Natural Hearing (Aristotle's Physics)
14. Empedocles: The Four Elements, Numerical Ratios, and Change as Change of Place
https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/3-natural-hearing/014-empedocles-the-four-elements-numerical-ratios-and-change/

[0:01] in the book on mistakes there, this book on Sophistical Refutations, he says this deceives even the wise. He says, and could hardly be stronger than that.

[0:14] So let's say our little prayer here. Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. God, our enlightenment, guardian angels, strengthen the lights of our minds, order and illumine our images, and arouse us to consider more correctly. Saint Thomas Aquinas, angelic doctor, Praise God. and help us to understand all that you have written. Name of the Father, Son, Holy Spirit.

[0:44] Amen. So we looked at Thales and Anaximander, Anaximenes, the three citizens of Miletus, and Pythagoras, who started on the island of Samos off the coast of Turkey or Asia Minor, but who migrated to southern Italy, and then Heraclitus, who's back again on the coast of Asia Minor, there, the city of Ephesus. What? do you know the date? Well, it's around 500 BC. No one knows for sure. Sure.

[1:15] The dates of these people are around 500 BC. Okay, same as Thales or. Well, a little bit later than Thales Because Thales is is operating around 600 BC. Predicted an eclipse of the sun the year 585 BC, so he must have been active around 600 BC. So that's the age we give.

[1:37] So we went through all the fragments. I we think of Heraclitus, and then we looked at these natural inclination of our mind to unity and simplicity and so on. In the moderns, that you see the same thing. So Heraclitus says, "Is wise listening not to me, but to reason, to agree that all things are one." He was touching upon that the inclination of reason itself. What's common to all of us?

[2:05] What's natural, therefore, to look for unity, simplicity, and these other things. Now, with Empedocles, you have a kind of break here in Greek philosophy, because Empedocles is going to give up the attempt to find one first matter, and we're going to have to try to see what might have been his reason for giving up that attempt. So even though our reason is naturally inclined to look for one thing, if we can find it, you might have a reason for thinking there's more than one matter, and we'll try to bring that out.

[2:48] Now, Empedocles is over in Sicily, and I was looking at a map of Sicily the other year there, and there's a place called Porto Empedocle Oh. And there's this legend about Empedocles that he jumped into Mount Etna there, and as if he had claims of being divinity, he wanted his mortal remains to not be around. But you find these crazy poets, you know, like Shelley and so on, running off and writing these fantastic things about Empedocles.

[3:29] But what apparently happened was that Empedocles was studying, among other things, the volcanoes, and what he did was to build a tower near the volcano, so he could look down inside the volcano. And those scientists who study volcanoes to do today do the same thing. They build towers so they can observe the volcano from the tower. And the legend in that area was that the tower collapsed, and that's how he ended up in Mount Etna, not by desire for immortality of earthly remains or the existence and unfinding of them, but the tower collapsed.

[4:14] And the scientists who dug up there, they they do see the remains of the tower. So it might be that that's the way it ended, and this other legend is really kind of making him kind of crazy that he was jumping into the mountain to pretend he was a divinity, like like we like Oedipus, who disappears at the end of Oedipus at Colonus. You know the story.

[4:41] Now, Empedocles wrote his philosophy in verse, and he also used poetic language. But that doesn't mean he's a poet. The authority of the poets was so great at the time that when Aristotle, even in the time of Aristotle, when Aristotle is talking about how men want to proceed, he says there are some who don't want to proceed unless you can quote a poet in authority for what you have to say.

[5:22] So the poets were seen to be even inspired by the gods, so that the respect for the poet in a way is a respect for the gods, and so the poets had a great deal of authority, just like in our time the scientists have a great deal of authority. So just as we try to be scientific, you know, the social sciences, so called, they try to be scientific.

[5:46] You know, the sociologists they have hypotheses and theories and they have tests and all sorts of stuff, but it's not really that scientific, but they try to put on the air of being scientific. And so you see a book called Scientific Philosophy, that sort of stuff. So he clothed his philosophy in the garment of what? Not science, but of the poets, using not only the verse of poets, but also using names of gods and goddesses. To name things and so on, so this would appeal to people because they're used to the poets and reading them.

[6:22] And you have some other philosophers, actually like Lucretius and so on, who wrote their philosophy in verse. But even no less a man than Boethius, if you look at the Consolation of Philosophy, he has poems in there. What we call poems—they're not really poems in the sense of he's trying to make a likeness of something, but he put into verse, maybe meter and so on, his teaching about things.

[6:52] And so it's kind of a prosa and then a poem and then a prosa and then a poem—I mean something in verse anyway. But. I think we use the word poem sometimes too lightly for anything in verse. I mean Thomas's prayer there, the Adorote Devote Latitans Deitas, qui sub his figuris very latitans—it's got a meter and it's got a a a rhyming and so on, but it's still a a prayer and not a poem in the sense of a fiction or a likeness.

