Empedocles of Acragas

Empedocles of Acragas

(b. Acragas [now Agrigento, Sicily], ca. 492 B.C.; d. ca. 432 B.C.)

natural philosophy.

The originator of the four-element theory of matter, Empedocles was the author of two hexameter poems, a physical-cosmological one traditionally entitled “On Nature” (estimated to have been 2,000–3,000 lines in length) and a religious-mystical one, “Purifications,” on themes of personal salvation (including lists of taboos), metempsychosis, and eschatology. A total of 450 lines from the two poems, the largest amount of text available to us from any of the pre-Socratics, have been preserved in the form of quotations by later authors (Simplicius, Aristotle, Plutarch, and others). Also attributed to him in antiquity were a treatise on medicine, tragedies, and other works, but the sources tell us nothing about the contents of any of these, and modern scholars are generally of the opinion that the attributions were spurious or confused. It is noteworthy, nevertheless, that Empedocles is often mentioned as a physician by the medical writers (Galen refers to him as founder of the Sicilian school of medicine) and that Aristotle called him the inventor of rhetoric.

The ancient biographical tradition concerning Empedocles is overlaid with legend. Most of the stories told about him can be seen to be fanciful elaborations of personal remarks made in his poems. He is supposed to have stopped an epidemic by diverting and mixing river streams, to have improved climate by erecting a windbreak across a gorge, to have moderated the etesian winds by drawing them into sacks, and to have revived a woman who had had neither breath nor pulse for thirty days. Of his death it was said that, convinced of his immortality, he jumped into one of the craters of Etna. An alternative version (this one not tinted with sarcasm) has him ascending to the sky. An ancient tradition, enthusiastically revived by the Sicilians in the days of Garibaldi, was that Empedocles, although born an aristocrat, became a champion and hero of democratic politics.

The contents and style of his poetry reveal a man of fervid imagination, versatility, and eloquence, with a touch of theatricality. Perhaps some of the traits of the historical Empedocles have indeed been captured in the colorful portrait of the biographical tradition. The legend-making has continued in modern times: Empedocles has been the hero of Romantic tragedy-poems by Holderlin and Matthew Arnold, and of other literary works (a French play as recently as 1950).

While the religious poem betrays the influence of Pythagoreanism and kindred strands of what has been called Orphism by some scholars and the Greek “puritan psychology” by others, the cosmological poem is unmistakably a development, with crucial modifications, of Parmenidean metaphysics. Parmenides of Elea had deduced that the real must be (a) unborn and imperishable, (b) one and indivisible, (c) immobile, (d) a complete actuality. Since familiar entities of the world of sense fail to conform to these criteria, these entities are a man-made illusion.

Empedocles moderates the extreme transcendent rationalism of the Parmenidean deduction. He postulates four eternal and unchanging elements, earth, water, air, and fire (he actually calls them “roots of all things” and also refers to them by mythological names) and two forces, Love and Hate. Viewed distributively, all six conform, in some sense that Empedocles considers appropriate, to the Parmenidean criteria. The familiar entities of the manifest world (animals, plants, minerals) result from the mixture, in various degrees of combination and according to various proportions of components, of the four elements (“So much does the mixing alter their [the elements’] look,” fragment 21.14). Generation and destruction—change in general—are nothing but aggregation and dispersal of the elements by the two cosmic forces acting externally upon them.

Parmenides’ requirement for unity and total integration of the real, expressed by him in a comparison with a “sphere well-rounded from all sides,” is also fulfilled in a collective sense in Empedocles’ system. The latter postulates a cosmic cycle involving four phases: (1) complete mixture of the four elements in a homogeneous sphere; (2) partial and increasing separation owing to the ascendancy of Hate; (3) an interval of total separation; (4) partial and increasing integration owing to the ascendancy of Love. A cosmos like ours can exist, it would seem, only in phases 2 and 4. (What is given here is the traditional interpretation, most recently defended by O’Brien. Bollack and others have argued that the ancient evidence does not support the ascription of a cycle, in the sense of chronological repetition of these phases.)

To explain the origins of animals in phase 4, Empedocles invokes chance and natural selection. From random combinations of stray limbs and organs, monsters emerge at the early stages. Since these are not adapted for survival and reproduction, they perish. Eventually viable organisms come to be assembled; they succeed in producing offspring, and they proliferate. Darwin mentions this Empedoclean theory (indirectly, by citing a passage from Aristotle in which the views of Empedocles are being discussed) in the first note of the historical preface to The Origin of Species. But it should be stressed that in Empedocles the mechanism of selection ceases to function precisely where Darwinian evolution starts: when the mechanism of heredity begins to play a role.

