Empedocles’ The Testimonia, Volume II

The senses, and the chapter that refutes them

A 86 is a single Diels number and a whole book: the entire chapter Theophrastus devoted to Empedocles in On the Senses, the first history of a philosophical problem that anyone wrote.

Its first half sets out the doctrine. Perception happens when effluences from a thing fit the passages of a sense organ — too large and they do not enter, too small and they pass through untouched. The eye is a lantern: fire within, a screen of finer stuff around it, and passages for fire and water lying alternately, so that white and black are seen through different apertures of one organ. The ear is a bell, and Empedocles called it a sprout of flesh. Thought is a property of blood, and a man is slow or quick or eloquent according to how the elements lie in the blood of a particular limb. That is the oldest temperament theory in Europe.

Its second half takes the account apart, and is the more informative half, because to refute a position Theophrastus must first state it exactly. Several things we know about Empedocles survive only because they were worth objecting to.

Three of the objections are still good. If perception is things fitting passages, the passages are either empty — and Empedocles denied the void outright — or full, in which case perception never stops. If like is known by like, an eye of fire and water can see white and black, but grey matches nothing. And explaining hearing by a bell inside the head only moves the question: when the bell sounds, what hears that?

The most interesting remark in the chapter is a single sentence at § 20, and it appears to have gone unnoticed since. Under the reign of Love, where all things are drawn together and nothing flows off, there could be no perception at all. Theophrastus has seen that the physics of the cosmic cycle and the physics of the senses do not sit easily together — that a doctrine of effluence requires a world in which things are coming apart.