1 Eric Ben Edwards 02/25/2013 Dr. Michael Dean Philosophy 100 What Are the Traditional Four Elements?

One of the central aims of early Greek philosophy was to develop physical theories that explain the nature of the world around us, especially how physical change occurs. Virtually all the philosophers normally called Presocratics included cosmological accounts that provided (to varying degrees) nontheological explanations for the origins and continuing nature of physical reality. Indeed, this aspect has been over-emphasized in explanations of early Greek philosophy generally, and especially in the case of such philosophers as those of the Milesian school, who are dubbed by various commentators as the material monists or the early cosmologists. The Milesians, however, philosophized about a wide range of other domains, and their physical theories themselves often overlap into the moral and spiritual realms. Even later philosophers such as Heraclitus are sometimes presented as just another cosmologist with his chosen originative principlefire in his case. This excludes most of what holds the highest significance in the philosophy of Heraclitus. Thus, there is a common oversimplification in a double sense: all of early Greek philosophy gets collapsed into physical theory, and the physical theory aspects of the period are themselves oversimplified. Such simplification and brevity comes at the price of the misrepresentative pigeonholing of diverse and fascinating ideas. This essay itself focuses on physical theory, but reiterates the caveat that to think of early Greek philosophy as a mere early physics is to ignore much of what they have to offer, and actually runs the risk of misinterpreting the physical theory itself. It explores fragments of several philosophers and doxographical testimonia relating to the traditional elements, mainly exemplified by those of Empedocles, who claimed they were the four Air, Earth, Fire, and Water. It will also analyze the notion of arche, or originative principle, and the implications of positing one or more element as an arche. The aim of the work is threefold: to expose some key implications of element-based cosmologies,

2 to expose a particular problem in these cosmologies regarding the relationship between qualities and material, and finally, to trace the historical influences regarding the elements and related physical theory from Thales to Aristotle. Two factors to be continually considered are the Parmenidean criterion that excludes absolute coming-to-be, and the challenges of our own contemporary conceptions of matter. The present writer hopes to accomplish this in a manner that honors the particular differences among the relevant philosophers, giving their ideas on physical origin and change focused and charitable treatment. All individual aims of this essay are in turn an attempt to break the question, What are the four elements? From the standpoint of the current understanding of matter, the Greek view can be very difficult to grasp. An early Greek's conception of matter traverses various domains that we keep distinct, even in our relating themso it can be very hard to discern what sort of stuff he is talking about. In tracing the history of the four elements, this essay aims to shed light upon the changing notions in the various aspects of early Greek physical theory that pose such a challenge to the current frame of reference. *** Thales of Miletus is widely considered to be the father of both Western philosophy and science, the first thinker to begin providing natural explanations of the world, as opposed to to earlier mythological thinkers, such as Hesiod. Accounts of his thought as well as scientific feats have come down to us through various testimonia, but there are no extant fragments of his actual writings, if he wrote anything at all. Thales is one of first philosophers encountered by the philosophy student, who will take a history sequence of classes, beginning with ancient Greek philosophy. Treatment of Thales, as well as other Presocratics may be a brief prelude to fuller treatment of the Big Three, and the new philosophy student may leave such a class with little more than the recollection that Thales said Everything is water.

3 Most of the first philosophers thought that principles in the form of matter were the only principles of all things; for the original source of all existing things, that from which a thing first comesinto-being and into which it is finally destroyed, the substance persisting but changing in its qualities, this they declare is the element and first principle of existing things, and for this reason they consider that there is no absolute coming-to-be or passing away, on the ground that such a nature is always preserved...for there must be some natural substance, either one or more than one, from which the other things come-into-being, while it is preserved. Over the number, however, and the form of this kind of principle they do not all agree; but Thales, the founder of this type of philosophy, says that it is water (and therefore declared that the earth is on water), perhaps taking this supposition from seeing the nurture of all things to be moist, and the warm itself coming-to-be from this and living by this (that from which they come-to-be being the principle of all things)-taking the supposition both from this and from the seeds of all things having a moist nature, water being the natural principle of moist things Many scholars hold that the earliest Greek philosophers displayed some deference to the Parmenidean criterion. This seems a reasonable conclusion, if we assume the Milesians were asking What are things really? Thales and the others must have been inquiring into what is necessarily always the case as opposed to the ephemeral appearances of nature. In other words, the very question of reality can be easily extrapolated into the various dichotomies related to the Parmenidean criterion. How explicit such thinking was in Thales and his fellows is unknownand if we can reasonably assume that it was not relatively well-articulated, it may leave other interpretations of the Milesian first-principles open. First, consider what a full Parmenidean awareness would do to Thales' water-principle. If water is the real source of everything else that (apparently) comes-to-be, but itself remains unchanged, all of the sorts of justifications we suppose Thales had for water as so-called arche, become incorrect. Aristotle appeals to organic metaphors on the part of Thales, including the idea that the quality of moistness is necessary for the growth and nurture of all things. Others have suggested non-organic powers, such as Heraclitus Homericus in such passage, It [water/moistness] is easily formed into each different thing, is

