SOME
OBSERVATION ON LUCRETIUS
[The following lecture has been prepared by Ian
Johnston, Vancouver Island University. It is in the public domain,
released January 2010]
[Quotations from On the Nature of
Things are taken from the translation available here: Lucretius]
PRELIMINARY
REMARKS
Thomas Carlyle had firm opinions about
modern translations of works from the classical past: “We want what the
ancients thought and said, and none of your silly poetry” (quoted in the Preface
to W. C. Green’s translation of the Iliad), a remark which comes to
mind when one surveys some of the recent English translations of Lucretius,
where (as with Homer) one finds a rich selection of competing versions in
poetry and prose. I doubt if there has ever been a time when so many different
English translations of On the Nature of Things have been so
readily available to the reader. Thus, in the spirit of someone who has to
select a single text for a class, I find myself speculating on a question of
some importance in such a situation: How should one assess the relative merits
of prose and poetry translations of this book for student readers, both in
general terms and in particular cases?
Lucretius’ poem, of course, belongs to
a genre most English readers are not very familiar with, a long poetical work
on a “philosophical” or “scientific” subject (the reason for the quotation
marks will soon be apparent). We do have such things in our traditions—Zoonomia by Erasmus Darwin (written in
heroic couplets) springs to mind as the best example—but for the most part our
philosophical and scientific works have been written in prose (to say nothing
of the fact that poems like Darwin’s are hardly read by anyone nowadays, let
alone by students). So the decision of many translators to render Lucretius in
English prose appears sensible enough on the surface: they are establishing
contact with the tradition most familiar to the reader. Who has any desire to
read about science or philosophy in verse? In the spirit of Carlyle, we might
say that in such a treatise what matters are the ideas, and the versification
simply gets in the way.
What objections could one make to such
a stance? Well, the first objection might be that Lucretius constantly reminds
us that he is writing a poem, is very insistent that the poetic form is an
important part of his purpose, and is evidently very proud of the result (even
if he did not fully revise it and prepare it for the reading public). True, he
does encourage us to separate form and content (à la Carlyle) with that image
of honey smeared around the cup containing bitter medicine, a section which we
might interpret as suggesting that for Lucretius the poetic form is merely a
sweet decoration covering the real content. Still, it might be worth remembering
that the issue of the suitability of poetry for “philosophical” works was alive
and well in ancient times and that in selecting to write poetry Lucretius is
going against the traditional suspicions of poetry in Plato and, more
importantly, in Epicurus (as Emily Gowers reminds
us). So perhaps we could be losing more than a tasty but irrelevant treat by
completely ignoring and contradicting the passages where he celebrates the poetry
he is “weaving” (and, of course, reading about such lyric ambitions in an
English prose translation strikes one as rather odd).
Another possible objection is that On
the Nature of Things is a culturally important poem, a vital development
in the history of Latin verse, the key link between Ennius,
the father of Latin poetry, and Virgil (somewhat similar, perhaps, to the
importance of Marlowe’s dramatic poetry in the transformation of English blank
verse before Shakespeare). This point is naturally important to students of
Latin poetry and applies only to the poem in Latin. Hence, it is obviously not
relevant to any English translation, no matter how much
classical scholars may deplore the practice of prose translations (if they
deplore it), in the same way that some students of English literature scoff at
French prose translations of Shakespeare.
Objections to the tradition of
translating Lucretius into English prose become more substantial if one pauses
to explore an important question: What is this work trying to do? What is its
purpose? To reach a tentative answer to these questions, we need to take our
lead from Lucretius and follow a circuitous road.
It takes no profound reflection to realize
that the main purpose of this poem is not to present and defend in any rational
manner a comprehensive scientific argument about the nature of the world. To
demonstrate this point one does not have to assess the scientific content of
the poem (more about that later) but simply point out what is obvious enough
from the start: the main point of the work is not scientific but ethical.
Lucretius wants to encourage people to live more successfully, to experience
life without the constant anxieties brought about by their ignorance of natural
causes and by their excessive dependence on customary religious practices and
political ambitions. Knowledge of the materialistic nature of things, he
believes, is the most certain route to such an improved awareness and thus to a
better life. It addition it will motivate the reader to seek out appropriate
pleasures. In writing the poem he is undertaking a task of persuasion, trying
to convince the reader to follow the advice he is offering. And that persuasion
involves, not simply the prosaic reasonableness of the scientific views he is
advancing, but more importantly the rhetorically persuasive effects of poetry.
In other words, this poem is not simply a presentation of rational ideas; it is
about the emotional feelings associated with those ideas (nowhere is this more
evident than in the superb closing section of Book 3, where the speaker
addresses directly the reader’s fear of death).
