Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and the Atomists
In the fourth and fifth centuries B.C.E., an effort was made among intellectual circles in Greece to make inquiries into the very nature of the infrastructure of the known cosmos. These thinkers form a pattern in which they react to and are influenced by earlier thought, and Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and the atomists (specifically Leucippus and his successor, Democritus) are no exception. In looking back at the various theories that were developed, it is important to consider how they were built on, or devised solutions to, problems and scenarios that preceded them. A major problem in considering the nature of what composed the universe at the time these three thinkers presented their ideas comes about when the main ideas of their predecessor, Parmenides, are held up against these new theories. His crucial intellectual hurdle, “I shall not let you say or think ‘from what it is not’” (113) had to be resolved before any new theories about “what is” could truly stand. In the case of the four thinkers mentioned above, only Leucippus and Democritus sufficiently addressed and resolved Parmenides’ far-reaching quandary.
Empedocles, the oldest of the four, was rumored to be a Pythagorean (151). But if the Pythagoreans were by definition a mystery religion, then it must be deduced that Empedocles deviated from this tradition. Therefore, the ideas that he presented may be acknowledged to have been influenced by the Pythagoreans but not necessarily confined to them. This influence helped form a duality in Empedocles’ mind between a separate and pristine godlike state and the condition of his known environment, described in his text Purifications as a “meadow of Doom” (153) in which immortal souls are “driven this way and that, vainly supposing that [they have] discovered the whole” (156). These exiled spirits are trapped in eternal cycles perpetuated by what Empedocles viewed as impure acts, such as bloodletting (154), a notion derived straight from Pythagoras.
Another element in Empedocles’ ideas of a Pythagorean origin is the importance that they both placed on numbers. Empedocles claimed that the cosmos was composed of four elements, namely earth, air, fire, and water, and two forces, being mingling and separation, named by him as “Love” and “Strife” (158). Upon these building blocks and the forces that move them, all that exists is built by a series of variations of ratios. What separates one substance from the next is simply a basic shift in the portions of elements and the amount of Love or Strife involved.
An incorporation of other modes of thought beyond those known to be Pythagorean can be seen as well. There is a harkening back to the centralized “primordial vortex” construct of Anaximander, for example (162). Earth, considered to be the heaviest element, is naturally centered and compressed within the rotations of the vortex, while lighter elements such as fire and air are contained in the periphery. Traces of various ratios (effluences) within the spiraling mass are ingested with other various ratios, thereby comprising all that is known (170).
Empedocles was unmistakably influenced not only by Pythogoras, but also by Parmenides. He is shown, in a work addressed to a fellow Pythagorean, to attempt to justify basing ideas on what can be perceived through the senses (157). At the same time, however, he asserts that because the cosmos is comprised of timeless elements, nothing is ever destroyed or comes into existence (158). This is Empedocles’ basic answer to Parmenides. He acknowledges the limitations of human senses, but insists that we must work with what we have. At the same time, there is an attempt made to short-circuit the impossibility of “not-being” by asserting that nothing in fact was ever brought into being, except through the illusion of a combination of elements seeming to compose things of separate identity.
Anaxagoras introduced ideas of ratios of basic components quite similar in some ways to Empedocles. His departure, however, lay in the notion of “effluences,” traces of other substances found in substances of a different nature. Anaxagoras asserted that this mixing went even further, to the point that everything is mixed into everything else, with only the greater portion of the mixture as a determinant of what we recognize as “is” (177). He also departed from Empedocles in the concept that all substances indeed are what they are, not merely built out of elemental ratios. The trick is Anaxagoras’ idea of “homoiomeria”: that for any given substance, its greater ratio is comprised of an infinite number of smaller particles having the same nature as the whole (176). This clever innovation leaves room for the “homoiomeria” of all the other particles in existence to be included in all mixtures.
For Anaxagoras, though, there is one fundamental essence that remains unmixed, setting the whole thing in motion. He refers to this essence as “mind,” without it being confined to any certain identity other than thought or reason (177). This theory seems to be an inadequate answer to Parmenides, however, because this exalted mind serves as a catchall phrase that can be used to rationalize any given problem. At the same time, it is a leap of faith that Anaxagoras cannot justify making based on Parmenides, who made it a point not to grant perception any credit that is impossible for it to earn.
Even after the challenging and interesting innovations made by Empedocles and Anaxagoras, the basic thrust of the thought of Parmenides still had not been sufficiently dealt with. How can all of this motion and plurality occur in a reality that can only justify a central monism, lacking the emptiness necessary for anything to be separate in the first place? Leucippus, and later Democritus, finally step up to the task of freeing both motion and plurality from the iron grip of Parmenides.
If something that does not exist cannot be thought of, then what is thought of must be limited to what exists. Leucippus’ response to this is almost baffling in its simplicity. For if this is true, the next logical step is simply to state that “Not-being exists as emptiness” (196). Referring to what “not-is” as an existing condition of emptiness finally provides room both for motion and plurality. A given area can be full of lack of fullness, and emptiness can be described as a “something” that stays in the realm of existence, and therefore resolves the problem that Parmenides had set forth. If existence of what isn’t can exist as emptiness, however, Leucippus and Democritus both had to then tackle describing just what it is precisely that moves around in all of this newly-justified emptiness.
Their answer to this was the concept of atoms, uncuttable units of material that are eternal and cannot change (198). How these atoms form what we perceive is primarily through ideas Leucippus and Democritus were already familiar with. It was already assumed as common sense that like tends to gravitate towards like, so atoms of a similar structure in this way sought to be among each other. When enough of these atoms merged together in a pattern, the much larger impression becomes what we define as a structure in its totality. The impression given to us is based on perception and interpretation of parts too small to be seen. A rational theory had finally broken free of Parmenides’ limits with the atomists.
WORKS CITED
Robinson, John Mansley. An Introduction to Early Greek Philosophy. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968.
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