Jonathan Langseth PHIL 521 Presocratics Final Paper Winter 2013 The fragments of Empedocles, the most voluminous

of all the pre-Socratic thinkers, leave contemporary readers with a specific problem pertaining to his metaphysics. While trying to reconcile the oneness of Parmenides with the many found by perception, does Empedocles end up putting forth a proto-atomic theory of reality or does he rather offer a view of the continuity of change and difference? While many authors, from Aristotle to John Burnet suggest Empedocles theory is ultimately atomic, I will argue otherwise. I will begin by outlining Empedocles theory of the roots and forces at work in the creation of the cosmos, follow this with the specific charges of atomism made against Empedocles, and conclude by attempting to reconcile his theory with a view of nature as both spatially and temporally continuous. Empedocles is most known for his theory that the entire cosmos is made up of mixtures of four elements (fire, water, aether, and earth) being moved and changed by the forces of Love and Strife. His cosmology suggests that there is a repeating pattern of all things becoming one by the persuasion of Love and being separated by the influence of Strife. This process is a response to the problem of the one and many. The problem is whether the cosmos is a unified, singular, unchanging being (as reason may suggest), or it is a realm of many diverse and differentiated beings (as our sense would suggest). The problem can synonymously be understood in terms of being and becoming. Parmenides had argued that being must be one and unchanging, for if something were to come to be, from whence would it come? In other words, for Parmenides, being is, and what is not cannot be. Therefore, all becoming is illusory. We can hear an echo of this thought in

Empedocles fragment 14 and 15:

Fools! Their reflections are not far-reaching, Who expect what was not before to come to be, Or that something will die out and perish utterly. For from what in no way is, it is impossible to come to be, And for what-is to perish cannot be fulfilled or known, For it will always be there wherever one puts it at any time.i

Yet, unlike Parmenides monistic view of being, Empedocles has a pluralistic view involving the four rootsii and two forces as eternal. These for Empedocles would be defined as immortal being, while what is mortal (the objects of experience) becomes and passes away. In this sense Empedocles is trying to balance the problem of the one and many, being and becoming. He speaks of times when all things come together into a unified sphere (like Parmenides) in which there is no discrimination of individual roots or entities. At other times in the history of the cosmos he says things break apart from this singular unified sphere into a world full of many beings as experienced via the sense (arguably following Heraclitus). The unified sphere is being, and the dissolution of the sphere into many begins the process of becoming. But during the process of becoming there is still being, as instantiated by the roots of fire, water, aether, and earth. These, he says, never cease to exist, while what they commingle to create appears to come into and out of existence. This leads to the fragment inspiring and initiating this project is DK 31 B 8:
: , : : , . I shall tell you another thing: there is no birth of any of all Mortal things, neither any end of destructive death, But only mixture and separation of mixed things Exist, and birth is a term applied to them by men.iii

The specific interpretive problem here delves into the heart of Empedocles metaphysics: Is he here referring only to the transmigration of souls, as put forth in Purifications, or does Empedocles mean that all change is continuous in so far as, to quote John Dewey, There are no absolute originations or initiations or absolute finalities and terminations in nature.iv If the second is true, then Empedocles, while being pluralist (having four elements and two principles as his metaphysical foundation), is not atomistic (as some scholars believev), arguing for immutable, irreducible, indivisible parts of reality and change. Rather, it would imply that Empedocles metaphysics assumes no ultimate parts in space or discrete cuts in the process of change, but rather that there are no ultimately discernable beginning or end to any process or lifespan of an entity. In order to address the question of Empedocles view of discreteness (atomicity) and continuity I will now cite a few passages claiming he is atomistic and follow this with my own rebuttal of this claim.
Aristotle: In what way can those who say what Empedocles says [explain compounds]? For there must be a composition as a wall from bricks and stones. And this mixture will be composed of elements that continue to exist, but are juxtaposed in small particles. This is how flesh and every other such thing would be composed. (On Coming to Be and Passing Away 334a26-31) Aristotle: If the division [of parts] stops at some point, the body at which it stops will either be indivisible [atomic], or divisible but never to be divided, as Empedocles seems to want to say. (On the Heavens 305a1-4) Aetius: Empedocles [et. al.] and all who construct the world by a combination of tiny bodies employ aggregations and segregations, but not properly generations and destructions. For these things come to be, not qualitatively by alteration, but quantitatively by combination. (P 1.24.2) Burnet: Plutarch says that Phusis here means birth, as is shown by its opposition to death, and all interpreters (including myself) have hitherto followed him. One the other hand, the fragment clearly deals with thneta, and Empedokles cannot have said that there was no death of mortal things. The thneta are just perishable combinations of the four elements, and the point is that they are constantly coming into being and passing awayI take the meaning of the fragment to be that temporary compounds or combinations like flesh, bone, etc., have no phusis of their own. Only the four immortal elements have a phusis which does not pass away.vi

