Empedocles

Empedocles

FUTURE MODERN ANCIENT GREEKS - Empedocles is a wealth of subject matter.

The Classical Mind
W.T. Jones
1980

Empedocles

-Empedocles is the first pluralist we know anything about.
-accepted the Parmenidean notion that nothing is created or destroyed
-denied the Parmenidean notion that motion is impossible
-argued that motion took place by things swapping places in the plenum
-The many things that exist are roots: earth, air, fire and water. Each of these roots are a Parmenidean one, eternal, uncreated, indestructible and unchanging
-Two types of motion: Love & Strife
-Love - the motion of uniting
-Strife - the motion of separation
-The world ebbs and flows between total love (absolute mixing of the four roots) and total strife (absolute segregation of the four roots)
-the objects of the perceivable world are unstable combinations of the four roots
-anticipated the survival of the fittest part of evolution in a creative way:

As love begins to come back into the ascendency and take back from strife the world will have a strange look: "At this time the various parts of animals arise in a hit-or-miss way, as Love bit by bit mixes the elements that Strife has separated: 'heads spring up without necks and arms wander bare and bereft of shoulders. Eyes stray up and down in want of foreheads'. As love continues to mix things up, these parts get united in a completely haphazard way: 'these things joined together as each might chance, and many other things besides continually arose'. Eyes might, for instance, 'mix' with hands, feet with shoulders. Such mixtures obviously cannot survive, but in the course of random combinations a successful relationship sooner or later occurs" (Jones, 27).  But the evolutionary process is completely controlled by chance. There is no god guiding it along.

FUTURE MODERN ANCIENT GREEKS - Empedocles needs to be a sort of mad scientist letting things 'evolve' by random. Weird beasts with no eyes, six hands and a foot, sort of a Dali painting out of a nightmare. 

While Empedocles denied the existence of god in the evolutionary process of love coming into the ascendency, he did worship the overall process as a god like Xenophanes. Also like Xenophanes, the god of Empedocles was not anthropomorphic.

The History of Western Philosophy
Bertrand Russell
1972

"The mixture of philosopher, prophet, man of science, and charlatan, which we found already in Pythagoras, was exemplified very completely in Empedocles" (Russell, 53).

-Flourished circa 440 BC
-from Acragas, Sicily
-a democratic politician and claimed to be a god
-stories abound of him as a miracle worker, could control the winds, brought a woman back to life after being dead for 30 days
- to prove he was a god he leapt into the crater of Etna
"Great Empedocles, that ardent soul
Leapt into Etna, and was roasted whole"
-Like his contemporary Parmenides, Empedocles wrote in verse
-his science and religion were inconsistent with one another
-discovered a crude version of centrifugal force
-wild evolutionary theory
-knew that the moon shined by reflected life (but, thought the sun did too)
-four elements (six in function): fire, earth, water, air (love & strife)
-love and strife are processes that are cyclical. there was a time when love fully wiped out stripe and men only worshiped the Cyprian Aphrodite then. But strife came back and things began to separate again.
-The cycle of life was not teleological. It was only governed by chance.
-His religious leanings were Pythagorean and Orphic
-He also considered himself a god, even if sometimes he felt like one in exile for some sin

Early Greek Philosophy
Jonathan Barnes
2001

-Came from Acragas, Sicily
-Came from a rich and distinguished family
-lived circa 495-435 BC
-claimed to be no longer mortal, an immortal god, compassionate for strangers and inexperienced in evil
-was a little conceited, "But why do I attack them as though I were achieving something great if I prove superior to much-perishing mortal men?" (Barnes, 112). This is how Empedocles described being smarter than the average man, eh Boo-Boo. Sextus Empiricus however says that no one even moderately versed in philosophy would have thought him boastful.

Plutarch describes some of his words (the bold are Empedocles, the regular Pultarch):

There is an oracle of necessity, an ancient decree of the gods, that whenever anyone errs and defiles in fear his dear limbs - one of the spirits who have been allotted long-lasting life - he shall wander thrice ten thousand seasons far from the blessed ones. Such is the road I now follow, an exile from the gods and a wanderer. He proves from his own case that not just he himself but all of us are immigrants here and strangers and exiles. For it is not blood, my friends, nor blended breath (he says) which provides the substance and principle of our souls: from these the body has been fashioned, earth-born and mortal; but the soul has come here from elsewhere and he calls birth by the gentlest of terms, a journey abroad. And what is most true, the soul flees and wanders, driven by divine decrees and laws...when it is tied to the body, it cannot recall or remember from what honour and from what breadth of bliss it has come, having exchanged not Sardis for Athens, nor Corinth for Lemnos or Scyros, but the heavens and the moon for earth and an earthly life (Barnes, 113).

FUTURE MODERN ANCIENT GREEKS - This is why the Greeks live on another planet. They were sent to earth to live abroad by the gods. Some of them are still stuck in a cycle of birth-death in exile on earth, but some have returned to their home planet, where our traveler is being taken. They were sent to earth because of sin they committed, decreed to wander thrice ten thousand seasons far from the blessed ones. But, the gods got bored waiting and followed them to earth, forgot how to get home and have since traveled elsewhere. Only Prometheus, because of his punishment was sent back home to wait. 

-Souls were 'long-lasting spirits' in his poetry because the soul is immortal
-Strife, the process by which things are coming apart in his cosmology punish the souls by forcing them to go from body to body
-the bodies of the animals men eat are the dwelling places of punished souls
-sex is bad because it makes men and women co-workers with strife
-He called those who gain the wealth of divine thoughts happy and those whose beliefs about the gods are dark are wretched
-believed that no part of the universe is empty

His biological evolution theory had four generations:

1st Generation of animals was just body parts
2nd Generation of animals were monstrous
3rd generation of animals are what we see today (properly joined limbs and such)
4th generation of animals is when Love is totally in dominance and all is One

"In the time of Love where many neckless heads sprang up" (Barnes, 142)

FUTUTRE MODERN ANCIENT GREEKS - A field of 'Love' where neckless heads are being grown like cabbages. There is a scarecrow in the field to scare away the strifebirds.

"Many were born double-headed and double-chested - man-faced oxen arose and again ox-headed men" (Barnes, 143).

For Empedocles blood contained the capacity to understand. Thought is located in the blood.

Empedocles was a vegetarian because he found that the souls migrated from one body to another. Eating an animal was a grave sin because you devour another when you eat meat.

Like Pythagoras, Empedocles said it was a sin to eat beans.

Empedocles had a Utopian ideal. In his Utopian age, the beasts and animals were friendly to man and man friendly to them.