eternal, when they’re more like Giants, spurned
for a grievous fault. They all diverge
from divinity which dwells between them,
between the astral bodies gods enhance.
For who with reasoning would quench the shine,
the Sun, or blotch th’ immortals in mortal words.
(V.126ff)
The mind cannot be thought to dwell in all
nooks, nor trees in the sky, nor in sea a cloud,
nor fish in a field, nor blood in lumber wood.
We don’t expect to find the sap in a rock.
Earlier, in Book IV, Lucretius wrote about sex, and Dryden apologized for translating; I'm no Dryden,
but here's my version of a few lines:
(IV.1052ff) "Sic igniter Veneris qui telis accepit ictus"
Thus who’s hit by Cupid’s love arrows
from a a young boy with girlish limbs and butt
or from a girl whose every part sparks love,
he’s drawn to the source, the site of his sights,
pulses to unite their bodies and cast
their creative juices mute in pleasure.
(IV.1155ff)
Lovers can exaggerate women’s beauties,
the Black girl called “nut-brown,” the green-eyed one
a “Pallas Athene,” the thin, a “gazelle,”
the big-boobyed? She’s Ceres, to be plowed.
But I really can’t tell you all the praises.
Get this. No matter how beautiful she is,
we’ve lived our whole life without her so far
and we continue well.
(IV.1192ff)
Sometimes women don’t need all this praise,
she often wants the man with all her heart,
she seeks mutual passion reciprocal joy.
Rolfe Humphries recommended me to a one night a week advanced Humanities session through which I heard the Classics head lead discussions, for ex., of Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy. I have since read most of Humphries' numerous Latin classics, and especially enjoyed his Ovid.
In graduate school at U MN, I had stellar Latin teachers, including Peter Bodunrin from Nigeria (by way of Oxford) who could recite thousands of lines of Latin verse in marvelous, evocative style. He combined African oral recitation with his Oxford classics preparation. In my Latin course on Ovid (from the Dept. Chair Sonkowsky), I came to see why Ovid was Shakespeare's favorite Latin writer (perhaps after Plautus), along with Publilius Syrus: Ovid's Ars Amatoria also support Donne's poems, a couple of which are almost direct translations, like "The Indifferent."
edition from his office. Now we focus on Lucretius, who wrote the first "scientific" epic, his six books in dactyllic hexameters. Speaking of Aeneas, Lucretius begins with him, Venus the "Aeneas-maker":
"Aeneadum genetrix, hominum divomque voluptas,
alma Venus, caeli subter labentia signa
quae mare navigerum, quae terras frugiferentis.."(Loeb,p.2).
Loeb translator W Rouse has the best translation of "voluptas," for Venus, "darling" of men and gods; as for "alma Venus," non-Latinists know "alma mater," nursing/nurturing mother.
John Dryden has, "Delight of humankind, and gods above,
Parent of Rome, propitious Queen of Love
Whose vital pow'r, air,earth and sea supplies..." (Works of Dryden, ed. Noyes, p.182)
Humphries may improve on Rouse with "joy" for voluptas. RH begins with a neologism,
"Creatress, mother of the Roman line,
Joy of earth and joy of heaven"
With the return of Spring, Humphries' alone notes cattle are "tame no longer," they wade across roaring streams, "rapidos amnis" (line 15).
Humphries can be both meta-poetic, and direct, as ten lines later, addressing Venus, "I try to write here, on 'The Way Things Are," as Lucretius, "quos ego de rerum natura pangere conor."
Heri triginta lineas interpretatus sum posuique-- though I'm no RH:
(V. line 93ff)
One day will end what grew a billion years,
the complex system of the world upheld
will crash to ruin. Yet I don’t forget
how strange it hits the mind, how catastrophic
this collapse it’s hard to form the words,
hard to hear such unaccustomed rack,
as hard as not to see it, not to lift—
when true belief so easy hits the heart.
(V.115ff)
I’ll offer you much solace with my words,
lest you should think them all divine, the air,
the earth and sun, and sea and stars and moon—
eternal, when they’re more like Giants, spurned
for a grievous fault. They all diverge
from divinity which dwells between them,
between the astral bodies gods enhance.
For who with reasoning would quench the shine,
the Sun, or blotch th’ immortals in mortal words.
(V.126ff)
The mind cannot be thought to dwell in all
nooks, nor trees in the sky, nor in sea a cloud,
nor fish in a field, nor blood in lumber wood.
We don’t expect to find the sap in a rock.