And finally:
Clara Elizabeth Millerd Smertenko: Their [the four roots] mixture was to be thought of as

mechanical mixture, "like the bricks in a wall." They were moved from without by external agencies, Love and Strife. Most modern discussions explicitly or implicitly accept this interpretation.vii

The view all these interpretations have in common is the idea that the roots consist of ultimately indivisible miniscule particles that interact in a mechanical fashion to create the objects of becoming. But here we have three questions to address. First, what impetus made Aristotle and others think that the roots must have ultimate parts? Second, why are the motion, combination, and separation of the roots considered mechanical? And third, what exactly does Empedocles mean by the roots? The third question was brought to my attention while raking the ground to separate rocks from dirt. The question donned on me: Is the dirt earth? Or the rocks? Or both? I then began thinking about all the various kinds of soil, clay, sand, etc. and realized that I was unable to experience anything I could call pure, immutable earth. The names of the roots, fire, water, aether (air), and earth represent pure unchanging eternal aspects of reality, but we only experience mixtures, never the roots in their pure form. What is available to the sense would be the mixtures of these roots, not the roots themselves. So although the roots in combination with the forces of Love and Strife compose the world and determine (with chance) the nature what we experience, we do not experience the roots or forces in their pure, eternal forms. We can question whether the roots are ever in a pure form or are always within a mixture. At the end of fragment 17 Empedocles says, but insofar as they never cease their continual interchange, thus far they exist always changeless in the cycle.viii This suggests that in the cosmic period in which the many exist, there is no discerning of pure elements, yet when unified into a single sphere, nothing is discernable. So it would appear that although he elements are pure and eternal unto themselves, they are never completely unmixed with each other.

This leads to the first and second questions above. The idea that Empedocles view of motion is mechanical seems due to retrospective interpretations of his theory. After Democritus, who really did hold an atomistic view of the universe, it made sense to think of Empedocles roots as divisible down to a point, but that this point must maintain the characteristics of the root in question. For example, an indivisible particle of fire would still be fire, and so for the other elements. But where does Empedocles speak of ultimate parts? Perhaps Aristotle and Aestis had access to more fragments than we do, but from what we do have there is no mention of parts, ultimate or not. If their were ultimate parts then the commingling and separating of roots may be understood as mechanical. The picture portrayed would be one in which the ultimate parts of each root come together, yet remain separate, to produce a mortal being. Their interaction in composing mortal beings would be similar to the cogs in a clock, or, as Aristotle says, the bricks of a building. In conjunction they create a new structure or object available to the senses, but in actuality the roots would remain independent, acting on each other as Humes billiard balls. In response to this charge I have to agree with Nietzsches interpretation when he says,
The more definite love and strife replace [the] indefinite mind [of Anaxagoras]. Of course, he thereby dissolves all mechanical motionYet this was its [his theorys] consequence, for how can something dead, one rigid being (ov), have an effect on another rigid being? No mechanical explanation of motion whatsoever exists; rather only one from drives.ix

There is certainly nothing the fragments that imply mechanical motion. Rather the drives, love and strife, attraction and repulsion, seem more related to our contemporary notion of agency. We must ask whether the forces or drives of love and strife operate from outside objects, connecting them together, or from inner impulses active within the mortal beings

themselves. The latter would make more sense if there is to be any directed momentum to the process of change as Empedocles suggests with his circular cosmology of oneness and many-ness. The mechanical motion of dead particles would never produce life and the teleological determination (agency) we find there. The argument for mechanical motion rests on the belief that Empedocles viewed the roots as divisible to a minute point, which is indivisible yet still qualitatively the same as the root it is derived from. Yet again, nowhere in the fragments do we read of particles or the smallest, indivisible points of each root. Now there may be portions of Empedocles text that Aristotle and other commentators had that we do not, but given what we do have there is no indication of smallest parts or mechanical motion. In fact, the fragments seem to suggest quite the opposite. Empedocles speaks of co-mingling, mixtures, and roots entering each other. His metaphor of the painter speaks to this:
As when painters are decorating offerings, men through cunning well skilled in their craftwhen they actually seize pigments of many colors in their hands, mixing in harmony more of some and less of others, they produce from them forms resembling all thingsx

