Accueil
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Nail
https://fr.1lib.fr/book/5434087/cc193b?dsource=recommend
"The first-century Roman poet, whose famous didactic poem De Rerum Natura was single-handedly responsible for the reintroduction of Greek atomism into Western thought and its influence on the modern scientific revolution, has now decidedly fallen out of favour. [...]
De Rerum Natura has been abandoned as a contemporary text because a number of key modern atomist tenets have now been proven scientifically and philosophically untenable in light of twentieth-century discoveries in physics.
First, and most importantly, the core atomist thesis that all of reality is made up of discrete, indestructible, and indivisible atoms can no longer be upheld. Beginning with the discovery of electrons in the late nineteenth century and culminating with the discovery of other subatomic particles, the splitting of the atom, and the discovery of quantum fields in the twentieth century, it is no longer possible to maintain a philosophical or scientific belief in the core tenet of Greek atomism. The twenty-first century scientific consensus is now that of quantum field theory: that all particles are fluctuations or effects of more primary field processes." (p.1)
"Secondly, and correlatively, the modern atomist commitment to materialism remains fundamentally flawed. The modern interpretation of Greek atomism, primarily based on Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura, remained committed to a version of materialism defined by at least three core aspects: discreteness, observability, and mechanistic causality.
Discreteness. For modern materialism, all of being is made of matter and all of matter is defined by discrete particles of three-dimensionally extended physical stuff. The particles of matter move around, but with respect to their own self-identity they remain unchanged. Matter can be divided up into smaller and smaller particles, but matter will always be nothing other than the sum total of divided discrete particles with extension in space.
Observability. All of these discrete particles are defined by their observability and measurability. According to classical physics, if something cannot be observed or measured with accuracy then it is not material. Discreteness and observation are thus related. A non-discrete body will not yield to the totality of presence required by a total observation of the
body, but only a partial and thus incomplete observation. Furthermore, discreteness is also the precondition of completely accurate measurability. Without the discreteness of atoms, measurements or quantification become stochastic or chaotic, changing in character by virtue of being measured. If the act of measurement or observation modifies the object
of measure, then a completely accurate measurement becomes impossible. Today, such simple scientific empiricism has become a deeply flawed methodology.
Causality. Based on the intrinsic discreteness and measurability of corporeal matter, classical physics believed that the causal connections between discrete bodies could be mechanically broken down and made predictable. If the measure of one body could be determined, its relation to other bodies could be determined by the observation of patterns and so-called ‘forces’ between them. Matter, in this interpretation, behaves according to fixed laws, which are, in principle, rational, calculable, and predictable. ‘The great book of nature’, as Galileo says, ‘can be read only by those who know the language in which it was written. And this language is mathematics.’
Flux. Contemporary physics, however, has rendered these three features of modern materialism, inspired by Greek atomism, absolutely outdated. Einstein’s famous discovery of mass–energy equivalence (E =mc2) fundamentally transformed our understanding of matter as some reified, discrete body. Discrete matter is essentially equivalent or transformable back and forth between continuous fluctuations of energy and discontinuous bodies of matter. Following the basic insights of quantum field theory, one can no longer maintain any such definition of matter as fundamentally discrete or reified.
Interaction. Furthermore, since the movement of quantum fields has been found to be fundamentally stochastic, one can no longer maintain a philosophical or scientific commitment to the necessarily observable or measurable nature of matter. One can observe and measure the energy and momentum of a quantum field only with respect to the particle it generates. The direct observation and measurement of quantum fields is further complicated by the fact that they are in constant motion and superposition. The act of measurement interacts with the field itself and gives determination to the indeterminate fields. Prior to this interaction or measurement there is no objective discrete state or states, only an indeterminate flux.
Pedesis. Finally, in quantum field theory matter cannot be understood causally or mechanistically. Since matter is fundamentally stochastic, the connections between motions are never absolute or predictable with certainty in advance. So-called immutable laws of nature are now mutable. We can no longer speak of absolute causality, but only probabilities of constant conjunctions between fields and particles. Fields are not discrete mechanisms with billiard-ball-like effects. Subatomic particles can ‘tunnel’ through solid physical barriers and become ‘entangled’ over distances, duplicating the movement of the other and responding instantaneously to changes in motion. In short, the modern interpretation of Greek atomist materialism, from the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries, can no longer seriously be entertained and has no place contemporary philosophy or science, except perhaps as a historical relic.
Given the failure of the core ontological and scientific tenets of modern atomism, it is not surprising that their textual origin, Lucretius’De Rerum Natura, has suffered the same fate."
(pp.2-3)
"The argument of this book is that another Lucretius is possible beneath the rubble of its modern interpretation. In light of contemporary physics it is possible again to return to Lucretius and find in his work fresh philosophical insights that provide a poetic and theoretical coherence to the philosophical and scientific discoveries of our time. Beneath the paving stones of atoms, the sandy loam of flux." (p.4)
"The history of De Rerum Natura is part of a subterranean current of philosophy that has been systematically decimated throughout Western history. People have been burned alive for reading this book. Copies of it have been destroyed and its ideas denounced as heretical, communist, atheist, hedonist, and materialist. It is not at all by accident that the writings of Epicurus and Lucretius were destroyed and those of Plato and Aristotle preserved. For all the diversity of the ancient philosophers, only one tradition was courageous enough to deny the existence of God and the immortality of the soul, and to reject the politics of the state and the aesthetics of representation: atomism. The fact that the writings of atomist philosophers, and therefore the robust legacy of their philosophical interpretation and development, have been destroyed and misinterpreted is a direct expression of a certain Graeco-Judaeo-Christian will to destroy their ultimate philosophical enemy. The current of materialism is underground, not by necessity, but by force of oppression. Like the damming of a flood, the primacy of matter in motion has been blocked up and systematically denied throughout Western philosophy." (pp.4-5)
"With the exception of Parmenides, all pre-Socratic philosophers accepted the thesis of continuous motion, but none of them accepted the idea that there was always motion without a static first cause of that motion. At the centre of Greek philosophy has always been the eternal, the God, the One, or the first mover and cause of all motion. Leucippus, Democritus, and Epicurus alone rejected the idea of a static or eternal origin. ‘The atoms’, Epicurus writes, ‘move continuously for all time.’ Their movement has no origin and no end, no God and no immortal soul. There is only matter in motion. There are no static phenomena to appear to a stable observer but only kinomena, or bodies in motion." (p.5)
"With the reign of Theodosius the Great began the destruction of all pagan rituals and the closing of cultic sites. Christian mobs were unleashed on the great ancient libraries, including the library of Alexandria, and their books and art burned. Plato finally got his wish. If there were any works of Democritus left, they were burned in libraries across the Empire. When the Roman Empire finally collapsed, the books salvaged by the Christians were rarely pagan ones, and even when they were, only pagan texts that might contribute to the theological positions of Christianity were chosen: deism, idealism, the immortality of the soul, and so on. The rest were left to rot." (p.6)
"The second revolution of the underground current of materialism began in 1417 when the Italian humanist book hunter Poggio Bracciolini discovered and copied the last surviving and most complete existing manuscript of Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura, which he sent back to Italy. All the odds were against this discovery, and yet this text remains the last, only, and longest ancient text on atomism; without it one can hardly speak of an atomist philosophy at all.
Monks in monasteries collected all kinds of crumbling ancient books and often did not know exactly what they had. Only an expert with a classical training in the humanities would be in a position to know the status of these kinds of works. Furthermore, after over a thousand years, many of the books were eaten by worms, decomposed, and illegible. Monks would then scrape a layer off the vellum (animal skin) and copy a new book over the first in a palimpsest. Additionally, these libraries were not open to the public, and pagan outsiders looking for texts would not be welcome. Luckily, Poggio Bracciolini had the right training, time, money, and the Christian prestige to get into these libraries and to know what he was looking for.
