Love and Strife: Empedocles and Anaxagoras

Which of 2 ways the nature of the universe contains the good, and the highest good?

Is it something separate and by itself, or as the order of the parts?

Probably in both ways, as an army does. For its good is found both in:

• its order and
• its leader
  • More good is found in its leader since the order depends on him.

All things are ordered together somehow, but not all alike,-both fishes and fowls and plants;

the world is not such that one thing has nothing to do with another, but they are connected.

For all are ordered together to one end, but it is as in a house, where the freemen are least at liberty to act at random, but all things or most things are already ordained for them, while the slaves and the animals do little for the common good, and for the most part live at random;

This is the sort of principle that constitutes the nature of each.

All must be dissolved into their elements. There are other functions similarly in which all share for the good of the whole.

Many impossible or paradoxical results confront those who hold different views from our own.

All make all things out of contraries.

But neither ‘all things’ nor ‘out of contraries’ is right.

These thinkers do not tell us how all the things in which the contraries are present can be made out of the contraries; for contraries are not affected by one another.

This difficulty is solved by a third element.

These thinkers however make one of the 2 contraries matter. This is done by those who make the unequal matter for the equal, or the many matter for the one.

But this can also be refuted in the same way.

The one matter which underlies any pair of contraries is contrary to nothing.

All things, except the one, will, on the view we are criticizing, partake of evil.

For the bad itself is one of the two elements. But the other school does not treat the good and the bad even as principles; yet in all things the good is in the highest degree a principle.

The school we first mentioned is right in saying that it is a principle, but how the good is a principle they do not say-whether as end or as mover or as form.

Empedocles also has a paradoxical view.

He identifies the good with love. But this is a principle both as mover (for it brings things together) and as matter (for it is part of the mixture).

The same thing might be a principle both as matter and as mover. But still the being, at least, of the two is not the same.

How then is love a principle? It is paradoxical also that strife should be imperishable.

The nature of his ’evil’ is just strife.

Anaxagoras makes the good a motive principle.

His ‘reason’ moves things.

But it moves them for an end, which must be something other than it, except according to our way of stating the case.

I believe that the medical art is in a sense health.

It is paradoxical also not to suppose a contrary to the good, i.e. to reason. But all who speak of the contraries make no use of the contraries, unless we bring their views into shape.

Why some things are perishable and others imperishable, no one tells us; for they make all existing things out of the same principles.

Further, some make existing things out of the nonexistent; and others to avoid the necessity of this make all things one.

Why should there always be becoming?

What is the cause of becoming?

A third superior principle is supposed by:

• those who suppose 2 principles
• those who believe in the Forms

For why did things come to participate, or why do they participate, in the Forms?

All other thinkers are confronted by the necessary consequence that there is something contrary to Wisdom, i.e. to the highest knowledge; but we are not.

For there is nothing contrary to that which is primary; for all contraries have matter, and things that have matter exist only potentially; and the ignorance which is contrary to any knowledge leads to an object contrary to the object of the knowledge; but what is primary has no contrary.

If besides sensible things no others exist, there will be no first principle, no order, no becoming, no heavenly bodies, but each principle will have a principle before it, as in the accounts of the theologians and all the natural philosophers.

But if the Forms or the numbers are to exist, they will be causes of nothing; or if not that, at least not of movement.

How can space be produced out of parts that occupy no space?

Number will not, either as mover or as form, produce a continuum. But again there cannot be any contrary that is also essentially a productive or moving principle; for it would be possible for it not to be. Or at least its action would be posterior to its potency.

The world, then, would not be eternal. But it is. One of these premisses, then, must be denied.

In virtue of what the numbers, or the soul and the body, or in general the form and the thing, are one-of this no one tells us anything; nor can any one tell, unless he says, as we do, that the mover makes them one.

Some say mathematical number:

• is first
• goes on to generate one kind of substance after another
  • These substances each have different principles

These people:

• make the substance of the universe a mere series of episodes.
  • This is because one substance has no influence on another by its existence or nonexistence.
• give us many governing principles
  • But the world refuses to be governed badly.

It is not good ot have many rulers.

• There should be just one ruler