Lucretius in the European Enlightenment

17 ERIC BAKER Lucretius in the European Enlightenment To characterise Lucretius’ impact on the age of the Enlightenment is a daunting task. Virtually every major figure of the period was in some way influenced by Lucretius, and many of these engagements represent a complex, often polemically charged dialogue with previous interpretations. However, it is possible to make out three relatively cohesive strands, which might be termed the ameliorist, the radical and the aesthetic. In the first phase, the Newtonians and deists both English and French (such as Locke, Shaftesbury and Voltaire) seek to reconcile the secular authority of science with the concept of providence. Second comes the inevitable consequence of the tension between these two mutually antagonistic worldviews, for, once science had succeeded in accounting for the order of creation, God, as Laplace remarked to Napoleon, increasingly became an unnecessary hypothesis. Among those who helped to render that hypothesis superfluous, Bayle, Diderot and Hume represent the Lucretian critique of deist arguments from design, while Mandeville and Rousseau illustrate the use of the DRN for purposes of a more general social critique. The third strand can be seen as an attempt to negotiate the antagonism between Enlightenment progress and religious value. The focus here will fall chiefly on Kant, but the wider picture includes the work of Burke, Schiller, Rousseau and Goethe. Common to each of these three aspects of reception are the assumptions of naturalism, a philosophical attitude encompassing three main tenets: ‘(1) that the bounds of reality are circumscribed by the natural order; (2) that the natural order is the principal object of philosophical study; and (3) that some variety of empiricism is required in order to gain an understanding of the natural order’.1 Implicit in these tenets are the corollary notions that ‘there cannot exist any entities or events which lie, in principle, beyond the scope of scientific explanation’2 and most importantly ‘that the universe as such is neutral to human values and ideals’.3 Naturalism thus reinstates man 1 Zoll 1972: 210. 274 2 Danto 1967: 448. 3 Lamont 1947: 598. Lucretius in the European Enlightenment within the natural world rather than placing him above it. Human beings may be very clever animals, but they are still animals. The naturalistic outlook of the DRN found new relevance in the scientific and philosophical revolutions of the Enlightenment, when philosophers and others debated issues previously thought to fall within the purview of religion. It was in this context that Lucretius acquired a renewed relevance: in H. B. Nisbet’s words, ‘the Enlightenment’s increasing preoccupation with nature to the detriment of theology, and the immense popularity of didactic poetry as a means of disseminating the new knowledge, made his work more accessible than ever before’.4 The deist compromise We are accustomed to think of the eighteenth-century deists as having limited their use of Lucretius to rhetorical purposes. James Thomson’s ‘To the Memory of Sir Isaac Newton’ (1728) deftly transfers Lucretius’ sublime characterisation of Epicurus (DRN 1.62–79) to his great scientific contemporary: He, first of men, with awful wing pursued The comet through the long eliptic curve, As round innumerous worlds he wound his way; Till, to the forehead of our evening sky Returned the blazing wonder glares anew, And o’er the trembling nations shakes dismay.5 But there is no doubting the Christian basis of a poem which finishes by envisaging Newton’s resurrection in ‘the second life, | When time shall be no more’.6 Lucretius has been adopted for ornamental effect, not absorbed organically. On the other hand, the deistic conception of religion bears comparison with that of Lucretius. It is rationally justified and universally true, independent of any specific historical or even, ultimately, any scriptural basis – a religion, in other words, ‘without miracles, priestly hierarchies, ritual, divine saviors, original sin, chosen people, and providential history’.7 The great empiricist philosopher John Locke in his discussion of natural theology in The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695) wrote: ‘the works of Nature . . . sufficiently evidence a Deity; Yet the World made so little use of their Reason, that they saw him not’. This blindness is attributed in part to ‘fearful apprehensions’ which ‘gave them up into the hands of their priests, to fill their 4 6 5 Thomson 1897: ii, 177–8; cf. DRN 1.68–77. Nisbet 1986: 97. 7 Gay 1966: 373. Thomson 1897: ii, 182. 