Let me (at the risk of digressing)
expand on this last point, since it is key to what I
am going to be claiming about On the Nature of Things. Here is a
very famous example of the poetic expression of feeling for an idea:
And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. (Wordsworth, “Tintern
Abbey”)
Now, this idea would be easy enough to
render in prose, but the entire point of the lines would be lost, because what
matters here is not the idea but the speaker’s feelings about the idea. No one
would ever place Wordsworth’s poem on a required reading list for a philosophy
course, because the idea is commonplace. And yet no one would leave this poem
out of a course in English Romantic poetry because it is, quite simply, one of
the finest expressions of feeling about an idea ever written. And that feeling
emerges from the poetic form (the sentence structure, repetition, imagery,
rhythm, and so on), from the way those features of the
style help us grasp the confident and urgent intensity of the speaker’s
feelings. The passage is a fine and justly celebrated example of Wordsworth’s
amazing ability to provide in his best poetry insight into his feelings about nature,
something which transformed the understanding of countless people, not only
about nature but about themselves. And he achieved
this, not by rational persuasion but by his poetic power. One might make
similar observations about other famous poems of “ideas” (Pope’s Essay
on Man, for instance or, if we move outside English literature, the supreme
examples of Dante in the Divine Comedy and Aeschylus in
the Oresteia): their purpose is to
illuminate feelings about ideas, not rationally to argue for those ideas (in
fact, from a logical perspective, their poetic work often amounts to a rather
poor rational defence of anything).
Now, this gives us the basis for a more
substantial objection to prose renditions of Lucretius. If he is, indeed, seeking,
like Wordsworth, to convey feelings about a particular understanding of the
cosmos in order to persuade the reader to share those feelings, then abandoning
the poetic form in favour of prose would seem to work against that purpose,
since it means turning away from the literary form best suited to exploring
such emotions. This observation may carry a little more weight when we reflect
that the scientific content of Lucretius’ poem has had little to no effect on
the history of science (indeed it rarely merits consideration in accounts of
that history); whereas, what the poem reveals about an attitude towards life
(and science) has always had an enormous influence among those who read his
work in Latin—scientists and non-scientists alike.
At this point a couple of questions
inevitably arise. First, why cannot prose carry out the same rhetorical effect
as poetry? Why would a prose translation automatically deny this aspect of the
poem? The short answer is that such a loss is not inevitable, for prose is capable
of remarkably “poetic” effects, as anyone who has read the sermons of John
Donne or listened to those of Jeremiah Wright can attest. One could also point
out that Plato’s early Socratic dialogues, thanks largely to their dramatic
form and the characterization of Socrates, are justly famous as prose works
which communicate insight into the delights of the philosophical life and that
this aspect of these fictions is far more important to most readers than any
light they shed on complex philosophical issues. After all, those who meet
Socrates in these works retain a (usually affectionate) memory of the man long
after they have forgotten this or that detail of his argumentative conversations.
So, given these and many other examples, I would never establish some a
priori principle about what prose can or cannot achieve.
That said, however, it does seem from
the examples of prose translations of Lucretius in English which I have read
that prose generally fails to account satisfactorily for the aspect of the work
I have just mentioned. The best of them (the Hackett edition by Martin Ferguson
Smith), for all its merits as crisp, clear English, never comes close to the
sort of poetic quality needed—the evenness in the tone and cool clarity of the
diction and sentence structure keep things calm and steady in a way well suited
to a science essay or philosophical argument, but there is little sense of
emotional variety or intensity and the pace never seems to vary (try reading
aloud the famous opening to Book 2, for example). Smith certainly avoids the
dreary plod of, say, Cyril Bailey or H. A. J. Munro,
but still there’s little sense of Lucretius’ urgency or imaginative excitement
in Smith’s prose.
Part of this response may well stem
from the complex question of the reader’s expectations. People’s way of reading
poetry differs from the way they read prose (a potentially contentious point, I
admit, but my assertion is based on my own experience and my years of teaching
prose and poetry to students). And setting out to read what looks at first like
a scientific treatise in the form of a series of prose essays is inviting the
reader to treat Lucretius as if she were reading a scientific text (like Origin
of Species). And to that task the reader brings different habits and criteria
than she does to something that looks and reads like a long traditional poem.
In response to this assertion one might well ask the following: If
translations of Homer have worked well enough in prose, why cannot one say the
same about Lucretius? And haven’t you contradicted yourself with your remarks
about Plato’s early Socratic dialogues? Fair enough, I suppose. Prose editions
of Homer, however, also elicit different expectations and habits from readers
than do poetic ones. In a prose version, the epic poem becomes an epic novel
or, in many cases I prefer not to think about, a historical romance. However,
even given this shift, I would be prepared to argue that, all else being equal,
much less is lost in that transformation than in one which turns a great epic
poem into what reads like a prosaic argument (at least both prose and poetic
forms of Homer preserve the details of the story, the characters, and the
speeches, and the reader is still dealing with fiction).
