Instead of trying to transcend nature with our minds, escape it with our immortal souls, and dominate it with our technologies, Lucretius was perhaps the first in the Western tradition to forcefully argue for a completely materialist and immanent ethics based on moving with and as nature. Almost two thousand years ago Lucretius proposed a simple and stunning response to these problems: an ethics of motion. Thomas Nail argues that Lucretius was the first to locate the core of all these ethical ills in our obsession with stasis, our fear of movement, and our hatred of matter. Suffering, the fear of death, war, ecological destruction, and social inequality are urgent ethical issues today as they were for Lucretius.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |