Empedocles
For I was once already boy and girl, Thicket and bird, and mute fish in the waves.
Empedocles
Empedocles is the most spectacular of the early Greek philosophers, a thinker who was at once a hard-headed natural scientist and a religious prophet. From his city of Acragas in Sicily he gave the West its four elements, earth, air, fire, and water, and imagined the whole cosmos as the endless war and reconciliation of two forces he called Love and Strife. In the same breath he taught that souls are fallen gods condemned to wander through bodies of every kind, and he wrote that he himself walked among men no longer as a mortal. He composed it all in soaring hexameter verse, and even in the broken fragments that survive he is unmistakable.
The corpus and how the chat cites it. Like Parmenides, Empedocles wrote in verse, in two poems: On Nature, which sets out the cosmology, and the Purifications, which sets out the fate of the soul. Scholars still argue whether these were two poems or one, and a papyrus discovered at Strasbourg in the 1990s added fresh lines. Only fragments survive, quoted by later writers, and this room reads them in William Ellery Leonard's 1908 verse translation, The Fragments of Empedocles (Open Court), which is in the public domain. The chat cites by the standard fragment numbers. Expect citations by fragment number, for example fr. 117.
Life. Empedocles was born around 494 BC in Acragas, a wealthy Greek city on the southern coast of Sicily, into an aristocratic family. Ancient reports make him a striking public figure: a champion of the popular cause in his city's politics who is said to have refused an offer of kingship, a physician, an orator whom Aristotle called the inventor of rhetoric, and a reputed worker of wonders who claimed knowledge of remedies against old age and the power to call up the winds. Legend gathered thickly around him in antiquity. Through it all he was a serious philosopher whose four-element physics passed to Aristotle and ruled European natural science for two thousand years.
Where to begin. Read the fragments of On Nature first for the system, the four roots, the forces of Love and Strife, the cosmic cycle, and the bold conjectures about life and perception. Then read the Purifications for the doctrine of the wandering soul. Leonard's edition arranges the fragments by theme, which makes the architecture easy to follow.
The answer to Parmenides. Empedocles writes in the shadow of Parmenides, who had argued that what is must be one, ungenerated, and changeless, since nothing can come from nothing, so that birth and perishing are illusions. Empedocles accepts the ban: nothing, he agrees, truly comes to be or passes away. But he rescues the world of change by a brilliant move. There are, he says, four eternal and imperishable roots, and what we call birth and death are nothing but the mingling and the separating of these changeless elements. There is no coming to be of anything mortal, only a mixture and exchange of things mixed. Parmenidean logic and the obvious reality of change are reconciled at a stroke.
The four roots. Empedocles calls his elements roots, and names them under the names of gods, Zeus and Hera, Aidoneus and Nestis, for fire and air, earth and water. Everything in the world is a blend of these four in fixed proportions, so that bone or blood is just so much fire and water and earth combined in a particular ratio, an early and fertile guess at the idea of chemical proportion. This doctrine of the four elements, taken up and systematized by Aristotle, became the framework of Western physics, medicine, and chemistry until the scientific revolution.
Love and Strife. The roots do not move themselves. They are driven by two opposed powers: Love, which draws them together and blends them, and Strife, which forces them apart. These two are the sole causes of all change, the everlasting forces behind every union and every division in nature. With them Empedocles introduces something genuinely new into philosophy, the idea of moving causes distinct from the matter they act upon, the distant ancestor of every later notion of force.
The cosmic cycle. Because Love and Strife take the upper hand by turns, the world runs through an endless cycle. When Love wins completely, the four roots blend into one perfect, motionless sphere, the Sphairos, a god of pure unity in which all difference is dissolved. When Strife wins completely, the roots draw wholly apart. Our world, mixed of unity and division, lies on the long slope between the two extremes, and the cosmos breathes in and out forever between the One and the Many. It is among the most powerful images of becoming the West has produced.
The science of nature. Empedocles was a daring observer. He imagined an early phase of life in which stray limbs and organs wandered and combined at random, monstrous combinations perishing and only the workable ones surviving to reproduce, a startling anticipation of the idea of natural selection that Aristotle reports and disputes. He explained perception by effluences that stream from things into the pores of the sense organs, like recognizing like, the fire in the eye meeting the fire outside it. And he gave the first known account of breathing, using the analogy of the water-clock to show how air and fluid trade places through hidden passages.
The wandering soul. The Purifications turn from the cosmos to the destiny of the soul. A daimon, a divine spirit, who stains himself with bloodshed or breaks his oath is exiled from the company of the blessed and condemned to put on body after body across thousands of years. "For I was once already boy and girl," Empedocles writes, "thicket and bird, and mute fish in the waves." By purification, above all by abstaining from bloodshed and from the eating of flesh, the fallen spirit may climb again toward the divine. Here the physicist and the mystic stand together in a single thinker, a union later philosophy found both scandalous and impossible to forget.
Reception, and adjacent reading. Aristotle treated Empedocles as a major predecessor, preserving and criticizing both his four elements and his guess about the survival of the fit, and the Roman poet Lucretius inherited from him the very form of philosophy sung as verse. Read now, Empedocles is the great pluralist who answered Parmenides and the first thinker to name distinct moving forces behind change. He learned the transmigration of souls and the discipline of purity from Pythagoras; he replied to the changeless One of Parmenides with his mixture of imperishable roots; he stands beside Heraclitus as the other great Pre-Socratic poet of becoming, though where Heraclitus made strife the father of all things, Empedocles set Love against it; Aristotle is the chief witness who hands him down; and Lucretius carried his vision of nature into Latin. His cosmos of Love and Strife has never stopped haunting the philosophy and the poetry that came after.