Empedocles’ Cosmic Cycle and Modern Chemistry
Empedocles is one the the foremost presocratic thinkers who engaged in a pluralistic view of the cosmos and had an interesting theory about how things come-to-be and pass-away.
Empedocles posited that there exists 6 basic eternal things: The four roots (Earth, Air, Fire, Water) and the forces of Love and Strife. Love and Strife are two forces which mix and unmix the four basic roots (also known as “elements” later on in history). Love is responsible to attracting things together and causing them to mix, and Strife is a force that separates and repulses all things back into its four roots.
When Love dominates, we see the natural world and life around us, human being exist, animals and plants exist, formed by different ratios of the four basic roots. When Strife dominates, all these things are separated back into Earth, Air, Fire, and Water. This cycle repeats, as things mix together and unmix in an eternal cosmic cycle.
A special note here is that there are references in modern chemistry to things posited here. Empedocles uses the term “Stoicheia” to mean “letters” which we term as “stoichiometry” in modern chemistry. Stoichiometry is the ratios of products in a chemical equation that mix to create the ratio of reactants. Empedocles also theorized the basic elements mix in various ratios to create the different things we see in nature. Aristotle says on the stoicheia and Empedocles' cosmology:
“As when painters decorate votive offerings— men through cunning well taught in their skill— who when they take the many-colored pigments in their hands, mixing in harmony more of these and less of those, out of them they produce shapes similar to all things, creating trees and men and women and beasts and birds and fishes nurtured in water and long-lived gods highest in honors.” (Simplicius, Commentary on Aristotle’s Physics 160.1–8)
What Aristotle refers to here is that from a limited number of pigments (the analogy of elements), we can mix them in different combinations and ratios to produce a multitude of products. The same ideas we posit today in our modern chemistry. Though his ideas are far more crude and unrefined then we have in our modern science, they form the basis of the ideas that the world is pluralistic in nature that combine in multiple ways to produce our natural world.
To illustrate how I comprehend his cosmic cycle, I created a diagram (using top-notch artistic skills no doubt) on Empedocles’ cosmic cycle:
For more info on Empedocles’ philosophy and cosmic cycle see:
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/empedocles/
A Presocratics Reader, Patricia Curd, Chapter 8
