Philosophers could hardly disagree more than that! But who was right? It fell to Empedocles (c. 490-430 B.C.) from Sicily to lead the way out of the tangle they had gotten themselves into.
He thought they were both right in one of their assertions but wrong in the other.
Empedocles found that the cause of their basic disagreement was that both philosophers had assumed the presence of only one element. If this were true, the gap between what reason dictates and what “we can see with our own eyes” would be unbridgeable.
Water obviously cannot turn into a fish or a butterfly. In fact, water cannot change. Pure water will continue to be pure water. So Parmenides was right in holding that “nothing changes.”
But at the same time Empedocles agreed with Heraclitus that we must trust the evidence of our senses. We must believe what we see, and what we see is precisely that nature changes.
Empedocles concluded that it was the idea of a single basic substance that had to be rejected. Neither water nor air alone can change into a rosebush or a butterfly. The source of nature cannot possibly be one single “element.”
Empedocles believed that all in all, nature consisted of four elements, or “roots” as he termed them. These four roots were earth, air, fire, and wafer.
All natural processes were due to the coming together and separating of these four elements. For all things were a mixture of earth, air, fire, and water, but in varying proportions. When a flower or an animal dies, he said, the four elements separate again. We can register these changes with the naked eye. But earth and air, fire and water remain everlasting, “untouched” by all the compounds of which they are part. So it is not correct to say that “everything” changes. Basically, nothing changes. What happens is that the four elements are combined and separated—only to be combined again.
We can make a comparison to painting. If a painter only has one color—red, for instance—he cannot paint green trees. But if he has yellow, red, blue, and black, he can paint in hundreds of different colors because he can mix them in varying proportions.
An example from the kitchen illustrates the same thing. If I only have flour, I have to be a wizard to bake a cake. But if I have eggs, flour, milk, and sugar, then I can make any number of different cakes.
It was not purely by chance that Empedocles chose earth, air, fire, and water as nature’s “roots.” Other philosophers before him had tried to show that the primordial substance had to be either water, air, or fire. Thales and Anaximenes had pointed out that both water and air were essential elements in the physical world. The Greeks believed that fire was also essential. They observed, for example, the importance of the sun to all living things, and they also knew that both animals and humans have body heat.
Empedocles might have watched a piece of wood burning. Something disintegrates. We hear it crackle and splutter. That is “water.” Something goes up in smoke. That is “air.” The “fire” we can see. Something also remains when the fire is extinguished. That is the ashes—or “earth.”
After Empedocles’ clarification of nature’s transformations as the combination and dissolution of the four “roots,” something still remained to be explained. What makes these elements combine so that new life can occur? And what makes the “mixture” of, say, a flower dissolve again?
Empedocles believed that there were two different forces at work in nature. He called them love and strife. Love binds things together, and strife separates them.
He distinguishes between “substance” and “force.” This is worth noting. Even today, scientists distinguish between elements and natural forces. Modern science holds that all natural processes can be explained as the interaction between different elements and various natural forces.
Empedocles also raised the question of what happens when we perceive something. How can I “see” a flower, for example? What is it that happens? Have you ever thought about it, Sophie?
Empedocles believed that the eyes consist of earth, air, fire, and water, just like everything else in nature. So the “earth” in my eye perceives what is of the earth in my surroundings, the “air” perceives what is of the air, the “fire” perceives what is of fire, and the “water” what is of water. Had my eyes lacked any of the four substances, I would not have seen all of nature.
Something of Everything in Everything
Anaxagoras (500-428 B.C.) was another philosopher who could not agree that one particular basic substance—water, for instance—might be transformed into everything we see in the natural world. Nor could he accept that earth, air, fire, and water can be transformed into blood and bone.
Anaxagoras held that nature is built up of an infinite number of minute particles invisible to the eye. Moreover, everything can be divided into even smaller parts, but even in the minutest parts there are fragments of all other things. If skin and bone are not a transformation of something else, there must also be skin and bone, he thought, in the milk we drink and the food we eat. ~~
A couple of present-day examples can perhaps illustrate Anaxagoras’ line of thinking. Modern laser technology can produce so-called holograms. If one of these holograms depicts a car, for example, and the hologram is fragmented, we will see a picture of the whole car even though we only have the part of the hologram that showed the bumper. This is because the whole subject is present in every tiny part.
In a sense, our bodies are built up in the same way. If I loosen a skin cell from my finger, the nucleus will contain not only the characteristics of my skin: the same cell will also reveal what kind of eyes I have, the color of my hair, the number and type of my fingers, and so on. Every cell of the human body carries a blueprint of the way all the other cells are constructed. So there is “something of everything” in every single cell. The whole exists in each tiny part.
Anaxagoras called these minuscule particles which have something of everything in them seeds.
Remember that Empedocles thought that it was “love” that joined the elements together in whole bodies. Anaxagoras also imagined “order” as a kind of force, creating animals and humans, flowers and trees. He called this force mind or intelligence (nous).
Anaxagoras is also interesting because he was the first philosopher we hear of in Athens. He was from Asia Minor but he moved to Athens at the age of forty. He was later accused of atheism and was ultimately forced to leave the city. Among other things, he said that the sun was not a god but a red-hot stone, bigger than the entire Peloponnesian peninsula.
Anaxagoras was generally very interested in astronomy. He believed that all heavenly bodies were made of the same substance as Earth. He reached this conclusion after studying a meteorite. This gave him the idea that there could be human life on other planets. He also pointed out that the Moon has no light of its own—its light comes from Earth, he said. He thought up an explanation for solar eclipses as well.
P.S. Thank you for your attention, Sophie. It is not unlikely that you will need to read this chapter two or three times before you understand it all. But understanding will always require some effort. You probably wouldn’t admire a friend who was good at everything if it cost her no effort.
The best solution to the question of basic substance and the transformations in nature must wait until tomorrow, when you will meet Democritus. I’ll say no more!
Sophie sat in the den looking out into the garden through a little hole in the dense thicket. She had to try and sort out her thoughts after all she had read.
It was as clear as daylight that plain water could never turn into anything other than ice or steam. Water couldn’t even turn into a watermelon, because even watermelons consisted of more than just water. But she was only sure of that because that’s what she had learned. Would she be absolutely certain, for example, that ice was only water if that wasn’t what she had learned? At least, she would have to have studied very closely how water froze to ice and melted again.
Sophie tried once again to use her own common sense, and not to think about what she had learned from others.
Parmenides had refused to accept the idea of change in any form. And the more she thought about it, the more she was convinced that, in a way, he had been right. His intelligence could not accept that “something” could suddenly transform itself into “something completely different.” It must have taken quite a bit of courage to come right out and say it, because it meant denying all the natural changes that people could see for themselves. Lots of people must have laughed at him.
And Empedocles must have been pretty smart too, when he proved that the world had to consist of more
