Scientific Enlightenment, Div One Book 2: Human Enlightenment of the First Axial 2.B.1. A Genealogy of the Philosophic Enlightenment in Classical Greece Chapter 11: Empedocles ACADEMY | previous section | Table of Content | next section | GALLERY

2003, 2005 by L. C. Chin.

Empedocles criticizes the doxa of ordinary people:

for their not consciously recognizing the first law of thermodynamics embedded in the conscious recognition of the effects of the second law. What is there must have always been there and will always be there: the law of Conservation. With the memory of the first law, Empedocles arrives at the substratum of the Ionians, the "hot soup" in Big Bang cosmology: The mixed soup of the four elements, but in addition to those he notes also the two "forces" (Love and Strife) mediating between them so as to explain how separate things may arise out of an original undifferentiated unified "soup". Empedocles describes this undifferentiated origin under the influence of Parmenides:

This sort of undifferentiated circular "egg-like" mixture out of which the components of the cosmos differentiate and the image of which is repeated in all sorts of creation myths and metaphysical speculations is, as we have said, a simple reflection of the memory of Conservation. Parmenides' influence is mostly in the help it offers in terms of linguistic articulation, because this sphere of Empedocles is the unity of becoming and not of Being itself: it is the perfect mixture of the four elements, fire, air, earth, and water, articulated in mythic terms as Zeus, Hera, Aidoneus, and Nestis, plus, as we said, Love and Strife to mediate the changes necessary for becoming. "When a thing is said to come into existence or perish, all that has really happened is that one temporary combination of these indestructible elements has been dissolved and another been established. Change in fact is nothing but a re-arrangement [since the amount of everything must be conserved: the law of Conservation]; and to account for the motion in space which alone could effect such a reshuffling, two motive forces, Love and Strife, take their place along with the elements as the only ultimate realities." (Kirk and Raven, ibid., p. 324) What has happened here is that the first law of thermodynamics is not seen in separation from the second; Empedocles has returned to the physis or the cosmos in which genesis and dissolution happen on the surface and the amount of everything -- the four elements -- is conserved behind. He has pulled the transcendental Parmenidean insight back down to the embodied world. The singularity is traced back forward in time to the "hot soup of Big Bang". (C.f. later, especially the fruitful comparison between the Neo-Confucian Zhang-Zai and Empedocles.)

In a way Empedocles is probably reacting to Parmenides' radical disjuncture between becoming (according to the second law) and Being (the conservedness behind according to the first); thus he makes Being the Being of becoming, i.e. the Conservedness of the Conservation underlying all superficial changes. But this is not a corrective of the Parmenidean insight, but degradation of it.

The "forces" Love and Strife are the same forces that we name in ourselves by the same names, and so exist both macroscopically in the cosmos and microscopically in living beings: something like the universal forces of attraction and repulsion. "For she [Love] is recognized as inborn in mortal limbs; by her they think kind thoughts and do the works of concord [arthmia: joined, united, at peace with others"], calling her Joy by name and Aphrodite" (Simplicius, ibid., in Kirk and Raven, ibid., p. 328. htiV kai qnhtoisi nomizetai emfutoV arqroiV, thi te fila froneousi kai arqmia erga telousi. Ghqosunhn kaleonteV epwnumon hd'Afrodithn).

In addition to there being moral or psychological forces within organisms as well as within the cosmos, Empedocles seems to think of these "forces" as material: atopwV de kai EmpedoklhV. thn gar filian poiei to agaqon, auth d'arch kai wV kinousa (sunagei gar) kai wV ulh. morion gar tou migmatoV "Strange is Empedocles' [view]: for he identifies the Good with Love. But this is the principle [origin: arche] both as mover (for it brings [things] together) and as matter [material cause: ulh]. For it is part of the mixture." (Aristotle, Met. L9, 1075 b I; Ibid., p. 330) But such view is actually realistic by modern standard. For in quantum physics, e.g. in the Standard Model force is represented as the exchange of particles -- bosons -- between fermions, e.g. electrons exchange photons in order to be repelled by one another.

How "forces" are stirred to action:

These enigmatic lines seem to reframe the Anaximanderean justice: that everything has its time of ascendancy (prerogative: timas), nothing is ever disadvantaged to the profit of the opposite or something else. The necessary equilibrium among all beings and processes is symbolized by the "broad oath" here. "[The] higher power that determines 'by a mighty oath' the timing of the alternation in the cosmic cycle" is, indeed, justice, the necessary equilibrium. After the rule of Love for the allotted time, the rule of Strife will follow. "When that happens, motion begins, and cosmogony, in the normal sense, is initiated." (Ibid.)

