Empedocles (c.495–c.435 BC)

5. Cosmic history

Mention of the cosmic sphere brings us to Empedocles’ boldest application of the concept of a cycle of change: to the history of the universe. He conceived that just as harmonization by Love and decomposition by Strife constitute the common pattern for the biological development of plants and animals, there must be a similar story to tell about the universe as a whole. But here he supposed that the unity achieved at one pole of the cycle and the division at the other took more radical and absolute forms than in the biological realm. When – as he described first as usual – the influence of Love is at its strongest, all distinctions disappear as reality becomes a perfect divine sphere (frs 27–9). Strife for its part generates a vortex which not only breaks the sphere down into its constituent roots, but achieves their complete separation. It is under Strife’s domination that the world as we are familiar with it comes into being (A37, 42).

Empedocles’ account of this development was evidently extensive, and included full discussions of all the topics by now traditional in philosophical cosmogony: notably, the formation of the earth, the sea, and the heavenly bodies, and the evolution of life. Strife divides the roots into four great isolated masses. What happens next is obscure, but the key process was physical interaction between these masses: some of its effects inevitable, some pure chance (see, for example, fr. 53). In particular, misty air heated by fire rises up and forms a nocturnal hemisphere balanced by a diurnal counterpart of fire. The sun is a reflection of this fire, the moon compacted air. The earth too sweats under the heat of the sun, which is the origin of the sea (A30, 49, 66).

The power of Strife is clearly not what it was, but we hear nothing yet of Love. Its influence begins to be apparent with the emergence of life. A clear example is the creation of bone, ascribed to harmonia, one of Empedocles’ synonyms for Love: ‘And kindly earth received in its broad melting-pots two parts of the gleam of Nestis [water] out of eight, and four of Hephaestus [fire], and they became white bones, marvellously joined by the gluing of harmonia’ (fr. 23). The creatures to which bodily parts such as this belonged were described subsequently, in Empedocles’ memorable theory of evolution:

Surviving fragments give vivid details of the bizarre beings of the first three stages (frs 57–62). From these it is clear that in the first two especially chance was made responsible for a great deal. Empedocles may have talked in this context of the survival of the fittest: a remarkable anticipation of Darwinism, although criticized by Aristotle for its inability to account for the regular teleological patterns of nature (Physics II 8). It is only with the animals of the fourth (that is, present) stage that Love begins to exercise a control over the whole structure and pattern of life (fr. 71). The evidence suggests that at this point in the poem Empedocles included a full-scale comparative biology of plant and animal species, focused on explanation of the formation and function of the parts of the body.

Ultimately all this diversity would be reabsorbed into the divine sphere. On Nature may have concluded with some verses which foreshadow this, speaking of god as a mind, ’holy and beyond description, darting through the whole universe with swift thoughts’ (fr. 134).

Aristotle sometimes talks as if he thinks two cosmogonies were envisaged: one occurring as Strife grew more powerful, another as its influence ebbed. He then complains that Empedocles said and could say nothing about the second (A42). Some modern commentators have reinforced this idea of a double cosmogony, adding a double zoogony and appealing to some obscure lines which speak of a ‘double birth and double failing of mortal things’ (fr. 17.3–5). But it seems likely that this is just a reference to the growth of unity, then of plurality, both ‘mortal’ conditions persisting only for a while. In any event, the reduplicating interpretation is hard to reconcile with the shape of the cosmic history as it emerges from the rest of the fragments.

Another way of reading Empedocles’ history of the universe is as an arbitration and synthesis between two approaches to cosmogony adopted by different among his philosophical predecessors. Broadly speaking, the Ionians from Anaximander on explain the emergence of a world or worlds as the outcome of separation from an original undifferentiated condition, and of the consequent interaction between the physical forces released by the separation. By contrast, in the cosmological part of his poem Parmenides had posited an original duality of fire and night, and explained the development of cosmic order and life on earth as the work of Aphrodite mixing the two basic forms (Parmenides fr. 13). Empedocles implies that each strategy is half right: separation produces a differentiated universe, but mixture the biosphere.

There is in fact reason to think that Empedocles wanted to be read as among other things an encyclopedist of previous thought. For example, the forms generated in the early phases of evolution are not just the stuff of dreams, but also recapitulate and rationalize myth. Most notable of these is the figure of the Minotaur, surely the model of Empedocles’ ‘ox-headed man-natured’ being (fr. 61). At the opposite extreme, his verses describing the divine sphere deliberately recall Xenophanes’ god (see Xenophanes §3) – ‘No twin branches spring from his back, no feet, no nimble knees, no fertile parts’ (Empedocles, fr. 29) – and that of Parmenides’ being – ‘Thus he is held fast in the close obscurity of harmonia, a rounded sphere rejoicing in joyous solitude’ (Empedocles, fr. 27).