The permanence of change: Empedocles, Dewey, and two kinds of pluralist metaphysics of force

Abstract

This paper sets forth three main claims. First, in light of an interpretation of Empedocles’s pluralistic account of nature (as consisting of the four eternal material or root elements of fire, air, earth and water and the two eternal forces of love and strife), I move beyond a longstanding scholarly dispute (between some commentators who interpret Empedocles as holding that there is an endlessly recurring two-part cosmic cycle and others who hold Empedocles as claiming that there is a single positive movement from cosmic separation and manyness to unity and oneness) to the view that love and strife are an integrated cosmic force that constitutes a permanence of change. It is this view that allows Empedocles to embrace the Parmenidean commitment to the permanence of being (and the impossibility of its passing into non-being) and also to affirm the reality (rather than mere appearance) of the many changes evident in our experience. (And it is this view that the Strasbourg papyrus supports.) Second, I am concerned to establish parallels between this metaphysics of forces and the pragmatism of John Dewey, who held that nature is a mix of the precarious and the stable. The point here is not that Dewey and Empedocles hold the same views; they are separated by radically different accounts in biology, physics, psychology, and morality. The point, rather, is that both set forth metaphysical accounts that are at once pluralistic and centrally attuned to change, process, force, and activity. And it is that Dewey heeded Empedocles’s warning not to boast one knows the general nature of things. Third, I want to explain how Dewey’s view might be seen as a development of the philosophy of Empedocles—a development in which the notion of process or force or activity is reconstructed without any teleology and in which the notion of root elements is understood functionally rather than ontologically. I take this to be a movement within the development of metaphysical pluralism from being to becoming—a movement in which an Empedoclean focus on force may prefigure pragmatism and, thus, a way of viewing Empedocles as not merely pre-Socratic but also pre-pragmatic.