[7:26] Some people say that they think the Our Father in the original language was in a kind of verse. It would be easier to remember. So there are some prayers that I know that kind of in verse, kind of in meter, but it's easy to remember. Shakespeare's Exhortation News reason was in a verse in a meter, but it's not really so much a poem; it's really an exhortation So, Empedocles gave up the attempt to find one first matter, and instead he said that there were four first matters.

[8:07] And what he took was the four that individually had been taken before. So, Mother Earth and water and air and fire. And so, in this first fragment that you have here, he says, "Here first the four roots of all things. Bright Zeus—that would be fire. He gives the names of gods and goddesses. Life-giving Hera would be what? Mother Earth. Would be air. Okay, air is the soul, as you know.

[8:47] And Hades, so Hades was the god of what? The underworld. So that would be Earth. And obviously Nestis, who moistens with tears the springs of mortals, she is what? Water. Okay. So this is the first thing that strikes one about Empedocles. They call these thinkers after starting with Empedocles, the pluralists, because they're saying there's plural, many. By the guys before, they were the monists, they're saying there's one matter.

[9:14] Now. We do have a fragment of Empedocles in the fragments on method, where he says, "Man doesn't live very long, Man, he says, "having seen only a part of life, he says, they boast of having seen the whole." So maybe Empedocles thought that there's some truth in saying water is the beginning of things. But maybe, having seen a part of the truth, that water is a beginning of things.

[9:46] Thales says, "What? It's beginning of all things. You know, all things are explained by water." And someone else said, "Mother Earth is the beginning of all things." And someone else said, "Air." And someone else said, "Fire." But maybe each of these men had seen part of the truth. And but the whole truth is that there are all four of these as beginnings. Huh? There's four roots. But before we get down to the details of that, let's do like we did with Thales, because in a way we're making a fresh beginning And we had a descent from the general to particular now.

[10:30] Why would he give up the attempt to find one matter? That's the most general thing here. And we can only kind of gather from things he says later on what might have been a reason for doing this. And perhaps the best way to state this reason is to make an either-or argument out of it. That if there is one first matter, like everybody up to this point, thinks, if there is one first matter,

[11:13] now the either-or statement: either that matter has some definite quality, or it has no definite qualities. One of the two. Either it has some definite quality,

[11:37] or it has no quality. Those seem to be the only alternatives. Right. Now, going to proceed by the either-or syllogism, going to eliminate both of these, and then going to have to say whether they can't be one matter. Okay. Now, to some extent, already with Thales and Anaximander and Anaximenes, they saw a difficulty in saying that the first matter has some definite quality. What is that difficulty?

[12:26] Everything would have to have that quality. Yeah. So if sugar was the beginning of all things, and sugar has a definite quality of being sweet, and everything is then made out of sugar, everything should be sweet. But in fact, we live in a world of contrary things, of sweet and bitter things, right? Okay. Hard and soft things, wet and dry things, and so on. So when they moved from Mother Earth towards water, and then towards the unlimited or to air, they seemed to be moving in the direction of a matter that had no definite quality.

[13:08] Okay. As if they saw the difficulty in that alternative. But now, if you say that the beginning of all things is something that has no qualities whatsoever, then maybe there's even a greater difficulty—not just that of getting the contrary quality, but of getting any qualities whatsoever in the universe. And as Empedocles will say later on, you can't get something out of nothing. Now, as a child, you might have made Kool-Aid, and what you add to water, which has no color and no taste to speak of, you add something that gives it a color and a taste and makes it sweet and so on.

[13:59] But you have to add to water something that has color, that has taste, in order to get something with color and taste, don't you? If you added water to water, you'd still have something colorless and tasteless and so on. So if everything is made out of one matter and that matter has no qualities, how would anything have any qualities? Not just the contrary qualities, but any qualities whatsoever.

[14:25] You can't get something out of nothing. So there's a difficulty in either one of these two positions, isn't there? Now, that's the first step, right? So now you're saying there must be more than one first matter,

[14:50] and those first matter will have to have some quality, otherwise you'd get something out of nothing. Now you know when you cook, when you make a wine sauce or a salad dressing, even you can combine different things and get a kind of new taste, but you have to start with something that has some kind of taste to it, otherwise you wouldn't get this new taste by combining these things.

[15:14] Okay, now the next step. If there's more than one first matter, which is the conclusion from this first step, would it be reasonable to distinguish the first matters in the plural now by opposites?

[15:40] This is going to be the next step. This is the first step. There are many. When I say many, I mean more than one. There are many first matters. We see the reason for saying that, but we see through our argument. So it's reasonable. I'm not saying necessarily the truth, but it's reasonable. Now the next step.

[16:09] The many first matters are distinguished by opposites, by opposite qualities. Now would that make sense to distinguish the first matters by opposite qualities? Would make sense to divide human beings into

[16:45] male and bad, or female and good, or male and good, or male and bad? Does that make sense? Well it'd be a complete. division. But where would you put Christ? Where would you put St. Paul? With the males or the good ones? You see? You see. So the same thing could be both a male and good. So it doesn't make sense to divide human beings into male and good, does it?

[17:19] It makes some sense to divide human beings into male and female, right? Some sense to divide them into good and bad. Because you can't be both a male and a female. You can't be both good and bad. Or divide them into young and old, or something. But young and male, that makes sense. No, because the same person could be young and male. So we have no place to put such a person.

[17:53] So you divide by opposites. That makes sense, doesn't it? Now we don't know how far Empedocles got, but what opposites would seem to distinguish the four that he comes up with—earth, air, fire, and water? And undoubtedly he was influenced by the thinking of those before him. Some of whom had taken mother earth, some water, some air, some fire. But he's going to take all four of them.

[18:34] But by what opposites would you distinguish those four? Hot and cold. Hot and cold. And then wet and dry. And you crisscross these divisions as we've spoken of before: at the rule of two and three. And what is hot and dry?

[19:06] Earth, air, fire, or water? Fire. Fire is hot and dry. And what is wet and cold? Water. Now, what is? Let me see if I got this wrong. Please. Hot and

[19:33] dry. What is dry and cold? Well, if you dig down in the ground, it's cool. My cellar is cooler than my house, so we always store things down in the cellar, so the earth is cool, right? But if you take the the water out of the dirt, it's wet. Dry is dust, so the earth is dry and cold.

[20:16] Now, if you go back to the way up and the way down, where you had Mother Earth in the middle, and water on top of that, and air on top of that, and then fire around the periphery, the sun, moon, the stars are fire. Air is in between fire and water. Well, if you think of air now in the sense of what steam, right? Steam is hot and what?

[20:44] Wet. That's a little forced a little. Okay. So air, and steam. So air shares with fire that it's hot, and shares with water that it's wet. So it's in the right place, isn't it? Between the two. It's got something in common; it's two neighbors, but not identical. Now, if he used opposites to arrive at these four, we saw in general we should use opposites, right? He would arrive at these four by using these two pairs of opposites, and he would also think, well, gee whiz, each of the other guys saw some part of the truth.

[21:28] The guy who said that Mother Earth was the beginning of all things, the poets, Thales, Anaximenes, and Heraclitus, right? Each of them didn't miss the vote entirely, but they saw some part of the truth, but they both too did not see the whole. But is there any reason why hot and cold, and wet and dry, in particular, should be the opposites we use to distinguish the first matters, rather than, let's say, hard and soft, huh?

[22:05] Or black and white, or sweet and bitter. We can think of many other pairs of contraries in the sensible world. Is there any reason to say that the first matters are distinguished by hot and cold, and wet and dry, rather than by, say, some of these other pairs of opposites?

[22:33] Okay. I think because the the the hot and the others they signify some kind of activity. Okay. And especially if you stop and think that hot and cold make the butter hard and what soft, right? So hot and cold are causes of hard and soft, aren't they? So if you're looking for the beginning of all things, the cause of all things, hard and soft would be not as good as hot and cold because they are effects of hot and cold.

[23:15] Likewise, you know if you have a sponge, you put the sponge in the water and it becomes soft. You leave the sponge out on the counter and it becomes hard like a rock.

[23:29] And you know how bread you get a stick loaf of bread after dinner, so it gets hard. It's not just so hard you can't even cut it; it just crumbles because it's dried out. But you moisten it and it will become what soft again. So hot and cold, wet and dry, are causes of the butter or the sponge or the bread being hard or soft. So if you're looking for the first causes of all things, the first roots, as he says, of all things, hot and cold, wet and dry would be a better guess than hard and soft.

[24:07] Do you see that? The same way, black and white. You put my you put white bread, let's say, into the toaster and it goes from white to what red, and eventually, if you know long enough, it goes even to black. You put metal when they hit it and it gets what red hot. You get even white hot. It gets eventually. You see, so hot and cold change the color of things.

[24:37] And you know how a a garment even looks different when it's wet than when it's dry. In the morning, my hair is all over the place, so I wet it down and it becomes much darker. And then as the day goes on, it dries out. It's more and more gray or white. You see, so hot and cold, wet and dry, are causes of the change in the colors of things, aren't they?

[25:04] So if you're looking for the first cause, hot and cold and wet and dry are causes of changes in black and white and the other colors. So not as basic a pair. And you all know the importance of what cooking things and so on to change their flavor. It's important to cook the steak. You don't cook it too much, or you find you ruin the taste of something.

[25:32] So. There doesn't seem to be any pairs of contraries more basic than in the world around us than hot and cold, wet and dry. And so you have to distinguish the first matters by opposites, and these are the most fundamental opposites. Therefore, these must be the fundamental matters. And it doesn't seem like there's any way to get around that. If you have more than one matter, you have to distinguish them by opposites.