There is, however, at least one
compelling argument in favour of a prose translation, an important point which
helps to account for the fact the Smith translation is still the first choice
of many teachers, and that is the questionable quality (to use the politest
term available) of many of those versions offered up as poetry. Carlyle’s
remarks, after all, may not spring from an insensitivity to poetry so much as
from a disgust with the failure of his contemporaries to provide acceptable poetic
translations of the classics, for their efforts were, by and large, fairly
wretched (at least in the case of Homer). Hence, one can make a good case that
having a clear and eminently readable prose version of Lucretius at least gives
us the content in a succinct and enjoyable manner, and that is preferable to
the loose, periphrastic, inert, and incompetent versification on display in
some of the recent attempts to render Lucretius in English verse. I would, for
example, select Smith’s or Ronald Latham’s efficient prose over Frank Copley’s
or Walter Englert’s laboured verses or A. E. Stalling’s often perky fourteeners
with their emphatic forced rhymes, or William Leonard’s hopelessly outdated and
euphemistic diction. Rolfe Humphries’ colloquialisms and odd word choices may
be relatively infrequent but their effect is catastrophic, and the tone of the
translation seems totally wrong. What one desiderates in a good deal of such
versification is any sense of emotional compression and intensity, together
with an awareness that there may be more to writing poetry than just leaving an
erratic blank space to the right of the page (as in, for example, David Slavitt’s lifeless lines or Anthony Esoslen’s
erratic, rhythmically halting verses, or the prosaic chat of C. H. Sisson laid
out to look like poetry). If Ronald Melville emerges as significantly better
than these poetic offerings, the reason may well be that—whatever criticism one
might have about this or that aspect of the style—he avoids the idiosyncrasies
of the others, so a sense of the power and seriousness of Lucretius can
manifest itself. In his text we are at least dealing with what we can recognize
and read as poetry, without constantly having to wonder about strange rhythms,
odd colloquialisms, and an inappropriate tone.
Of course, these judgments, like all
assessments of poetic quality, reflect very personal preferences. After all,
few literary matters are more disputatious than the issue of the quality of
poetic translations. But if the poetry in translation cannot catch and hold the
tone and intensity of Lucretius (what one reviewer has called the “relentless
urgency” of the poem), if, that is, it fails to deliver direct emotional
insight into the speaker’s feelings, especially at those moments when Lucretius’
poem really soars (as in the closing section of Book 3, for example), but
instead holds the reader back and forces her to wade through awkward, inflated,
and rhythmically inert or limping English, then give me good prose every time.
This is especially important when one is considering a text for students,
because bad poetry will probably reinforce any convictions they may already
have about how long poems are boring and irrelevant (especially those from
ancient times).
THE SCIENTIFIC
CONTENT OF LUCRETIUS
A response to a good deal of what I
have said so far will depend to a large extent on one’s opinion of the scientific
content of Lucretius’ poem. After all, if the work contains a treasure of
scientific information and argument, then one might reasonably defend a prose
version as a contribution important for its factual and rational content
(especially given the deficiencies in most poetic alternatives). In Carlyle’s
words, we would have the essential part—that is, the denoted content—and the
poetry is no great loss. If, however, the scientific content is not the main
(or the only) issue, then offering the work as a
scientific treatise in prose might seem somewhat limiting.
Now, it’s clear enough that Lucretius
is, in part, writing a polemic. He is, as it were, jumping into an energetic
intellectual battle, keen to announce his support for Epicurean science and his
admiration of Epicurus and to wage war against the opponents of those views,
especially the Stoics, the forces of organized religion, and the traditional values
of politically ambitious Romans. We have lost most of the other philosophical
works he is reacting to and borrowing from, although the diligent work of
countless scholars gives us many details of who said what and when. In the face
of that lack of full contextual documentation, we might well begin by looking
directly at the poem and asking ourselves if there is any scientific value in
his contribution (much of which is, as he admits, borrowed from others).
I say scientific value, because at this
point I wish to separate the literary and historical merits of his poem (its
qualities as a poem and its value as a historical document) from what it has to
offer of value as a scientific treatise. I also wish to stress that in trying
to sort out the value of Lucretius’ scientific contributions, we need to
remember that there is an important difference between a specific contribution
to a scientific understanding of the natural world and the effort to encourage
a particular approach to understanding nature (scientific or otherwise). The
first is a matter of reasoned argument and convincing evidence; the second is
an attempt at rhetorical persuasion (which may well involve rational argument
but is not limited to that).
