Empedocles on Love and Hate, Mind vs. Chance, and Anaxagoras on Everything in Everything

Orientation #

He opens continuing from change of place to the “more radical kinds of change” and the problem of coming-to-be and passing-away, then turns to Empedocles’ movers. He notes at the end he will be away a couple of weeks. Handout: “On the Natural Fragments (Natural Fragments of the First Philosophers),” read from around p. 32; printed volume DHB Vol I – The First Philosophers, p. 145.

The class, in order #

1. “Existence as if it were a house” (“as if existence were a house”) #

Speaking of coming into and going out of existence tempts us to picture substantial change as a change of place. The picture contradicts itself: you must already be before you get into the house, and you must still be outside it after leaving — so existence cannot be the house.

2. Two probable statements about causes (“Contrary effects have contrary causes”) #

The principles underlying Empedocles’ and Anaxagoras’ thinking about the mover:

1. Contrary effects have contrary causes, and vice versa. Butter: hard and soft are contraries; you would not guess the same thing makes it hard and soft, and you would eventually find heat softens, cold hardens. And conversely — if I am nice to you, one effect; mean, the contrary effect.
2. Like causes, insofar as like, give like effects, and vice versa.

3. Love and hate as the two movers (“something like love… something like hate”) #

Point: earth, air, fire and water come together into flesh, blood and bone and are separated again — contrary effects, so contrary causes.

• Magnets: sometimes jump together, sometimes push apart — not the same thing doing both.
• The atom: protons repel and should blow it apart, so something contrary holds them — “nuclear forces.”
• What brings human beings together is love; what separates them, hate. So: a cosmic love and a cosmic hate, in an endless cycle.
• He reads DK 17: “at one time it grew from the many to be only one… there is a double birth of mortals and a double death”; and the mover sentence: “at one time all things come together by love, and at another time again everything is carried away by the hate of strife.” DK 21 and DK 23 repeat this; details not important here.
• Modern parallel: force of attraction and force of repulsion — contrary forces, contrary effects, and “there’s some truth to this.”

4. Empedocles and the Manichaeans (“a little bit like a Manichaean”) #

Aristotle sees Empedocles as Manichaean-flavoured: love good, hate bad. The Manichaean posits a good God and a bad God on just this principle — good and bad are contrary effects, therefore contrary causes. Some probability there; they held Augustine for a while, and the heresy revived among the Albigensians of southern France, which the Dominican Order was founded to fight.

• Aside: Thomas at St. Louis’ dinner table striking the table — “That finishes the Manichaeans” — and the king calling for a scribe.
• Aristotle and Augustine reach the same argument against the Manichaeans independently (Augustine did not know that part of Aristotle); Thomas, having both, writes the De Malo, “the greatest understanding of evil that we have.”

5. Student objection: the will does opposites (“I can do two opposite things… from my will”) #

Objection: at the level of mind and will, the same cause produces opposite effects — I can be nice or nasty. His reply: Aristotle has a third corollary — the same thing can be a cause of opposites, by its presence and by its absence. He grants Empedocles did not go into this.

6. The great dichotomy: mind or chance (“What is the cause of the good order”) #

He lists the earlier dichotomies — Heraclitus (day and night are the same; change is real) vs. Parmenides (something cannot both be and not be; change is illusion); Empedocles (the empty is not) vs. Democritus (the empty is) — then sets the more important one: what is responsible for the good order in the parts of animals and plants?

Anaxagoras’ side, from “like effects have like causes”:

1. The good order in artificial things is like the good order in the parts of animals and plants.
   • False teeth: the dentist would put the biting teeth in front and the chewing teeth in back, just as nature did — because you bite off a piece of apple in front and pass it back to be chewed.
   • Pipes into a house are circular in cross-section, like blood vessels; square ones collect stuff in the corners and clog.
2. The cause of order in artificial things is known to us: the human mind.
3. The cause of order in animals and plants is at first unknown.
4. Therefore a reasonable guess: another, greater mind — greater because responsible for much more order. Otherwise, as Heraclitus says, the world would be “a heap poured at random.”

• Aside on the false-teeth story: army training films presuppose nothing (the tooth-brushing film, then the whole barracks brushing at the round sinks); the soldier with false teeth who cuts the apple into pieces.

7. The rival answer: mindless love and survival (“eventually you happen to hit upon a good combination”) #

The alternative to a greater mind is chance. Mindless love brings the four elements together in just any combination; DK 57, 59, 61 are examples of the crazy results — “many sides of foreheads without necks,” “bare arms wandered bereft of shoulders,” eyes wandering without foreheads, two-faced things, offspring of cattle with faces of men, men with heads of oxen. (He notes Empedocles calls the elements “gods,” poetically.) Hate separates, love unites again; eventually — one in a million, one in a billion — a good combination comes up, and that one survives while the non-viable perish: those with chewing teeth in front could not tear, and died off.

