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Articles

Chance & Human Error in Spinoza and Lucretius

Melissa Shew chances to wonder about the influence of doubt and human error in our lives.

The Roman Epicurean philosopher Titus Lucretius Carus (c 99-55BC) lived seventeen centuries before Baruch Spinoza, and at first glance they seem almost complete opposites. Lucretius’ universe began with a ‘chance swerve’; he wants human beings to desire and experience pleasure; and he writes what amounts, in essence, to a cosmological poem. Spinoza’s universe is generally taken as well-ordered; he urges human beings to an intellect unified with the whole of nature; and he writes the opposite of poetry, such as the dry and mathematically-arranged Ethics. We may push the contrast even further: for Spinoza, doubt – along with error and wonder – is fundamentally a privation of knowledge, signifying something that must be actively overcome through the intellect to achieve a better understanding. On the contrary, Lucretius urges us to doubt (and wonder, though not so much to err) so that we might see for ourselves the truth of things in our very doubting, or to discover something about the nature of human beings.

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