Empedocles (circa 493 - circa 433 B.C.)

 

 

Empedocles was a Greek statesman and philosopher, a disciple of Pythagoras and Parmenides.  According to tradition, he was an aristocrat who declined the offer to be king of Akragas after he aided the overthrow of the ruling oligarchy, choosing instead to institute a democracy.  He was a keen observer, certainly much more of a “scientist” than Parmenides — indeed, Empedocles may have been the first to suggest that light takes time to pass from one point to another.  He was also a considerable poet, having founded the art of rhetorical prose.  As if these were not enough laurels for one man, Empedocles also had an important influence on medicine, as he recognized the heart to be the center of the vascular system, and he was the original inventor of the Theory of the Survival of the Fittest, thus anticipating by more than 22 centuries the Theory of Evolution now attributed to Charles Darwin.  Oh, and there’s just one more thing: he went about in golden sandals and purple robes, his head crowned with laurel, and proclaimed himself to be a god.  This claim to divinity was not quite as arrogant as it may seem, however, for he believed that all men had once been gods, but had forfeited their heavenly place by some impurity or violence:

 

 

“From what glory, from what immeasurable bliss, have I now sunk to roam with mortals on this earth!”

— Empedocles

 

Like Pythagoras before him, this DaVinci of antiquity condemned the eating of animal flesh as a form of cannibalism, for he believed that animals had in them souls, too, which may have, in a previous life, resided in human bodies.  Despite his considerable legitimate achievements, Empedocles was a colorful character who claimed supernatural powers, performed magic rites, and offered to cure diseases by the enchantment of his words.  Of the patients that Empedocles applied his healing words to, those who somehow recovered attributed their recovery to his magic, while those who died were not around to testify to its ineffectiveness, and so in consequence, many believed his claims and he was the object of attention wherever he went.  In actuality, he was a learned physician who was versed in medical science, and skilled in the psychology of the medical art.  He was also a brilliant orator who, according to Aristotle, invented the principles of rhetoric, and taught them to Gorgias, who in turn peddled them in Athens.  As if this were not enough, Empedocles was also an accomplished poet who wrote in such excellent verse that Aristotle and Cicero ranked him high among the list of history’s greatest poets, and Lucretius lavished the highest flattery upon him by imitating him. As we have already mentioned, Empedocles was also a courageous statesman who, though himself an aristocrat, led a popular revolution against a narrow aristocracy, refused the dictatorship he was offered, and established instead a moderate democracy.  To this mountain of accomplishments we must add that he was also the engineer who freed Selinus from pestilence by changing the courses of streams and draining marshes.  As Will Durant remarked, perhaps Empedocles was a god, after all.

 

Many fragments of Empedocles’ work have come down to us.  One of these works, the Purifications, is a religious work concerned with the fallen estate of man.  One such fragment reveals the philosopher’s view of man’s fall from divinity:

 

 

“There is ... an ancient decree of the gods ... that whenever one of the divine spirits whose lot is long life has sinfully defiled his own limbs with murder, or in strife has sinned and sworn a false oath, for thrice ten thousand seasons he wanders, far from the blessed gods, being borne throughout that period in all kinds of mortal shapes, exchanging one painful path of life for another ... I, too, now am one of these — a fugitive from the gods and a wanderer — because I put my trust in raging strife.”

— Empedocles

 

 

Hesiod, too, in his Theogony, mentions exile from the company of the gods, but in Hesiod’s conception, the exiled god remains a god, apart from the race of men.  In Empedocles’ conception, the exiled god falls from his estate and enters into the cycle of birth and death, assuming one mortal form after another.  Thus, for the primal sin of shedding of blood, the former god is exiled to a place of punishment, and that place of punishment is this world:

 

 

“A joyless place, where murder and vengeance dwell, and swarms of other Fates — wasting diseases, putrefactions and fluxes — roam in darkness over the meadow of doom.”

— Empedocles

 

 

We see in Empedocles a Pythagorean view of the world which was to be embraced by later Christians: the soul alone is beautiful, the world is a joyless place full of corruption, and the body is but a rank prison in which the soul is shackled to this world.  Here we see the body conceived not as beautiful — as we see it in the bronze athletes of the Greek sculptors — but as corrupt, and subject to decay.  Because he held that the body is mortal, but the soul is not, Empedocles felt that this must inevitably imply that, at the death of the body the soul must enter into a new body, whether human, animal, or even plant:

 

 

“For by now I have been born as a boy, a girl, a plant, a bird, and a dumb fish in the sea.”

