Empédocles

Empedocles (c.495–c.435 bc)

Empedocles, born in the Sicilian city of Acragas (modern Agrigento), was a major Greek philosopher of the Presocratic period. Numerous fragments survive from his two major works, poems in epic verse known later in antiquity as On Nature and Purifications .

On Nature sets out a vision of reality as a theatre of ceaseless change, whose invariable pattern consists in the repetition of the two processes of harmonization into unity followed by dissolution into plurality. The force unifying the four elements from which all else is created – earth, air, fire and water – is called Love, and Strife is the force dissolving them once again into plurality. The cycle is most apparent in the rhythms of plant and animal life, but Empedocles’ main objective is to tell the history of the universe itself as an exemplification of the pattern.

The basic structure of the world is the outcome of disruption of a total blending of the elements into main masses which eventually develop into the earth, the sea, the air and the fiery heaven. Life, however, emerged not from separation but by mixture of elements, and Empedocles elaborates an account of the evolution of living forms of increasing complexity and capacity for survival, culminating in the creation of species as they are at present. There followed a detailed treatment of a whole range of biological phenomena, from reproduction to the comparative morphology of the parts of animals and the physiology of sense perception and thinking.

The idea of a cycle involving the fracture and restoration of harmony bears a clear relation to the Pythagorean belief in the cycle of reincarnations which the guilty soul must undergo before it can recover heavenly bliss. Empedocles avows his allegiance to this belief, and identifies the primal sin requiring the punishment of reincarnation as an act of bloodshed committed through ’trust in raving strife’. Purifications accordingly attacked the practice of animal sacrifice, and proclaimed prohibition against killing animals to be a law of nature.

Empedocles’ four elements survived as the basis of physics for 2,000 years. Aristotle was fascinated by On Nature ; his biology probably owes a good deal to its comparative morphology. Empedocles’ cosmic cycle attracted the interest of the early Stoics. Lucretius found in him the model of a philosophical poet. Philosophical attacks on animal sacrifice made later in antiquity appealed to him as an authority.

 

 

1 Life and work

The first lines of Empedocles’ poem Purifications give a flavour of the man:

Friends, who live in the great city of the yellow Acragas, up on the heights of the citadel, caring for good deeds, I give you greetings. An immortal god, mortal no more, I go about honoured by all, as is fitting, crowned with ribbons and fresh garlands.

(fr. 115)

Men and women followed him in their thousands, Empedocles says, wanting prophecies or remedies for diseases. Not surprisingly there accumulated in antiquity a huge conglomeration of fact and fantasy about the life and death of such a figure, summarized by Diogenes Laertius (VIII 51–75). A cautious sifting yields the following picture.

Empedocles was born of aristocratic family, a little after Anaxagoras. He died aged sixty. He was active in the political life of Acragas as a fierce opponent of oligarchy and tyranny. He had a reputation as an orator: Aristotle even makes him the inventor of rhetoric. He is described as a physician, but despite his profound interest in human physiology, anecdotes of his miracle working and the supernatural powers he claimed his teaching would impart (fr. 111 ) both strongly suggest a practitioner of magic, an activity doubtless to be seen in the context of his Pythagorean religious beliefs.

Among various writings ascribed to him, the two most important were On Nature and Purifications, hexameter poems probably in three and two books respectively. On Nature was at the time of its composition very likely the longest work of philosophy ever written and Empedocles’ fragments constitute the largest corpus of original extracts to survive of any Presocratic. Scholars disagree about which of the fragments belong to which of the two major works – the sources seldom supply specific information on this point. In the age of Victorian rationalism it was supposed that On Nature presented a sober materialist philosophy of nature, subsequently abandoned in Purifications for the intoxications of mystery religion. Fragments were assigned to the two poems accordingly. The basis for this division of the material has long since collapsed, and more recent study (notably by Kahn 1960) has suggested that On Nature itself draws religious morals from a philosophy which was always conceived in religious terms. Indeed, it has been argued that the great majority of the fragments, including those on religious themes, belong to On Nature, Purifications being simply a collection of oracles and ritual prescriptions designed to satisfy the desire for healing and salvation Empedocles mentions in its opening verses.

