Wisdom (Metaphysics 2005)
11. Empedocles: The Four Elements, Ratios, and Change as Mere Mixing
Class of 2005-01-27
https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/7a-wisdom-2005/011-empedocles-the-four-elements-ratios-and-change-as-mere-mixing/

[0:00] Now with Empedocles, we're going to go to Sicily, huh? And if you look at a big map of Sicily, you'll find a place called Porto Porto Empedocleo. And as I mentioned before, the Greeks had cities in Sicily, right? And if you read the Peloponnesian War, there, you know about the disastrous Athenian expedition, right? To Syracuse and so on. As I mentioned, I think before, there's more good remains of Greek temples there in Sicily than there is in Greece today, huh?

[0:48] So, but now with Empedocles, you're going to have a little break here, huh? Now thinking, huh? Because up to this point, everybody seems to be looking for one first matter. They may disagree as what the one first matter is, and some think of it as Mother Earth, right? And some is water, some is air, maybe some is fire, right? Empedocles purpose is a kind of break because he's going to give up the attempt to find one first matter.

[1:27] And so sometimes they call them in the history books. The thinkers up to this point they call monists because of mona meaning one, and then they use the Latin word for these guys called pluralists, right? Because they're saying they're plural, many, many matters, right?

[1:46] Now, we've spoken before of how it's reasonable to look for one first matter, in that reason is naturally inclined in that direction, right? But something can be reasonable also because there's a reason for thinking it, right? And is there some reason to think that there must be more than one first matter?

[2:20] Is there some reason why Empedocles? Would try to give up, right? Attempt to find one first matter. He's actually going to say that there are four first matters, right? And they've been touched upon by those before: earth, earth, fire, and water. which have, four basic first matters. But before we get into that more particular thing, is there some reason why you might give up the attempt to try to find one first matter?

[2:57] Well, as you read the fragments of Empedocles, you can see perhaps something of what might have led him to think this, huh? And I think the best way to kind of present it is to start with an either-or, okay? And you could say that if,

[3:23] there is one first matter, as previous thinkers, right, seem to be doing, right? Either that one matter has some definite quality or qualities, or it has no definite qualities, right? Okay. The other alternative, see,

[3:52] either it has some definite quality, or it has no definite quality, huh? Right. Now, to some extent, the thinkers before saw difficulty in the first alternative, didn't they? Insofar as they move from Mother Earth, at least to water to air, right? Or in the case of Anaximander, to unlimited, right? Having no quality, right? Okay. And there's a good reason for thinking that, right? And that is, if you give the first matter some definite quality, and there's only one first matter, and everything else is made out of it, everything would have to have that quality.

[4:56] You can't have opposites. And you could have the opposites in the world, right? So if sugar was the first matter, and sugar is definitely sweet, and everything is made out of sugar as the only matter which everything is made, everything should be sweet, right? And therefore, there'd be nothing bitter in the world, right? We live in a world with sweet and bitter things in it, right? Or if water was the beginning of all things, everything should be what?

[5:26] Wet wet and cool. And there shouldn't be nothing hot and dry, right? And again, we live in a world of hot and cold and wet and dry. And therefore, if fire fire was the beginning of all things. I'd be drinking fire, like the

[5:46] yeah, in the what do you call it, the sideshows, something, you know, drinking fire, you know, and you know, punch my folks. This would be hell on earth, right? So there are some definite difficulties in taking that first alternative, right? Okay. But now, if you take the second alternative and say, right, that there is one first matter and has no qualities, right? Maybe there is even greater difficulty.

[6:17] How do you get any qualities in this world, right? See, when you made Kool-Aid as a kid, right, you took this colorless, tasteless water, and you added the Kool-Aid that gave it a color and a taste, right? But if all you had was water, and you had water to water, what did you get? No color. More water. Yeah. No more taste, right? You know. So if it had no qualities, how would you get any qualities in the world, right?

[6:49] I mean, if it has some qualities, you know, like you got to cook and combine different things and get a new taste, right? But you have to start off with something that has some kind of taste to begin with, right? And you can mix colors and get kind of a new color, a new shade, right? But you got to have some color to begin with, right? So, as you'll see in the fragments of Empedocles you'll be talking about you can't get something out of nothing, and that's a kind of common thought, which is you can't get something out of nothing.

