Discussion: LUCRETIUS The Nature of Things

We had a good discussion today about Lucretius' The Nature of Things.  Interestingly, Stephen told us that a villa was found in Herculaneum (near Pompei) about 15 years ago, that contained a library buried and preserved in the ash. The owner was likely an Epicurean as his library reflected this school of thought. This was interesting to me, that in my lifetime these new discoveries of ancient information have been made. I visited Pompei with Megan in 1988 and this discovery was made after that. Who knows what we may yet find?

We'll be reading Marcus Aurelius next week so we spent some time discussing the Epicurean philosophy vs the Stoics (the school of thought Marcus Aurelius adhered to).  Both of them began in the 3-4 last centuries BCE and continued into the first centuries AD.
The Epicureans felt that life was completely random, there was no master plan, no Fate.  The Stoics felt that Nature had a master plan and Fate was very much a factor.  Epicurus (341-270 BCE) lived during the Hellenistic Age.  Both he and Lucretius (c. 99-55 BCE) lived during periods of crisis and upheaval with war and power struggles, lots of change.  This may have influenced both their viewpoints.  We discussed the concept of the axial age or the Great Transformation, the theory that prior to about 500 BCE, early man did not think very much about the meaning of life.  They did not question much, were not self-reflexive.  Fairly suddenly people in India, the Middle East, Asia and Greece began to radically question things.  Philosophers became more important and more prominent.

We began our discussion at the beginning: why did Lucretius start his poem with a homage to Venus when the Epicurenas did not believe in gods?  It was not necessarily that Lucretius did not believe in gods but that he probably did not believe that gods had any interest or control in our lives.  He also felt strongly that sacrifices to gods and using religion to justify evil actions (such as Agaememnon sacrificing his daughter Iphigenia to the gods) was not only useless but very wrong.

They did not believe in gods or afterlife.  They felt it was easy to get hold of what we need and we don't need much (need vs desire).  What we inevitably suffer is not too serious and easy to put up with.  The Epicureans preferred to live communally with like-minded people but apart from general society.  They felt the key to happiness (or contentment) was: freedom from disturbance and anxiety in the soul + freedom from pain in the body.  To accomplish these the Epicurean should avoid unpleasantness from other humans, live with like-minded people and avoid the pangs of conscience.  Don't live in the future (or past), live in the moment.  These ideals break down in larger societies but if society is disintegrating then these smaller, simpler communities become more desirable and viable as seen in some communities (or in works of fiction) examining dystopian ideals and Armageddon scenarios.

We spoke about needs vs desires and how our imaginations lead us to desires (again it's hard for me to think negatively about imagination).  You can use imagination to enliven your life and bring interest to it but don't let it make you unhappy or malcontent.

Roberta brought up empathy vs sympathy and there was a debate about the definitions of these two and which one would Lucretius have agreed with.

EMPATHY Oxford Online Dictionary - empathy
noun: the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.

SYMPATHY  Oxford Online Dictionary - Sympathy
noun: 1. feelings of pity and sorrow for someone else’s misfortune
          2. understanding between people; common feeling: the special sympathy between the two boys was obvious to all

• (sympathies) support in the form of shared feelings or opinions: his sympathies lay with his constituents
• agreement with or approval of an opinion or aim; a favourable attitude: I have some sympathy for this view

People often confuse the words empathy and sympathy. Empathy means ‘the ability to understand and share the feelings of another’ (as in both authors have the skill to make you feel empathy with their heroines), whereas sympathy means ‘feelings of pity and sorrow for someone else’s misfortune’ (as in they had great sympathy for the flood victims).


We also spoke about theimportance of the "swerve" or "clinamen", that slight movement of atoms that allows for randomness in the world and negates the possibility of predestination.  There was a discussion about Karl Marx who did a lot of thinking about the swerve vs. Democrates (Stoic) view that atoms move in straight lines.  For Marx this allowed the notion of free will.

In the Epicurean world view, we live in a world without plan or purpose, without meaning, but this world provides all that we need.  The Epicureans wrote about "ataraxia" or equanimity or being content with here and now.  The existentialist question then becomes how do you live in a world with no purpose, what is a good life?