[26:03] And these are the most fundamental opposites. So how could there be any more basic than these four? And this theory of the four elements lasted over two thousand years, not as the only theory, but the standard one, from roughly say 500 BC when Empedocles is writing, down to the time of Shakespeare. If you read Shakespeare's plays, there's all kinds of references to the four elements. You know, Cleopatra I'm, all fire and air, and my beast elements I give to the earth.

[26:33] And Shakespeare has sonnets on the deal with the four elements, the agile elements, you know, fire and air, and the more ploddy ones, the water and the earth, and so on. And all kinds, you know, people refer to these four elements that we're composed of. Can't see any way to get beyond that. There's no obvious way of getting beyond that. It had to be a very roundabout way with some kind of subtle experiment that would suggest something before water, like hydrogen.

[27:04] Say, but in terms simply of using your senses and having to distinguish by opposites, the senses don't know any opposites more basic than hot and cold, wet and dry. See, in our experience, we can see that these are more basic than hard and soft, and black and white. But the senses know no contraries or opposites more basic than these. And if you're distinguishing different matters, they've got to be distinguished by opposites.

[27:33] So this seems to be it. And so most thinkers accepted this theory of the four elements for the rest of what two thousand years. It's the longest lasting chemical theory in history. Doesn't mean it's true, but you can see why it would seem to be inevitable. Now DK38

[28:01] is touching upon these two, but not as clearly as DK6. But now in DK96, you can see Empedocles, in accordance with his thinking, that men see a part of the truth and they boast of having seen the whole. He's going to combine now with the thought of all his predecessors,

[28:27] the thinking of what Pythagoras, that things depend upon numerical ratios. Is going to be the first man now to say that the compounds like flesh and blood and bones are composed of these elements in different ratios. Now, this is very fragmentary, so we don't know his whole theory. But just look at at the two fragments that we have here. But the pleasing earth in its broad melting pots receives two of the eight parts of glittering Nestis. Now, Nestis, as we saw in the first fragment, is what water, right?

[29:10] Two parts of water and four of Hephaestus Now, Hephaestus was the god of what fire. So, two parts water and four parts of fire, and these became white bones, begotten divinely by the bluing of harmony. Now, notice the chemical formula there, so far as he we have in that fragment,

[29:46] bone equals what W2F4, right? Maybe a little more modern. Okay. Now, notice, huh, the ratio of these, the ratio of the dry element, which is fire, is greater than that of the what wet element, which is water, and that would help to explain why bone is the driest part of our body. It has more of the what dry element in it, and so we have an expression even today.

[30:18] We speak of something as being bone dry for the expression. Okay. Now, compare that with the next fragment here. The Earth, anchored in the harbors of Cyprus, and the goddess of love, came together with these in about equal measure, with Hephaestus, water, and the all shining upper air, either a little more or less than their greater share, and from these, that should be these, not the, and from these came blood and the forms of other flesh.

[30:52] Well, notice that the ratio of the elements is different in the case of flesh and blood, and there's more of the what moist element than there was in the bone. How far we developed this, we don't know, but at least he has the rudimentary idea that there are these four elements: Earth, Air, Fire, and Water. And secondly, they combine in different numerical ratios to form flesh and blood and bones, and that's the same idea we have in modern chemistry that there are different kinds of matter that combine in different numerical ratios to form chemical compounds.

[31:36] So, water is H2O, and something else is C6H12O6, and so on. Okay. And carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide have a different ratio, and one will kill you and one is okay. Um, so notice he's bringing together the thought of almost everybody before him. He's putting together the thought of the poets, and he talks about Earth as the beginning of things, and Heraclitus says fire, and Thales he says water, and Anaximenes he says air, as if each one of them saw part of the truth.

[32:10] But out of maybe human weakness, they boasted. That's a form of. Gregory the Great says that's the first species of pride. Right? They boasted having seen the whole, and but then he brings in the thought of what, of Pythagoras that there are numerical ratios and things, and he combines them in saying, well, there is a different numerical ratio of the four elements in bone and flesh and blood, and that explains.

[32:38] And even attempts, you might say, to explain why the bone is drier than the flesh or the blood because it has a greater ratio of the dry elements in it. I guess that's very interesting what he's doing there. Sure. And that fragment that we'll come back to again—that men see a part of the truth, they boast of having seen the whole. That's a lot of the reason for disagreement among men, that they do see—we tend to see a part of the truth before we see the whole truth—and out of pride, we might think we've seen more than we've seen, and then we boast of having seen the whole.

[33:18] So in the 19th century, there you have Karl Marx, and Karl Marx says, the economic mode of production explains everything. It explains our what? Not only our industry and so on, but explains what our social structure and eventually our government and even all our ideas and our philosophy. All goes back to economic mode of production. Now, undoubtedly, he saw some part of the truth. The economic mode of production does determine a lot of things, influence a lot of things.

[33:51] It does explain everything. And then along comes another, Jew, right? And he said, Well, no, no, no! Sex explains everything. You know, it explains what you'd philosophize, see? and so on, and. Well, undoubtedly, sex does explain some things, but does it explain everything. It's like you know, Freud saw part of the truth maybe, and but he blew it up. Explains everything. Someone else, remarks, another one. It's more likely that each of them saw some part of the truth, rather than this is the whole truth that they saw.

[34:30] So Empedocles in a way is following his own what dictum, because he is gathering parts of the truth that seem to him to be scattered amongst these men.

[34:43] And he comes up with something that we still have that there are more than one kind of matter, and they do combine in different numerical ratios.

[34:56] Now the next group of fragments, which we're going to look at individually, but take them as a group, the ones starting at the bottom of page three, which is DK8 and DK9 and DK11 and DK12 and DK15.

[35:12] Those five fragments, they're marvelous fragments. But take them together, and they bring out something very interesting here. What you'll see in these fragments is that Empedocles thinks that the only change in the world that there is is change of place.

[35:41] So, change of place is the only kind of change in the world. Now, if you recall, when Aristotle talked about nature as a beginning and cause of motion or change, he spoke of many kinds of change. One of which is change of place, but growth is another example of another kind of change, or alteration of qualities, another kind of change, and a fortiori generation and death are another kind of change.

[36:29] But in Empedocles now, and we think this may be, you know, a thought in all the early Greeks, but we'll see it explicitly in Empedocles and in Anaxagoras too. Change of place is the only kind of change in the world. This thought that what might appear to be another kind of change and a more inner change of a thing, changing its qualities, changing its size, and especially coming into existence or going out of existence, birth and death and so on, none of that is is really So it's just a disguised form of change of place.

[37:17] So you see explicitly, you will see that the fragments here from Empedocles and in those of Anaxagoras, this idea that change of place is the only change in the world—that's the only kind of change that they can really understand—and it's there will be this attempt to reduce any apparently different kind of change to merely a disguised form of change of place.

[37:43] Now, something like this happened in modern science too, because modern science begins really—it's going in the 17th century with Galileo and Kepler, Newton—and for the most part, Galileo and Kepler, Newton are perfecting our knowledge of change of place. So they begin with the study of change of place. So Galileo is talking about the free fall of a body to the earth, and Kepler is talking about the movement of the planets around the sun and so on, and Sir Isaac Newton is uniting these two.

[38:17] So modern science begins with the study of change of place, but then you see that same tendency in modern scientists to try to make what might seem to be some other kind of change merely a disguised form of change of place.

[38:37] Aristotle will reject the idea that change of place is the only kind of change in the world. And starting especially with quantum theory in the twentieth century, the physicists began to challenge the idea that change in place is the only kind of change in the world. That there are some changes that can't be understood as changes of place. But this is where it begins, right? So it's not unique to the Greeks, huh?

[39:03] We have the same tendency. And it's very hard for us to understand really how these other kinds of change are possible, even though somewhere in the back of our mind we really think that they exist. Let's look at the fragments of Empedocles, and we'll begin to see his position and maybe something of his reason. And I will tell you another thing. There is no birth of any mortal thing.

[39:31] Nothing really comes into what existence, like the word birth or generation might seem to indicate. Nor end, in destructive death. There's no such thing. But there is only a mixing and an exchange of what has been mixed. Birth, however, is a name given to these by men, but by ignorant men, who think something's more significant going on here than a mixing and separating of things.

[40:03] You see his position there, right? Okay. But they, meaning men in general, when these have been mixed in a way suited to men or to the race of wild beasts or the bushes or birds of prey, say then that this has been born. There's something that has come into existence, huh? And when these have been separated, they call it wretched death. They do not name these things rightly, but I also follow the custom.

[40:33] Well, just like a modern scientist, he might say, you know, the sun rose at six a. m. today, right? Or the sun set at five p. m. or something today. And you say to him, "No, is that really so?" He says, "No, no. The earth is turning on its axis. The sun is not rising and setting. But I also follow the custom or accustomed to speak this way, so I speak that way too.

[40:55] But that's not really scientific to say that the sun rose and the sun set. And so Empedocles is telling us, right? I often speak of so and so is dying. You know, that people won't understand what I'm talking about if I don't say this, right? But really, what's happened is that earth, air, fire, and water have been separated and mixed in some other combination. And we shouldn't call this birth and death.

[41:19] And the example I give in class sometimes, I say, if Berquist, you know, starts passing out cigars because his philosophy nature class or wherever it is has been born at Assumption College and a new birth, you know. And then at the end of the class, you know, Berquist, you know, is wearing a black armband and so on. My class has has died and so on. Well, that's ridiculous, right?

[41:49] What's happened is that the students were mixed in one combination in your class, then they are separated and mixed in other combinations and other rooms and other places, right? And nobody's really kind of into existence or out of existence, right? You're passing out cigars, Berquist, and you're wearing a a black armband and mourning and so on. Is implying that some more radical change, some inward change, huh?