[7:20] Julie Andrews sings about it, right? King Lear says, "Nothing will get you nothing," right? It's a common thought, right? So maybe there's even a greater difficulty if you take the second alternative, right? So the difficulty in either alternative, therefore, there must be more than one what first matter, right? Makes sense. Okay.

[7:48] Now, if there is many first matters, right? How should they be distinguished then? By their qualities. Yeah. Let's be more precise. How should the many first matters

[8:17] be distinguished? Well, give you a little. Lesson here, distinction here, and Plato's in the Sophist and other places always dividing into two. Right? There's a reason for that, and that maybe we should distinguish things by opposites, huh? And opposites are what? Two. Okay. Now,

[9:00] if I divide human beings into male and white, that's a good division. why not? it goes to an opposite yes. now, where would you put me? With the male or the white? Both. Yeah. Doesn't that make sense? See, it would make some sense to divide. human beings into male and female, right? Or young and old, right? You know, how about male and young?

[9:35] Or female and old? Huh? Oh, because your grandmother might be both female and old, right? See, but young and old that makes some sense, right? Male and female, good and bad, right? But male and good, that makes sense. Hmm. See.

[10:00] No. See. So you want to divide by opposites, right? Okay. So we're getting closer, right? Now we don't know how developed Empedocles' thinking was about which opposites should you use for the basic first matters, right? But

[10:31] if he takes these ones that the men before him said individually—earth, water, air, fire—they seem to be distinguished by hot and cold. At least if you think of air as what like steam, and by wet and what dry, right? Okay.

[11:02] Now you know when you divide into four, you usually divide and subdivide, or you crisscross, right? And in this case, maybe you could crisscross, huh? Hot and cold, wet and dry.

[11:29] Now what's hot and dry? Fire. Yeah. What's wet and cold? Those things are pretty obvious, right? I think what the scripture is talking about, you know, man's freedom and how before him is life and death. But I think scripture uses water and fire when pointed, isn't it? You see that in the text of scripture? Oh, yeah. Water and fire. Now what's cold and dry? All right. Yeah.

[12:07] And you might say, well, why do you say that? Well, you dig down in the cellar; it's cooler down. in the cellar, right. And if you take the water out of the earth, it's dry as dust, right? So it's wet and cold. If you think of air as a little more far, you think the air is. Like steam, then it's hot. Then what? Wet, huh? Okay. Now,

[12:34] why take hot and cold and wet and dry? Why not take hard and soft, or black and white, or sweet and bitter? Right? Is there some reason why these contraries are more basic than hard and soft? No, see, when you go into something like sweet and bitter, it's not nearly as prevalent as something like hot and hot and cold or things like that. But notice, son,

[13:07] aren't hot and cold causes of hard and soft? Oh yeah. Oh. And wet and dry, right? So you put the butter in the refrigerator and it gets hard, right? You put it on the stove or in the pan and it melts, right? Softens, huh? Okay. So hot makes it soft, and cold makes it hard. So hot and cold are more basic than hard and soft, right? You buy one of these stick loaves, and after a day or so, it dries out and gets wet, hard, right?

[13:47] But if you moisten it, you know, then you can make it soft again, right? Like a sponge, right? You moisten the sponge and it gets soft and flexible, and then dries out and gets hard as a rock. Sometimes these sponges, right? So hot and cold and wet and dry are causes of hard and soft, right? So if you're looking for the first cause of things, it would be better to distinguish them by hot and cold, wet and dry, than by hard and soft, which seem to be effects, right?

[14:19] Okay. And then with white and black, I put this white paper in the fire; it would turn what? Black, right? And they put black metal in the fire, and it turns red hot, and eventually what? White hot, yeah. See. And my hair is all over the place in the morning, and so I wet it down, and it gets dark. You think even though I was so gray, and then as it dries out in the day, it becomes what?

[14:49] Gray. Yeah, yeah. See. And a woman knows that clothing, you know, when it's wet, it's going to look like it has different color, right? Then when it dries out, huh? Okay. And of course, you know how sweet and bitter, how generally the taste and flavors of things are affected by what? Fire, right? Huh? Okay. So hot and cold and wet and dry seem to be the most basic qualities, the most basic opposites that are known by our senses, and they seem to be causes.

