Empedocles and Anaxagoras

Empedocles of Acragas takes the Pluralist bet and names his eternal beings: four roots (rhizōmata) — earth, water, air, and fire. Each is ungenerated and imperishable, exactly as Parmenides demanded of what truly is. Everything you see is some ratio of these four.

But roots alone are inert. Something must combine and separate them. Empedocles posits two motive forces: Love (philia, also Philotēs), which draws the roots together into unity, and Strife (neikos), which drives them apart. Love builds; Strife dismantles. Both are eternal, and neither ever fully wins.

The cosmos therefore runs in a cycle. At one extreme, total Love fuses all four roots into a homogeneous, motionless sphere (the Sphairos). As Strife enters, it separates the roots and a differentiated world of living things emerges. At the other extreme, total Strife pulls the roots into four isolated masses. Then Love returns, and the process reverses — endlessly.

Crucially, Empedocles satisfies Parmenides. Listen to fragment B8: there is no phusis (birth) of any mortal thing, and no end in death, but only mixture and separation of what is mixed — “birth” is just the name humans give to these. Nothing comes to be; nothing perishes. The roots are conserved; only their arrangement changes.

Anaxagoras of Clazomenae plays the Pluralist game with a very different move. He worries: if flesh is only earth-water-air-fire, how can eating bread build flesh, hair, and bone? His answer is radical — there must already be a portion of everything in everything.

So Anaxagoras rejects a small menu of elements. Instead, matter is infinitely divisible, and every bit of stuff contains seeds (spermata) of every kind — some flesh, some bone, some gold, some hot, some cold. A thing appears to be bread because bread-seeds predominate in it, not because it is pure bread. Cut it as fine as you like and every ingredient is still present.

Originally, he says, all these seeds were mixed together so completely that nothing was distinguishable — a uniform grey. So what started the sorting? Here Anaxagoras introduces his most famous principle: Nous (Mind). Nous alone is unmixed and pure — it contains no portion of anything else, which is precisely what lets it know and rule all things.

Nous initiates a rotation (perichōrēsis), a cosmic whirl that begins small and spreads. This spinning separates the seeds out — dense from rare, hot from cold, dark from bright — building the ordered world. Nous is the first thinker’s attempt at a genuinely intelligent first cause: the source of order, not just of motion.