A diverse world like the one we live in, Empedocles averred, could exist either during the phase of love’s ascendancy, pulling things together, or during the opposite side of the cycle, while strife strove for chaos. Then love reasserted its influence to rebuild the harmonious sphere. When chaos triumphed, strife’s work was done. But then strife attacked, mixmastering the sphere’s innards to create diversity, ultimately reaching a state of utter chaos. Elements just get mixed up in different ways, either while merging into one under the influence of love, or while dissembling during the predominance of strife.Ĭosmologically, then, love forced everything into unity, a huge homogeneous sphere. In an attempt to preserve Parmenidean logic while still accounting for the apparent change in the universe, Empedocles proposed that his four elements “never cease their continual interchange,” but “they exist always changeless in the cycle.” So no element ever comes into being or is ever destroyed. In the face of all the obvious change in the world, it might seem an odd philosophy, but it gained wide acceptance in the philosophical era preceding Socrates. Matter, and all existence, was therefore everlasting and never changing. Parmenides argued that nothing came from nothing, and therefore nothing new could be created. In the West, Aristotle adopted Empedocles’ classification and therefore so did the rest of educated Europe.Įmpedocles developed his element theory in response to the philosophy of Parmenides, who was a couple of decades or so older than Empedocles. But the rest of the world didn’t care what the Chinese thought the elements were. Ancient Chinese scholars agreed on just three of those four elements and identified a total of five: earth, fire, water, metal and wood. Remarkably, virtually all the Greek philosophers seemed to buy this story - at least the four elements part - and it persisted throughout the educated Western world until well after the Middle Ages. Love impelled the combination of elements into a unified whole strife was the destructive agitator that ripped the elements asunder. That is, the various forms of matter and life and the structures of the everyday world are just mixtures of the elements in varying proportions.Įmpedocles declared that sensible objects come into being as the elements are melded together or pulled apart by two opposing forces: “love” and “strife” (sometimes translated as “hate” or “conflict”). These elements, Empedocles declared, persist throughout recurring cycles of creation and destruction. They personified (or godified) the physical forms known as fire, earth, air and water (although experts do not agree about which god stood for which element). But most of all, he deserves recognition as one of the great natural philosophers of antiquity.Įmpedocles is most well-known for his theory that all matter consists of four elements - he called them “roots” - and named them for the Greek gods Zeus, Hera, Aidoneus and Nestis. Empedocles may also have been a physician (he wrote a lot about physiological topics at any rate), he dabbled in magic, and even described a primitive notion of natural selection’s role in shaping the forms of organisms. His oratorical ability and skillful writings inspired Aristotle to declare Empedocles the founder of rhetoric. By some accounts Empedocles promoted democracy (despite his aristocratic status) and supposedly declined an offer to be king of Acragas, his home city-state. He basically identified the essence of modern notions of matter and force, and he dreamed up a theory of the universe that shares features with some current cosmological speculations.Įmpedocles was born in Sicily around 490 B.C., apparently into a prominent family (his grandfather, legend has it, was an Olympic champion chariot racer). In fact, stripped of the literary embellishment in his poetic metaphors (and ignoring a few really weird ideas that didn’t make much sense), Empedocles articulated much of what passes today for sound scientific concepts. Even though Empedocles had the true number of elements wrong, and the substances he identified aren’t actually elements anyway, he had more or less (less, I guess) the right idea.
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