• A friend explained Empedocles to a modern biologist, who said: “that’s my theory.”
• So on this view nature produces heaps and disorder for the most part, and every well-ordered animal and plant is the rare surviving exception.

Student objections and his replies:

• There must be an ordered substrate against which things survive or fail. He agrees: there has to be an environment; good is always good in terms of something — so there is order back of it.
• Even if a good combination arises, why should two bears’ offspring turn out good? That is just as chancy. Granted: since the chances for bad almost infinitely outweigh those for good, things should be getting more disordered — as the second law of thermodynamics says of random action. Still, he notes, Empedocles’ theory remains popular with materialist biologists: if matter is the beginning of all things, chance must be responsible for the order we see.

8. Empedocles on knowing (“by earth we see earth, by water water”) #

He reads the last fragments: “by earth we see earth, by water water, godlike air by air, destroying fire by fire, love by love, and hate by hate” — we know things because we materially have them in us.

• What is true in it: the known must be in the knower before it is known. What is false: that it is in there materially.
• David’s stone into Goliath’s forehead: did Goliath then know stones better?
• If you cut open his head, would you find a chip of bone or flesh, or a little statue of each student?
• If material presence sufficed, the wooden chair would know wood, a Manhattan would know sweet vermouth and whiskey, water would know water.
• Aristotle keeps the principle but asks how it is in the knower: immaterially, more so in the mind than in the senses — though even sense rises above the material way. The eye sees only because there is no colour in it (if it were yellow he could not see that colour); Aristotle: if the tongue were sugary you could not taste different things. Sense and reason are an ability to receive the likeness, not a composition out of the things.

9. Thought as blood (“if you had to choose between bone, flesh, and blood”) #

Empedocles still makes thought material. Which of bone, flesh, blood would thought be? Blood — because thought moves and blood flows, and because we think thought fine and thin, penetrating: a dry bone or dry flesh laid on the table will not go through, blood soaks right through. The modern biologist makes it finer still — electric waves in the brain — but still material. Most people on the street think the brain thinks; “we need a course in the third book on soul.”

• Aside: the joke about “boneheads” — “that was not a compliment.”

10. Anaxagoras: the man and the charge of impiety (“a sober man among drunk men”) #

Socrates in the Phaedo, on his last day, tells of his enthusiasm for Anaxagoras. Aristotle’s compliment: Anaxagoras, introducing mind as cause of order in nature, “seemed like a sober man among drunk men.” He brought philosophy to Athens and was a friend of Pericles; he was charged with impiety for saying the sun is a burning rock rather than the god Apollo — the charge probably political, aimed at Pericles through his friend. Why a burning rock? Probably a meteor that struck in his part of Asia Minor; compare the meteor in the American southwest that the Indians handed down in story. Aristotle objected that if the sun were really on fire it would have burnt itself up long ago.

11. Everything in everything (“there must be a bit of everything inside of everything”) #

Aristotle gives his reasoning more fully than the fragments do (Natural Hearing I; the difficulties in reading 9).

1. You cannot get something from nothing — the fragment: “how could hair come from what is not hair, and flesh from what is not flesh?”
2. By induction, in the natural world everything eventually comes to be from everything. The chain: grass → cow → man (Berquist eats a steak) → lion (Berquist, being a Christian, is fed to it) → worms (the lion punished for eating a Christian) → bird → cat → daisies. Start anywhere, you get everything.
3. Therefore there must be a bit of everything inside everything.
4. But things keep coming to be forever, so an infinity of pieces of everything inside everything.
5. How fit an infinity into a blade of grass? Make them infinitely small. Grand conclusion: an infinity of infinitely small pieces of everything inside of everything. Fragment DK 1: “All things were together, unlimited in number and in smallness… nothing was clear.”

12. The same way of speaking in modern physics (“every elementary particle is composed of all the rest”) #

Twentieth-century work on elementary particles spoke the same way — he mentions Heisenberg’s book on the unified field theory (he disclaims interest in the theory itself): since out of any elementary particle you can get all the rest, and you cannot get something from nothing, each must be composed of all the rest.

Aristotle’s difficulty, applied to both:

1. If flesh, blood and bone can be infinitely small, they fall below any size.
2. Then the whole made of them falls below any size.
3. But cats, dogs, trees and grass do not come in just any size — each kind has limits of big and small.
4. So the parts do not have just any size: there is a smallest piece of flesh, blood, bone. The position is wrong. In physics likewise: particles within particles within particles would shrink indefinitely, yet all electrons have the same size, all protons the same size. So the rest can only be in there in ability.

