From the Beginning to Plato

164 FROM THE BEGINNING TO PLATO
subject become best-sellers. A particular interest here which is relevant to the
student of the pre-Socratics and especially of Empedocles is the search for a
unified theory which will explain the complexity of phenomena from the
immensely large to the most minute as a seamless manifestation of basic
principles.
A third focus of modern science comes in new research into the old mind-body
problem, where the study of the brain, and advances in parallel neural computing,
might well engender a more sympathetic attitude to the reductionism of the early
thinkers as well as providing a context in which it is still worthwhile to discuss
the working of individual sense-organs in something akin to Empedoclean terms.
Finally it becomes necessary to find a way of life for humans in the light of the
latest discoveries, to deal with individual emotions (especially the polarities of
erotic attraction and aggressive hostility) and to direct decision-making towards
the development of viable relationships and societies that do not conflict with
other living creatures and the natural environment. It is in these four main areas,
in the theories of elements, of cosmology, of perception and cognition, and of the
unity of life, that Empedocles’ position in the history of philosophy is assured.
THE THEORY OF ELEMENTS
Empedocles started from a basic principle that was his most influential discovery
in the history of science: the understanding of the nature of an element, and the
reduction of all apparent generation, alteration and destruction, along with the
particular and changing characteristics of what is perceived, to a limited number
of persisting and unchanging basic entities. Empedocles had assented to the
conclusion from the ‘Way of Truth’ of his predecessor Parmenides that there could
be no absolute birth or death, since these entail temporal non-existence,
which was found to be logically unacceptable; his wording here follows the
Eleatic argument closely:
It is impossible for there to be a coming into existence from what is not,
and for what exists to be completely destroyed cannot be fulfilled, nor is to
be heard of.
(fr. 12)
Parmenides had likewise denied the corresponding spatial non-existence;
Empedocles identified this as void (what is empty or kenon) and then, on similar
logical grounds, refused its admittance as a divider between the continuity and
homogeneity of being, for ‘there is no part of the whole that is empty’ (fr. 13).
This also meant that there could be no addition to or subtraction from the total
sum, for, as he says elsewhere, ‘What could increase the whole? And where
would it come from?’ (fr. 17.32). The common acceptance of additions and
subtractions as births and deaths should consequently be understood as merely
‘names’ mistakenly used in human speech: