disintegrates. We hear it crackle and splutter. That is “water.” Something goes
up in smoke. That is “air.” The “fire” we can see. Something also remains
when the fire is extinguished. That is the ashes—or “earth.”
After Empedocles’ clarification of nature’s transformations as the
combination and dissolution of the four “roots,” something still remained to be
explained. What makes these elements combine so that new life can occur?
And what makes the “mixture” of, say, a flower dissolve again?
Empedocles believed that there were two different forces at work in
nature. He called them love and strife. Love binds things together, and strife
separates them.
He distinguishes between “substance” and “force.” This is worth noting.
Even today, scientists distinguish between elements and natural forces.
Modern science holds that all natural processes can be explained as the inter-
action between different elements and various natural forces.
Empedocles also raised the question of what happens when we
perceive something. How can I “see” a flower, for example? What is it that
happens? Have you ever thought about it, Sophie?
Empedocles believed that the eyes consist of earth, air, fire, and water,
just like everything else in nature. So the “earth” in my eye perceives what is
of the earth in my surroundings, the “air” perceives what is of the air, the “fire”
perceives what is of fire, and the “water” what is of water. Had my eyes lacked
any of the four substances, I would not have seen all of nature.
Something of Everything in Everything
Anaxagoras (500-428 B.C.) was another philosopher who could not
agree that one particular basic substance—water, for instance—might be
transformed into everything we see in the natural world. Nor could he accept
that earth, air, fire, and water can be transformed into blood and bone.
Anaxagoras held that nature is built up of an infinite number of minute
particles invisible to the eye. Moreover, everything can be divided into even
smaller parts, but even in the minutest parts there are fragments of all other
things. If skin and bone are not a transformation of something else, there must
also be skin and bone, he thought, in the milk we drink and the food we eat.
~~
A couple of present-day examples can perhaps illustrate Anaxagoras’
line of thinking. Modern laser technology can produce so-called holograms. If
one of these holograms depicts a car, for example, and the hologram is
fragmented, we will see a picture of the whole car even though we only have
the part of the hologram that showed the bumper. This is because the whole
subject is present in every tiny part.
In a sense, our bodies are built up in the same way. If I loosen a skin cell
from my finger, the nucleus will contain not only the characteristics of my skin:
the same cell will also reveal what kind of eyes I have, the color of my hair,
the number and type of my fingers, and so on. Every cell of the human body
carries a blueprint of the way all the other cells are constructed. So there is
“something of everything” in every single cell. The whole exists in each tiny
part.
Anaxagoras called these minuscule particles which have something of
everything in them seeds.
Remember that Empedocles thought that it was “love” that joined the