[15:21] In changes in the other sensible qualities, right? So, notice the three steps here, right? Reason why you reject one first matter, right? The reason why you're going to distinguish the many matters by opposites, right? And then the reason why these opposites are better than hard and soft or black and white and so on, right? You see that? Okay. And he was in doubt, influenced also though by the fact that everybody had guessed one of these before.

[16:02] And we have a fragment of Empedocles which I have in a different collection, on method, where he says, you know, men see some part of the truth, and they boast that they see the whole. Is it? So maybe there's some truth to saying that Earth is the beginning of things, right? But that's the whole truth? No, it's only maybe part of the truth, right? Another guy says, no, water is beginning of all things.

[16:28] Another guy says, no, air is beginning of all things, right? Okay. And so the fact that these famous thinkers and poets had taken one of these in particular, right, gives some credibility to that being the beginning of things, right? But maybe they saw only a part of the truth, and they boasted that they had seen the what? Whole, right? Just like in the 19th century, there, you know, Karl Marx says everything is explained by the economic mode of production.

[16:59] Do you know that? Even your being here is explained by that. You see. And then along comes Freud and says everything is explained by your sexual drive. You know everything. Well, probably these people see some part of the truth, right? The sexual drive does explain some things, I guess. And the economic mode of production explains some things, right? But does either one explain everything, right? Or is it that these men have seen some part of the thing Part of the truth, and out of pride, right, they boast that they see the whole.

[17:37] You see. So maybe he thought that the men before him had seen some part of the truth, right? And now he can come and gather together the parts of truth that are scattered and divided amongst them, right? In Boethius's great work, there, the Consolation of Philosophy, huh? Lady Wisdom, you know, comes down, you know, to console him in prison, and her garments are kind of like torn, right?

[18:03] And the commentator, you know, says, "Well, that's to represent truth, huh? That men in grabbing at the truth have gotten some part of it. Another guy's got another part of it, and they've torn and kind of dismembered a bit the truth, and this is what's represented in that way by the great Boethius, huh? "

[18:23] Now, Empedocles. Lived in an age when, of course, the great authorities were not the scientists but the poets, right? And so he adopted a poetic way of speaking, and wrote in verse, huh, in the Greek, huh? And he uses the names of gods and goddesses, right, to be appealing to his audience, right? Just like nowadays, everybody tries to be scientific, right? You see a book, you know, scientific philosophy or history is a science, you know, or this is a scientific survey, you know, everything's scientific, right?

[19:03] So you have to pretend you're scientific to be accepted, you know, as a as a public public speaker. So notice in his first fragment here, here first the four roots of all things, right? And notice again, he borrows a word from living things, right? Bright Zeus, which one of the four is that fire? Fire, life-giving Hera. Earth. No, that'd be air. Air. Yeah, yeah. The soul is air, right?

[19:34] Hades. Well, he's the god of the what? That's earth. Yeah. And obviously Nestis, who moistens with tears the springs of mortals, that's water, right? Okay.

[19:47] The next one is somewhat the same thing, but not as clear, huh? Now, in the bottom of page three, Empedocles is going to take now

[20:03] not only what he's gotten individually from these great thinkers before him, he's going to bring in this Italian, in case come Italy, Pythagoras, right? That there are what ratios behind things, right? Okay. So you see here in these fragmentary form the thought that these elements will combine to make flesh and blood and bones and other things, right? But they combine in different what? Ratios. Numerical ratios, yeah.

[20:40] And the ratio that they have explains the quality of flesh and blood and bones, right? This is very fragmentary, but just see how far you can go with what he has here. But the pleasing earth in its broad melting pots received two of the eight parts of glittering Nestis. That's two parts of water, right? And four of Hephaestus. Now Hephaestus was the god of the furnace, right?

[21:07] So that's fire, right? And these became white bones, begotten divinely by the gluing of harmony. And notice, huh, that just as far as that goes here, put it in kind of modern terms here, modern formulae. Bone is what W two F four,

[21:48] right? That's the formula. As far as you get that fragment, right? Mm-hmm. And notice, huh, as far as that fragment goes, there's more of the dry element in bone, right? Oh. Than of the wet element, huh? And the bones, of course, are the driest part of the three main ingredients. They're obvious: flesh and blood and bones, right? But now in the next fragment,

[22:15] he says the earth, anchored in the harbors of Cyprus, goddess of love, came together with these in about equal measures. With Hephaestus, water, and the all-shining upper air, and from these, not from thee, and from these came blood and the forms of the flesh. But notice that the ratio of the wet to the dry is different now, right? In the case of blood and flesh, which are more moist, right?