4 accustomed to undergo very various changes; that part of it which is exhaled is made into air, and the finest part is kindled from air into aither, while when water is compacted into slime it becomes earth. Therefore Thales declared that water of the four elements, was the most active, as it were, as a cause. However, none of these metaphors or justifications work unless we are talking about the reality of things coming into existence. The metaphor's force comes from the fact that humans, animals and plants really grow from, and are preserved by, the virtue of water, and in the other case, that water has the requisite characteristics that allow it to actually transform into different kinds of material. They are meant to justify the idea of the productive power of waterthe power to actually bring-into-being novel things. If Thales' water can do this, then are other real things besides water in the cosmos. If Aristotle's account is correct, the positions of Thales and the other physikoi are untenableand Aristotle is probably unperturbed by this! Are there any alternatives that can save the single-material principle? There are at least four possible alternatives for defending Thales: 1) We might assume that Thales just didn't consider all of these implications in an explicit manner. This goes against Parmenidean principle, but Thules analysis may be pardoned as subjective. 2) Thales could have been claiming that water was merely important but not of entirety. In other words, water here would not be the arche of the entire cosmos, but could be seen as the ingredient most essential to growth in the cosmos. Closely related to this is the possibility that he considered water to be the first form of matter to actually emerge in the cosmos, in a contingent sense. This would leave unexplained the origins of the other elements, but perhaps take the burden off of water to account for everything else in the cosmos. 3) Thales could primarily be thinking mythologically. It is true that he was heavily influenced by non-Greek mythological accounts, including perhaps Babylonian and Egyptian creation stories. It is not unreasonable to assume that Thales, as the first thinker to appeal to natural causes in explanations, did so in a baby step away from supernatural explanations. 4) Perhaps Thales would

5 really hold that novelty can emerge in the cosmos, and that things that are really not water can emerge from water. We will now consider one of Thales' fellow Milesians, Anaximenes. While his physical theory shares many of the same implications as that of Thales, (including the above four possibilities for defense), his choice of a different element as the originative material and the reasons for it, as well as his other unique ideas, resist interpretations of him as just another physikoi with his pet arche. *** Anaximenes is the third and least studied member of the Milesian trio. Some scholars consider his ideas to be a step backwards from his predecessors. Philip Wheelwright remarks, In going back to Thales' acceptance of a single element as the first-principle of physical nature he appears to have lacked both Thales' originality and Anaximander's abstractive acuteness. Wheelwright does expose, however, what he feels to be Anaximenes' one real contribution to the development of scientific and philosophical thought: the notion of serial order. This is the idea of an ordered transformation of matter through stages of rarefaction and condensation, which Heraclitus later called the upward and downward ways, and which became an integral aspect of Aristotle's theory of physical change. The single element as originative principle that Anaximenes identified was air. The same sort of arguments for the productive power of water that Aristotle assumed Thales would offer are also attributed to Anaximenes regarding air. Hippolytus said that air was the source of absolutely everything, including gods and things divine for Anaximenes. The features of air influenced Anaximenes' choice as originative principle is plausible, especially since motive power was also associated with air, breath, and soul. The latter are all senses of the word pneuma, which Anaximenes seemed to use interchangeably with air. Pneuma or air, he says, binds the cosmos together just as our psyche, which is also air, binds together our body. Thus, air probably filled a similar role to Aristotle's unmoved mover, being a divine source of movement and change in the