The picture of this Empedoclean cosmic cycle, which should lead us to cosmogony in a while, is therefore becoming clear. "This never-ending cycle would seem... to have four stages, two polar stages represented by the rule of Love and the rule of Strife, and two transitional stages, one from the rule of Love towards the rule of Strife, and the other back again from the rule of Strife towards the rule of Love. The rule of Love itself, in which 'all things unite in one through Love', is of course the Sphere described [in the Parmenidean fashion above]. It is a uniform mixture of the four elements -- so uniform that nothing whatever can be discerned in it." (Ibid., p. 327.)

The physis of the Ionians reaches the highest analytical clarity in Empedocles (or one can consider the Empedoclean analysis of physis as decline in the Heideggerian manner), although he represents clearly a decline from Parmenides. Before we proceed to Empedocles' cosmogony, then, let us consider for a moment the significance of Fritjof Capra's Tao of Physics. "The dynamic quality of Eastern philosophy seems to be one of its most important features. The Eastern mystics see the universe as an inseparable web, whose interconnections are dynamic and not static. The cosmic web is alive; it moves, grows and changes continually. Modern physics, too, has come to conceive of the universe as such a web of relations and, like Eastern mysticism, has recognized that this web is intrinsically dynamic." (Ibid., p. 192) This dynamic and organismic view of nature is precisely that of the Ionian physicists and especially that of Empedocles. This is in fact the primordially Greek view of nature, captured in their designation of it as physis: nature as "that which grows", a "spontaneous origination". It is for this reason that Heidegger says that Aristotle thinks more Greek-ly than Plato, insofar as Aristotle is immanentist and Plato the transcendentalist. ("Sofern Platon das geeinzelte Seiende nie als das eigentlich Seiende zulassen kann, Aristoteles aber das Geeinzelte in das Anwesen einbegreift, denkt Aristoteles griechischer, d. h. dem anfaenglich entschiedenen Wesen des Seins gemaesser als Platon." Die Metaphysik als Geschichte des Seins, in Nietzsche, zweiter Band. p. 409.) Capra has noticed that the early Ionians seem to fit into the "new" view of the cosmos as revealed by modern theoretical physics (and he occasionally praises the Heraclitean "everything flows" [panta rei] as parallel to the dynamic world-view of physics and Eastern mystics) and he seems to have seen the close similarity between them and the Eastern philosophers. The view of seemingly stable objects as mere fleeting illusions and the precedence of processes of change over the individual objects therein which are mere temporary aspects or transitional stages in these spontaneous transformations of the cosmos -- these which Capra sees as the essence of the Eastern philosophies (a very superficial understanding of the East, actually) happens to be most succinctly expressed, not just in Heraclitus, but also by a not-so-profound philosopher such as Empedocles: "A man of wise mind could not divine such things as these, that so long as men live what indeed they call life, so long they exist and share what is evil and what is excellent, but before they are formed and after they are dissolved, they are really nothing at all." (From Fairbanks' translation, 51, at Hanover Historical Texts Projects) Or: "And besides these [the four elements] nothing else comes into being nor ceases to be [the expression of Conservation]. For if they were continually destroyed, they would no longer be. And what could increase this whole, and whence could it come? And how could these things perish too, since nothing is empty of them? [Thus far Empedocles is expressing the insight of Conservation couched in Parmenidean logos.] Nay, there are these things alone, and running through one another they become now this and now that and yet remain ever the same." (Kirk and Raven, ibid., p. 328. kai proV toiV out'ar ti epigignetai oud'apolhgei. eite gar efqeironto diampereV, ouket'hsan. touto d'epauxhseie to pan ti ke; kai poqen elqon; phi de ke khxapoloito, epei twnd'ouden erhmon; all'aut'estin tauta, di'allhlwn de qeonta, gignetai allote alla kai hnekeV aien omoia.) But Capra fails to see the same parallel between modern physics and the Greek transcendentalists (such as Parmenides, as we have noted, and Plato, as we shall see). Instead he sees the transcendentalists as corruption of our primordial view of and relationship with nature that conditions, together with the dualism consequent upon it, the next two millennium of Western philosophy and from which only recently does the new physics begin to extricate us, returning us to the original mystic experience. (Ibid., p. 19 - 23.) Heidegger may agree with this in a very general, approximate way. But this is really not what was happening, as the following in this treatise should make clear.

Capra's mis-evaluation of the transcendental tradition originates from his failure to understand that the point of philosophy, in East or West, is not just the recognition of the dynamicalness and creativeness of the cosmos and consequently of the illusoriness of the stability of "objects", but rather of the eternal and immutable, the Conservation, behind the fleeting moments.

