Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, vol. 10, no. 2, 2014
AFFIRMATIVE NATURALISM:
DELEUZE AND EPICUREANISM
Keith Ansell-Pearson
A naturalistic conception of things is a great work of imagination – greater, I
think, than any dramatic or moral mythology: it is a conception fit to inspire
great poetry, and in the end, perhaps, it will prove the only conception able to
inspire it. (Santayana)
ABSTRACT: In this essay I explore the nature of Deleuze’s commitment to an affirmative
naturalism that is based on certain Epicurean principles and insights. The essay is divided into
two main parts. In the first part I bring to light some of the key features of Lucretius’s great
poem on the nature of things, and I do so with the aid of Bergson and his reading of the
teaching as fundamentally melancholic. In the second part I switch my attention to Deleuze
and show how he links together physics and ethics as a way of providing an emancipatory and
affirmative philosophy of life and one that aims to defeat sadness. In the conclusion I return to
the question of melancholy and indicate how the problem might be best negotiated.
KEYWORDS; Naturalism; Epicureanism; Lucretius; Bergson; Deleuze; Melancholy; Sadness;
Joy; Ethics; Affirmation
In his lifetime Deleuze described himself as many things: an empiricist, a pluralist, a
pure metaphysician, and, the one that especially interests me, a naturalist. We shall
soon see what this commitment to naturalism entails. As a naturalist Deleuze marries
the philosophical endeavour to a novel re-working of ethics centred on the tasks of the
art of life. I say novel but Deleuze’s naturalistic-informed ethics has its anchor in the
likes of great naturalists such as the Epicurean Lucretius and Spinoza. His naturalism
fuses together the philosophy of nature and the philosophy of life where, he tells us,
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‘life’ is not simply an idea or a matter of theory but concerns a way of being, a style of
life, and a manner of living. For Deleuze, if philosophy has a use it is to be found in
the doctrine of the Epicureans, as well as in later thinkers such as Spinoza and
Nietzsche, namely, the creation of the free human being and an empirical education in
the art of living well. The object of naturalism – centred on both speculative and
practical aspects – is to distinguish in the case of human beings what belongs to nature
and what belongs to myth. This is why for Deleuze the first philosopher is a naturalist,
simply because he speaks of nature rather than the gods. This is what we might call an
Epicurean first principle.
Philosophy for Deleuze, then, is first and foremost practical philosophy and it
exists in its naturalist form or rendition to defeat sadness: it is an affirmative
naturalism. We shall see just what this entails and what it amounts to shortly. First, let
me provide a brief introduction to Lucretius and his remarkable poem De Rerum Natura.
I.
Let me begin with citing some lines from the work itself. I cite from the opening of
book two:
What joy it is, when out at sea the stormwinds are lashing the waters, to gaze
from the shore at the heavy stress some other man is enduring! Not that
anyone’s afflictions are in themselves a source of delight; but to realize from what
troubles you yourselves are free is joy indeed. What joy, again, to watch
opposing hosts marshalled on the field of battle when you yourself have no part
in their peril! But this is the greatest joy of all: to possess a quiet sanctuary,
stoutly fortified in the teaching of the wise, and to gaze down from that elevation
on others wandering aimlessly in search of a way of life, pitting their wits one
against another, disputing for precedence, struggling night and day with
unstinted effort to scale the pinnacles of wealth and power. O joyless hearts of
men! O minds without vision! How dark and dangerous the life in which this
tiny span is lived away! Do you not see that nature is barking for two things only,
a body free from pain, a mind released from worry and fear for the enjoyment of
pleasurable sensations? (II: 1-19).
In these lines Lucretius is being faithful to the core tenets of Epicurean teaching.
Philosophy for Lucretius is about attaining an elevated perspective on existence and
providing human beings with a special kind of joy. The immediate object is
pleasurable sensations of a stable and modest kind and the ultimate object is ataraxia
or tranquillity and imperturbability. Later in the book Lucretius will define
philosophy as a ‘rule of life’ (V: 10), the aim of which is to rescue life from existence
lived in ‘a stormy sea’, ‘so black a night’, and hence to learn how to live well (ibid.).
