The bottom line
When one understands the world, namely when one has digested Lucretius’s poem, the beauty of the natural world is accessible and fear of death is obliterated.
What does Lucretius say?
Book I: At the outset Epicurus is hailed as the slayer of religion, the cause of much suffering. In its place, in order to end suffering, Lucretius provides explanations based on the atomic model. Everything comes together as atoms, and everything dissolves into atoms. He had no Latin word for atom, and resorted to “rerum primordia”, “primordial things”, and similes, like “seeds”.
Right at the beginning Lucretius counters the first natural objection in the reader: How can I believe in atoms I don’t see? He starts with what is sensory: How can the invisible wind have effects? And odors, what are they, if not atoms? And the ring on the finger, how does it wear if not by shedding atoms? “Nothing can touch or be touched, except matter.” He is ingenious in proving the characteristics of the atoms: They are interminable and indivisible units.
Are there only atoms? No: There is one more thing, and it is just as important – “By void I mean vacant and empty space”. It has to be there, because voices penetrate the walls, some things are lighter, and without void nothing would be able to move. Furthermore, movement is what creates time, because no one would sense time separate from the movement of things. Lucretius, as Aristotle but unlike Newton, is economic in his theoretical view, not positing time, but subordinating it to events. The massive atoms are eternal. They combine, and recombine: “So changed that it forsakes former nature / Becomes death of what it was before.” Without the movement of atoms, there is no time. The atom-void pair is the key to everything that follows.
Closely related is our ability to know: “What can there be more certain than our senses / To mark true things and false?” He uses his senses to refute the idea that fire or any other one substance is the basis for everything. The Pre-Socratics are in for a whipping, foremost Heraclitus for his
monism based on fire, then Empedocles for positing several principles
and base matters, and Anaxagoras for believing things can be
interminably divisible. Lucretius instead argues for the multiplicity of the atoms building up everything. Combining similar things one gets differences, like when using the alphabet:
Look – in my lines here you can see the letters / Common to many of the words, but you know / perfectly well that resonance and meaning, / Sense, sound, are changed by changing the arrangement. / How much more true of atoms than of letters!
Lucretius’s reasoning is consequential. It provides explanations for the phenomena and displays the errors in alternative explanations. The universe, for instance, can’t be limited in any direction: How could we see there but not beyond? And if we’d encounter the limit and threw a spear, where would it go? Indeed, there can’t be anything beyond the universe, so there is no limit to it. Wherever you stand, it must be unlimited in all directions; hence quite logically, there can neither be a middle point.
In Book II the modern reader however finds him- or herself drawn into some explanations that challenge our school education.
It starts with the sweetness of beholding someone else in trouble at sea, a flamboyant way to introduce our two naturally given propensities: We avoid pain, and, when our souls are free from fear, we immerse ourselves in the beauty provided by the senses. The latter brings us back to the movement of the atoms in a striking image: Beholding tiny particles jumping around in the sunlight rays enables us to sense the atomic dance. (This is a premonition of the discovery of Brownian motion, random fluctuations in pollen seen in a microscope, later investigated by Einstein on the molecular level. The wikipedia article actually refers to Lucretius’s “remarkable description of Brownian motion of dust particles in verses 113–140 of Book II”.) No less remarkably, Lucretius shortly arrives at the counterintuitive conclusion that atoms must move at the same speed, regardless of weight, sixteen centuries before Galileo proved Aristotle wrong on the same topic. Yet, breaking the scientific home run, stating that atoms move faster than light, Einstein tags out Lucretius coming in for the third base.
Neither will the statement that atoms mostly move downwards convince us. Yet, another striking idea is introduced against this backdrop: Free will through atomic swerve. It is based on reasoning: The weight of the atoms paired with the directional changes of them bumping into each other is not enough to explain the phenomena, foremost the fact that our will has been torn from destiny.
The book is clear about the atoms: The number of shapes must be limited, otherwise there would be some atoms of unlimited size; therefore the number of atoms that have the same shape is unlimited, because the number of shapes is limited. And, most importantly, atoms only have primary qualities – size, shape, weight – and no secondary – color, taste, smell, heat or cold.
The departure of Book III points in two directions: On the one hand, “What a man really is, the time to learn / Comes when he stands in danger or in doubt”; on the other hand the fear of death inflames Man’s avarice, losing honor, friendship and loyalty. (This triad is named in the Swedish translation, but hard to catch in the English.) Fear of death is the root of all evil in Man, and the only way out is “insight into nature, and a scheme / Of systematic contemplation.” With insight, death comes to mean nothing to us.