 

 

2 Pythagoreanism

Empedocles praises Pythagoras as a man of surpassing knowledge and ’wise works’, with powers of foresight extending to ten or twenty generations ahead (fr. 129). What prompted this extravagant admiration was evidently Pythagoras’ analysis of the human condition: to atone for sin the soul is subject to a cycle of reincarnations into a variety of living forms (since all life is akin) until release is eventually achieved (see Pythagoras §2 ). On this view animal sacrifice counts as unwitting slaughter of one’s kin. Empedocles dramatizes the implication in some gothic hexameters:

Father lifts up a beloved son changed in form, and butchers him with a prayer, helpless fool…. Similarly son seizes father and children their mother, and tearing out the life they consume the flesh of those they love.

(fr. 137)

Further verses spell out the penalty bloodshed incurs, invoking an ’oracle of Necessity’ which condemns guilty spirits (daimones) to wander apart from the blessed for 30,000 years, in all manner of mortal forms. They conclude with a dramatic confession: ‘Of these I too am now one, an exile from the gods and a wanderer, having put my trust in raving Strife’ (fr. 115 ).

Fragment 115 is said by Plutarch to have formed part of the preface to Empedocles’ philosophy. Is this a reference to Purifications (the usual supposition)? ’Philosophy’ rather suggests On Nature; and Empedocles announces the recovery of his divinity at the start of Purifications (see §1). On the basis of comparison with the proem to Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things Sedley (1989) argues persuasively that the entire sequence of fragments just summarized helped to launch On Nature. The conjecture is apparently confirmed by the partial preservation in newly identified fragments (see Martin and Primavesi 1998) of lines on the folly of meat-eating (fr. 139) hitherto usually assigned to Purifications: most of the new material indubitably derives from On Nature, and it is likely that all of it does. In any event, Empedocles’ Pythagoreanism is the best clue we have to his intentions in On Nature. The poem should be seen as an attempt to exhibit the cycle of incarnation as an instance of a general pattern of repetition governing all change: plurality is converted into unity by the power of Love and unity is then broken into plurality by Strife, until the process is reversed and conversion of plurality into unity begins once again. What On Nature works out in detail is the realization of this pattern in the rhythms of plant and animal life and the design and dissolution of the body, but above all in the history of the universe itself (see Pythagoreanism §3 ).

 

 

3 The cycle of change

The cycle of change is announced in fragment 17.1–2: ’A twofold tale I shall tell: at one time they grew to be one alone out of many, at another again they grew apart to be many out of one’. These lines deliberately echo and defiantly contradict the assertion of Parmenides (§3) that there is only one tale to tell, that of changeless and timeless being and unity (fr. 8.1–6). The language of growth is not accidental. Empedocles has already indicated that the subjects of the dual process are what he calls the ‘roots’: earth, air, fire and water. Subsequent philosophy would speak of these as ‘elements’, but Empedocles chooses a designation which captures the idea that they are not merely the basis of everything else, but themselves have a potentiality for development. He is emphatic in his agreement with the Parmenidean thesis that nothing comes into being from non-existence or perishes into it: mixture and separation of roots are what humans mistakenly call birth and death (frs 8–12 ).

After amplification of the twofold tale Empedocles continues: ‘And these things never cease their continual interchange, now through love all coming together into one, now again each carried apart by strife’s hatred’ (fr. 17.6–8). Mixture and separation would not occur without the agency of forces bringing them about. Are Love and Strife physical or psychological forces? For us it is counterintuitive to envisage earth or fire as capable of psychological responses. But On Nature is permeated with expressions of the hatred the roots have for each other, of their desire for one another. Empedocles does not write as though he wants the reader to construe them metaphorically. On the other hand, the operation of Love in creating mixtures of the roots is often also described in the language of craftsmanship: she welds (frs 34, 96) and rivets (fr. 87) and fires like a potter (fr. 73). Here Love seems to represent whatever physical force makes for the assimilation of things. However we are to conceive of Love and Strife, they are certainly treated as existing independently of the roots. But there is a difference between them: Love is ‘among’ the roots, Strife ‘apart from’ them (fr. 17.19–20). The implication is presumably that Love works with the grain, Strife against it: roots have a natural tendency to join together, whether earth with earth or in mixture with air, fire and water, whereas their separation is unnatural (fr. 22). Aristotle, however, found Empedocles thoroughly confusing on this issue (Generation and Corruption II 6).

