Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-6bb9c88b65-vmslq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-07-24T08:15:07.766Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Chapter 3 - Cosmos

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 June 2025

Matthew Calarco
Affiliation:
California State University, Fullerton
Get access

Summary

Protagoras was really and truly having us on when he made ‘Man the measure of all things’—Man, who has never really known his own measurements.

—Michel de Montaigne

The Nature of Things

“The poets lie too much”—except, perhaps, the ancient Roman poet Titus Lucretius Carus. Although he admits to rimming the cup of his lessons with honey to take some of the edge off his austere message, Lucretius sees it as his task in his six-book poem, De rerum natura, to provide readers with a forthright and truthful account of the cosmos and the place of human beings within it. As a disciple of the early Greek philosopher Epicurus, Lucretius maintains that our anxieties about life and fears surrounding death are due to patently false superstitions about vengeful gods intent on causing trouble for us in this life and in the afterlife. The aim of philosophy as Lucretius sees it is to dispel “our terrors and our darknesses of mind” by giving us “insight into nature” and a schema of “systematic contemplation” that can help us understand who we really are and how the world truly works.

On Lucretius's account, the universe is constituted only by material particles and the void of empty space. The individual things we see around us are comprised of such particles of varied sizes and sorts and are brought together by chance to form relatively stable (but not invariant) patterns of existence and relation. While the individuals, groups, and patterns that form in nature and the cosmos are subject to change and destruction, the particles themselves are indestructible. Human souls are also, according to Lucretius, built from these same particles and, hence, are subject to the same processes of constitution and destruction. Our souls do not survive us after death and thus cannot be subject to punishment by the gods for anything we do in this life. Furthermore, if there are any gods, they would, Lucretius believes, be utterly uninterested in human affairs. The gods control neither the constitution and destruction of assembled particles nor the vicissitudes of human affairs; both realms unfold according to largely deterministic forces as well as random swerves from that predictable order.

Information

Type
Chapter
Information
How Not to Be Human
The Inhumanist Philosophy of Robinson Jeffers
, pp. 47 - 62
Publisher: Anthem Press
Print publication year: 2024

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Accessibility standard: Unknown

Accessibility compliance for the PDF of this book is currently unknown and may be updated in the future.

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

  • Cosmos
  • Matthew Calarco, California State University, Fullerton
  • Book: How Not to Be Human
  • Online publication: 14 June 2025
Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

  • Cosmos
  • Matthew Calarco, California State University, Fullerton
  • Book: How Not to Be Human
  • Online publication: 14 June 2025
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Cosmos
  • Matthew Calarco, California State University, Fullerton
  • Book: How Not to Be Human
  • Online publication: 14 June 2025
Available formats
×