On the face of it, Lucretius’ poem is
something of a disappointment as a scientific work. He is probably at his
scientific best when he is refuting an opponent (although he is not always fair
to his rival’s ideas, as in the case of Anaxagoras), when, that is, he raises
key objections to the theories of those materialists who wish to explain that
all matter is produced from one or more basic substances (fire, air, water,
earth, individually or in combination). The objections may be obvious enough,
but his treatment is effective and thorough. And his argument for the existence
of atoms, for their properties, and for the ways in which a limited number of
atomic shapes can produce the variety in materials we see all around us and
also account for variations in colour, smell, and other sensations is, although
not original to him, the strongest and most interesting scientific theory in
the poem. If we measure the value of the poem by its scientific ideas,
Lucretius’ presentation of materialistic atomism is an obvious highlight.
At this point one should acknowledge
what many people find particularly interesting in the poem: its apparent
anticipation of a number of modern ideas. These include the social contract,
non-visible sources of solar heat, the water cycle, the development of
language, and (perhaps) certain aspects of sexuality and heredity, among
others. However, in the poem these are, for the most part, not given a firm
theoretical basis—that is, they are not scientifically explained in any detail
by atomic theory or anything else (other than the velocity of falling particles
in empty space)—and, as often as not the differences between modern theories
and what Lucretius offers are more significant than the superficial
similarities, so that the very notion of an “anticipation” of modern theories
is pure Whiggery (for example, in what people see in
Book 5 as an early account of natural selection). And where we can recognize an
obvious influence, that may not amount to a scientific
contribution. For example, it may well be that that classic work of modern political
sociology, Rousseau’s Second Discourse (On the Origins of Inequality)
borrows heavily and directly from Lucretius, but the presentation in Lucretius
is no more scientifically convincing than it is in Rousseau.
Moreover, in many places, the materialistic
explanations Lucretius offers are, well, scientifically embarrassing (although
almost invariably interesting). He is particularly weak on what is often
considered the high point of ancient science, the regular motions in the cosmos
(a weakness Frank Copley attributes to the lack of interest in mathematics
endemic to Epicurean science). As a result, the treatment of solar and lunar
eclipses is hopeless (an inevitable result of the theory of perception which
convinces him that the sun and the moon are the same size as we observe them
from earth). In a similar manner, his treatment of the sun’s motion is very muddled
because he does not clearly differentiate between its daily orbit around the
earth and its annual movement around the ecliptic. He rejects the notion of
attraction to the centre (i.e., gravity) because he confuses the entire
universe (which has no centre) with celestial systems (in his terminology,
worlds) within that universe (which do have centres). What he has to say about
the celestial bodies seems to be derived, as Cyril Bailey observes, from the
general knowledge of his time (minus the mathematics). He relies upon various
winds or movements of air (air and wind are different substances in his view)
as the cause of any complex natural phenomenon that is difficult to explain,
everything from the motion of the sun and the stars to earthquakes, lightning,
volcanic eruptions, perception of distance, and magnetism. His most famous
doctrine, that of the unpredictable swerve of the atomic particles in their
linear motion (the clinamen), the source
of the atomic collisions which result in the initial material combinations
which create everything, saves us from the determinism of the Stoics and
guarantees free will in living creatures, but it has long been dismissed as
arrant speculation without scientific credibility. The idea is offered up
without evidence: in a nice piece of circular reasoning worthy of Descartes,
Lucretius introduces the swerve as the guarantor of free will and then uses the
existence of free will to demonstrate the validity of the swerve. The poem
relies heavily on observations of the natural world as evidence (an important
point we will consider later on), and is not interested in precise measurement
or experiment. The closest we get to the latter is (perhaps) the business with
the magnet repelling iron filings when a brass container is inserted between
the iron and the lodestone, a result which should not have happened, because,
as we now know and as Lucretius should (one assumes) have observed, the behaviour
of a magnet is not affected by the interposition of a non-magnetic substance between
iron and the source of the magnetism.
From the point of view of modern
science, one of the most telling deficiencies in Lucretius is his lack of interest
in universally binding theoretical explanations for natural phenomena (something
which may well be linked to his lack of interest in mathematics). Having
focused on a particular perception, he will then offer a list of alternative
often very ingenious theories (e.g., for the motion of the stars or the
appearance and disappearance of the sun each day). All those which might
conceivably happen somehow in a materialistic universe are acceptable, provided
they are not contradicted by our senses, and there is no use trying to sort out
one possible theory from another. He even expresses a certain
contempt for anyone who might want to do that. Lucretius concedes that in our
world there must be only one explanation, but given that there are countless other
worlds in the universe where other explanations may be valid, he sees little
point in trying to settle on just one of the alternatives as correct.
