Birth

Use in the book

The recollected light of birth is a divine gift rather than an achievement of study. Because it makes other gifts intelligible, it is among the most important endowments the speaker can recover. Yet the story is not simply an appeal to chronological beginnings. The child who later feels desolate learns that remembered joys from birth should continue to sustain him; past gifts must remain inwardly present. Rebirth similarly means more than starting over. It entails removing acquired false colours and habits so that things can appear in their truth. Birth thus supplies both the historical image of receiving life and the normative image of receiving the world rightly.

Places to read

1. III.1The light accompanying birth is remembered as the condition of enjoying other gifts.
2. III.5Being born again is explained as purification of acquired habits and valuations.
3. III.23The joys received from birth should remain present against the child’s fear and desolation.

In this edition

The language of birth moves among chronology, entitlement, and spiritual renewal. Those senses overlap without making “born again” a literal second physical birth.

Use in the book

B 8 denies birth and terminal destruction, then states the positive account: mixture and interchange of what has been mixed. Human beings call that process birth. B 9 extends the explanation to the appearance of humans, animals, plants, and birds, and allows the poet to speak by ordinary custom while marking its inadequacy. The point is explanatory correction, not an inability to discuss familiar events.

B 172 accordingly continues to speak of the twofold birth of mortal things. It can use the ordinary vocabulary while immediately qualifying the level at which it applies. Compounds come to be and lack a steadfast lifetime; the constituents remain through their unceasing interchange. Denying absolute birth does not erase the distinction between a formed living body and its separated ingredients.

This distinction makes the contextual meaning of physis especially important. Reading B 8 as “nothing has a nature” would turn a claim about origin into an indiscriminate denial of constitution or character. B 110, by contrast, positively speaks of the physis of each, and B 63 describes a physis of limbs distributed in reproduction. The work-title On Nature is neither a definition of the word in each verse nor proof that all fragments once occupied the present editorial sections.

Birth-language also reaches the roots' equal age in B 172 and the growth of mortal from formerly immortal in B 352. These expressions need interpretation in light of the permanence argument. They should not be used to smuggle a first production of the roots out of nothing into a doctrine which explicitly rejects it.

Places to read

1. B 8Physis names the absolute birth being denied and the conventional name applied to mixture.
2. B 9Human and animal generation is redescribed as mingling; ordinary names remain usable.
3. B 17.3–13The poem speaks of mortal generation while distinguishing cyclic persistence.
4. B 63Physis has a local bodily and reproductive sense rather than the identical polemical sense of B 8.
5. B 110.4–5Each thing is said to grow according to its own physis.
6. Introduction VI (editorial discussion)The translator explicitly warns against “nature” in B 8.

Translation in this edition

The edition's “birth” at B 8 is a contextual decision, not a glossary rule that physis always means birth. B 9's “say” and its negative “not” are editorial supplements. The supplied words affect how sharply the poet criticises ordinary naming and should remain visible.

Use in the book

Aristotle at A28 says that the four persist and do not come to be except through changes in the quantities combined and separated. Aëtius at A44 makes the distinction explicit: these thinkers have combination and separation, but not generation and destruction “properly so called.” Their ordinary becoming is quantitative aggregation, not transformation of ultimate ingredients into other kinds.

Cosmogonic witnesses nevertheless speak readily of heaven, stars and worlds coming into being. That is not automatically an inconsistency; such bodies can arise as arrangements of enduring materials. Aristotle’s criticism at A42 concerns which arrangement can generate a heaven and whether Empedocles omitted generation under Love. Simplicius’ later A52 then suggests that accounts of generation from simple constituents may be expository rather than chronologically literal.

The reader must therefore distinguish three questions: whether roots originate, whether compounds form, and whether a narrative order of cosmic formation states an actual temporal succession. The same broad English “creation” would blur all three and might introduce an unprinted agent creating from nothing.

Places to read

1. A 28 (testimony)Aristotle, Metaphysics A 3. Denies coming-to-be of the four except in the qualified sense of altered aggregation.
2. A 44 (testimony)Aëtius I 24,2 (D. 320). Distinguishes combination from generation properly so called.
3. A 42 (polemical)Aristotle, De caelo Γ 2. Questions the construction of a cosmos under Love.
4. A 52 (polemical)Simplicius, De caelo 305,21. Offers an expository rather than temporal interpretation of generation accounts.

Translation in this edition

Do not translate all generation as creation out of nothing. A44 is a collective doxographic classification; it preserves a distinction but does not make all named systems identical.