Love, Strife, and the Roots of All Things: Empedoclean Cosmopoetics

Arguably the most poetic of the Greek and Roman philosophers (he was rivaled only by Lucretius, who imitated him), Empedocles is the best preserved and most extensively debated of the early Greek philosophers known today as the Presocratics. Aristotle cites him more than he does any other predecessor (not always favorably). Two philosophical titles, both cast in epic hexameters, have come down to us: On Nature in three books, which gives a bracing account of the physical world, and the Purifications in two books, seemingly of a more mystical cast. Whether these represent one poem or two, and which fragments belong to which titles, are heavily disputed questions. But there is enough coherence in Empedocles’s remains to conclude, as scholars increasingly do, that all his writings were underlain by a single physical system.

That said, even the most basic outlines of Empedocles’s thought are highly controversial today. My ambition is not to solve these problems—that would be a quixotic task—but I do hope to contribute to a better understanding of them by highlighting two features of Empedocles’s philosophy that have not been sufficiently appreciated: his unbounded aesthetic appreciation of the cosmos, which is mirrored in the very proliferation of poetic images that track the mad courses of Becoming, what we might call his “cosmopoetics”; and his name for the cosmic elements, “roots,” which are the earth-bound materials of life.

Empedocles, as I read him, was a philosopher of life who recognized the impermanence of existence: he embraced life as a self-disrupting continuum. In the wake of Parmenides, Empedocles divides the world into One and Many. But unlike Parmenides, he makes each of these polar opposites not only equally real but also equally fragile and susceptible to metabolic change (becoming). The One, in ways resembling Parmenidean Being, must be produced in a process of becoming, and it is only ever approached but never fully realized. Eventually, the Empedoclean One dissolves into a plurality of lesser entities, and then the pluralities are reunited into the One, in an endlessly repeated cycle. The whole of nature is framed by these two competing narratives, which in fact describe competing tendencies toward unification and dispersal. The tendencies are personified by two cosmic agents: Love, the drive or impulse (hormē) to unification (the One), and Strife, the drive to separation, differentiation, and plurality (the Many). The antagonism between these two id-like forces is indefeasible and unhealable, not least because neither one achieves perfect realization. On the contrary, their reality is simply to remain unresolved and, as it were, unfulfilled. Because the cosmos cannot exist without either agency, and because their dual agency is what makes and unmakes the cosmos, we have to conclude that Love and Strife work collaboratively as well as antagonistically. Their tension is what makes the cosmos as variegated and attractive as it is unstable, precarious, and fateful.

This is the basic architecture of the Empedoclean system and its principal novelty. Love and Strife loom over the cosmos like everlasting divinities, which they in fact are. They also act like regnant powers, each one staking its claim on the same subjects, which is to say, the material constituents of the cosmos. These are the four elements (Empedocles uniquely calls them rhizai or rhizōmata, “roots”)—earth, water, air (or aether), and fire—which are themselves divine, immortal, and immutable. Love mixes and combines, seducing the heterogeneous elements to congregate with one another. Strife separates, by encouraging the elements to congregate with their like. Together, Love and Strife are demiurgic powers, the artists of cosmic becoming. Indeed, Empedocles likens them to painters whose canvas is the cosmos itself.

To complete this picture, we must imagine intersecting cyclical patterns that operate in the world simultaneously but at different velocities. On the slower cosmic level, Love and Strife take turns in achieving near-total dominance, be it in the formation of an immobile Sphere (the One) or in its dissolution into the single elements (the Many) after being shattered by Strife. On the quicker zoogonic level, the immortal roots are joined into mortal compounds, at first forming the manifold physical structure of earth, waters, airs, and aethereal fire. Next, a cascade of life forms populates the universe, starting with basic compounds (blood, seed, flesh, bark, bone, stone) that combine, in turn, into larger living unities that continuously flourish and die, only to be recycled or reincarnated in new forms. Within these individual life cycles, life forms undergo further complications (divisions), unifications, and fallings off (for instance, in the formation of embryos, where a kind of cell birth and death or division occurs, or in the wear and tear of limbs). After a time, created life vanishes and the Sphere is born, only to be shattered again eons later. Such are the Empedoclean cycles in their most basic and least controversial form.

That said, every aspect of Empedocles’s cosmology is the subject of fierce debate, from the nature, number, and frequency of the cycles to the number of worlds that each cycle generates. In nesting an unknown number of zoogonic stages within each larger cosmic rotation (from Sphere to Sphere), I have already aligned myself with one strand of the scholarship within this vast and frankly chaotic field. In doing so, I am highlighting the ceaseless cyclical activity that takes place at every level of reality in the living world, its unending vitality, before which Empedocles, and we, stands in complete awe—at least some of the time. But to say this is to bring to the surface an inconsistency in Empedocles’s writings that slips by almost unnoticed in the ancient and modern literature on him and that can result in a skewed reading of his thought. Let me explain.

Much of the time, Empedocles seems to be truly inspired by the processes that make up the cosmos as a changing thing. But in his darker moments, he appears to detest the world in which he finds himself. Most scholars accept this pessimism as Empedocles’s settled opinion about earthly reality, which they attribute to an eschatological orientation on his part. Love is good, Strife is evil, the world has fallen from its perfected condition of the Sphere into an increasingly divided and “despicable” state, and we are morally obligated to yearn for a return to our, or rather the world’s, pristine origins.⁴ To state this is to imagine that human beings are guilty of having sinned against reality and that they should seek salvation by returning through reincarnation to the blessed harmony of life, sometimes equated with a mythical Golden Age, that is modelled after the Sphere. The privilege of reincarnation must be earned by means of altered life practices—chiefly, abstention from blood-stained meat and from procreative sex.

While this reading is not without some foundation in Empedocles’s fragments, I find it implausible for a variety of reasons, not least because it rests on a highly speculative reconstruction of extremely fragile evidence. Of equal importance, this reading is contradicted by the logic of Empedocles’s thought, which does not privilege the One over the Many or Love over Strife but instead explores their ineffaceable tension or, better yet, their structural antagonism, which is itself a form of Strife. Belief in a salvific eschatology is futile in a world that is periodically being born and destroyed again. There is no end of time to which one can look forward, and no prior and more perfect time to which one can look back. In short, to elevate the Sphere to a pristine origin is to make a bet against the dynamic processes of the universe. And that is a bet one can only ever lose.⁵

Most scholarship embraces and privileges the constructive offices of Love and its ultimate product, the Sphere, over against the destructive tendencies of Strife. Who could love Strife? Who does not yearn for perfection? On the other hand, the birth of the Sphere comes at the cost of all earthly creations, which it effectively snuffs out. Ferella calls the Sphere “the most peaceful and beautiful,” and even “ideal,” “form of the universe.” But the words are not Empedocles’s. She is quoting and endorsing Hippolytus, a later Christian and Christianizing source.⁶ I find it improbable that the Sphere can signal the perfection of the cosmos and the final destiny of the roots, let alone the pinnacle of beauty. The Sphere recalls Parmenides’s spherical Being, and yet it represents a deathly beyond. Empedocles the pluralist is not endorsing Parmenidean monism. He is turning it inside out.

Another approach is needed. In place of escapism backed by a belief in eschatology, salvation, and redemption, ambiguity and ambivalence best capture Empedocles’s stance toward the world. The very fragility of the Sphere—its genesis and mortality—tells us all that we need to know. Life for Empedocles is disruptive, first and foremost of Being. But it is also self-disruptive, a double-edged condition that inspires a double-edged response in us. Nothing that is (that exists) escapes the transience of becoming. It is here that the distinctively poetic logic of Empedocles’s verses takes on the burden of his deepest arguments. The prolific wonders of Life are not arguments for the primacy of the One. They are the marvelous product of the world’s ephemeral makeup. Not only are all the beauties witnessed in the life of the cosmos shot through with evanescence and unthinkable without it. Those beauties are also the residual effect of an underlying and ongoing violence.

The ambiguities that haunt the cosmos go all the way down. For each side of Empedocles’s binary of Love and Strife is itself divided in its allegiances to creation and destruction. This, I would hazard, is the underlying meaning of “twofold” and “double” in B17. Ordinarily construed as referring to the twofold sequence of birth followed by death, both terms are bywords for “ambiguity”:

What the verses say is that birth and death are themselves twofold and ambiguous in meaning: birth is a kind of death and death is a kind of birth.⁷ And so, even as the unfolding of the life processes is “a wonder to behold” (B35.17), what these processes exhibit is not beauty tout court but a mortal beauty.