Earlier, in Book IV, Lucretius wrote about sex, and Dryden apologized for translating; I'm no Dryden,
but here's my version of a few lines:
(IV.1052ff) "Sic igniter Veneris qui telis accepit ictus"
Thus who’s hit by Cupid’s love arrows
from a a young boy with girlish limbs and butt
or from a girl whose every part sparks love,
he’s drawn to the source, the site of his sights,
pulses to unite their bodies and cast
their creative juices mute in pleasure.
(IV.1155ff)
Lovers can exaggerate women’s beauties,
the Black girl called “nut-brown,” the green-eyed one
a “Pallas Athene,” the thin, a “gazelle,”
the big-boobyed? She’s Ceres, to be plowed.
But I really can’t tell you all the praises.
Get this. No matter how beautiful she is,
we’ve lived our whole life without her so far
and we continue well.
(IV.1192ff)
Sometimes women don’t need all this praise,
she often wants the man with all her heart,
she seeks mutual passion reciprocal joy.
Rolfe Humphries recommended me to a one night a week advanced Humanities session through which I heard the Classics head lead discussions, for ex., of Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy. I have since read most of Humphries' numerous Latin classics, and especially enjoyed his Ovid.
In graduate school at U MN, I had stellar Latin teachers, including Peter Bodunrin from Nigeria (by way of Oxford) who could recite thousands of lines of Latin verse in marvelous, evocative style. He combined African oral recitation with his Oxford classics preparation. In my Latin course on Ovid (from the Dept. Chair Sonkowsky), I came to see why Ovid was Shakespeare's favorite Latin writer (perhaps after Plautus), along with Publilius Syrus: Ovid's Ars Amatoria also support Donne's poems, a couple of which are almost direct translations, like "The Indifferent."
October 31, 2020
Wonderful translation by AE Stallings, one of my favorite poets. Lots of playful language. The lines flow nicely, and the sentence structure to get the rhymes is not obtrusive. Quite startling prescience at times about atomic structure, while other explanations of natural occurrences are pretty amusing. The section on death and its aftermath--or not--is very good.
November 24, 2018
But, as I have said before, the majority of people suffer from a common disease, as in a plague, with their false notions about things, and their number is increasing (for in mutual emulation, they catch the disease from one another, like sheep). —Oenoanda Inscription, fr. 3
By the end of the poem the reader will have passed from birth to death, and in the process come to see like Lucretius, that the angst-ridden activity of everyday life is pointless, and that true happiness must be sought elsewhere. —Don/Peta Fowler, Introduction
__________
Of matters high I make my theme,
Proceeding to set free the minds of men. (1.931)
My purpose is
With the sweet voices of Pierian song
To expound my doctrine, and as it were to touch it
With the delicious honey of the Muses. (1.944)
__________
De Rerum Natura or On the Nature of Things (or On The Nature of the Universe, as the translator, Ronald Melville, has chosen to render it) is a didactic poem by Lucretius in Six Books, expounding both Epicurean Physics and Ethics.
When it comes to poetry, I prefer the natural and emotional lyrics of the Ancients, and there are definitely flashes of this to be found in Lucretius, but there is no denying that the majority consists of a blend of Atomic and Physical theory with Ethics. In this sense, the poem is very unusual, and can almost be read as non-fiction.
For this reason, I would not recommend this to anyone new to Ancient Poetry, but rather to anyone with an interest in Epicureanism, and how the Ancients viewed science, the world around them, and indeed, the entire universe.
I also gather the poem is much better in the original Latin; unfortunately, possessing none myself, I cannot comment on this point.
__________
N.B.
The references to lines are not exact, but an approximation, as this particular translation renders, at times, single lines in the original Greek, into multiple lines in English.
For you the earth well skilled puts forth sweet flowers. (1.8)
. . . reap some fruit of live-giving delight. (2.971)
__________
For oft my doctrine seems
Distasteful to those that have not sampled it
And most shrink back from it. (4.17-19)
Learned in ancient lore. (2.600)
Thus inspired
With mind and purpose flourishing and free . . .
I traverse, where no foot has ever trod. (1.924-5, 927)
Preserved intact from endless ages past. (1.549)
Fall through endless tracts of time . . . (1.1001)
. . . glide eternal through the course of ages . . . (5.1216)
Always everything's the same. (3.945)
. . . There is no change, even if you live
Longer than anyone on earth, and even more
If it should be your fate never to die. (3.948-949)
So each man flies from himself . . .
And hates himself because he is sick in mind
And does not know the cause of his disease.
