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Titus Lucretius Carus, Lucretius On the Nature of Things, trans. Cyril Bailey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ). 1/6/ Book I: Deals with the · Book II: Deals with the · Book III: Deals with the Soul.
Table of contents
For Epicurean philosophy and especially its own metaphysics, there are two fundamental features that make up reality or the universe and that being the duality of atoms and void. These two pillars of Epicurean metaphysics are the features of the universe you cannot see with the naked eye but they are the bedrock that make up all of existence and enable all the phenomenon that is known to be known.
In addition, the Epicureans believed that the universe is limitless, does not have an edge or bottom.
On The Nature Of Things
Combine the concepts of atoms and void and you get the physical. The physical is the undivided wholeness of reality. Starting with atoms , these particles that make all at least for baryonic matter, protons and neutrons e. The heat of the body is in constant motion, which is an example of kinetic energy. The atoms are the origin of all forms for, logically, without atoms there cannot be visible bodies, without visible macroscopic bodies there can be no shape and without shape there cannot be beauty.
The void has special meaning in Epicureanism as the enabler of all motion, which renders null the need for a supernatural mover. Whenever there is emptiness there is void since matter is absent.
However because of that emptiness of space, matter moved by an outside force can occupy that space and restrict other objects from occupying that very same space. For does not the bolus chewed food after being swallowed, need empty space to traverse the lumen of the digestive system in order to finally arrive at the small intestine to be finally absorbed?
Lucretius De Rerum Natura Summary
Or how can water move in plants from the roots to the leaves through the xylem vessels if there be no empty space? For without the void nothing can be animated. Neither the atoms nor void dominate over the other in the universe but instead are interspersed. We for instance are most familiar to matter because:. While matter has mass and weight the void is absent of mass or weight and so logically an object on Earth that weighs heavier than the other has more matter amounted inside it and the other that weighs less has more void or empty space between its atoms and molecules.
We can analogise what is said above about atoms and void with the physics concept of density or in its formula format. So in the language of the Epicureans water has more void because it does not have as much matter in it compared to lead. Lo and behold! An atom of lead has far more matter than a molecule of water because it simply has more subatomic particles in its space.
Epicurean philosophy has its own standard on what qualifies as eternal. It measures something as eternal by the things ability to be invulnerable to dividing forces, decay and change. Epicureanism states the three things that last forever:.
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Lucretius gave thought to motion in its various modes of implementation, the first was motion by will of the mind. To elaborate, we can voluntarily move our skeletal muscles at will and walk wherever we are at liberty to do so. Lucretius, probably from his own observations, was inspired to speak of motion, when he saw horses galloping out at the moment the starting gates swung open:. For the whole supply of matter in the flesh must be spurned on, with a great try throughout the frame, so it can follow the yearning of the mind. The other mode of motion is unwilled or involuntary motion, when something shoves you from behind launching you forward, when a strong gust of wind launches you in the opposite direction, when you fall through ice on a frozen lake because of gravity dragging you down, all these mentioned are examples of unwilled motion.
Motion that causes our bodies to be moved by external mass objects. What do I say of these musing of Lucretius? Well, these categories of motion, voluntary and involuntary have a common cause; force. Force is what approves the movement of all motion, just crack open your physics textbooks. What voluntary motion is referring to in a naturalistic perspective is the workings of the somatic nervous system that division of the nervous system which enables us to voluntarily move our skeletal muscles.
By the cause of our will or cortex , a mechanical cascade of operations is played out just to contract or relax a tissue of muscle so that a purpose can be achieved. So everything needs a seed, it all emerges from a prior condition in order to be so. Look at life itself! We do see however all these things retain the nature of its parents, the physical attributes for instance which distinguishes it from other species, and behaviour of its race. Moreover, we got ourselves here an ancient version of the law of conservation of mass:. We set down a pile of wood, prep the conditions for it to combust, sprinkle some oil here and there, throw the lighted match as a source of ignition and the wood begins burning.
The burning of the wood results in nothing being erased from existence only refashioned; the atomic constituents of the wood are only rearranged. The atoms themselves are conserved across chemical reactions but not the molecules that are just the arrangement of those atoms. To summarise, we see no spontaneous generation of complex organised beings in nature everything is limited by the matter that does exist and must make do with these limited building blocks. We got entropy mentioned here way before thermodynamics, throughout the books that make up this work the effect of time is often mentioned; the effect we now call entropy.
Indeed, Epicurean philosophy and Lucretius especially were no strangers to the concept of entropy, although the word and modern definition is not provided, throughout the poem the effects are well explained and lauded in good delivery as a cornerstone of the doings of nature. The steady drip of water causes stone to hollow and yield. The curving iron of the ploughshare fritters in the field by imperceptible degrees. The cobbles of the street we see are polished smoothly by now from throngs of passing feet.
All things decompose back to the elemental particles from which they rose. The last one here is my favourite line in the poem for entropy, in its brevity it easily rolls of the tongue a fine addition to my memory of philosophical quotes. Epicurus is a teacher who passed to Lucretius the light of understanding.
The character Religion is a monster that attacks men from the sky and seeks to destroy truth. Epicurus wins against Religion because he explains to the comprehending person the vast and infinite universe, and brings a sudden realisation of what can be and what cannot be. This sudden understanding of the underlying atoms, void, and possible interactions of the universe will free individuals from the inherited fears of gods and of death.
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Here are the words of Lucretius translated to English by William Ellery Leonard and provided courtesy the Gutenberg e-text project. Lucretius has compassion for those men who do not understand the mechanisms of the universe that gave them birth.
He felt these ignorant and unfortunate men need religion to explain where they came from, why good things sometimes occur, and what could possibly shield them from the misfortunes they see fall upon others. Lucretius wrote this epic poem to "Memmius", who may be the Gaius Memmius who in 58 BC was a praetor , a judicial official deciding controversies between citizens and between citizens and the government. There are over a dozen references to "Memmius" scattered throughout the long poem in a variety of contexts in translation, such as "Memmius mine", "my Memmius", and "illustrious Memmius".
Apparently, Lucretius wrote On the Nature of Things in an attempt to convert Gaius Memmius to atomism, but was unsuccessful. Categories : Roman era books Philosophy books Latin poems.