From the Beginning to Plato

EMPEDOCLES 167
To illustrate the possibility of the wide diversity of phenomena generated from
just four elements Empedocles used the simile of a painting, which can show in
two dimensions a variety of plant, animal and human life, although it consists
basically of pigments of a few primary colours in a particular arrangement:
As painters, men well taught by wisdom in the practice of their art,
decorate temple offerings when they take in their hands pigments of various
colours, and after fitting them in close combination—more of some and
less of others—they produce from them shapes resembling all things,
creating trees and men and women, animals and birds and water-nourished
fish, and long-lived gods too, highest in honour; so do not let error
convince you that there is any other source for the countless perishables
that are seen…
(fr. 23.1–10)
This fragment also throws light on how parts of elements are placed together in a
compound. Empedocles is not speaking of a complete fusion, like blue and
yellow blending to form green, but, according to the common practice in Greek
painting, of the juxtaposition of pigments or washes (usually black, white, red
and yellow) to produce the effect of figures and objects. The parts of elements
involved in a compound may be very small, as when for example they form the
alternating channels of fire and water in the eye, or are compared to metals
ground down to fine powders, but even so they are not reducible to absolute
minima. In positing elements in Aristotle’s phrase (On the Heavens 305a4) that
are ‘divisible but never going to be divided’, Empedocles’ philosophy here
contrasts on the one hand with the complete infinite divisibility of compounds in
Anaxagoras’ theory and on the other with Democritean atomism.
Empedocles’ far-reaching conclusion that despite appearances to the contrary
all animate and inanimate forms should be understood as particular arrangements
in different proportions of a small number of unchanging, qualitatively distinct
elements immediately became standard, and was taken into account by
philosophers, cosmologists, natural scientists and medical writers throughout
antiquity, and into the Middle Ages and beyond. As a basic principle it
foreshadows contemporary assumptions in a number of areas, for example that
the main ingredients of living things are the elements of carbon, hydrogen and
oxygen, that language, literature and mathematics can be expressed as encoded
variations of the binary numbers zero and one, and that the genetic range of
species is reducible to an arrangement of the four basic letters of the DNA
strings.
Some further motive force however was required in Empedocles’ scheme to
explain how the four elements come into compounds and separate into their own
masses. For this role he posited opposed principles of attraction and repulsion
which, in his vivid vocabulary, he called philia (‘love’, ‘friendship’) and neikos
(‘strife’, ‘hate’). As the visible masses of earth, sea, sun and sky had provided