Reading Day 2
ClinamenSF #essay, #clinamen, #contemporary
Clinamen, derived from clīnāre, to incline, is the Latin name that Lucretius gave to the unpredictable swerve of atoms, to defend the atomistic doctrine of Epicurus (Wikipedia). Epicurus Epicurus was a Greek philosopher who was born and lived between 341 and 270 BC. Lucretius Carus was a poet and philosopher who was born and lived between 99 and 55 BC. Lucretius can sometimes be seen as the successor of Epicurus since he wrote a book based on Epicureanism: De Rerum Natura Libri Sex. In Rerum Natura, Lucretius addressed clinamen as a change of motion, when bodies, due to uncertainties, swerve from their course. (Retallack 2) Here, Lucretius tried to explain clinamen as a change of motion. The action or process of moving or being moved (Oxford Languages). This way Lucretius addresses the natural part of the significance of clinamen. The idea of not being forced into one direction. So, this way clinamen can enforce the natural capacity to have a will of its own. Lucretius In the third century B.C.E. the Greek philosopher Epicurus posited the swerve (a.k.a. clinamen) to explain how change could occur in what early atomists had argued was a deterministic universe that he saw as composed of the elemental body moving in unalterable paths. (Retallack 2)
Uncertainly, from this I can deduce that clinamen was the name for research on atoms. An atom is the smallest part of an object and is used to explain the most dominant changes in every single move in the atmosphere that happened until now on planet earth. In this way, clinamen can also be explained by the big bang theory. The Big Bang Theory is a cosmological model of the observable universe from the earliest known periods through its subsequent large-scale evolution (Silk 208). In the text The Poethical Wager, Retallack adds a significant component to the concept of climanem. She stated that Cage’s idea of chance operation, or composed clinamen, highlights a productive sense of contingency. She refers to this later when she defines writing as nothing more and nothing less than living and composing one contemporariness. (Retallack 16-17). In this way, the idea of “composed clinamen’’ manipulates one’s ideas by, for example, writing. I see writing as well as reading as a way to manipulate one’s thoughts. This has to do with the fact that writing, when it’s read, can lead to a change in the way of thinking, or can leave something hanging that triggers a reaction later on. Furthermore, you can force movements, and in this case it’s the movement of neurons. So, these movements are convenient since we can access information and react to it, which will sum up in more movements. On the other hand, “composed clinamen” can be negative, or can suggest negativity. An example of this is the pollution humans
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