Fragment 17.9–13 sums up the two key features of change – its oscillating duality and its ceaseless repetition – in a surprisingly Heraclitean conclusion (compare Heraclitus §3 ):

So insofar as they have learned to grow one from many, and again they grow many as the one grows apart, thus far do they come into being and have no stable life; but insofar as they never cease their continual interchange, thus far they exist always, changeless in the cycle.

The implication is that Parmenides looked for changeless existence in the wrong place: it is not to be found in being (not even the being of the roots), but in the regularity of the cycle of unending flux.

 

 

4 The biological paradigm

The initial presentation of the cycle of change in fragment 17 is entirely general and abstract in its formulations. The evidence for the structure and content of the following section of On Nature is inadequate, and hopes that newly discovered fragments might clarify the matter definitively have not so far been realized. What the do confirm however is that Empedocles took the creation of plants and animals as a paradigm of the way mixture of roots generates a huge variety of other forms (fr. 21; ensemble (a) (ii) 21–30 of the Strasbourg papyrus ). He appealed to the analogy of a painter, using a few pigments with many potentialities:

When they seize pigments of many colours in their hands, mixing in harmony more of some and less of others, they produce from them forms resembling all things, creating trees and men and women, beasts and birds and water-bred fish, and long- lived gods, too, highest in honour.

(fr. 23)

If this is how art achieves its effects, why should we look for any other explanation of the way nature produces the originals copied by the painter?

It may be that the paradigm of animal creation, once established, was subsequently invoked in later sections of the poem. For example, the following lines from fragment 20 might well have been written to support the notion expressed in fragment 31 of the disintegration of the limbs of the cosmic sphere:

This is well-known in the mass of mortal limbs: at one time, in the maturity of a vigorous life, all the limbs that are the body’s portion come into one through love; at another time again, torn asunder by evil strifes, they wander, each apart, on the shore of life. So it is too for shrubs and water-housed fish and mountain-laired beasts and wing-progressing gulls.

5 Cosmic history

Mention of the cosmic sphere brings us to Empedocles’ boldest application of the concept of a cycle of change: to the history of the universe. He conceived that just as harmonization by Love and decomposition by Strife constitute the common pattern for the biological development of plants and animals, there must be a similar story to tell about the universe as a whole. But here he supposed that the unity achieved at one pole of the cycle and the division at the other took more radical and absolute forms than in the biological realm. When – as he described first as usual – the influence of Love is at its strongest, all distinctions disappear as reality becomes a perfect divine sphere (frs 27–9). Strife for its part generates a vortex which not only breaks the sphere down into its constituent roots, but achieves their complete separation. It is under Strife’s domination that the world as we are familiar with it comes into being (A37, 42 ).

Empedocles’ account of this development was evidently extensive, and included full discussions of all the topics by now traditional in philosophical cosmogony: notably, the formation of the earth, the sea, and the heavenly bodies, and the evolution of life. Strife divides the roots into four great isolated masses. What happens next is obscure, but the key process was physical interaction between these masses: some of its effects inevitable, some pure chance (see, for example, fr. 53). In particular, misty air heated by fire rises up and forms a nocturnal hemisphere balanced by a diurnal counterpart of fire. The sun is a reflection of this fire, the moon compacted air. The earth too sweats under the heat of the sun, which is the origin of the sea (A30, 49, 66 ).