Which if he clearly saw, at once he would
Leave everything, and study first to know
The nature of the world. For what is in question
Is not of one hour but of eternity . . . (3.1068-1073)
__________
But nothing sweeter is than this: to dwell
In quiet halls and lofty sanctuaries
Well fortified by doctrines of the wise,
And look thence down on others wandering
And seeking all astray the path of life—
(2.6-10)
In . . . tranquil peace
Live ever quiet in a life serene. (2.1094-1095)
Why do you moan and groan and weep at death?
For if your former life now past has pleased you
And if your blessings through a broken jar
Have not run out, all wasted, unenjoyed,
Why don't you, like a man that's wined and dined
Full well on life, bow out, content, and so
Your exit make and rest in peace, you fool?
(3.934-939)
There is no escape from death and we must die. (3.1078)
Live though you may through all ages that you wish,
No less that eternal death will still await . . . (3.1090-1091)
He resents that he was born mortal. (3.884)
__________
Ah, steeped in art . . . (4.792)
with a snow of roses falling, falling . . . (2.627)
He therefore who has mastered all these vices
And cast them from the mind by words, not arms,
Will it not then be right to find him worthy
To be counted in the number of the gods? (5.49-51)
Men do not care, and no one lifts his head
To look up to the shining realms of heaven. (2.1038-1039)
For once your reason, born of mind divine,
Starts to proclaim the nature of the world
The terrors of the mind flee all away,
The walls of heaven open, and through the void
Immeasurable, the truth of things I see. (3.14-18)
And as the days passed, more and more they learnt
To change their former life and way of living . . . (5.1105-1106
__________
The racing tides of youth . . . (4.1031)
Burn with Venus . . . (5.897)
_____
When the shafts of Venus strike . . . (4.1052)
[The blood is stirred, the flesh is thrilled
All through with feeling . . . (3.248-249)
With flowers, anoints the proud doorposts with perfumes,
And plants his love-sick kisses on the door. (4.1178-1179)
Mouth pressed to watering mouth and lips to lips
Drawing deep breaths as body calls to body. (4.1108-1109)
. . . Moistens his mouth with hers to prolong his kisses. (4.1194)]
. . . sticks
And burns like fire in his yearning heart. (4.1137-1138)
And by avoiding love you need not miss
The fruits that Venus offers, but instead
You may take the goods without the penalty. (4.1072-1074)
__________
Let Venus radiate from all her body . . . (4.1071)
January 29, 2024
A truly important work in scope and design. One can see the beginnings of the scientific method as a way to find the truth in the methodology and content of this treatise. I remember this book lifting a veil for me; after reading it I could see (for the first time) a foundational structure that I had not been aware of.
June 7, 2021
The Nature of Things (or De Rerum Natura in the original Latin) by Lucretius is a combination of poetry, science and philosophy. The poem explores Lucretius’ belief about the gods, humanity, the senses, the world, and the universe, all through the philosophical framework of Epicurus. It was written in the first-century BC and has been lovingly translated by A. E. Stallings into rhyming fourteeners in this Penguin Classics edition. Stallings’ translation cannot have been an easy task, but it is a thing of beauty that elevated the reading experience into something truly special.
Full review on the blog: https://wp.me/p4pZUw-iq
Full review on the blog: https://wp.me/p4pZUw-iq
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August 16, 2019“As men’s prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease of the intellect.”-Emerson
June 23, 2019
It might have taken me longer than it should have to finally read this work, but I was fairly sure I wasn't going to be that impressed with it before I started; and now that I am done with it, I can now say for certain that I am not that impressed. My procrastination was warranted as far as I am concerned. I am really glad to be done with this piece of materialistic pretension.
I will admit I am probably a biased. The two schools of ancient Hellenistic philosophy that always left me bemused (only because I couldn't understand the attention they gained) is Epicureanism and Pyrrhonism. I have always held that philosophy was originally geared toward those who were enamored with a sense of the transcendent; people who investigated nature, or the cosmos, with a profound sense of wonder and a sense that there is meaning to be had for those who search for it. People like this find it self-evident that the universe is rational and intelligible because there is a mind behind it. Materialism and severe skepticism nullifies any of the former; there is no meaning to be gleaned because there is no inherent meaning. The Atomists were probably the first materialists of note. Leucippus and Democritus are credited as the founders of this philosophical school. Their works no longer survive; what is left is fragments and quotations in other writers. Most of Epicurus' materialistic philosophy was borrowed directly from the Atomists.
