Symposium: Pleasure Until Death. On Epicurean Philosophy in the Poetry of Lucretius

What is the relationship between philosophy and poetry? For a certain radical current within the philosophical tradition, the relationship between philosophy and poetry seems to have been essentially characterised by pleasure. If philosophy has dispelled all illusions about eternal life and damnation after death, then what should prevent us from enjoying life here and now? Oxford scholar, Jane Cooper, joins philosopher Eirik Fevang in a discussion of Epicurean thought, focusing on the first-century BC Roman treatise De Rerum Natura, which expounds the philosophy of Epicurus in poetic form, advocating for the good life in the light of human mortality. The relationship between death and pleasure is a central feature of the poem’s Epicurean message which exhorts the human subject to be free from the fear and pain brought about by anticipation of the afterlife. On a rhetorical and poetic level, De Rerum Natura aims to impart aesthetic pleasure. We will discuss the relationship between philosophy and poetry by looking at their fusion in Lucretius’ poem, focusing on how early modern translators of Lucretius responded to the ostensible “danger” of the poem’s aesthetic appeal, given its central incompatibility with Christian doctrine: the rejection of the soul’s immortality. Jane Cooper is Examination Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford and a DPhil candidate at the University of Oxford, where she is writing a thesis on natural philosophy and sublime theory in early modern English poetics (1660-1740). The conversation is in English. Illustration: Giorgio de Chirico, 1914, The Song of Love via Wikimedia Commons