I couldn’t help thinking of you and your wretched relativity notions the other evening when I went to see Loftus Adam who now lives here, just down the coast from me. He too said how irritated you made him by trying to subject everything to the merely provisionaclass="underline" and all truth as subject to scale. Yet he himself at last admitted that if you selected your coordinates you could prove anything from any evidence; he wants to write a modern history of Europe based on three coordinates, namely the moustaches of Hitler, Marinetti, and Chaplin, which have formed our unhappy age. They were all the same little smudge moustache which must prove something. And between them the new European sensibility was forged and founded. It sounds highly fanciful but why not? He is going to call the book The Moustache; and Why.
I went to sleep quite late that night and had a dream in which I recovered the name of the philosopher which had escaped her — the great Empedocles who was a native of the town and around whose name and memory gathered so many tales of necromancy and witchcraft as to almost obscure his real fame as a philosopher as eminent and as fruitful as any of the great men of his time. Is it nothing to have won the respect of Aristotle, or to have influenced Lucretius? Moreover, enough of his system remains extant today for our scholars to evaluate and describe. Why has he been written off as a mythomane? In the case of Bertrand Russell the reason is plain; great as Russell is, he was, in the affective and intuitional sense, colorblind. He is no poet but a geometer. And it was inevitable, given the type of temperament that was his, that he should be as unfair to Plato as he was to Empedocles. Then one recalls the gibes and sneers of Epicurus when he referred to Plato’s attempts to systematize reality and to comprehend nature. To him everything that Plato beheld was the purest illusion, the purest self-deceit. He believed in a world which held no mysteries and in consequence no great dangers. Temperamentally Empedocles lies on a tangent between the absolute behaviorism of one and the pure subjective vision of the other. To each his truth, and qui verra vivra to adapt the phrase to suit philosophers who are also visionaries (charlatans to the Russells of this world and the last). The two functions, however, the two arts of deduction and of intuitive vision must be complementary at some remove. Plato to Aristotle, Freud to Jung.… In this sharp diversity is born the marriage of true minds.
For Empedocles also the world was arranged in not too mysterious a fashion, though it was far from an impulse-inhibition machine run by invisible and soulless engineers. One could best comprehend it as a sphere ceaselessly agitated by two primordial impulses or dispositions which in turn acted upon four primary roots of all being — fire, air, water, earth. This joining and separating motor (the Love and Strife machine) in its quite involuntary convulsions manipulated matter and shook it out in a million differentiated patterns and mixtures like a kaleidoscope shakes out pictures at the slightest jog. The arch movers of all process were Love and Hate — the joining and separating impulses. The domination of one or the other produced quite recognizable effects in nature, alloys of the four basic elements. It seems fair enough.
The original condition of matter was to be envisaged as a sphere in which Love played the dominant role and where the four basic elements were perfectly accorded and mixed. Into this primordial harmony entered the principle of Strife, which set off the whole dance of process and foxed up the original harmony of things. First air became separated, then fire, then earth — the motion acted like a milk separator, forging unexpected unities and dissonances; and the effects of these changes were reflected in every department of man’s life and thoughts. Quantity was all-important — a hint perhaps of a Pythagorean influence? The present world — the world he knew and which has not noticeably changed since his time — is a theater where Love is being everywhere assailed by Strife; and where Strife becomes dominant species and sexes become separated, lose their coherence and identity — it is matter in a state of hysteria. But at the other end of the cosmic seesaw — for the gain of one element turns to loss by over plus and gives ground to its opposite — the overwhelming force of undiluted love could bring about bizarre physiological changes in nature. Empedodes, in his vision of the disorder brought about by the mixture of unequal quantities of the four elements, speaks about separate limbs being begotten, arising and walking around, as in the canvases of Dali; hands without shoulders and necks, bodies without hands. And all sorts of singular combinations like oxen with human heads, fishes with breasts, lions with hands, birds with ears.… A chaos of undifferentiated forms ruled.
But nature aspired to the functioning rule of the sphere, and only the sphere mixed the elements rightly, in the proper proportion and harmony. Yet the slightest push from one side or the other and one got an imbalance in nature which only hazard could redress. This then was the reality of things as we were living it, for we were part and parcel of the whole convulsion, our thoughts and feelings were all influenced by it. As for thought, Empedocles was convinced that we think with our blood, and more especially with the blood around the heart, because in the blood here all the elements are more correctly fused than in other sectors of the body. What is endearing, and indeed peculiarly modern, is his interest in embryology and in the growth systems of plants; whenever possible he drew his analogies from this department of knowledge. For him thought and perception were materially functions of our bodily constitution. All this was down to earth, was perfectly functional, was the fruit of sweet reason and not of fantasy; somewhere at heart he was temperamentally akin to Epicurus.
Yet in spite of this rational disposition the visions kept intervening — Nature kept unfolding itself before his eyes, delivering its secrets to his curious and poetic mind. By some strange alchemy, too, he somehow managed to include a purely Orphic notion about the transmigration of souls into his system, where it sits somehow awkwardly. But so much of his work is missing that it is really a miracle that the extant remnants present as coherent a view of things as they do. It is rather like trying to reassemble a beautiful vase from a few recovered bits and pieces of it — the task which faces the archaeologist. Inevitably there will be here and there a shard which does not fit. In the case of this great man I was always struck by the fact that he felt that he himself had forfeited the final happiness; he describes himself as an “exile from a possible Bliss,” because he had put his trust in “senseless strife.” Was there any way to escape from such spiritual contamination? Apparently there was — by fasting, abstention from animal flesh, and the performance of certain mystical rites….
For him also the first completely realized forms to grow on earth were trees in whom male and female sexuality were so perfectly conjoined. And so on. Apparently the intoxication of these high thoughts was matched by a brilliant fuliginous style which made Aristotle christen him the first of rhetoricians or the father of rhetoric.
Yes, it is not hard to see why the notions of magic, of necromancy, clung to the name of old Empedocles — one thinks of his final leap into the maw of Etna. A suitable way for a great magician to take his leave of his fellow Sicilians. But the truth appears to be that he actually died far away, in the Peloponnesus. He must have been a very dramatic figure, this great rhetor, poet, visionary. In my mind’s eye I see always someone of the aspect of the modern Greek poet Sikelianos, who so charmed and bewildered us all with his strange mixture of greatness and histrionic absurdity. He became as much beloved for his aberrations and exaggerations as for his truly great verse which he insisted on declaiming at gale force and with gestures — which so often all but disguised its real merits. He too chose “big” subjects like his contemporary Kazantzakis — St. Paul, Buddha, Socrates.… They were grist to his poetic mill. I remember how Martine used to adore anecdotes about the Greek poets of our time — she was fully aware of their European stature in a period when Greece had yet to find its immortal echo outside Athens and Alexandria. Sikelianos at that time was already a walking reincarnation of an ancient God. He had founded the Delphic festival not as a piece of tourist folklore but, in true Empedoclean fashion, because he believed that the spirit of place was ever present, and that Delphi despite its silenced shrine of the Pythea was still pregnant with life. The meeting of great European minds at this sacred spot could have an incalculable effect on the poetic destiny of Europe — so he thought. He did not lack detractors, as may be imagined; but the incontestable greatness of his poetry silenced them. But sometimes he got so carried away by his vatic role that people thought of him as a mountebank. Yet the peasants at Delphi saw him as a sort of magician of today.