INTO THE FIRE

Our next pre-Socratic giant is Empedocles, perhaps the most imaginative and entertaining thinker known to history. Born around 490 BC, he disappeared around 430 BC, purportedly, throwing himself into the crater of Etna, as the legend has it. He called himself a god (“I go about among you, an immortal god”), banished from the realm of other gods for some unspecified transgressions. (“One of these [rejected ones] I now am, an exile and a wanderer from the gods for that I put my trust in insensate strife.”) In life, he was supremely arrogant, as befitted a god. He dressed himself in flashy purple robes and wore bronze sandals (one of these sandals was later conspicuously found at the site of his demise, that is, at the place where he purportedly leaped into the fire of Mt. Etna), and he also claimed to have performed miracles. He was a mystic and a poet, curiously, the last Greek philosopher to write in verse (nota bene!). The extant fragments of his works are from two of his poems: Purifications and On Nature. The earliest account of his life, used in all his subsequent biographies, predictably belongs to our by now old acquaintance: the delightfully unreliable, but absolutely indispensable Diogenes Laertius.

In his ontology, Empedocles is different from all other philosophers before him, although a similarity with Heraclitus has been noticed by Plato, and mentioned in the Dialogue Sophist, alluding to him as the gentler muse, as opposed to Heraclitus, the severer muse:

Then there are Ionian and in more recent times Sicilian muses, who have arrived at the conclusion that to unite the two principles is safer, and to say that being is one and many and that these are held together by enmity and friendship, ever parting, ever meeting, as the-severer Muse asserts, while the gentler one does not insist on the perpetual strife and peace, but admits a relaxation and alternation of them; peace and unity sometimes prevailing under the sway of Aphrodite, and then again plurality and war, by reason of a principle of strife.

What Empedocles accomplishes in his extremely interesting ontological construct, is overcoming the main stumbling block over how one can possibly become many. To this end, he disposes of the physical monism of his predecessors, in favor of four original roots of every single thing in existence: earth, air, fire, water. These roots are eternal, uncreated, indestructible, and unchanging, just like the Parmenidean One. But, as there are four of them, they are able to combine in all sorts of combinations. Thus, according to his theory, all things in existence somehow consist of these four roots, particularly mixed. There are also two agents, or principles, involved in either the mixing or the separation They are love (philia) and strife (neikos):

The coming together of all things brings one generation into being and destroys it; as the other grows up and is scattered, all things become divided. And these things never cease continually changing places, at one time all uniting in one through Love, at another each carried in different directions by the repulsion of Strife. Thus, as far as it is their nature to grow into one out of many, and to become many once more, when the one is parted asunder, so far they come into being, and their life abides not. But inasmuch as they don’t ever cease changing their places continually, so far they are ever immovable as they go round the circle of existence. (Fragment 17.)

There is an interesting twist to this fantastic story. Apparently, there is no purpose in love’s conjoining of things, which is ruled only by chance and necessity. But some kind of natural selection determines which unions are viable (and they survive) and which are degenerate (and they don’t). Therefore, several modern authors have suggested that here Empedocles shows himself as a precursor of Darwinism in its survival of the fittest aspect.

But such precociousness is by no means a single such distinction of Empedocles. He was ahead of his time in many other respects as well. His theory that light travels at a finite but super-high speed, ought to speak for itself. He said that the moon shines by reflected light (which is true), unfortunately, saying the same of the sun (which is false). He was also correct in saying that solar eclipses were caused by the interpositions of the moon. His most notable empirical discovery established air as a physical substance as he observed a girl playing with a water-clock, dipping it into the water: “the stream does not flow into the vessel, but the bulk of the air inside keeps it out until she uncovers the compressed stream; but then the air escapes, and an equal volume of water runs in.” A related discovery of centrifugal force was made by him when he saw that a cup of water whirled around on a string keeps the water in.

Naturally, Empedocles is one of Nietzsche’s G8 (Group of Eight), and so, our next entry looks at what one genius has to say about the other.