Irrational Foundations of a Rational World
The philosophers Lucretius and Hume were both rationalist philosophers, developing theories based solely on what man can reason within their mind alone, deemphasizing the importance of the senses. In believing that the senses were inferior to reason both philosophers limited themselves to reasonable explanations, using their mind and limiting their senses, to describe not only the world around them, but also to explain the very origins of man, the earth, and indeed the universe. Lucretius’ use of the clinamen as an explanation for the beginning of life is similar to Hume’s explanation of induction, in that both thinkers pose theories that are built on arguments springing from the irrational. Both authors attempt to describe the rational world in a logical way, yet end up resorting to, or realizing that, it is ultimately irrational beginnings that underlie all their rational explanations of reality. Each explanation pulls from the absurd and irrational to describe the origins of the universe, thus ultimately creating a rational world from irrational origins.
Lucretius’ posed that the origins of life were explained by the slight tilt of atoms within a void, which he called the “clinamen,” and it is this swerve that created collisions and binding of atoms that formed all that we know. In the following, Lucretius describes clinamen, and the origins of being:
And a random point in space [the atoms] swerve a little,
Only enough to call it a tilt in motion.
For if atoms did not tend to lean, they would
Plummet like raindrops through the depts of space,
No first collisions born, no blows created,
So nature never could have made a thing. (220-225)
The important word in the above passage is “random,” for it seems completely irrational, and therefore contrary to a rationalist perspective, for an incident leading to all of life to be a consequence of a “random” swerve in the void. This random swerve, and especially his use of the word “random,” implies a lack of rational cause, purpose, or idea that was the force behind the swerve in itself. A rational perspective emphasizes the importance of reason driving all incidents in the world, and only what man can rationalize can be conceived. To propose an origin of the world based on the foundation of a single, irrational, random event contradicts the rest of the theory in its entirety, undermining the foundations before the rest of the arguments are even described.
Lucretius posits, subtly, the argument of the clinamen as just another rational proposition in his argument for atomic structure and formulations. However, unlike Lucretius, Hume does not approach induction as an infallible argument, instead quickly disputing the inductive rationale and posing the limitations of induction at the core of his argument. Hume writes that “The mind can never possibly find the effect in the supposed cause, by the most accurate scrutiny and examination. For the effect is totally different from the cause, and consequently can never be discovered in it” (111). This is Hume’s fundamental flaw of induction, because induction can only be used with a foundation of experience to guide inductive conclusions. Experience cannot dictate the future, explains Hume, because if one did not have experience to dictate the outcome of a cause, then every effect would be subject to extreme doubt. Subsequently, Humans cannot understand the ultimate cause of all being without the ability to conceive of a cause based on an effect. After all, the “effect” that one perceives is, in many cases, entirely different from the cause: “It is impossible, therefore, that any arguments from experience can prove this resemblance of the past to the future; since all these arguments are founded on the supposition of that resemblance” (117). The ultimate cause, or root cause, cannot be derived from events that occur after the cause, just as future events cannot be predicted from previous.
Experience is weak forms of evidence used explain the relation between cause and the supposed perceived effects. One example of experience being weak evidence is the impossibility that any person can experience the beginnings of the universe, or even conceive of the beginnings of time. Humans have no experiences that can be reasonably used to describe these events, but it is only those experiences that can be used as evidence. This explanation then, is not satisfactory to describe the origins of being, and Hume realizes that these correlations are entirely arbitrary. He writes:
In a word, then, every effect is a distinct event from its cause. It could not, therefore, be discovered in the cause, and the first invention or conception of it, a priori, must be entirely arbitrary…the conjunction of it with the cause must appear equally arbitrary…In vain, therefore, should we pretend to determine any single event, or infer any cause or effect, without the assistance of observation and experience. (111)
Hume’s induction plays a similar role to Lucretius’ clinamen because, though induction at first seems to be based in rational thought, ultimately there seems to be no rational foundations for it. Induction is based on experience, argues Hume, but experience is limited and cannot be applied to those events that have not, or cannot be experienced. Nor can the cause be drawn from the effect that we perceive, as the above quote describes, as is shown in everyday examples of what we consider to be cause and effect.
The shortcomings of each of the arguments are given different emphasis by each author. Lucretius does not attempt to explain the absurdity of his unexplained postulate. Of course it is not hard to understand why, because it is hard to explain the origins of life without the use of a higher power as a source of creation. Lucretius, however, rules out even that option early in Book Two with the assertion that “not for us and not by gods/was this world made. There’s too much wrong with it” (181-182). His theory of clinamen is as imperfect as the world itself, and it is the imperfect beginning that will birth the imperfect world. Hume realizes this when he writes that “one mistake is the necessary parent of another” (88). It is definitely reasonable for Lucretius to assume an irrational beginning for an irrational world, so the absurd becomes normal in light of this correlation. Hume, in contrast, approaches the limitations of induction confidently, and purposefully, exposing the weaknesses as more evidence of its certainty. He explains:
All reasonings concerning matter of fact seem to be founded on the relations of Cause and Effect…And here it is constantly supposed, that there is a connexion between the present fact and that which is inferred from it. Were there nothing to bind them together, the inference would be entirely precarious. (109)
Much like Lucretius’ imperfect beginning, induction is another example of imperfect reasoning that seems to harbor the truth within its imperfections, for, even “the most ignorant and stupid peasants, nay infants, nay even brute beasts, improve by experience” (118).
Lucretius resorts to irrationality to prove his argument, and Hume realizes the irrationality of his argument, yet both authors are rationalists attempting to find rationale in the world. This only proves the absurdity of the world around us, and the relevance of a “science of the imaginary” that we find described by ‘pataphysics. Hume seems to realize this when he writes:
Hence we may discover the reason, why no philosopher, who is rational and modest, has ever pretended to assign the ultimate cause of any natural operation, or to show distinctly the action of that power, which produces any single effect in the universe…The most perfect philosophy of the moral or metaphysical kind serves only to discover larger portions of our ignorance. (111-112)
Lucretius also describes a ‘pataphysical idea when we writes:
Nothing’s so very easy to believe
Which at first does not seem incredible;
So too nothing’s so great or wondrous, whose
Wonder will not diminish, little by little. (1025-1028)
We are left with few arguments that give us knowledge, and many questions that take away what we thought we knew. Our foundations in science leave us with more answers than solutions, and the closer we come to the rational, the more irrational we become.
Works Cited
Hume, David. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. London: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Lucretius. On the Nature of Things: De rerum natura. Trans. Anthony M. Esolen. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995.
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