Closely related to the cosmic cycle that culminates in the sphere is the Empedoclean picture of our universe as a spherical (or perhaps egg-shaped) plenum, with an encompassing crystalline firmament. Both fixed stars and planets are islands or pockets of fire, the former rigidly attached to the firmament. Empedocles may well have been the first Greek to articulate this influential picture. (Some scholars credit this to Anaxagoras, on the assumption that his date is earlier; others to Parmenides, or to the Pythagoreans, or to even older thinkers, but on evidence that is less firm than what we possess for Empedocles.) That he regarded the earth as spherical is open to doubt, since he explained the inclination of the celestial axis as the result of “tilting” caused by air pressure. Three more doctrines of his astronomy are worth mention. He adopted Parmenides’ account of moonlight as a reflection from the sun and gave the correct explanation of solar eclipses. But he was not content to limit the hypothesis of reflection to the moon; he considered the sun itself to be an image of the whole daytime sky as the latter is reflected from the earth’s surface.

The macrocosmic cycle reverberates at all levels of the universe. In fragment 100 Empedocles explains respiration and the movement of blood in terms of ebbing and flowing, and gives as illustration the movement of a liquid in the clepsydra, “the water snatcher”—essentially our pipette but wider and with multiple holes at the lower end, suitable for drawing and serving wine from a deep jar. The illustration has often been extravagantly hailed by modern scholars as an experiment. More significantly, the passage represents the earliest statement of the tidal theory of blood movement that remained standard until the time of William Harvey (1628).

The theory of the four elements was adopted by Plato and Aristotle, although both postulated subelemental principles and allowed for transmutation. The Empedoclean theory also inspired or influenced the similar doctrine of four elements and four humors in the Hippocratic school of medicine. Through these three avenues of Platonism, Aristotelianism, and the medical tradition, Empedocles’ theory of matter remained the dominant one until the revival of atomism (by Gassendi and Boyle) in the seventeenth century.

While critical of the four-element theory and of Empedocles’ conception of the world as a plenum, the ancient atomists nevertheless drew heavily on him. As can be seen very clearly in Lucretius, they adapted Empedoclean ideas not only in the areas of cosmology and zoogony but also in explanations of the phenomena of perception. Empedocles’ theory of filmlike “effluences” that are emitted by all things and of corresponding “pores” that serve as selective receptors for these emissions was especially influential.

To trace the various types of Love-Hate metaphysics, speculative physics, and Naturphilosophie to Empedocles would be gratuitous, of course, since that particular pair of forces has the universality of a psychological archetype. Freud, who was struck by the resemblance of his later theory of Eros-Destructiveness to the Empedoclean scheme, mused that his own theory might be a case of cryptomnesia of his early readings in pre-Socratic philosophy (The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, James Strachey, trans. [London, 1964], XXIII, 244–246).

Many of Empedocles’ ideas that did not have historical influence turned out to have been prophetically right. Most often mentioned in this connection is his evolutionary paleontology—a prime example, according to Hans Reichenbach, of how “a good idea stated within an insufficient theoretical frame loses its explanatory power and is forgotten” (The Rise of Scientific Philosophy [Berkeley, 1957], p. 197). The same holds for Empedocles’ distinction between matter and mechanical force, his ultimate dualism of attractive and repulsive forces, his postulate of the conservation of energy and matter, his doctrine of constant proportions in chemical reactions, and his assumption that light is corporeal and has finite velocity. If one of the two presently competing theories of cosmology (the “big bang” theory) turns out to be right, even his vision of the universe under the influence of Strife will have found a counterpart in modern physics.

The question of the relation between “On Nature” and “Purifications” remains an enigma. The contrast is not only one of mood; the doctrines of personal salvation and metempsychosis cannot easily be reconciled with the essentially materialist metaphysics of the physical poem. Most modern interpreters have despaired of finding more than a psychological or biographical solution. They see the antinomy implicit in the extant fragments as significantly connected with Empedocles’ dual reputation as philosopher-scientist and miracle worker. “The last of the Greek shamans,” “a Faust,” “a Greek Paracelsus” are some of the more suggestive characterizations that have been proposed.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

For the fragments and ancient reports, see Hermann Diels, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, Walther Kranz, ed., 6th ed., 3 vols. (Zurich-Berlin, 1951), ch. 31. Selections with English translation and commentary are in G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven, The Presocratic Philosophers (Cambridge, 1957), pp. 320–361. The most recent lengthy accounts are Jean Bollack, Empédocle: I, Introduction a l’ancienne physique (Paris, 1965); II and III, Les origines (Paris, 1969); W. K. C. Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy, II (Cambridge, 1965), 122–265; and D. O’Brien, Empedocles’ Cosmic Cycle (Cambridge, 1969), which includes an annotated bibliography of all publications on Empedocles from 1805 to 1965.

Alexander P. D. Mourelatos