By the end of the fifteenth century, the recirculation of De Rerum Natura had spread around Italy, and atomism had become a definitively heretical position. By the end of the sixteenth century, word of atomism had spread all through Europe, and the book had been translated and printed in a number of languages. It would never be destroyed again. The impact of the book on the budding scientific revolution was enormous. It gave a coherent philosophical account of the natural world and a non-theological explanation of a number of important natural processes well before many of them could have been experimentally proven. The influence of De Rerum Natura can be seen across the greatest minds of the humanities and sciences up to the beginning of the twentieth century: Giordano Bruno (1548–1600), Francis Bacon (1561–1626), Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592), Thomas More (1478–1535), Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655), Molière (1622–73), Michel de Marolles (1600–81), the mathematician Alessandro Marchetti (1633–1714), Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), Baruch Spinoza (1632–77), René Descartes (1596–1650), Isaac Newton (1642–1726), Charles Darwin (1809–82), Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) (1824–1907), and Albert Einstein (1879–1955)." (pp.6-7)
"In 1986, Louis Althusser traced this Epicurean idea of the contingency within matter itself through a number of figures in the history of philosophy including Lucretius, Machiavelli, and Marx, identifying them as thinkers of ‘aleatory materialism’, that is, philosophers who believe that matter itself is spontaneously creative and that this creativity is fundamentally stochastic. Althusser identifies the heroes of this tradition as well as the counter-revolutionary attempts to interpret it as identical to the mental freedom of human beings. Althusser thus provides an interesting historical lineage for the idea, even though he ends up oddly emphasising the ‘aleatory’ over the ‘materialist’ implications of atomism more than is accurate for Lucretius.
Today, the echoes of a return to Lucretius can be heard in the footnotes of ‘new materialist’ philosophers, such as Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (2010), William Connolly’s A World of Becoming (2011), and Levi Bryant’s Democracy of Objects (2011), among others. All of these works emphasise the original Deleuzean imperative to reinterpret Lucretius according to the creative and immanent power of matter itself against the modern atomist interpretations of mechanistic particles and psychological freedom." (p.10)
"Greek atomism espoused a number of philosophical positions, but all are derived from the rare and radical ontological thesis that being is in motion. Even among today’s atomist and materialist sympathisers, no one has dared to utter such a thesis, opting instead for theories of becoming, immanence, force, or neo-Spinozist vitalism. Being, for Lucretius, however, is nothing other than matter in motion.
This book is thus opposed to the modern atomic interpretation of Lucretius in three ways, following the triple failure of classical materialism and physics: discreteness, observability, and mechanistic causality.
First and most importantly, instead of positing discrete atoms as ontologically primary, as in the ancient and modern interpretation, this book argues that Lucretius instead posited the flow of movement as primary. The difference between Lucretius and the earlier Greek atomists is precisely that – the atom. For Leucippus, Democritus, and Epicurus, atoms are
always in motion, but the atom itself remains fundamentally unchanged, indivisible, and thus internally static – even as it moves. Thus instead of positing discrete atoms as ontologically primary as both ancient Greek and later modern theories do, one of Lucretius’ greatest novelties was to posit the movement or flow of matter as primary.
Lucretius did not simply ‘translate Epicurus’, he transformed him. For example, although the Latin word atomus [smallest particle] was available to Lucretius to use in his poem, he intentionally did not use it, nor did he use the Latin word particula or particle to describe matter. The English translations ‘atom’, ‘particle’, and others have all been added
to the text based on a particular historical interpretation of it. The idea that Lucretius subscribed to a world of discrete particles called atoms is therefore both a projection of Epicurus, who used the Greek word atomos, and a retroaction of modern scientific mechanism on to De Rerum Natura. As such, Lucretitus’ writings have been crushed by the weight of his past and his future at the same time.
In this book I argue that Lucretius rejected entirely the notion that things emerged from discrete particles. To believe otherwise is to distort the original meanings of the Latin text as well as the absolutely enormous poetic apparatus he summoned to describe the flowing, swirling, folding, and weaving of the flux of matter. Although Lucretius rejected the term atomus, he remained absolutely true to one aspect of the original Greek meaning of the word, ἄτομος (átomos, ‘indivisible’), from ἀ- (a-, ‘not’) + τέμνω (témnō, ‘I cut’). Being is not cut up into discrete particles, but is composed of continuous flows, folds, and weaves. Discrete ‘things’ [rerum] are composed of corporeal flows [corpora] that move together [conflux] and fold over themselves [nexus] in a woven knotwork [contextum]. For Lucretius, things only emerge and have their being within and immanent to the flow and flux of matter in motion. Discreteness is a product of continuous, uncut, undivided motion and not the other way around.
Secondly, for Lucretius, the material flows of being are not necessarily observable as such. Material flows never appear as discrete, observable or empirical particles. Material flows [corpora], he writes, are always just below the level of observation. This is because observation only notes discrete composites [rerum] and not the constitutive flows that produce the discrete product. Since material flows are fundamentally immanent to the constitutive kinetic flow which produces things, in principle one never finds a corpora but only an infinite corporeal flow as the material condition of any discrete composite or thing.
Thirdly, instead of a mechanistic causality between atoms, we find in Lucretius a theory of stochastic or pedetic motion inherent in matter itself. Matter is not moved by an external will or force, but by itself. It is the source of its own motion. Matter by its very nature is not a predictable mechanism. It is fundamentally turbulent, disordered, and chaotic. But from this turbulent motion it also produces order and stability through the folding, circulation, and knotting of flows. Matter is therefore onto- and morpho-genetic." (pp.10-12)
"My thesis here is not that Lucretius’ theory of matter and the quantum field theory of matter are strictly identical, or that one is derived from or legitimated by the other, but that they are historically compatible and mutually illuminating in the way that atomism once was with classical physics." (p.14)
"Karl Marx (1818–83) and Henri Bergson (1859–1941) are the only two philosophers to have remained committed to the fundamentally stochastic nature of matter and the ontological primacy of motion." (note 17 p.16)
-Thomas Nail, Lucretius I: An Ontology of Motion, Edinburgh University Press, 2018, 281 pages.
https://fr.1lib.fr/book/5459116/c6fa71?dsource=recommend
https://fr.1lib.fr/book/5658888/ab6bb1
https://fr.1lib.fr/book/5434087/cc193b?dsource=recommend
"The first-century Roman poet, whose famous didactic poem De Rerum Natura was single-handedly responsible for the reintroduction of Greek atomism into Western thought and its influence on the modern scientific revolution, has now decidedly fallen out of favour. [...]
De Rerum Natura has been abandoned as a contemporary text because a number of key modern atomist tenets have now been proven scientifically and philosophically untenable in light of twentieth-century discoveries in physics.
First, and most importantly, the core atomist thesis that all of reality is made up of discrete, indestructible, and indivisible atoms can no longer be upheld. Beginning with the discovery of electrons in the late nineteenth century and culminating with the discovery of other subatomic particles, the splitting of the atom, and the discovery of quantum fields in the twentieth century, it is no longer possible to maintain a philosophical or scientific belief in the core tenet of Greek atomism. The twenty-first century scientific consensus is now that of quantum field theory: that all particles are fluctuations or effects of more primary field processes." (p.1)
"Secondly, and correlatively, the modern atomist commitment to materialism remains fundamentally flawed. The modern interpretation of Greek atomism, primarily based on Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura, remained committed to a version of materialism defined by at least three core aspects: discreteness, observability, and mechanistic causality.
Discreteness. For modern materialism, all of being is made of matter and all of matter is defined by discrete particles of three-dimensionally extended physical stuff. The particles of matter move around, but with respect to their own self-identity they remain unchanged. Matter can be divided up into smaller and smaller particles, but matter will always be nothing other than the sum total of divided discrete particles with extension in space.
Observability. All of these discrete particles are defined by their observability and measurability. According to classical physics, if something cannot be observed or measured with accuracy then it is not material. Discreteness and observation are thus related. A non-discrete body will not yield to the totality of presence required by a total observation of the
body, but only a partial and thus incomplete observation. Furthermore, discreteness is also the precondition of completely accurate measurability. Without the discreteness of atoms, measurements or quantification become stochastic or chaotic, changing in character by virtue of being measured. If the act of measurement or observation modifies the object
of measure, then a completely accurate measurement becomes impossible. Today, such simple scientific empiricism has become a deeply flawed methodology.
