Empedocles: The Four Elements, Ratios, and Change as Mere Mixing

Orientation #

He begins the new author without looking back explicitly; the previous thinkers (“everybody up to this point”) are treated as the monists whom Empedocles breaks with. He reads from the handout of fragments of the first philosophers (verified: handout “On the Natural Fragments”, p. 27; printed volume DHB Vol I The First Philosophers, p. 140). The next class continues with Empedocles’ Love and Strife and with Anaxagoras on Mind.

The class, in order #

1. Empedocles the Sicilian; monists and pluralists (“we’re going to go to Sicily”) #

Place-setting: Porto Empedocleo on the map of Sicily; the Greek cities of Sicily and the Athenian disaster at Syracuse in the Peloponnesian War; more good Greek temple remains survive in Sicily than in Greece today. With Empedocles there is “a break” in thinking: earlier thinkers all sought one first matter (earth, water, air, fire) and are called monists (mona, one); Empedocles gives up that attempt and is called a pluralist. He will hold four first matters: earth, air, fire, water.

2. The dilemma against one first matter (“either that one matter has some definite quality”) #

The point: there is a positive reason to abandon one first matter, not just a taste for many.

1. If there is one first matter, either it has some definite quality or it has none.
2. If it has a definite quality: since everything is made out of it alone, everything would have that quality, and there would be no opposites in the world. Examples: if sugar were first matter, everything would be sweet and nothing bitter; if water, everything wet and cool, nothing hot and dry; if fire, “I’d be drinking fire” like the sideshow fire-eater — “this would be hell on earth.” But we live in a world of sweet and bitter, hot and cold, wet and dry.
3. If it has no definite quality, the difficulty may be even greater: how does any quality get into the world? Kool-Aid: colorless tasteless water plus the powder gives color and taste — but water added to water gives only more water, no color, no taste. To mix a new flavor or a new shade you must start with some flavor, some color.
4. Behind (3): you can’t get something out of nothing — a common thought (Julie Andrews sings it; King Lear, “nothing will get you nothing”).
5. Therefore there must be more than one first matter.

He notes the earlier thinkers half-saw the difficulty of the first horn, moving from Mother Earth to water to air, and Anaximander to the unlimited (no quality at all).

3. Divide by opposites (“how should the many first matters be distinguished?”) #

Answer: by their qualities, and more precisely by opposites, which are two — the reason Plato in the Sophist and elsewhere always divides into two. Test case: dividing human beings into male and white is a bad division, because “where would you put me?” — both. Male/female, young/old, good/bad are good divisions; male/young or female/old are not (your grandmother is both female and old).

4. Why hot/cold and wet/dry rather than hard/soft, black/white, sweet/bitter (“aren’t hot and cold causes of hard and soft?”) #

The four named elements seem distinguished by hot/cold crossed with wet/dry: fire hot and dry; water wet and cold; earth cold and dry (the cellar is cooler; take the water out of earth and it is dry as dust); air, thought of as steam, hot and wet. A student’s suggestion — sweet/bitter is not as prevalent — is accepted but improved: hot/cold and wet/dry are causes of the others, hence more basic for one seeking first causes.

• Butter hardens in the refrigerator, softens in the pan: hot and cold cause soft and hard.
• Stick loaf dries and hardens; moisten it and it softens; the sponge, soft when wet, hard as a rock when dry: wet and dry cause hard and soft.
• White paper in fire turns black; black metal in fire turns red-hot then white-hot: fire causes color change. His hair wet is dark, dry is gray; wet clothing looks a different color than dry.
• Tastes and flavors generally are altered by fire.

He flags the three steps: the reason for rejecting one first matter; the reason for distinguishing the many by opposites; the reason why these opposites are better than hard/soft or black/white.

5. Seeing part of the truth (“men see some part of the truth, and they boast that they see the whole”) #

A fragment on method (from a different collection): his predecessors’ guesses each carry credibility as part of the truth; the pride is in claiming the whole. Empedocles can gather the scattered parts. Modern parallels: Marx explaining everything by the economic mode of production (“even your being here”), Freud by the sexual drive — each explains something, neither everything. Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy: Lady Wisdom’s garments are torn, which the commentator says represents truth, men having each grabbed and torn away a part.

6. The four roots under names of gods (DK 6) (“here first the four roots of all things”) #

Empedocles lived when the authorities were poets, not scientists, so he wrote in verse and used divine names to be acceptable — as today everything must be called “scientific” to be accepted. “Roots” is a word borrowed from living things. Identifications worked out with the class: bright Zeus = fire; life-giving Hera = air (the soul is air); Hades = earth; Nestis who moistens with tears the springs of mortals = water. The next fragment repeats this less clearly.

7. Ratios: Empedocles as first chemist (DK 96, 98) (“the gluing of harmony”) #

He now adds Pythagoras (the Italian): behind things are ratios. Bone: earth’s broad melting pots receive two of the eight parts of glittering Nestis (water) and four of Hephaestus (fire, god of the furnace) — “white bones, begotten divinely by the gluing of harmony.” In modern formula: bone is W2 F4. Note that as far as the fragment goes, bone has more of the dry than the wet element — and bone is the driest of the three chief ingredients (flesh, blood, bone). In the next fragment earth, anchored in the harbors of Cypris, comes together with Hephaestus, water and the all-shining upper air “in about equal measures,” yielding blood and forms of flesh — a different ratio of wet to dry for the moister things. So the elements combine in different numerical ratios, a primitive attempt to explain the dryness of bone against blood; how far he pushed it we do not know. We still hold that many elements combine in numerical ratios to make compounds.

8. No birth, no death: only mixing and separating (DK 8) (“there is no birth of any mortal thing”) #

Point: the next five fragments argue that the only change is change of place. “Birth” and “death” are unscientific words, since birth implies something came into existence that was not at all, death that something went out of existence. “There is only a mixing and an exchange of what has been mixed; birth is a name given to these by men.”

• His own class: “at 2:10 my class was born… at 4:30 my class died.” Fool — these men existed before, they were mixed in the room and then separated; nothing came to be or perished.
• When these are mixed in a way suited to men, or wild beasts, or bushes or birds, men say “born”; separated, “wretched death.” “They do not name these things rightly. But sometimes I also follow the custom” — like a scientist saying the sun rose at 6 a.m., though the truth is the earth turning on its axis.
• So a new grandchild is a new mixture; the funeral home is a separation.
• Aside: “something in the back of your mind says there’s more to it than this.” Bertrand Russell held we are combinations of molecules and atoms, yet ran about the world to stop atomic war — why be upset at a mere rearrangement of atoms?

9. The argument, and the student’s objection about ratios (DK 11, 12) (“they have no far-reaching minds”) #

Why fools: (a) to think that what before was not comes to be is to get something out of nothing; (b) to think anything is destroyed utterly — “what is cannot cease to be by being cut” (he attributes this example to the words of Anaxagoras). To cut something up is to cut it into what it is made of; if you could cut a man into nothing he would have to be made of nothing. DK 12 states the reason for the first part: it is impossible that anything come to be from what in no way is, and that what is should perish completely “is not accomplished or heard of.”

Student objection: a living man has his particular ratio; after death he does not — so on Empedocles’ own terms has not something gone out of existence? His answer: that is an accidental change — “No, it is accidental… nevertheless it’s a real change” — yet all you are doing is bringing in two parts of this and one of that. Manhattan cocktail: two parts whiskey, one part sweet vermouth over the cubes; it is really only a change of place of the whiskey and the vermouth. (He does not develop the objection further.)

• The log on the fire: “dummy Berquist” says it was consumed and no longer exists; but look under the grate at the ashes, and look up at the sky through the chimney — everything in the log still exists, only separated.

10. Reducing quality-change to place-change, ancient and modern (“merely a complicated or disguised form of change of place”) #

The tendency is Empedocles’, but also Anaxagoras’, perhaps all the early Greeks, and modern physical science from Galileo, Kepler and Newton, whose subject is falling bodies, cannonballs, planets. Aristotle by contrast maintains inward change: change of quality and even substantial change — though even for Aristotle change of place is the commonest and the best understood.

• Coffee: Berquist tastes bitter coffee, leaves, a student stirs in sugar until no grains remain; he returns and says, “same place, but it has gone from bitter to sweet — a change of quality.” Reply: fool, the coffee was and is bitter; the sweetness is the sugar, which was and is sweet, and only changed place from bowl to cup, too small for you to see.
• Caloric (Einstein, The Evolution of Physics, on earlier moderns): hot body and cold body left side by side become lukewarm — apparently a quality-change with no change of place; explained instead by a hot substance, caloric, flowing from the hot body into the cold. A body changed place; nothing changed quality.
• Kinetic theory: later and more sophisticated — heat is the gross appearance to your hand of the motion of tiny molecules; hotter water means particles moving faster (hence expansion, blowing the lid off). So a change from cold to hot is a complicated change of place too small for your senses.
• Marching band: Berquist without his glasses sees Michigan’s band form the shape of the state, then a ship for Navy, and announces “a new kind of change — change of shape.” Put your glasses on: it is a hundred bandsmen changing place.

