Weary and sated with seeing
Lucretius and us
“Weary and sated with seeing, no man deigns to lift his eyes to the luminous spaces of the sky.”
(Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, II, 1038)
This is what Lucretius wrote in his poem on nature. The line occurs when Lucretius is encouraging us to turn our attention away from imagination, and towards reason. “Now turn your mind, I pray, to a true reasoning.” For if you do not, you will pay attention to all the wrong things. Why? Left alone to itself, the mind is always attracted to what is most new, to what is most different from what it has already seen before. To a sight that it sees for the very first time, the mind is drawn as if it were the most important thing. And gradually, the more we become accustomed to what was once new, the less interesting it becomes, and the less we pay attention to it. Lucretius invites us to imagine, that the colour of the sky, the stars, the moon, and “the sun with its brilliant light” were to appear to us for the very first time. Would it not be the case, that we could not hold our eyes away from these sights, thinking we had never seen something more magnificent. If we were to see these sights tomorrow for the very first time, we would deem nothing more worthy of our attention. Yet, we have seen the sky and all that fills it many times, and no one now, “weary and sated with seeing”, cares to lift his eyes to the sky. Lucretius points to something interesting about human psychology. We do not follow judgement when it comes to what we deem worthy of our attention, we merely follow ‘newness.’ The sun is evidently more magnificent a sight than many other things, but who takes the time to look at the sun? Reason, says Lucretius, would lead us to worship very different things than the things we actually worship. But we do not follow what is worthy of worship, rather, we follow what is ‘new’, what is ‘different’, ‘interesting’, or merely fashionable. We follow ‘the problems of today’, for contrary to the problems of all times, these carry the addictive flavour of newness.
“Wherefore cease to spew out reason from your mind, struck with terror at mere newness, but rather with eager judgement weigh things, and, if you see them true, lift your hands and yield, or, if it is false, gird yourself to battle.”
We do not care for what is important, we care for what impresses us most forcefully, and what impresses us most, is what is most new.
When we say that something is ‘interesting’, we can mean two things. We can mean that it carries us deeper into the essence of things, it allows us to be ‘inter-esse.’ But more often, when we say that something is interesting, we mean that it carries us away from the ever selfsame essence of things, and towards the most new and different thing that has come to appear.
Lucretius’ poem, De Rerum Natura, or, ‘on the Nature of things’, describes precisely this dynamic. Far from grasping the nature of things, our minds seek to grasp the false appearance of things. How can this be? Are we not naturally attracted to what is worthy of our attention, and do we not naturally turn away from what is entirely uninteresting? But appearance is always second to essence, and what is second is more ‘new’, more different, and therefore more attractive to the eye.
How come, we are more enamoured by a piece of metal allowing us to communicate over the internet, than we are by the light of the sun? How come, we are so occupied with death, fearing it at all times, when for us as living beings, it is so irrelevant, and even non-existent. It is much more reasonable to be occupied with life. Lucretius’ answer is simple: superstition. It are always the faulty contents of our minds, it are our interpretations, our theories, our ideologies, that come to corrupt our vision. But we can only become corrupted, because our nature makes it so easy. We naturally turn towards what is new and different, and fail to pay attention to what we are already habituated to. But, the nature of things is always self-same, it was there when we were born, and it will be there when we die. It is so ever-present, that it never really appears as something new, to which the mind is forced to pay attention by its drive towards newness. The sun was always there, the blue of the sky was always there, and so was the mere fact of our being alive. What is, is what is. But we are not interested in what is, but in what comes to be.
But if nature is like this, if reality is self-same in its becoming, then where will we satiate our hunger for newness? Precisely, in what is not of nature, but comes to be laid over it. Not in nature, but in our interpretation of it. Not in reality, but in our theories about reality. Or nowadays, in what is called ‘theory’, a field of pseudo-philosophical inquiry, betraying its lack of regard for reality by its very name.
Here is the crux of Lucretius’ idea, blinded by all sorts of ideas, theories, and interpretations, we fail to pay attention to the nature of things. Lucretius’ problem is not how we can gain knowledge of things, but how it is that knowledge has come to stand in the way of knowing things.
Hungry for something new, we read about ‘new’ ideas, and the more complex they are, the better, for the more they’ll be able to feed our desire.
By nature, man desires to know the nature of things. But by nature, man also desires the appearance of things.
It is attractive to interpret Lucretius’ words in terms of contemporary examples. Weary and sated with staring at screens, we care not for the light of the sun. Attracted by the progressive flavour of infinitely complex gender-theories, we fail to simply accept who we are. No one wants to be discarded as old-fashioned, we all want to be in tune with our times. But Lucretius tells us, strive not to be in tune with your time’s interpretation of things, strive to be in tune with the nature of things.
“The mind forever yearns to peer into infinity”, the mind yearns for what it doesn’t know, caring not for what it does.
“The mind seeks explanation” of nature, not nature. Who cares if the interpretation is correct, the mere fact of it being an interpretation, is much more interesting to the mind than its being true. For the truth is what is, what was, and what will always be. How could such a thing ever impress us with the alluring flavour of ‘newness’, that tinge of newness, that makes us rush out to watch the latest movie about the problems of today, thinking it has more to offer than the sight of dawn.
No one prides themselves on knowing that the sky appears blue, but we do pride ourselves on more exotic types of knowledge.
Lucretius says that we should not fear death, for death is not present to us if we can fear it, and if it were present, then we would no longer be there to fear it. The fear of death is an entirely irrational fear. But no one listens to Lucretius, for no one listens to what is present right now, but only to how we interpret the present in terms of what is not present. We do not listen to reality, but only to how we interpret reality in terms of what is not real —the fleeting ideologies of the day, the thoughts flowing through our minds, appearing and disappearing like clouds.
“Look to their actions - you will realize these things they crow
Are not beliefs they base on proven facts, but just for show”
(Lucretius, III, 44-45)
The materialist laughs at the idea that it is the soul that sees through the eyes, and not the eyes themselves that see. In order for us to see through our eyes, there must first be a power of sight, that is not of the eyes. And this power, sees what it wants to see, not what is.
We have seen so much, that we have become tired of seeing. Our eyes have seen so much, and it has made our soul dull. The more we see, the less we become capable of seeing what is worth seeing. This is what Lucretius tells us. Weary and sated with seeing, the eye still sees, but the soul does not.