The power of Strife is clearly not what it was, but we hear nothing yet of Love. Its influence begins to be apparent with the emergence of life. A clear example is the creation of bone, ascribed to harmonia, one of Empedocles’ synonyms for Love: ‘And kindly earth received in its broad melting-pots two parts of the gleam of Nestis [water] out of eight, and four of Hephaestus [fire], and they became white bones, marvellously joined by the gluing of harmonia’ (fr. 23 ). The creatures to which bodily parts such as this belonged were described subsequently, in Empedocles’ memorable theory of evolution:

Empedocles held that the first generations of animals and plants were not complete, but consisted of separate limbs not joined together; the second, arising from the joining of these limbs, were like creatures in dreams; the third was the generation of whole-natured forms. The fourth arose no longer from the homogeneous substances such as earth or water, but by intermingling, in some cases as the result of the compacting of their food, in others because female beauty excited the sexual urge. And the various species of animal were distinguished by the quality of the mixture in them.

(A72)

Surviving fragments give vivid details of the bizarre beings of the first three stages (frs 57–62). From these it is clear that in the first two especially chance was made responsible for a great deal. Empedocles may have talked in this context of the survival of the fittest: a remarkable anticipation of Darwinism, although criticized by Aristotle for its inability to account for the regular teleological patterns of nature (Physics II 8). It is only with the animals of the fourth (that is, present) stage that Love begins to exercise a degree of control over the whole structure and pattern of life (fr. 71 ). The evidence suggests that at this point in the poem Empedocles included a full-scale comparative biology of plant and animal species, focused on explanation of the formation and function of the parts of the body.

Ultimately all this diversity would be reabsorbed into the divine sphere. On Nature may have concluded with some verses which foreshadow this, speaking of god as a mind, ’holy and beyond description, darting through the whole universe with swift thoughts’ (fr. 134 ).

Some commentators have thought that Aristotle sometimes talks as if he supposes that two cosmogonies were envisaged: one occurring as Strife grew more powerful, another as its influence ebbed. They have then reinforced this idea of a double cosmogony by adding a double zoogony and appealing to some opaque lines in On Nature itself which speak of a ‘double birth and double failing of mortal things’ (fr. 17.3–5 ). But it seems likely that this is just a reference to the growth of unity, then of plurality, both ’mortal’ conditions persisting only for a while. In any event, the reduplicating interpretation is hard to reconcile with the shape of the cosmic history as it emerges from the rest of the fragments.

Another way of reading Empedocles’ history of the universe is as an arbitration and synthesis between two approaches to cosmogony adopted by different among his philosophical predecessors. Broadly speaking, the Ionians from Anaximander on explain the emergence of a world or worlds as the outcome of separation from an original undifferentiated condition, and of the consequent interaction between the physical forces released by the separation. By contrast, in the cosmological part of his poem Parmenides had posited an original duality of fire and night, and explained the development of cosmic order and life on earth as the work of Aphrodite mixing the two basic forms ( Parmenides fr. 13 ). Empedocles implies that each strategy is half right: separation produces a differentiated universe, but mixture the biosphere.

There is in fact reason to think that Empedocles wanted to be read as among other things an encyclopedist of previous thought. For example, the forms generated in the early phases of evolution are not just the stuff of dreams, but also recapitulate and rationalize myth. Most notable of these is the figure of the Minotaur, surely the model of Empedocles’ ‘ox-headed man-natured’ being (fr. 61). At the opposite extreme, his verses describing the divine sphere deliberately recall Xenophanes’ god (see Xenophanes §3) – ‘No twin branches spring from his back, no feet, no nimble knees, no fertile parts’ (Empedocles, fr. 29) – and that of Parmenides’ being – ‘Thus he is held fast in the close obscurity of harmonia, a rounded sphere rejoicing in joyous solitude’ (Empedocles, fr. 27 ).

 

6 Biological explanations

The power of Empedocles as a thinker and his gifts as a poet are most happily married in the surviving extracts of his biology, where he shows an extraordinary capacity to get the reader to see the kinship of all nature. Sometimes parts of animals with homologous functions are just listed: ‘The same things are hair and leaves and close-packed wings of birds and scales, coming into being on sturdy limbs’ (fr. 82). Sometimes metaphor makes the point: ‘Thus do tall trees lay eggs: first olives… ’ (fr. 79). Other animals are armed with horns or teeth or stings, but ‘Sharp-speared hairs bristle on hedgehogs’ backs’ (fr. 83 ).

