Version: v1, Published online: 1998
Retrieved April 20, 2024, from https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/biographical/empedocles-c-495-c-435-bc/v-1
4. The biological paradigm
The initial presentation of the cycle of change in fragment 17 is entirely general and abstract in its formulations. The evidence for the structure and content of the following section of On Nature is inadequate, although newly discovered fragments may clarify the matter (see Martin and Primaveri 1997). However Empedocles seems to have taken the creation of plants and animals as a paradigm of the way mixture of roots generates a huge variety of other forms (fr. 21). He appealed to the analogy of a painter, using a few pigments with many potentialities:
When they seize pigments of many colours in their hands, mixing in harmony more of some and less of others, they produce from them forms resembling all things, creating trees and men and women, beasts and birds and water-bred fish, and long-lived gods, too, highest in honour.
(fr. 23)
If this is how art achieves its effects, why should we look for any other explanation of the way nature produces the originals copied by the painter?
It may be that the paradigm of animal creation, once established, was subsequently invoked in later sections of the poem. For example, the following lines from fragment 20 might well have been written to support the notion expressed in fragment 31 of the disintegration of the limbs of the cosmic sphere:
This is well-known in the mass of mortal limbs: at one time, in the maturity of a vigorous life, all the limbs that are the body’s portion come into one through love; at another time again, torn asunder by evil strifes, they wander, each apart, on the shore of life. So it is too for shrubs and water-housed fish and mountain-laired beasts and wing-progressing gulls.
Schofield, Malcolm. The biological paradigm. Empedocles (c.495–c.435 BC), 1998, doi:10.4324/9780415249126-A046-1. Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Taylor and Francis, https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/biographical/empedocles-c-495-c-435-bc/v-1/sections/the-biological-paradigm.
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