What follows is part of my book review of Lucretius II: An Ethics of Motion.
In this book, Nail seems to be taking his views about Lucretius in the direction of a radical skepticism, and his commentary includes a Marxist commentary of De Rerum Natura and a critique of capitalism that is a bit forced.
It is fair to question capitalism, and to address issues of economics. That’s all perfectly legitimate. However, capitalism is based on liquidity and movement of assets, goods and money. If Nail believes that movement is the nature of things, is not this liquidity also natural?
Lucretian Anarchism
In page 56–while equating stasis, the state, statues, and katastematic, stable pleasure–Nail goes as far as setting instability and anarchy / statelessness as an arbitrary ideal … which would render us unstable. It’s not clear how Nail’s anarchism works in practice (is Somalia an ideal state-less society?), but Epicurean anarchism is not anti-state. It’s, at most, indifferent to the state. But in page 56 of Ethics of Motion we read:
If there is no state that has not fallen prey to classism and militarianism of some variety, then there is no state that Lucretius can ethically endorse.
No Lucretian source cited. Elsewhere, Nail equates the state with wealth acquisition (which is bad?), again claiming that Lucretius is anti-state. In a previous Twentieth message titled Better Be a Subject and at Peace, I cited the portion of the fifth book of De Rerum Natura where Lucretius explains that people grew tired of vengeful, anarchic violence and of the violence tied to fighting over power, and accepted the peace that comes with the yoke of the state. Here is the relevant portion:
For man grew weary: the life of violence
and hatred left him sick, and more disposed
freely to choose the yoke of law and statute.
For angered men kept calling for revenge
more savage than just law will now permit;
this made man sicken of life by violence. (DRN V.1136-1150)
… Better by far be subject, and at peace
than will to govern the world and hold a throne! (DRN V.1129-1130)
And so the idea that Lucretius would not support any state is not founded on the text and here, Lucretius is abiding by Epicurus’ Principal Doctrine 6.
In pages 58-59, Nail says Lucretius is against “anti-social individualism” … Where does Lucretius state this? Where does he say ethics is fundamentally collective, as Nail claims? It has always seemed to me that Epicurean philosophy does not accept this either-or logic Nail is applying. We are both individuals (Vatican Saying 14 accentuates our responsibility for our own happiness, and in On Moral Development Epicurus mentions the anticipation of moral responsibility as resting on individual agents) as well as social entities (several of the Principal Doctrines deal with mutual advantage), and ethics must attend to both.
If my readers are truly interested in a good Epicurean-compatible critique of capitalism and labor, I would direct you to the book On the inhumanity of religion.
Property as Theft
Neil takes huge interpretative liberties when he equates (in page 121) property and theft, where Lucretius is really saying that our life, our time, is borrowed (DRN 3.970-1). This equation is hard to reconcile with Philodemus’ discussions in On Property Management, which trace their origin to the founders’ doctrines on economics, on wealth, and on autarchy. Is Nail advocating having no property whatsoever? Is he willing to carry this out in his own life? Is this type of “utopian destitution” compatible with a pleasant life?
Philodemus of Gadara says that wealthy Epicurean friends should share the excess of their wealth with their friends. This is clear enough. Nail’s failure to explain WHO should abolish private property adds problems to his thesis. Should the state do this? Is he saying state communism is compatible with the nature of things? Would this state appropriation of all property not be an act that would require huge violence? If not the state, then who would abolish private property? It’s difficult for me, as a reader, to see the connection between theory and practice.
Collectivism in De Rerum Natura?
In page 134, Nail says “desire is collective”. He does not explain in what way desires are collective, so there is no real philosophical argument, only this statement. But we know from experience that desire happens in the body of individuals, and throughout the history of philosophy, politics, and anthropology, the tensions between the desires of the body and the demands of the collective have always been noted.
In page 135, Nail claims that matter is “always collective”. Not only does Lucretius not really speak in this manner or say this, but stressing the collective as if to diminish the individual seems arbitrary to me and strikes me as not based on the study of nature, but on political leanings. I say this as a proud leftist. I’m not opposed to leftist interpretations of any of our sources, but the interpretative liberties here are considerable. In page 137, Nail goes as far as re-defining the soul as collective:
The soul is not a merely imagined identity; it is a real, practical identity that gathers all the heterogeneous people into a single process (not state) of living and dying together.
No sources are cited for this statement, which is neither an Epicurean nor a Lucretian definition of the soul, which is material and individual. It’s hard to see how this relates to De Rerum Natura. If my readers want to read updated discussions on the physical, mortal soul from an Epicurean perspective, I would direct them to A Concrete Self, an essay that relates the Epicurean doctrine of the material soul to a wonderful essay by Serife Tekin titled Self-Evident.
The next essay will discuss Epicurean / Lucretian environmentalism.