Here we run into the inconsistency that I mentioned at the beginning of this essay. Empedocles demonstrates an unbounded appreciation for the world we inhabit and its processes, which he describes as inexhaustibly vital, and even sublime. How can this vision of the world be squared with existential pessimism, which is to say, his apparent desire to turn away from the world that he elsewhere so compellingly admires?

Most scholars skirt the problem, if in fact they perceive it at all, because they attribute the aesthetic productions of Empedocles’s world primarily to Love alone.⁸ Their view is premised on the assumption that Strife is utterly hateful and incapable of producing good in the world. The truth lies elsewhere. The world, and above all the one we perceive, is invariably the joint product of Love and Strife. As a result, Empedocles’s idea of aesthetics is complex. Indeed, it is as complex as his appreciation of the vitality of the world, whose denizens “pour forth,” die, and are regenerated again. Beauty and mortality, wonder and suffering, come as a package. Together they make Empedocles’s philosophy into an ethically challenging proposition for us, one that poses the difficult question, What is it to find beauty in the realm of the perishable? And, then, How do all-too-human creatures like us fit into this elemental and cosmic picture? An answer is to be found in the ambiguity of creation itself, what in antiquity was known as kosmopoiia (world-making), a process that could be creative and destructive at one and the same time. In what follows, I argue that it is only by appreciating the richness of Empedocles’s poetic craftsmanship that we can find a measure of coherence in his philosophy of the world and of human ecology. But to do so will entail embracing an aesthetics of a different kind and articulated in a different register from its classical and canonical forms, for instance, the idea of beauty as a promise of happiness. Let’s first look briefly at the way Empedocles’s cosmos is constructed (his kosmopoiia) and then turn to its implications for his cosmopoetics and for us.

Empedocles’s cosmos is the result of a twofold poietic process, that of the repeated unmaking and remaking of the world. Aristotle in the Physics (196a22) explicitly labels this process a kosmopoiia. Surprisingly, he has in mind the work not of Love but of Strife. Aristotle’s late commentator Simplicius confirms the emphasis when he speaks of the poetic and demiurgic capacities that Strife shares with Love.⁹ Most Empedoclean scholars have difficulty with this idea, since they are guided by the assumption that Love alone is creative and Strife is only destructive. I am not interested in reversing the scholarly consensus. On the contrary, I want to suggest that the distinction between creation and destruction presents us with a false choice. There can be no act of creation in nature that is not at the same time a destructive act, and the reverse is true as well.

If this is right, then Empedocles’s accounts of Love and Strife will be difficult to parse: what appears to be destructive can be understood as creative, and vice versa. The point was again foreshadowed by Aristotle. He observes that Strife “is no less a principle of generation” than one of destruction, for it produces “all things except the One,” that is, the Sphere (Metaphysics 1000a24–b2). Aristotle continues, “And similarly Love is not specially the cause of existence; for in collecting things into the One it destroys all other things.” This, too, is correct. After all, Love’s final act is to destroy the world of abundant life when it creates the Sphere (Metaphysics 1000b9–12), while Strife’s destruction of the Sphere triggers the profusion of life in all its biodiversity, of the sort that appears in B21.10–20 (quoted by Aristotle at 1000a24–b2 as evidence of his claims), which names the creation of trees, men and women, beasts and birds and water-bred fish, and long-lived gods. (The list is Empedocles’s repeated formula for all life on earth.) Aristotle’s points are shrewd and undeniably right.¹⁰ So too is his conclusion that “if Strife were not present [and active] in things, all things would have been one,” which is to say, at rest, unchanging, and immobile (1000b1–2). A permanent deathly pall would have befallen the universe, as it does when the Sphere is formed at one end of the cosmic cycle. But nothing of the sort occurs in the world that we know, the zoogonic world, which is instead a place of restless and manifold marvel and beauty.