[22:46] Okay. So in these two fragments here, DK ninety-eight and the one on the bottom of the previous page, you can see him bringing together the thought of almost all his predecessors, right? Because he has earth, air, fire, and water, but now combining in different numerical ratios to make bone and flesh and blood, right? And some primitive attempt here, at least, to explain the difference in dryness, et cetera, of bone as compared to blood, right?

[23:20] By a different ratio of the wet to dry elements, huh? Okay. We don't know how far he pushed this, but notice how we still, in a way, keep this idea that there are many elements, right? And they combine in different numerical ratios to make water and all the other chemical compounds, right? Okay.

[23:45] So he's kind of like a first chemist in a way, right? Now the next group of fragments, which are very important, the next five fragments here.

[24:06] You see, Empedocles bringing out the thought and some the reasons for the thought that there's really only one kind of change in this changing world, and that is change of place, huh?

[24:27] Now, Plato, perhaps, but certainly Aristotle was to reject the idea that change of place is the only change in the world. Aristotle will maintain that there is inward change, right? And there's even substantial change, there's change of quality. But even in Aristotle's thinking, change of place is the most common kind of change, but also the kind that we understand the best, right? Okay. In order to understand an inward change, it's very difficult when you really come down to it.

[25:07] And we think, perhaps, can you see it also in Anaxagoras, huh? But maybe it runs through all the early Greeks, a kind of tendency to think of change of place as the only change there is. And you'll see that same tendency in modern physical science, huh? Modern physical science with Begins really with Galileo and Kepler, Newton, and they're talking about change of place, huh? The fall bodies to the Earth, or the cannonball being shot, or the planets going around the sun, and so on.

[25:46] And there's a tendency of the physicists in modern times to say that change of place is the only change there is, and what appears to be a change of quality or substance is merely a complicated or disguised form of change of place. And that takes place. I'll give some examples of that in modern science, but the basic thought here we'll see already in Empedocles Notice what he says here in DK8.

[26:24] And I will tell you another thing. There is no birth of any mortal thing, nor end in destructive death. See, these words "birth" and "death" are unscientific words, right? I talk about a birth of another grandchild, Mister Berkwist. Huh? See, because birth seems to imply that someone has come into existence, right? That wasn't at all before, right? And death seems to say that something has gone out of existence, right?

[27:05] That can't take places, he'll go on to explain why. Okay. And that's a very radical thing, right? To be or not to be, as Hamlet says, eh?

[27:23] What is there? But there is only a mixing and an exchange of what has been mixed, huh? Birth, however, is a name given to these by men, huh? See, so all you're doing is moving things around, mixing them together in some combination, and separating them, and mixing them in another combination, and so on, right?

[27:49] And be like Berkwist, you know, saying, "Oh, at two ten, my class was born." And then at about four thirty, oh, my class died. There was a death in the family. Oh, oh. See, no, no, Berkwist. These guys, they existed before your class were, right? And they are mixed together in this room, right? And then they were separated, right? See, but nothing has really come into existence or out of existence, right?

[28:19] They still exist, and they existed before your class, right? Didn't come into existence in your class, right? But just a mixing and separating of people.

[28:33] But they, meaning men in general, when these have been mixed in a way suited to men or to the races of wild beasts or to bushes or birds of prey, they say then that this has been born. And when these have been separated, they call it wretched death. They do not name these things rightly. But sometimes I also follow the custom, right? Just like a modern scientist might say, you know, the sun rose today at 6 a.

[29:03] m. or the sun set at 5 p. m. or something. And you say, well, did the sun really rise? Was the Earth turning on its axis? Well, yeah, I just follow the custom. That's what we speak, you know. I that's not scientific, though. I mean, the sun didn't really rise. It didn't really set, you know. It's the Earth turning on its axis, right? That's the truth. You want to know the truth.