275 e r i c ba k e r heads with false notions of the Deity, and their worship with foolish rites, as they pleased’. Out of this error grew the later institutional encrustation of religion: ‘and what dread or craft once began, devotion soon made sacred, and religion immutable’.8 Locke’s theory of true and false religion turns out, then, to evince strong similarities to Lucretius’ theory. I shall return shortly to this derivation of institutionalised religion from fear. The very different figure of Voltaire was more explicit as to his affiliation with the Roman poet, styling himself a latter-day Lucretius in the Epı̂tre à Uranie (1722) and making liberal use of Lucretius’ arguments against religion throughout his life.9 He consistently and unequivocally praised DRN 3 on the materiality of the mind and the fictionality of the afterlife, and he composed a dialogue (Entre Lucrèce et Posidonius, 1756) placing Lucretius’ arguments on mortalism in the mouth of his own character. Nevertheless, he still professed a belief in the providential order of Newton’s God. He was, however, an empiricist by nature, and when it came to a conflict between doctrine and practice, it was most often the latter that won. The uneasy alliance of faith and reason of which Newton and Locke were so confident was already beginning to crumble when the great Lisbon earthquake of November 1755 struck. The timing – on the morning of All Saints Day, just as the churches of the city were full, and the city in festive array – was such as to shake the foundations of belief in providence around Europe. Never had a natural catastrophe aroused so much philosophical debate.10 It immediately called to mind Lucretius’ observation that earthquakes are evidence that the walls of the world will crack, and that the universe is devoid of justice and providential order (DRN 5.95–109, 1236–40; 6.596– 607). In the presence of such suffering, what possible good could come of further debating the theoretical niceties of its causality? That is the question Voltaire posed in Candide (1759), and the answer he gave drew heavily, in its substance as well as in its satirical modality, on the DRN. The specific target of Voltaire’s satire was the German idealist philosopher Leibniz, who had defended the notion of providence against Bayle’s critique in his Theodicy (1710). We first encounter Pangloss (i.e. Leibniz) in the opening chapter, delivering a lecture on ‘metaphysico-theologico-cosmonigology’ which establishes that ‘noses were formed to support spectacles’, legs ‘for the wearing of breeches’, and stones to be ‘made into castles’. Pangloss concludes: ‘those who have argued that all is well have been talking nonsense: they should have said that all is for the best’.11 Voltaire’s satire on 8 9 10 Locke 1999: 143. For a fuller overview of Voltaire’s use of Lucretius see Redshaw 1980. 11 Voltaire 1991: 2. See further Brightman 1919, Ray 2004 and Benjamin 1999. 276 Lucretius in the European Enlightenment providence harks back to Lucretius’ stinging critique of anthropomorphism in DRN 4, where he cautions against the assumption that nature provided our senses and limbs expressly ‘so that we might be able to do what is needful for life’ (4.830–1). The shield was designed in order to protect the body in combat, just as the bed and the drinking cup were invented to make life more convenient (4.846–50): such innovations ‘may well be supposed to have been invented for the purpose’ (4.851–2). But to argue by analogy that just as a clock presupposes a clock-maker, so too with creation, would be what Lucretius calls ‘distorted reasoning’ (4.832). The anthropomorphic projection of the logic of cultural invention onto nature recurs with such regularity throughout Candide that the reader becomes almost as weary as the protagonists and thus perhaps prepared to accept the bitter lesson with which the story breaks off. The allusion to the garden of Epicurus in the famous concluding line of the novel, ‘Il faut cultiver notre jardin’, is fairly clear.12 This particular garden differs from its Epicurean predecessor in some respects,13 but it is a good example of one of the things that make Enlightenment thought profoundly Lucretian: the notion, as Charles Taylor puts it, ‘that the metaphysical views which tie us to a larger moral order destroy our peace of mind . . . in the name of an illusion’.14 Pangloss is allowed to remain solely on condition that he refrain from all further speculation regarding matters irrelevant to their wellbeing. Martin (a figure based on Pierre Bayle) is the new sage, and his wisdom is predominantly practical in orientation: the pressing concerns are the enjoyment of attainable goods, here and now. There is just a glimmer of hope that tranquillity might still be possible. But we will see much less attenuated promises of ataraxia in a later phase of Lucretianism. Radical critique Earlier surveys of Lucretius’ literary influence15 tend to assume that rhetorical appropriations of the DRN to the end of celebrating the divine book of nature and the feelings of awe and reverence it inspired constituted his major Enlightenment contribution. Today we must accept that ‘in their earnest rancour against religion the philosophes resembled no one quite so much as Lucretius’16 and that the basis of that resemblance was methodological and conceptual as well as rhetorical. The deists’ attempt to reconcile the dogmas of faith with the demands of reason was no match for the rapidly mounting 12 15 16 13 See Redshaw 1980: 40–2. 