Even though Epicurus and the Atomists have been adopted by current “philosophical” atheists as their philosophical forbears, the truth is, they were really more akin to deists, not atheists. While both deism and atheism are practically atheistic, deism is at least theoretically theistic. What I mean by this is that both may claim that God (or the gods) do not intervene in life, and are thus of no religious consequence, deists at least acknowledge that some mind must be behind the order inherent in the cosmos; atheists, of course, deny any such thing. Like Epicurus and the Atomists, Lucretius acknowledges the gods in theory, but denies any role to a divine mind in the order of the cosmos. For him, as for Epicurus, atoms and void are the essential substantia of the cosmos. Everything is formed from the chaotic flux of atoms. There is no rhyme or reason behind it. Indeed, Lucretius denies a mind to anything that does not have a body. For Lucretius, everything is atoms. Some atoms might be finer particles and some might be more a bit more substantial, but all are atoms. Even fire is made up of these atoms. While admittedly we have to acknowledge the word “atom” itself and the overall theory behind it as being influential on how we currently view the physics of matter, it would be a mistake to think that the ancient atomistic thinkers viewed atoms the same way we do. Like other philosophical schools, the Atomists apparently did believe that atoms had a definite size and shape. These various types of atoms could combine and form different kinds of substances—even whole worlds, potentially. The combination is ad hoc; it is random and not indicative of intention. Materialists haven't progressed that much since the days of the Atomists; Atheistic materialists and their randomly selective universe are not all that different from Lucretius. Here's a quote from Lucretius:
“In those days also the telluric world strove to beget monsters that upsprung with their astounding visages and limbs...some widowed of the hands, dumb horrors too, without a mouth, or blind ones of no eye... And others prodigies and monsters earth was then begetting of this sort – in vain, since nature banned in horror their increase and powerless were they to reach unto maturity...”
The Darwinian idea of natural random selection is not that different than that put forth above. In theory, natural selection must have formed many failed organisms. Environment is key for materialistic Darwinians, just as it was for Epicureans like Lucretius. If the formation of life is entirely random, there would of course be a plethora of animals like Lucretius mentioned above, i.e. without hands, eyes, mouth, etc. None of these could survive for long because of these deficiencies. Of course, the fossil record doesn't help this kind of theory at all. There are almost no examples of these kinds of monstrosities—even though there should be more of these than successful animals in theory. We only have examples of animals that really were successful for large stretches of time. Barring cataclysm, almost all animals in the fossil record were successful. Lucretius was no less naive than current materialist Darwinians. Chaos never breeds order; even if one were to postulate vast stretches of time, the view is still absurd. No gambler's fallacy helps the scenario seem anymore rational. It wasn't rational a millennia ago and is no more rational now.
Lucretius more or less presents his book as a great philosophical index of answers for all natural questions; and a means of diminishing religious fears. Many of these natural theories were later proven quite wrong, but some were stock theories of the time (e.g. earthquakes were caused by wind trapped in subterranean caverns). Reading all of Lucretius' theories made this book incredibly tedious and tiresome. I suppose the novelty is lost on me given that I know these theories are wrong. At the time, for those who needed to be comforted that the gods weren't behind every lightning bolt, these theories might have served their purpose. I feel like poetry that is literally false, but figuratively true, is better than poetry that attempts to be literally true and never attempts a figurative meaning. If that literalistic poetry is found to be literally false, there certainly isn't any other meaning that can be gleaned. It fails at its intent and becomes a passé guide to antiquated thought. I can't see much utility beyond this.
Lucretius wastes almost no time in attacking earlier philosophers like Anaxagoras and Heraclitus. Anaxagoras believed that everything started as some kind of seed. Heraclitus saw fire as the quintessential substance. Even though Lucretius often refers to his atoms as seeds, and his theory on atoms is not all that essentially different from Anaxagoras, he still manages to find fault with him. I found the thought amusing that if Lucretius had seen his supposedly indivisible atoms divided and a fiery inferno ensue, he might be left quite dumbfounded. Undeniably, Heraclitus saw something just as basic in fire as Lucretius saw in atoms. Neither were wholly wrong in their theories—however rudimentary those theories might have been. One thing that Anaxagoras and Heraclitus had in their respective systems that Lucretius certainly didn't, was a mind behind everything. Lucretius ignores this aspect of their philosophy. For Lucretius, the cosmos is mindless. Heraclitus believed in a transcendent Logos; Anaxagoras believed in a transcendent Nous. I, for one, prefer a philosophy that is rational deductively and inductively—from top to bottom and from bottom to top. Beyond Anaxagoras' seeds there is mind; beyond Heraclitus' fire there is reason. Beyond Lucretius' atoms there is only mindless void. His void is as impenetrable to mind as his atoms are supposedly to division. Certainly the latter was proven wrong, undoubtedly the other is wrong as well—regardless if there are self-deluded people still around that deny a basic rationality to the cosmos.