[29:21] Yeah, but I follow. the. Custom sometimes right. So you said you might hear me talking about, you know, birth or death or something like that, you know. But that's not really what's taking place, right? So when I go down to see my new grandchild, oh, a new mixture, right? And when I go to the funeral home when somebody's died, oh, I see a separation, separation of things. Now something in the back of your mind says there's more to it than this, right?

[29:51] You know, Bertrand Russell had this kind of position, you know, that we're more or less a combination of molecules and atoms and so on, right? Huh? But then he's running around the world trying to, you know, stop atomic war, right? Well, why get so upset about atomic war if it's just a rearrangement of atoms and molecules, right? I mean, you know, just rearrangement.

[30:15] Okay. Now what's wrong with these things, fools? He says, for they have no far-reaching minds who think that what before was not comes to be. Because then you'd be getting something out of what? Nothing, yeah. Or that anything dies and is destroyed utterly in every way, right?

[30:40] Now we'll see a little more clearly in one of the examples there in the words of Anaxagoras, huh? He says, what is cannot cease to be by being cut, right? Can I really destroy anything? Take it out of existence? Can I really annihilate, turn to nothing, anything?

[31:00] Can I cut you up so there's nothing left to you? You might speak that way sometimes, right? But if I could cut you up so there's nothing left to

[31:10] you, cut something up into what it's made out of, right? If I could cut you up into nothing, what do you be made out of? Nothing. Yeah, isn't that stupid to think that? Only a fool would think that. He's saying, right? The fool is the opposite of a wise man, right? Can you get something out of nothing? Only a fool would think such things, huh? So nothing really comes into existence, it goes out of existence.

[31:38] All you do is push things around and shove them around and withdraw them and so on, right? That's science. And here in the next fragment, he's stating the reason for the first part. For it is impossible that anything comes to be from what in no way is, right? You'd be getting something out of nothing, right? And that what is should perish completely is not accomplished or heard of.

[32:11] As I say, the reason for that just goes back to Anaxagoras, right? You can't cut something up into nothing, right? What about what about his ratio? What about his ratios? Like right now, with a living human being, you have your particular ratio. Yeah, but after that, you you don't have that ratio. So hasn't something gone out of existence even for him? Yeah, but that's that's kind of accidental, you'd say.

[32:37] No, it is accidental. It's an accidental change, all gratuitous. Nevertheless, it's a it's a real change. Yeah, but all you are doing is you are bringing in two parts of this and one part of that, right? When I make Manhattan, right, I take two parts of whiskey and I put them in over the cubes and one part of of sweet vermouth, you know. And so it's really just a change of place of the whiskey and the

[33:05] thing, right? See, if you think something really goes out of existence, you see, you are back in DK eleven there. The fool has no far-reaching mind. See, we see dummy Burkus You know, he says, "I put the log on the fire, right, and it was consumed by the fire. It no longer exists, right? " He says, "You have no far-reaching mind, right? Everything that was in the log still exists.

[33:30] What do you mean? Well, look under the grate there, right? See those ashes, right? Yeah. Now go outside the house and look up in the sky. There, you see that went to the chimney, and you are polluting the neighborhood there with these little. Now you see, all you've done is separate these things that are in the log, right? And some of them are down in the ashes, and some of them are up in the what?

[33:50] Yeah, yeah. See, so there is going to be a tendency in Empedocles and in all these early thinkers, but also a tendency in the modern scientists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and in the nineteenth centuries to try to take anything that appears to be a change other than change of place, anything that appears to be more inward change, right? And say that that is merely a what complicated or disguised form of change of place that you are too stupid to follow, right?

[34:28] And that's why you think right t here is been a change of quality or a change of. Um, I would take a simple example of this. You see, to show the need of the person who disagrees with Empedocles right? See, so Burkus comes in and he gets a cup of coffee, right? And he tastes the coffee. This is kind of bitter. This coffee, right? Okay, so he goes out of the room for a moment, And while he's out of the room, you go to the sugar bowl.

[35:00] You get a little bit of sugar out of the sugar bowl, and you put it in Burpus's coffee, and you stir it so much that t here is no grains in the bottom of the coffee, right? Okay, so dummy Burpus comes back, and the mug is still there and so on. He tastes the coffee again. My coffee has changed from bitter. to sweet. It's still in the same place, but it's gone from bitter to sweet, right?