14 Taylor 1989: 345. See Fletcher 1978. Fusil 1928, Fusil 1930, Mayo 1934, Hadzsits 1963, Fleischmann 1963. Gay 1966: 371. 277 e r i c ba k e r assaults on the notion of design, beginning with the French sceptic Pierre Bayle’s Various Thoughts on the Comet of 1680 (1682), the conceptual basis of which, like ‘every psychological discussion of the origins of religion’ in the eighteenth century, closely followed Book 5 of the DRN, the ‘most magnificent ancient expression of the fear-theory’.17 Bayle was one of the first to take up the Lucretian critique of the anthropomorphic projection of purpose and agency onto the inexplicable events of nature, emphasising not so much the institution of religion as the psychology that made the institution possible. Bayle continued his assault on design in his Dictionnaire historique et critique (1695–7, enlarged 1702). By approaching religion with the same rigour Newton had applied to celestial mechanics, he seemed to pronounce the prophecy that the deists were later unwittingly to fulfil: he made ‘the biblical God vanish into the natural world that is in principle subject to the analytical science of physicists and philosophers’.18 Moreover, Bayle’s Dictionnaire provided the model – and in many cases, much of the material – on which the later Encyclopédie of the philosophes was based. This project’s chief editor as well as contributor was Denis Diderot, one of the Enlightenment’s most outspoken Lucretians. In 1746 he published his Philosophical Thoughts, the motto of which is drawn from the DRN: E tenebris autem quae sunt in luce tuemur (‘Now we see out of the dark what is in the light’, 4.337). This work, largely a vindication of the Lucretian view of nature devoid of purpose, was one of Diderot’s most popular, attracting sufficient attention to be condemned by the Paris parliament to destruction at the hands of the official hangman. Diderot’s difficulties with the authorities came to a head with his next publication, The Letter on the Blind and the Deaf, 1749. Two weeks after it was issued, Diderot was arrested and imprisoned, and it is not difficult to express the reason in terms of its Lucretianism: ‘The Lettre sur les aveugles poses a hypothetical universe in undisguisedly Epicurean-Lucretian garb, from which all dogma and the purposeful design of a Christian-Aristotelian universal dualism are excluded.’19 The philosophical context of the Letter concerns Locke’s sensationist notion that all ideas are derived from, and entirely dependent upon, sense experience (as opposed to Descartes’ notion of innate ideas). Diderot’s heresy consisted in the suggestion that the very idea of God is also a product of the senses, and his demonstration of this thesis relies almost entirely on Lucretius. Towards the close of the Letter Diderot stages an encounter between a Protestant minister and the blind Cambridge mathematician, Nicholas Saunderson, set in the circumstances of the latter’s impending death. The clergyman begins 17 Manuel 1959: 145–6. 278 18 Bartlett 2001: 12. 19 Schmidt 1982: 200. Lucretius in the European Enlightenment by ‘haranguing on the wonders of nature’, to which the blind mathematician curtly responds: ‘Think, if you choose, that the design which strikes you so powerfully has always subsisted, but allow me my own contrary opinion.’ Against the minister’s deist view, Saunderson asserts that ‘if we went back to the origin of things and scenes and perceived matter in motion and the evolution from chaos, we should meet with a number of shapeless creatures, instead of a few creatures highly organized’.20 Saunderson’s side of the argument is stitched together from several passages in DRN 5.21 His repudiation of purpose and design is clearly Lucretian in origin: ‘How many faulty and incomplete worlds have been dispersed and perhaps form again, and are dispersed at every instant in remote regions of space . . . where motion continues and will continue to combine masses of matter until they have found some arrangement in which they may finally persevere?’ Against the notion of the immortal soul Saunderson pits the Lucretian notion of the immortality of matter, and against the providence of nature, its monstrosities – monstrosities such as himself: ‘Then, turning toward the clergyman, he added, “Look at me, Mr Holmes. I have no eyes. What have we done, you and I, to God, that one of us has this organ while the other has not?”’22 Diderot’s imprisonment left him understandably inclined to keep to himself productions such as D’Alembert’s Dream (1769), containing ‘more references and similarities to the De rerum natura than any other of Diderot’s works’,23 and in which the bantering tone and proselytism as well as the subject matter can justly be termed Lucretian. But the use of the DRN in undermining the deist notion