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Lucretius makes it clear that the superior mode of existence attained is a modest
existence, one enjoyed with a tranquil mind (V: 1119). This is not an aspect of the
teaching explicitly brought out by Deleuze in his reading of Lucretius, but it is
nonetheless presupposed by it. It is an aspect dwelled upon by Nietzsche when he is at
his most Epicurean, as in his middle period writings (1878-82). For Nietzsche,
Epicurus displays a voluptuous appreciation of existence that is supremely modest
(Nietzsche 1974: section 45), and the way of life that is lived is modest both in terms of
the kinds of pleasure to be pursued and satisfied and the expectations one has of one’s
brief sojourn on the planet. As Nietzsche writes in one especially succinct aphorism in
The Wanderer and His Shadow, ‘a tiny garden, figs, a bit of cheese, and three or four
friends besides: this was luxuriance for Epicurus’ (Nietzsche 2013: section 192). More
than this, Nietzsche notes that as an Epicurean one dies as if one has never lived,
exiting from life as if one had never entered it. And yet, Nietzsche also notes that as
the inventor of ‘heroic-idyllic philosophizing’ Epicurus is a figure who enduringly felt
that he existed in the world and the world existed in him (Nietzsche 2013: section 292).
For Lucretius, the object of philosophy is the cultivation of health and he speaks of
philosophy as a form of treatment that can be administered (IV: 22); it is a
therapeutics, one that has specific illnesses and afflictions to cure, notably the fear of
the active gods and the fear of death as well as the whole realm of superstition.
Lucretius thinks that his Roman brethren suffer from what he calls the ‘dead weight’ of
superstition and are haunted by the fear of eternal punishments after death. A
thoroughgoing and clear-sighted program of naturalism is needed in order to
emancipate the mind from subjection to fear and superstition. Several occasions in the
book Lucretius provides the following lines as a refrain of learning:
The dread and darkness of the mind cannot be dispelled by the sunbeams, the
shining shafts of day, but only by an understanding of the outward forms and
inner workings of nature (II: 59-62; see also III: 91-94).
We are not to ask of the universe ‘what does it mean?’, since it means nothing, there is
only the dance of the eternal return of atoms and the void; rather, we are to ask, ‘how
does it work?’ Lucretius writes in book five of his text:
So many atoms, clashing together in so many ways as they are swept along
through infinite time by their own weight, have come together in every possible
way and realized everything that could be formed by their combinations (V: 186190).
True piety for Lucretius, as an Epicurean, consists in the serene contemplation of such
a universe (V: 1203).
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Lucretius offers a naturalist program of philosophy that amounts for Deleuze to a
project of demystification and hence liberation. His is a philosophy of immanence:
nature is a self-producing positive power, eternally self-creating and self-destroying; the
elements postulated at the base of nature work bottom up, in which the diverse
products of nature are generated rather than assumed as already given (Johnson 2014:
73). The immanence at work is a radical one for it means that no ‘divine power’ has
created the universe (II: 181); that there is no ‘divine plan’ (V: 81); and that, I quote:
…our world has been made by nature through the spontaneous and casual
collision and the multifarious, accidental, random, and purposeless congregation
and coalescence of atoms whose suddenly formed combinations could serve on
each occasion as the starting point of substantial fabrics – earth and sea and sky
and the race of living creatures. On every ground, therefore, you must admit
that there exist elsewhere other clusters of matter similar to this one which the
ether clasps in ardent embrace (II: 1058-66).
We can note the influence of Epicurus on Lucretius: virtue is related to pleasure and
this pleasure consists in peace of mind, being the privilege of the sage. Epicurus has
understood that human beings have materially everything they need to live and more,
and yet humankind brings suffering upon itself, enslaving itself to superstition, fear,
and desire or the ‘deplorable lust for life’, as Lucretius calls it. We could reflect here
on the various paeans to Epicurus that structure the text, in which Epicurus is
presented as a noble saviour-like figure freeing human beings from the inauthentic life
– excessive pride, lust, aggression, self-indulgence, and indolence – and inspiring them
to a new way of life, including an ethics of refined egoism, as Nietzsche calls it, and the
cultivation of the self (see especially the opening of book six, the final book of the text).
However, in preparation for my turn to Deleuze, let me stress once again the
naturalism informing the ethical doctrine: it rids philosophy of supernatural
explanations with its scientific principles of nothing springing from nothing and
nothing ever being destroyed. The emphasis all the time is explaining phenomena
through natural causes, so lightning is to be explained in such terms and not as a
divine warning. Nothing springs from nothing since for anything to be created there is
required specific germs, a set of conditions, and time. As noted, the teaching has
radical aspects: for example, the soul is nothing more than matter and is subject to
death since it is made of subtle atoms scattered throughout the body, and is therefore
as material as the body and without which it cannot exist. Death is radical in its
finality and Lucretius is uncompromising in his account of this: it denotes the end of
our existence and yet is not to be feared for the reasons that Epicurus has provided
and that Lucretius rehearses in dramatic fashion in the denouement to book three of
the text.
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Such is the stark realism of his words on death that Nietzsche called the poet
‘sombre Lucretius’. Life is mortal, and death is immortal, says Lucretius. To none is
life given on freehold, but to all on lease. But we have nothing to fear from death
there is nothing sensory to experience: ‘One who no longer is cannot suffer, or differ in
any way from one who has never been born, when once this mortal life has been
usurped by death the immortal’ (III: 868-871). And yet human beings do live in
bondage to the fear of death and on account of this fear, ‘the life of misguided mortals
becomes a Hell on earth’ (III: 1023-4). Bergson is one thinker who holds that Lucretius
was not able to completely destroy belief in the immortality of the soul since this belief
is stronger than philosophical arguments. What he does develop though is insight into
one of the causes of the belief, namely, ‘the instinctive tendency which every living
being has to perpetuate itself indefinitely in time’ (Bergson 1959: 19). Indeed, as I have
noted, Lucretius speaks at the very close of book three of the text of the lust for life as
‘deplorable’ since it ‘holds us trembling in bondages to uncertainties and dangers’,
with the ‘unquenchable thirst for life keeping us always on the gasp’ (III: 1084-5)
(Denique tanto opere in dubiis trepidare periclis quae mala nos subigit vitai tanta
cupido?).
For Lucretius, then, a fundamental reformation of the human mind and its
attachment to life is required, and this is the task he reserves for philosophy.
Knowledge serves to show us that we count for practically nothing in the universe
since we are but a fortuitous combination of elements that decays just like everything
else alive. Having stated this, though, we know that for Lucretius there is a deep joy to
be had from this naturalism: this is the elevated joy of the sage who imbued with great
truth calmly awaits a death that will reduce him to nothingness: he possesses supreme
knowledge and yet at the same time savours the sweetest joys that a human being is
privileged to experience.
As far as the ethical task is concerned, the aim is to raise ourselves to serene
regions for whoever complains of the nature of the universe and their existence in it,
gritting their teeth, is ignorant of the true nature of things. We need, therefore, to
resign ourselves to certain facts:
That the body of necessity must waste away.
That old age is forced to succeed youth by an eternal law.
That beings necessarily reproduce at the expense of other beings.
That the movement of atoms is eternal and the formation of new worlds
continues eternally.
We do not need to marvel at the creation of life since the laws of matter are all
that is needed to explain everything.
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Finally, that humankind is not separate from nature and is not in any way a
special case or exception to the laws of material existence. It is destined to perish
since, as a result of the movement of atoms, everything will one day disintegrate.
The atoms, converted into dust, will be drawn together again, and new
combinations of atoms will produce new worlds, and on it will go throughout
eternity.
Nietzsche, as I have noted, refers to the poet as the ‘sombre Lucretius’, and
Bergson holds that he produces a melancholic philosophy of nature and of life; indeed,
for Bergson this is where Lucretius departs from his great master, Epicurus. For
Bergson, the science of Lucretius is fundamentally a melancholic one. Indeed, it’s only
the French text that makes it clear that Bergson conceives the poem as ‘profoundly
melancholic’ (mélancolie profonde) since the English translation from 1959 alters the order
of the original text, and it’s the point about melancholy that the text begins with and
indicates that this is Bergson’s main concern in his commentary. This opening of
Bergson’s commentary does not appear in the expurgated English edition until well
into the translation (Introduction 1. La Poésie de Lucrèce’, p. II; trans. 1959: 44). For
Bergson the teaching is ‘sad and disheartening’ since it raises the fundamental
question, ‘why persist in living?’ if life is nothing more than a treadmill that leads
nowhere and desire never finds a fulfilment. Moreover, pleasures are deceptive and
no joy is untainted, and all striving is in vain. Now this sounds a lot like
Schopenhauer, but his doctrine is nowhere mentioned in the text: 1 ‘we spend the best
part of our lives in pursuing vain honours or in cultivating land that is barren and
indifferent to our toil. Then comes senescence and with it the childish fear of death’
(Bergson 1959: 45). 2 We are tortured by our visions of death, in which all hope and joy
disappear. Although death is the end of everything and deprives us of the comforts of
life, it at the same time delivers us from our need of them and the sufferings that
always accompany them. Thus, why should we not gain consolation from the thought
that all this will end for us when our lives end? This, says, Bergson, ‘is the conviction
of the sage and the conclusion of the philosopher’ (1959: 46).
1
See also Gillespie and Mackenzie (2007: 309), who write: ‘Overall, one might say that Bergson presents a
Lucretius with an imaginative vision akin to that of Thomas Hardy – but a Hardy braced by something of
the analytic sweep and rigour of Pascal’.
