Empedocles

Introduction

Empedocles of Acragas is the Pre-Socratic philosopher of the mid-fifth century BCE whose four-element cosmology (earth, water, air, fire mixed and separated by the cosmic forces of Love and Strife) shaped Western natural philosophy for two thousand years. The four-element framework was adopted by Aristotle (with modifications), transmitted through the medieval Aristotelian tradition, and preserved as the dominant natural-philosophical framework until the seventeenth-century scientific revolution. The contemporary scientific framework of elements (the periodic table) is the modern successor to the Empedoclean framework, and the number 4 of the classical elements persists in popular and astrological discourse to this day.

Empedocles was a polymath whose corpus integrated cosmological speculation, biological theory, religious-ethical doctrine, and political and medical practice. The doxographical tradition reports achievements in politics (he was instrumental in the democratic reorganization of Acragas), in medicine (he is treated as a early founder of Greek medicine alongside Hippocrates), and in religion (he claimed divine status and reportedly demonstrated powers of healing and weather control). The integration of these dimensions in a single career is one of the most distinctive features of the Pre-Socratic period and differs from the later Greek separation of philosophy, science, and religious practice.

Life and biography

Empedocles was born around 495 BCE in Acragas (modern Agrigento) on the southern coast of Sicily. The family was wealthy and politically prominent; the doxographical tradition reports that Empedocles was active in the democratic reorganization of the city after the expulsion of the tyrant Thrasydaeus around 470 BCE.

The biographical reports include features that contributed to the legend that grew up around Empedocles in subsequent centuries. He dressed in purple robes, bronze sandals, and laurel wreaths; he claimed divine status; he reportedly demonstrated powers of healing and weather control; the death of Empedocles became the subject of competing legends (the most famous being that he leapt into the crater of Mount Etna, leaving behind only a bronze sandal, in an attempt to substantiate his claim to divine status).

The historical Empedocles less spectacular than the legend. He died around 435 BCE, probably in mainland Greece (the doxographical tradition reports that he was exiled from Acragas after the democratic reorganization had failed).

The works

Empedocles composed two principal poems in hexameter verse: the Physics (Peri Physeos; On Nature) and the Purifications (Katharmoi). Until the mid-1990s, the two were treated as distinct works addressing distinct subjects: the Physics the cosmological-natural-philosophical work and the Purifications the religious-eschatological work. The 1992 publication of the Strasbourg Papyrus (a third-century BCE manuscript containing extensive new Empedoclean fragments) reopened the question; recent scholarship (especially the work of Brad Inwood and Catherine Osborne) argues that the Physics and Purifications may have been portions of a single integrated work or closely related works whose natural-philosophical and religious-ethical content were integrated.

The surviving fragments are gathered in the Diels-Kranz edition (1903; revised through 1952) and in the Strasbourg papyrus publication (Alain Martin and Oliver Primavesi, L'Empédocle de Strasbourg, 1999). The English translations include Brad Inwood's The Poem of Empedocles (1992, revised 2001), M. R. Wright's Empedocles: The Extant Fragments (1981, revised 1995), and the new Loeb edition by André Laks and Glenn Most (2016).

The four elements

The central doctrine of the Physics is the four-element framework. The cosmos consists of four eternal elements (Empedocles calls them roots; the later Greek tradition calls them elements, stoicheia): earth, water, air, and fire. Each element is eternal and unchanging; macroscopic objects are mixtures of elements in varying proportions; change is the mixing and separating of elements rather than generation or destruction of new substances.

The framework satisfies the Parmenidean constraint that what-is cannot come to be from what-is-not. The four elements are the Parmenidean what-is (eternal, unchanging); the macroscopic phenomena are mixtures whose generation and destruction is the mixing and separating of the eternal elements rather than absolute creation or destruction. The framework preserves change and plurality (which the Parmenidean framework had eliminated) while satisfying the Parmenidean constraints on what-is.

