Losing It. 5 culmative thesis from Lucretuis.
1)Perhaps it is, for Modern ears, one of the odder moments n Ancient thought, when Lucretius claims that memory is fundamentally the same as perception, only the images involves are far thinner, and more flimsy, and so harder to grasp (or tell apart from other thought). We are of course so used to the idea that memory is ours (or we are its), and without is spasm of ownership somewhere in the system. But this owning Lucretus insists is always wrong. It is not we that own reality, but rather our strange materialism which owns us. This materialism is all the odder in that it appears to leave little or not room for anything like an individual or an act of perceptions. Fine particles peal of objects, and enter into heads, which grasp in the movements facts, and that is it. Matter carries in it its own luminosity – that is its own ability to run out an affect things, its own ability to change what is. Our minds are then merely one example of this change. Memory and perception are therefore material phenomena, not mental, and the challenge of thinking is to allow for a matter which is capable, of providing the ‘hard’ reality to luminosity.
2)Perceptions and hard matter are therefore not different in kind, merely degree. Matter comes in numerous shapes and form, and contains numerous hard particles. Each particle might of itself by finite. This finitude is no mean claim, and no simply vulgar solution to Zeno. On the contrary it is perhaps the hidden point of finitude which serves as the moving focus point which allows matter and perception to be said in the same grasp. Each block of matter contains particles. Hard particles of reality. But also smaller gauzy particles which peal off, and do other material things in the mind. In being finite, each gauzy particle can as complete enwrap a shape just as well as the parts of grosser reality. Each then meet in giving wrapping a form (albeit is different ways, and with very different consequences). Matter is luminous if the basic unit of that matter is finite and volatile: it can fly off, holding the image to itself (and yet then of course fragment into memory or monsterous confusions) . To Be finite is therefore to be antisynthetic (although still conjoined, and prone to conjunction). No one need run elements together in anyway. The elements come in material agglomerations, agglomeration what were just as real as the original shape. All that differs is the finess of the particles involved. What makes a human special, what gives it its mind, is the fact that that mind both gross and fine necessarily interacting with one another. Materialism must be reconfigured to allow for life within the interrelations of particles that only vary in degree never kin): life is nothing extra in itself;- it is merely one special interaction.
3) Chance takes on a strange new form. One the one hand chance informs the minds very ability to be in the first place. Matter left to itself could and could do nothing save tumble. It is the mystery twist of fate, the twist of the Clinnamen that allows matter to be at all. Creation is therefore the unpredictable effect of what defies blind chance- what is pitched at a point beyond all thought o reason. Moreover this twist of fate also enhouses the secret of free action. A human is suddenly aware that everything has changes, and the world appears so very different, an awareness that has no rational housing (and appear as to emerge irrespective of a mere progression in time). Free will, and the bind chance of fate are therefore one and the same: Or humans in their most human directly participate in the mysteries of creation. Beyond this point it might, if one proceeds too hastily be easy to claim that everything is tied to causality chains. In the case of materialism this is of course the case. An yet for an individual mind, there is another aspect to chance. A mind can never know exactly what memories it might encounter minute y minute. The perception, that fine and gauzy thread it hold in its mind, might well contain other threads, other points, which might leads or open on yet others;, and all the while those finest of particles are bombarding the mind. To be alive is therefore to be opened into a world where chance has a deep role within the apparent causality of matter, and the flow of causality. Each point is no doubt causals (that is material composed), and yet to the mind that grasps, and regrasps these threads a can never be given in advance. The gross finitude of the body, which only knows of particles of which it is a party, opens the mind up to a chance that is notheless held absolutely within causality. A body, as it lives cannot know, everything and will be able to recreate what it is, within the rules of the causaul, just as much as it can outside of them. The Finitude of the particles and the body open the mind onto two very different forms of chance: one the one hand there is the chance of the swerve, a chance which exists at a level before all particles really are, and in a time that is beyond any continuum, a moment of difference indeed. On the other, pitched just beyond the skin of the finite body itself, there is an opening to chance, based on the gross finitude of the body, which is by definition never knows every, and therefore, is always, even as it grasps at memory, reworking its own nature in a way it can never simply predict – even is a God might be able to (although no Lucretian God would care to!)
4)Life is therefore the gearing up one to the other, of the movement of particles. Each body contains an endless flow of gross matter, which flow steadily in and out. The enter in gross bodies, and leave in both gross bodies, but also small hard lumps. Such particles can of course return to the body again, but to do so they will have had to hook up with into another gross body which is directly ingested in some manner (eaten, drunk, breathed, whatever). Likewise, albeit with a totally different rhythm, the finer particles of perception come and leave the body. And yet wit of course the difference that forms can very easily repeat as the same particles (or more realitistically different particles with the same shape) are able to re-enter the body depending upon chance. Each flow has therefore its own rhythm, and life is arrange between these rhythms. Morevover it might not be too fanciful to impose a direction here: Perception, runs between material bodies to fine conception in the mind, while action flows the over way from the finer particles of the mind to the grosser. And yet one needs care here . This is not really a Bergsonain difference between temporalities. Each Flow is not contained with in different envelopes of time. On the country each are, as they are finite blocs of matter. Each might move with their own rhythm (and that rhythm constantly jutter and start), and yet each, even in their duality are caught up in the same materiality. The Problem of taking one flow, and placing it on any other (clinamen none withstanding), is therefore not a movement between difference in kind, so much as a gearing up or down of different flows. Each remain fundamentally of the same kind. This gearing no doubt imposes a rigour of its own. Each perception is of cause an action (there is a flow of fine particles), and yet each action is not a perception : Without being a fine particle – without being able to move across a world in a way that interpenetrates everything, then perception simply is not. The Gearing of flows which give a world is not therefore a containment within the same container, but rather different properties of the matter, which nonetheless in itself remains different in different cases: Gross particles are not merely the finer particles of a giant, as giants which contains are not real.
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5) Hence the deep importance of that other element, the void. The void, at once opens up chance, but also delimits it. Each void contains at once both a very large number of fine particles, and yet that large number is nonetheless finite. This is not Leibniz therefore, there are not an infinity of forms in a drop of water. On the contray the void bounds what is what: What is fine (and so perceived) and what is gross and material. Emptiness itself ultimately therefore not only contains all randomness (which is after ll a movement in the void), but delimits what particle is what, and thereby set the parameters of life itself (which of course is only possible in the gearing up of the flows of different particle). Moreover it is of course the void in which is arrange the flows of matter, or fine particles, and the logic of those that interpenetrate many bodies, ad those which relate to the one alone. The void becomes is not a creative force, at least the very conditions within which all creation becomes possible. It is that without which nothing, including life can be. Final thesis then sees emptiness itself, the void, if not as a creative power (for it must contain many things) then as the agent within which all creation must be held: the additional element which allows both tpyes of freedom to exist, and allows life an existence within the plenitude of matter.