2
For Schopenhauer on Epicurus and the teaching on death see 1966, volume two, 468ff. Schopenhauer
astutely writes: ‘From the standpoint of knowledge, there appears to be absolutely no ground for fearing
death; but consciousness consists in knowing, and thus for consciousness death is no evil. Moreover, it is
not really this knowing part of our ego that fears death, but fuga mortis comes simply and solely from the blind
will, with which every living thing is filled. But…this fuga mortis is essential to it, just because it is the willto-live, whose whole inner nature consists in a craving for life and existence’ (468).
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So, where does Lucretius depart from Epicurus? The doctrine of Epicurus,
Bergson argues, excludes melancholy and sadness as these would only continue to
trouble the mind when the whole point of practising philosophy as a way of life is to
attain a state of undisturbed serenity or what Bergson describes as a placid state of
joyfulness that may not be intense but is nevertheless permanent. Lucretius draws
different conclusions from the theory of the atom according to Bergson. We are
subject to rigid natural laws so why work or take pains to accomplish anything? Why
struggle or complain?: ‘We are victims of a common law, and nature shows little
concern over us’ (1959: 82). As Bergson notes, the poem ends with a frightful
description of the plague of Athens during the Peloponnesian War (and borrowed
from Thucydides), and that stands in marked contrast to the poem’s opening
celebration of life. For Bergson, Lucretius succeeds in painting an ‘awesome picture’
of the nature of the universe and one that fills our mind with dread.
In spite of his reliance on Epicurus’s teaching, including the science and the ethics,
Bergson sees Lucretius as singularly original (1959: 77). He is original in his conception
of the nature of things and in his conception of human nature. For Bergson, Lucretius
differs from Epicurus in being an enthusiastic observer of nature, showing a gift for its
‘picturesque’ aspect (its ‘fleeting, transitional variations’). Moreover, he appreciates
simultaneously both the pattern of nature that appeals to the geometrician and that of
the artist: he admires the beauty of nature and understands it, but this does not stop
him from analysing it and breaking it apart anatomically into fibres and cells. This
ability on the part of Lucretius to grasp the two-sided character of things is for Bergson
the source of the originality of his poetry and his philosophy. For Bergson, Lucretius is
not like Democritus: he does not depict collections of atoms in their stark nakedness
but decks them out in natural or in fancied colours. Moreover, his descriptions of the
universe are not cold but ‘imbued with an oratorical fervour that stimulates and sways’
(1959: 80). Indeed, Bergson speculates that Lucretius would not have written his text if
he had seen in Epicureanism little more than a dry and self-centred doctrine,
‘contrived for the purpose of bringing to man the calm placidity of the beast and
ridding him of his most noble anxieties’ (1959: 80-1). In addition, Bergson does not
think that Lucretius reduces philosophy to being little more than a means of
consolation. Knowledge is not simply a refuge or a consolation in times of civil strife;
rather, it is ‘the object of life itself’; wars and disasters are ills because they divert the
attention of humans from the only noble preoccupations worthy of the mind.
Philosophy is noble because it frees us from social ambition and competition. As a
philosopher Lucretius liberates himself from indignation and anger; he feels only pity
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for those who fail to see where genuine happiness lies and thus unknowingly afflict
great harm on themselves.
II
According to Alain Badiou, it is Bergson who is Deleuze’s real master, and not
Spinoza or Nietzsche (Badiou 2000: 39). However, one area of philosophical inquiry
where Deleuze appears to show an intellectual independence from Bergson is in his
interpretation of Lucretius. For Deleuze naturalism exists to defeat sadness, and where
sadness amounts to a diminution of our powers of action. He writes: ‘From Lucretius
to Nietzsche, the same end is pursued and attained. Naturalism makes of thought and
sensibility an affirmation’ (Deleuze 1969: 323; 1990: 279). For Deleuze, the aim of
Lucretius’s text is not to fill the human mind with dread but to liberate it from the
reign of fear, guilt, and superstition. Indeed he considers the depiction of the plague
that allegedly ends the poem as a Christian invention. He writes of his fantasy:
I fantasize about writing a memorandum to the Academy of the Moral Sciences
to show that Lucretius’ book cannot end with the description of the plague, and
that it is an invention, a falsification of the Christians who wanted to show that a
maleficent thinker must end in terror and anguish (Deleuze 2002: 15).
