/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.18213181]

>Excited to read the Romans
>Hear good things about Lucretius
>Check out the wikipedia article on de rerum natura
>His insights are limited to boring premises beaten to death and taken for granted by post-modernists such as atomism, Darwinism, determinism, etc.
>Everyone from his contemporaries up to modern Latin-speaking Roman LARPers take him as a genius.
I don't get it. Is this boring shit supposed to inspire me or something? Should I go back to Dostoevsky?

[Anonymous No.18213188]

>>18213181
But anon, all of the premises you mentioned are based ...

[Anonymous No.18213189]

>>18213181
>I don't get it
Right, you don't. You're not tall enough for this ride.

[Anonymous No.18213213]

>>18213188
No they're not. Life is chaos, not the possibility of chaos, but chaos itself. This is not a bad thing because chaos can be serene as well. Lucretius is boring with muh atomism. Evolution is also boring because it takes us for animals. Determinism is also shit because of the first reason I wrote.
>>18213189
It is simply boring. I dislike people like you who mark intellectualism as the degree of endurance to boredom. I should be stimulated but I'm not.

[Anonymous No.18213215]

>>18213181
>atomism
based though

[Anonymous No.18213257]

>>18213213
>No they're not. Life is chaos, not the possibility of chaos, but chaos itself. This is not a bad thing because chaos can be serene as well. Lucretius is boring with muh atomism. Evolution is also boring because it takes us for animals. Determinism is also shit because of the first reason I wrote.
You're not tall enough for this ride.

[Anonymous No.18213267]

>>18213257
>the average height of men from the Italian peninsula being around 5'4" to 5'7"
Looks like I'm plenty tall kek.

[Anonymous No.18213283]

>>18213181
OP.

You should consider looking into this book. It actually goes into the discovery of Lucretius in the 15th century by Poggio Bracciolini and how Lucretius' ideas were actually competing with notions of Christianity, leading to its demise.

It puts a lot of Lucretius into context that is really necessary for a better understanding of the text.

[Anonymous No.18213294]

>>18213215
>atomism
>they actually act more like molecules but are unsplittable

[Anonymous No.18213317]

>>18213283
Do you mind typing out a quick summary? Sounds interesting.

[Anonymous No.18213360]

>>18213181
He was also a flat earther 300 years after Aristotle endorsed a round earth:

Admittedly, Lucretius never explicitly states that ‘the Earth is flat’. You need to understand the context of his ideas to realise that he believes it. Since the foundation of Epicurean natural philosophy is that everything is made up of tiny particles falling within a limitless void, that means there is no beginning or end to space or time, nor anything beyond the material world. Towards the end of book one of On the Nature of Things, we find Lucretius defending his contention that the Universe is infinite. He presents the splendid argument that, if it had a boundary, then all the falling atoms would collect at the bottom. From this, it is clear that Lucretius respected the intuitive idea that there are absolute directions of up and down. By itself, this makes a globular Earth unfeasible because, unless perched right on the top, we’d slip off the sides.

Lucretius then explains that it’s an error to think that the Earth is at the centre of the Universe because, as the Universe is infinite, it can’t have a centre. He’s arguing against ideas found in Aristotle’s lectures On the Heavens, which contain the earliest detailed arguments for a spherical Earth. Writing in the mid-300s BCE, Aristotle said that the Earth sits at the centre of the Universe, to where all heavy matter naturally travels. So, for Aristotle, falling downwards means moving towards the centre of the Earth, while for Lucretius is means drifting in an arbitrary linear direction. It’s immediately clear why Aristotle thinks that the Earth is round, since heavy objects fall towards it in all directions. In contrast, Lucretius ridicules the idea that anything could be on the other side of the world because it would fall off into the vastness of space. He didn’t just reject a spherical Earth, he thought it was daft.

In a way, he was right about that. Although we condemn flat-Earth thinking as an example of foolish ignorance, a spherical Earth is actually counterintuitive. It’s such a radical idea that it has been ‘discovered’ only once, in Athens after 400 BCE. The concept of the Earth being round didn’t appear in any other civilisation. India and the Islamic world learnt it from the Greeks, while China had to wait until the Jesuits arrived in the 16th century and turned the Chinese view of the Universe upside down. Still, at the time that Lucretius was writing in the 50s BCE, educated Greeks and Romans seem to have been familiar with the true shape of the Earth, so the flat-Earth cosmology of On the Nature of Things was quite eccentric for its time.

https://aeon.co/essays/lucretius-the-flat-earth-and-the-malaise-of-modern-science

[Anonymous No.18213386]

>>18213267
Lying on an anonymous image board