[42:10] That something really came into existence, went out of existence, instead of always existing things have been mixed in a new way and separated. So I shouldn't go to the the funeral house and say so and so has died. No, I see a new new mixture, huh? See, or a separation. See, now something in the back of our mind might tell us that something's not quite right about that thinking.

[42:33] But we'll see why he has a difficulty in understanding it. Just like Bertrand Russell, said, in the 20th century, he he would think, you know, that we're more or less just a mixture of atoms and molecules and so on. And and yet he he spends the last few years of his life running around to all these conferences on against atomic war and so on. Like atomic war is something more than a rearrangement of molecules and atoms.

[42:58] Now somehow he sees this as more than that, right? But if that's all it is, you know, a rearrangement of atoms and molecules, what's the big deal about about atomic war, right? Just a rearrangement. More efficient. Yeah, but it's just just a rearrangement of atoms and molecules, right? And a new combination, huh? And it's not like there's no more than than my class, you know, the bell or whatever it is, they you know separated and they're mixed in other combinations.

[43:22] No, no big deal. See, but some in the back of his mind, he's telling him there's something more about atomic war, right? You know, before we're going to be dying, you know, and it's not just atoms and molecules being segregated and mixed in new combinations. But he can't quite understand how could be anything more than that. Yeah. Now, next fragment. Fools, huh? Now, the fool is the opposite of a wise man, for they have no far-reaching minds who think that what before was not comes to be,

[44:02] or that anything dies and is destroyed utterly in every way. Now he's denying that anything really comes into existence, right? Or that anything really is what annihilated, huh? Destroyed, huh? Okay. Now, in the next fragment, DK12, you get something of the reason why nothing has really come into existence. Because if something really came into existence, then before it came into existence, it would be nothing, and then you'd be getting something out of what?

[44:40] Nothing. Only a fool would think that, huh? Okay. For it is impossible that anything comes to be from what in no way is. You can't get something out of nothing. So you might go down your basement, and yesterday it was all dry. You go down there today, and it's all filled with water. Your basement. Something out of nothing, right? Fools have no far-reaching mind, huh? That water couldn't come to be out of nothing.

[45:13] What do you mean? It was nothing there yesterday, huh? Yeah, but it must have what? Changed its place, huh? It was out in the soil, or up in the clouds, and then down the soil, and then it's found its way in through the wall, and you didn't see it coming in, but it was just a change of place, really. It's not water coming into existence out of nothing.

[45:35] What? Only a fool would think such a stupid thing, huh? Right. But you have no far-reaching mind. You can't trace it how it got through this crack in the wall, and so. You see that? Now, the other side is maybe more clearly explained in a fragment that we'll see in the great Anaxagoras: that what is should perish completely is not accomplished or heard of. Well, could I annihilate you or annihilate this desk?

[46:07] Could I cut you up so there's nothing left of you? Well, as Anaxagris would say, what is cannot cease to be by being cut. You cut something up into what it's made out of. So if I could cut you up into nothing, you'd be made out of nothing. That's absurd, isn't it? Only a fool would think such thoughts, huh? So nothing really comes into existence, right? Because you can't get something out of nothing, and you can't cut something up.

[46:40] Into nothing, because you cut something out into what it's made out of. Something can't be made out of nothing. So you really cut it into, all you're doing is separating things that make it up, huh? And that's why ends up that fragment by saying, "For it will always be there where anyone ever puts it." Okay. But now, if you don't have that far-reaching mind that Empedocles has, see, Berquist puts a log on the fire, see, and the fire annihilated the log, right?

[47:10] The log is gone of existence. Fool, you'd say, had no far-reaching mind. You can't turn a log into nothing. Everything that's in the log still exists. What do you mean? Well, look under the grate there. You see those ashes down there? That's part of what was in the thing, huh? Now we go in the backyard. Look up in the sky, and you'll see that you're kind of polluting the neighborhood and so on.

[47:34] That all those little specks up there. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So everything that's in the log still exists, but someone's down in the grate and someone's up there, and you don't have a far enough reaching mind to trace it, and you think it became what? Nothing, yeah. Like a magician, you know, he reaches in your pocket and he pulls out something that wasn't there, right? Getting something out of nothing.

[47:59] No, you have not a far-reaching mind. Now you have the rabbit or the bird or whatever is up his arm or somewhere. It didn't come to be out of nothing, did it? Only a fool thinks such thoughts, huh? Yeah, magic show, making a magic show of the natural world, huh? Ridiculous. Yeah.

[48:18] Now in the next fragment, DK fifteen, you have the opposite, of course, of a of a fool that you had in DK eleven. For a wise man would not guess such things in his mind. As if this is a unreasonable guess, right? A crazy guess. As that, as long as they live, what they call life, so long they are, and experience wretched things and good things. But that before mortals are fastened together and after they are unfastened, they are then nothing. But notice if Empedocles' wife or his son or his friend died, he'd probably react like we all would react, right?

[48:54] It's just something more than just a what rearrangement of earth, air, fire, and water is taking place there. That someone who was is no longer, right? Or if his wife gives birth to a baby, right? You know, a new person has come into the world. He's going to react. He knows that this is more than just a new arrangement of earth, air, fire, and water. But he can't quite understand how this is what possible.

[49:20] Now the other side of the coin is, you deny any inward change because change of place is kind of a what outward change, huh? But there's no inward change of quality or or substance, huh? You can't understand how an inward change is possible.

[49:51] One of Aristotle's main contributions to natural philosophy, that we'll see later on, is to understand how an inward change is possible, and that's tied to Aristotle's understanding of the ability that is matter, of the potency that is matter. But this is a very hard thing to understand for us. The difficulty is in it, not in us. But we can't understand this ability of potency very much. But in quantum theory in the 20th century, where this idea that there's only change of place broke down, in quantum theory, you know, they were especially in studying the atoms.

[50:34] They first tried to understand the atom as kind of a miniature solar system. You know, the nucleus is kind of like the sun, and electrons going around it. And then they started running into all kinds of contradictions. And for example, if the electron goes from one orbit to another orbit, if it's a change of place, there should be a continuous emission of what energy, but that doesn't take place.

[51:00] There's a what jump-like emission of energy. So they begin to realize, hey, we can't. We're imagining falsely what the electron is doing. It's not moving from one place to another, right? There's a change that's more inward. But Heisenberg, who saw most of all how radical it was quantum theory, he said it introduced a quantitative version of the potency that Aristotle had what talked about. So it's interesting, huh, that the part of modern science where this thought that's common to not only the early Greeks but to the early modern scientists, the change of place is the only change in the world, the place where that was challenged or broke down, really.

[51:47] Was also the place where Aristotle's understanding of potency was introduced. So if you look at Heisenberg's Gifford lectures, almost every lecture is talking about that potency. It first started to appear in the in the 1924 paper. He says of Bohr, Kramers, and Slater, something entirely new. But you know Louis de Broglie, there the father wave mechanics. He talks about this a little bit too, and he said if you had asked, he says, a physicist of the 19th century, what happens when white light hits a prism and you get this spectrum of all different colors, he would have said, well all those colors were inside the white light.

[52:31] What the prism has done is to separate those things. That's Empedocles' way of thinking, right? See those all those different colors haven't come into existence out of nothing, right? They're all actually inside the white light, and all the prism did was to separate them. So it's a separation and mixture of things. That's only a change of place in that way. He says today we no longer think that's what what happens.

[52:58] Today we think that those different colors exist in the white light. He says only as in a possibility. See this is again the idea of potency or ability that Aristotle was the first to bring out. My friend Warren Murray had some conversations with Heisenberg, he speaks German and so on, and is asking Heisenberg one time, "What is more, a Platonist or Aristotelian?" And of course he's always coming back to Aristotle and potency, you know.

[53:29] Although Warren is saying, "Yeah, but aren't you a mathematical physicist?" The Plato, as you know from Timaeus, is very much into the mathematical sciences. Well, in that sense, he says, "Well, I'm more a Platonist than Aristotelian, right?" But he always comes back, you know, to his appreciation of Aristotle. His understanding of potency or ability, and how the theories in modern physics, especially quantum theory, are suggesting ideas like what Aristotle talked about.

[53:57] But we'll see how hard it is to understand that. But so long as you're ignorant of of ability or potency, then this seems to be the only way that things could change.

[54:20] So there's this tendency then to try to explain any apparently different change as merely a change of place that you're too stupid, or your senses or your reason are not trained enough to to follow. Let me just give a little bit of examples of that sort of thing. I'll take a very simple example, Perkos is watching the football game between Michigan and some other, Michigan and Navy, let's say.

[54:49] Okay. So it's halftime, right? And the University of Michigan marching band comes out on the field, huh? And first they play a tribute to the Navy, you know, and they march like this, and they're in the shape of a what boat, and they play Anchors Away, right? And then they march, and in the shape of what the state of Michigan, they play the Michigan song, you know, and so on.

[55:11] So Perkos is there, you know, and I discovered a new kind of change in the world. Really, Mr. Perkos, what have you discovered? Yeah, change of what shape? I saw this thing, you know, changing its shape on the TV screen there.

[55:31] Fool, he'd say, right? Put your glasses on, right? Look more closely, right? There's 150 members of the marching band, right? And all they're doing is what? Changing place. Yeah, what you call a change of shape is really the gross appearance to your imperfect eyesight, huh? Of what? 150 changes of place that you're too stupid to follow. You see that? Okay. Now,

[55:58] take another example here. Berkos gets his coffee here, see? Oh, that's bitter, see? So Berkos gets called the room for a moment, huh? And you went over to the sugar bowl, and you take a little bit of sugar, and you put it in Berkos' coffee, and you stir it up, and stir it up good, so there's no sugar, you know, on the bottom of the cup, and so on.