Although known today as an appendix to The Logic of Sense from 1969, the essay
‘Lucretius and the Simulacrum’ was first published in 1961 in Les études Philosophiques as
‘Lucrèce et le naturalisme’. As Brooke Holmes has suggested, the significance of
Deleuze’s essay has been overshadowed by Deleuze’s reading of Plato and his effort to
overcome Platonism, and so valued as part of the larger philosophical perspective
advanced in Difference and Repetition. Following the lead of Holmes, I propose to read
the essay as a contribution to an understanding of Epicureanism. As Holmes further
suggests, Deleuze’s essay raises the question of what it means to make Epicureanism
catalytic in the present and she even suggests that Epicurean teaching remains a
constant presence in Deleuze’s corpus (Holmes 2012: 317-18). In this essay my attention
is focused strictly on Deleuze’s attempt to develop an ethics on the basis of his
appreciation of Epicurean naturalism.
For Deleuze, Lucretius follows Epicurus by effecting a double determination in
which ‘naturalism’ – the scare quotes are Deleuze’s when he first deploys the term in
his essay (1969: 307; 1990: 266) – is made the speculative and the practical object of
philosophy. The products of nature are inseparable from an ontological diversity, and
the chief theoretical task of philosophy is to think this diverse as diverse. For Deleuze
nature is characterized by an irreducible pluralism and so he resists all attempts to
think nature in terms of notions of the One or the collective Whole. The
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characteristics of the diversity of nature are individuality and heterogeneity, in which
species differ, members of the same species differ, and there is a diversity of parts that
make up an individual. So, we encounter in nature a diversity of matter and a
heterogeneity of elements in which we can declare that there are no two shellfish or
grains of sand that are absolutely indiscernible; in addition we can posit distinct animal
and living worlds. The argument is not circular: the claim is not that the production of
the diverse has itself to rest on a principle of diversity. Rather, we need to think the
production of the diverse in terms of an infinite sum (endless combinations and recombinations); as Deleuze memorably puts it, ‘there is no combination capable of
encompassing all the elements of Nature at once’ (308; 267). In a declaration that
seems indicative of Deleuze’s lifelong commitment to pluralism and multiplicity, he
argues that nature is not collective but distributive, not attributive but conjunctive: it
proceeds not through being (the ‘is’) but through becoming (the ‘and’). In the worlds
of nature we observe ‘alternations and entwinings, resemblances and differences,
attractions and distractions, nuance and abruptness’ (ibid.). Nature, then, whilst not a
whole can be conceived as a sum, and we can think this in terms of the image of the
Harlequin’s cloak (manteau d’Arlequin), ‘made entirely’, Deleuze says, ‘of solid patches
and empty spaces, she is made of plenitude and void, beings and nonbeings’ (ibid.).
It is, then, the simplicity of Lucretius’s cosmology and ontology that appeal to
Deleuze and that challenge anti-naturalist philosophies: there are simple beings and
the void, with the simple being in the void and the void in compound beings. For antinaturalist philosophies – here Deleuze does not provide any examples from the history
of thought – Being (the One or the Whole) is always thought in terms of porosity and
in corruptible terms of the fleeting and the brittle. Following the cosmology he had
adumbrated in his 1956 essay on Bergson’s conception of difference, in the essay on
Lucretius Deleuze argues that the nature of things is not identity and contradiction but
differences and resemblances or repetitions, so for him there is ‘co-ordination and
disjunction’ (309; 268; see also Deleuze 2004).
How is naturalism, in its essence, to be conceived? For Deleuze, it requires a
highly structured principle of causality to account for the production of the diverse
since there are only different and non-totalizable composition and combinations of the
elements of nature. It is the nature of the atom that needs to be clarified first, and this
is what Deleuze focuses his attention on. It is the atom that challenges our sense
perception and our consciousness or awareness of temporal existence. Deleuze begins
with a surprisingly simple proposition: the atom is that which can only be thought and
it is to thought what a sensible object is to the senses. Moreover, the atom is what gives
food for thought: as we cannot perceive the atom we have to think its nature or
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character, and to do so rigorously precisely, and, as far as possible, nonanthropomorphically. The atom is imperceptible not because of some deficiency in
our senses but on account of its own character. Deleuze identifies an ‘Epicurean
method’ of epistemology by which we may come to know something of the atom, and
this method proceeds by analogy and by passage or transition. First, we draw the
analogy between the sensible object, which we endow with (sensible) parts, and the
noetic object that is also endowed with parts, and we posit in this act a minimum
thought that represents the smallest part of the object just as in the instance of
sensibility there is a minimum sensible that represents the smallest part of the object.
Second, guided or steered by this analogy between the sensible object and the noetic
object, we move from the sensible to thought and in reverse by means of a series of
transitions.