6 universe. Anaximenes' choice was far from arbitrary, justified by a number of arguments, and plausibly represents more complexity of thought than Wheelwright credits him. *** Empedocles is often credited with creating the theory of the four elements. This is somewhat misleading, as the concept attached to each of the four elements has been employed indefinitely far back into antiquity. He was, however, the first to choose Earth, Air, Fire, and Water specifically as the irreducible originative principles of the entire cosmos. Consider the following several passages, all concerning the four elements. Hear first the four roots of all things: shining Zeus, life-bringing Hera, Aidoneus and Nestis who with her tears waters mortal springs. Fire and water and earth and the immense height of air. And earth chanced in about equal quantity upon these, Hephaestus (fire), rain and gleaming air. These comprise the bulk of the Empedoclean elements, and display a variety of ways of describing them, traversing several domains that we would now consider quit distinct. In the first passage, the elements are wholly referred to by the names of mythological figures, including the notion that the entity Nestis fills mortal springs with her tears. Some take such metaphors fairly literally, taking Empedocles to believe that the elements are also spiritual essences. This doesnt necessarily imply that his metaphors indicate divine or spiritual connections, any more than we necessarily do today when we refer to the sky as the heavens. Yet, some association with divine entities cannot be completely ruled outas with many Presocratics, there are often mythological associations with physical concepts. Just as fields of knowledge were not yet differentiated into the categories now familiar to us, realms of inquiry that many of us now consider very distinct or even nonoverlapping magisteria, as Stephen Jay Gould claimed of religion and science , were as yet only beginning to be differentiated.

7 The second passage calls the elements by the names we now normally hear, and the third introduces a completely different god in the place of fire (Hephaestus). Water is simply referred to as rain, and air is referred to as aither, which further confuses the matter, since it is something often considered a different sort of stuff altogether, and often considered to be more similar to fire than air. In referring to a different god in place of fire, Empedocles is probably just extending the metaphor used before. Hephaestus is also associated with the element: fire is Zeus, fire is Hephaestus from this point of view. In referring to rain in place of water, he is simply using a common manifestation of water, instead of the more abstract concepts. The point to be illustrated by this is that it appears to be the case with Empedocles, and early Greek philosophers generally, that the words we today use to denote very specific entities were used very differently. Despite how strong the mythological connections may or may not have been in Empedocles or others, such associations were embedded in language to a degree, and probably a constant feature of discourse running the gamut of topics. And without the precise scientific understanding of water we now have (water=H20), the term water was formed by loose conceptual association. Another angle to consider is that Empedocles purposely employed these loose associations in order to illustrate the pervasiveness of the factors he considered to have the most primacy. No matter which domains one considers, the four roots are there. They are universally relevant, not only as the constituents of all things, but perhaps connected with the essence or idea of various things. A drop of rain is a particular manifestation of the whole essence of water, and the essence of certain divine beings. In this interpretation, the elements become pervasive not just a constituents, but as essences that pervade through the level at which constituted beings have agency.

8 *** As it turns out, Empedocles only partially satisfies the Parmenidean criterion. In establishing the exclusive reality of the elements, he makes all composite entities unreal in a strong senseand these composite entities should not be immune from the ex nihilo criterion. All of the objects of human concern are mixtures of the four rootseven the blacksmith's fire, his livelihood, is not the element fire. Just like his hammer, the forge fire is but a mixture. The elements, if unchanging, cannot be identical to any perceptible matter, which is always changing. The four roots turn out to be fairly abstract concepts, even though they intend to represent sensible qualities. Virtually everything in our lives that we say is born or dies or changes are merely conventions, and unreal. Empedocles' aim, however, was to reconcile the things of the world with an account of realitywhat he really meant is that, by mixing, sensible objects come to be. As Merrill Ring understands, Empedocles (as well as Anaxagoras) cannot produce a good account of the status of individual things. This failure is related to the gap between the four elements and the actual sensible objects of the world, a gap that, by one interpretation, is surprisingly absent with a monistic account such as Thales' or Anaximenes'. Monistic accounts, whether water or air or anything else, can seamlessly explain all sensible objects, from rain and wind to gold jewelry and wolves in the mountainsas long as one allows for transformation. The exact mechanism, of course, is another matterit is mysterious, but perhaps not more so than how a mixture of discrete substances cause the emergence of objects that don't strongly resemble any of the constituent parts. The problem, however, is that calling the single transforming substance of the world by any name, or distinguishing it any way, implies more than one stuff. Thus, calling it airor water is both arbitrary and contradictory. A transforming single substance avoids a gap between principle and sensible world, but is contradictory if identified as any actual substance: multiple mixing qualitative substances that satisfy the Parmenidean criterion do not avoid this gap. This seems to be the

