Egocentric Empedocles

"As his life was drawing to a close, he decided to fling himself into a volcano, so that when his body was destroyed, people would think that he must have gone back to the heavens with his fellow gods. But, the story goes, as he flung himself into Mount Etna, one of his very expensive sandals caught on a branch and survived when the philosopher did not. When it was found, the local people discerned the truth."

"A philosopher who thought he was a god"

by

Gregory Elder

August 18th, 2012

RedlandsDailyFacts

"Great Empedocles, that ardent soul, leapt into Etna and was roasted whole."

This ancient verse hardly seems respectful for one of the greatest of the ancient Greek philosophers. But by his own choice, that is how the old boy left this life, and not for very good reasons either. He was born sometime around 490 B.C., and depending on which historians you listened to, he lived from 60 to 100 years before his unfortunate encounter with the volcano.

Empedocles was a Greek who lived in the city of Agrigentum, which is in modern Sicily. He came from a prominent family, who were involved in the democratic revolts which drove out the monarch and then later the rich aristocrats who ruled the city. He was known for his brilliant and passionate oratory, as well as his compassion to the poor and desperate. His commitment to human rights was so great that when he was offered the rule of his city as a tyrant, he refused it and remained a private citizen.

All that good stuff said, he was not a very humble man, either. He was a physician and a magician, and preferred people to think that his cures came from his supernatural powers rather than the medical arts. He claimed to be able to prevent or cause winds and storms and even to cure old age.

But it is for his philosophy and natural science that Empedocles is remembered rather than his claims to magical skills. Empedocles was one of the philosophers whom historians lump together under the title of the pre-Socratics, that is, the natural philosophers who lived before Socrates of Athens and his disciple Plato.

Unlike Socrates and Plato, who were concerned with subjects such as ethics and metaphysics, the pre-Socratics were interested in what the universe was composed of. Thales of Miletus had argued that the original, or prime matter, from which the rest of the world was formed, was water. Heraclitus believed that the prime matter was fire and Anaxagoras had taught that it was air. Parmenides of Elea had taught that the entire universe was one solid mass and the perception of change and motion was a mental illusion.

Empedocles was a synthesizer of these earlier ideas, and proposed the novel theory that the universe was mode of up not one prime matter but several. He proposed that there were in fact four prime matters: earth, air, fire and water, and from these four basic elements the rest of the world was made. This was not modern atomic theory, but he was on the way.

His theory of the four elements would be eventually accepted by a great many people, and was a standard accepted view until the age of the Renaissance. He recorded his ideas in two long poems, called "Purifications" and "On Nature," which were well known and often cited in antiquity, but only about a tenth of which have survived to our times.

Empedocles was also one of the that last philosophers, like Homer and Hesiod who lived two centuries before him, to record his ideas in traditional poetry rather than prose. He also used his poetry to record for posterity how smart he was, and he tells us:

 

"To whatever illustrious towns I go,
"I am praised by men and women, and accompanied
"by thousands, who thirst for deliverance,
"some ask for prophecies, and some entreat,
"for remedies against all kinds of disease."

What is also interesting about this charmingly vain philosopher is not simply that he decided that the world was made of composite elements, which was in itself a remarkable intellectual breakthrough. He also was one of the first "scientists" to propose how change occurred in the cosmos.

While earlier writers ascribed the process of change to the work of the gods, Empedocles tied to find physical reasons why materials changed and evolved. His answer to the mechanism of change was the principles of love and strife.

As we all know, love brings being together - we all desire to be physically present to the persons or things we find attractive. So, too, he argued, this must occur in nature. Magnets love one another, he reasoned, which is why they latch onto one another. So too the tides, gravity, rain must also "love" one another and so seek to be conjoined.

Opposed to the principle of love is strife. Just as in human nature, those we do not like, we avoid, so too this cosmic principle of strife drives the natural elements apart. Smoke hates the fires and flees from it, hot air flees the cold, water runs away for the tops of mountains.

Strife, he asserted, was the more common of the two principles, and the universe is full of hostility. But this in turn makes love, when it does appear, all the more attractive and powerful. I cannot ague with that. Working together, love and strife produce both harmony and variation in all that we see in nature.

Clearly from our perspective this is absurd and easily mocked. I do not advise chemistry students to write on their final examinations that hydrogen despises nitrogen. But given a world where chemistry, physics and any mathematics, much less microscopes, were unknown, Empedocles' idea was quite remarkable as a means to explaining, without any recourse to religion, how things occurred in time and space.

Empedocles was wildly popular in his day, and on his visits to various towns was lauded as the wisest of men. Alas, this seems to have gone to his head. While he did not use the idea of the gods in his theories, he did begin to think that he must be a god, and he certainly wanted others to think so.

As his life was drawing to a close, he decided to fling himself into a volcano, so that when his body was destroyed, people would think that he must have gone back to the heavens with his fellow gods. But, the story goes, as he flung himself into Mount Etna, one of his very expensive sandals caught on a branch and survived when the philosopher did not. When it was found, the local people discerned the truth.

Even then popular legend crept in and later writers decided that he must have learned a lesson from his final flight, survived, was flung into the skies by an eruption and went to live on the moon.

In the year 2006 an underwater volcano erupted off the coast of Sicily, sending huge amounts of debris into the area. Italian scientists named the volcano Empedocles in honor of the ancient scholar crank. Somewhere in the afterlife, no doubt the other pre-Socratic philosophers were filled with envy and strife at the love the moderns had for their Sicilian friend.

[Gregory Elder, a Redlands resident, is a professor of history and humanities at Moreno Valley College and a Roman Catholic priest.]

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Empedocles [Wikipedia]

Empedocles: Fragments and Commentary by Arthur Fairbanks