Lucretius in Four Ideas
the essentialsNothing from nothing
Nothing can ever be created by divine power out of nothing — the first principle of his physics (Book I).
Atoms and the swerve
All things arise from atoms falling through the void; the unpredictable swerve (clinamen) breaks the chain of fate.
The symmetry argument
Look back at the eternity before your birth — it was nothing to you. The eternity after your death will be the same.
Religion's crimes
“Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum” — so great the evils religion could inspire, as when Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia.
Almost nothing is known of Lucretius’ life (the story that he was driven mad by a love potion and killed himself comes from Jerome, centuries later, and is doubted). His poem De Rerum Natura nearly vanished in the Middle Ages; the humanist Poggio Bracciolini found a copy in a German monastery in 1417. Its atomism, its denial of providence and its serene calm about death fed Montaigne, Gassendi, and the Enlightenment.
See the phrase Nothing from Nothing.
Curiosities
did you know?- His poem survived the Middle Ages in a handful of manuscripts; one was found in a German monastery in 1417.
Questions to Argue About
debate club →- Should the fact that we didn’t exist before birth console us about death?
Arguments
argument library →The Symmetry Argument
The eternity after our death is a mirror of the eternity before our birth — and the first never troubled us.
- We do not regret the infinite time before we were born.
- The time after our death is relevantly like the time before our birth — in both we do not exist.
- We should treat relevantly similar things alike.
∴ We should not fear or regret the time after our death.
2 objections
- Thomas Nagel and Frederik Kaufman: The cases are asymmetric: we could not have been born much earlier and still been ourselves, but we could have lived longer.
- Derek Parfit: We are biased toward the future; whether that bias is rational is the real question.
In Their Own Words
2 quotationsNothing can ever be created by divine power out of nothing.
nullam rem e nilo gigni divinitus umquam
Context & when to use it
For naturalism and conservation laws; the root of “ex nihilo nihil fit”.
So great the evils that religion could prompt.
tantum religio potuit suadere malorum
Context & when to use it
On Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia.
For critique of religious violence.
Sententiae
phrases in the originalEx nihilo nihil fit
Origin. The principle goes back to Parmenides (c. 500 BCE), who argued that what-is cannot come from what-is-not. Lucretius put it in Latin verse — “nil posse creari de nilo”, nothing can be created out of nothing (De Rerum Natura I.155–156). The compact form “ex nihilo nihil fit” is a later scholastic formula. — Parmenides
⚠ Christian theology answered with “creatio ex nihilo” — God creates out of nothing, precisely because God is not bound by the rule. Shakespeare’s Lear throws the maxim at Cordelia — “Nothing will come of nothing: speak again.”
Against any argument that pulls something from nowhere — a free lunch, a cause without a cause, a conclusion without premises.
Explore Next
related by shared connections
Seneca
Roman Stoic, playwright and statesman — tutor and adviser to Nero — whose letters on time, death, anger and friendship are among the most readable works of ancient philosophy.
Cārvāka (Lokāyata)
India’s materialist school — only perception is knowledge, only matter is real, there is no soul, no rebirth, no karma and no God, and the purpose of life is pleasure. Its own books are lost; we know it through the furious refutations of every other school.
Kaṭha Upaniṣad
The story of the boy Naciketas, who goes to the house of Death and asks what happens after death — receiving the teaching of the immortal Self.
Kaṇāda
The founder of Vaiśeṣika and traditional author of the Vaiśeṣika Sūtras — the sage remembered as India’s first atomist, who taught that everything perceptible is built from eternal, indivisible particles.
Alas, Poor Yorick
In the graveyard, Hamlet is handed the skull of the jester who carried him on his back as a child — and sees where all flesh, wit and glory end.
Martin Heidegger
The philosopher of Being, who argued that the West had forgotten the question of what it means to be, and analysed human existence (Dasein) as thrown, anxious, being-toward-death.