of design was taken to even greater extremes in David Hume’s Natural History of Religion (1757), as well as the Dialogues on Natural Religion (1777), which like Le Rêve d’Alembert was hidden away and unpublished during Hume’s lifetime because of its radical implications. The Natural History of Religion expanded Bayle’s critique into a thoroughgoing naturalistic, psychological and historico-comparative analysis of the rise of religion. Bishop Warburton was quick to see the implications: Hume’s intention was ‘to establish naturalism, a species of atheism, instead of religion’.24 In the opening segment Hume unceremoniously dispenses with the notion of a primitive but rational and monotheistic religion: ‘The farther we mount up into Antiquity, the more do we find mankind plunged into polytheism. No marks, no symptoms of any more perfect religion.’ The common root of both pagan polytheism and Christian monotheism is found to lie in the tendency ‘to transfer to every object, those qualities, with which they are 20 23 21 For full details see Singh 1975. Diderot 1999: 70–2. Schmidt 1982: 246. For this work see also Gigandet 2002. 22 24 Diderot 1999: 72–3. Gay 1966: 409. 279 e r i c ba k e r familiarly acquainted, and of which they are intimately conscious’. Many of Hume’s remarks, moreover, show conspicuous parallels with Diderot’s Letter. It is the human fear of the inexplicable that leads to religious worship: ‘A monstrous birth excites his curiosity, and is deemed a prodigy. It alarms him from its novelty; and immediately sets him a trembling, and sacrificing and praying.’ Hence the origin of religion lies precisely in the lack of insight into those ‘unknown causes’ that are ‘the constant object of our hope and fear’.25 Throughout Hume’s anatomy of the passions and moral sentiments, ‘his sources are classical, and mainly Epicurus and Lucretius’.26 What fuels Hume’s animus towards what he ironically characterises as ‘comfortable views’ is the same scorn of organised religion that animated Lucretius: ‘What so pure as some of the morals, included in some theological systems? What so corrupt as some of the practices, to which these systems give rise?’ Deism, taken to its logical conclusion, culminates in scepticism: ‘Doubt, uncertainty, suspense of judgment appear the only result of our most accurate scrutiny, concerning the subject.’ Instead we should ‘enlarge our view, and opposing one species of superstition to another, set them a quarrelling; while we ourselves, during their fury and contention, happily make our escape into the calm, though obscure, regions of philosophy’.27 The Lucretian strain of Hume’s naturalism is more explicit in his coup de grâce to deism, the Dialogues on Natural Religion. Here, each fictional speaker represents one of three opposed positions: Cleanthes the philosophical deist, Demea the dogmatic theist, and Philo the sceptic (generally assumed to personify Hume). It is Philo who consistently, and often explicitly, uses Lucretius to undermine the religious positions of his opponents. Cleanthes, for instance, presents the conventional deist position: ‘The curious adapting of means to ends, throughout all nature, resembles exactly, though it much exceeds, the productions of human contrivance – of human design, thought, wisdom, and intelligence.’ It is on the basis of ‘the rules of analogy’ that Cleanthes asserts ‘that the Author of nature is somewhat similar to the mind of man’, and Philo is quick to expose the underlying fallacy of anthropomorphism.28 Just as Lucretius stresses the faults of the natural world for antiprovidentialist purposes (esp. 5.195ff., tanta stat praedita culpa), so too Hume: ‘This world, for aught he [the providentialist] knows is very faulty and imperfect . . . and was only the first rude essay of some infant deity who afterwards abandoned it, ashamed of his lame performance.’29 And when 25 28 Hume 1956: 23–9. Hume 1948: 17–18. 280 26 Taylor 1989: 345. Hume 1948: 18. 29 27 Hume 1956: 76–9. Lucretius in the European Enlightenment Cleanthes has recourse to the standard deist device of revelling in nature’s grandeur – ‘Look round this universe. What an immense profusion of beings, animated and organised, sensible and active! You admire this prodigious variety and fecundity’ – the joyous exclamation immediately collapses when contrasted with the state of man in political society: ‘But inspect a little more narrowly these living existences, the only beings worth regarding. How hostile and destructive to each other! How insufficient all of them for their own happiness! How contemptible or odious to the spectator!’30 It is not surprising that the concluding part of Hume’s Dialogues, unlike that of the Natural History, seems preoccupied with the problem of melancholy. The contribution of the DRN to the Enlightenment critique of religion extended to more general, but equally radical, forms of social critique. The account of the origins of human society and culture in DRN 5 played an important role