Like perceives like

Use in the book

The statement reaches beyond the four roots. Love and Strife also enter the relation, which makes it inadequate to paraphrase the passage simply as four material detectors recognizing four kinds of object. The perceiver’s resources are continuous with what is perceived. This is why the physical account of what a being contains matters to the account of what it can apprehend.

The verb translated “see” should not automatically reduce the claim to the anatomy of the eyeball. Love and Strife are not presented elsewhere as ordinary coloured objects, and B172 explicitly directs attention to Love with the mind rather than astonished eyes. B109 therefore bears on apprehension more broadly even though it uses a strongly visual verb.

The relationship also has physical analogues. In B62 fire drives early forms upward because it seeks its like. B90 describes sweet approaching sweet and other corresponding qualities meeting one another. These comparisons show the reach of like-directed relations, but their exact processes remain distinct: a material’s movement, a quality’s association, and a thinker’s perception are not necessarily one identical event.

B107 supplies another essential connection by making the constituents of a compound the means of its thought, pleasure, and pain. B105’s heart-blood account can then be approached as a particular bodily realization, without forcing a complete mental taxonomy from a few surviving lines. The principle is powerful, yet the source leaves open many details of organ structure and perceptual discrimination.

The line's balanced syntax is itself explanatory. Repeating each item on both sides of the apprehending relation lets the hearer follow the correspondence without an intervening technical definition. The addition of epithets then prevents the formula from becoming colorless: aither is divine, fire destructive, and strife baleful. The objects of cognition remain the poem's active materials and powers, complete with their characteristic force.

Including Strife is especially important. The passage does not say that likeness operates only through harmonious or morally admirable states. Apprehending strife also involves a corresponding capacity or constituent in the apprehender. That statement is not an ethical instruction to cultivate hostility, any more than knowing fire requires the reader to burn something. It belongs to the account of how recognition is possible. The poem's practical and moral treatment of Strife must be sought in its own contexts.

Equally, the principle does not remove the need for routes and organs. Correspondence describes what makes apprehension possible at one level; the eye's membranes and the nostrils' investigation describe how particular bodily encounters occur. The surviving evidence is strongest when those levels are allowed to complement one another rather than when one is used to erase the other.

Places to read

1. B 109The complete sequence pairs each constituent and both opposed powers with its like.
2. B 107The constituents of formation also support thought and feeling.
3. B 62.4–6Fire seeks its like in the emergence of whole-natured forms.
4. B 90Corresponding sensible qualities approach one another.
5. B 17.21–262Love is to be seen with the mind rather than with astonished eyes.

Translation in this edition

The translation retains the different word στοργή as lowercase love in B109 rather than silently replacing every expression with Philotēs. The entry title is a traditional summary, not a separate surviving maxim in precisely those English words.

Use in the book

Theophrastus's opening classification makes likeness the organizing principle of Empedoclean perception. Fire-related passages recognize white and water-related passages black; thought too is produced by likes, whereas ignorance is associated with unlikes. Pleasure is also assigned to likeness in both parts and blend. Thus the same family of words connects perception, cognition, and affect without requiring that these have already been proved identical.

The criticisms expose several meanings of “like” which should not be silently merged. At §13 complete likeness would leave no reason why one body must enter passages that the other cannot fill. At §15 the operational work seems to fall to commensurability rather than likeness. At §19 an ear already containing sound is less, not more, effective at hearing. That example treats sameness of sensible quality, whereas the exposition may concern elemental constitution or affinity. Theophrastus explicitly demands a distinction; his objection does not establish that no distinction was possible.

Finally, at §23 likeness appears incompatible with alteration because, in the critic's formulation, like does not alter like. The dossier therefore supplies an inquiry into how resemblance can be explanatory, not one transparently uniform formula.

Places to read

1. A 86 §§ 1–2 (testimony)Theophrastus, On the Senses 1. Classifies Empedocles, Parmenides, and Plato under likeness.
2. A 86 §§ 10–11 (testimony)Theophrastus, On the Senses 10. Extends like-by-like to thinking, in contrast with ignorance.
3. A 86 §§ 14–15 (polemical)Theophrastus, On the Senses 15. Argues that fit makes likeness explanatorily redundant.
4. A 86 §§ 18–19 (polemical)Theophrastus, On the Senses 19. Challenges an undefined appeal to likeness in hearing, smell, and taste.
5. A 86 §§ 22–23 (polemical)Theophrastus, On the Senses 23. Questions the compatibility of cognition by likeness with alteration.

Translation in this edition

The edition invokes the verse “by earth we see earth” in its note to §§14–15, but the verse itself is not printed there. It should remain contextual rather than be presented as another quotation in this volume.