At this point one might well protest
that such criticisms are manifestly unfair. To measure Lucretius against the
methods and purposes of modern science is to make demands neither he nor any
other ancient thinker could be expected to meet. They did not have an agreed
upon method of enquiry and their reflections on nature had a purpose
fundamentally different from the modern preoccupation with gaining power over
nature. That is very true. But I am not trying to assess the merits of
Lucretius methods, merely to point out that his poem has serious problems if we
wish to see in it a valuable contribution to specific developments in the
methodology and achievements of science. There is, after all, a reason why, as
I have already mentioned, Lucretius, who was read by almost every well-educated
European for five centuries (at least) is almost always totally absent from
histories of science.
This last historical point perhaps
needs some elaboration. There is no doubt that, in directing people’s attention
to a thoroughgoing and secular materialism based on atoms, Lucretius’ poem
exerted a significant influence on those interested in natural philosophy, so
that, as Monte Johnson and Catherine Wilson state, “the Lucretian
conception of nature . . . was a major driving force in the Scientific
Revolution experienced in Western Europe beginning in the early seventeenth
century.” But that influence, important as it was in shifting attention away
from traditional ways of carrying out investigations of the natural world, did
not contribute directly to defining the purposes and methods of the new
science. Indeed, as Johnson and Wilson point out, the new scientific
developments in many respects contradicted the major purpose of Lucretius’
endorsement of ancient atomism.
Here I should also mention the spirited
defence of Lucretius’ scientific merits made recently by Michel Serres, in an extraordinary book which argues that, far
from being a justly forgotten footnote in the development of science,
Lucretius’ poem is, in fact, where it all begins: it is, simply put, the
beginning of modern physics (hence the title of his study of Lucretius, The
Birth of Physics). I do not have time here to explore Serres’
argument in detail, but, eloquent and interesting as it may be, his defence
strikes me as an extreme case of Whiggery, which
requires the insertion of a mathematical backbone carved out of Archimedes to
prop up the often flabby bodily structure of Epicurean science. Whatever the
merits of this procedure for an understanding of Archimedes or Epicurus, such
links are not present in Lucretius’ poem and suggesting possible connections
does little to mitigate the criticisms I pointed out above.
However, Serres’
book is a vitally important contribution to an understanding of Lucretius (and
I am very indebted to his arguments) because he quite correctly places most of
his emphasis on the single most important point about On the Nature of
Things: the poem is not primarily about this or that explanation of natural
phenomena, nor does it have much to offer by way of outlining a detailed method
of scientific enquiry (other than repeatedly emphasizing sense experience and
reason); it is instead, first and foremost, an eloquent plea for a certain way
of orienting oneself to nature and, beyond that, to one’s own life. And this
aspect of the poem has exerted an enormous and continuing impact on European
intellectual life, not only among natural scientists but among educated people
of every imaginable description, from Catholic priests to materialistic atheists,
from nuclear physicists to Romantic poets and democratic politicians.
Let me amplify this point a little
before moving on to consider just what that orientation involves. What I am
claiming about On the Nature of Things is that the merit of
the poem emerges from the eloquence of its observations and recommendations
rather than from the facts or explanations it offers. Just as Wordsworth’s
poetry fundamentally changed many people’s attitude to nature without offering
any particularly useful or detailed “theory” of nature, so Lucretius contributed
fundamentally to influencing attitudes about the natural world and human
conduct, without in the process giving us any remarkably new discoveries or
methods. In other words, On the Nature of Things is not a scientific
treatise (merely or primarily) but an amazing and influential poem, which
succeeds because of its poetic insight and power. To overlook that or brush it
aside in the interests of isolating its scientific content is to negate the
very reason the work has played such an important role in our historical
development and is still a wonderful read.
These observations about the scientific
value of Lucretius’ poem could also be applied to its philosophical value as
well. Hence, tributes to the philosophical content need to be
assessed carefully. George Santayana, for example, claims that Lucretius
offers us “one complete system of philosophy, materialism in natural science,
humanism in ethics. Such was the gist of all Greek philosophy before Socrates.
. . . Such is the gist also of what may be called the philosophy of the Renaissance,
the reassertion of science and liberty in the modern world. . . .” Given what I
have said above about the scientific contributions of Lucretius, my response to
such a claim will be obvious enough. I have no quarrel with that word “gist”
(the limitations it suggests are appropriate), but the notion that Lucretius
offers us a “complete system of philosophy” seems, to put it mildly, stretching
things considerably (there is, after all, an important difference between
applauding and paying tribute to such a system or to the “gist” of such a
system and actually offering us the philosophical details).
For Lucretius is about as important to
the history of philosophy as he is to the history of science. Yes, he is a justly celebrated proselytizer for a
certain way of looking at the world and of conducting oneself in it: in fact,
he is the most famous, eloquent, long-lasting, and influential literary
champion of Epicurean ideas and a crucial voice in the spread of classical
humanism. But one would hardly consider Lucretius worth looking at closely if
one’s main concern was to analyze the complex details of an attempt rationally
to justify the philosophical system he is endorsing.