9 circumstances that led to yet another approach, one that required a novel move that had not yet been attemptedseparating matter from its qualities. The Atomists, Leucippus and Democritus, responded to Parmenides and, in turn, the Qualitative Pluralists (Anaxagoras and Empedocles), with a view of matter that, in some ways, seems a lot closer to the current understanding of matter. Matter becomes mere pieces of featureless stuff, having only size, location, and shape. The particles are also indestructible, thus satisfying the Parmenidean principle. With the Atomists, The gap between the explanatory principle and the sensible qualities of objects becomes even more pronounced: 'By convention sweet', he says, 'by convention bitter, by convention hot, by convention cold, by convention colour: but in reality atoms and void.' The conventional world, including perceptible qualities, becomes absolutely divorced from any inherent qualities in matter. With all previous thinkers (except perhaps Anaximander), quality was undifferentiated from the matter associated with it. This provided some connection (entailing problematic implications) between the sensible quality and matter. With the atomistic approach, the gap between sensation and matter widened. Although Empedocles' effluence theory of perception strongly influenced that of the Atomists, their ideas had different implications. In Empedocles, material was the source of qualities in objects and perceived qualities, but with the Atomists perceptible quality must be understood in a way more like emergence or supervenience. The latter terms are defined, and some of the implications of the idea are explained in the following: Properties of one kind, F, supervene upon those of another kind, G, when things are F in virtue of being G. thus a person cannot just be good, but must be good in virtue of possessing other properties, such as courage or kindness....For example, biological properties plausibly supervene upon chemical ones; mental properties upon categorical ones, and so on. One promise the notion holds out is that by its means we can understand the relation of such different layers of description without attempting a

10 reduction of the one area to the other. The value of this promise depends on how well we understand the supervenience relation itself. If it is a dangling, inexplicable, metaphysical fact that the Fs relate in this way to the Gs, then supervenience inherits rather than solves the problems of understanding the various areas. While the Atomists' differentiation of quality from matter and resulting separation of perceived qualities from the objects of perception does introduce a problem of relating supervening properties, it does avoid the problem entailed by Empedocles' account: matter no longer bears the burden of explaining how the vast sorts of qualities we experience can be contained within just four elements with limited kinds of inherent qualities. *** The direction that the Atomists took in physical theory, away from a qualitative understanding of matter, ended up being a bit of a false start in physical theory. Skipping ahead to Aristotle, his theory actually rejects much of what the Atomists say, and returns to a more qualitative view of matter. For Aristotle, the idea of the basic stuffs of the cosmos being empty of qualities perhaps seemed too abstract, too far from the world of sense experience. His theory, too complex to treat at length here, demonstrates his awareness of the distinction between matter and quality, yet he recombines these aspects into the model that represents the classical elements in their heyday, which became so influential in disparate fields, from medicine to alchemy. Aristotle developed a system by which matter underwent transformation by the mechanism of shifting contrary qualities. His complex physical theory obviously deserves more treatment than is possible here. However, what is relevant in this to the foregoing analysis is the aforementioned return to a physical theory in which qualities take a central role, as well as several other features that suggest how Aristotle synthesized many features of Presocratic physical theory into his own. Prime matter suggests the influence of Anaximander, whose own Apeiron may have been postulated as a way of avoiding the

11 problems of identifying an arche with any particular sensible feature of the world, and Aristotle's role for mixing suggests the influence of both the Qualitative Pluralists and the Atomists, to name just two of many such influences. *** In conclusion. This essay traces the development of physical theory from the very beginning of philosophy in the West, all the way to Aristotle, who combined various features of previous thinkers' theories into a complex rotation of the elements. This development is presented within an interpretive basis of the relationship of matter and quality, which began undifferentiated with the Milesians and reemerged integrated with Aristotle after the Atomists divorced the aspects completely. Some are surprised that Aristotle seemed to go backwards in not continuing in the manner of the Atomists. I would suggest, however, that this interpretation comes about as a result of favoring Atomism by too strongly emphasizing the similarities between Atomism and the current view of matter, while ignoring major differences. Aristotle's return to a qualitative view, rather, is indicative of the powerful role that the qualitative view of matter held in the Greek mind. Matter and quality, in their multiple theoretical guises, each with various advantages and problematic implications, illustrate the story of Greek physical theory better than any other single interpretive basis.