— Empedocles

 

 

In this way, the soul of the exiled god changes one path of life for another.  The cycle is endless because the exiled spirit commits again and again the primal sin for which it fell: violence.  By a terrible irony, the blood sacrifices by means of which man seeks to appease the gods only plunge them into further guilt.

 

 

The philosophy of Empedocles was eclectic — he saw some wisdom in every school of thought and adopted what he considered to be the best parts of each.  He deprecated Parmenides’ wholesale rejection of the senses, and welcomed the senses as an “avenue to understanding.”  He asserted that all things are composed of four primal elements: earth, air, fire, and water, and that two active and opposing forces, (love, attraction, or affinity; and hate, repulsion, or antipathy) act upon these elements, combining and separating them into infinitely varied forms.  In anticipation of the Law of the Conservation of Matter, Empedocles believed also that no change involving the creation of new matter is possible; only changes in combinations of the four existing elements may occur.  He also formulated a primitive Theory of Evolution in which man and the animals were supposed to have evolved from antecedent, monstrous forms.  Empedocles wistfully looked back to a Golden Age before the Olympian gods when Aphrodite, the goddess of Love, prevailed everywhere, and where there was no strife between man and man, or between man and beast.  This was a vision of life lived according to the teachings of Pythagoras, a life of friendship, of mutual forbearance, and of peace.  To this blessed state (we are assured) Empedocles, “unacquainted with wickedness,” himself has attained.

 

 

By the end of his life, this prophet, healer, poet, and holder of high office in the city felt he had reached the end of his long exile from the gods, and indeed the crowds treated him as a god among men, as they attended him, seeking to be cured and to know the future.  Like Parmenides before him, Empedocles held that nothing can come into being out of nothing, and nothing can be utterly destroyed.  The mortal forms which arise in the world do not appear out of nothing, but arise through the mingling of elements which already existed.  The intermingling force which brings the elements together Empedocles called Love, and the disintegrating force which causes the elements to discorporate he called Strife.  In the view of Empedocles, these forces take turns ruling the world-process.  Love is the force that unites, bringing together unlikes, and binding them, while Strife is the force that disrupts and disunites, separating what love has joined, sending each thing back to its like: fire to fire, earth to earth.  Empedocles often speaks of  Love and Strife as though they were things rather than forces; they seem to behave like fluids, which alternately fill the cosmos and retire from it.  But he writes, after all, as a poet and the language he uses is the vivid and concrete language which is proper to poetry, although he also makes it clear that the forces are themselves invisible.  Only the elements are perceptible to the senses, while the existence of the forces which move them must be inferred from their effects upon these perceptible elements.  Empedocles held that, just as the elements have real existence, and are therefore eternal, so the forces that move these elements, Love and Strife, also have real existence, and are also eternal.  These two forces work in opposite directions.  Strife, when it prevails, separates out what Love has united; Love, when it prevails in its turn, unites what strife has separated.  Empedocles’ theory of teratogenesis — his explanation of how monstrosities arise in Nature — descends into disappointing unintelligibility.  He maintained that Love and Strife, in contention, produced monstrosities (such as centaurs and minotaurs) by the random coalition of the unattached body parts of disparate animals.  Perhaps this was an attempt to explain freaks of Nature, such as hermaphrodites.  Whatever the case, this philosophical legitimization of the chimeras of Greek folklore did contain the seed to one very important concept: Empedocles maintained that most of the monstrosities produced in the vortex by the contending forces of Love and Strife perished immediately, for they were not fitted to live, and only those random coalitions of elements which were fittest to live survived, and continue to survive today.  This is history’s first enunciation of the concept of Natural Selection through Survival of the Fittest.  Although we will not delve into Empedocles’ quaint cosmology, and his equally quaint account on the genesis of life, it may be of interest to note that Empedocles maintained that blood differs from bone in the ratio of the mixture of the elements.  This view, an echo of the Pythagorean doctrine that “Number is the essence of all things,” is still held by scientists today, (carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide, for example, are today considered to differ only by the ratio of the same constituent elements in these entirely different substances,) although the number of elements recognized today has increased considerably beyond the ancient four.  Empedocles held that from blood and bone the bodies of animals were formed, and the sexes were distinguished.  But because they were once one they seek to be reunited with one another, and from such unions arise all the creatures we know.  But what brings together the elements in the proper ratio? Is it a guiding intelligence, or is it mere chance?  Aristotle seized upon this question raised by the work of Empedocles, and in a mere six sentences, offers history’s first lucid exposition of the Emergence of  Species by Random Chance, and the Survival of  Only the Fittest of Them:

 

 

