Changing thought

Use in the book

The pair of short quotations joins cognition to changing circumstances or constitution. B108 does not depict thinking as an invariant power whose products are entirely detached from the thinker. As the beings in question become different, their thinking changes correspondingly. Since the quotation begins mid-argument, the precise antecedent and the kinds of difference intended are not fully specified.

B106 is similarly compressed. Men’s mētis grows in relation to what lies before them or is present. The line can guide attention toward the conditions of understanding, but the isolated wording does not decide whether those conditions are principally immediate objects, bodily constituents, or a wider present situation. That limit is important because Aristotle preserves the verses in an argumentative context of his own, not as an unbroken chapter on Empedocles' psychology.

Read beside B105 and B107, the fragments strengthen the case for thought as dependent on embodied and material conditions. They do not reduce the poem’s epistemology to the claim that every passing appearance is true. Questions of trustworthy inquiry and disciplined attention are addressed elsewhere and should not be pre-empted by these physiological lines.

Places to read

1. B 106Mētis grows with what is present; Aristotle is the quoted witness.
2. B 108Difference in beings is accompanied by difference in thinking.
3. B 105The identification of thought with heart-blood provides a related bodily context.
4. B 107Thinking and feeling operate by the constituents from which things are fitted together.

Translation in this edition

The printed B108 repeats “does” in English across its two lines; this is a translation blemish, not an extra Greek assertion. The introduction describes mētis as practical cunning or contrivance, whereas B106 renders it “wisdom.” That local difference should remain visible rather than be flattened into one modern faculty.