When a painter mixes, say, yellow and blue, he or she gets green. Nowhere in the green are we able to discern the yellow or blue. This is not some kind of mechanical motion in which each part can be delineated. The blending of the mixture obscures the purity of the original qualities. By using the example of painting to describe the mixture of the roots, Empedocles is suggesting that motion, growth, decay, and change are not mechanical, nor of indivisible parts. For if some part of yellow was indivisible, we would see in the mixture (or there would be in the mixture) an unmodified yellowness. It would be as if from far away the mixture of yellow and blue created green, but from close enough a vantage point we could discern the independent particle of yellow and blue, which would be connected to one another, sharing a border. On the other hand, if the colors actual

blend into each other, then it would be impossible to differentiate blue from yellow. This second reading must be the implication of the fragment, for if not, he would have used an analogy more like Aristotles or bricks and stone. It therefore seems that Empedocles is not suggesting ultimately indivisible parts that operate upon each other creating the sensual effects we experience, but rather that the roots are always already mixed to an extent that discrimination is impossible. They roots are always in blend with each other creating all the fleeting objects and processes of experience. Fire cannot exist without air, nor air without earth, etc. Therefore the interplay of the roots is necessary for the many. And as for the unified, singular sphere, no discrimination is possible. The inability to demarcate the roots in their purity is now understandable. As Aristotle says, Empedocles says there is everlasting motion of things congregating continuously through the whole of time, saying there is [F17] nothing void in the totality: whence then would anything else come to be? (On Melissus, Gorgias, Xenophanes 976b22-27)xi The continuous motion and mixing of the roots suggests that there is no discreteness beyond our sense perceptions. All is blended; and this either in unity or separation, for in both cases the roots are being intertwined by the forces of love and strife. If the interpretation just presented is true then we must ask how did Empedocles detect the individual roots and forces. This is to say that if all is always blended together, how could one conceptually distinguish between the roots blended; and how could one fix a determinate number of roots and forces? We must find our answer in the fragments. Consider fragment 20:
Double is the birth of mortal things, and double the demise;

For the confluence of all things begets and destroys the one, While the other [presumably Strife] in turn, having been nurtured while things were growing apart, fled away. And these things never cease continually alternating.xii

We find here Empedocles answer. Love, while the uniting factor of all that is, in uniting destroys the particulars of the many. Strife tends to produce the individual objects or processes of the many that we experience. The double birth seems to flip the roles of love and strife upside-down. For Destructive Strife is the artificer and creator of the birth of all things that come to be, but Love the artificer and creator of their withdrawal from the world of created things and their change and restoration of one world. (Hippolytus Refutations 7.29.9-10)xiii So these two forces each have a double role as that which unites and that which separates. And this not in some mechanical fashion of elementary particles (as presented by Democritus) being connected. Rather, it is the continual flux (ala Heraclitus) of roots that ground the actuality of reality by intermixing and separating out. How Empedocles came upon the roots is somewhat historical for prior to his time there were thought to be three roots, excluding earth. But with the addition of earth Empedocles is able to offer an explanation, close to Darwinian evolution, of how things come to grow out of the earth by way of water, air, fire, and earth itself. The process, rather than mechanical, is closer to a biological or chemical understanding of the relations of the ultimate constituents of reality. And the repeated claim that the mixing and separating of the roots by love and strife in unending implies there is never any unmixed or discrete aspect to the world. And if this is the case then it is true that there is no point at which something comes into being or passes out of being for all is a continuous blending of the foundational roots of existence.

Whether or not Empedocles believed in the transmigration of the soul (which seems to be the case), the transmigration would be a change in blending, the slowly, never approaching beginnings and ends that always continues unnoticed. So regardless of ones interpretation, Empedocles theory in founded on the continuity of change, in which no discrete elements are ever fully actualized.

Bibliography: Burnet, John. Early Greek Philosophy. Merdidian Books, New York: 1958. Dewey, John. The Later Works Vol. 12: 1938. Southern Illinois University Press, 1997. Graham, Daniel W. The Texts of Early Greek Philosophy. Cambridge University Press: 2010. Kirk, G. S., J. E. Raven, and M. Schofield. The Presocratic Philosophers. 2nd Ed. Cambridge University Press: 1995. Neitzsche, Fredrick. The Pre-Platonic Philosophers. Trans. Greg Whitlock. University of Illinois Press: Chicago, 1995.m

Graham 349 I will use the translation roots, as opposed to elements which was not a concept Empedocles used, although most authors use elements in their translations and interpretations of Empedocles. The term elements came into use after Empedocles texts. iii Graham 347. Alternative translations of Fragment 8: Another thing will I tell you: of all mortal things none has birth, nor any end in accursed death, but only mingling and interchange of what is mingled birth is the name given to these by men. And I shall tell thee another thing. There is no substance of any of all the things that perish, nor any cessation for them of baneful death. They are only the mingling and interchange of what has been mingled. Substance is but a name given to these things by men. iv Dewey, LW 220 v For example Aristotle, Aestis, and Burnet. vi Burnet 206-5 vii Smertenko 40 viii Kirk and Raven 287 ix Nietzsche 116 x Kirk and Raven 293-4 xi Graham 349 xii Graham 351 xiii Graham 351
ii