Empédocle d\' Agrigente

Biography

The birth dates and of died of Empédocle are not certain: he probably lived between 484 and 424 av. J. - C. Its life is known little about to us and is sometimes legendary obviously due to its somewhat eccentric personality. He was an important character of Agrigente, defender of the democracy. He was banished and finished his life in the Peloponnese. According to the legend, Empédocle was thrown in the furnaces of the Etna by giving up on the edge one of its shoes, proof of its death. This history is refuted by Strabon.

Empédocle was undoubtedly strangest and most eccentric of the Présocratiques: it is, according to Nietzsche “ the multi-coloured figure of old philosophy ”. It was a serious character, melancholic person and original, getting dressed with crimson, showing a delphic crown on the head, the long hair, the closed face. He wanted that it was believed prophet, and he declares in his poems that one honoured it like a god. Some wonders are allotted to him.

He wrote his thought in the form of poems: the Περὶ Φύσεως/ Perished phuseôs and Καθαρμοί/ Katharmoi . There us remain approximately four hundred worms about it. It was at the same time Engineer, Philosophe, Thaumaturge and Poète.

Its thought

Its thought is influenced by the Orient, the orphism and the Pythagorisme. One showed it to have plundered the work of Pythagore.

Cosmology

Its physical doctrines make Four elements (water, fire, ground and air) the principles composing all things. To these elements the forces of the Amour and Hatred are added: the Love brings closer even what is dissimilar, and Hatred separates what is joined:

At a given time, one was formed Multiple, at another moment, it divided, and the One left the Multiple - Fire, Eau and Ground and the powerful height of the Air.

The duality and the opposition of the forces of Love-Hatred applying to these four elements undergo moreover an alternation: in a state where reign only the Love and where all is plain (the sphaeros , pointing out the sphere of Parménide), succeeds the progressive introduction of Hatred until complete separation of the elements, the then reappearing Love brings back the things to the unit and towards a new cycle:

Because they prevail alternatively in the revolution of the circle, and pass one in another, and become large according to the turn which was assigned to them.

Empédocle locates our time in a phase of progression of Hatred: sphaeros separated the air (atmosphere), then fire (light of day, stars), the ground, and of the ground water.

The description of the generation of the living beings obeys the same double movement: of a primitive state of androgyny to the generation sexuée under the progress of Hatred; members solitary and wandering seeking to link itself in the phase of meeting under the impulse of the love (“ heads without necks, private naked arms of shoulders, the vague eyes deprived of faces ”).

Medicine

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

Religion

Its religious teaching makes a great place with the need for the purification. He believes in the transmigration of the hearts and conceives the cycle of the existences like an atonement:

If ever one of the hearts soiled its hands of blood criminally, or followed Hatred and were parjurée, it must wander three times ten thousand years far from the residences of happy, being born in the course from time under all kinds of forms mortals, and changing a painful path of life against another.

The complex of Empédocle

Relating to the dreamer fascinated by the fire for which the destruction (by fire) is more than one change, it is a renewal. Principle of the daydream linking love and respect of fire, instinct of living and instinct to die at Bachelard.

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