Deleuze now advances several key theses on the nature of what is, the nature of
the atoms. In the first one he states some key aspects of the atoms and the void, such
as that the sum of atoms is infinite and precisely because they do not combine or
synthesize to form a totality. This his followed up in points 5-7 on the shapes, sizes,
and possible configurations of atoms. However, it is the third point that is clearly the
decisive insight for Deleuze, and this concerns the clinamen or swerve. When atoms
collide, they do so not account of their different weights but due to the clinamen and it
is this ‘differential of matter’ that relates atoms to one another. 3 This is Deleuze’s
main claim and insight, and it removes him from prevailing readings of Lucretius,
including Bergson’s: ‘The clinamen or swerve (déclinaison) has nothing to do with an
oblique movement which would come accidentally to modify a vertical fall’ (311; 269).
On Deleuze’s reading it is an error to construe the clinamen as something haphazard
and capricious. On the contrary, for Deleuze it is not at all accidental but always
there, and he likens it to the conatus, speaking of it as a differential of matter.4 Thus,
for Deleuze, we go astray when we conceive the clinamen as a secondary movement
since there is only an originary movement and this movement is characteristic of what
matter ‘is’. The causality of the clinamen is, therefore, more ‘unassignable’ (incertus,
or uncertain) than it is indeterminate, and this is because it takes place at such a
velocity that we have to think it in terms of a time smaller than what can be thought in
a minimum of continuous time. It is this set of insights that leads to Deleuze to an
3
Michael Serres also construes the clinamen in terms of a differential, and a flow, in his The Birth of Physics
(2000: 174). For insight see also Walter G. Englert (1987). Serres refers to Bergson’s reception of Lucretius
on more than one occasion in his book (see 37 & 174).
4
For further insight see Warren Montag, ‘From Clinamen to Conatus: Deleuze, Lucretius, Spinoza’
(unpublished essay).
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important conclusion regarding the lex atomi, chiefly, that there is an irreducible
plurality of causes and in any causal series a whole is not brought together and so
nature cannot be totalized: it is on account of this that causes are said to be
‘unassignable’. The structured principle of causality Deleuze is after works, as Holmes
helpfully puts it, ‘inside the various compositions and combinations that populate the
cosmos. As a result, diversity emerges within a world that is also characterized by
pattern and resemblance’ (Holmes 2012: 323). In point 7 Deleuze arrives at the
conclusion that difference is primary, which means that in the philosophy of nature we
find ‘the heterogeneity of the diverse with itself, and also the resemblance of the diverse
with itself’ (Deleuze 1969: 313; 1990: 271). Worlds and bodies have their similarities in
time and space. Deleuze insists, however, that resemblance proceeds from the diverse
and is implicated in diversity. Of course, for Deleuze there is determination: a body is
born from determined elements but there is also a ‘vitalism of seeds’.
The next move Deleuze makes in his essay is of crucial importance for it centres
on how we make the move from physics to ethics, including the motivation for doing
so.
As every student of Epicurean teaching knows such a move is its most
fundamental aspect. The task of physics – to be thought in terms of naturalism – is to
determine what is really infinite from what isn’t and to demarcate the difference
between the true infinite from its false form or appearance. The true infinite,
according to Deleuze, consists in the sum of atoms, the void, the number of atoms of
the same shape and size, and the number of combination of atoms and of worlds
similar, or different, to ours. What is not infinite are the parts of the atom and the
body, the sizes and shapes of atoms, and every worldly or intra-worldly combination.
This determination of the nature of the infinite is said to be ‘apodeictic’; and yet the
real task is to show why this determination is the necessary means of ethics and
practice. Let me now follow how Deleuze seeks to demonstrate the subordination of
physics to ethics in Epicurean teaching.
Epicurean ethical practice suggests to us ways of supressing or conquering pain.
However, as Deleuze correctly notes, our attainment of real pleasure, including a sense
of being in the world in a joyful manner, has much more powerful obstacles to
confront, such as phantoms, superstitions, terrors of existence, and the fear of death.
The humanity that Lucretius depicts it in the book is indeed a melancholy one. As
Deleuze notes, the plague not only inflicts pain and suffering but equally disturbs the
soul. The disturbance of the soul has two main elements: first, the illusion that arises
from our spurious idea that the body has an infinite capacity for pleasure; and, second,
the illusion that the soul endures forever and that gives rise, once it has taken root in
the mind, to the notion of an infinity of possible sufferings and torments after death.
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We can even see a link between the two illusions since the fear of an infinite suffering
and punishment is but the natural price to be paid for having desires without limit.
Here the life of the fool becomes a hell on earth, as the poem so instructively depicts.
For Lucretius, as for Spinoza after him, the religious person displays a curious complex
of avidity and anguish, and of covetousness and culpability. We live in fear of dying
when we are not dead and the fear of not actually being dead once in fact we are.