LUCRETIUS’ VIEW OF NATURE
What, then, is Lucretius’ view of
nature? What lies at the heart of his impulse to teach us how to view the
natural world? And how does that impulse shape what he has to say? Here we come
to the heart of the matter, the “vision” which inspired him and which he offers
to us.
It is clear enough that Lucretius’
major purpose is, as I said before, ethical. He wants people to live happier,
more successful lives. His Epicurean sympathies naturally enough see the route
to such better lives in the relief of pain, especially pain of mental anxieties
fostered by the pursuit of unworthy and self-defeating aims (money, fame,
political power), by the fear of death, and by organized religion and its
doctrines. Along with release from pain, he includes the pursuit of pleasure,
but only those pleasures which do not promise to bring with them an increase of
pain (that is why random promiscuous sex is to be preferred to romantic entanglements
and why the pleasures of contemplation, so richly celebrated at the start of
Book 2, are the finest of all). Such avoidance of pain and enjoyment of
pleasure, especially in contemplation, are best achieved by understanding the
material basis of the world, thus acquiring knowledge which will provide a much
healthier perspective on what truly matters (particularly knowledge of our own
mortal physicality). Hence, his teaching does not involve the study of nature
for its own sake or as a means of spiritual discipline or as a method for increasing
our power over natural phenomena: its major purpose is utilitarian—it will make
our lives happier.
The most obvious and famous result of
this attitude is Lucretius’ extreme hostility to traditional religion—which, in
his view, is neither reasonable or natural and is the
source of endless anxiety and cruelty. And responses to his poem often begin
and end with that. Voltaire, as one might expect, enthusiastically approved the
most famous line in the poem attacking traditional religion: “That shows how
much/ religion can turn mankind to evil” (1.134), and the energy of that endorsement
is matched by any number of people who turned away from Lucretius in horror for
this irreligious stance. In many places, the materialistic explanations for
certain phenomena (particularly for the famous series of seventeen proofs of
the mortality of the soul in Book 3) are obviously designed to neutralize the
effect of organized religion’s most potent weapon: the fear of death and the
afterlife. Just as Thomas Hobbes (in Leviathan) realizes that to
convince people to accept his theory he has to demolish traditional ways of
interpreting scripture in order to ease fears of the life hereafter, so Lucretius
has to demolish the immortality of the soul, which is the basis for all sorts
of stories and practices, in order to ease similar fears deliberately fostered
by traditional belief.
Lucretius does, of course, believe in
the gods, but his vision of these entities does not admit that they have any
significant interaction with human beings other than providing them images of
their divine but material persons (by a process he promises to explain but
never does) so that human beings may engage in the only appropriate form of
worship, the contemplation of divine forms. He explicitly rejects the notion
that gods created the world (Why on earth would they interrupt their tranquil
existence to do that? And where would they get the idea?), as well as the
ever-popular view that the design of nature reflects benevolent purposes in the
divine powers that created it (If so, why are there so many obvious flaws in
nature?). It is interesting to observe how some later thinkers influenced by
Lucretius who wish to adopt his materialistic stance but who need to take the
sting out of any accusations of impiety simply make those gods (or God) the
source of natural laws (e.g., the Deists) or else, like Kant (in Universal
History of Nature), invoke Lucretius in order to distance themselves from
him by summoning the design argument to their assistance.
Lucretius’ vision of nature, however,
has other important targets. He wishes to counter skeptics who claim that there
is no certain knowledge of anything, let alone of nature, as well as the determinists,
for whom nature operates by permanently fixed universal laws of cause and
effect. The former group he dismisses easily (the self-referential paradox
reveals that they are standing on their heads), and in response to the latter
he offers a vision of a natural world which cannot be subjected to
deterministic rules. The result is totally fascinating, even if (or perhaps
because) it is so different from our mainstream scientific traditions. And when
we explore this aspect of the work, the poem takes on an extraordinary life of
its own as a vision of great imaginative power.
The first and most obvious point about
Lucretius’ view of nature is its extraordinary dynamism. Everything is always
moving all the time. Objects may be apparently at rest, but all their particles
are always in restless motion, matter is streaming to and from them all the
time, the air is full of particles in motion (sunlight, images, smells, noises,
and so on) and its composition is always changing, corporeal stuff enters and
leaves the cosmos continuously, below the earth all matter is constantly
shifting, and everywhere around us the battle between heat and water continues
without pause. The earth is constantly leaning over and
threatening to collapse (like a precarious, ill-constructed building), then
righting itself, and then moving once again, often with cataclysmic results.
