It’s hard not to simultaneously feel crushed and filled with wonder and joy when reading Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura. Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, all morons. I jest, of course, but truly, in De Rerum Natura, it’s all there. Beautiful poetry, a profound understanding of nature, a beautiful ethical vision and project of emancipation, an account of emergence, a thoroughgoing posthumanism, a [rather misguided] sex manual replete with meditations on love; it’s all there. All too often we get the sense that many philosophers are civil servants acting on behalf of the state, superstition, and ideology, yet with Lucretius we get the sense that we are before truth– or at least the germinal hypothesis that would lead us truth –and the seeds of a genuinely emancipatory project. That emancipatory project unfolds at the psychological level striving to free us from fear and to lead us to peace of mind, that unfolds at the social level, emancipating us from superstition and ideology, and that unfolds at the political level emancipating us from despots and unjust systems.
Yet perhaps most of all the wonder that Lucretius instills lies in the way he transforms the ordinary and familiar into a question. For Lucretius there is just atoms and void. With this hypothesis all things are to be explained. We take it for granted that wind can bend trees, yet with Lucretius’ hypothesis we must now ask how wind, which seems like nothing at all, can have this force. We take it as obvious that sound can be heard through walls, but now we must ask what it is that travels through walls and how one entity can pass through another that is solid (all things no matter how apparently solid, Lucretius will teach, contain void). We will now need a theory as to how water is able to change colors with wind and waves (the patterns and relationships among the atoms are reconfigured). As I write this my daughter lays on the couch watching Beetlejuice. What is it I’m seeing as I regard her? She is in a diffferent position in the void, so how is it possible for me too see her? This too will need explanation and Lucretius will argue that bodies emit films or simulacra that impinge upon our bodies. To see something else is to be affected by an emanation, not the thing itself, such that whatever we do see is an effect of what took place in the past is films or simulacra take time to travel in the void.
read on!
With Lucretius that which is most ordinary and familiar, all things in the world, become fascinating, calling for counter-intuitive and charming explanations. To be a Lucretian today– as in the case of being a disciple of any philosopher –is not to follow him in all he says and in all his explanations. One need not hold, for example, that atoms are hard, indivisible, simple units, nor that bodies secrete simulacra (photons of light bouncing of bodies will do). No, to be a Lucretian is to follow the materialist, posthumanist, and naturalist spirit of his thought, the mode of explanation it entails, and the ethical and emancipatory project that issues from it.
To be a Lucretian today is to follow him in the new conception of nature that he introduced. This new concept of nature is nicely articulated by Love & Rockets in their song no new tale to tell:
“You cannot go against nature when you do it’s nature too.” The old Platonic, Aristotlean, and Medieval conception of nature was teleological in character, such that each entity was haunted by an essence that it should be and where everything has a divinely decreed place in a hierarchical order. This is why, for example, we occasionally find Aristotle talking about “monsters” when he encounters something like a two-headed chicken. If two-headed chickens are, for Aristotle, monsters, then this is because there is something chickens ought to be. With Lucretius, by contrast, we get nature as absolute interactive immanence where whatever comes to be is but one of the possibilities of nature. Within this nature there is no outside or other (there is no culture, for example, that is something “other” than nature), but rather there is just The Wild. Culture too is a part or manifestation of the wilderness. One cannot travel to the wilderness or wild because wherever one is they are already in the wild or wilderness. Our building of houses is no more unnatural than beavers building damns. And this conception of nature, without teleology or divinely decreed ought is the condition and mark of any genuinely emancipatory project.
Larval Subjects . 
August 26, 2011 at 3:09 am
… brings to mind that extraordinary exchange in The Winter’s Tale: 4.4 80-99
They’re discussing Perdita’s garden… why she neglects the ‘bastardization’ of her carnations by streaked gillyvors…
Perdita: For I have heard it said/ There is an art that in their piedness shares / With great creating nature.
Polixenes: Say there be/ Yet nature is made better by no mean/ But nature makes that mean. So over that art/ Which you say adds to nature is an art/ That nature makes. You see, sweet maid, we marry/ A gentler scion to the wildest stock,/ By bud of nobler race. This is an art/ Which does mend nature–change it rather; but the art itself is nature.
Perdita: So it is.
Polixenes: Then make your garden rich in gillyvors/
And do not call them bastards.
Did Gregor Mendel read Shakespeare? Whether he did or not, we see how a fundamental understanding can exist, and pass for generations and centuries–waiting for a monk in his garden to observe and describe in such a way that it becomes transformational–a concept embedded in material reality such that in itself… it will forever after… have power to make a difference. And all along… the art of seeing…itself was natures.
Let us make the garden of our world rich in Gillivores… and let none call them bastards!
