Lucretius4
Alastor
Avia Pieridum peragro loca nullius ante
trita solo. iuvat integros accedere fontis
atque haurire, iuvatque novos decerpere flores
insignemque meo capiti petere inde coronam
unde prius nulli velarint tempora musae;
primum quod magnis doceo de rebus et artis
religionum animum nodis exsolvere pergo,
deinde quod obscura de re tam lucida pango
carmina, musaeo contingens cuncta lepore. (IV, 1-9)
Paraphrasing: I'm treading a path through Poetry nobody has trod
before. I enjoy finding and drinking from pure streams and selecting
flowers for an honoured chaplet that the Muses haven't bestowed on
anyone else before, because I'm talking about cool things, Dude,
releasing the mind from tight bonds of superstition, and because I
write so lucidly about difficult stuff, touching everything with
poetic charm.
The guy understands his place in literary history even before he has
finished his masterpiece. Nobody has ever presented a philosophical
system in verse before - in such great verse at that! His task is
radical and even revolutionary, breaking the shackles of superstition.
Actually, the passage reminds me of something Milton wrote in his
intro to Paradise Lost, about writing "Things unattempted yet in prose
or rhyme" (now I know where Milton got his claim to originality - he
got it second hand from Lucretius!)
Poetry is a pleasant way of winning converts and it kind of fits the
Epicurean approach to life in general. Trouble with poetry is the
writer has to meet demands of metre, poetic convention etc and that
can compromise the meaning because clarity of argument is no longer
the only priority. So why did he write in verse? I think it's because
he saw himself as a poet first and only later did he find a cause
worth writing about. There's a tradition that he committed suicide in
despair over a love affair. In can believe it, though I also think
that could be propaganda from the enemies of his philosophy.
A life long since gone can still touch us, can't it?
Ed Cryer
"Alastor" <ros...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:40fe585b-9d13-45f5...@i29g2000prf.googlegroups.com...
Nice achievement by Lucretius! He left a lasting monument behind. You
read it; and we discuss it and make sense of it in modern terms. I have
a Loeb edition on my shelves. I've mostly just dusted it down for the
last several years, but I've been looking at it again since you started
this very worthwhile series.
I guess he could have left children behind (Scientists do tell us that
all animals are driven by the need to pass on their genes.) but they do
so often disappoint your hopes; end up going in the opposite direction
to the path you chose. Just look at Marcus Aurelius' heir to the
imperial purple!
I like Horace's ode;
Exegi monumentum aere perennius
regalique situ pyramidum altius,
quod non imber edax, non Aquilo inpotens
possit diruere aut innumerabilis
annorum series et fuga temporum. 5
Non omnis moriar multaque pars mei
uitabit Libitinam; usque ego postera
crescam laude recens, dum Capitolium
scandet cum tacita uirgine pontifex.
.................................
.................................
I shall not die entirely. A large part of me will escape the grave.
I like the
.............................. dum Capitolium
scandet cum tacita uirgine pontifex.
as long as a pontifex maximus climbs the Capitol with a silent maiden.
Well, you'll find a pontifex maximus across the Tiber. But the nuns who
flock into St Peter's Square aren't very tacitae; tend to jabber like
old fishwives!
:-)
I was in Rome last year; tourist. I walked from the Colosseum through
the remains of the Forum Romanum and up past the Tarpeian Rock onto the
Capitoline Hill.
No Temple of Juppiter; no geese sacred to Juno. A bloody big monument to
Victor Emmanuel; guarded by soldiers in skirts!
:-)
But not far away is the statue of Marcus Aurelius on his horse. And the
crowds who take the same journey along the Via Sacra in their thousands
must mostly have heard of Vergil, Horace and Ovid. And maybe even
Lucretius too.
Ed
Francis A. Miniter
I am going to have to respond more at length when I get
home. Just a little over a week ago, I acquired *The Tragic
Sense of Life in Men and in People* by Miguel de Unamuno.
Skimming through it I was struck by a passage in which he
argues that philosophy is closer to poetry than to science.
That made me reflect on Socrates' speech in the Symposium,
where he places poetry close to philosophy on the ladder of
desires.
Francis A. Miniter
Jim Braun
> Nobody has ever presented a philosophical
> system in verse before -
How about Parmenides?