Quantum theory is the first serious challenge to this in modern science: as Heisenberg said (Gifford lectures), it introduced a quantitative version of what Aristotle called potency or ability — what Heisenberg admired most in Aristotle. Potency is what lets one understand an inward change that is not a change of place, a change of quality and in some cases of substance; and “ability or potency is very hard to understand,” so before it was grasped it was very hard to see any change but local motion — even though when your father or mother or friend dies, everyone reacts as though it were more than a change of place.

11. The wise man (DK 15) (“a wise man would not guess such things in his mind”) #

The fool’s opposite: a wise man would not suppose that men are only while they live and experience wretched and good things, and that before they were fastened together and after they are unfastened they are nothing. Aside: “the Greeks are like us; they experience wretched things more than good things.”

12. The empty: Empedocles against Democritus (“nothing of the whole is empty”) #

Two possible opinions about the empty: that it is (Democritus, in the fragment at the top of handout p. 10, where the sense qualities do not truly exist but the atoms and the empty do), and that it is not (Empedocles: “nor does anything of the whole become empty or overfull… whence could anything additional come?”).

• The difficulty in saying the empty is: empty space has length, width and depth. If something is there with those, it is not empty; if nothing is there, how can nothing have length, width and depth? To say the empty is, is to say that what is not, is.
• Democritus’ reason for the empty: without it there could be no motion — things packed tight in a suitcase do not move; with nothing empty anywhere, everything would be wedged like ice, no give at all. So although he admits the empty is nothing, he says it must exist or there is no motion.
• Pattern in the history: like Heraclitus admitting day and night, hot and cold are the same, men trying to save the reality of change accept an apparent contradiction. Three positions: (1) change is real, so contradictions really occur, something can both be and not be; (2) Parmenides — nothing can both be and not be, therefore change is illusion; (3) Aristotle — Parmenides is right that nothing can both be and not be at the same time and in the same way, and change is real; therefore the contradiction is only apparent, and hidden under it is a true way of understanding. Aristotle’s suggestion against Democritus: motion could be circular, as in a full beer can, one thing moving out as another moves in — motion without admitting that what is not, is.
• Aside: even modern scientists sometimes say modern mathematics is not possible without contradictions.

He stops at the bottom of page four and calls a short break.

His words #

• monists / pluralists — those who seek one first matter (mona, one) vs. Empedocles’ many first matters.
• first matter — that out of which everything is made [ed.: material principle].
• roots — Empedocles’ name for the four elements, “a word borrowed from living things.”
• the empty — [ed.: the void]; what Democritus affirms and Empedocles denies.
• ability — his rendering alongside “potency” for Aristotle’s dynamis, cited from Heisenberg.
• far-reaching mind — from DK 11; the fool lacks it, i.e. cannot follow the hidden changes of place.
• change of place / inward change — local motion vs. change of quality or of substance.

Texts #

Read in class

• Empedocles DK 6 (the four roots: Zeus, Hera, Hades, Nestis)
• Empedocles, the fragment following DK 6 (“somewhat the same thing, but not as clear”)
• Empedocles DK 96 (bone: two parts water, four of Hephaestus) and DK 98 (blood and flesh, about equal measures)
• Empedocles DK 8, 11, 12, 15
• Empedocles’ fragments denying the empty (“nor does anything of the whole become empty or overfull”)
• Democritus on the atoms and the empty (handout, top of p. 10)

Mentioned

• Empedocles, fragment on method, “men see some part of the truth” (from a different collection)
• Thucydides, Peloponnesian War (inferred title; he says “the Peloponnesian War”)
• Plato, Sophist
• Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy
• Shakespeare, King Lear (“nothing will get you nothing”); Hamlet (“to be or not to be”)
• Einstein, The Evolution of Physics
• Heisenberg, Gifford lectures

His questions #

• Is there some reason to think there must be more than one first matter? — Yes: a qualified single matter makes everything alike; an unqualified one can never produce any quality.
• If there are many first matters, how should they be distinguished? — By qualities, and specifically by opposites, which are two.
• Why hot and cold, wet and dry, rather than hard and soft or black and white? — Because hot/cold and wet/dry are causes of the others; the first cause should be sought in causes, not effects.
• Which god is which element in DK 6? — Zeus fire, Hera air, Hades earth, Nestis water.
• Can I really annihilate anything, cut you up into nothing? — No: you would have to be made of nothing; only a fool thinks it.
• If a living man’s ratio is gone at death, hasn’t something gone out of existence? (student) — It is an accidental change, a real change, but still only a bringing together and parting of parts.
• Can nothing have length, width and depth? — No; so to say the empty is, is to say that what is not, is.
• Must there be empty for there to be motion, as Democritus says? — Not necessarily: motion could be circular, as in the full beer can.