[35:26] So there's a change of quality, not just change of substance. I mean, of place, but now there's change of quality. Something goes from being bitter to being what? Sweet. And he'd say, fool, you had no far-reaching mind. That coffee was and still is bitter. What do you mean? See, that sweetness you taste is the sugar, which was and still is sweet, right? And the sugar had a change of place.

[35:56] Some, some was in the sugar bowl, is now inside the what? Coffee. Burke's attempt. I don't see the sugar in there. You know, but it's too small for you to see, right? Huh? You see, you don't have a far enough-reaching mind or the tools to to see that it's in there, right? You see. So what appears to Dummy Burkeus to be a change of what? Quality, right?

[36:21] From bitter to sweet is really a change of what? Place of sugar from the sugar bowl to the what? Cup of coffee. You see. So that's the attempt to try to find an explanation that way. Now Einstein, in his book "The Evolution of Physics," he describes some of the earlier things of modern scientists, and they're talking about if you put a hot body and a cold body next to each other on the table there, right?

[36:52] Leave them together for a while, and you come back after a while, and the hot body would not be so hot, and the cold body would not be so what? Cold, right? Now the dummy, the fool, right, would say, "Well, there's been a change of quality, right? The hot body has gone from hot, let's say, to lukewarm, right? And the cold body has gone from cold to lukewarm.

[37:16] This is a change of quality. They're in the same place, right? Been no change of place, but there's been a change of quality now, right? Well, the way they tried to explain it was by saying that there is a hot substance called what? Caloric, I guess, is the name. Today, the word caloric, I guess, we have now, right? Caloric, and some of the caloric that was in the what?

[37:38] Hot body has flown into the what? Cold. Yeah, yeah. So there's not been any what? Change of of quality from hot to cold or vice versa, right? But a hot body has what? Changed its place, right? Just like in the other example I gave, the sweet body had changed its place, right? But nothing had changed its quality, huh? You see that? But there you see the modern scientists trying to explain it, just like you know we explain Burkeus's attempt to say there's a change of quality here in my coffee, right?

[38:18] Now later on, they got a little more sophisticated in modern science, right? And they said, "Well, what you call heat is merely what? the gross appearance, right? On your hands of the kinetic energy, right? The movement of these little tiny molecules in the water, right? Okay. And when the water gets hotter, what actually is taking place is that these particles are moving faster and faster, right? And therefore, they're you know that's why it tends to expand and blow the lid off the things on.

[38:56] But there's all kinds of little changes of place that you're to what grows your senses to do, right? You see, so a change from cold to hot is merely a complicated change in many little tiny particles, right? Of their you know motion, motion, yeah, yeah. So this tendency in modern science was to say that really change of place is the only. change there is in the world, and what appears to be a change of quality, let alone a change of substance, is merely a disguised or unrecognized form, right?

[39:33] A complicated form, in some cases, right? A very small scale form of any changes of place that you're too stupid to follow, right? So it's like purpose watching, you know, the football game on TV there without his glasses, you know, and the University of Michigan, you know, comes out in the field marching out there, and let's say they're in the shape of the state of Michigan, and they're playing the Michigan rousing song and so on, and then let's say they're playing Navy, so now they get into the shape of a ship, and they play Anchors Away or something, and purpose says, Oh, I discovered a new kind of change in the world, change of what shape, right?

[40:11] You say, you dummy, put your glasses on, look more carefully. What you call a change of shape, right, is really the gross appearance to your imperfect eyes, right, of a hundred members of the what marching band of the University of Michigan changing what? Place. Yeah, their place, yeah. So you see, real likeness there between modern science, right? And it's not really until until quantum theory that this was really seriously challenged in modern science.

[40:47] But quantum theory in the 20th century, as Heisenberg said, introduced a quantitative version of what Aristotle talked about, named potency or ability. If you look at Heisenberg's Gifford lectures, right, he talked about this again and again, right. That's what he admired most of all in Aristotle, right? But Aristotle's understanding of potency or ability enabled him to understand how it's possible to have an inward change that is not a what change of place, huh?

[41:22] But a change of quality, and even in some cases, a change of what Substance. substance, yeah. But ability or potency is very hard to what understand, huh?

