01 Jan 12

http://www.well.com/user/garyf/Swerve_shortened2.htm

Death is nothing to us. To spend your existence in the grip of anxiety about death, he wrote, is mere folly. It is a sure way to let your life slip from you incomplete and unenjoyed

The stuff of the universe, Lucretius proposed, is an infinite number of atoms moving randomly through space, like dust motes in a sunbeam, colliding, hooking together, forming complex structures, breaking apart again, in a ceaseless process of creation and destruction. There is no escape from this process

There is no master plan, no divine architect, no intelligent design

What human beings can and should do, he wrote, is to conquer their fears, accept the fact that they themselves and all the things they encounter are transitory, and embrace the beauty and the pleasure of the world

the scientific vision of the world—a vision of atoms randomly moving in an infinite universe—was in its origins imbued with a poets sense of wonder. Wonder did not depend on gods and demons and the dream of an afterlife; in Lucretius it welled up out of a recognition that we are made of the same matter as the stars and the oceans and all things else. And this recognition was the basis for the way he thought we should live our lives

for long centuries monasteries had been virtually the only institutions that cared about books

all monks were expected to know how to read

In the course of the vicious Gothic Wars of the mid-sixth century and their still more miserable aftermath, the last commercial workshops of book production folded, and the vestiges of the book market fell apart. Therefore, again almost inadvertently, monastic rules necessitated that monks carefully preserve and copy those books that they already possessed

Between the sixth century and the middle of the eighth century, Greek and Latin classics virtually ceased to be copied at all

there was a unique moment in history, between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius, when man stood alone

in Lucretius view, Epicurus, who had died more than two centuries earlier, was nothing less than the saviour. When human life lay groveling ignominiously in the dust, crushed beneath the grinding weight of superstition

you needed only to comprehend that there is a hidden natural explanation for everything that alarms or eludes you. That explanation will inevitably lead you back to atoms. If you can hold on to and repeat to yourself the simplest fact of existence—atoms and void and nothing else, atoms and void and nothing else, atoms and void and nothing else—your life will change

Liberated from superstition, Epicurus taught, you would be free to pursue pleasure

fear that to maximize pleasure and to avoid pain were in fact appealing goals and might plausibly serve as the rational organizing principles of human life. If they succeeded in doing so, a whole set of time-honored alternative principles—sacrifice, ambition, social status, discipline, piety—would be challenged, along with the institutions that such principles served

If you grant Epicurus his claim that the soul is mortal, wrote Tertullian, the whole fabric of Christian morality unravels

In one of the great cultural transformations in the history of the West, the pursuit of pain triumphed over the pursuit of pleasure

a shared mania, one whose origin can be traced back to Petrarch, who, a generation before Poggios birth, had made the recovery of the cultural heritage of classical Rome a collective obsession

The papal court had, to serve its own needs, brought into being a class of rootless, ironic intellectuals. These intellectuals were committed to pleasing their masters, on whose patronage they utterly depended, but they were cynical and unhappy

the question with which Poggio and others in Rome grappled was how they could retain even the shreds of a moral sensibility while living and working in the court of this particular pope

Notwithstanding the assurances that the pope, the council, and the emperor had given him, Hus was almost immediately vilified and denied the opportunity to speak in public. On November 28, barely three weeks after he arrived, he was arrested on order of the cardinals and taken to the prison of a Dominican monastery on the banks of the Rhine.

All living beings, from plants and insects to the higher mammals and man, have evolved through a long, complex process of trial and error

The universe was not created for or about humans

The human soul is made of the same material as the human body

there can be no posthumous punishments or rewards. Life on this earth is all that human beings have

You will not care, because you will not exist

There are entirely natural explanations for such phenomena as lightning and earthquakes

The highest goal of human life is the enhancement of pleasure and the reduction of pain

A failure to recognize the boundaries of these needs leads human beings to a vain and fruitless struggle for more and more

Understanding the nature of things generates deep wonder

All speculation—all science, all morality, all attempts to fashion a life worth living—must start and end with a comprehension of the invisible seeds of things: atoms and the void and nothing else

Savonarolas warnings corresponded to authentic concerns: the set of convictions articulated with such poetic power in Lucretius poem was virtually a textbook—or, better still, an inquisitors—definition of atheism

Thomas More took the engagement with Epicureanism much further in his most famous work, Utopia

imagine those conditions that would make it possible for an entire society to make the pursuit of happiness its collective goal

fear might be eliminated in the philosophers garden, among a tiny, enlightened elite, but it cannot be eliminated from an entire society, if that society is to be imagined as inhabited by the range of people who actually exist in the world as it has always been known

Bruno: There is an order in the universe, but it is one built into the nature of things, into the matter that composes everything, from stars to men to bedbugs. Nature is not an abstract capacity, but a generative mother, bringing forth everything that exists

Bruno might have been the first person in more than a millennium to grasp the full force, at once philosophical and erotic, of Lucretius hymn to Venus. The universe, in its ceaseless process of generation and destruction and regeneration, is inherently sexual

The universe is not all about us, about our behavior and our destiny; we are only a tiny piece of something inconceivably larger. And that should not make us shrink in fear. Rather, we should embrace the world in wonder and gratitude and awe

profound affinity between Lucretius and Montaigne

Montaigne articulates what it feels like from the inside to think, write, live in an Epicurean universe

skepticism about the restless striving for fame, power, and riches

Your death is part of the order of the universe; it is part of the life of the world

Above all, he noted again and again, the soul is corporeal

Atomism absolutely denied the key distinction between substance and accidents

Atomism, explained the inquisitor, is incompatible with the second canon of the thirteenth session of the Council of Trent, the session that spelled out the dogma of the Eucharist

Isaac Newton, in what has been called one of the most influential pieces of writing in the history of science, declared himself an atomist, making what appears to be a direct allusion to the title of Lucretius poem

Lucretius materialism helped to generate and support the skepticism of the likes of Dryden and Voltaire and the programmatic, devastating disbelief expressed in Diderot, Hume, and many other Enlightenment figures.

The turn was toward a government whose end was not only to secure the lives and the liberties of its citizens but also to serve the pursuit of Happiness. The atoms of Lucretius had left their traces on the Declaration of Independence

I am, Jefferson wrote to a correspondent who wanted to know his philosophy of life, an Epicurean.