No writing about nature is so dominated by verbs of motion, change, collision,
combat, creation, explosion, destruction, and dissolution. This vision is
reinforced by the way in which Lucretius spends so much time on phenomena
involving flowing liquids and constantly shifting atmospheric conditions, those
features of nature which most resist accurate prediction (to judge from
the time he spends on various subjects and the quality of his poetry as he
moves from one subject to another, he is far more interested in the behaviour
of clouds, winds, and lightning, for example, than he is in the regular motions
of the planets). Yes, he does acknowledge the repetitive patterns, like the
returning seasons and the monthly phases of the moon, but what really fires his
imagination are the sudden and unexpected phenomena, like earthquakes, volcanic
eruptions, thunderbolts, rainstorms, whirlwinds, torrential floods, and
disastrous diseases).
Allied to this dynamism is the
randomness of nature. At the heart of all natural processes is the random
swerve which cannot be reduced to some universal deterministic law. And, like
that swerve, nature often operates suddenly, unpredictably, and often with
enormous force. The overwhelming sense one gets is of an intense vitalism, whose effects we can acknowledge but cannot
contain, control, or entirely foresee. The vitalism
helps to produce an interesting ambiguity in the poem, since Lucretius moves
back and forth between a sense of earth as a caring and endlessly creative
mother and a sense of the world as an inanimate stage for the survival of the
fittest and for the enduring mechanical and often violent wars between the
forces of production and dissolution.
These qualities of Lucretius’ vision of
nature lie at the heart of Serres’ argument that in
this work we have the birth of modern physics, which, in response to the
inadequacies of classical physics, has embraced randomness and irrational
dynamism at the heart of matter. That claim, as I have mentioned, strikes me as
exaggerated, but there is no denying the characteristics of the poem which
prompt it. The vitalism is best symbolized early in
the poem by Venus, the source of the erotic energy that drives all activities
in nature. And Serres makes much of the opening
picture of Venus and Mars, in which the speaker of the poem is asking Venus to
control the natural aggression of her lover in order to bring peace to Romans.
Of course, this is a plea for political harmony at a time of growing unease,
but, Serres argues, it is also an important indication
of Lucretius’ overall purpose: Lucretius wants Venus (the symbol of his vision
of nature) to rein in Mars, the aggressive, warlike spirit at the heart of
other ways of looking at nature (Serres makes the
same comment about the later reference to Hercules and his aggressive masculine
exploits early in Book 5).
The importance of this irrational
vitality at the heart of nature may help to explain one of the greatest attractions
of Lucretius’ poem—the emphasis it places on particular perceptions of single
natural phenomena. Again and again, Lucretius links the point he is making to a
specific scene: a horse halfway across a flowing river, sheep grazing in the
meadow, trees rubbing in the wind, severed limbs twitching on the ground, lions
going berserk in battle, garments hanging up beside the sea, huge dogs playing
with their pups, a cow searching for her slaughtered calf, the appearance of
oars above and below the water, stars glimmering in the heavens, a race horse
in the starting gate, the build up of clouds before a storm, and on and on.
Such experiences, the style of the poem insists, are much more important than
any explanations we might try to come up with to account for them. Lucretius
clearly does not wish to subsume the particularity of our sense perceptions
under some universal principle (hence, all mechanical explanations which satisfy
our sense experience are equally correct). It’s as if he wants our interaction
with nature to be specific, local, individual—anything
but some exemplification of a general rule. This desire, of course, sets him at
odds with the driving impetus of modern science, whose entire endeavour is to
subordinate the particular experience to the general law.
Now this last point is an important
reason why the poetic quality of a translation matters. Lucretius is often
accused of being extremely pessimistic, thanks especially to his emphatic assertions
about the destruction of the world and the eventual dissolution of everything
in our cosmos (to say nothing of the final section on the plague in Athens). In
addition, his poem frequently calls attention to the destructive effects of
natural processes (earthquakes, whirlwinds, floods, and so on) and to the
mutability of everything. Yes, such passages provide plenty of material for
some gloomy reflections. But offsetting this is the enormous delight he communicates
in his pictures of the natural world and the confident joy he expresses in
thinking about it as a source of unending activity, beauty, sublimity,
and power. Like Socrates in Plato’s early dialogues, Lucretius is urging us to
have the courage to reorient our priorities to nature and to our own lives, and
(again, like Socrates) the most persuasive means he has at his disposal is an
insight into his own intense convictions and his determined courage in the face
of an unpredictable, powerful, dynamic, and dangerous but always fascinating
world.