[41:39] So before ability or potency was understood, it's very hard to see how there could really be any change other than change of place. Even though when your child dies, or your father dies, or your mother dies, or your friend dies, everybody reacts as if this is more than just a change of place, right?

[42:05] Now the opposite of a fool, of course, is a wise man, right? So he says in DK 15, for a wise man would not guess such things in his mind, as that as long as they live what they call life, so long they are. And experience wretched things and good things. I guess the Greeks are like us; they experience wretched things more than good things. But that before mortals were fastened together, and after they are unfastened, they are then nothing, right?

[42:33] Okay. So what Empedocles is saying is that nothing comes into existence, and nothing really goes out of existence. All you do is move things around, right?

[42:47] Now, in the next two group of fragments, you get the position of Empedocles about the empty, right? You might contrast this with Democritus on the last page,

[43:02] where in that fragment at the top of page ten, Democritus is saying that a lot of these sense qualities don't really exist, but what truly exists are the atoms and the empty. So there is two possible opinions about the empty. One is that it is, and that's what Democritus says, and the other that it is not, which is what Empedocles says. Okay. Now,

[43:32] let's talk a little bit about the empty. In these fragments here, notice what he's saying. Nor does anything of the whole become empty or overfull. Nothing of the whole is empty, so whence could anything additional come? Now, if you say that the empty is, don't you seem to get into a contradiction?

[44:05] Because is there something there? See, we're wrapped in modern times to speak of empty space, right? And we used to even say that in the atom there was empty space, you know, and so on. But empty space has got length and width and depth, right? Okay. Now, is there something there that has length and width and depth? If there is, it's not really empty, is it? But if there is nothing there, how can nothing have length, width, and depth?

[44:39] It's like a contradiction, right? So you are trying to say, in a sense, that what is not is when you say the empty is.

[44:51] Now, Democritus apparently the reason why he thought empty exists was that there couldn't be any motion unless the empty was. You know, when you pack things in a suitcase, you know, and you have to sit in the suitcase together. Well, things don't move around very much in there if they're tightly packed, right? But there is nothing empty in the world, right? And how tightly packed would things be?

[45:18] Completely right. You'd be like wedged in the ice, right? There'd be no give at all, right? You know, we'd all be stuck, and so there'd be no motion, right? So, although Democritus admits that the empty is nothing, he's saying it's got to exist, otherwise there's no motion. And so, like Heraclitus, right, in trying to save the reality that we have of motion, right, he says, "I'll admit that what is not is."

[45:52] See, he admits that the empty is right. Just a little bit like Heraclitus seems to be admitting that day and night are the same, and hot and cold, and wet and dry. Otherwise, there'd be no change of one becoming the other. Okay, so this is kind of a repeating thing in history that men trying to understand change, right, often run into what seems to be a contradiction, right?

[46:20] And sometimes they say, "Well, I'm so convinced that change is real, I'll admit that contradictions really take place. " Can both be and not be, right?

[46:31] And then you have a few loners like Parmenides who say, "No, something can't both be and not be. " Therefore, change is illusion, right? And then you have the third position of Aristotle, who would say, "Yeah, and Parmenides is correct. Something can't both be and not be the same time anyway, the same way. " But change is real, right? Therefore, this is only the appearance of a contradiction, and hidden under this apparent contradiction is a way of understanding that is true and avoids the contradictions.

[47:06] Okay, that's the three possible positions that men get into. So, Empedocles, I think, is denying that the empty exists because, in a way, you're saying, "Well, what is the empty there? " You know, well, there's really nothing there. Well, then you're saying that nothing, what is not, is right. Yeah. While the other guy, Parmenides, is saying, "Yeah, but motion is real, and you won't be motionless. " There's some some give, some emptiness, huh?

[47:41] Aristotle would say, "But couldn't there be motion in some kind of circular way, right? Like the beer in the beer can, right? Even though it's full, could still, but yeah, one thing is moving out, for the other is moving in, you know. " Maybe there's a way to understand change without admitting that what is not is. But men do hit that problem, right? And you find that even the modern scientists sometimes, you read them, right?

[48:04] They they want to admit contradictions, right? They say for modern mathematics, it's not possible without contradictions. I hear them say that. So. Not the bottom of page four. You want to take a little break here? Yeah, maybe. Some short break here here, and I.