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Empedocles

Empedocles of Agrigento.

Empedocles is a philosopher , engineer and physician Greek of the fifth century BC. AD.

Summary

Biography

The dates of birth and death of Empedocles are not certain: he probably lived between 490 and 435 BC. BC His life is poorly understood and sometimes has a legendary character obviously due to his somewhat eccentric personality. It was an important figure of Agrigento , a defender of democracy. He was banished and ended his life in the Peloponnese. According to legend, Empedocles threw himself into the furnace of Etna on the edge by dropping one of his shoes, proof of his death. This story is however refuted by Strabo.

Empedocles was probably the strangest and most eccentric Presocratics : it is, according to Nietzsche , "the most colorful figure of ancient philosophy ).

He wrote his thoughts in the form of two poems, can be combined into one: 1) the / Peri phuses (In Nature), 2) / Katharmoi (Purification). We still have about four-hundred lines. We must add a papyrus fragment of the first century, discovered in Strasbourg, published in 1999 .

Empedocles was both an engineer , philosopher , magician and poet.

His thought

His thinking is influenced by the East , the Orphism and Pythagoreanism.

Cosmology

His physical doctrine made four elements (Fire, Air, Earth, Water) principles component all things .

"Know first the quadruple root
Of all things: bright Zeus traffic lights,
Hera's mother lives, and then Aidoneus,
Nesti finally, the tears which mortals drink . "

First there is the problem of interpretation. Zeus, the god of heavenly light, means the Fire, Hera, wife of Zeus, means the Air; Aidoneus (Hades), god of the underworld, the Earth refers; Nest (Poseidon) is the water. However, for Stobaeus, which seems less credible, Hera is Earth, is the Air Aidoneus. Second, there is the problem of order. Empedocles said Fire / Air / Earth / Water. Logically, Aristotle establishes the series: Fire, Air, Water, Earth. Thirdly, there is the problem of completeness. How many elements? Aristotle and the young Philip of Opus (the author of Epinomis) will add a fifth element, which is the quintessence: the ether.

To these elements must be added the Forces of Love and Hate: Love brings even what is dissimilar, and hatred between what is enclosed:

"At one point, the One was formed of multiple, at another time, it was divided, and left the Multiple One - Fire, Water and Earth and height of the powerful Air. "

Duality and opposition forces of Love-Hate applying these four elements also undergoes an alternation: a state where there is only Love and everything is united (the sphaeros, recalling the sphere of Parmenides ) , follows the gradual introduction of Hate until complete separation of the Elements, Love then reappearing back things to unity and to a new cycle:

"For they prevail in turn in the revolution of the circle, and pass into each other and become larger as the tower that they were assigned. "

Empedocles is our time in a phase of progression of Hate: the split sphaeros Air (atmosphere) and Fire (daylight, stars), Earth, Earth and Water.

The description of the generation of living things obey the same double movement: a primitive state of androgyny to the sexual generation in the progress of Hate; members solitary wanderers seeking to unite in the phase of assembly under the impulse of love ("heads without necks, arms bare shoulders private, eyes waves without fronts").

Empedocles proposed a correct explanation of eclipses of the Sun .

Medicine

The combination and the properties of the four elements that determine the health and temperaments and characters.

Religion

His religious education is an important place to the need of purification. He believes in the transmigration of souls, and designed the cycle of existence as an atonement:

"If ever a crime of souls stained his hands with blood, or followed the hatred and has testified falsely, she must wander thrice ten thousand years away from the abodes of the blessed, being born in the course of time in all kinds forms of death, and changing a painful path of life against another. "

Vegetarianism

In keeping with his theory of transmigration of souls of living beings, his teaching very probably encouraged vegetarianism , the remarks on this subject, its ancient commentators contradicting or varying more or less, however:

"The school of Pythagoras and Empedocles of Agrigento and the rest of the Italians teach that we are related not only between us and the gods, but also to irrational animals, that indeed is the single breath that runs through the universe like a soul and unites us with these beings. Therefore, by killing them, eating them, we commit an injustice and impiety, because we are destroying congeners. As a result of what these thinkers were advised to abstain from what has life and they have charged an impious men who blush carnage warm the altar of the Blessed. Empedocles says somewhere (Fr. 136): "So stop this massacre to the clamor fatal. Do not you see that you might come to devour the unconscious in your mind? ""

- Excerpt from Against the dogmatists, IX, 127, of Sextus Empiricus.

"But Empedocles, who was a Pythagorean , and so did not eat anything that had had life, did, with the myrrh , frankincense and other aromatics precious ox which he distributed to all the congregation of games Olympic . "

- Athens. I, 5th - Hermann Diels, Die Fragmente Der Vorsokratiker.

This seems confirmed by direct fragments of Empedocles:

"144. Fast of wickedness! (- RP v. 184) "

Or here Empedocles speaking of those who had "acquired divine wisdom" without "confusing public opinion about the gods'

"128. They had not yet for god Ares, nor Kydoimos, nor king Zeus, nor Kronos nor Poseidon, but Cypris, queen ... They made her pile by enabling present and figures painted by the subtle fragrance of incense, with offerings of pure myrrh and balsam in the sweet scent, spreading on the ground libations of honey brown. And the altar did not dripping blood pure bull, but it was among men that the greatest crime of devouring their noble members after they have ripped the life. (- RP 184.) "

The complex of Empedocles

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Gaston Bachelard uses his "psychoanalysis of subjective beliefs about the knowledge of the phenomena of fire" (or The Psychoanalysis of Fire ) to the contemplative attitude, the dreamer's attention before the fire. It identifies characteristics of the complex of Empedocles, which unite for 'being fascinated "listen to" the call of the stake, "love and respect for fire, life instinct and death. For this dreamer, "the destruction . "


References

  1. Quoted by Vladimir Grigorieff, in Philo base, Eyrolles, 2003, p. 18.
  2. Quoted by Quintino Cataudella, philosopher (1900-1984), in Cataudella and Schoeller 1990 , p. 109
  3. A. Martin O. Primavesi, the Strasbourg Empedocles, Berlin, ed. Gryuter of 1999.
  4. This intuition of Empedocles involuntarily classifies the first four states of matter that is going to experience physics: plasma, gas, solid, liquid, with the first until the twentieth century to be identified. See page 7 in Mathematical Classification and Clustering, B. Mirkin, Springer, 1996 or page 15 in An Illustrated Brief History of Western Philosophy, Anthony Kenny, Blackwell Publishing, 2006
  5. Empedocles, fragment B 6: The Presocratics, Gallimard, coll. Pleiade, p. 376.
  6. fragment B 42 DK
  7. http://remacle.org/bloodwolf/philosophes/empedocle/diels.htm
  8. a and b http://philoctetes.free.fr/empedocle.html
  9. The Psychoanalysis of Fire, Ch. II "Fire & reverie, the complex of Empedocles', p. 31-40, 1949, Gallimard, Ides.

Bibliography


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