in Bernard de Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees (first published as The Grumbling of the Hive, 1705). The crux of the Fable’s lesson is that human nature in the state of political society is driven by greed, ambition and the desire for recognition, rather than rational calculation (as was the case in Locke’s social contract theory) or Christian morality. And the basic premiss of this strikingly modern critique – it anticipates in many respects Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals – was Lucretius’ derivation of the social contract from the degeneration of the pre-political compact of friendship, caused by avarice and treachery: ‘mankind, tired of living in violence, was fainting from its feuds, and so readier to submit to statutes and strict rules of law’ (5.1145–7). The same Lucretian elements that served Mandeville as a means of exposing the hypocrisy of Enlightenment civilisation are taken up by Rousseau in his contribution to the debate occasioned by the Lisbon earthquake, the Discourse on the Origin and the Foundations of Inequality among Men (1755), but to very different ends.31 The dark sarcasm of Mandeville’s tone resembles that of Voltaire: he has no illusions regarding human nature, only a desire to force us to acknowledge the inequality on which our way of life is premised, so that it may be better managed. There is, in other words, no hope for change. But change is for Rousseau the entire point of his painful demonstration of the wrong path on which civilisation has set out, and Lucretius’ representation of the pre-political state of society serves Rousseau as an ideal. Like Lucretius, Rousseau criticises civilised society as ‘the realm of false opinions, unnatural passions, and aggravated fears, all of which 30 31 Hume 1948: 79. The influence of Lucretius on this work and others by Rousseau was recognised from early on: for bibliography see Gourevitch 2000: n. 83. 281 e r i c ba k e r are incompatible with genuine happiness, with natural satisfaction, with unspoiled pleasure’.32 Indeed, Gordon Campbell’s recent characterisation of Epicurean ethics as indicative of ‘a deeply ambiguous view of civilisation itself’, as being a ‘stop-gap’ only ‘necessary because of present-day human injustice . . . caused by the fear of death and by religion’,33 summarises Lucretius’ influence on the Second Discourse. Like Rousseau, Lucretius conjured forth the image of ‘a naturally occurring just state in the past’ which might be recovered, though ‘not through the further development of the contrivances of civilization, but through the embracing of Epicureanism’.34 The source of alienation for Rousseau, as for Lucretius, lies in ‘vanity and pride, a concern for and a dependency on the opinions of other men, an ambitious desire for superiority . . . and in consequence the unlimited desire for things that are not by nature good, but are merely goods in the (misguided) opinions of others’.35 All these points of commonality have been noted also with regard to Mandeville, who in addition adopted a view of the origin of language anticipated in the DRN.36 Aesthetics and ataraxia By the second half of the eighteenth century the transition was largely complete from Descartes’s spiritual self, independent of nature and body and supplied at birth with innate ideas, to Locke’s conception of the self as a tabula rasa reliant on sensation. The naturalist, Lucretian explanation of the origins of society and religion had rendered deist arguments from design quaint. However, while the DRN had served the needs of the Enlightenment in its destructive phase so well, it had little to offer the constructive phase it had helped to usher in by liberating humanity from the shackles of superstition and fear. The ever-increasing speed with which scientific advances were changing the world made Lucretius’ quietism seem a dubious proposition. Was the best one could hope for really only peace of mind and freedom from pain? Could we not better achieve that goal by the untrammelled pursuit of science and technology? Indeed, was it not our duty to take the mastery of nature as far as possible in the hope of alleviating suffering and maximising comfort, pleasure and happiness? As Hans Blumenberg has argued, the persistence of Lucretius’ apolitical individualism and passivist ethics came to be perceived as a threat during this time of transition. The original meaning of the Lucretian topos of shipwreck, Blumenberg notes, was that seafaring was a violation of nature; ‘what drives 32 35 Nichols 1976: 199. Nichols 1976: 199. 