The Timpson Lyceum · History of Philosophy (2024)

Empedocles: Master of the 4 Elements – Lecture 8 (History of Philosophy)

Overview

Empedocles of Acragas (~494–434 BC), born in Sicily, is the first of the pluralists — thinkers who answer the crisis left by Heraclitus and Parmenides not by picking a single arche, but by proposing several. Parmenides had argued (by strict logic) that change is impossible: what is cannot become what is not, there is no empty space, and reality is one motionless whole. Heraclitus insisted the world plainly does change. Empedocles' project — which drives the rest of Presocratic philosophy — is to keep Parmenides' logic and Heraclitus' change at the same time.

His solution: there is no one stuff but four eternal roots (elements) — fire, air, water, earth — that never come into being or perish. All apparent generation and destruction is really just these unchanging elements mixing and separating by two forces, Love (attraction) and Strife (repulsion). Nothing is ever created from nothing; things only rearrange. Empedocles was also a physician, a cult-like religious figure, and a poet — leaving a natural-philosophy poem (On Nature) and a religious one (Purifications).

Key Concepts

• Pluralism — Reality is made of several fundamental substances, not one. This is the move that lets motion and change back into a Parmenidean universe.
• The four roots (elements) — fire, air, water, earth: eternal, ungenerated, indestructible, internally unchanging. Everything else is a ratio-mixture of them. This scheme dominated Western chemistry for ~2,000 years.
• Motion without a void — Parmenides banned empty space, so how can anything move? Empedocles: if space is full but plural, one substance can move into the place another vacates. His demonstrations: water and air swapping ends of a tilted tube; and the klepsydra / inverted-cup experiment proving air is a real body (water can't enter a cup already full of air).
• Love and Strife — The two motive forces. Love (philia) attracts unlike elements together (apparent generation/birth); Strife (neikos) drives them apart (apparent destruction/death). All change is reduced to motion of the elements under these forces — never true coming-to-be.
• Elemental qualities — Empedocles is first to cleanly separate a thing from its properties, assigning each element two of the qualities hot, cold, wet, dry (fire = hot+dry, air = hot+wet, water = wet+cold, earth = cold+dry) — a proto-periodic-table and the basis of humoral medicine.
• The cosmic cycle — The universe eternally oscillates between the Sphere (total Love: all elements perfectly blended) and total Strife (all elements fully separated), held in balance by a binding "contract" so neither force wins forever. Life exists only in the in-between stages.
• Proto-natural-selection — In a mixing phase, isolated body parts form at random and randomly combine into creatures; only viable combinations survive and reproduce, so we no longer see the monstrous mismatches.
• Perception by effluences — Objects constantly shed material ("effluences") that enter our bodily pores; we know a thing because bits of it physically enter and meet like-elements in us ("like knows like"). Thought, memory, even imagination are material rearrangements — implying a thoroughly materialist, arguably deterministic, mind.
• Scientific insights — He held that light travels at finite speed and that the moon shines by reflected sunlight — remarkable for his era.
• The religious side (Purifications) — Transmigration of souls (metempsychosis), a strict diet to avoid "cannibalizing" reincarnated souls, and Empedocles' own claim to divinity — tied to the legend of his death leaping into Mount Etna.

Worked Example

Counting the mixtures Empedocles' four roots can make. If every substance is a whole-number ratio of fire, air, water, and earth (e.g. "a banana is 2 earth, 5 water, 3 air, 1 fire"), how many distinct recipes use a total of $n$ parts?

1. A recipe is an ordered list $(f, a, w, e)$ of non-negative whole numbers — parts of fire, air, water, earth — with a fixed total $f + a + w + e = n.$
2. Count the non-negative integer solutions. This is the classic stars and bars: distribute $n$ identical "parts" among $4$ elements. The count is $\binom{n + 4 - 1}{4 - 1} = \binom{n+3}{3}.$
3. Try a small blend, $n = 3$ parts: $\binom{3+3}{3} = \binom{6}{3} = 20$ distinct recipes.
4. A richer blend, $n = 10$ parts (Empedocles' bone was famously fire:water:earth ≈ 4:2:2): $\binom{13}{3} = \dfrac{13\cdot 12\cdot 11}{6} = 286$ recipes.
5. The point: from just four eternal, unchanging roots, the number of possible substances grows rapidly with how finely they combine — $\binom{n+3}{3}$ is a cubic in $n$. A tiny fixed inventory of elements yields an enormous variety of things without ever creating new stuff — exactly the reconciliation Empedocles wanted: Parmenidean unchanging elements, Heraclitean variety and change, all from rearrangement alone. $\blacksquare$

Summary

• Empedocles launches pluralism to rescue change from Parmenides: not one arche but four eternal roots — fire, air, water, earth.
• All apparent birth and death is really the mixing and separating of these unchanging elements, driven by Love (attraction) and Strife (repulsion) — so nothing truly comes from nothing.
• He showed motion is possible in a full universe (things swap places) and proved air is a body; he assigned each element two of the qualities hot/cold/wet/dry, seeding 2,000 years of four-element chemistry and humoral medicine.
• The cosmos cycles eternally between total Love (the Sphere) and total Strife; life and a proto-natural-selection of creatures occur only in the mixing phases.
• Perception is material: effluences enter our pores and "like knows like," making mind and thought physical — while his Purifications adds transmigration and his own claim to godhood.