Against Deleuze’s reading, however, I argue that clinamen and conatus belong to metaphysical systems that are quite incompatible and that they support different understandings of both freedom and necessity. In Book I of De Rerum Natura, Lucretius writes, A property is that which not at all can be disjoined and severed from a thing without a fatal dissolution: such, weight to the rocks, heat to the fire, and flow to the wide waters, touch to corporeal things, intangibility to the viewless void. The second section is dedicated to clarifying Spinoza’s metaphysics and the accommodation of the theme of freedom within his robust necessitarian framework, interwoven with the motif of conatus, or self-preserving striving. Because Lucretius lived a couple of generations before the birth of Jesus, Stephen was expecting a tale of how gods, goddesses, earth, air, fire and water and an assortment of miracles created. He posited instead what he called a swerveLucretius’ principal word for it was clinamen an unexpected, unpredictable movement of. In this regard, the first section is oriented towards an elucidation of Lucretius’ philosophy – consequently, of Epicurus’ as well –and, specifically, of his view about the swerve of atoms, or clinamen, combined with the subject of freedom. He thought that nothing could violate the laws of nature. For Epicurians, religion is the poison cup rimmed with honey that dispels fear of death at the cost of the appreciation of life as it is. Lucretius, Virgil, Catullus - is their powerful, uncanny frankness, an appeal that remains fresh. What has motivated my research for this paper is a conflation between these two notions as suggested by Deleuze in the appendix to his Logique du sens. The appeal of the Latin poets in first century B.C.E. This paper compares and contrasts two philosophical concepts that stem from different lineages of thought: on the one hand, Lucretius’ clinamen on the other, Spinoza’s conatus.

The swerve lucretius