Alastor
> "Alastor" <ross...@gmail.com> wrote in message
>
> - Show quoted text -
Oh yes that's a fine quote from Horace. Now there is the 3rd great
poet we've caught shamelessly trumpeting his own greatness (Lucretius,
Ovid and now Horace). We ought to cut and paste those quotes and make
another series of messages because I'm sure there are other Romans
just as guilty - probably enough for a pamphlet. We could call that
series Braggarts1-2,3etc.
Regarding the soldiers in skirts - so what's changed in over 2500
years?
Alastor
Nobody has ever presented a philosophical system in great verse before
{:)]
Alastor
wrote:
>
> - Show quoted text -
Hi Francis. I think it depends on the brand of philosophy, doesn't it?
Socrates is seen as a villain by some thinkers (eg Bertrand Russell, I
seem to remember) because until he put his squat little nose (pussycat
nose?) into philosophy it had a more scientific quality. He gave it a
more naval-gazing quality. But even after him, there are still
different kinds of philosophers. You get the Platos, who are very much
into finding beauty at the centre of everything, and the Aristotles,
who are into cataloguing anything. The ancients practised a form of
'thought experiments', something Einstein indulged in too, and I can
imagine Epicurus and his pals sitting around a pot of tea or coffee
exchanging notes on the directions they had been investigating. But
they didn't get their hands dirty and that's where they differ from
scientists today. On the other hand, the way modern science is going
now, we can say that physics increasingly begins to resemble
metaphysics. I mean, a photon doesn't make up its mind to be a
particle or a wave until somebody tries to measure its location.
That's weird.
John Briggs
Well, no - it's only weird if you think the natural world should conform to
your way of thinking. Just think of a photon as a wave, or a particle, or
both, or neither, or all of those simultaneously.
--
John Briggs
Alastor
>
> - Show quoted text -
I can top that, John! Here is a quote from Richard Feynman, maybe the
greatest scientist since Oppenheimer or Einstein himself. It's taken
from his 1966 Nobel Prize speech:
"What I am going to talk to you about is what we teach our physics
students...It is my task to convince you not to turn away because you
don't understand it. You see, my physics students don't understand
it...That is because I don't understand it."
I got that quote from here:
http://www.spaceandmotion.com/Physics-Richard-Feynman-QED.htm
There are some other great quotes there. Such as:
"The more you see how strangely nature behaves, the harder it is to
make a model that explains how even the simplest phenomena actually
work. So theoretical physics has given up on that." (1985 - sorry, I
didn't note the title of the text)
I like this one:
"Religion is a culture of faith. Science is a culture of doubt."
So I think I can quite validly assert that modern physics is weird -
not even a brilliant physicist understands it! [ :>}]
John Briggs
I don't think you can validly assert that anything is weird just because you
don't understand it.
--
John Briggs
Ed Cryer
"John Briggs" <john.b...@ntlworld.com> wrote in message
news:5VtEj.443$6R1...@newsfe4-gui.ntli.net...
The thing about quantum mechanics is that they work; infallibly; no
exception ever been found. The mathematics work on predicting the
behaviour of the microcosmic atomic world.
And yet they embody a logical absurdity that Erwin Schrödinger tried to
illustrate with his famous cat.
Now, if that doesn't deserve the epithet "weird" then nothing does.
Ed
Ed Cryer
"Ed Cryer" <e...@somewhere.in.the.uk> wrote in message
news:fru73g$pg9$1...@aioe.org...
Albert Einstein refused to accept quantum theory. He couldn't square it
with relativity theory; nor with reason itself. He argued with Niels
Bohr for decades; he's even credited with the assertion that "God does
not play dice with the world". And, of course he spent the last years of
his life trying to come up with something to square the macro world with
the micro one. He failed.
And so, in the 70 odd years that have intervened, when we have two
different sets of equations for the two spheres (and each set works in
its own sphere), is it not weird that no one can unify them?
Ed
John Briggs
> exception ever been found. The mathematics work on predicting the
> behaviour of the microcosmic atomic world.
> And yet they embody a logical absurdity that Erwin Schrödinger tried
> to illustrate with his famous cat.
>
> Now, if that doesn't deserve the epithet "weird" then nothing does.
I still say you are misusing "weird". A paradox is not necessarily the same
as an absurdity.
--
John Briggs
Francis A. Miniter
OK, "tonight" took a little long to arrive.