13. The failure to understand ability (“in ability… but none of them in act”) #

The common root of these errors: we tend to imagine what is in something in ability as actually in there. Heisenberg (reported through his pupil Weizsäcker): when we imagine something we make it actual in our imagination. Thomas, in the epistles to Timothy, on false imagination as the great cause of error — imagining things otherwise than they are, or imagining what cannot be imagined (e.g. the soul as an air-like substance). Anaxagoras is groping for potency: by making the pieces infinitely small he gave them as little actuality as he could; “nothing is distinct” is his attempt. Aristotle listens to what he is trying to say, but he cannot say it. Other cases of the same failure:

• The Meno: because the way to double the square comes out of the slave boy’s own answers, Socrates imagines that what the boy is able to know he already actually knew, hidden.
• Locke’s Essay: the general triangle must be equilateral, scalene and isosceles all and none — because he cannot say all in ability, none in act. Berkeley in the Principles quotes the passage, finds it senseless, and denies general ideas. Neither can understand the ability of the genus: the three straight lines in the definition are equal or unequal in ability, neither in act; adding the difference makes actual what was there in ability.
• C. S. Lewis’ remark that pantheism is the oldest thinking of the human mind about God: it makes actually distinct everything that is in God’s ability or power — the same mistake.
• Aristotle devotes the whole ninth book of Wisdom to ability and act, which they will look at eventually. Aside on God: the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are not parts of God — God has no parts and is not a part of anything, whereas everything else has parts and is a part of something. God likewise has no end or purpose; he is the end of all other things, for otherwise he would have a cause.

His words #

• “Natural Hearing” — [ed.: Aristotle, Physics]
• “the ninth reading” — a lectio of Physics I [ed.: lesson/lectio]
• “Wisdom,” ninth book — [ed.: Metaphysics IX]
• “probable statements” — premises with some probability on their face, not demonstrations
• “cosmic love” / “cosmic hate” — his names, “for want of a better name,” for Empedocles’ two movers
• “the greater mind” — Anaxagoras’ cause of order, greater because responsible for more order than ours
• “a heap poured at random” — Heraclitus’ phrase for what the world would be without a mind ordering it
• “ability” — [ed.: potency]; opposed to “act”
• “false imagination” — imagining things other than they are, or imagining what cannot be imagined
• “the third book on soul” — [ed.: De Anima III]

Texts #

Read in class

• Empedocles DK 17 (the double birth and double death; love and the hate of strife); DK 21, DK 23 (mentioned as repeating it)
• Empedocles DK 57, 59, 61 (the monstrous combinations)
• Empedocles, final fragments: “by earth we see earth, by water water…”
• Anaxagoras: “how could hair come from what is not hair, and flesh from what is not flesh?”
• Anaxagoras DK 1: “All things were together, unlimited in number and in smallness.”

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Natural Hearing (Physics) I, reading 9; Wisdom (Metaphysics) IX; the third book on soul; Aristotle’s compliment to Anaxagoras (“a sober man among drunk men”) and his objection that a burning sun would have consumed itself
• Plato, Phaedo; Meno (the slave boy and the doubled square)
• Aquinas, De Malo; his commentary on the epistles to Timothy (false imagination)
• Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding (the general triangle); Berkeley, Principles
• Heisenberg on the unified field theory of elementary particles; Weizsäcker
• C. S. Lewis on pantheism as the oldest thinking about God

His questions #

• Would you look for the same cause of contrary effects — for what makes butter hard and what makes it soft? No; contrary effects have contrary causes.
• What are the contrary causes that bring earth, air, fire and water together and separate them? Love and hate, in an endless cycle.
• What is the cause of the good order in the parts of animals and plants? Either a greater mind (like effects, like causes) or chance with the unfit perishing — the great dichotomy that has come down through history; he judges the mind more reasonable.
• Would the dentist put the biting teeth in back and the chewing teeth in front? No — in front and back respectively, just as nature did.
• Did Goliath begin to know stones better when David’s stone hit him? No — the known must be in the knower, but immaterially, not materially.
• If you had to choose between bone, flesh and blood for thought, which would thought be? Blood — it moves and penetrates, as thought does; but thought is not material at all.
• How do you fit an infinity of pieces of everything inside a blade of grass? By making them infinitely small — Anaxagoras’ grand conclusion, which Aristotle refutes from the fixed sizes of kinds.
• Can all the other elementary particles really be inside each one? Only in ability, not in act — which is just what Anaxagoras could not say.
• Are the three straight lines in the definition of triangle in general equal or unequal? All of them in ability, none of them in act; adding the difference makes actual what was there in ability.