Therein lies the contradiction. Pessimism and glorying in mortal creation are hard to square with each other. Ambiguity and ambivalence are not. And that is what we find throughout Empedocles’s verses. Consider the beginning of B21:

Empedocles closes the fragment by stating that the roots, while resolutely unchangeable, nevertheless take on different and wondrous looks (“different appearances,” gignetai alloiōpa) owing to mixture. The key term here is “different.” It signals the presence of Strife amid this mixture. Strife’s role is to create new cuts, articulations, and individuations as new mixtures come into existence (sexual difference is one example). The point I am making against the usual understanding is that Love’s specific work is not mixture. We could say that Love combines while Strife resists. But even this is a simplification of their division of labor. Both forces combine and separate, and each resists the other every step of the way.¹¹ The result of this dialectical push and pull is the compromise we call “mixture.”¹²

Love and Strife are equally involved in the world’s creation: they are the twin artists of cosmic becoming. Empedocles likens them to two painters whose canvas is the cosmos. Simplicius introduces the fragment:¹³

The image illustrates how both Love and Strife are needed to produce and fashion, through collaboration, a world. This is their joint kosmopoiia. Their dual agency is at once cosmogonic and aesthetic, and the same is true of their joint products. The world is presented here as a dazzling sight. It is multicolored (“polychrome”), multifarious (exemplifying poikilia, variety), and infinitely manifold (“countless”). And, yet, the phenomenal entities that it contains are “mortal.” Once again, beauty is manifest in our world only at the cost of mortality.

Here as elsewhere, Empedocles is writing in the mode of the stunned spectator of the world’s inimitable beauty. But he is also writing as the author of his philosophical poem who has an additional problem to solve, as we saw in B21: How to capture the shifting shapes of reality? How to equal worldly beauty in an account of it? And, finally, how to persuade the listener to share the wonders of reality as Empedocles sees it? The task is not entirely hopeless, since the four roots are not featureless. They have their own minimal physical qualities and they are descriptively available (B6): “Hear the four roots of all things: bright-shining Zeus [i.e., fire], life-bringing Hera [i.e., aēr, or air], Aidoneus [i.e., Hades, earth], and Nēstis [i.e., water] who with her tears waters mortal springs.” Significantly, the features are approximations. Elsewhere it is Nēstis that “glitters,” and in another fragment it is air that is “all-shining.” None of these slight slippages matter if the reality we know presents a vibrant spectacle in the end. And, yet, slippages like this do matter: they guarantee the vibrancy of what is to be seen.

But we should not be deluded. For all its beauty, the world remains a place of ephemerality, and it is proleptically aware of this fact about itself. How else can we explain the fact that the creations of Nēstis are “mortal” and the product of her “tears”? Here we have further evidence that the nature of life in Empedocles, both cosmic and “earthly,” proves to be ambiguous to the core. Its intrinsic complexity cannot be neatly captured in binary terms. Creation and destruction are inseparably linked. And at a further extreme, the ambiguity of life’s processes is staged by Empedocles as a deep ambivalence toward life itself.¹⁴ Birth—entry into a strange new world upon mortal embodiment—is experienced as a painful shock by Empedocles’s creatures (D76.11–18) and by himself on one autofictional occasion (B118). And, yet, the place of his new residence appears to be filled not with monochrome darkness but with contrasting spectacles. Populated with Discord and Harmony, Beauty and Ugliness, Haste and Tarrying, Truth and Obscurity, Growth and Decline, Movement and Rest, Grandeur and Filth, the world is a paradox of seemingly incompatible predicates (B122). As this litany of fictitious goddesses demonstrates, life in the world into which “Empedocles” is born, our world, is not all of one hue. But our life is only a mirror of the life of the cosmos, from which there is no escaping, not even through reincarnation. Significantly, fecundity and suffering go hand in hand (D76.11–13). Mixture produces both results, and it does so at both the zoogonic and the cosmic levels.

Let’s take a closer look at the generation of this multitude. In the remarkable painting allegory, Love and Strife are the skilled hands that lay down the colors, representing the four elements, side by side in varying proportions. Empedocles is being true to the practice of early Greek polychromy: primary pigments, four in number, were not so much blended as they were juxtaposed side by side in what was called a harmogē, or a fitting together. Strife’s role in this labor is to set out the individuated pigments (the roots) and to keep them from bleeding into one another.¹⁵ Love’s role is to juxtapose them and fit them together in a harmogē, here called a harmoniē.¹⁶

What counts as perfection in this account? The answer may surprise. It is not a complete realization of the work of either Love or Strife. A perfect blending of the roots is not permitted at any point in the cosmic cycle, not even in the Sphere.¹⁷ Instead, compounds of elemental roots are compromise formations: they mix but do not blend indistinguishably, just as the painters mix the elements, “the ones more, the others less.” The statement is about proportions, not blendings. It also reflects the tug of war between the two principles acting as artists of the world. Imperfection is the source of variety in the painter’s products as well as a sign of their ephemerality. In order to be, the phenomena of the world depend on imperfect blends. The world is always a compromise between more and less.