Causality. Based on the intrinsic discreteness and measurability of corporeal matter, classical physics believed that the causal connections between discrete bodies could be mechanically broken down and made predictable. If the measure of one body could be determined, its relation to other bodies could be determined by the observation of patterns and so-called ‘forces’ between them. Matter, in this interpretation, behaves according to fixed laws, which are, in principle, rational, calculable, and predictable. ‘The great book of nature’, as Galileo says, ‘can be read only by those who know the language in which it was written. And this language is mathematics.’
Flux. Contemporary physics, however, has rendered these three features of modern materialism, inspired by Greek atomism, absolutely outdated. Einstein’s famous discovery of mass–energy equivalence (E =mc2) fundamentally transformed our understanding of matter as some reified, discrete body. Discrete matter is essentially equivalent or transformable back and forth between continuous fluctuations of energy and discontinuous bodies of matter. Following the basic insights of quantum field theory, one can no longer maintain any such definition of matter as fundamentally discrete or reified.
Interaction. Furthermore, since the movement of quantum fields has been found to be fundamentally stochastic, one can no longer maintain a philosophical or scientific commitment to the necessarily observable or measurable nature of matter. One can observe and measure the energy and momentum of a quantum field only with respect to the particle it generates. The direct observation and measurement of quantum fields is further complicated by the fact that they are in constant motion and superposition. The act of measurement interacts with the field itself and gives determination to the indeterminate fields. Prior to this interaction or measurement there is no objective discrete state or states, only an indeterminate flux.
Pedesis. Finally, in quantum field theory matter cannot be understood causally or mechanistically. Since matter is fundamentally stochastic, the connections between motions are never absolute or predictable with certainty in advance. So-called immutable laws of nature are now mutable. We can no longer speak of absolute causality, but only probabilities of constant conjunctions between fields and particles. Fields are not discrete mechanisms with billiard-ball-like effects. Subatomic particles can ‘tunnel’ through solid physical barriers and become ‘entangled’ over distances, duplicating the movement of the other and responding instantaneously to changes in motion. In short, the modern interpretation of Greek atomist materialism, from the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries, can no longer seriously be entertained and has no place contemporary philosophy or science, except perhaps as a historical relic.
Given the failure of the core ontological and scientific tenets of modern atomism, it is not surprising that their textual origin, Lucretius’De Rerum Natura, has suffered the same fate."
(pp.2-3)
"The argument of this book is that another Lucretius is possible beneath the rubble of its modern interpretation. In light of contemporary physics it is possible again to return to Lucretius and find in his work fresh philosophical insights that provide a poetic and theoretical coherence to the philosophical and scientific discoveries of our time. Beneath the paving stones of atoms, the sandy loam of flux." (p.4)
"The history of De Rerum Natura is part of a subterranean current of philosophy that has been systematically decimated throughout Western history. People have been burned alive for reading this book. Copies of it have been destroyed and its ideas denounced as heretical, communist, atheist, hedonist, and materialist. It is not at all by accident that the writings of Epicurus and Lucretius were destroyed and those of Plato and Aristotle preserved. For all the diversity of the ancient philosophers, only one tradition was courageous enough to deny the existence of God and the immortality of the soul, and to reject the politics of the state and the aesthetics of representation: atomism. The fact that the writings of atomist philosophers, and therefore the robust legacy of their philosophical interpretation and development, have been destroyed and misinterpreted is a direct expression of a certain Graeco-Judaeo-Christian will to destroy their ultimate philosophical enemy. The current of materialism is underground, not by necessity, but by force of oppression. Like the damming of a flood, the primacy of matter in motion has been blocked up and systematically denied throughout Western philosophy." (pp.4-5)
"With the exception of Parmenides, all pre-Socratic philosophers accepted the thesis of continuous motion, but none of them accepted the idea that there was always motion without a static first cause of that motion. At the centre of Greek philosophy has always been the eternal, the God, the One, or the first mover and cause of all motion. Leucippus, Democritus, and Epicurus alone rejected the idea of a static or eternal origin. ‘The atoms’, Epicurus writes, ‘move continuously for all time.’ Their movement has no origin and no end, no God and no immortal soul. There is only matter in motion. There are no static phenomena to appear to a stable observer but only kinomena, or bodies in motion." (p.5)
"With the reign of Theodosius the Great began the destruction of all pagan rituals and the closing of cultic sites. Christian mobs were unleashed on the great ancient libraries, including the library of Alexandria, and their books and art burned. Plato finally got his wish. If there were any works of Democritus left, they were burned in libraries across the Empire. When the Roman Empire finally collapsed, the books salvaged by the Christians were rarely pagan ones, and even when they were, only pagan texts that might contribute to the theological positions of Christianity were chosen: deism, idealism, the immortality of the soul, and so on. The rest were left to rot." (p.6)
"The second revolution of the underground current of materialism began in 1417 when the Italian humanist book hunter Poggio Bracciolini discovered and copied the last surviving and most complete existing manuscript of Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura, which he sent back to Italy. All the odds were against this discovery, and yet this text remains the last, only, and longest ancient text on atomism; without it one can hardly speak of an atomist philosophy at all.
