Encyclopedia of Philosophy: EMPEDOCLES

« Whether or not Empedocles was a wonder-worker, he deserved his reputation as an original and imaginative philosopher.

He wrote two poems, longer than Parmenides' and more fluent if also more repetitive.

One was about science and one about religion.

Of the former, On Nature , we possess some four hundred lines from an original two thousand; of the latter, Purifications , only smaller fragments have survived. Empedocles' philosophy of nature can be regarded as a synthesis of the thought of the Ionian philosophers. As we have seen, each of them had singled out some one substance as the basic stuff of the universe: for Thales it was water, for Anaximenes air, for Xenophanes earth, for Heraclitus fire.

For Empedocles, all four of these substances stood on equal terms as the basic elements (‘roots', in his word) of the universe.

These elements have always existed, he believed, but they mingle with each other in various proportions to produce the furniture of the world. From these four sprang what was and is and ever shall Trees, beasts, and human beings, males and females all; Birds of the air, and fishes bred by water bright, The age-old gods as well, long worshipped in the height. These four are all there is, each other interweavingAnd, intermixed, the world's variety achieving. The interweaving and intermingling of the elements, in Empedocles' system, is caused by two forces: Love and Strife.

Love combines the elements together, making one thing out of many things, and Strife forces them apart, making many things out of one.

History is a cycle in which sometimes Love is dominant, and sometimes Strife.

Under the influence of Love, the elements unite into a homo geneous and glorious sphere; then, under the influence of Strife, they separate out into beings of different kinds.

All compound beings, such as animals and birds and fish, are temporary creatures which come and go; only the elements are everlasting, and only the cosmic cycle goes on for ever.Empedocles' accounts of his cosmology are sometimes prosaic and sometimes poetic.

The cosmic force of Love is often personified as the joyous goddess Aphrodite, and the early stage of cosmic development is identified with a golden age over which she reigned.

The element of fire is sometimes called Hephaestus, the sun-god.

But despite its symbolic and mythical clothing, Empedocles' system deserves to be taken seriously as an exercise in science.We are accustomed to think of solid, liquid, and gas as three fundamental states of matter.

It was not unreasonable to think of fire, and in particular the fire of the sun, as being a fourth state of matter of equal importance.

Indeed, in our own century, the emergence of the discipline of plasma physics, which studies the properties of matter at the temperature of the sun, may be said to have restored the fourth element to parity with the other three.

Love and Strife can be recognized as the ancient analogues of the forces of attraction and repulsion which have played a significant part in the development of physical theory through the ages.Empedocles knew that the moon shone with reflected light; however, he be lieved the same to be true of the sun.

He was aware that eclipses of the sun were caused by the interposition of the moon.

He knew that plants propagated sexu ally, and he had an elaborate theory relating respiration to the movement of the blood within the body.

He presented a crude theory of evolution.

In a primitive stage of the world, he maintained, chance formed matter into isolated limbs and organs: arms without shoulders, unsocketed eyes, heads without necks. These Lego-like animal parts, again by chance, linked up into organisms, many of which were monstrosities such as human-headed oxen and ox-headed humans.

Most of these fortuitous organisms were fragile or sterile; only the fittest structures sur vived to be the human and animal species we know. Even the gods, as we have seen, were products of the Empedoclean elements. A fortiori , the human soul was a material compound, composed of earth, air, fire, and water.

Each element – and indeed the forces of love and strife – had its role in the operation of our senses, according to the principle that like is perceived by like. We see the earth by earth, by water water seeThe air of the sky by air, by fire the fire in flameLove we perceive by love, strife by sad strife, the same. Thought, in some strange way, is to be identified with the movement of the blood around the heart: blood is a refined mixture of all the elements, and this accounts for thought's wide-ranging nature. Empedocles' religious poem Purifications makes clear that he accepted the Pythagorean doctrine of metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls.

Strife pun ishes sinners by casting their souls into different kinds of creatures on land or sea. Empedocles told his followers to abstain from eating living things, for the bodies of the animals we eat are the dwelling-places of punished souls.

It is not clear that, in order to avoid the risks here, vegetarianism would be sufficient, since on his view a human soul might migrate into a plant.

The best fate for a human, he said, was to become a lion if death changed him into an animal, and a laurel if he became a plant. Best of all was to be changed into a god: those most likely to qualify for such ennoblement were seers, hymn- writers, and doctors.Empedocles, who fell into all three of these categories, claimed to have experi enced metempsychosis in his own person. I was once in the past a boy, once a girl, once a tree Once too a bird, and once a silent fish in the sea. Our present existence may be wretched, and after death our immediate prospectsmay be bleak; but after the punishment of our sins through reincarnation, we can. »