Not even blood is exempt. The most perfect of mixtures along with flesh (B98), blood is the most vitally significant but also the most ethically ambiguous substance in Empedocles’s world. Its composition gives blood its privileged role in thought and sensation. Even so, blood is not a perfect mixture. It, too, is the result of approximation, being formed through the “roughly equal” mixture of the four elements, with Cypris (i.e., Love) named as their safe haven (B98; A86.10). This is why blood, like everything else in Empedocles’s universe, is unbalanced and capable of madly surging or quietly ebbing like the sea (B105). What stands out in B98 and in the painters’ fragment is the double emphasis on approximation, which reminds us of the antagonistic undertow between Love and Strife, with each agency inhibiting the other, each struggling to get more and to give less. The process highlights the dynamic quality of the world as Empedocles conceives it: the world is imperfectly balanced on a knife’s edge. The more that Love mixes, the more Strife insists on an ever-greater articulation, difference, and complication in things. In their tussle with matter, they never get the measures exactly right. Love and Strife are thus painters of the imperfect. And thanks to this imperfection, life burgeons forth the way blood ebbs and flows in the body and the way the sea surges, in both cases with a kind of mad violence. Love and Strife are not simply collaborative partners. They are violent collaborators, and life exhibits this violent instability at every turn.

Nowhere is this healthy imbalance clearer than in the example of breathing, which sustains both plants and animals. We all know the sensation. To breathe is to draw in vital life; each breath wards off certain catastrophe. But in its desperate systolic and diastolic movements, breathing is itself a form of catastrophe. Empedocles connects the action of breathing to the mesh of channels and pores that airways and blood vessels share. As we inhale, the blood must make way for air. As the blood “rushes backwards” in retreat, “the air, boiling [like the sea], rushes after it” in a “mad tidal wave, | but when the blood leaps back, the air is exhaled again” in the same proportion (B100). The convulsive character of these intertwined vital functions reminds us of the exuberance of life and of its violence. The scene is more like a flood than a biological event, though it is perhaps safest to say that biological events just are catastrophic events for Empedocles, so fine is the dividing line between life and death and so intense are their movements. After all, life is a fragile experiment in recycling, being pushed and pulled by the violent impulses of Love and Strife that give life its compulsive character. Here and elsewhere, the world bursts forth, at first hesitantly and then with an impulsive immediacy, into a certain mortality:

Are the immortal roots exhibiting a drive to life or a drive to death? The question is badly formed. From our limited perspective, they exhibit both tendencies. Sub specie aeternitatis, their actions express the necessity of nature, nothing more. Out of this twofold condition, beauty emerges.

Everywhere we look in Empedocles’s fragments, an abundance of particulars comes to light in the dizzying display of creation. Plants, the airs, and living beings are breathing, fragrant, colored, porous, ripe and overripe (huperphloia), sentient, multifarious, manifold, and countless.¹⁸ The universe is not merely abundant: it is extravagantly abundant. Pluralism here is taken to an extreme, both philosophically and aesthetically, in the excessive plurality of quantities, objects, and living creatures that are generated, then destroyed, and then generated anew in an endless cycle of evolving and revolving life forms.

Empedocles’s poetics is plainly one of excessiveness.¹⁹ We start with a twofold (never a singularity), then a manifold; we arrive at biodiversity, and then at hyperdiversity, a delirium of possibilities that verges on genuine madness (mania).²⁰ The four elements literally “run through” one another, and they occupy every region in the expansive world, from the “immense height of air” to the “lowest depths” of the cosmic vortex and everything in between that stretches beneath the broad reach of “great heaven,” the “wide circle of the moon,” “the immense brilliance of the sun,” and the “boundless gleam” of aether.²¹ Trees grow tall, “with abiding foliage” (empedophullon) and “with abiding [but not everlasting] fruits (empedokarpa)”: they are vibrantly and forcefully alive.²² Tellingly, fruits are for Empedocles the “excesses” of water and fire in plants.²³ Everything that flourishes—all that exists—is excessively alive. More than simply beautiful to behold, the phenomenal world is sublime. But with excess comes instability: nothing born is empedos, everlasting.²⁴