Deleuze will then explain these operations of the mind in terms of how bodies or
atomic compounds emit subtle and fluid elements, and they emanate either from the
depths of bodies (such as sounds, smells, and tastes) or as detachments from the surface
of things, including the simulacra (such as forms and colours). I will not follow
Deleuze’s treatment of this, which is instructive on a highly complex topic. What is
key is Deleuze’s account of a third species of simulacra, which emanates neither from
the depths of bodies nor the surface of things, and that he calls ‘phantasms’. These are
images that enjoy a high degree of independence and assume a life of their own, and
they can be theological, oneiric, and erotic. We develop images that take the place of
actual objects, from giants to ghosts. This happens for instance when the mind
becomes isolated from the external world and when the body lies dormant, as in sleep.
In the case of the erotic, although there is an actual love object, it can be neither
possessed nor absorbed, and so the mind contemplating such an object is prone to all
kinds of fantasies, including ones motivated by jealousy.
The ethical task, then, is, with the aid of naturalism, to dispel the illusions of the
mind and that generate fears, torments, and superstitions. It is in this sense for
Deleuze, and this sense only, that physics is made subordinate to ethics: the task is not
only to limit knowledge or prevent its development, as is often said of Epicurean
teaching, but rather to demonstrate the range of its practical application. Deleuze
writes, then:
The speculative object and the practical object of philosophy as Naturalism,
science and pleasure, coincide on this point: it is always a matter of denouncing
the illusion, the false infinite, the infinity of religion and all the theological-eroticoneiric myths in which it is expressed. (322; 278)
If philosophy has a use it is to be found in the doctrine of the Epicureans, as well as in
later thinkers such as Spinoza and Nietzsche, namely, the creation of the free human
being. This freedom consists, at least as an initial task, in freeing oneself from the
realm of illusions produced by the image of the false infinite. Other, more
complicated tasks will then come into view and motivate the free mind or free spirit to
undergo various metamorphoses. It is not a question, for Deleuze at least, of opposing
nature to custom, to convention, or to invention: there can be natural customs,
conventions and nature are not opposed and the fact that the law does depends on
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convention does not preclude the existence of natural laws (here the ‘law’ would
measure the illegitimacy of desires against the disturbance of the soul that accompanies
them), and inventions are discoveries of nature itself. For Deleuze, then, what nature
actually opposes is the whole domain of myth. When we examine the history of
humanity we discover that human unhappiness stems not from customs, conventions,
or inventions and industry but from the aspect of myth that gets mixed with them,
including the false promises of happiness offered by wealth, power, and luxury.
Deleuze writes:
To the origins of language, the discovery of fire, and the first metals royalty,
wealth, and property are added…; to the conventions of law and justice, the
belief in gods; to the use of bronze and iron, the development of war; to the
inventions of art and industry, luxury ad frenzy (322; 278).
The object of naturalism, and in terms of both its speculative and practical aspects,
now comes clearly into view: it is to distinguish in the case of human beings what
belongs to nature and what belongs to myth. This is why for Deleuze the first
philosopher is a naturalist, simply because he speaks of nature rather than the gods.
Humanity has suffered from three main forms of myth in its history: the myth of
religion (the active gods); the myth of a false physics (that humankind is destined to a
particular fate); and the myths of false philosophy under the influence of theology
(Being, the One, and the Whole). The critical task here is not to introduce new myths
since these would only serve to deprive nature of its positivity. Lucretius carries the
‘enterprise of “demystification”’ to its limit. 5 In addition, Deleuze thinks there is a
‘constant’ of naturalism and evident in its history from Lucretius to Spinoza and
Nietzsche: this constant consists in the denunciation of sadness, in particular
denouncing everything that has sadness as the basis of its power. Moreover, the
philosophy of nature we find in this naturalism is also accompanied by a philosophy of
affirmation. If the One or the Whole is a false image of nature, then we are free to
think nature in accordance with its actual positivity, that is, as an infinite sum,
5
The classic study of myth in Lucretius is by Monica R. Gale, Myth and Poetry in Lucretius (1994). She
understands myth to be a body of traditional stories distinct from other fictions, and maintains that
Lucretius makes use of myth in support of Epicurean demythologization: ‘The mythological passage sin
the DRN thus act a powerful polemical and didactic tool: at one and the same time, Lucretius is able to
dispose of rival theories of myth satisfactorily by substituting his own account of its origins and nature; and
to use myth didactically to illustrate his own argumentation’ (230). From this we can say that Deleuze’s
appreciation is misleading if the suggestion is that Lucretius dispenses with myth altogether. As Gale ably
shows the poet rejects myth but, at the same time, he appropriates mythological imagery so as to invest his
argument, including his presentation of the god-like figure of Epicurus, with attractive and impressive
qualities.