While Lucretius may use words like “nature” in a sense that indicates personification, one must acknowledge that this is about the only example of poetic language one can really find in Lucretius. Lucretius' nature is mindless and thus cannot be a personification of anything really. It is simply a fanciful name for atoms and void. When one can constantly keep this in mind when reading through this work, one is struck by how well Lucretius can ramble about a nature that is essentially pointless. Maybe materialists have a gift I lack, i.e. deluding themselves into a meaning despite essential meaninglessness. I suppose cognitive dissonance is really not my strong suit.
To sum up, I found this about as interesting as Sextus Empiricus' Outlines—that is, not very. Both are philosophically impotent as far as I'm concerned. Epicureanism/Atomism was often attacked by other philosophers and it is hardly surprising that there are few examples to be found from this school that gained any widespread popularity. Indeed, few such works survive. It probably is a miracle that this work did. It's a notable example of the Epicurean philosophy, but reading what remains of Epicurus is probably better. Lucretius pretty much just parrots Epicurus. I personally found Epicurus' philosophical remains more interesting.
As philosophy I find this lackluster, and as poetry, it fails to inspire. I also can't say much for the translation. I really hope that the Latin was better than the English here. I would prefer to fault the translator first, but even the ideas behind the prosaic English words are uninspiring. If one is a student of ancient philosophy, I suppose this is essential reading, but I have to posit many works as being superior and are far more worthy of being read first.
I will admit I am probably a biased. The two schools of ancient Hellenistic philosophy that always left me bemused (only because I couldn't understand the attention they gained) is Epicureanism and Pyrrhonism. I have always held that philosophy was originally geared toward those who were enamored with a sense of the transcendent; people who investigated nature, or the cosmos, with a profound sense of wonder and a sense that there is meaning to be had for those who search for it. People like this find it self-evident that the universe is rational and intelligible because there is a mind behind it. Materialism and severe skepticism nullifies any of the former; there is no meaning to be gleaned because there is no inherent meaning. The Atomists were probably the first materialists of note. Leucippus and Democritus are credited as the founders of this philosophical school. Their works no longer survive; what is left is fragments and quotations in other writers. Most of Epicurus' materialistic philosophy was borrowed directly from the Atomists.
Even though Epicurus and the Atomists have been adopted by current “philosophical” atheists as their philosophical forbears, the truth is, they were really more akin to deists, not atheists. While both deism and atheism are practically atheistic, deism is at least theoretically theistic. What I mean by this is that both may claim that God (or the gods) do not intervene in life, and are thus of no religious consequence, deists at least acknowledge that some mind must be behind the order inherent in the cosmos; atheists, of course, deny any such thing. Like Epicurus and the Atomists, Lucretius acknowledges the gods in theory, but denies any role to a divine mind in the order of the cosmos. For him, as for Epicurus, atoms and void are the essential substantia of the cosmos. Everything is formed from the chaotic flux of atoms. There is no rhyme or reason behind it. Indeed, Lucretius denies a mind to anything that does not have a body. For Lucretius, everything is atoms. Some atoms might be finer particles and some might be more a bit more substantial, but all are atoms. Even fire is made up of these atoms. While admittedly we have to acknowledge the word “atom” itself and the overall theory behind it as being influential on how we currently view the physics of matter, it would be a mistake to think that the ancient atomistic thinkers viewed atoms the same way we do. Like other philosophical schools, the Atomists apparently did believe that atoms had a definite size and shape. These various types of atoms could combine and form different kinds of substances—even whole worlds, potentially. The combination is ad hoc; it is random and not indicative of intention. Materialists haven't progressed that much since the days of the Atomists; Atheistic materialists and their randomly selective universe are not all that different from Lucretius. Here's a quote from Lucretius:
“In those days also the telluric world strove to beget monsters that upsprung with their astounding visages and limbs...some widowed of the hands, dumb horrors too, without a mouth, or blind ones of no eye... And others prodigies and monsters earth was then begetting of this sort – in vain, since nature banned in horror their increase and powerless were they to reach unto maturity...”
The Darwinian idea of natural random selection is not that different than that put forth above. In theory, natural selection must have formed many failed organisms. Environment is key for materialistic Darwinians, just as it was for Epicureans like Lucretius. If the formation of life is entirely random, there would of course be a plethora of animals like Lucretius mentioned above, i.e. without hands, eyes, mouth, etc. None of these could survive for long because of these deficiencies. Of course, the fossil record doesn't help this kind of theory at all. There are almost no examples of these kinds of monstrosities—even though there should be more of these than successful animals in theory. We only have examples of animals that really were successful for large stretches of time. Barring cataclysm, almost all animals in the fossil record were successful. Lucretius was no less naive than current materialist Darwinians. Chaos never breeds order; even if one were to postulate vast stretches of time, the view is still absurd. No gambler's fallacy helps the scenario seem anymore rational. It wasn't rational a millennia ago and is no more rational now.