One of the more unexpected sources of instability in the natural world is the threat to individuation that is posed by proliferation itself. If we go back to the painters fragment (B23), we can see that it is offered as an account of the way myriad differences emerge from sameness. For all their prolific differences, mortal things are imprinted with resemblances. This gives them a powerful coherence. But the coherence comes at the cost of a certain de-individuation. Not only do all created things, fashioned from the mixing of a mere four roots, share family resemblances, but the more one looks the more it becomes evident that nothing is completely like itself, apart from the immortal four roots and the two cosmic principles, Love and Strife. Such is the paradox of identity in Empedocles, which results from the easily overlooked fact that everything in the created world is, in a real sense, rooted in everything else.

Poetically, this condition of similitude across individuals pervades Empedocles’s language. His allusions to mixture often take the form of novel compound words and mixed metaphors, as if to mimic the promiscuity of nature and the interanimation of all things. “Man-faced ox-progeny” and “ox-headed man-progeny” are only the most striking, Bosch-like instances.²⁵ “Hairs, leaves, the dense feathers of birds, are all the same,” as are “scales on sturdy limbs.”²⁶ The earth’s “body” is “shaggy,” as is, presumably, our own, given that our canopy of flesh is called “man-enveloping earth.”²⁷ “The sea is the sweat of the earth.”²⁸ Mussels are “sea-grazing, heavy-backed” creatures; their shells are “the earth occupying the uppermost layer of the skin.”²⁹ So too the “stone-skinned sea-snails and turtles.”³⁰ Empedocles speaks of a “mute tribe of many-seeded fish,”³¹ a species that is long and narrow, which in another verse he compares to “high trees.”³² He also speaks of tall trees that “lay eggs” such as “olives,”³³ and elsewhere we hear about “olive-faced offshoots of vines.”³⁴ The analogy to seeds, embryos, and fetuses is a commonplace in Empedocles:³⁵ even the productive cosmos is egg-shaped.³⁶ Limbs of creatures—representing a “lovely framework” and an “illustrious mass” in their own right—are “branches” of a body; the ear is “a fleshy branch,” while the antlers of “horned stags” are “ashen spears.”³⁷ If you are detecting an obsession with trees here, you are not wrong.

Similitude and approximation haunt all things in the cosmos, which are, to different degrees, more or less like and proximate to one another. Empedocles makes the point in clever ways, often by playing on the central image of “roots” in his own promiscuous language. Parts and forms of humans and gods “sprout” and “shoot up” from the earth; they blossom and bloom like plants.³⁸ Flowers are “root-bearing.”³⁹ Grapes are “vine-climbing.”⁴⁰ The first men and women are “nocturnal saplings.”⁴¹ But why plants, and why trees in particular?

The answer appears to be that trees are emblematic and primordial beings for Empedocles. They are the first creatures to be born, and they are born of the earth—a privilege that is made canonical in his neologism for what later would be called elements, namely “roots” (rhizōmata, rhizai). But roots are not simply elements.⁴² Divine and prolific, they radiate organic and orectic (appetitive) growth: they represent the enchantment of nature but also the disenchantment of humankind.⁴³ And, as we are beginning to see, the word “roots” maps out an entire field of associated objects and descriptions. With every mention of the word, Empedocles is pointing to the “rootedness” of all things and their relationship to the earth, to nutritive sustenance, and to the vitality of earthly life—that is, life incarnated in the here and now and not in some uncertain afterlife. Such is the actual destiny of the roots. Let’s explore the phenomenon quickly.

In thinking of roots, Empedocles was thinking of plants, of which trees were the paradigm case. The first born of all creaturely life, trees are truly sublime objects, owing to their vertical reach upward into the sky and downward into the earth through their magnificent roots (rhizais). Trees are “beautiful-tressed,” and their “roots are dense but…above on high they grow out blossoming in scattered saplings” (that is, branches).⁴⁴ “Streams” are “tree-nourishing,” which permits trees to “dwell in the aether.”⁴⁵ These unusual phrasings and compounds are not mere poeticisms. They animate, fecundate, and amplify Empedocles’s earthly philosophy. On another telling, we hear that “the aether sank down under the earth by long roots” even as fire was carried upward.⁴⁶ The reference must be to trees again, in which case trees are being figured as conduits. They communicate with the very highest and lowest reaches of the cosmos. And through them, the aether is continuous with earthly reality or, as Jean Bollack so well puts it, “there is heaven beneath the earth.”⁴⁷ Observing trees now, under the light of our own Dawn,⁴⁸ we are in touch with the first life forms on earth. Trees are thus conduits to the cosmological past for us, but also to its present (for the “rootedness” of things persists and grows more essential as living forms unfold), and to its future, when the world will be reborn out of the roots once the next cosmic rotation takes place.

