QUANTUM METAPHYSICS - E-thesis

Empedocles believed that the combining and dividing of elements followed from the power of
Love to unite and the power of Strife to divide. When the world was formed, the different
elements had been combined in a loving association, but the power of Strife had caused them to
diverge. This in turn led to an idea of development which has points of contact with Darwin’s
theory of evolution and natural selection. In the end, elements powered by Love started to move
closer together again, and this marked a return to the initial condition. The names Love and Strife
given by Empedocles do not only stand for ‘Attraction’ and ‘Repulsion’, but for two forces that
reign throughout the inorganic and organic worlds. Empedocles seeks to understand inorganic
processes in terms of organic life rather than vice versa. 57
The Athenian Anaksagoras (ca 460 BC) criticised the view taken by Empedocles. In explaining
the multiplicity of beings, Anaksagoras was also not satisfied with Empedocles’ four elements,
he believed they consisted of countless different minute qualities which had substantive
properties. Qualitative change in beings should be understood as different mixings and
separations of these qualities, and all these countless qualities must have been contained in the
primal mass at the outset. Empedocles did not postulate any kind of unchanging reality existing
behind what could be observed, but Anaksagoras maintained that movement was caused by a
transcendental will, the ‘Nous’, which gave the universe both form and order. 58
Anaksagoras was a purist who could not believe like Empedocles that in a material universe,
observed movements could be the result of a struggle for power between semi-mythical Love
and Strife. With Anaksagoras, the philosophy of nature for the first time consciously encounters
the problem of mind. He realised that humans did not consist entirely of flesh, hair, bones, nails
and sinews, and he tried to find a place for the reality of mind in the scheme of the world. When
mind was not present in all things but merely in some, he concluded that mind was something
that was not mixed with the other infinitely-many materials and qualities mingled into the things
of nature. We have his own words on this point. A lengthy passage begins ‘Everything else has a
share of everything: mind, however, is infinite and self-ruling, and is mixed with nothing, but is
alone, itself by itself. 59
57
Jaeger 1947, 138.
58
Stenius 1953, 133-138, Tarnas 1998, 21. Jaeger 1947, 159.
59
Jaeger 1947, 160.
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