Recognition of the illusory nature of the stability of objective existence -- that the world of our everyday experience is only an illusion -- is the first stage in the philosophic enlightenment everywhere. At this stage we may see the parallels between modern physics and the Ionians, Heraclitus, and Empedocles by reading Capra:

"Energy is one of the most important concepts used in the description of natural phenomena. As in everyday life, we say that a body has energy when it has the capacity for doing work. This energy can take a great variety of forms. It can be energy of motion, energy of heat, gravitational energy, electrical energy, chemical energy, and so on. Whatever the form is, it can be used to do work. A stone, for example, can be given gravitational energy by lifting it up to some height. When it is dropped from that height, its gravitational energy is transformed into energy of motion ('kinetic energy'), and when the stone hits the ground it can do work by breaking something. Taking a more constructive example, electrical energy or chemical energy can be transformed into heat energy and used for domestic purposes. In physics, energy is always associated with some process, or some kind of activity, and its fundamental importance lies in the fact that the total energy involved in a process is always conserved. It may change its form in the most complicated way, but none of it can get lost. The conservation of energy is one of the most fundamental laws of physics...

The mass of a body, on the other hand, is a measure of its weight, i.e. of the pull of gravity on the body. Besides that, mass measures the inertia of an object, i.e. its resistance against being accelerated. Heavy objects are harder to accelerate..." (Capra, ibid., p. 201) Mass is what characterizes the essence of matter or objects for us, giving us their seeming "stability".

"Once it is seen to be a form of energy [from Einstein's E=mc²], mass is no longer required to be indestructible [by the law of Conservation], but can be transformed into other forms of energy [so that it is the underlying energy-mass-momentum that is conserved]. This can happen when subatomic particles collide with one another. In such collisions, particles can be destroyed and the energy contained in their masses can be transformed into kinetic energy, and distributed among the other particles participating in the collision. Conversely, when particles collide with very high velocities, their kinetic energy can be used to form the masses of new particles. [Now, not just space-time and the quantum field co-extensive with it are forming a unity with the matter therein; even the motion of matter is part of matter itself.]...

The creation and destruction of material objects is one of the most impressive consequence of the equivalence of mass and energy... The colliding particles can be destroyed and their masses may be transformed partly into the masses, and partly into the kinetic energies of the newly created particles. Only the total energy involved in such a process, that is, the total kinetic energy plus the energy contained in all the masses, is conserved...

In modern physics, mass is no longer associated with a material substance, and hence particles are not seen as consisting of any basic 'stuff', but as bundles of energy. Since energy, however, is associated with activity, with processes, the implication is that the nature of subatomic particles is intrinsically dynamic... [Because of relativity] [t]heir forms have to be understood dynamically, as forms in space and time. Subatomic particles are dynamic patterns which have a space aspect and a time aspect. Their space aspect makes them appear as objects with a certain mass, their time aspect as processes involving the equivalent energy... When we observe [subatomic particles], we never see any substance; what we observe are dynamic patterns continually changing into one another -- a continuous dance of energy.

Quantum theory has shown that particles are not isolated grains of matter, but are probability patterns, interconnections in an inseparable cosmic web... they themselves are processes! The existence of matter and its activity cannot be separated. They are but different aspects of the same space-time reality." (Ibid., p. 202-3.)

This is physis. And so the following comment of Capra must also be extended to the Greeks:

"Like modern physicists, Buddhists see all objects as processes in a universal flux and deny the existence of any material substance. This denial is one of the most characteristic features of all schools of Buddhist philosophy. [This is false, actually, since Buddhists deny the reality of existence per se, not because it is in flux.] It is also characteristic of Chinese thought which developed a similar view of things as transitory stages in the ever-flowing Tao and was more concerned with their interrelations than with their reduction to a fundamental substance. 'While European philosophy tended to find reality in substance,' writes Joseph Needham, 'Chinese philosophy tended to find it in relation.'" (Ibid., p. 204.)

Not only is the reading of Eastern philosophy here superficial, but essentially the opposition between Eastern and Western philosophy is untenable. The difference of Western philosophy from the East lies in the fact that since the Greeks, European philosophy had progressively derailed until its (if only insufficient, weak) revival by Heidegger -- a phenomenon which itself has much to do with the rise of science, especially with the transition from the functional to the structural perspective in consciousness. The derailment of philosophy (and of art and religion as well) in the West is the preparation for the rise of the structural perspective of empirical science.

Furthermore, the disappearance of the reality of the individuality of what is presumably material within the underlying processes as temporary manifestation thereof is, as we have repeatedly emphasized, conditioned by the fact of Conservation, to which corresponds the second stage of philosophic enlightenment. (But, however, as is to be seen, this physis which Capra takes pain to elaborate in scientific terms [the dynamic "dance" of energy] is only the immature stage of philosophic anamnesis of Conservation.) Strangely, this ultimate philosophic insight is implicitly present in Capra's presentation of the physics of hadrons but never reaches articulation. We shall point it out for him.