Mixtures are found in and across things and their descriptions in Empedocles’s verses. In creating these cross-references, Empedocles is not merely underlining his most basic philosophical position—the universal kinship of all things. He is also poetically performing the point with his novel word-compounds and his mixed metaphors.⁴⁹ For the same reason, what he says about the roots is true of the way they appear in his verses: for all their elemental differences, they never fail to produce kindred appearances.⁵⁰ This is how the cosmos is organized, as a series of permutations of itself. Compounded into recognizably different things, the roots leave trace elements of themselves at every level. This creates a patchwork of resemblances in nature, in the form of nouns (from “roots” and “branches” to “limbs” and “seeds”) and action verbs (“wander,” “run,” “run through one another,” “rush,” “leap,” “shoot” or “pour forth,” “pursue,” “surge,” “drive” or “be driven”), often with adverbial inflections (“madly,” “furiously,” “impulsively,” or “impetuously”). As the elemental roots cycle through the zoogonic generations over countless numbers of cycles, identities are made, dissolve, and recombine into something else. Thus, what once was a tree will at another time take on the shape of a human being, an animal, or a long-lived god—unless all things just are long-lived gods.⁵¹ This is exactly how Empedocles describes his own past reincarnations. He was once “a boy and a girl, a bush and a bird, and a sea-leaping, voyaging fish.”⁵² What this means is that whenever we look at a tree, we are seeing other kinds of entities that have merely been rearranged, just as we are treelike in more ways than one.

The same point was brought out forcefully by Aimé Césaire in an essay from 1945, titled “Poésie et connaissance.”⁵³ In it, he rails against scientific epistemology, which desiccates and impoverishes the human mind, and pleads for another approach to the world, a “poetic knowing” that permits “an astonishing mobilization of all human and cosmic forces.” Such knowing (rather than knowledge), he writes, unites all that is, was, and will be in a “cosmic All” in which “everything has a right to life.” In this vision of things, we are united with the world not from without but from within: “Within us, all the ages of mankind. Within us, all humankind. Within us, animal, vegetal, mineral. Mankind is not only mankind. It is universe.” The boundary between “le moi, le soi, [and] le monde” is constitutively effaced.

Then comes a remarkable turn. Césaire next draws attention to the “knotted primordial unity whose gleam and wonder poets have always guarded” and whose secrets betray “the superiority of the animal [over the human]. And of the tree even more than the animal, because the tree is fixity, attachment and perseverance in the essential. And because the tree is stability, it is also surrender and abandon…to vital movement, to creative élan. Joyous abandon.” The tree is “rootedness [enracinement] and deepening [approfondisement].” Only the poet can save mankind from its relative inferiority to the tree, but he does so by bringing out what is most treelike in the human being: “Like the tree, like the animal, he has surrendered to…that immense life that exceeds him.…He has rooted himself in the earth, he has stretched out his arms,” which “imitate branches,” “he has played with the sun, he has become tree [il est devenu arbre]: he has blossomed, he has sung.”⁵⁴

Like Césaire, Empedocles is obliging us to see commonalities in nature that we might otherwise never suspect. His verses are less an exploration of physics than a speculative poetic imagining with at least three ecological and ethical ramifications. First, if everything we see is in some sense rooted “in” everything else, then everything in nature is equally precious but also equally porous and vulnerable to change and transformation. Second, individuality is minoritized on this view of the world. Existing mortal entities, being mixtures, are only provisionally individual (for as long as they hold together). But they are also never fully individual (insofar as they contain otherness within themselves, which they always do). Finally, nothing in the world has autonomous agency, since everything that exists is continually acted upon by external forces, including Love and Strife (for they act on each other). The Empedoclean world is a radically (dis)enchanted place. It may not be so very different from our own world in the end.