Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and the Atomists

The Idea of Four Elements.

Empedocles attempted to find an escape from the logical conclusions of the Eleatic philosophers. Born in the early fifth century b.c.e. in Sicily, Empedocles took on many roles before becoming a philosopher. For a short time he was a politician, and then he turned his attention to educating people on the topics of medicine and religion. When he embarked on his own study of philosophy, he held two very important views. First, he abandoned the accepted belief that all philosophers had held since Thales: that all matter was derived from a single underlying substance. Instead he theorized that the world, as it is known, is due to the mixing and separation of four elements: earth, air, fire, and water, which Empedocles called "roots." Second, he accounted for the blending and the separation of the elements by theorizing the existence of two different forces that blend and separate called Love and Strife—attraction and repulsion. The first caused the elements to blend together and created the physical world, whereas Strife forced the elements apart and caused destruction.

Love and Strife.

Empedocles compared the blending of the elements to what a painter does when he mixes his basic colors: by combining his colors, he produces new tints. So in the universe, which Empedocles, like Parmenides, imagined as a sphere, the elements are mixed together by the attractive force of Love in their proper ratios to form concrete objects; human bones, for instance, were two parts water, four parts fire, and two parts earth. This blending of the elements results in genesis and growth in the world of the senses, whereas the separation of the elements results in death, destruction, and decay. Strife is on the outside of the sphere but in due time it penetrates it, driving Love towards the center of the sphere. Gradually the four elements separate from each other. Death and decay occurs. Then the opposite process begins: Love, which has been driven into the center of the sphere, begins to expand, driving out Strife. This never-ending cycle is like the flux and reflux of blood from the heart, or the action of breathing air into the lungs and then expelling it. All the objects that can be seen are unstable compounds. Blending the elements brings about genesis and the creation of new things, and the dissolution of the mixture of elements brings about their decay.

The Problem of Motion.

Empedocles still had to explain how this blending of the elements took place. The process implies movement, and Empedocles accepted Parmenides' concept of a sphere as a plenum in which there was no movement for lack of space in which to move. Empedocles explained that there were "pores" in the elements that allowed them to move together and coalesce. The Greek for "pores" is poroi, passageways, like the holes in a sponge. These "pores" provided passageways so that the elements could move into each other and create unstable compounds, and then move apart and destroy them as the endless cycle of cosmic change.

Anaxagoras of Clazomenae.

Anaxagoras, a contemporary of Empedocles, took up Empedocles' theory of blending elements and completed it by describing what caused motion in these elements. Anaxagoras, born in Clazomenae in the early fifth century b.c.e., was a man of privilege from a wealthy background. He gave up a good deal of his possessions and lands to study science and philosophy, to the point that he left Clazomenae after 470 b.c.e. and settled in Athens. He stayed there for some forty years until he was driven into exile on a charge of impiety. Much like Empedocles, Anaxagoras asserted that the Greeks were wrong to speak of genesis and destruction; instead they should call genesis a "blending together," and destruction "decomposition." Empedocles spoke of "elements" whereas Anaxagoras spoke of "seeds." His "seeds," however, were not the same as Empedocles' "roots." Rather, they were themselves compounds, each with a fixed shape, color, and taste, and each containing a fixed number of dynameis—the word means "powers" or "capabilities." The ration of dynameis within each seed is a fixed amount, and they tend to exist in pair of opposites, such as hot dynameis coupled with cold ones, heavy with light ones, and moist with dry ones. A stone is made up of seeds with more heavy dynameis than light ones and more dry than moist ones—hence its solidity. Every seed has a portion of everything within it, no matter how minutely it may be divided.

The Power of "Mind."

Anaxagoras realized that his theory of "seeds" was incomplete. He still needed a source of motion that allowed this blending and uncoupling of the "seeds." Anaxagoras, however went a step beyond Empedocles and created a force called the Nous (Mind), which served as the source of knowledge for the human intelligence. It was not an incorporeal force, however, but a kind of unmixed fluid that did not have portions of other things in it. It coupled the "seeds" and uncoupled them by setting them in rotation. That is, "Mind" established a kind of vortex which began in the center of the "seed" and then spread further and further, evidently somewhat like the ripples that a stone thrown into a tranquil lake produces on the surface of the water. Anaxagoras did not expand further on his concept of the Nous, and this left future philosophers dissatisfied with the theory. Although initially attracted to Anaxagoras' philosophy in his youth, Socrates complained that Anaxagoras thought of "Mind" simply as a mechanical device to get motion started in his universe, and once that was done, he had no further use for it.

sources

Felix M. Cleve, The Philosophy of Anaxagoras (The Hague, Netherlands: Nijhoff, 1973).

Daniel E. Gershenson and Daniel E. Greenberg, Anaxagoras and the Birth of Physics (New York: Blaisdell, 1964).

—, Anaxagoras and the Birth of the Scientific Method (New York: Blaisdell, 1964).

Denis O'Brien, "Empedocles Revisited," Ancient Philosophy 15 (1995): 403–470.

—, "The Relation of Anaxagoras and Empedocles," Journal of Hellenic Studies 88 (1968): 93–114.

Gregory Vlastos, "Physical Theory in Anaxagoras," in Studies in Greek Philosophy. Ed. Daniel W. Graham (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996): 303–327.

Leonard Woodbury, "Anaxagoras and Athens," Phoenix 35 (1981): 295–315.