I think the reason that Plato placed poetry so close to
philosophy (Symposium, Phaedro) was that he saw human nature
as rational in part, and irrational in part, and the
irrational embodied in the concept of ερος . See Stanley
Rosen, "The Role of Eros in Plato's Republic," in The
Quarrel between Philosophy and Poetry: Studies in Ancient
Thought (Routledge 1988) and Drew Hyland, Finitude and
Transcendence in the Platonic Dialogues, (State University
of New York Press, 1995). Since you could not, therefore,
give a λογος of human nature, science would be inadequate to
fully describe it. Therefore, something like poetry would
be needed to attempt a description.
As to Unamuno, I will just quote from pp. 2-3 of The Tragic
Sense of Life:
-----------
It behooves us to say, before all, that philosophy lies
closer to poetry than to science. All philosophic systems
which have been constructed as a supreme concord of the
final results of the individual sciences have in every age
possessed much less consistency and life than those which
expressed the integral spiritual yearning of their authors.
And, though they concern us so greatly, and are, indeed,
indispensable for our life and thought, the sciences are in
a certain sense more foreign to us than philosophy. The
fulfil a more objective end - that is to say, an end more
external to ourselves. They are fundamentally a matter of
economics. . . .
Philosophy answers to our need of forming a complete and
unitary conception of the world and of life, and as a result
of this conception, a feeling which gives birth to an inward
attitude and even to outward action. But the fact is that
this feeling, instead of being a consequence of this
conception, is the cause of it. Our philosophy - that is,
our mode of understanding or not understanding the world and
life - springs from our feeling towards life itself.
-----------
Francis A. Miniter
Alastor
wrote:
>
> - Show quoted text -
Hi again Francis. I can now see where you are coming from, I think.
Let me know if I'm on the right track!
The key phrase in your post is 'unitary conception'. When great
philosophers like Plato and Plotinus begin deriving one kind of being
from something higher or more general, inevitably their thoughts
ascend to more and more general forms of being, until finally they end
at some transcendent being, The One, God, or whatever name you have
for the pinnacle of the 'unitary conception'. At that point, logic
fails because you can't predicate anything of this transcendent being
without subsuming it within some other concept, in which case it
ceases to be transcendent or supreme. I seem to remember that Plotinus
said we couldn't even say of The One that it is, since even that was
too specific. Instead he resorted to rather poetic ways of trying to
express his understanding of the supreme and transcendent being. Every
philosophic system that tries to comprehend the Big Picture by
progressing from the particular to the general has always ended in
religion or poetry or mysticism.
It's some years since I read Hegel but, if I remember correctly,
instead of reasoning from particular to general, he began with a
general concept being and tried to deduce complexity from it. In the
first instance, mere being turns out to be nothing, and then these
concepts (being and nothing) collapse into the more particular concept
of something, a triadic movement that informs his whole system,
characterized as thesis, antithesis and synthesis. It's a neat trick
but it didn't really convince anyone until it was reinvented as
Marxism, which has more to do with poetic myth than social reality
(few today would disagree with that observation, i think).
So I think I do understand what you mean. Philosophy resembles poetry
rather than science in so far as every attempt by philosophers to
comprehend the Big Picture has so far ended in poetry or religion or
mysticism or political mythology. But here's irony for you (I love
irony, don't you?) - science also has not yet succeeded in
comprehending the Big Picture. Scientists are still trying to come up
with a Unified Theory that makes sense of everything. Until they do,
science might also be considered a quest for order that is ultimately
beyond understanding. Poetry, in fact.
Ed Cryer
"Francis A. Miniter" <fami...@comcast.net> wrote in message
news:Jp-dnZlX_ZnFxHna...@comcast.com...
I've always thought there's something very poetic in mathematics; and
not just pure maths, either, which is extremely
Platonistic. Scientists rave about the beauty of E = Mc² or the double
helix structure of DNA.
It could all have been so very different. Energy could have been a
function of, say, twenty different universal variables;
but it's a function of one universal constant + a body's mass. And DNA
could have been like, say, the eye, which is a
real hotchpotch construction of evolutionary pragmatism; but instead it
is constructed extremely efficiently.
Beauty and truth; very Platonistic! With justice it's a kind of
Platonistic trinity.
Scientists (especially cosmologists) have a prejudice; if a theory has
beauty, then it's more likely to be true. And by
beauty I mean compounded of simplicity and symmetry; efficiency.
Ed