“Why should not Nature work, not for some end, or because it is better so, but just as the sky rains — not in order to make the grain grow, but of necessity?  For the vapor that is drawn up must cool, and when it is cooled, must become water and descend; and when this occurs, the grain grows.  Similarly, if the grain is spoiled on the threshing floor, it did not rain for the sake of this — in order that the grain might be spoiled — but this simply followed.  Why then should it not be the same, then, with the parts in Nature — that our teeth, for example, should come up of necessity, the front ones sharp and fitted for tearing, the molars broad and useful for grinding food, not because they are formed for this end but simply by chance?  And so with all the other parts in which we suppose that there is purpose.  Whenever all the parts turned out as they would if they had come to being for a purpose, these creatures survived, being organized spontaneously in a fitting way; whereas those which grew otherwise  [and were maladapted] perished — and still do perish ...”

— Aristotle, Physics Book II, Chapter 8

 

 

In this view, touched upon by Empedocles (and, amazingly, rejected by Aristotle in his next sentence) there is no need to invoke deliberate design to account for the origin of plants and animals; we may think of them as having come into being by a process similar to that which we can still see taking place all around us at the present time: the progressive elimination of the unfit by Natural Selection.  Plants and animals of every possible sort arise.  Those to which random chance has given characteristics which enable them to survive in their given environment live to reproduce themselves and pass on their fortuitous advantages to their descendants; those that random chance has failed to organize in a fitting way do not survive long enough to reproduce, and thereby to pass these maladapted characteristics on to any descendants.  This grandest of all concepts ever devised by the human mind is the essence of the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection, which we moderns generally attribute to Charles Darwin, although, as we have seen here, this monumental idea was in fact originated by Empedocles some twenty-three centuries before Darwin.  It should be recalled here that Anaximander, too, anticipated a part of the evolutionary theory of Darwin, even before Empedocles, for he held that life arose spontaneously in the primordial seas, but his theory was not quite the modern one for he believed that man was born of animals of a different sort at first — the first humans being literally hatched at puberty from the bodies of fishlike creatures, and only thereafter began propagating themselves sexually.  While Anaximander originated the idea that men arose from simpler life forms, Empedocles originated the theory of Natural Selection by the Survival of the Fittest, and Darwin’s genius lay in linking these ancient theories into the modern theory of Evolution.  Like Anaximander, Darwin held that human beings arose from lower life forms, not all at once as in Anaximander’s theory, but over countless generations.  The mechanism of this evolution, or gradual transformation, was exactly the same in Darwin’s theory as in that of Empedocles: changes occur at random continuously, from one generation to the next, and those individuals who are ill-adapted do not survive to reproduce and pass along their characteristics to subsequent generations.  The changes occur randomly, not by a guiding intelligence  — or shall we say that surviving long enough to reproduce and to successful raise offspring is the “guiding intelligence” which steers the changes in the make-up of all living things?  Whatever the case, In Empedocles’ theory, as in Darwin’s, the selection of survivors occurs naturally and automatically.  We see in Anaximander and Empedocles the two central concepts of the theory of Evolution.  All that it took was for someone to put these two concepts together, and the man that gets credit for this is Charles Darwin (although, in all fairness, it must be mentioned that this erstwhile aspirant for the clergy might have kept this theory a secret had not Alfred Russel Wallace arrived at it independently, and taken the first steps to publish it.)  This is the way in which the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection itself evolved from the ruminations of the ancient Greek natural philosophers.

 

 

It will not profit us to elaborate upon Empedocles’ goofy physiological theories here (theories of transcutaneous respiration, sensation by means of “effluences”, and the quaint notion that thought really takes place in the blood in the vicinity of the heart) but a mere passing mention of these should suffice to highlight the fact that even the greatest thinkers in history were not infallible.  None of history’s great geniuses has always been right about everything, and this is why arguments from authority should never carry any weight whatsoever, and why we should never abdicate our right to think for ourselves at all times.  Every one of history’s great minds has had bad ideas mixed in with the good ones, and so it is always up to subsequent generations of thinkers to critically evaluate the ideas of their predecessors, to discard what they judge to be nonsensical, and to treasure and build upon those few precious gems of Truth which wise men have labored a lifetime to unearth.  This is how the mind of man evolves, and we are indeed fortunate that great minds, such as those of Anaximander, Darwin, Wallace, and Empedocles were free to consider the thoughts of their predecessors, to add their own new thoughts to these, and thereby to bring a grand concept like that of Evolution itself into the world.  Because Empedocles lived, the mind of man itself continued to evolve, and the world was changed forever.