August 26, 2011 at 3:48 am
Jacob,
Thanks for this!
August 26, 2011 at 4:18 am
If, in fact there is only wilderness, then *should* the statements we make about nature conform to this fact?
August 26, 2011 at 2:29 pm
If there is only wilderness, and no essence that determines what nature ought to be, then values are radically denaturalized. There is no pre-existing set of values, only a multiplicity of values (human and non) continually vying for expression. The reality that we see before us is the result of the interactions – the cooperations, negotiations, compromises, and competitions – between the multiple entities and their attempts to express their values.
August 27, 2011 at 2:26 pm
Saying there is no way of deviating from nature leaves you in an awkward position for emancipatory politics. If there is nothing outside of the wilderness, then the supposed divide between wilderness and culture, and all of the ills that follow from it, are natural as well. You are merely inverting the terms, and denouncing the positing of a nature as unnatural. What real argument can you have against nature? How can it possibly be misrepresented? What if it is in the nature of nature to mispercieve its own nature? I have always thought there was something very strange and not altogether convincing about these negative absolutes. “There is no nature, there is no truth, there is no essential identity”. Not saying you are advocating all of this, but it does seem to sort of fit into a general current of thought. What always strikes me is the way these statements are made as though one is occupying the very position one denies. Perhaps I’ve misunderstood all of this, but I’ve always felt a little dense with these issues.
August 27, 2011 at 2:39 pm
Frank,
I think this conflates the Medieval concept of nature as essence, inevitability, and what things ought to be with the concept of nature Lucretius points to. That latter concept of nature holds that nature is creative and inventive, rather than an essence that is teleologically determinative. Under this, the contingency of cultural formations is not other than nature, but a form the power of nature takes. The point is the same with ecosystems. Ecosystems are contjngent ways in which entities hold together that are capable of being otherwise. Likewise with human social systems.
August 27, 2011 at 9:30 pm
Three words: John Bellamy Foater.
August 27, 2011 at 10:12 pm
http://complit.as.nyu.edu/object/complit.events.lucretius-and-modernity
August 30, 2011 at 1:40 am
I hope this does not come across as flippant, but I’m wondering now if we cannot conceive of nature as being essentially creative. Does it matter? Is essence only pernicious when it is determined fixedly? Is not creativity some kind of essence? I think, and I could be very wrong, that what you abhor is not essence as such, as a purely formal category that structures our apprehension and conceptualization of reality, but very specific, historically and socially constructed essences that entail, in social practices and organizations, obvious iniquities. For instance, if I were to say that the essence of nature is to creatively form itself, to build, out of its own materials, the structures and edifices that we recognize as both organic and biological, as well as social and semiological, and further on and on, I doubt you would fully disagree. Then again, you might not like to use the words nature and essence at all, because even if we distance our use from the traditions in which we typically find them, it is impossible to completely remove the more unsavory assocations that are the result of centuries, if not millenia, of practiced beliefs that we can no longer sanction. You have probably written more on this matter, but I haven’t read your blog for very long, so I apologize if you have addressed this in earlier posts.
August 30, 2011 at 1:51 am
Frank,
I think the Modern concept of nature necessarily conceives of it as creative (with some notable exceptions such as Laplace). In my view, pre-Modern conceptions of nature conceived the natural as fundamentally non-creative, governed by teleology. The ancient distinction between phusis and nomos was basically a distinction between the non-creative (phusis) and the creative (nomos as culture, subject, freedom, etc.). When cultural theorists oppose culture to nature they’re basically working within a pre-modern framework that conceives nature as essence, necessity, and inevitability. That all goes out the window with Darwin. It’s important not to confuse the premodern concept of nature as “acting according to an essence” with the modernist thesis of immanence to the effect that there is nothing outside of nature, i.e., there are no supernatural causes.
December 2, 2012 at 4:25 am
[…] For Lucretius there is just atoms and void. With this hypothesis all things are to be explained. We take it for granted that wind can bend trees, yet with Lucretius’ hypothesis we must now ask how wind, which seems like nothing at all, can have this force. We take it as obvious that sound can be heard through walls, but now we must ask what it is that travels through walls and how one entity can pass through another that is solid (all things no matter how apparently solid, Lucretius will teach, contain void). We will now need a theory as to how water is able to change colors with wind and waves (the patterns and relationships among the atoms are reconfigured). As I write this my daughter lays on the couch watching Beetlejuice. What is it I’m seeing as I regard her? She is in a different position in the void, so how is it possible for me too see her? This too will need explanation and Lucretius will argue that bodies emit films or simulacra that impinge upon our bodies. To see something else is to be affected by an emanation, not the thing itself, such that whatever we do see is an effect of what took place in the past is films or simulacra take time to travel in the void. (see Lucretius in the Wilderness) […]