The knowledge of the world is not guilty but peaceful and creative. The hymn to Venus is a song to voluptuousness, to the original power, victorious – without having fought – over Mars and over the death instinct, a song to the pleasure of life, to guilt-free knowledge. This may seem odd, given that in the rest of the poem he goes to some pains to repudiate religious beliefs, but it makes imaginative sense when we see that he is praising Venus by contrast with Mars, the god of war: Poetry in turn needs myth, and Serres has much to say about the opening of On the Nature of Things, in which Lucretius offers his tribute to Venus, the Roman fertility goddess. Hence Serres insists that science needs poetry in order to appreciate the ‘orderly disorder’ of the world. For, rather than impose order, the poet is telling us to discover the organic order that underlies apparently random events and entities but this order is so complex that it cannot be understood through the unaided reason. We should regain Lucretius’ notion of creation through divergence. Thus we should respect chance and diversity, not try and impose abstract ideas of necessity or hierarchy upon the rich variety of existence, the sheer beauty of things. What On the Nature of Things tells Serres is that life proceeded from the joyous dance of atoms, with its capacity for spontaneous variation of motion. The new contact made between atoms because of this swerving movement generated life, resulting eventually in the world we know. According to this theory, the reason why there is something rather than nothing is that in the dim past there came about within the ‘void’ a subtle variation in the movement of atoms, a variation which Lucretius called the clinamen. Though Epicurus’ reputation is for hedonism, his main contribution to human thought, according to Lucretius, and so to Serres, is his ‘atomist’ theory of creation. For it was Lucretius who put into verse the philosophy of Epicurus, and in so doing made a powerful case for the idea that the origin of the earth, and so of humanity, lay in the motion of minute particles, or atoms. This six-volume poem provides Serres with his main evidence that contemporary science has more in common with ancient myth than we might at first think possible. I am thinking of Michel Serres’ reading of On the Nature of Things by the Roman poet Lucretius, who lived in the first century BCE. The turn to antiquityīy way of preface, and in case the reader is tempted to think that Lovelock and Primavesi are exceptional in believing that narratives from the distant past can illuminate our present environmental needs, it may be worth considering briefly how another thinker has looked back to antiquity in order to find his bearings on the present. For it is in finding parallels between Genesis and Gaia that Primavesi has done her most impressive work – work that has been warmly praised by Lovelock himself. In order to appreciate her achievement, I will need to say something about the example set her by her mentor, James Lovelock, in his reading of the ancient Greek myth of Gaia. ![]() Whatever the reason, I hope that a brief exposition of her ideas may encourage others to use her as a guide to a fascinating field of enquiry. Perhaps the fact that she is known primarily as a theologian rather than an ecological philosopher may have something to do with this. I choose her work, partly because I have been very impressed by it, and partly because her name seems to be very little known within green studies. I will approach it by way of the work of Anne Primavesi. Thus, it is appropriate that my main focus will be on Genesis, the first book of the Bible – the most famous creation narrative of them all, perhaps, as well as the most famous religious text. ![]() Essential to its importance is that it almost always makes an explicitly religious affirmation about the relationship between the gods who create and the earth that is created. While there are other kinds of myth which merit attention – hero myth, for example – it seems to me that creation myth is the richest field of enquiry. As someone who has written on both mythology and ecology, I am particularly interested in the way stories of origin have been interpreted from a green perspective.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |