One and many

Use in the book

The contrast works at more than one scale. B 172 speaks broadly of the change from multiplicity to unity and back, while B 20 makes a body's limbs come together into one at the height of life. B 26 calls the coming-together a single order and also looks towards the All grown together as one. Those expressions should not all be treated as equivalent names for one stable intermediate world.

The famous double account of mortal birth and disappearance in B 172 is deliberately difficult: gathering can produce and destroy, and growing apart can likewise sustain and dissolve. The one–many pattern is therefore not a simple equation of one with life and many with death. A mortal organism is one composed of many, whereas complete cosmic union removes the differentiation by which such organisms exist.

The numerical language also does not imply that the roots lose their identity and become a new fifth substance when united. The passage insists that these same things continue through the changes. At the other extreme, plurality is not the creation of being from nothing. The double account is an attempt to think change alongside the permanence of its constituents.

Places to read

1. B 17.1–17The repeated one–many formula frames the double explanation of birth and disappearance.
2. B 20.1–5A living body is a local example of limbs coming into one.
3. B 26.1–12The sequence includes a single order, the All grown together, and enduring cyclic interchange.
4. B 27The Sphere lacks distinguishable sun, earth, and sea, showing what complete union entails.

Translation in this edition

The line repeating the one-from-many formula at B 17.9 is supplied in the printed Greek. B 26 preserves a closely corresponding line without brackets. The duplication is useful evidence, but should not be concealed by printing a reconstructed seamless discourse.

Use in the book

Plato’s A29 contrasts two manners of combining unity and plurality. The more strenuous Muses make their conjunction perpetual; the gentler Sicilian Muses make the All alternately one and friendly or many and hostile to itself. The edition identifies the latter with Empedocles. Plato is characterizing unnamed positions, and his contrast should not be mistaken for a literal poetic quotation.

Aristotle’s A46 groups Empedocles with thinkers who separate contraries out of one mixture. The important distinction from Anaxagoras is recurrence: Empedocles’ process is periodic rather than once-only. A32 then describes the One as spherical, eternal and unmoved, and associates it with necessity. But the opening description is supplied from Stobaeus, and the passage’s translation has a consequential problem in its account of resolution into the Sphairos.

The unity/plurality issue thus operates at several levels: unity of mixed constituents, the unity of the All at a phase of the cycle, and the One as a divine or necessary state. No single passage licenses replacing all these with an abstract monism in which the four cease to have explanatory standing.

Places to read

1. A 29 (testimony)Plato, Sophist 242c-d. Contrasts perpetual unity-and-plurality with an alternating account attributed by interpretation to the Sicilian Muse.
2. A 46 (testimony)Aristotle, Physics A 4, 187a20. Groups Empedocles with one-and-many thinkers but distinguishes periodic separation.
3. A 32 (testimony)Aëtius I 7,28 (D. 303). Assigns spherical, eternal and unmoved predicates to the One in a supplemented opening.

Translation in this edition

The supplemented wording of A32 and the interpretative allusion of A29 have different evidentiary statuses. “One” is not automatically a synonym for the visible cosmos at every phase.