Wisdom and folly · Lexicon

From the book

Empedocles’ Complete Fragments, Volume I

Empedocles of Acragas · Diotimos Editions · 2026

Orientation

At a Glance

The wordSophos means wise or skilled according to context; sophiēs is the form translated wisdom in B 32.
In EmpedoclesB 11 calls fools those who expect what did not exist to arise or what exists to be completely destroyed.
In this editionThe translation's “divine” in “would not divine” at B 15 is a verb for imagining or pronouncing in the heart, not a statement that every wise judgement is an oracle.
A place to readFolly is inability to think through the impossibility of absolute generation and destruction.

Meaning

Sophos means wise or skilled according to context; sophiēs is the form translated wisdom in B 32. Nēpioi and the singular nēpios designate fools, with the force of immature or uncomprehending people. The contrast concerns what people understand and how they act.

Use in the book

B 11 calls fools those who expect what did not exist to arise or what exists to be completely destroyed. Their thinking is not far-reaching enough. B 15 states the complementary standard: a wise person would not imagine that mortals exist only during the span called a life and are sheer nothing before their composition or after their dissolution. Wisdom here requires going beyond habitual descriptions of birth and death to consider what persists through change.

The same severe language of folly enters the sacrificial scene in B 137. A father lifts and kills his transformed son while praying, unaware of the identity within the altered form. The insult does not merely mean a lack of cleverness: failure to understand has become an act of kin-killing. B 136 similarly locates mutual devouring in heedlessness of mind. Cosmological and ethical error are therefore connected in the surviving vocabulary, even if the fragments do not provide a single deductive system joining every claim.

B 32 complicates the ideal of wisdom by mocking the position of someone who would claim its heights through unholy overstatement for public honour. Being acclaimed wise is not equivalent to speaking responsibly. B 129, by contrast, associates wise works with an extraordinary range of understanding. The collection thus distinguishes several conditions: skilled accomplishment, adequately extended thought, right recognition of others, and the seductive social appearance of expertise.

None of these passages licenses a modern division under which natural philosophy is rational wisdom and ritual exhortation mere credulity. The poem deploys wisdom and folly on both sides of that later boundary.

Places to read

B 11Folly is inability to think through the impossibility of absolute generation and destruction.
B 15The wise person rejects sheer nonexistence before composition and after dissolution.
B 3.6–8A claim to the heights of wisdom can be tied to unholy ambition.
B 137.1–4A sacrificing father is called a great fool because the victim is his transformed child.

Translation in this edition

The translation's “divine” in “would not divine” at B 15 is a verb for imagining or pronouncing in the heart, not a statement that every wise judgement is an oracle. Sophos should also be distinguished from mētis, despite the English “wisdom” sometimes used for the latter.