Ancient Philosophy · Part 7 · The first philosophers · B2
Empedocles: Four Roots, Love and Strife
Part 7 of Ancient Philosophy: a Sicilian poet, doctor and politician answered Parmenides by saying that nothing comes into being, but four eternal roots, fire, air, water and earth, are mixed and separated by two forces, Love and Strife. His four elements ruled Western science for two thousand years. Paired conjunctions (both … and, either … or, neither … nor, not only … but also), with Philo, Sophia, Marcos and Demetria.
Tonight, the man who gave the world its four elements: Empedocles.
Everyone knows them because of him. And he was not only a philosopher but also a poet, a doctor, a politician and, by his own account, a god.
He said so in his poem. Modesty was not his strength.
Empedocles lived in Acragas, a rich Greek city in Sicily, in the 5th century BCE. He wrote in verse, like Parmenides. Ancient writers name two poems, On Nature and Purifications; scholars still argue whether they were really two works or one. About four hundred and fifty lines survive in quotations.
He accepted that nothing can come from nothing, but rejected the idea that nothing changes. Instead, he taught that everything is made of four eternal roots, fire, air, water and earth, which are mixed and separated by two forces: Love, which unites, and Strife, which divides.
Things to come: in the 1990s, scholars in Strasbourg will find pieces of a papyrus in a museum drawer, with more than seventy new lines of Empedocles, the first new text of an early Greek philosopher found in centuries.
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