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II / Empedocles
- University of California Press
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II Empedocles 1. the cosmic cycle In my first chapter, I identified in the writings of Anaxagoras what I take to be the first Greek manifesto of rational creationism. I concluded by suggesting that Anaxagoras’s own agenda was not essentially religious in motivation , but scientific: to exhibit the power of intelligence when it operates on matter to create the world is to uncover the irreducible dualism of mind and matter that constitutes nature itself. As we pursue the story in this second chapter,1 we will move into more overtly religious territory, in which named divinities take on the key roles. But, above all with the chapter’s protagonist, Empedocles (mid-fifth century b.c.), it will be vital not to assume that religion and science were mutually exclusive modes of thought. Sicilian poet,healer,and wonder-worker,Empedocles described in his poem On nature two cycles, a cosmic one and a daimonic one. The cosmic cycle is one of alternating world phases, governed alternately by two divine powers called Love and Strife, each phase apparently containing its own creation of life forms. The daimonic cycle is also governed by Love and Strife. A superior race of daimons, after living in blissful peace during the days of Love’s dominance, committed under the pernicious influence of Strife the cardinal sins of animal slaughter, meat eating, and oath breaking. For these sins they have been banished from bliss for ten thousand years (“thirty thousand seasons ”),2 condemned to be reborn as all manner of living things, until their 31 1. Large parts of this chapter are drawn from Sedley 2005a. 2. See O’Brien 1969, pp. 85–88, for this equivalence, based on the Homeric division of the year into three seasons. eventual return to bliss, a return which Empedocles at the beginning of his poem the Purifications announced he had himself finally achieved. It was once the policy of scholars to keep these two cycles firmly segregated , certainly in different poems, and if possible in separate and irreconcilable areas of Empedocles’ thought, the one scientific, the other religious. That old separatist policy was already all but extinct when in 1999 a newly identified papyrus from Strasbourg containing portions of Empedocles’ On nature was published,3 putting the final nail in its coffin. For there the daimonic cycle was to be found in the immediate context of Empedocles’ physics. If we are to make adequate sense of Empedocles’ zoogony—that is, his theory of the origins of life4—it must include the creation of these daimons . For, contrary to a common scholarly assumption, the daimons are themselves flesh-and-blood organisms, not mere transmigrating souls or spirits. Indeed, their sin of meat eating would have been quite hard to perform if they had not been. Empedocles, like Anaxagoras, was working in the aftermath of Parmenides ’ challenge to cosmology. Parmenides had bequeathed a notorious dilemma: are we to follow mere appearances and accept the existence of the familiar variable cosmos bounded by the spherical heaven, or are we to follow reason, according to which the sphere that constitutes reality must in truth be an undifferentiated and changeless one?5 Empedocles’ solution to the dilemma is to interpret these alternatives diachronically, as each therefore capable of realization in its own turn.6 The world, he suggests, undergoes an everlasting cycle of change under the alternating government of two divine forces, Love and Strife. Love, alias Aphrodite, is the divine power that strives to maximize harmony and blending, while Strife’s aim is the opposite,maximum separation.Periodically Love gains total dominance,and when that happens the world does indeed become the changeless and blissful sphere which Parmenides had described.In most phases of the cycle,how32 / II. Empedocles 3. Martin and Primavesi 1999. 4. “Zoogony” should be understood to mean the generation of life (zwhv ), not specifically of animals (zw/¸a), because plants are included too, alongside humans, beasts, and gods. 5. In interpreting Parmenides’ reality as literally spherical I am entering a realm of controversy. I defend the interpretation elsewhere (Sedley 1999c), but for present purposes it should be enough to remark (a) that the onus of proof is on anyone who wishes to deny the literal reading, and (b) Empedocles, like Plato (Sph. 244e2–8), must have assumed the literal reading himself, if his sphairos is, as widely believed, of Parmenidean inspiration. 6. Cf. Plato, Sph. 242d4–243a1 for recognition of Empedocles...