Pleasure and pain · Lexicon

From the book

Empedocles’ Complete Fragments, Volume I

Empedocles of Acragas · Diotimos Editions · 2026

Orientation

At a Glance

The wordB107 places being pleased and being pained beside thinking.
In EmpedoclesThe two-line passage is compact but philosophically wide-reaching.
In this editionThe fragment is quoted by Theophrastus in On the Senses.
A place to readBodily composition, thinking, pleasure, and pain are linked in the same statement.

Meaning

B107 places being pleased and being pained beside thinking. The verbs describe what constituted things do through the same constituents from which they are fitted and compacted. No separate noun naming a faculty of feeling occurs in the fragment.

Use in the book

The two-line passage is compact but philosophically wide-reaching. The physical account does not stop at explaining the shape of an organism. The very materials through which things are formed also account for cognition and affective experience. Pleasure and pain are therefore not appended as unexplained events after the body has been built.

The demonstrative “these” depends on a context not fully reproduced within the fragment. The surrounding physical account makes reference to the constituents natural, but the two lines alone do not enumerate them. Likewise, “all things” must be handled at the scale of the statement, without inventing a detailed ranking of which particular substances experience pleasure in which way.

B109’s knowing of like by like and B105’s thought-bearing blood provide closely related points of entry. Neither supplies a complete account of the causes of particular pleasures or pains. The book preserves a general commitment to shared material conditions for formation and experience, not a catalogue of sensations or a modern neurological mechanism.

Places to read

B 107Bodily composition, thinking, pleasure, and pain are linked in the same statement.
B 109Like-by-like apprehension also links cognitive activity with physical constituents.
B 105Thought is identified with blood around the human heart.

Translation in this edition

The fragment is quoted by Theophrastus in On the Senses. That provenance is useful, but it does not make the two verses a verbatim summary of everything in his report about Empedocles.