HoP 011 - All You Need Is Love, and Five Other Things - Empedocles

[Music] Hi, I'm Peter Adamsen and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Liver Hume Trust. Today's episode, all you need is love and five other things, and pediclease. Today, I want to start by telling you something about what you would have held in your hands if you'd picked up a work of ancient philosophy. I mentioned last week that Socrates was, according to Plato, able to buy a copy of a book written by Annex Saggerus, but the word book conjures up the wrong image. What Socrates would have read was not a stack of pages fit between two covers. It would have been written on a long scroll. You would unroll the book as you read it, and the writing would be in vertical columns, which you would read from left to right. There would have been no punctuation, no separation between words, and no difference between capital and lowercase letters. All these things were invented later. The book would have been made of either Papyrus, which is an Egyptian invention, a writing surface made from plants, or from parchment, which is made from animal skins. The first philosophers will talk about who had the opportunity to write on paper would be the medieval thinkers in the Islamic world, who benefited from the import of paper manufacturing from China in the 8th century AD. And of course, whether they were on Papyrus, parchment, or paper, all ancient and medieval philosophical works, had to be written and copied out by hand. The reason I mentioned this at the beginning of today's episode is to help you picture an exciting event which occurred about 20 years ago in the Library of the French City of Strasbourg. A scholar named Alain Mautin was examining some scraps of Papyrus, which had been lying around in this library for quite some time, when he made a discovery. These bits of Papyrus had verses of a poem on it. The poem was written by Empedacles. This could be verified because some of the verses matched fragments of Empedacles known from other sources. Thus in the year 1990, the extent remains of Empedacles got a bit bigger. In ancient philosophy, that's about as exciting as it gets. Quite frankly, my heart rate is elevated right now just talking about it. Thanks in part to the Strasbourg fragments, we have a surprisingly large amount of evidence for the writings of Empedacles. So you might think that, whereas with other pre-secratics we've been having to work hard to fill in the gaps, we would have a really firm understanding of Empedacles' philosophy. We should be so lucky. In fact, Empedacles is at least as controversial among scholars of early Greek philosophy as any of the thinkers we've looked at. Maybe because all that evidence just gives the historians more to argue about. Even without this relative abundance of evidence, Empedacles would be hard to resist. He combines the religious mystique of Papyrus, the pithy inscrutability of Heraclitus, and the cosmic vision of Annexagoras. Let's start with the religious mystique. Empedacles informs us modestly enough that he is a god who is decorated with reeds wherever he goes, worshipped by the people who beg him to bestow prophecy and healing upon them. Diogenes Learceus, a later ancient author who preserves a lot of juicy biographical material about Empedacles and other philosophers, claims that "Empedacles did indeed make quite an impression." In part, this was because of the miracles he performed, not unlike Pythagoras. He raised a woman from the dead and cured one city of the plague. Then there was the way he looked, affecting long, flowing hair and a purple robe and wearing distinctive bronze-sold shoes. Those shoes appear in the most famous bit of Diogenes' report. This has Empedacles dying by throwing himself into a volcano in order to vanish without a trace and thus prove that he had become a god. The trick was discovered, though, when his bronze sandal was discovered on the edge of the volcano's mouth. You've got to love this stuff, even though as usual with Diogenes were in the realm of legend rather than biography. Even Diogenes, certainly not the most critical of historians, reports also a more sober story that Empedacles simply went off to the Peloponnes and was never heard from again. But there's a grain of truth in the volcano story, which is that the volcano named is Mount Etna in Sicily, and Sicily really is where Empedacles was from. To be more specific, he hailed from Akkragas on the southwestern coast of Sicily. His proximity to Italy, where Pythagoreanism was enforced during the 5th century BC, may help explain the distinct Pythagorean flavor of some of his ideas, including his boast about his divinity. Among his doctrines, the most obviously Pythagorean element is his belief in reincarnation. We right remember that the followers of Pythagoras believed that after death, we return as other people and as animals. Empedacles apparently was able to confirm this from personal experience. He tells us in one fragment that he has been a boy, a girl, a bird, and a fish, even a bush. One can't help asking oneself what it is like to remember being a bush, but let's pass over this and move on. In another fragment, he describes the father who raises up his own son in prayer before brutally slaying the child heedless of his screams. The idea being that the son has previously died and been reincarnated as an animal who's being sacrificed on the altar. Like the Pythagorean's, Empedacles figures that if reincarnation is possible, you'd better not eat meat, you might wind up eating your family. What's really remarkable though is