A rchive Date
[ 13-12-2005 ]
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[ Philosophy ]
sub-Categoy
[ Greek ]
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[http://www.archaeonia.com/philosophy/presocratics/empedocles.htm
EMPEDOCLES (about 459 B.C.)
Presocratics: Empedocles
Empedocles was a citizen of Agrigentum in Sicily. His date is roughly fixed for us by the well-attested fact that he went to Thourioi shortly after its foundation in 444/3 B.C. He was, therefore, contemporary with the meridian splendor of the Periclean age at Athens, and he must have met Herodotus and Protagoras at Thourioi. He was distinguished not only as a philosopher, but also for his knowledge of natural history and medicine, and as a poet and statesman. After the death of his father Meto, who was a wealthy citizen of Agrigentum, he acquired great weight among his fellow-citizens by espousing the popular party and favoring democratic measures. His consequence in the State became at length so great that he ventured to assume several of the distinctions of royalty, particularly a purple robe, a golden girdle, a Delphic crown, and a train of attendants. He combined scientific study with a mystical religion of the Orphic type, but he differed from Pythagoras in the direction his scientific inquires took, focusing on medicine, rather than mathematics. That accounts for the physiological interest that arks his speculations.
The skill which he possessed in medicine and natural philosophy allowed him to perform many wonders, which he passed upon the multitude for miracles. He pretended to drive away noxious winds from his country and thereby put a stop to epidemic diseases. He is said to have checked, by the power of music, the madness of a young man who was threatening his enemy with instant death; to have restored a woman to life who had lain breathless thirty days; and to have done many other things, equally astonishing, after the manner of Pythagoras. Because of all this he was an object of universal admiration. Besides medical skill Empedocles possessed poetical talents. The fragments of his verses are scattered throughout the ancient writers; and Fabricius is of opinion that he was the real author of those ancient fragments which bear the name of the "Golden Verses of Pythagoras," and may be found printed at the end of Gottling's edition of Hesiod.
His principal works were a didactic poem on Nature (Peri Physeos), and another entitled Katharmoi, which seems to have recommended virtuous conduct as a means of averting disease. Gorgias of Leontini, the well-known orator, known as the "the Nihilist", was his pupil, from where it may seem reasonable to infer that Empedocles was a master of the art of eloquence. According to the common account he threw himself into the burning crater of Aetna, in order that the manner of his death might not be known, and that he might afterwards pass for a god; but the secret was discovered by means of one of his brazen sandals, which was thrown out from the mountain in a subsequent eruption of the volcano. This story is rejected, however, as fictitious by Strabo and other writers. According to Aristotle he died at sixty years of age.
PHILOSOPHY: His views in philosophy are variously given. By some he is called a Pythagorean, in consequence of a resemblance of doctrine in a few unessential points. But the principles of his theory evidently show that he belongs to the Eleatic School. He unreservedly accepts the doctrine of Parmenides that what is is uncreated and indestructible, and he only escapes from the further conclusions of the Eleatic by introducing the theory of elements or roots. Of these he assumed four -- fire, air, earth, and water, -- and in some respects this was a return to primitive views which the Milesians had already left behind them. It must be noticed, however, that Empedocles discovered that what we call atmospheric air was a body, and was quite distinct from empty space on the one hand or from vapor or mist on the other. This he did by means of an experiment with the water-clock. He showed that air could keep water out of a vessel, and that the water could only enter as the air escaped.
Besides these four 'roots', Empedocles postulated something called Love (philotita) to explain the attraction of different forms of matter, and of something called Strife (neikos) to account for their separation. He speaks of these quite distinctly as bodies. We start with something like the sphere of Parmenides, in which the four elements are mingled in a sort of solution by Love, while Strife surrounds the sphere on the outside. When Strife begins to enter the Sphere, Love is driven towards its center, and the four elements are gradually separated from one another. That is clearly an adaptation of the old idea of the world breathing. Empedocles also held, however, that respiration depended on the systole and diastole of the heart, and therefore we find that, as soon as Strife has penetrated to the lowest (or most central) part of the sphere, and Love is confined to the very middle of it, the reverse process begins. Love expands and Strife is driven outwards, passing out of the Sphere once more in proportion as Love occupies more and more of it. In fact, Love and Strife are to the world what blood and air are to the body.
Empedocles taught that originally All was one, a God eternal and at rest; a sphere and a mixture (sphairos, migma), without a vacuum, in which the elements of things were held together in indistinguishable confusion by love, the primal force which unites the like to like. In a portion of this whole, however, or, as he expresses it, in the members of the Deity, strife, the force which binds like to unlike, prevailed, and gave the elements a tendency to separate themselves, whereby the first became perceptible as such, although the separation was not so complete but that each contained portions of the others. Hence arose the multiplicity of things. The origin of organic life was ascribed to the increasing action of Strife.
At the beginning of this world there were undifferentiated living masses, which were gradually differentiated, the fittest surviving. Empedocles also described how mortal beings arose in the period when Love was gaining the master, and when everything happened in just the opposite way to what we see in our world. In that case, the limbs and organs first arose in separation, and were then joined together at haphazard, so that monsters were produced, 'oxen with heads of men and men with heads of oxen.' This strange picture of a reversed evolution may possible have been suggested by the Egyptian monuments. But, as the forces of love and hate are constantly acting upon each other for generation or destruction, the present condition of things cannot persist forever, and the world which, properly, is not the All, but only the ordered part of it, will again be reduced to a chaotic unity, out of which a new system will be formed, and so on forever. There is no real destruction of anything, but only a change of combinations.
A world of perishable things such as we know can only exist when both Love and Strife are in the world. There will, therefore, be two births and two passings away of mortal things, one when Love is increasing and all the elements are coming together into one, the other when Strife is re-entering the Sphere and the elements are being separated once more. The elements alone are everlasting; the particular things we know are unstable compounds, which come into being as the elements 'run through one another' in one direction or another. They are mortal or perishable just because they have no substance of their own; only the 'four roots' have that. There is, therefore, no end to their death and destruction. Their birth is a mixture and their death is but the separation of what has been mixed. Nothing is imperishable but fire, air, earth and water, with the two forces of Love and Strife.
Of the elements (which he seems to have been the first to describe as four distinct species of matter), fire, as the rarest and most powerful, he held to be the chief, and consequently, the soul of all sentient and intellectual beings which issue from the central fire, or soul of the world. The soul migrates through animal and vegetable bodies in atonement for some guilt committed in its disembodied state when it is a demon, of which he supposed that an infinite number existed. The seat of a demon, when in a human body, is the blood.
Closely connected with this view of the objects of knowledge was his theory of human knowledge. In the impure separation of the elements it is only the predominant one that the senses can apprehend; and, consequently, though man can know all the elements of the whole singly, he is unable to see them in their perfect unity, wherein consists their truth. Empedocles therefore rejects the testimony of the sensed, and maintains that pure intellect alone can arrive at a knowledge of the truth. This is the attribute of the Deity, for man cannot overlook the work of love in all its extent; and the true unity is open only to itself. Hence he was led to distinguish between the world as presented to our senses (kosmos aisthetos) and its type, the intellectual world (kosmos noetos). Lucretius, who praises Empedocles highly even while criticizing his philosophy, appears to have taken him as a model.
We have little information as to how Empedocles explained the constitution of particular things. He regarded the four elements, which could be combined in an indefinite number of portions, as adequate to explain them all, and he referred in this connection to the great variety painters can produce with only four pigments. He saw, however, that some combinations are possible, while others are not. Water mixes easily with wine, but not with oil]
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