282 33 36 34 Campbell 2003: 14. Campbell 2003: 14. For the latter see Hundert 1987, Hundert 1995. Lucretius in the European Enlightenment man to cross the high seas is at the same time what drives him to go beyond the boundary of his natural needs’, and ‘the crime of seafaring punishes itself through the fear of mighty powers to which man subjects himself’. In the later, constructive phase of the Enlightenment, by contrast, the shipwreck came to be understood as ‘the price that must be paid in order to avoid that complete calming of the sea winds that would make all worldly commerce impossible’. It is trade and technology – not the salvation of the individual through the attainment of ataraxia – that is now the goal: ‘Shipwreck is no longer the extreme image of the human situation in nature . . . It is the task of technology, of science, to deal with the problem of steering the ship.’37 Blumenberg detects a move away from the Lucretian assumptions in Voltaire, culminating in Voltaire’s comment on DRN 2 in his article on ‘Curiosity’ in the Dictionnaire philosophique. Here Voltaire is concerned to refute Lucretius’ claim that the pleasure derives from the gap between one’s own security and the peril of others: I ask your pardon, Lucretius! I suspect that you are here as mistaken in morals as you are always mistaken in physics. In my opinion it is curiosity alone that induces people to hasten to the shore to see a vessel in danger of being overwhelmed in a tempest.38 Voltaire substitutes the pleasure of satisfying curiosity for the pleasure the DRN had described, in accordance with the Enlightenment imperative of the acquisition of knowledge, to be understood in the Baconian sense as power. The pleasure of ataraxia has yielded to the pleasure of power. But another shift in the meaning of the shipwreck takes place diametrically opposite to the Enlightenment equation of knowledge with power. For those convinced that science and technology might eventually one day reveal ‘the true springs and causes of every event’ – not in the Epicurean but in the modern, Newtonian sense of science – the goal is to eradicate not the fear, but the very reality of the threat itself. That is why Voltaire insists that sympathy is motivated by the drive to knowledge: passion is to serve the interests of enlightenment and progress. (For Hume, it was precisely the other way around: ‘Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions.’)39 Lucretius’ reception in the latter half of the eighteenth century needs to be understood within the context of these competing paradigms. Neither the Enlightenment subordination of passion to knowledge nor the consequent degradation of aesthetic experience to a self-indulgent pleasure satisfied those who saw aesthetic experience as a source of value in itself, and 37 38 Blumenberg 1997: 10–11, 29, 41. 39 Hume 1981: 415. Voltaire 1962: 365. 283 e r i c ba k e r their dissatisfaction took on two opposed forms with respect to Lucretius. For those who looked to literature as a surrogate for moral values, and for anything else that cannot be comprehended from a purely rational perspective – history, tradition, the unique destiny and dignity of the human species – Lucretius was a threat of the first order. Edmund Burke and Friedrich Schiller are prominent representatives of this type of response. By contrast, those who sought to preserve the autonomy of moral as well as literary experience (Kant, Goethe, Schopenhauer) view Lucretius as more a model than a threat. Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757/9) was written in response to the privileging of theoretical knowledge over feeling (of Locke’s Essay over Milton’s Paradise Lost). Burke viewed Lucretius as complicitous in the rationalist tendency to declare everything that cannot be clearly understood and explained – such as the experience of the sublime – to be devoid of all value. But Lucretius was an even greater threat than those who, like Locke, flatly denied the value of literature, for Lucretius had suggested that it was possible to generate the highest and most intense of feelings, the sublime feeling of the diuina uoluptas (3.28) traditionally attributed to God, solely by the revelation of nature’s law – a nature, moreover, that is completely devoid of purpose or design. To reassert the authority of the feeling of sympathy over the authority of scientific knowledge, or self-interested pleasure, Burke argues that its true source lies in the theological tradition of Christianity. While he acknowledges that ‘Lucretius is a poet not to be suspected of giving way to superstitious terrors’, he suggests that his representation of Epicurus as ‘overcast with a shade of secret dread and horror’ (Lucretius’ diuina uoluptas is cited as support) testifies not to the greatness of the intellect of man, but to the presence of the divine in nature: ‘In the scripture, whenever God is represented as appearing or speaking, every thing terrible in nature is called up to heighten the awe and solemnity of the divine presence. The psalms, and the prophetical books, are crowded with instances of this kind.’40 We take pleasure in the spectacle of shipwreck, then, because it is part of a providential dispensation that we should feel sympathy with our fellows. Kant’s relationship to Epicurus and Lucretius has received little attention.41 This is curious considering his open declaration in his first major work, A General Natural History of the Heavens (Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels, 1755): ‘I will . . . not deny that the theory 40 41 Burke 1968: 69. But see Aubenque 1969, Fenves 2003, Thouard 2003 and pp. 177–83 above. 