Lucretius more or less presents his book as a great philosophical index of answers for all natural questions; and a means of diminishing religious fears. Many of these natural theories were later proven quite wrong, but some were stock theories of the time (e.g. earthquakes were caused by wind trapped in subterranean caverns). Reading all of Lucretius' theories made this book incredibly tedious and tiresome. I suppose the novelty is lost on me given that I know these theories are wrong. At the time, for those who needed to be comforted that the gods weren't behind every lightning bolt, these theories might have served their purpose. I feel like poetry that is literally false, but figuratively true, is better than poetry that attempts to be literally true and never attempts a figurative meaning. If that literalistic poetry is found to be literally false, there certainly isn't any other meaning that can be gleaned. It fails at its intent and becomes a passé guide to antiquated thought. I can't see much utility beyond this.
Lucretius wastes almost no time in attacking earlier philosophers like Anaxagoras and Heraclitus. Anaxagoras believed that everything started as some kind of seed. Heraclitus saw fire as the quintessential substance. Even though Lucretius often refers to his atoms as seeds, and his theory on atoms is not all that essentially different from Anaxagoras, he still manages to find fault with him. I found the thought amusing that if Lucretius had seen his supposedly indivisible atoms divided and a fiery inferno ensue, he might be left quite dumbfounded. Undeniably, Heraclitus saw something just as basic in fire as Lucretius saw in atoms. Neither were wholly wrong in their theories—however rudimentary those theories might have been. One thing that Anaxagoras and Heraclitus had in their respective systems that Lucretius certainly didn't, was a mind behind everything. Lucretius ignores this aspect of their philosophy. For Lucretius, the cosmos is mindless. Heraclitus believed in a transcendent Logos; Anaxagoras believed in a transcendent Nous. I, for one, prefer a philosophy that is rational deductively and inductively—from top to bottom and from bottom to top. Beyond Anaxagoras' seeds there is mind; beyond Heraclitus' fire there is reason. Beyond Lucretius' atoms there is only mindless void. His void is as impenetrable to mind as his atoms are supposedly to division. Certainly the latter was proven wrong, undoubtedly the other is wrong as well—regardless if there are self-deluded people still around that deny a basic rationality to the cosmos.
While Lucretius may use words like “nature” in a sense that indicates personification, one must acknowledge that this is about the only example of poetic language one can really find in Lucretius. Lucretius' nature is mindless and thus cannot be a personification of anything really. It is simply a fanciful name for atoms and void. When one can constantly keep this in mind when reading through this work, one is struck by how well Lucretius can ramble about a nature that is essentially pointless. Maybe materialists have a gift I lack, i.e. deluding themselves into a meaning despite essential meaninglessness. I suppose cognitive dissonance is really not my strong suit.
To sum up, I found this about as interesting as Sextus Empiricus' Outlines—that is, not very. Both are philosophically impotent as far as I'm concerned. Epicureanism/Atomism was often attacked by other philosophers and it is hardly surprising that there are few examples to be found from this school that gained any widespread popularity. Indeed, few such works survive. It probably is a miracle that this work did. It's a notable example of the Epicurean philosophy, but reading what remains of Epicurus is probably better. Lucretius pretty much just parrots Epicurus. I personally found Epicurus' philosophical remains more interesting.
As philosophy I find this lackluster, and as poetry, it fails to inspire. I also can't say much for the translation. I really hope that the Latin was better than the English here. I would prefer to fault the translator first, but even the ideas behind the prosaic English words are uninspiring. If one is a student of ancient philosophy, I suppose this is essential reading, but I have to posit many works as being superior and are far more worthy of being read first.
January 26, 2023
It's not easy to read Lucretius's The Nature of Things: Not only does he attempt to summarize the philosophy of Epicurus and the science knowledge of his day (40-55 BC), but he did in in rhymed couplets, which in this edition are translated as heptameter ("fourteeners").
Not to worry: If you press on, you will get the gist of what Lucretius writes, and you will encounter some great passages such as this one on the role of the gods in life:
Not to worry: If you press on, you will get the gist of what Lucretius writes, and you will encounter some great passages such as this one on the role of the gods in life:
If you possess a firm grasp of these tenets, you will seeIt is a far different world than hours. Instead of the Periodical Table of the Elements, Lucretius had earth, wind, air, and fire. You can see him bending in obscure directions to explain such phenomena as magnetism, thunder, earthquakes, and plagues. Yet one could not help but admire the ingenuity of an astute observer who had no notion of Newtonian Physics, let alone Quantum Physics, yet tried his hardest to explain what he saw.
