Philosophy Today

published on January 20, 2016

Lucretius and Monsters
Between Bergson and Canguilhem

In this paper, I analyse the problem of monstrosity as a key point of Lucretius’s theory through the opposite interpretations of Bergson and Canguilhem. According to Canguilhem, Lucretius’s philosophy can be described as follows: before the constitution of the ‘pacts of the nature,’ forms proliferate in the kingdom of Chaos. Following the pacts, the Kingdom of the form and of the Cosmos is established. Following Bergson, on the contrary, Lucretius’s pacts of nature represent the ‘kingdom of necessity’ and the ‘eternal law of nature.’ Not in the sense that the persistence of forms is ensured, but rather in the sense of the necessity of the combinations of atoms. Hence, the form’s constitution is not secured by the pacts of nature, and a monster is not an exception to them. Both interpretations paradigmatically illustrate what is at stake in the concept of monstrosity, namely the meaning of Lucretian determinism and its relation with chance.