Monks in monasteries collected all kinds of crumbling ancient books and often did not know exactly what they had. Only an expert with a classical training in the humanities would be in a position to know the status of these kinds of works. Furthermore, after over a thousand years, many of the books were eaten by worms, decomposed, and illegible. Monks would then scrape a layer off the vellum (animal skin) and copy a new book over the first in a palimpsest. Additionally, these libraries were not open to the public, and pagan outsiders looking for texts would not be welcome. Luckily, Poggio Bracciolini had the right training, time, money, and the Christian prestige to get into these libraries and to know what he was looking for.
By the end of the fifteenth century, the recirculation of De Rerum Natura had spread around Italy, and atomism had become a definitively heretical position. By the end of the sixteenth century, word of atomism had spread all through Europe, and the book had been translated and printed in a number of languages. It would never be destroyed again. The impact of the book on the budding scientific revolution was enormous. It gave a coherent philosophical account of the natural world and a non-theological explanation of a number of important natural processes well before many of them could have been experimentally proven. The influence of De Rerum Natura can be seen across the greatest minds of the humanities and sciences up to the beginning of the twentieth century: Giordano Bruno (1548–1600), Francis Bacon (1561–1626), Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592), Thomas More (1478–1535), Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655), Molière (1622–73), Michel de Marolles (1600–81), the mathematician Alessandro Marchetti (1633–1714), Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), Baruch Spinoza (1632–77), René Descartes (1596–1650), Isaac Newton (1642–1726), Charles Darwin (1809–82), Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) (1824–1907), and Albert Einstein (1879–1955)." (pp.6-7)
"In 1986, Louis Althusser traced this Epicurean idea of the contingency within matter itself through a number of figures in the history of philosophy including Lucretius, Machiavelli, and Marx, identifying them as thinkers of ‘aleatory materialism’, that is, philosophers who believe that matter itself is spontaneously creative and that this creativity is fundamentally stochastic. Althusser identifies the heroes of this tradition as well as the counter-revolutionary attempts to interpret it as identical to the mental freedom of human beings. Althusser thus provides an interesting historical lineage for the idea, even though he ends up oddly emphasising the ‘aleatory’ over the ‘materialist’ implications of atomism more than is accurate for Lucretius.
Today, the echoes of a return to Lucretius can be heard in the footnotes of ‘new materialist’ philosophers, such as Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (2010), William Connolly’s A World of Becoming (2011), and Levi Bryant’s Democracy of Objects (2011), among others. All of these works emphasise the original Deleuzean imperative to reinterpret Lucretius according to the creative and immanent power of matter itself against the modern atomist interpretations of mechanistic particles and psychological freedom." (p.10)
"Greek atomism espoused a number of philosophical positions, but all are derived from the rare and radical ontological thesis that being is in motion. Even among today’s atomist and materialist sympathisers, no one has dared to utter such a thesis, opting instead for theories of becoming, immanence, force, or neo-Spinozist vitalism. Being, for Lucretius, however, is nothing other than matter in motion.
This book is thus opposed to the modern atomic interpretation of Lucretius in three ways, following the triple failure of classical materialism and physics: discreteness, observability, and mechanistic causality.
First and most importantly, instead of positing discrete atoms as ontologically primary, as in the ancient and modern interpretation, this book argues that Lucretius instead posited the flow of movement as primary. The difference between Lucretius and the earlier Greek atomists is precisely that – the atom. For Leucippus, Democritus, and Epicurus, atoms are
always in motion, but the atom itself remains fundamentally unchanged, indivisible, and thus internally static – even as it moves. Thus instead of positing discrete atoms as ontologically primary as both ancient Greek and later modern theories do, one of Lucretius’ greatest novelties was to posit the movement or flow of matter as primary.
Lucretius did not simply ‘translate Epicurus’, he transformed him. For example, although the Latin word atomus [smallest particle] was available to Lucretius to use in his poem, he intentionally did not use it, nor did he use the Latin word particula or particle to describe matter. The English translations ‘atom’, ‘particle’, and others have all been added
to the text based on a particular historical interpretation of it. The idea that Lucretius subscribed to a world of discrete particles called atoms is therefore both a projection of Epicurus, who used the Greek word atomos, and a retroaction of modern scientific mechanism on to De Rerum Natura. As such, Lucretitus’ writings have been crushed by the weight of his past and his future at the same time.
In this book I argue that Lucretius rejected entirely the notion that things emerged from discrete particles. To believe otherwise is to distort the original meanings of the Latin text as well as the absolutely enormous poetic apparatus he summoned to describe the flowing, swirling, folding, and weaving of the flux of matter. Although Lucretius rejected the term atomus, he remained absolutely true to one aspect of the original Greek meaning of the word, ἄτομος (átomos, ‘indivisible’), from ἀ- (a-, ‘not’) + τέμνω (témnō, ‘I cut’). Being is not cut up into discrete particles, but is composed of continuous flows, folds, and weaves. Discrete ‘things’ [rerum] are composed of corporeal flows [corpora] that move together [conflux] and fold over themselves [nexus] in a woven knotwork [contextum]. For Lucretius, things only emerge and have their being within and immanent to the flow and flux of matter in motion. Discreteness is a product of continuous, uncut, undivided motion and not the other way around.
Secondly, for Lucretius, the material flows of being are not necessarily observable as such. Material flows never appear as discrete, observable or empirical particles. Material flows [corpora], he writes, are always just below the level of observation. This is because observation only notes discrete composites [rerum] and not the constitutive flows that produce the discrete product. Since material flows are fundamentally immanent to the constitutive kinetic flow which produces things, in principle one never finds a corpora but only an infinite corporeal flow as the material condition of any discrete composite or thing.
Thirdly, instead of a mechanistic causality between atoms, we find in Lucretius a theory of stochastic or pedetic motion inherent in matter itself. Matter is not moved by an external will or force, but by itself. It is the source of its own motion. Matter by its very nature is not a predictable mechanism. It is fundamentally turbulent, disordered, and chaotic. But from this turbulent motion it also produces order and stability through the folding, circulation, and knotting of flows. Matter is therefore onto- and morpho-genetic." (pp.10-12)
"My thesis here is not that Lucretius’ theory of matter and the quantum field theory of matter are strictly identical, or that one is derived from or legitimated by the other, but that they are historically compatible and mutually illuminating in the way that atomism once was with classical physics." (p.14)
"Karl Marx (1818–83) and Henri Bergson (1859–1941) are the only two philosophers to have remained committed to the fundamentally stochastic nature of matter and the ontological primacy of motion." (note 17 p.16)
-Thomas Nail, Lucretius I: An Ontology of Motion, Edinburgh University Press, 2018, 281 pages.
https://fr.1lib.fr/book/5459116/c6fa71?dsource=recommend
https://fr.1lib.fr/book/5658888/ab6bb1
Dernière édition par Johnathan R. Razorback le Sam 2 Oct - 12:45, édité 2 fois