the chilling vividness with which Empedacles imagines this gory scene. It's one of the only two images from pre-sacratic philosophy that would be right at home in a horror movie. The other one is also from Empedacles and we'll get to it in a minute. The power of Empedacles' imagery is in part due to the way he wrote, namely in hexameter poetry, following the lead of parmenides. Parmenides looms large over Empedacles' philosophy, as it does for all the philosophers we've been talking about in recent episodes. As with the Atomists and Anacsagoras, one of the main worries for Empedacles is how change is possible, despite the arguments the parmenides and his followers gave for the impossibility of change. We've seen that in their own ways, the Atomists and Anacsagoras sort of agreed with the eliatics that absolute change cannot happen. Nothing comes to be from complete and utter non-being. Rather, what happens is that the things which already exist, whether this means Anacsagoras' infinite mixture of everything with everything, or the Atomist's infinity of unchanging atoms, alter or recombine in different ways. This is Empedacles' solution, too. He says echoing parmenides that, in a way, nothing ever changes. The basic building blocks of the cosmos, which Empedacles called roots, but which Aristotle and later philosophers will call elements, are always the same. They just get separated and combined in different ways, and this yields the universe we see around us. The roots, or elements, are air, earth, fire, and water. Even people who have never really encountered ancient Greek philosophy know about these four elements. You might hear people talk about them when discussing astrology, for instance. Well, Empedacles was the first person to establish these as the basic ingredients of the world. Mind you, he doesn't always just call them air, earth, fire, and water. That would be too straightforward for his style. Instead, he uses the names of gods to refer to them. For instance, in one fragment, water is the goddess Nestus, and fire the god Hephaestus. These combined in certain proportions with earth result in bone. He even gives a numerical analysis, which sounds like something a bartender, would say, when describing a mixed drink. Four of eight parts are fire, and two are of water. Empedacles himself gives a more artistic analogy. To those who doubt that the world in all its complexity could emerge from only these four roots, he points out that painters can fashion images of all things from just a few pigments. Of course, we're more than likely to think Empedacles is on to something here. Varied and complex things can indeed come out of only a few basic elements, just think of the periodic table. What we'll want to know next, though, is how and why the elements come together in the way that they do. The analogy of the painter suggests that someone is controlling this process. As it turns out, there are two some ones or two some things in charge. Empedacles calls them love and strife. These two principles, which we might think of as cosmic forces, are ultimately responsible for the formation of plants, animals, stars, the whole cosmos, out of the four roots. They play something like the role that mind plays in the cosmology of an Xagoras, except that, of course, in an Xagoras, mind has no other force opposing it. The fact that Empedacles has two principles gives him the opportunity to put forward a grandiose and influential idea, his theory of cosmic cycles. According to this theory, there's a kind of waxing and waning in the power of both love and strife. When love is completely dominant, all the four elements are mixed together in total piece and harmony. Empedacles describes the cosmos in this condition as a sphere, which might remind us of the spherical one being in parmenides. Like parmenides as being, though, this sphere is going to change. As strife begins to exert its influence, the elements are sifted out from one another. Ultimately, the elements become completely separate, so that all the fire is gathered together, all the water gathered together somewhere else, and the same for air and earth. Obviously, when the cosmos is dominated totally by love or by strife, there will be no people, animals or plants. It's only when we are somewhere in between these moments of total domination that things get really interesting. Here's where we run into one of the difficulties that impetically scholars enjoy arguing about. Is the idea that a cosmos like ours would be produced as we go from a total love to total strife or vice versa? Or does it happen twice, so to speak, so that you get fish, giraffes, people, and everything else, whenever you are somewhere in between total love and total strife, whichever direction things are going? I guess we don't need to decide this in our modest little podcast, but for what it's worth, I suspect that impetically thinks that the apparent order and harmony in our cosmos shows that love is still exerting significant influence. This brings us to the second image in impetacles that wouldn't be out of place in a horror movie. It's one thing to say that somehow, plants, animals, and people arise from the four elements, is quite another to explain how this happens. Impetically, it's true to form has quite a bold theory about this. He says that animals emerge in stages. At first, you don't get whole animals, but only individual limbs and organs. In what is surely a contender for his most fantastic fragment, he describes the situation as follows. Here, spraying up many faces without necks, arms wandered without shoulders unattached, and eyes strayed alone in need of foreheads. I take that translation from the Kirk Raven and Skofield volume on presacratic philosophy, by the way, an invaluable book which I've been using a lot as I've written these episodes. Mostly I've done my own translations, but I think you'll agree that this translation cannot be improved upon. Anyway, here you have these eyeballs cruising around, occasionally bumping into a shoulderless arm. The eyes can't apologize, they have no lips. Now, the next thing that happens is that the limbs come together, but they do so in an apparently random fashion, which produces, as he says, things that look like they come from dreams. The dreams must be nightmares, I guess, though I don't remember having too many nightmares where I saw shoulderless arms sporting eyes. Next, things progress still further, and you get whole animals. But these aren't necessarily the animals we know and love. Since they come together randomly, the results can still be monstrous. Aristotle quotes Empetacles' example of an ox with the face of a man. But these monsters said Empetacles always die out, and still die now when they are occasionally born. They perish, he says, because they are unsuitable. It's only in a fourth phase that we get animals which are able to reproduce. Now, I know what you're thinking, holy cow, or rather holy man-faced ox, Empetacles invented the theory of evolution. At least that's what a lot of people have thought. Now, I don't want to take anything away from Empetacles' audacious theory, but I do want to point out that it does not really anticipate the theory of evolution. To have a theory like Darwin's, you need to have the idea that species carry on by means of inherited features, and the idea that inherited features are selected because they make the animal or plant more likely to survive. Empetacles has neither of these ideas. Reproduction comes in only the final stage when the suitable animals, namely the ones we have now, have been produced. Fitness for survival is what makes reproduction possible, not the other way around. Without an explanation of inherited features, Empetacles cannot really tell us why it is the so-called suitable animals that survive. Perhaps it's true that the man-faced ox will die equipped death, whereas the ox-faced ox will prosper and get to mate with the other ox-faced oxen. Not quite sure where that should be, maybe the lady beasts find the man-faced ox a turn off, but let's just grant it to Empetacles for the sake of argument. Still though, why does the ox-faced ox presoost an animal that looks just like it? This cannot be explained by appealing nearly to chance. Like the other presocratic, Empetacles was genuinely fascinated by the physical world around him, and maybe more than any other presocratic. Though this could also just be because we have more evidence for Empetacles, he tried to explain the things around us in light of his cosmic theory, for instance, the eye. In one complicated fragment, the eye is said to be fashioned by Aphrodite and put together very much like a lantern which shields a fire from the wind. The fire of the eye is surrounded by water, but never doused, because of the membranes that separate the flame from the moisture. Vision is possible because of tiny pores that allow fine material to pass through, so that the membrane around the fire inside the eye is like a kind of screen, both protecting it and letting it interact with the world outside. But why does there need to be fire in the eye? The reason is that Empetacles thinks that colors are fiery, and only fire can be affected by something fiery. This principle that in sensation only "like" can affect "like" is one we will revisit when we get to Aristotle's theory of the soul. But for now, I want to emphasize something else, which is the careful way Empetacles has thought about the eye. You might even say "dicected the eye" maybe literally when we think about those membranes. Remember, Empetacles claimed that everywhere he went, people flocked around him asking to be healed. Maybe this wasn't just part of his Magical Wiseman act, because there are other ancient authors who tell us about Empetacles' expertise in medicine. But was there really medicine at this early period in ancient Greece? You bet there was. In fact, ancient medicine and ancient philosophy were in constant interaction since at least the 5th century BC, if not earlier. Hypocrites, the father of medicine, was in near contemporary of Plato's, and hypocrites was already able to draw in generations worth of ideas about the human body, including the sort of things we find in Empetacles. Of course, these days we don't think of medicine as being a part of philosophy, and even in ancient Greece and Rome, medical doctors were considered to be something of a separate profession. But as we'll see in a couple of episodes from now, you can't understand the history of Greek medicine without talking about philosophy and vice versa. In two weeks then, we'll be discussing the Hippocratic Corpus and its relation to philosophy. But before that, we'll have another exciting guest. Next time, I'll be interviewing one of the world's leading scholars of Presocratic thought as a fitting culmination to the episodes on the Presocratic so far. In fact, he's one of the authors of that invaluable volume of translation and commentary on Presocratic philosophy I just mentioned earlier in this podcast. There may be four elements, but there's only one Malcolm's Scofield, so join me for an interview with him next week on the history of philosophy without any gaps. [Music]