The elements are mixed and separated by two cosmic forces: Love (Philotēs, the force of attraction and union) and Strife (Neikos, the force of separation and conflict). The cosmic history is a cyclical alternation between periods of Love-dominance (in which everything is mixed into a single homogeneous Sphere) and periods of Strife-dominance (in which everything is separated into pure elements). The intermediate periods (substantial Love increasing or Strife increasing) are the periods of cosmic life and biological diversity.

Biology and the origin of life

Empedocles developed a evolutionary account of the origin of biological forms. In the period of Love increasing, the elements combine in substantial random ways, producing random combinations of body parts (substantial isolated heads, isolated limbs, random combinations of animal and human features). Most of these random combinations are non-viable and die out; the small minority that are viable survive and reproduce. The framework anticipates features of Darwinian natural selection by 2,500 years (though the mechanism of heredity that the Darwinian framework requires is absent from the Empedoclean account).

The Empedoclean biological framework was developed by Aristotle, who preserves portions of the Empedoclean account in his biological works. The Aristotelian tradition transmitted Empedoclean themes into the medieval and early modern biological tradition.

Religious-ethical doctrine

The Purifications develops the religious-ethical dimension of Empedocles's thought. The doctrine of the transmigration of souls (inherited from the Pythagorean tradition that Empedocles had encountered) organizes the framework. The soul is immortal and passes through successive incarnations in different bodily forms (substantial human, animal, plant); moral failures in one life produce degraded incarnations in subsequent lives; purifications and ascetic practices can restore the soul to its original divine status.

The integration of natural philosophy with religious-ethical doctrine is one of the most distinctive features of the Empedoclean framework. The subsequent Greek philosophical tradition (especially after the development of the Platonic-Aristotelian distinction between natural philosophy and ethics) separated the dimensions Empedocles integrated; the later religious-philosophical traditions (substantial Neoplatonism, early Christianity, Hermetic philosophy) returned to the Empedoclean model of integration.

Reception

The ancient reception of Empedocles was substantial. Aristotle engaged him throughout the natural-philosophical and biological works; the Hippocratic medical tradition developed Empedoclean themes; the Stoic tradition preserved Empedoclean elements in its cosmology; the Neoplatonic tradition treated Empedocles as a precursor of Neoplatonist themes.

The medieval transmission was through the Aristotelian tradition; the four-element framework dominated medieval natural philosophy. The Renaissance recovery of Pre-Socratic philosophy through Marsilio Ficino and the sixteenth-century humanists reawakened interest in Empedocles directly; the Romantic engagement (especially through Hölderlin's unfinished drama The Death of Empedocles, 1798–1800) shaped nineteenth-century European engagement.

The modern reception has been shaped by the nineteenth-century recovery of Pre-Socratic philosophy and the twentieth-century scholarly engagement. The 1992 publication of the Strasbourg Papyrus revived Empedocles scholarship and produced the contemporary engagement with the integration of the Physics and Purifications.

Continuing engagement

Major recent scholarly work includes Brad Inwood's The Poem of Empedocles (revised 2001), M. R. Wright's Empedocles: The Extant Fragments (revised 1995), Catherine Osborne's Rethinking Early Greek Philosophy (1987), Simon Trepanier's Empedocles: An Interpretation (2004), and the Strasbourg Papyrus edition by Martin and Primavesi (1999). Active scholarly debates concern the relation between the Physics and the Purifications, the cosmological cycle, the interpretation of the biological doctrine, and the relation between Empedoclean and Pythagorean religious-ethical frameworks.

Further reading

• Pre-Socratic — the tradition Empedocles helped shape
• Parmenides — the predecessor whose constraints the four-element framework was designed to satisfy
• Pythagoras — the religious predecessor whose doctrine of transmigration Empedocles adopted
• Democritus — the contemporary whose atomism was the competing post-Parmenidean framework
• Aristotle — the successor whose natural philosophy preserved the four-element framework

The Pre-Socratic philosopher whose four-element cosmology shaped Western natural philosophy for two thousand years and whose poetic-philosophical works integrated cosmological speculation with religious-ethical doctrine.