Air

Use in the book

The account of Anaximenes makes air the principle from which things arise and into which they dissolve. It compares the soul’s holding a person together with air and breath encompassing the world. Archelaus’ account instead stresses density and rarefaction in explaining the production of fire and water. Air therefore has both a material and an explanatory role.

Places to read

1. I.10.12.5Anaximenes’ air and breath encompass and hold together.
2. I.10.12.7Archelaus connects air with density and rarefaction.

Translation in this edition

“Air” renders aēr. The report’s explicit equivalence with pneuma in the first passage does not make the two words interchangeable throughout the volume.

Use in the book

An early account assigns air to hearing as its medium. The Aeolian harp later supplies an image for delicate organs that should perform thought only when stirred by moving air and the wind nature sends. Poetry can consist in luminous “words of air,” and air can lightly mold itself without holding form too strongly. These contexts make air responsive and nearly unburdened, but do not turn it into a synonym for immaterial spirit.

Places to read

1. I, p. 35–36, entry 1, ¶12Air is identified as hearing’s medium.
2. II, p. 926, entry 4, ¶1Moving air plays the Aeolian harp in a comparison with thought.
3. II, p. 477, entry 11, ¶1Poetry is associated with luminous words of air.
4. II, p. 481, entry 1, ¶1Air illustrates light molding.

Translation in this edition

The English translation retains the strange “words of air.” Air meaning manner, appearance, or tune occurs elsewhere; raw French matches therefore are not an inventory of atmospheric images.

Use in the book

Air is a particularly effective test of value because almost everyone receives it and no jewel can perform its services. It refreshes the body, gives the senses their surroundings, and permits objects to remain visible instead of obstructing them. Its transparency, which makes it disappear from habitual notice, is precisely one of its excellences. The comparison with pearls and diamonds exposes the inconsistency of admiring a costly object for qualities possessed more generously by the common medium. Air belongs among the obvious things selected for study by trust in divine goodness. Its ordinary presence is evidence of bounty rather than evidence of worthlessness.

Places to read

1. I.21Air visits the lungs, refreshes the senses, and leaves objects unobstructed.
2. I.34Air’s transparency makes it more valuable than innumerable pearls and diamonds.
3. III.53Air heads the list of common things whose service proves real value.

In this edition

The physiological references to repairing spirits and cooling blood belong to the passage's historical account of breathing. They are not modern respiratory terminology.

Use in the book

Guérin’s landscapes enter the body through the air. Spring warmth releases a constricted soul into breathing; the warm air of a beech wood awakens memories whose relation to the scene remains unexplained. Moisture and perfume can also become excessive: the May rain of 1834 fills the atmosphere with a softness that almost dulls sensation. Receptiveness is embodied, and its pleasures have degrees beyond which they can turn into languor.

The contrast with Paris is exceptionally physical. Rural breezes give way to a current of hot, foul human breath in crowded streets. This is more than a difference in scenery: it changes the medium through which the writer encounters others. The country atmosphere later seems to warm the mind’s sap into growth. Such passages make development depend upon exposure and circulation. Air is neither an empty interval between objects nor an invariably gentle influence; the same openness that permits growth also makes the self vulnerable to weather.

Places to read

1. 28 March 1833 · ¶1Breathing warm air in the beeches unexpectedly opens an avenue to memory
2. 7 May 1834 · ¶1Rain-heavy, scented air approaches sensory saturation
3. 4 August 1834 · ¶1The countryside’s atmosphere warms the mind’s own sap
4. 20 August 1834 · ¶1Human breath replaces the rural breeze as the oppressive medium of city life

Translation in this edition

The English renders en plein vent in the August 1834 account as in the open air. That is idiomatic, but the French more strongly exposes the developing faculties to wind itself; it is not merely a recommendation to be outside.

Use in the book

B 172 includes the boundless height of air in the fourfold list. B 38, however, speaks of moist air and also aither in a compressed account of the origins of what is visible. Whatever reconstruction one favours, this wording makes a simple interchangeable English label unreliable across every passage. B 149's isolated “cloud-gatherer” gives air the traditional dignity of a divine epithet and emphasises its connection with weather.

The clepsydra comparison in B 1002 offers a more local description. An internal mass of air obstructs the entry of water; elsewhere in the same comparison aither and breath occupy the corresponding explanatory roles. The word onkos marks an effective bulk, not an empty region. This is especially significant beside the denial of void: air need not be visible to count as something present which can impede water.

The introduction reports that some ancient witnesses interpreted Aidoneus as air, using its invisibility to explain the name, while another tradition connected air with Hera. That disagreement belongs to the history of interpreting B 6. Neither the label “cloud-gatherer” nor the clepsydra passage independently resolves it.

Places to read

1. B 17.18The boundless height of air completes the physical list.
2. B 38.3–4Moist air appears beside earth, sea, and the difficult Titan/aither wording.
3. B 149Air receives the epithet “cloud-gatherer” in a short isolated quotation.
4. B 100.9–21The mass of air prevents water entering a stopped vessel; other lines use aither and breath.
5. Introduction V (editorial discussion)Ancient identifications of air with Hera or Aidoneus are reported as conflicting interpretations.

Translation in this edition

The translation preserves “air” and “aither” rather than making them automatically synonymous. This is a textual distinction, not a guarantee that Empedocles adopted a later systematic separation between the two. B 149 contains an ellipsis, so the original syntax and surrounding account are missing.

Use in the book

The root enumerations at A28 and A332 include air. Its divine name is disputed: Aëtius assigns Hera to it, while the Homeric Allegories, Hippolytus and Diogenes identify it with Aidoneus. The explanations are correspondingly different. The Homeric Allegories stresses that air has no light of its own; Hippolytus stresses that air itself remains unseen although other things are seen through it. These are arguments supplied by the interpreters, not preserved explanations from B6.

Air plays a complicated role in world-formation. Ps.-Plutarch says it is poured round in a circle before fire moves outward; Aëtius’ sequence in A49 instead has air exhaled from water after aither, fire and earth separate. A51 describes the solid heaven as compacted air, while a scholion substitutes water. Such descriptions show why the lexicon keeps Air and Aither separate without assuming their relation is uniform across witnesses. In the pore debates at A872, air also serves as a possible finer body filling passages that are not empty.

Places to read

1. A 33 (testimony)2Aëtius I 3,20; Homeric Allegories, in Stobaeus; Hippolytus, Refutatio VII 29. Preserves competing divine assignments and two explanations of the Aidoneus identification.
2. A 49 (testimony)Aëtius II 6,3. Places exhaled air after the release of water, distinguishing it in this sequence from aither.
3. A 51 (testimony)Aëtius II 11,2. Calls the heaven air compacted by fire in a crystalline manner.
4. A 87 (testimony)2Philoponus, On Coming-to-be and Passing-away. Gives air as an example of finer matter filling pores.

Translation in this edition

The variation between air and aither must remain visible. “Frozen air” is a transmitted cosmological description, not an identification with modern liquefied or solid atmospheric gases.