The Spirit at the Center of the World

Abstract

Although Parmenides’s goddess of Truth warned against the thought of any enlivening “mixing” spirit at the center of the world, Parmenides’s contemporary Empedocles, a practical man who participated in civic affairs and practiced medicine, insisted that, regardless of what logicians might claim, change and diversity are experiential facts. Appearances can deceive, but when all one’s senses are consulted—sight, hearing, testimony, touch, and taste—it is possible to reach an understanding of physical reality that is “as far as mortal cunning can go” (Frg. 342). Nature as perceived, said Empedocles, is endlessly variable, and if that variety cannot have come from one primal homogeneous stuff, it can be understood as generated from combinations of primary elements.² As for what sets the process in motion, he identified two primal forces. Strife that mixes up elements and drives them apart, and Love, or φιλóτης, that brings elements together in new combinations.

In Strife everything is in different forms and separate, but in Love they come together and desire one another. From these come everything that was and will be: trees sprout up, as well as men and women, animals and birds, water-spawned fish, and long-lived most honored gods. These are such, but running through each other they become different, so much does mixing change them.

—Empedocles, Frg. 355¹