References
“De Rerum Natura.” Wikipedia, 10 Apr. 2024. Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=De_rerum_natura&oldid=1218250609.
De rerum natura was a poem written by the Roman intellectual Lucretius in the first century that sought to explain the philosophy of epicurus. The poem was divided into six untitled books.
The subjects of the poem include:
- atomism
- mind and soul
- sensation and thought
- world’s development
- celestial and terrestrial phenomena
The universe described by the poem is one governed by chance and not divine intervention.
the unhappiness and degradation of humans arose largely from the dread which they had of the power of the deities and terror of their wrath.
Epicurus thus made it his mission to remove these fears and thus establish tranquility in the minds of his readers.
Epicurus invoked the atomism of Democritus to demonstrate that the material universe was formed not by a Supreme Being but by the mixing of elemental particles which had existed from all eternity, governed by certain simple laws.
He argued that the deities (whose existence he did not deny) lived forever in the enjoyment of absolute peace—strangers to all the passions, desires and fears, which affect humans—and are totally indifferent to the world and its inhabitants, unmoved alike by their virtues and their crimes. This meant that humans had nothing to fear from them.
Lucretius’s task was clearly to state and fully develop these views in an attractive form. His work was an attempt to show through poetry that everything in nature can be explained by natural laws, without the need for the intervention of divine beings.
Lucretius identifies the supernatural with the notion that the deities created our world or interfere with its operations in some way.
He argues against fear of such deities by demonstrating, through observations and arguments, that the operations of the world can be accounted for in terms of natural phenomena, which are the result of regular but purposeless motions and interactions of tiny atoms in empty space.
The first three books provide a fundamental account of being and nothingness, matter and space, the atoms and their movement, the infinity of the universe both as regards time and space, the regularity of reproduction, the nature of mind (animus, directing thought) and spirit (anima, sentience) as material bodily entities, and their mortality, since, according to Lucretius, they and their functions (consciousness, pain) end with the bodies that contain them and with which they are interwoven.
The last three books give an atomic and materialist explanation of phenomena preoccupying human reflection
Lucretius wrote this epic poem to “Memmius”, who may be Gaius Memmius, who in 58 BC was a praetor, a judicial official deciding controversies between citizens and the government.
According to Lucretius’s frequent statements in his poem, the main purpose of the work was to free Gaius Memmius’s mind of the supernatural and the fear of death—and to induct him into a state of ataraxia by expounding the philosophical system of Epicurus, whom Lucretius glorifies as the hero of his epic poem.
However, the purpose of the poem is subject to ongoing scholarly debate.
The German classicists Ivo Bruns and Samuel Brandt set forth an alternative theory that Lucretius did at first write the poem with Memmius in mind, but that his enthusiasm for his patron cooled over time.
while Lucretius extols the virtue of the Epicurean school of thought, Epicurus himself had advised his acolytes from penning poetry because he believed it to make that which was simple overly complicated.
Near the end of his first book, Lucretius defends his fusion of Epicureanism and poetry with a simile, arguing that the philosophy he espouses is like a medicine: life-saving but often unpleasant. Poetry, on the other hand, is like honey, in that it is “a sweetener that sugarcoats the bitter medicine of Epicurean philosophy and entices the audience to swallow it.”
The state of the poem as it currently exists suggests that it was released in an unfinished state.
Some have suggested that Lucretius died before being able to edit, finalize, and publish his work.
Metaphysics
Lack of divine intervention
numerous thinkers began to see Lucretius’s Epicureanism as a “threat synonymous with atheism.”
Lucretius does not deny the existence of deities; he simply argues that they did not create the universe, that they do not care about human affairs, and that they do not intervene in the world.
due to the ideas espoused in the poem, much of Lucretius’s work was seen by many as a direct challenge to theistic, Christian belief.
he historian Ada Palmer has labelled six ideas in Lucretius’s thought (viz. his assertion that the world was created from chaos, and his denials of Providence, divine participation, miracles, the efficacy of prayer, and an afterlife) as “proto-atheistic”.
many of his ideas were taken up by 19th-, 20th-, and 21st-century atheists.
Repudiation of immortality
the poem claims that the soul, like all things in existence, is made up of atoms, and because these atoms will one day drift apart, the human soul is not immortal.
death is simply annihilation, and that there is no afterlife.
He likens the physical body to a vessel that holds both the mind (mens) and spirit (anima). To prove that neither the mind nor spirit can survive independent of the body, Lucretius uses a simple analogy: when a vessel shatters, its contents spill everywhere; likewise, when the body dies, the mind and spirit dissipate. And as a simple ceasing-to-be, death can be neither good nor bad for this being, since a dead person—being completely devoid of sensation and thought—cannot miss being alive.
the eternal oblivion awaiting all humans after death is exactly the same as the infinite nothingness that preceded our birth. Since that nothingness (which he likens to a deep, peaceful sleep) caused us no pain or discomfort, we should not fear the same nothingness that will follow our own demise
Lucretius sees those who fear death as embracing the fallacious assumption that they will be present in some sense “to regret and bewail [their] own non-existence.”
Physics
Lucretius maintained that he could free humankind from fear of the deities by demonstrating that all things occur by natural causes without any intervention by the deities. Historians of science, however, have been critical of the limitations of his Epicurean approach to science, especially as it pertained to astronomical topics
Despite his advocacy of empiricism and his many correct conjectures about atomism and the nature of the physical world, Lucretius concludes his first book stressing the absurdity of the (by then well-established) spherical Earth theory, favoring instead a flat Earth cosmology.
His naturalistic explanations were meant to bolster the ethical and philosophical ideas of Epicureanism, not to reveal true explanations of the physical world.
The swerve
Lucretius attempts to allow for free will in his physicalistic universe by postulating an indeterministic tendency for atoms to veer randomly.
According to Lucretius, this unpredictable swerve occurs at no fixed place or time
This swerving provides the indeterminacy that Lucretius argues allows for the “free will which living things throughout the world have”
four dominant themes of the poem—universal causal explanation, leading to elimination of the threats the world seems to pose, a vindication of free will, and disproof of the soul’s survival after death.
Because Lucretius was critical of religion and the claim of an immortal soul, his poem was disparaged by most early Church Fathers.
Lucretius has also had a marked influence upon modern philosophy, as perhaps the most complete expositor of Epicurean thought.
Check: The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by S. Greenblatt