That Nature, rid of harsh taskmasters, all at once is free,
And everything she does, does on her own, so that gods play
No part. For by the holy hearts of gods, who while away
Their tranquil immortality in peace!—who can hold sway
Over the measureless universe? Who is there who can keep
Hold of the reins that curb the power of the fathomless deep?
Who can juggle all the heavens? And with celestial flame
Warm worlds to fruitfulness? And be all places at the same
Time for all eternity, to cast a shadow under
Dark banks of clouds, or quake a clear sky with the clap of thunder?
What god would send down lightning to rend his own shrines asunder?
Or withdraw to rage in desert wastes, and there let those bolts fly
That often slay the innocent and pass the guilty by?
May 30, 2016
Perhaps I should say 3.5 stars. 3 because it could be difficult to read at times, taking away from the enjoyment; and it could be rather repetitive and contradictory at times. 4 stars for the amazing content of Lucretius' arguments about the phenomena of the natural world written in 50BCE!!!! Quite an eye-opener. Had no idea that the notion of nature being made up of particles or atoms was even a thought in ancient times. This work is where the famous "swerve theory" is derived.
Lucretius was a disciple of Epicurus, and was offering arguments against the interference of the Gods in human lives and natural phenomena, instead positing "scientific" explanations based on observations and extrapolation. Some of it quite modern in conclusion, even if how he got there wasn't right. And all in the form of a very long poem! Quite a feat.
Lucretius was a disciple of Epicurus, and was offering arguments against the interference of the Gods in human lives and natural phenomena, instead positing "scientific" explanations based on observations and extrapolation. Some of it quite modern in conclusion, even if how he got there wasn't right. And all in the form of a very long poem! Quite a feat.
February 29, 2024
Ми живемо в світі де все ніби і відомо і, водночас, ніхто по-справжньому нічого не знає без Гугла. Буденні речі нас перестають цікавити ще в ранньому дитинстві, через оце відчуття вже накоплених відповідей. Але ж світ не завжди був таким? Ці знання і досвід збиралися крапля за краплею. Навіть в часи коли не існувало ні інструментів для спостереження, ні розуміння що ці інструменти взагалі можливі. Людина стикалася зі світом напряму, сам на сам, і у неї не було варіантів запитати у Інтернету чому довга паралельна колонада ніби сходиться в одну точку коли дивишся в інший її кінець.
Твір Лукреція хоча і потребує значної концентрації в читанні, а іноді, навіть, читання вголос щоб краще сприймалось, але це унікальна можливість сприйняти світ очима людини (розумної і спостережливої) яка жила більше 2000 років н��зад. Хоча варто відразу відзначити, що автор був геть не пересічним громадянином Риму, а скоріше навпаки - певного роду бунтівником проти тогочасного усталеного погляду на світ.
Хоча він і починає, як годиться з присвяти Богам, але вже скоро крізь сторінки проступає портрет сильного агностика, а може і атеїста, який набрався сміливості кинути виклик "забобонам" які лише заважають людям жити. Його позиція акуратна: Боги, звісно, є! Але їм плювати на долі людей і вони в них не мішаються. Після смерті людина зникає, зникає її душа - ніякого бродіння Аїдом, ніяких спогадів про земне життя і свою сутність - пустота і небуття. Думка хоча і не нова, але дуже смілива і...обнадійлива. Справді, Лукрецій подає свої погляди (які є лише розвитком поглядів Епікура - якого він всю книгу возвеличує і восхваляє) як можливість для суспільств позбутися страху смерті і забобонного страху перед неіснуючими сутностями:
"З берега - моря великого гнів споглядати приємно,
Як у великій біді серед хвиль там хтось опинився.
Ні, насолоду приносить не те, що змагання когось хвиля, -
Солодко бачити, скільки страждань обігнав ти від себе"
В основу свого дослідження він покладає атомарну (!) теорію, звісно він не вживає термін атоми, як не вживав його Епікур - оригінальний автор ідеї, але опис "тілець матері" з яких все складається дуже близький до примітивного опису атомів який може дати пересічний сучасник. І це неймовірно цікаво спостерігати як людина УМОГЛЯДНО доводить вам що світ складається з атомів і пояснює цим такі явища як щільність, рух, силу тяжіння, вогонь....та що завгодно. Звісно, звісно він дає маху в багатьох речах, бо не зміг додуматись до існування хвилевої теорії. Так само Лукрецій вважав що Земля є диском. Але це неймовірний і унікальний досвід - подив��тися на світ його очима, очима давнього римлянина який дивився на світ зацікавлено і намагався дати відповідь на запитання: ЩО ЦЕ ВСЕ В БІСА ТАКЕ І ЯК ВОНО ПРАЦЮЄ?