[56:21] Berkos comes back in, huh? And he tastes it again. Mmm. Ah. Ah, that's much better, huh? There's been a change of quality. I discovered a new change, change of quality. The coffee has changed from sweet to what? From bitter to sweet, huh? Hmm. Now, say what? Fool! They have no garbage in mind, huh? What you call a change of quality, nothing has really changed its quality. The coffee was bitter, and it still is bitter.

[56:56] See? But some sugar has changed its place from the sugar bowl and into the coffee, right? And the sugar was sweet, and still is sweet. There's been no change of quality there either. What you're really tasting is the sweetness of the sugar. Oh, I don't see any sugar in my coffee. And well, it's too small for you to see it. But you see, see? So what you think, Berkos is a change of quality?

[57:22] Is really a change of what? Place for the sugar, huh? Okay. Um. Now, Berquist is going to have some tea, so he puts the water on the stove. Okay, and he feels the water, and it's cool. And a little shortly later, he puts his finger in there again, and now the water is warm. Ah! A change of quality, right? An inward change. The water was cool, and now the water is warm.

[57:56] It changes quality. It stayed in the same place, obviously. The water. There's been no change of place, but staying in the same place, its quality has changed. Well, just a minute, Mr. Berquist, huh? Where did that heat come from? If there wasn't any heat in the water to begin with, then you're getting something out of what? Nothing. See? Okay. Now, Einstein, in his book The Evolution of Physics, he describes some of the first theories, even modern times.

[58:27] And you put a hot body and a cold body next to each other in a room. You go out and leave them there together for a while. You come back in, and the cold body is not so cold anymore, and the hot body is not so hot anymore. See? Well, they had the theory that there is a substance which they called caloric, which is by nature hot, and some of the caloric in the hot thing what flowed into the what cold one, right?

[58:56] See? Well, just like the sugar, isn't it? See? They're trying to explain that change of the hot body from hot to warm, let's say, and of the cold body from cold to warm or something, by merely what a disguised form of change of place. It's just like the sugar example, isn't it? Not as easy to see, but see. Now, later on, it got more more quite sophisticated, huh?

[59:20] And so Berquist is thinking that the water here on the stove is changing from cold to hot, but what the scientists would say is, hey, there's these little tiny things we call molecules down there, and they're vibrating. See? And what you call this change from cold to hot is really these things going faster and faster. See? In this sort of kinetic theory, heat or something of this sort.

[59:43] And so, what you call hot is merely the gross appearance to your senses of all those what hyperactive little molecules here. See? And that's why eventually the water starts to what bubble, you know, which is kind of changing its place, and eventually shoots out, right? Because it's merely what. But but before it even starts to bubble, and before it shoots out, these things are going faster and faster, but not enough to make it, you know, bubble and start shooting out of the pan, so on.

[1:00:12] But you're too small. I mean, they're too small for you to see, right? So what you call the change of quality of the water from cold to hot is really a change of what thousands and millions, right, of little molecules moving faster and faster, right? So it's really a change of place, isn't it? So you'll find that tendency then to try to reduce any apparently different kind of change.

[1:00:36] To merely a change of what place that's disguised in what escapes us, and they seem to be forced to that because they can't understand how there could really be an inward change in a thing. If the thing really changes quality in any form or shape, it changes substance. You'd be getting something out of nothing. Where did that quality come from? And sometimes I kid the students. I say, "Well, if this is really true, then what's going on when he teaches?

[1:01:07] " There must be a change of place from my mind into your mind, because otherwise, right? I mean, if I continue to know what I'm knowing and you all of a sudden start to know, you're getting something out of nothing, right? So obviously there must be, you know, a change of place, so that the the more I teach, the the dumber I'm getting. But there's something wrong with this theory.

[1:01:30] See, it doesn't explain even teaching. See, but but but but how is that possible? See, I would say it's possible that I cannot get dumber, but you can get smarter because you're able to know, huh? And your ability to know is being what actualized, huh? What is this ability? You see, kind of an odd thing to try to understand, huh? So before they can understand ability, they're almost limited to this way of thinking, and you find that, as I say, in in the modern scientists before quantum theory in the 17th and 18th and 19th centuries, that it begins.

[1:02:17] Only change of place is the kind of change most known to us, and even Aristotle, when he descends from the consideration of change in general to the particular kinds of change, the next thing he studies, the first kind of change in particular he studies, is change of place. That's certainly what's more known to us. But without understanding ability or potency, one doesn't really see any other kind of change as possible.

[1:02:44] That something could really change inwardly, that something could really come into existence or go out of existence. All you can do is shift around, you know, mix and separate things that always were and always will be. That's kind of the thinking of the of the early Greeks and of the early modern scientists.

[1:03:07] So you see why I take those five fragments together.