Perception was explained by an ingenious theory of pores and effluences. It occurs when pores in the sense organ are just the right size to admit effluences of shape, sound, etc. given off by things (A92). The theory was employed to account for other phenomena also, such as chemical mixture (frs 91–2, A87) and magnetism (A89). Only like things (or things made like by Love) could have symmetrical pores and effluences. Empedocles posits fire in the eye for perception of light colours, a resounding bell in the ear to account for hearing, and breath in the nose for smelling (A86 ). Little of this material survives in his own words, except for an extended simile:

As when someone planning a journey through the wintry night prepares a light, a flame of blazing fire, kindling for whatever the weather a linen lantern, which scatters the breath of the winds when they blow, but the finer light leaps through outside and shines across the threshold with unyielding beams: so at that time did she [Aphrodite] give birth to the round eye, primeval fire confined within membranes and delicate garments, and these held back the deep water that flowed around, but they let through the finer fire to the outside.

(fr. 84)

Empedocles made thinking a function of blood around the heart (fr. 105). Of all physical substances blood comes closest to an equal blending of all the elements, even though its origin still owes something to chance (fr. 98). This is what equips it to grasp the nature of things: earth with earth, and so on – but also Love with Love and Strife with Strife (fr. 109 ).

 

 

7 Sacrifice

Empedocles relates his guilt over bloodshed to ’trust in raving strife’ (fr. 115). As all creation of plants and animals is due to the power of Love, so Strife is the invariable cause of their dissolution and death. It is in his account of blood that Empedocles describes the mixture of the roots as ‘anchored in the perfect harbours of Kypris [Love]’ (fr. 98 ). Hence to kill by spilling blood is to act against the principle that makes for all that flourishes and enjoys harmony. It is no surprise that Empedocles conceives it as madness.

Theophrastus tells us that in his account of ’sacrifices and theogony’, usually taken to belong to Purifications, Empedocles portrayed a golden age when humans recognized only Love as a god: ‘They did not count Ares a god nor Battle-cry, nor was Zeus their king nor Kronos nor Poseidon, but Kypris [that is, Aphrodite] was queen’ (fr. 128 ). There was no animal sacrifice:

Her they propitiated with holy images, with paintings of living creatures, with perfumes of varied fragrance and sacrifices of pure myrrh and sweet-scented frankincense, throwing to the ground libations of yellow honey. The altar was not drenched with the unspeakable slaughters of bulls, but this was held among humans the greatest defilement – to tear out the life from noble limbs and eat them.

(fr.128, continued)

Empedocles envisages this golden age as a time when humans were in fact friends with the rest of animal creation: ‘All things were tame and gentle to humans, both beasts and birds, and friendship burned bright’ (fr. 130 ). Is the image of harmony painted in these passages intended as part of the cosmic history? According to Empedocles’ theory of evolution Strife was more, not less, dominant in the past. We should infer that like most pictures of primal bliss, this too is designed to function principally as an ideal measure of contemporary misery and wickedness.

What Empedocles lays down for all time is a moral rule against killing living things, whose expression led Aristotle to treat it as a paradigm of how natural law is to be conceived: ‘That which is the law for all extends unendingly throughout wide-ruling air and the boundless sunlight’ (fr. 135). Particular Pythagorean injunctions against touching beans and laurel leaves are recorded as Empedoclean (frs 140–1 ). As for the future, other verses promise the repentant sinner eventual release from the burden of reincarnation entailed by committing bloodshed:

At the end they come among humans on earth as prophets, bards, doctors and princes; and thence they arise as gods highest in honours, sharing with the other immortals their hearth and table, without part in the sorrows of men, unwearied.

(frs 146–7)

Empedocles no doubt found the killing of other humans as horrific as animal sacrifice – the lines in which he represents sacrifice as infanticide etc. trade on a particular form of revulsion on the part of the reader. But he directs his outrage at violence to life as such, and more specifically at the assumption that blood-shedding can form part of a proper form of worship. In other words, his protest aims both to broaden our moral horizons and to reform religion. It should be seen as a radical challenge to the entire cultural framework of the ancient Greek city-state.