284 Lucretius in the European Enlightenment of Lucretius or of his predecessors (Epicurus, Leucippus and Democritus) has much similarity to mine.’42 Since Kant’s Critique of Judgement is addressed elsewhere in this volume, discussion here will be limited to Kant’s early aesthetics in the form of a relatively neglected text, the Observations on the Feelings of the Sublime and the Beautiful which appeared in 1764, just a few years after Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful. The similarity between the two titles was carefully calculated to draw attention to their dissimilarity: whereas Burke speaks of ‘ideas’ (presumably in the Lockean, sensationist sense), Kant speaks rather of ‘feelings’, and the distinction is crucial. In opposition to Burke, Kant seeks to preserve the autonomy of aesthetic feeling, independent of the categories of the understanding as well as the rigorous imperatives of morality. The aesthetic spectator of Kant’s early essay relies on the standard not of epistemology nor of morality. Rather, he approaches aesthetic feeling on its own terms: those of pleasure. Kant had a personal copy of the Observations made with interleaved folios in which he collected further notes over the course of several years, the Notes on the Observations. These provide the quickest path to his particular kind of aesthetic hedonism. ‘The sensitive soul at rest is the greatest perfection in speech and poetry’, he writes; ‘in society this cannot always be, but it is the final goal. And the same holds true even in marriages.’ Kant’s understanding of aesthetic pleasure as the ‘sensitive soul at rest’ is thus clearly bound up with the Epicurean ideal of ataraxia: ‘The equilibrium of feelings is the soul at rest. This flat surface is only troubled by passion.’43 Kant even goes so far as to entertain the heretical possibility (as Bayle and Shaftesbury had done before him) that this tranquil equipoise might provide a sufficient basis for morality: ‘One wonders if the soul at peace might not provide the basis from which the whole of morality could be deduced’44 (a notion from which he will later distance himself). The only aesthetic philosopher to have considered the possibility of such a form of the sublime is Santayana, who wrote: ‘If we may call the liberation of the self by the consciousness of evil in the world, the Stoic sublime, we may assert that there is also an Epicurean sublime, which consists in liberation by equipoise.’45 Although Goethe was inclined to view technically theoretical discourse with suspicion, he did not feel this way about Kant, whose first and third 42 43 45 Kant 1968: i, 233 (my translation). For a discussion of this work, see Shea 1986: 95–124. 44 Kant 1991: 114 (my translation). Kant 1991: 11 (my translation). Santayana 1955: 241. 285 e r i c ba k e r Critiques he read carefully and repeatedly.46 The assertion of human freedom from divine interference was the subject of his early ‘Prometheus’ Ode (1774), a poem ‘full of the Lucretian spirit of religious defiance’ which uses his satirical jibes at the gods (DRN 6.396–7, 421–2).47 Goethe himself conceded that he ‘believed more or less in the teachings of Lucretius’, and at one time even planned a book on the life of Lucretius.48 He was instrumental in bringing about the first German translation of the DRN, a splendid hexameter work undertaken by Karl Ludwig von Knebel and completed in 1827.49 Goethe’s scientific studies, which stand opposed to the modern, quantitative science of Newton (whose optics he sought to refute with his Theory of Colours), also show certain parallels with the DRN.50 Like Lucretius’ radical sensualism, Goethe’s naturalism aims at the mastery not of nature but of humanity’s relationship to nature. It is therefore not surprising that references to the Lucretian topos of shipwreck are frequent throughout his literary œuvre as well as his correspondence. These represent variations on the theme of a non-Stoic, hedonistic model of resignation, enabling Goethe to adopt a position of spectatorship with regard to life’s randomness.51 As with Kant and Hume, Goethe’s adaptation of the metaphorics of shipwreck consistently expresses a renunciatory stance towards the desire for design or providential order and thus is compatible with the Lucretian presentation itself. Although a plan to use Knebel’s translation as the basis of his own Lucretian poem for the modern age did not come to fruition, as a poet Goethe can be said to have achieved a close approximation to Lucretian verse in the short didactic work probably written at the turn of the century, the ‘Metamorphose der Tiere’.52 Here Goethe passes from zoology to broad generalisation on man and the cosmos, and in the former, much larger section, ‘there is scarcely a sentiment that does not have its counterpart in the DRN’.53 Ultimately, however, Goethe parts company with Lucretius, whose poem moves constantly between principles and illustrations rather than concluding with a climactic summation, and whose sombre reflections are not of a piece with Goethe’s expression of optimism and faith in mankind. 