At times one even gets the impression
that Lucretius wants us to reach an understanding of nature through our
particular perceptions of natural phenomena on a case by case basis. His materialistic
atomic theory and his two guiding principles (sense experience and reason) will
give us the tools to carry out such a task, so that we can then share the
enthusiasm he feels by looking all around us with a heightened sensitivity to
the wonders of nature. Serres makes much of the fact
that Lucretius at times uses the word foedus (meaning treaty)
to describe this relationship: rather than seeking out and imposing universal
laws on our experience of nature, we should begin and end with our perceptions
and, as it were, arrive at an understanding by some mutual negotiation with
nature. Whether this qualifies as a scientific stance is, I suppose, open to
debate—it certainly flies in the face of our accepted notions of what science
is all about—but it is a call to reorient the way we look at, comprehend, and
feel about the world and about ourselves. If we need a “proof” of the value of
such a stance before signing on, we find it, not in the scientific or philosophical
arguments, but in the character of the narrator of the poem, in the intense
confidence, resolution, and delight he reveals in contemplating this vision of
the nature of things.
A COMMENT ON THE INFLUENCE OF LUCRETIUS
I have referred above to the
significant impact Lucretius has had on all sorts of developments in our
culture, up to and including the present day. I have no wish to offer a
detailed or comprehensive account of that influence, even if I had the time and
expertise to do so. Still, one should, I think, at least pay tribute to that
aspect of the poem, if only by suggesting that readers interested in the
subject consult the recently published Cambridge Companion to Lucretius,
a collection of essays in which scholars well versed in the subject offer,
among other things, a fascinating glimpse of those who have paid tribute to the
shaping influence of Lucretius on them and their works.
The Latin text of Lucretius was first published
as a printed book around 1473, and the first English translation, by a “Puritan
blue-stocking,” Lucy Hutchinson, appeared in the mid 17th century (Taylor).
Since the first appearance of the Latin text in print, the list of those who
have acknowledged Lucretius as an important influence reads like a Who’s Who of
Western Culture. It includes, as one might expect, those who welcome the poet’s
attacks on organized religion and endorsement of reason and sense experience in
pursuit of a life of moderate pleasure (e.g., Voltaire, Diderot, Hume) but it
also includes pious Catholics (e. g. Gassendi), who
seem to have experienced little difficulty with the anti-religious sentiments
in the poem, leading Romantic poets (e. g., Wordsworth, Shelley), and a slew of
nineteenth-century figures (e. g., Arnold, Tennyson, Marx, Fitzgerald, Pater,
Whitman, Goethe), among many, many others. Thomas Jefferson, it seems, owned
eight copies of On the Nature of Things, declared himself a firm
disciple of Epicurus, and may have derived that phrase “pursuit of happiness,”
at least in part, from his reading of Lucretius (Hamilton). The poem’s
influence, according to Stuart Gillespie and Donald Mackenzie, can be linked to
a range of twentieth-century poets and philosophers. So pervasive is its
presence in the intellectual climate that for one critic at least (Stuart Gillespie)
Charles Darwin’s claim that he had not read Lucretius is rather like Milton’s
claiming that he had not read Genesis.
One figure in this tradition who obviously stands out is Montaigne, who was immersed in
Latin as a child and grew up with the great Latin classics as his constant
companions. Montaigne knew Lucretius backwards, quotes him more than any other
classical author, and covered his copy of Lucretius’ text with his own annotations.
Of course, there are some obvious differences between the two thinkers, for
Montaigne has a much more skeptical, ironic, and wry imagination than Lucretius
does, but for all that there is a great deal in Lucretius which Montaigne finds
to his liking, especially the brave resolve to live with the pleasures which
are possible and to turn away from the storms of political life and religious
controversies in very uncertain times, relying upon reason and sense experience
of nature as a guide. If we remember that Montaigne has exercised a decisive
influence on the education of French students for hundreds of years, we can
better appreciate how a leading modern European intellectual like Michel Serres, who hails Montaigne as his “father,” is also an
ardent defender and brilliant interpreter of Lucretius.
LIST OF WORKS
CITED
Bailey,
Cyril, translator. Lucretius, On
the Nature of Things. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1910.
Copley,
Frank O., translator. Lucretius, The Nature of Things. New York: Norton, 1977.
(Sample here)
Gowers, Emily. “Thoroughly modern
Lucretius.” Times Literary Supplement,
October 1, 2008 (available here).
Englert, Walter, translator. Lucretius, On the Nature
of Things. Newburyport, MA: Focus Publishing, 2003. (Sample here).
Esolen, Anthony M., editor and translator. Lucretius, On the Nature of Things. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. (Sample here)
Gillespie,
Stuart and Philip Hardie, editors. The Cambridge Companion
to Lucretius. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2007.
Green, W. C. The
Iliad of Homer with a Verse Translation. London: Longmans, 1884.
Hamilton, Carol V. “The Surprising Origins and Meaning of the ‘Pursuit of Happiness.” George Mason University’s History News Network 1-28-07. (Availablehere
)Stallings,
A. E., translator. The Nature of Things.
London: Penguin 2009. (Sample here)
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