Твір Лукреція хоча і потребує значної концентрації в читанні, а іноді, навіть, читання вголос щоб краще сприймалось, але це унікальна можливість сприйняти світ очима людини (розумної і спостережливої) яка жила більше 2000 років н��зад. Хоча варто відразу відзначити, що автор був геть не пересічним громадянином Риму, а скоріше навпаки - певного роду бунтівником проти тогочасного усталеного погляду на світ.
Хоча він і починає, як годиться з присвяти Богам, але вже скоро крізь сторінки проступає портрет сильного агностика, а може і атеїста, який набрався сміливості кинути виклик "забобонам" які лише заважають людям жити. Його позиція акуратна: Боги, звісно, є! Але їм плювати на долі людей і вони в них не мішаються. Після смерті людина зникає, зникає її душа - ніякого бродіння Аїдом, ніяких спогадів про земне життя і свою сутність - пустота і небуття. Думка хоча і не нова, але дуже смілива і...обнадійлива. Справді, Лукрецій подає свої погляди (які є лише розвитком поглядів Епікура - якого він всю книгу возвеличує і восхваляє) як можливість для суспільств позбутися страху смерті і забобонного страху перед неіснуючими сутностями:
"З берега - моря великого гнів споглядати приємно,
Як у великій біді серед хвиль там хтось опинився.
Ні, насолоду приносить не те, що змагання когось хвиля, -
Солодко бачити, скільки страждань обігнав ти від себе"
В основу свого дослідження він покладає атомарну (!) теорію, звісно він не вживає термін атоми, як не вживав його Епікур - оригінальний автор ідеї, але опис "тілець матері" з яких все складається дуже близький до примітивного опису атомів який може дати пересічний сучасник. І це неймовірно цікаво спостерігати як людина УМОГЛЯДНО доводить вам що світ складається з атомів і пояснює цим такі явища як щільність, рух, силу тяжіння, вогонь....та що завгодно. Звісно, звісно він дає маху в багатьох речах, бо не зміг додуматись до існування хвилевої теорії. Так само Лукрецій вважав що Земля є диском. Але це неймовірний і унікальний досвід - подив��тися на світ його очима, очима давнього римлянина який дивився на світ зацікавлено і намагався дати відповідь на запитання: ЩО ЦЕ ВСЕ В БІСА ТАКЕ І ЯК ВОНО ПРАЦЮЄ?
July 18, 2015
Philosophy is Supposed to be Fun!
Cicero, because of his personal aversion to the Epicurean philosophy, didn't quite do it justice in his book The Nature of the Gods, which introduced the Greek philosophical schools to the Romans (He all but made the Epicurean the laughing-stock of all the other philosophers). However, he also prepared and edited the transcript of this book by Lucretius, arguably the best exposition of Epicureanism, as a counterpoint.
Lucretius made a strong case for Epicureanism with epic poetry and systematic reasoning. His thoughts and presentation with creative use of analogies are eminently clear and logical to a modern reader, in spite of his relative lack of scientific knowledge. In this book, he sought to dispel the notion of gods governing the universe, and demonstrate the natural causes of all things based on a few premises, from thunderbolts to earthquakes, from the nature of disease to the nature of the mind, from the beginning of the earth to the development of society.
Highly recommended for its epic scope, clarity of thought, beauty of narrative, richness of humor and compassion.
Cicero, because of his personal aversion to the Epicurean philosophy, didn't quite do it justice in his book The Nature of the Gods, which introduced the Greek philosophical schools to the Romans (He all but made the Epicurean the laughing-stock of all the other philosophers). However, he also prepared and edited the transcript of this book by Lucretius, arguably the best exposition of Epicureanism, as a counterpoint.
Lucretius made a strong case for Epicureanism with epic poetry and systematic reasoning. His thoughts and presentation with creative use of analogies are eminently clear and logical to a modern reader, in spite of his relative lack of scientific knowledge. In this book, he sought to dispel the notion of gods governing the universe, and demonstrate the natural causes of all things based on a few premises, from thunderbolts to earthquakes, from the nature of disease to the nature of the mind, from the beginning of the earth to the development of society.
Highly recommended for its epic scope, clarity of thought, beauty of narrative, richness of humor and compassion.
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