46 48 50 51 52 53 47 See further Nisbet 1986: 101, also the source of the quotation. See Molnár 1994. 49 Prandi 1993: 6. For Knebel’s translation see Nisbet 1988. For an in-depth investigation of Goethe’s science and its Lucretian leanings, see Tantillo 2002. See Blumenberg 1997: 58–9. See the full commentary on this poem in Nisbet 1986, on which the present discussion draws. Nisbet 1986: 108. 286 Lucretius in the European Enlightenment It is clear that secular ways of thinking in later eighteenth-century Europe often constitute responses to Lucretius whether pro or con. Naturally, no major thinker adopted Epicureanism wholesale, but it consistently had the effect of undermining received Christian doctrines. Several more minor figures did become unqualified philosophical materialists, including the French thinkers La Mettrie (L’Homme machine, 1748) and Baron d’Holbach (Système de la nature, 1770), and in Germany Lucretius’ translator Knebel and the eccentric August von Einsiedel (1754–1837), whose unpublished writings on atoms were used by Herder.54 Moreover, ‘when materialism finally came out into the open . . . its classical origins were still evident’.55 In a later generation, Karl Marx’s doctoral dissertation on Democritus and Epicurus would evince considerable attachment to Lucretius.56 We shall conclude here by glancing at Arthur Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Representation (1818), which may be said to represent the culmination of the radical as well as aesthetic lines of Lucretius’ reception. G. F. Else characterised the DRN as ‘an appeal to man to drop his hubris and become a spectator of the tragedy in which he is an actor. To the latter, death and failure in his own designs are terrible; to the former, who stands aside and sees the law as well as the passion, they are beautiful and justified.’57 That characterisation seems to fit remarkably well with Schopenhauer’s characterisation of the duality of the human condition: In respect of this withdrawal into reflection, [man] is like an actor who has played his part in one scene, and who takes his place in the audience until he must appear again. In the audience he quietly looks on at whatever may happen, even though it be the preparation of his own death (in the play); but then he again goes on the stage, and acts and suffers as he must.58 If the sole means of (temporary) salvation lie in brief respite from the endless cycle of need, want and suffering, then the enduring popular image of Schopenhauer as an inveterate pessimist may be warranted. However, considering what was about to come of all the hopes of the Enlightenment, one might question whether the pessimism was not mixed with prophecy. At a time when the optimistic faith in science was reaching its peak, Schopenhauer’s Will, like Lucretius’ Nature, stands as a reminder that the control of nature through science and technology – the science of Mars – is always subject to the will, which is to say, to that indifferent and inhuman impulse that is nature. 54 57 55 Nisbet 1986: 102. See Dobbok 1957: 11. 58 Schopenhauer 1969: 85. Else 1930: 165. 56 See Prawer 1976: 27. 287 e r i c ba k e r Further reading Though somewhat technical and detailed for the general reader, Lange’s classic 1866 study is still a good antidote to the misleading view – prevalent in the works of Hadzsits, Mayo and Fleischmann – that the DRN played little or no role in the Enlightenment. Blumenberg 1983 gives a detailed account of the Enlightenment shift regarding Lucretius’ image of the detached spectator. W. R. Johnson 2000: 79–102 is restricted to Polignac, Diderot and Voltaire but still represents one of the few more synoptic expositions of Lucretius’ role in Enlightenment thought. Nisbet 1986 is an excellent survey of his reception in Germany for the period. Kimmich 1993 provides a more extensive and detailed survey, although it is largely restricted to Epicurus. The rest of the relevant literature on Lucretius’ eighteenth-century reception consists of investigations of individual Enlightenment authors. On Diderot, particularly noteworthy for its extensiveness as well as contextualisation is Schmidt 1982. On Rousseau see Masters 1968: chs. 3–4, Vaughan 1982, Scott 1992 and Gourevitch 2000. On Goethe see Bapp 1926 and Nisbet 1986. Locke’s relationship to Epicureanism has been discussed by Smock 1946, Tuveson 1955/6, Jackson 1987 and N. Wood 1992. Taylor 1989: 345–9 remarks on Hume’s and Diderot’s reception of Lucretius. For Kant see Aubenque 1969, Shea 1986, Thouard 2003 and especially Fenves 2003: 10–13, 22–9. For Voltaire see Redshaw 1980. 288