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including multiple elements that are not composed all at once or ever brought together
in terms of a final synthesis: ‘The multiple as multiple is the object of affirmation, just
as the diverse as diverse is the object of joy’ (323; 279).
CONCLUSION
In his essay Deleuze attempts to work through Lucretius’s teaching in a way that
illuminates a far-reaching project of demystification and he does so with the aid of two
of the philosophers he was most engaged with in the 1960s, namely, Spinoza and
Nietzsche. Bergson hovers in the background – e.g. there are clear allusions to the
1956 essay on Bergson and difference where once again Deleuze presents a philosophy
of nature and of life that challenges the philosophy of the negative (Hegelianism, as a
philosophy of the negative, appears to be the target and the ‘enemy’ at which Deleuze
directs his critical thinking). However, Bergson’s dissertation on Lucretius is not
mentioned by or referred to by Deleuze in his own reading. Deleuze signals a real
departure from Bergson in his thinking about the clinamen and the fact that he locates
in Lucretius a richly worked out philosophy of nature, and of which the notion of the
swerve or ‘declination’ forms a key part. Deleuze’s is keen to show that for
Epicureanism nature is a positive power and can only be satisfactorily understood in
terms of the production of diversity and multiplicity. Although nature is characterised
by a determination of causes and effects, it is at the same time an order of positive
production.
However, we need to ask: what of the melancholic aspect of the text, including the
grim ending of the poem with its graphic depiction of the plague of Athens? Does the
book not end of a fundamentally sad, indeed, tragic note? More recent scholarship on
Lucretius acknowledges that the end of the poem is significant but lends support to
Deleuze’s perspective on the text: not that the ending is a conspired Christian
invention as he suspected, but that it does not detract from the steadfastly serene
character of the wisdom and science that guides the teaching. The noted scholar
David Sedley, for example, argues that the closing description of the plague must
contain some message for us as the readers of the poem. In short, have readers really
learnt their Epicureanism? That is, do we know how to remain serene in the face of
severe and even terminal physical suffering? According to Sedley, Lucretius has dealt
with three of the four Epicurean remedies in the book before the plague description –
God presents no fears, death no worries, the good is readily attainable – but not the
fourth one that the terrible is endurable. This, he thinks, is what the closing
description of the book is meant to do: if we have not learnt the ultimate lesson and
attained philosophical serenity over the most intense physical pain and suffering, then
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we cannot face the nature of the universe with truly Epicurean equanimity (Sedley
1998: 160-5).
We cannot locate sadness or melancholy in the teaching on death and the need
not to be a slave to the lust for life. Freedom – joyful being and becoming active –
does not reside in lust. Lucretius is extremely keen to free us from the fear of death:
what is there terrifying or depressing in the thought of our death? We will be in an
‘eternal sleep’ til the end of time, and pain and sorrow will never touch us again.
Death, in fact, should be regarded as having much less existence than sleep since in
this condition we see an even greater dispersal of the mass of matter. Why should we
not retire from life like a dinner guest who has eaten our fill of life and take a carefree
rest with peace of mind? Should we not, moreover, put away all that is unbecoming to
our years and with a composed mind make way for others? : ‘The old is always thrust
aside to make way for the new, and one thing must be built out of the wreck of others’
(III: 964-6). There is, Lucretius says, ‘need of matter, so that later generations may
arise’ (III: 968-9). The thought of death, as Nietzsche also taught, should make us
think of life and what we truly desire:
Men feel plainly enough within their minds a heavy burden, whose weight
depresses them. If only they perceived with equal clearness the causes of this
depression, the origin of this lump of evil within their breasts, they would not lead
such a life as we now see all too commonly – no one knowing what he really
wants and everyone for ever trying to get away from where he is, as though travel
alone could throw off the road (III: 1052-1058).
When Lucretius speaks of the ‘deplorable lust for life’ he has in mind the pursuit of
spurious external goods, such as fame, ambition, wealth, luxury, and so on. If we free
ourselves from this ‘unquenchable thirst for life’ we can be both free for a different
mode of life and serene in the face of the inevitable fact of our death. This is the ethical
transformation we need to undergo. Deleuze demonstrates what this freedom entails
and just how liberating it is. I don’t think this commits us to the view that the prospect
of our demise and disappearance from existence will never fill us with anxiety, only
that we can re-focus the attention of our minds and, to a certain extent, free ourselves
so as to focus on a life of Epicurean attachment and involving pleasure and the virtue
of friendship, as well the cultivation of a deeply affirmative mode of existence.
Department of Philosophy
University of Warwick
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136
k.j.ansell-pearson@warwick.ac.uk
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