Love and Strife in Empedocles: Q&A
Love joins; Strife separates. That’s how I sum up Empedocles’ account of change: 4 lasting roots - fire, air, earth, and water - mix and separate without being created or destroyed.
Here’s what I mean:
Love and Strife are cosmic powers, often described as gods - not just feelings or labels for good and evil.
The cosmos moves from the unified Sphairos through separation and back to unity in a repeating cycle.
Life exists between the extremes, where the roots can form separate bodies.
Only fragments of his poetry survive, so scholars debate the cycle’s details - including whether life forms during both growing Love and growing Strife.
The key to reading Empedocles: think changing mixtures, not changing roots.
Love, Strife, and the Four Roots
The Four Roots: Fire, Air, Earth, and Water
For Empedocles, fire, air, earth, and water are the four roots: the lasting materials that make up the cosmos. They aren’t chemical elements in the modern sense.
Objects differ because their roots appear in different proportions and arrangements. Change means rearranging those roots, not turning them into something else. Love and Strife act on them but never create or destroy them.
Love and Strife as Forces and Gods
Empedocles separates the material roots from the powers that bring them together or pull them apart. “forces” is a useful shorthand, but he treats Love and Strife more like governing powers. He also describes them as gods, bringing his language about nature and religion together.
The next section shows how Love unites the roots and Strife separates them.
How Love and Strife Act on the Roots
Love: Mixture and Unity
Love joins the four roots into compounds without changing the roots themselves. What changes is their arrangement, not what they are.
At its fullest, Love forms the Sphairos, the perfectly unified cosmic sphere. As Strife grows, that unity gives way to separation.
Strife: Separation and Division
Strife pulls the roots apart, breaking up the mixtures Love creates. It is Love’s counterpart, not an exception to the system. Together, these alternating movements shape the larger cosmic cycle.
Beyond Good and Evil
Empedocles describes this cosmic process in familiar moral terms. But Love and Strife are cosmic powers, not merely symbols of good and evil or expressions of human feelings.
EMPEDOCLES, Love and Strife - History of Philosophy with Prof. Footy
The Cosmic Cycle
Empedocles’ Cosmic Cycle: Love and Strife
As Love and Strife take turns, Empedocles’ cosmos follows a repeating cycle: unified Sphairos, growing Strife, total separation, growing Love, renewed unity. The four roots separate and mix again as the cosmos moves through these phases.
Living Things Between the Extremes
Life and separate bodies exist only between the two extremes, where fire, air, earth, and water form mixtures. In total unity, no distinct bodies remain. In total separation, the roots cannot combine to form bodies. Life needs both mixture and distinction.
Disputed Details of the Cycle
Scholars disagree about whether life appears twice during the cycle: once as Love grows and once as Strife grows. This reading is called the double-cycle interpretation.
Conclusion: Lasting Roots, Changing Mixtures
Throughout the cycle, fire, air, earth, and water remain; only their mixtures change.
Love brings these roots together, while Strife pulls them apart. Empedocles sees both as cosmic powers, often divine.
The cosmos changes through rearrangement - not creation or destruction.