Lucretius moves to a discussion of the soul, the body, and their relation. A few concepts are clarified by the notes in my translation: What in English is “intelligence and spirit”, “mind and soul” (in Swedish “sinnet och själen”), in latin is animus, the seat of reason, passions, and the will, and anima, which has its atoms all throughout the body and thus is closer connected to the senses. This is compounded by the use of anima also for both; Lucretius is wrestling with a series of Greek concepts, especially from Epicurus: psyché (≈soul) split into to logikón (reason), and to álogon (the unreasonable part), and in older Greek philosophy nous (≈reason). He boxes in the question of the soul by many sophisticated arguments, arguments for its mortality, for the soul being made up of atoms, for the logical pairing of sorrow and pain in the mind and body, and for the co-experience of body and mind. The key point is that the soul is held together by the body. The soul has a birthday and it dies too; what is dissolved is destroyed. There is consolation in this: Death is nothing to us precisely because our soul is deadly too; what comes before, it does not know, nor what comes after; death is the limit. One can as well dust off Epicurus own version of the same consideration:
Death is nothing to us. When we exist, death is not; and when death exists, we are not. All sensation and consciousness ends with death and therefore in death there is neither pleasure nor pain. The fear of death arises from the belief that in death, there is awareness.
Furthermore, the illustrious Epicurus died, as did Homer and Democritus, so “Who are you, forsooth, / To hesitate, resent, protest your death?” After this attack on the small minded reader he adds an almost zen-like contemplation for consolation:
But life, prolonged, / Subtracts not even one second from the term / Of death’s continuance. [...] Suppose / You could contrive to live for centuries, / As many as you will. Death, even so, / Will still be waiting for you;
Book IV first deals with sensation and thought. Foremost focusing vision he safeguards the truthfulness of sensation, and displaces the problem to the mind. What he observes about sleep and dreams is truly amazing in several regards, foreshadowing Freud: The picture of a kentaur is combined from the closeness of the picture of horse and man. In sleep, our reason is inactive, our limbs lose their power to move, our mind does not find strange things strange, things that we have spent a lot of time pondering or recently encountered; these images join and move at the greatest speed; desires insist, from becoming a king to being at a river when one is thirsty. Even the pollution of the young soiling the bed sheet is named.
Dreams introduce the theme of erotic desire and more generally, the problem of love. Venus is akin to madness and
an appetite for pain [...] / There’s hope, always, that the fire may die / Extinguished by the body which aroused / Its ardor in the first place. What could be / more contrary to nature? Nothing else / Inflames us, with desire / Of more and more and more. [...] Venus plays tricks on lovers with her game / Of images which never satisfy.
Not only death should be handled by insightful reason, but also love, by clear injunctions: Blinded by love, Man gives the beloved qualities he or she does not have! She does the same things as the worst of her sex, and you know it! There are also others! You have lived without her so far without problem!
Lucretius, unsurprisingly because the theme is really the harmony and the peace of mind, strikes a blow for the plain woman:
The little woman does not have to be / A raving beauty; she can win your love, / Without the darts of Cupids or Venuses, / Simply by being decent, neat and clean, / A pleasant person to be living with. / That’s about all it takes, and love depends, / On habit quite as much as the wild ways / Of passion. / Gently does it, as the rain / In time wears through the very hardest stone.
Is On the Nature of Things compelling?
Yes. Lucretius observing the phenomena of the world resorts to two simple concepts given by tradition for explanation: atoms and void. Neither can be seen; both need justification. It is astonishing how much headway he makes with these two concepts into the phenomena by consistent reasoning. It is a Roman Enlightenment intentionally yielding a disenchanted world.
No. Fear of death still lurks behind; the mind is not satisfied with good reasons not to fear, because its very own reasoning will stop, as will its pleasures through the senses. As for pleasure, the plain woman is a more reasonable match, but passion will either have its way or a price will be paid if held at bay, neither of which will be conducive of a peaceful mind.
What of it?
What is remarkable is the movement from Nature, the natural order, the material basis, into the human order, into a moral world where the best way of life is built on the natural order. Lucretius succeeds where modern science fails.
No comments:
Post a Comment